I don't agree with the hyperbole, but it's the biggest Science Scandal of the last 30 years or so.

Someday, my children will mock the Climate Change Chicken Littles much the same way I mock the "Today is just a space between ice ages" Global Cooling morons of the 1970s.

Even then, the arguments were largely the same.

"Even if we're wrong, it's too big to risk. Shouldn't we do SOMETHING? After all, IT'S FOR THE CHILDREN."

... and the "solution" then is the same as it is now -- more State control of individual lives.

No thanks, count me out.

Barb wrote in smitty's journal:

We're exceptionally dysfunctional in the U.S. because we have two major parties. It means each can take turns ignoring the will of people, as when one is booted out of power in one election, they'll just get it back next go-around when we punish the other party for screwing us over. They've got us convinced there's only two choices, and so our voting ends up assuring that.

And so there's no need for compromise, if you'll just be given power again the next cycle. I've long thought, for efficiency, and to do their jobs representing the people, why not take all the stuff that both sides agree on, stuff it in a bill and quickly pass it, and then wrangle over the contentious stuff after that. But I think both sides hold the agreeable stuff hostage to get more disagreeable stuff passed.

Or refuse to do a give-and-take on the disagreeable stuff, like this from 8.5 years ago. To better serve their respective constituencies, both parties could do an even swap and let the other side have 3 things to get 3 things for their voters. But neither party needs to worry about serving us well.

And there's no need for restraint, when you'll just be given power again the next cycle. Political litmus tests for judicial appointees, applying the fillibuster (meant for legislative bills) to judicial appointees, the "nuclear option" ("In 2005, Obama opposed [it, when Republicans had control of the Senate] before supporting it in 2013 [when Democrats had control]."), being against usage of a lot of executive orders when your side is not in power and then flipping when it is, declaring by fiat that Congress is in recess to make recess judicial appointments, refusing to pass a budget for 4 years, not allowing legislation to come to floor to be voted on (when there might be enough dissenters in one's own party to pass it), not allowing amendments from the minority party to legislation that is brought up for a vote, skirting debate by passing things via slipping them into funding bills.

The misuse of power keeps escalating giving the minority party at the time even less power. But if the minority party in the Senate is 46% of it like it is now, about half the country wants those values put forth, and not 90% or 100% of the values of the 54%. For example, there's absolutely no excuse for something as significant as Obamacare passing, when it got not a single vote by the minority party. Representation of the political diversity of the country is nowhere close to happening, in the U.S.

I wish we had more "sides" than just two. It's really bad for voters who are, for example, fiscally Conservative but socially Liberal. They don't get represented no matter what. We should have at least 4 major parties, one for each side of both axes. And then we should get 2 votes to cast, one for each axis. Then Congress should be made up of the winning proportions of each. Then we'd get things like 35 Senators who ran on socially Liberal positions, 30 who ran on fiscally Conservative positions, 20 who ran on fiscally Liberal positions, and 15 who ran on socially Conservative positions.

Then we might see things like those who think social issues are the most important be willing to compromise on fiscal things to let one side or the other win on fiscal issues, in exchange for compromise on social issues by those who don't consider those to be of upmost importance. Where it's not a simple "us versus them", because it's more complicated than that. Where it's about constantly building temporary coalitions between strange bedfellows, and expecting to give something up to get something. And then if for example the fiscally Liberal party just refused to work with the other three, the voters could punish just that one party and not expect the remainder to go hog wild in abuses, because there'd still be divisions left to keep them somewhat in check.

With only two parties, it's too easy to get people thinking in black-and-white terms about things, as if there are only two sides to every issue, the right one and the wrong one. It dumbs us down. With only two parties, it's too easy to make it not about the issues, but about the parties; people think "I'll never vote for a Republican" instead of "I'll never vote for anyone who differs from me on my top 3 issues of x, y, and z". Maybe I'm for gun rights but some people in both parties uphold that. Maybe I'm for private ownership of certain guns but not others. Only two major parties means we tend to only get to choose from extremes. More major parties would better reflect and remind us that there are nuances, and that there's a lot more to things than to just remember that Republicans are racist and to vote Democrat if you're brown.

I'm really past caring. Somewhere around the thousandth iteration, the trash talk just got tedious. It's my fault. I'll take the hit, like an RPG striking a helicopter carrying Brian Williams. I just can't muster the interest any more.

I got a thing from the IRS and they want me to fill out an on-line form.

To successfully complete the form I have to enter my filing address and it has to match my return. The form fields don't allow me to correctly enter the address.

So the address has to match for the form to validate, but the form wont allow me to enter the address correctly. It's beautiful. There's an email address to send information about the process and it says below the address that you can send an email but they wont respond. Super.

So I go to the page with a phone number to call. It says "You can call between 7 am and 7 pm your local time." I'd wager not.

I've never had a problem with the IRS or filing until this year. Something has put me onto some list with them, which they wont tell me about other than in a general way and now everything is exponentially more difficult. Fantastic.

The video editor built into youtube is surprisingly decent. It lets you cut videos up, add transitions, add photos, add text, put in music, all kinds of stuff.
 
With it running on their side I was able to edit up a bunch of separate videos, and then leave them processing while I did other stuff. It made it possible to do a lot of videos in parallel and not have my machine bogged down with it. Not bad.
 
It's not the greatest but for simple stuff that you just want to get up - it is pretty awesome. And it's really easy to get authenticated (or authorized or whatever) to load longer content than the default. I've been putting up stuff that is over an hour long without any problems.

Jeb Bush

Jeb supports amnesty for illegals, supports Common Core, and will likely raise taxes. Jeb is also a believer in the mythical deity sometimes called "Global Warming" or "Climate Change" (or "manbearpig", junior Al Gorean!).

Nope.

If the GOP is dumb enough to nominate Jeb, they will convince me to finally leave the Republican Party. I suspect they'll convince a number of other Tea Partiers to leave as well.

If Jeb is the nominee, I will vote for either the Constitution Party Candidate or write myself in.

Go ahead and tell me that not voting for the GOP is a vote for the Democrat -- I don't care. If the nominee is Jeb, who could tell the difference anyway?

Ben Carson

Not my first choice, as Mr. Carson has said before that he's not sure anyone needs a semi-automatic rifle in the suburbs. He's since walked that one back, but regaining my trust is something he'll have to do.

If Dr. Carson is the GOP nominee, I would vote for him, but I probably won't vote for him in the Primary.

It might be fun to accuse people who don't support Carson of being racist, but I already know how the left will spin that one -- that Dr. Carson is not a "real" African-American since he's off the liberal plantation.

Chris Christie

No. See Jeb Bush, as Christie is cut from the same amnesty / common core / manbearpig cloth. If it's Christie, I vote 3rd Party.

Ted Cruz

He hasn't announced, though if the Primary were held tomorrow and he was running, he'd (as of right now, but things can change) would get my vote.

Carly Fiorina

I will never vote for a Pro-Infanticide candidate. Abortion is evil, period. If the GOP Nominee is Fiorina, I vote third party.

Mike Huckabee

Forgetting that Huckabee

+ isn't very intelligent
+ raised taxes in Arkansas
+ furloughed a criminal who claimed to "find Jesus" who later killed 4 police officers

No, Actually, I can't forget that. Add Suckabee to the list with Jeb and Fiorina.

Sarah Palin

Realistically, she has no chance as the liberal hate machine has done a lot of damage to her. However, I'd vote for her. I don't, however, believe she's running.

Rand Paul

I wanted to like this guy... but he's inherited some of his father's crazy. I like that he's anti-drone in US skies.. and there's other things I like about him, but his foreign policy is a deal killer for me to support him in the Primary.

However, Rand Paul would get my vote over the Democrat in a General Election.

Rick Perry

The only knocks I have against Perry are that he supported in-state tuition for illegals and had 12 years to secure the border and didn't. He's soft on amnesty for illegals.

Yes, he's currently indicted, but that's a complete joke and he'll be found not guilty. The Governor has the (state) constitutional right to threaten a veto. The liberal hate machine will use this to try and torpedo him, but considering he's selling T-Shirts with his mugshot on them, using it as a way to promote the fact that the unhinged left (though is there really any other kind of lefty?) hates him, so I don't think it'll sink his bid.

Perry's my #2 choice behind Cruz right now, and realistically he'd be my first choice since I don't think Cruz is running for President, and I think Perry is.

Too bad it's not Greg Abbott, the current TX Gov. Abbott is terrific.

Marco Rubio

Marco claims to be against illegal immigration, but then casts votes for amnesty. Get lost, Rubio.

However, since he doesn't (to my knowledge) support the abomination that is Common Core, Rubio's nomination would not cause the GOP to lose my vote.

Rick Santorum

Santorum is as big of a nanny-state supporter as Michael Bloomberg. Go away, Rick.

Still, if Santorum is the nod, I don't hate him enough to vote third party.

Scott Walker

Scott Walker is soft on amnesty, and has been dialing back his opposition to Common Core. Find a spine, Walker. Walker at this point would be my number 3 choice, if he's the nominee, I could live with it. I'd rather have Cruz or Perry.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RbrY1-mlUYs#t=102

A member of the panel that investigated JFKâ(TM)s death now worries he was a victim of a "massive cover-up."
Whoops!

What the Popes really say about socialism.

We did our first home delivery from Tesco yesterday. My wife ordered on-line and they brought our stuff inside the window we were given for the delivery. The fee for delivery was 299 HUF which is about $1.10 right now.
 
It was a pretty awesome deal. The guy brought everything right in. There was a slight mix up - but that's because when people use GPS to come to our house it always takes them to my neighbor a little down the street. I don't know how it works in other parts of Europe, but in Hungary they seem to change the numbering of streets at a higher frequency than the U.S. So my house number is 6 but that use to be my neighbor Zsolt's house number and a lot of systems still think it is.
 
So the guy called me and after a moment or two of me fumbling around for the right Hungarian words, I realized he was 'here' and went outside to bring him in. A few minutes later we'd checked everything over, paid and we were all set. With gas going for around 400 HUF a liter, I doubt we could drive to the store and get it for less than we paid to have it delivered. On top of that the whole thing took maybe 10 minutes at most. If I go get it all myself I'm gone for over an hour. So we'll be using it again.

Walker has the same virtue as Sarah Palin: making the Left wet itself. Unlike Palin, Walker has a substantially better record of standing in the breach and surviving. Stipulate that fustakrakich is correct, and it's all rigged. Fine. Let's go for max Lefty head 'splosions, then.

I'm growing to despise the word "entitled", preferring "earned" or "merited":

I think it's a real opportunity for federalism to allow states and local school boards to figure out what works for them. There isn't a thing wrong with the Department of Education that we can't fix by just reducing to some light oversight. In particular, federal financial interactions with non-employees should just stop.

Previously:
1. All forms of racial segregation and discrimination are wrong. 2. Everyone is entitled to his own opinion.

We had what I thought was a deal, but, after a month, he's blowing off his end of the deal. Serves to underscore what a crapflooder he is. News to none.
Meanwhile, we have a source for a series of JEs that could be of interest.

I hate this question at the first word. Using a universal quantifier blows away discussion.
In this case, people voluntarily segregate themselves all the time. What would you do, have forced randomization, for crying out loud? And discrimination: what is Affirmative Action, if not state-managed discriminatory behavior.
If if involves giving careers to Yet More Bureaucrats, my going-in position is against the idea.
To ATFQ, I'm against segregation and discrimination, but I think that attempting to regulate behavior via legislation is folly. Rather, we need to use the court of public opinion to promote positive behavior and chide negative behavior to minimize it.

I got a message that the OTA update to Lollipop was available for my Nexus 7 so I installed it.

It made the tablet unusable. Performance was atrocious, battery life could dropped to a couple hours. It couldn't play music. Doing anything took so long (if it worked at all) that it was really not worth it.

I googled around. One suggestion was to clear the cache. I tried to do that but when I tried to boot into recovery that always failed with an error about "No command found."

So finally I just flashed it back to Kit Kat.

I'm wrapping that up now. Google backup is reinstalling my apps and such. Hopefully things will improve. I know it's 3 years old but I really like it and I don't think it's too much to ask for it to still run well.

My son updated his too (he has the 2013 model) and he's been complaining. So this was a good run through if he wants me to do the same for his. I don't think the impact on his was as bad. He may just not like how lollipop looks. I'll talk to him about it this week-end and see what he wants to do.

Fun times.

To get the most out of ffmpeg on Fedora - as far as I can tell - it needs to be compiled, not installed from a package manager. This is the only way I could find to get it with libfdk_aac support. I tried other stuff and then just went ahead and followed the very thorough guide on installing from source, right here: https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/CompilationGuide/Centos

Though there was one thing I needed that they didn't have in the dependencies - libtool. That was quickly rectified. So if you do this - might as well add that on the front end. I noticed the need when there was an error with autoconf for one of the parts.