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Journal Journal: Does #OccupyResoluteDesk Read Slashdot? 52

He reminded Republicans that some of the ideas behind the Affordable Care Act--most notably its individual mandate to buy coverage--were once supported by some conservatives, although its Medicaid expansion and some other big parts of the law stem more from liberal thought.
"The Affordable Care Act pretty much was their plan before I adopted it," he said.

It sounds as though he's snorting the same Drano as some I could name here.
Yeah, one time some Heritage dudes said something semi-fungible, so I guess that lets the No-Talent Rodeo Clown off the hook for what's among the more expensive cock-ups in human history. Or something.
A cleaner non-argument would be that Republicans use the Roman alphabet, and all five reams of the PooPoo-cACA itself* were composed in the Roman alphabet**.
The broader point is that this country is an experiment in self-government, and the time has arrived to admit that Hayek is correct, and the Progressive Project (both Republican and Democrat flavors) just needs to be scuttled in favor of simpler systems empowering individuals in their liberty. You either support that, or I oppose you.

*To say nothing of the ensuing reams of regulation--would that they were reduced to nothing!
**For all it could have as well been a simple Klingon translation, for all anyone who cast a vote to hang this albatross about our necks actually read the Mike Foxtrot.

User Journal

Journal Journal: In which a certain piece of work on here is thoroughly pegged 5

"In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is...in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to."

You know who you are, peddler of filth. And if I'm incorrect, I won't know short of Eternity, for this is pretty much what I think of you: a dirty diaper that, despite the best efforts, continues to spew crap in all directions, contaminating everything.
I think you false, diabolical, and unworthy of dialogue. Return to your pit.

User Journal

Journal Journal: Workin' real hard, wishing I could be surprised 26

The supposed Benghazi "investigations" touted by some of the tools in these parts were as useless as suspected.

The timeline isn't an official committee report or publication; it's just an informal summary compiled to help members keep dates straight as they assess the State Department's lack of cooperation. The timeline doesn't include every significant date in the Benghazi investigation, but it does give readers an idea of what Republican investigators have been up against as they've tried to uncover the story of Benghazi. What follows is a fleshed-out version of the timetable--in my words, not the committee's--based on information from committee sources.

As an aside, I'd like to forgive fustakrakich for raping my quotation a couple weeks back. I realize it was a troll, but, as with false accusations from other corners, that sort of thing just destroys my interest in engaging on here.
So there's that.

User Journal

Journal Journal: Web Dev on the Mac 1

I've been working on a little side project. I would like to have an app where people can read updates that I send out. It seemed like a fun way to learn more about programming mobile apps and it's something I could actually use if I can get it to a decent state.
 
I'm keeping it simple. I decided the app would just be an rss feed reader. And that meant I need a feed. I want it to be very specific to my app so I decided the way to go would be to just create my own back end for creating the feed. I decided to use php and I wrote a simple set up using the codeigniter framework. That gave me a quick way to set up authorization and it was easy to tie in styling from bootstrap so that things can look decent without any effort.
 
I've been doing all the work at my office, on my desktop running Fedora. I have two nice big lcd monitors and developing on Linux is just so easy. I had the environment up and running in no time.
 
Then this week my son got sick. Nothing serious - but enough for him to stay home from school for a few days. I worked from home to keep an eye on him. I've been putting off getting my Macbook set up to do this kind of stuff but now I really needed to tackle it. Ugh - what a pain. The machine itself has grown on me. The hardware is decent and works pretty well. The software isn't horrible. But oh my word - when I want to do anything 'out of the ordinary' and by that I mean any kind of meaningful work with the system, it is pretty bad. I know lots of professional developers use Macs but I'm stunned at what a pain it is to do things that are trivially easy in Linux.
 
Getting Mysql installed and running with Apache was a lot more work. Getting PHP working the way I want took more time than it ever has before. Things are far from ideal even now, but I've got it to a point where it works.
 
And now I have my code in 3 places. So I'll be using github to keep code in sync between them. It's a little more of a challenge because I have the production environment set up a little differently than the dev environment. But not so differently that it is a huge deal. I have ssh access to my hosting environment (Bluehost) so that makes it pretty easy. - Oh and that is the one thing that saves the mac - having bash. If it didn't I'd have given up on it long ago.

User Journal

Journal Journal: Might explain some of the behavior here 23

I have quoted before my old friend Theodore Dalrymple on the purposes of lies in totalitarian societies:

In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control.

This has a ring of truth to it with respect to Slashdot. I've been on the receiving end of repeated accusations used like bludgeons to the point there are some people on here to whom I just ain't got jack to say beyond: "Lord bless your heart".
Which is not to whine about it. This is Slashdot; let the incontinent go elsewhere.
Rather, I'm yawning.

User Journal

Journal Journal: And you thought Twitter useless 11

User Journal

Journal Journal: Nebbishes Yearning for Truth (NYT) 26

Pravda on the Hudson decided to un-frack itself with its Gail Collins hit piece.
I don't really care if Slashdot's favorite dirty diaper un-soils himself on the subject as in this JE.
It would be fine if he manned up and repented of being a total crapflooder; I'd enjoy adult conversations with him, as he seems an intelligent person. But then, we're talking about a dedicated bile spewer here. The sort that yields to nothing less than full-on Divine Intervention. So let me pray for that.
User Journal

Journal Journal: You can all blame me 39

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.

User Journal

Journal Journal: Catch 22 6

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.

User Journal

Journal Journal: Youtube Video Editor 2

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.

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