Me: "2 + 2 = 4"
Him: "You're incapable of seeing beyond your affirmations."
Me: "What, then? Can you sketch an alternative to traditional math?"
Him: "Look, you're just regurgitating the same old stuff. If you won't give that up, there's nothing I can do."
Me: "Sorry! I thought this was an exchange of ideas, not a con job."

--
Wow. I thought I was supposed to be the one who's nuts for thinking that Jesus of Nazareth is the Christ.
But you won't begin to catch me evangelizing the meaning of life in the kind of anti-intellectual mode I have conveyed above.
And, no, the above dialog is not a literal one. I've taken what I consider the gist of another discussion with someone else here on /. and recast it from scratch.

I have said many times that the difference between capitalism and socialism is one of cardinality. Socialism is the singular corporation. Capitalism, if it be more than oligarchy, is a full-on multitude.

Dude, don't bogart that joint. I want to know what magic definition of "human" you're operating under, who manages that definition, and the size of your kickback for being such a useful patsy.
Full disclosure: my definition is the liberty-conveying one found in the New Testament, and I'm not buying any of these variations on Marx. Karl, indeed, preached "The Kingdom of God, hold the God," with the corpse piles of the last 170 years to show for it.

Certainly, let there be a fair trial.
But for the seemingly unambiguous cases like this one unfolding in Cleveland, I say, to paraphrase the Brother's Grimm, let them

Awwww yeahhhhh:
https://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3704115&cid=43596003

I have two dual-core 64bit laptops.
Thought is to take, say, Arch Linux, and craft a minimal configuration that:

• Installs to a thumb drive
• Supports virtualization
• Boots itself to one core, then the other
• Can bind both the host and guest instances to external mass storage
• Can at least fake some Big Data work

My MacBook Pro's meager 4GB of RAM is probably suicidal for this sort of thing.
However, the intent here is to do preliminary research, and document that I have enough technical chops not to kill myself in a real situation.
I priced the gear I'd need at MicroCenter today. $500-$600. Once I've got the distro configured, and can do a double-USB boot trick, plunking down further cash won't be totally idiotic.

It took me a while to figure out how to identify a user by ID. You can't just randomly put that query string variable in the URL and get any joy.

My Slashdot UID is 8191. Less than 10K, *and* Mersenne prime. #InfowarsPickupLines

— Smitty TheWackoBird (@smitty_one_each) April 26, 2013

Click the Twitter hash link for some quality abuse of Alex Jones.

From Roger L. Simon

Today Sirota seems like an imbecile (well, he did before), but I would venture to say he doesnâ(TM)t know why. So I will spell it out for him: the War on Terror (euphemism alert) is not about skin color. It is about ideology, Islamic ideology.
The Tsarnaevs are white people in the purest sense. They are Caucasians from the Caucasus, of all things, but they believe in Allah â" do or die, apparently.
Too young for the civil rights movement, Sirota is an adherent of an ultra-bourgeois nostalgia for racism that hides under the ludicrous rubric âoeprogressive.â Itâ(TM)s laughable, but itâ(TM)s also sad and dangerous.
It avoids a confrontation with the great issue of our time â" what to do about Islam, an all-consuming ideology that seeks to engulf the world. The Sirotas of our culture want to downplay that but the reality remains.
Sloughing this off on âoewhite skin privilegeâ is particularly worrisome, even venal, because many will believe it. As one who was heavily active in the days that term was invented (â(TM)60s) and helped promulgate it in my writing and speechmaking, I can attest to how dangerous it is. Its intention was never really to cure racism, but to perpetuate it, to increase racial enmity by pointing the finger at people who were, if anything, only culpable in the most remote sense.

From Roger L. Simon

Today Sirota seems like an imbecile (well, he did before), but I would venture to say he doesnâ(TM)t know why. So I will spell it out for him: the War on Terror (euphemism alert) is not about skin color. It is about ideology, Islamic ideology.
The Tsarnaevs are white people in the purest sense. They are Caucasians from the Caucasus, of all things, but they believe in Allah â" do or die, apparently.
Too young for the civil rights movement, Sirota is an adherent of an ultra-bourgeois nostalgia for racism that hides under the ludicrous rubric âoeprogressive.â Itâ(TM)s laughable, but itâ(TM)s also sad and dangerous.
It avoids a confrontation with the great issue of our time â" what to do about Islam, an all-consuming ideology that seeks to engulf the world. The Sirotas of our culture want to downplay that but the reality remains.
Sloughing this off on âoewhite skin privilegeâ is particularly worrisome, even venal, because many will believe it. As one who was heavily active in the days that term was invented (â(TM)60s) and helped promulgate it in my writing and speechmaking, I can attest to how dangerous it is. Its intention was never really to cure racism, but to perpetuate it, to increase racial enmity by pointing the finger at people who were, if anything, only culpable in the most remote sense.

May all dishonorable men know the underside of the bus.
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/04/jenny-sanford-sabotaged-mark-sanford-comeback.html

Murdoch on socialism.

NSFW => Gizoogle knows.

Confessions of a Counter-Revolutionary

At Reason.

God rest your soul, lady.