Stipulate that
- There Is Nothing To See Here, Move Along, and
- Nuremberg Defense, and
- Conservatives Are Just Lightweight Metallic Headwear Aficionados, and
- If The Tea Parties Hadn't Worn That Short Skirt To The Bar Where The Violent Illegal Alien Was Cleaning The Federal Agent's Hog-Leg, The Tea Party Probably Wouldn't Have Been Ventilated.
Those zany conservatives. Always going for the victim narrative.

America's Bitter Pill: Money, Politics, Backroom Deals, and the Fight to Fix Our Broken Healthcare System

Conservatives won't like it because it supports the thesis I have been repeating for some time - that the republicans voted against the ACA not because they disliked the contents but because they didn't want Obama to get the credit for a health care reform bill.

Liberals won't like it because it shows how the ACA is just the next offspring of a long lineage of conservative bills that line the pockets of big businesses in the guise of improving health care.

Slashdot "libertarians" won't like it because it isn't a youtube video of Ron Paul

Smitty won't like it because I posted a link to it :)

Since slashdot is slashdotting my slashdot account with random logouts.

I have a Select Statement that returns 4 rows. When used in a stored procedure as input to an Insert Into, though, it was returning five rows. I commented out SET NOCOUNT ON; which is added by the SQL 2014 template. It then returned 4 rows. To test that was what was really going on, I uncommented out SET NOCOUNT ON; and it is now returning 4 rows properly.

I made no other changes.

Anybody else ever run into anything like this??

Remember the motorized retracting radio antenna option that some cars had back in the 70's/80's? Well I want something like that, only on the driver's side of the car. And I want it to be a pipe with an elbow that can be raised like a submarine periscope. Only instead of lenses, I want it to be hollow. And instead of being an air intake like those snorkels on Hummers and Jeeps, I want it to be connected to the exhaust system and have a valve that can be actuated from a control in the cabin.

This way when I'm stopped at a traffic light, and next to me on my left is a big-ass truck jacked up off the ground with its "tailpipe" aimed right at my driver side window, smogging me out, I can flip a switch and return the favor and redirect my noxious emissions into one of *his* windows. (Or even better, a rubber hose that can be extended out from the car sideways to slip over the offender's tail^Wsidepipe, and reroute their own exhaust back at them!)

p.s. Speaking of automotive "why is this shit even legal?", how come motorcycles don't have to have mufflers? I have to notice one coming up on me and quick stick a finger in the appropriate ear so that blood doesn't shoot out of it when the guy roars by. I can be just about to fall asleep and one will go by on the main street down the block from me.

So I guess I also could use a 125 dB loudspeaker, which is just the threshold of pain but no real damage, on a turret on the car's roof, that automatically tracks an above-average loud noisemaking object, and when in range delivers a massive sound pulse of this.

A polar bear
Eats a bowler pair.
Into the Arctic he falls.
His dying wish,
As he passes a fish:
"Have better luck with my balls."

Then again, this could show up on the test:
http://www.futilitycloset.com/2015/06/28/made-to-order-4/

Taking a breather from Amazon Web Services study.
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=7644157&cid=50043823

Last Monday we had a front page article asking about the "effectiveness" of ISP-level spam filters. I eventually responded with a rehash of my central thesis on slashdot, pointing out that spam is an economic problem and filters will never resolve it.

My comment was generally well received (as seen by the moderations applied to it), though clearly some people were confused by it. Note for example two anonymous applications of the standard form, neither of which showed good comprehension of my comment. Overall my comment fielded 13 replies, many of which seemed to struggle with my statement in one way or another.

However the one who really failed most dramatically was this comment claiming - based on nothing at all - that everything I said was completely wrong. I eventually challenged his faith in spam filters, which apparently caused him to take off the gloves and make it personal.

In fact, so personal, that he kept bringing the conversation back to himself. Eventually I got tired of trying to bring the discussion back to being about spam, and he apparently got tired of talking about himself.

Even for this crowd, that was an odd discussion. Something like 18 comments from him in ~5 days and possibly not a single fact across the lot of them.

What's that other term again, that only can be applied to democrats? Similar to a type of shoe, but clearly it can't fit Scott Walker's wavering stance on the confederate flag.

http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=7612903&cid=50002991

I'm not Catholic, but even if I was:

1) I do not recognize this ball of mud in space as "our Sister, Mother Earth". How long before Catholics, who already come dangerously close to or cross the line into worshipping false idols, refer to it as "the Blessed Holy Mother Earth"? Water is blessed to make "holy water", so when will dirt be? Say three Hail Gaia's and you're absolved of your sins against "her"? I'm envisioning a creepy earth cult a la the movie Avatar. Stop the madness. Stop making little godlets out of other people and mere things.

2) This "sister" is not now crying out to us nor never has, because it doesn't have vocal chords and it's not alive. It's a giant dirtclod that has living things on it, most of them soulless/not made in God's image and therefore as valuable as the rock they live on.

3) I will not say a prayer for "our Earth". I don't pray for inanimate objects. Nor do I deify them.

These are based on an article I read at lunch about it this week on ArsLeftica. I ignored what the author said about the Pope's writing, and refer only to the quotes. Which appalled me enough; I don't care to read the original source on this one. (I don't want to know fully how bad it is.)

p.s. Note that I consider Catholics to be my fellow brothers in Christ. Same with Mormons. I trust that our acceptance of Jesus will enable us to go to the place that's the best. (Where I guess it'll all be straightened out.)

Read the whole thing. The next 20 months shall afford the appeal of a bad tequila hangover, I reckon.

Islamic State operative suspected in 2012 Benghazi attack killed in US airstrike

Because certainly they must have known that he had all those deleted emails from Hillary Clinton's email server - particularly the ones where she asked him to initiate the strike - on his person when he was killed in Iraq this week. Hence this airstrike was done only to bring about the coronation of Mrs. Clinton.

Am I getting the conspiracy about right this time? I haven't heard anything from the usual gang here to tell me what to think about this yet.

My dad made an interesting point in the car on the way to lunch today. He wondered how my bro-in-law's folks, who are dedicated Liberals, could buy Toyotas, when they don't use union labor.

It's a bit of a conundrum. If you're a Leftie, you have disdain for anything American. Yet the Japanese automakers dodge unions like Wal*mart.

While it's still a capitalist system, how's a socially conscious person supposed to support the labor movement without also indirectly supporting their (private) employers.