Frustrating!

My computer skills are probably a 5/10. In other words I have "functional" skills, but when I run into problems I get stuck.

I have old home movies on DVD. I would like to covert them to an .mp4 or .mov file so I can have them on my PC and share with family. Using VLC, I was able to (eventually) figure out how to how to convert one into a video file - but it's a .VOB file. Even though I choose the output for .mp4, I got a .VOB. At least it works.

So, using the same software, I tried to convert it from .VOB to .mp4. When finished, my PC tells me it's a .mp4a file and won't run.

I've tired other conversion software like Any Video Converter and Handbrake - both convert the video to .mp4, but there is no audio!

I imagine I am doing something wrong, but can't figure it out.

I would greatly appreciate some advice to correct what I'm doing, or a better software for the conversion process. It doesn't even have to be a free software.

Thanks in advance!

The 10-lane freeway that slices through this part of Southern California is one of the busiest in the country, ushering more than 300,000 cars across the greater Los Angeles area every day.

For drivers, it’s a nightmare: This stretch of Highway 101 is known as the “highway from hell,” the infamous host of the nation’s worst commutes.

But if the 101 is bothersome for bipeds, it is downright disastrous for the wildlife that also calls the region home. The 101 cuts like a chain saw through a vibrant natural ecosystem of coastal sage scrub and oak trees interspersed with suburban neighborhoods, disrupting the movement of animals and threatening their survival.

Now a massive infrastructure project is underway to suture together the vast tracts of fragmented wildlife habitat that have been separated by the highway for decades. Construction on a key phase of the Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing — a $100 million structure funded by a mix of public and private money — began last month and it is expected to open in early 2026.


The bridge will be the largest of its kind in the world, spanning the highway at roughly the size of a football field, and it will reconnect the undeveloped sections of the Santa Monica Mountains with those of the Simi Hills. The new pathway will be a boon for the rare and struggling species that are trying to subsist amid the sprawl, especially mountain lions, whose local population could perish without it, say the scientists who study the animals.

The crossing has inspired an influx of government and philanthropic investment for similar ventures across the country, and it has become a beacon of cohabitation during an age indelibly shaped by human activity, when many of Earth’s vulnerable species are facing the prospect of extinction propelled by a roadkill epidemic. If a wildlife crossing can work in the cradle of American car culture, proponents say, then it can work anywhere.

“When the number one threat to wildlife worldwide is the loss of habitat, we can’t write these places off,” Beth Pratt, the project’s lead fundraiser and chief spokesperson, said of urban areas like Los Angeles. “Environmentalists like me usually don’t like bulldozers, but this is the world’s most hopeful construction site.”

How many Palestinian civilians have US munitions killed?

It's easy to imagine that someone might consider US civilians to be equally acceptable targets.

Not only are our bombs killing their civilians, but our civilians vote in support of those policies.

My wife watches the Today Show so I passively listen. Obviously Trump is talked about a lot. I ignore any of it however something has stuck out. They refer to him as “Mr. Trump” however they never address Obama or W as Mr Obama or Mr Bush. I assume I know why but does anyone have any insight.

This was a good move. And very interesting to read a bit into how painstakingly they've worked on doing this right.

Josh Gibson is now the all time leader in batting average (over Ty Cobb), Slugging and OPS (over Babe Ruth)

Link to ESPN

Let's get this stopped and fixed by voting for Donald Trump in November!

Not doing a poll, because the Brat Pack list is pretty extensive. I was thinking about this because I saw St. Elmo's Fire about 2 months ago. Whatever happened to those crazy kids? Or, how about the Breakfast Club? Did Bender and Claire make it last?

If your owners dropped you off with a relative's kennel and you wanted to make the trek back home across the wilderness. Which animal from the movie would you want to be (dog-Shadow and Chance; cat-Sassie) and how far do you think you could make it home?

Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken suggested on Wednesday that the Biden administration could be open to tolerating strikes by the Ukrainian military inside Russia, saying that the United States would “adapt and adjust” its stance based on changing conditions on the battlefield.
Mr. Blinken said that the United States had neither encouraged nor enabled such attacks. But he said that the Ukrainians needed to make their own decisions on how to best defend themselves — a position he has stated before — and that the U.S. government had “adapted and adjusted as necessary” as the war evolves.
When asked by a reporter whether his words meant the United States could support attacks by Ukraine inside Russia, he said, “Adapt and adjust means exactly that.”
Since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Washington has sent the Ukrainians military aid but has repeatedly asked that they not fire U.S.-made weapons into Russian territory for fear of escalating the war.
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Several European leaders have called on President Biden to stop imposing those limits, among them Jens Stoltenberg, the secretary general of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and Emmanuel Macron, the president of France.
Mr. Blinken made his remarks in Chisinau, the capital of Moldova, while standing beside Maia Sandu, the nation’s president, who is expected to face a pro-Russian candidate when she runs for re-election in October. The two spoke to journalists after an afternoon meeting in the presidential offices.
“Our neighbors, our friends in Ukraine, they pay an outrageous price on a daily basis,” Ms. Sandu said.
Image

Ukrainian soldiers preparing to head to the frontline in a Bradley fighting vehicle near Ocheretyne, Ukraine, last year.Credit...Nicole Tung for The New York Times
Mr. Blinken announced new aid to Moldova to address a range of issues arising from Russian aggression, including its invasion of Ukraine.

The first of two packages mentioned was $50 million in broad support for Moldova’s industry and government, as well as for democratic processes. Mr. Blinken mentioned the energy and agriculture sectors, and the need to combat disinformation.
“What’s so powerful here is the deep and deep-rooted commitment to democracy in the face of bullying from Russia,” Mr. Blinken said.
Ms. Sandu thanked Mr. Blinken for American help in fighting corruption, building renewable energy infrastructure and addressing the “adversities of democracy,” a nod to Russian election interference.
The second aid package mentioned was $85 million to help Moldova increase its energy resiliency and reduce its dependence on electricity generated in a Russian-backed separatist region in the east, Transnistria. This support would help Moldova strengthen its battery storage capabilities and high-voltage transmission lines, among other energy needs, Mr. Blinken said.
Moldova recently ended its reliance on natural gas imports from Russia and now buys gas from a number of countries, including the United States.

The MLB Draft isn't until July 14, but ESPN has a mock draft up --


They've got Brody Brecht going at #19 to the Mets.

North Korea has resumed an unusual operation to show its displeasure with South Korea: dumping trash from the sky across the world’s most heavily armed border.
Between Tuesday night and Wednesday, the South Korean military said that it found 260 balloons drifting across the Demilitarized Zone, the buffer between the two Koreas. Soon, residents across South Korea, including some in Seoul, the capital, reported seeing plastic bags falling from the sky.
The authorities sent chemical and biological terrorism response squads, as well as bomb squads, to inspect the payloads. But they only found garbage, like cigarette butts, plastic water bottles, used paper and shoes, and what looked like compost. The South Korean military said the garbage was released by timers when the balloons reached its airspace.
North Korea in recent years has taken an increasingly belligerent military stance. Its unusual offensive this week prompted South Korea to send a cellphone alert to residents living near the inter-Korean border to refrain from outdoor activities and watch out for unidentified objects falling from the sky. Some confusion arose when the alert message included the auto-generated English phrase “Air raid preliminary warning.” The government said it would fix the glitch.
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“Acts like this by North Korea are a clear violation of international law and a serious threat to the safety of our people,” the South Korean military said in a statement on Wednesday. “We issue a stern warning to North Korea to stop this anti-humanitarian and dirty operation.”
The North Korean balloons arrived in South Korea days after Pyongyang accused North Korean defectors living in South Korea of “scattering leaflets and various dirty things” over its border counties and vowed to take “tit-for-tat action.”
“Mounds of wastepaper and filth will soon be scattered over the border areas and the interior” of South Korea, Kim Kang Il, a vice defense minister of North Korea, said in a statement on Saturday. “It will directly experience how much effort is required to remove them.”
During the Cold War decades following the 1950-53 Korean War, the two countries waged fierce psychological warfare, bombarding each other with propaganda broadcasts and sending millions of propaganda leaflets across the border.
Such operations ebbed and flowed depending on the political mood on the Korean Peninsula. The two Koreas agreed to de-escalate their propaganda duel after a landmark summit in 2000 at which they agreed to promote reconciliation. The nations again reaffirmed that agreement when the North’s leader, Kim Jong-un, and President Moon Jae-in of South Korea met in 2018.

​

But North Korean defectors and conservative activists in the South continued to send balloons to the North. Their balloons carried mini-Bibles, dollar bills, computer thumb drives containing South Korean soap operas, and leaflets that called Mr. Kim and his father and grandfather, who ruled the North before him, “pigs,” “vampires” and “womanizers.”
These balloons, their proponents said, helped chip away at the information blackout and a personality cult North Korea imposed against its people.
North Korea took offense, so much so that its military fired antiaircraft guns to shoot down the northbound plastic balloons. In 2016, it retaliated by sending balloons loaded with cigarette butts and other trash, as well as leaflets calling the then South Korean leader, Park Geun-hye, an “evil witch.” A few years later, it claimed that balloons from the South were carrying the Covid-19 virus.
In 2021, South Korea enacted a law that banned the spreading of propaganda leaflets into North Korea. The government at the time said that the balloons did little more than provoke the North and also created trash in the South because some balloons never make it across the border.
But last year, the South’s Constitutional Court struck down the law, calling it an unconstitutional infringement on the freedom of speech.
On Wednesday, North Korea admitted to sending trash balloons to the South — and vowed to send more — to exercise its own “freedom of expression.”

Good grief he wins by 11 votes in a runoff??? myself and my wife were two of the votes. it really does not matter because he's going against a local austin hero, who is a communist btw. and has california and soros money. the guy he is running against is Greg Casar. A nuke bomb would have to drop on austin for ol' greg to lose.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive...results-texas-us-house-35-primary-runoff.html

Republican Primary Runoff​

Latest results from 2:13 AM ET
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Republican Primary Runoff

A dozen years ago, John Mark Dougan, a former deputy sheriff in Palm Beach County, Fla., sent voters an email posing as a county commissioner, urging them to oppose the re-election of the county’s sheriff.
He later masqueraded online as a Russian tech worker with a pseudonym, BadVolf, to leak confidential information in violation of state law, fooling officials in Florida who thought they were dealing with a foreigner.
He also posed as a fictional New York City heiress he called Jessica, tricking an adviser to the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office into divulging improper conduct by the department.
“And boy, did he ever spill ALL of the beans,” Mr. Dougan said in a written response to questions for this article, in which he confirmed his role in these episodes.
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Those subterfuges in the United States, it turned out, were only a prelude to a more prominent and potentially more ominous campaign of deception he has been conducting from Russia.
Mr. Dougan, 51, who received political asylum in Moscow, is now a key player in Russia’s disinformation operations against the West. Back in 2016, when the Kremlin interfered in the American presidential election, an army of computer trolls toiled for hours in an office building in St. Petersburg to try to fool Americans online.
Today Mr. Dougan may be accomplishing much the same task largely by himself, according to American and European government officials and researchers from companies and organizations that have tracked his activities since August. The groups include NewsGuard, a company that reviews the reliability of news and information online; Recorded Future, a threat intelligence company; and Clemson University’s Media Forensics Hub.
Working from an apartment crowded with servers and other computer equipment, Mr. Dougan has built an ever-growing network of more than 160 fake websites that mimic news outlets in the United States, Britain and France.
With the help of commercially available artificial intelligence tools, including OpenAI’s ChatGPT and DALL-E 3, he has filled the sites with tens of thousands of articles, many based on actual news events. Interspersed among them are also bespoke fabrications that officials in the United States and European Union have attributed to Russian intelligence agencies or the administration of President Vladimir V. Putin.

​

Between September and May, Mr. Dougan’s outlets have been cited or referred to in news articles or social media posts nearly 8,000 times, and seen by more than 37 million people in 16 languages, according to a report to be released Wednesday by NewsGuard.
The fakes have recently included a baseless article on a fake San Francisco Chronicle website that said Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, had smuggled 300 kilograms of cocaine from Argentina. Another false narrative appeared last month in the sham Chronicle and on another site, called The Boston Times, claiming that the C.I.A. was working with Ukrainians to undermine Donald J. Trump’s presidential campaign.
Mr. Dougan, in a series of text exchanges and one telephone interview with The New York Times, denied operating the sites. A digital trail of clues, including web domains and internet protocol addresses, suggests otherwise, the officials and researchers say.
A friend in Florida who has known Mr. Dougan for 20 years, Jose Lambiet, also said in a telephone interview that Mr. Dougan told him in January that he had created the sites.

​

Steven Brill, a founder of NewsGuard, which has spent months tracking Mr. Dougan’s work, said he represented “a massive incursion into the American news ecosystem.”
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“It’s not just some guy sitting in his basement in New Jersey tapping out a phony website,” he added.
Mr. Dougan’s emergence as a weapon of the Kremlin’s propaganda war follows a troubled life in the United States that included home foreclosures and bankruptcy. As a law enforcement officer in Florida and Maine, he faced accusations of excessive use of force and sexual harassment that resulted in costly lawsuits against the departments he worked for.
He faces an arrest warrant in Florida — its records sealed by court order — on 21 felony charges of extortion and wiretapping that resulted from a long-running feud with the sheriff of Palm Beach County.
Mr. Dougan’s activities from Moscow, where he fled in 2016 one step ahead of those charges, continue to draw scrutiny from the authorities in the United States. Last year, he impersonated an F.B.I. agent in a telephone call to Mr. Brill, according to an account by Mr. Brill to be published next week in a new book, “The Death of Truth.”
Mr. Dougan, who acknowledged making the call in a text message this week, had been angered by a NewsGuard report in February 2023 that criticized YouTube for allowing videos parroting Russian propaganda about the war in Ukraine, including some by Mr. Dougan.

In a rambling, profanity-laced video in response on YouTube last year, Mr. Dougan posted excepts of the call with Mr. Brill and showed a Google Earth satellite photograph of his home in Westchester County, a suburb of New York City — “just down the road from the Clinton crime family,” as Mr. Dougan put it, referring to the home of former President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.
The call prompted an F.B.I. investigation that, according to Mr. Brill, traced the call to Mr. Dougan’s telephone in Russia. (A spokeswoman for the bureau did not respond to a request for comment on the investigation or Mr. Dougan’s previous activities.)

I'm sure that's OK, right?

[I have not fact-checked those numbers, and a banner in the video says something different. But these are still scary numbers.]

...they later determined that the specific type of Trichinella larvae were able to survive months in the freezer

I'm becoming more and more convinced that Iowa will be looking for a grad transfer PG in the portal this summer. With recruit Aaliyah Guyton and Kennise Johnson both down with ACL injuries, I think it only adds to the possibility.

Lets get a thread going on possible targets.

Already starting to see names pop up in the portal, but no obvious targets yet. Maybe someone from the Ivy League since they are not allowed to be grad students??

valid

KF up in Green Bay today. Imagine he connected with Lukas Van Ness and got a look at some of the Packer offense that Lester is bringing to Iowa.
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He runs over a police officer(not really, but he is being charged like he did) about 3 hours before his tee time, gets yanked out of his car and arrested right in front of the course entrance, taken to the station and booked, released about an hour and a half before his tee time, gets to the course about an hour before, tees off on time and birdies his first hole(10th as we started on the back 9).

Even Tiger couldn't pull that off! Crazy....