Just came across a couple of interesting Alternative Histories. Did the Crusades happen when and where you think they did?

And if this has you doubting your history and running to the books to disprove Michael Voris (like it did me) only to find out that every historical fact was fact, then what about this?

I have never found distributism as well defended, as in this talk from the American Chesterton Society. I know I've done a bad job promoting distributism in this journal, so those of you who have criticized this third way in the past, please read this paper.

That is, if you haven't already abandoned slashdot for Google+.

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First, it's a myth that 47% of Americans don't pay taxes- 86% do, it's just that it isn't all federal income tax. Which led me to ask, are there any other crony capitalist myths used by the GOP to get social conservatives like myself to vote for billionaires? Turns out there's no job creation in the 10 years of Bush tax cuts, which means trickle down economics no longer works.

Slashcode 2.0 is evil
 
Slashcode 2.0 is evil

Or less. This one lasted only 7 months. Still, gonna take the time to learn Android programming, and I've already sent out two resumes, and I've got a LAN config job I'd been putting off for the past few months to do this very afternoon.

Plus, I have enough cash in savings, and invoices billed but not paid yet, to pay the house payment through September.

I'm mandated to use Visual Studio .NET 2008 for this project:

Does anybody know of a decent object library that will load a PDF, render it, has #of pages for a property someplace, and has a print function?

I thought Component One would do this for me, but no dice- I get an error on load. I thought PDF Sharp (open source library) would do this- but it only creates PDFs it doesn't render them.
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Last night I figured out a way to reduce the requirements for this. I no longer need to render the PDF in memory, and I'm using file size to detect number of pages. Since the PDF in question is a pretty well standardized report- similar page counts should be within a few K of each other.

Anybody know of a good .NET PDF printing solution?

My own left and right wing tendencies have been allowed to infect distributism in these journals. It's both far more fair (for the freedom lovers) and far more equitable (for the socialist lovers) than I have described.

Here's an excellent article on the subject, written NOT by a Roman Catholic (it's the first pro-distributist, Christian theological tract that I've read that isn't based on _Rerum Novarum_ and deserves archiving for that purpose alone) written by an Orthodox Theologian. Likely not enough difference for the American Protestants in my ring- but worth reading *just for the descriptions and comparisons of the other three economic systems that are commonly used*.

A Triumph of Rhetoric over Reality. Guess I wasn't too far off with my charge that Ronald Reagan was a closet liberal.

A world war between India, China, and Pakistan would solve a lot of foreign relations and economic problems for the United States.

If the CIA is this bad at forgery, somebody should be fired.

So, along with every other anti-Birther I know, I applauded Obama releasing his birth certificate yesterday.

Needless to say, some incompetent made fools of us all- and didn't even bother to hide his tracks (just click on the first link and load it up in illustrator if you don't believe me).

So, do they think we have no computer skills? Or is this a distraction?

In the next few weeks, soon as the weather stabilizes enough, I'm going to be returning to bicycle commuting. Well, not really- instead of a bicycle, I'm riding an electric scooter- a Curie Tech Ezip 500.

Since the last time I did this, I upgraded to a very nice Tmobile G2 cell phone with all sorts of bells, whistles, and sensors.

Obviously, since it's going to take me nearly twice as long to get to work (30MPH roads, 16MPH scooter) I'd really like some good sound support while not compromising safety (too much). A mono bluetooth that supports A2DP & Handsfree would be nice- integrated into the helmet by either manufacturer or hardware hacking would be even nicer.

Anybody got any recommendations?

So, is Global Warming done for? I've long used "Global Chaotic Climate Change" instead, and have never bothered with the anthropogenic/natural debate. But recent data seems to indicate that the entire idea of the earth going into runaway greenhouse effect is WRONG.

Of course, now it's too late anyway- peak oil, combined with growing demand in Asian Markets, has done what all the Kyoto accords couldn't and will bring us $5/gallon gas by August anyway.

Had to read a stupid managers book called _Flash Foresight_ for work, that came out in January. He's at least two steps behind the state of the art in computers- he's obsessed with the cloud and with phone applications.

Here's my prediction after reading his book: The next big concept in general will be the Chunked Cloud. Due to the apparent inability of cell phone companies to punch a signal through a mountain range or even some buildings, what is really necessary is to use the ever increasing flash memory of phones to fill in the gap in network connectivity. The guy who figures out an algorithm that predicts the applications a person will run on their phone in the next 24 hours- and pre-downloads as much data as possible whenever the phone is in range of the internet- will indeed be a rich fellow 15 years from today.

Too bad I'm not 20 years younger, that kind of flash foresight would have been very valuable before I had children and debt and not enough time on my hands.

Ok, so I have a Jabra BT530 bluetooth earbud, that is supposed to support A2DP media streaming. I have a TMobile G2 Android 2.2 phone, which is also supposed to support A2DP streaming. Worked somewhat OK up until yesterday, had to reset the earpiece after a phone call, but it worked.

It has stopped working. Any attempt I've made to connect Media Porfile to the BT530, is rejected.

I've tried putting the BT530 into "purple" pairing mode, deleting the pairing, and repairing it, but even that hasn't worked.

Anybody see this behavior? Anybody have any clue how to fix it, save getting a new headset?

And just in case I have to go with that last- anybody have any idea of a good one-ear headset that supports HandsFree and A2DP profiles?

But I think my faith is showing.

In the first, yet another evangelical preacher comes closer to Catholicism. In the second, I say that the two highest priorities right now should be pro-life and debt reduction, in that order- and that the Ryan Budget fails on both. I'd criticize Obama and the Democrats on their budget as well- but the fact is if they could agree on a budget back last October, we wouldn't be in this mess now.

An interesting rebuttal to the secular humanist concept that sacrifice is never necessary and human suffering is to be avoided at all costs.