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Authorship is not a trade, it is an inspiration; authorship does not keep an office, its habitation is all out under the sky, and everywhere the winds are blowing and the sun is shining and the creatures of God are free. -- Mark Twain
Patti and I decided a month ago to move. The city of Houston is big - its population is twice the size of the entire state of Iowa. We lived 45 minutes from her work. Time to retrieve 90 minutes back from her day.
Over the weekend, we've moved to northwest Houston, and got ourselves a little apartment for now. Her family, we're closer to them, and so we can see them more often. She can bike to her summer gig teaching advanced algebra at summer school, and I am getting productive work through two web development companies here in Houston, so things are grooving pretty well.
And then there's us: through the entire move, it was a very loving time. Helping each other, listening to each other... she's the only woman who every looked at me and said with conviction, "What we do, we do together."
As I type this, baby Carlin is being sung to by my beautiful Patti. We have her overnight.
Life is good.
Oh, and one other thing. I had a guy respond to my Asshole post via email. He's a liberal, and got all defensive about his vote for Obama and harped on me for my "ad hominem" attack. Okay. Truth is truth. I was no fan of Bush when Bush spent way too much money and employed crony tactics in government to the detriment of we the people.
Bush is over - so very 2008. If your only response to "Obama is an asshole" is "Look at Bush!" then I appreciate your validation of my sentiment. Distraction, and not refutation, is agreement.
I did agree with his point that neither party is good. Absolutely. They both suck. I really don't see any difference between the two any more. Neither is fighting for business, low taxes, strong defense, or anything of urgent merit. My point wasn't that only Obama is an asshole. He's just the asshole with the biggest power, and that's rather irrefutable.
Let's all stop the hero worship of politicians and treat them with the merited universal disdain that they deserve.
Glenn Greenwald reports on secret court order, issued in April, which compelled one of the nation’s largest telecom providers to hand over daily call logs to the federal government. The information did not include actual content of conversations, but it included everything but.
So you, me, and many who are part of Verizon's network were (and are) being watched by the government without a warrant and without our knowledge.
The tyrant in the White House doesn't give one crap about your rights as an American. He uses the IRS to target political opponents. More Americans killed in Afghanistan under him than Bush. Spying on the American people.
He's an asshole. You elected him, and you did it mostly without knowledge or care of who he is. He speaks well. The press, 96% leftie, fawns over him. It felt like good style to say that you voted for him. And that he violates every principle you claim to hold dear doesn't matter to you. You'd vote for him again.
Here he is, in all his hypocritical glory.
If you voted for this claptrap, you're desperately ignorant. You're in the ranks of the low information voter.
In my search for ongoing work, I've stumbled into a WordPress gig. Or gigs. Depends on how it goes.
So I hadn't actually written anything yet - still trying to grasp the platform, and then it occurred to me: in WordPress, everything is a post. Literally. And every post gets a page.
If you're creating a site about dogs and cats, and you needed to create relationships between the cats and dogs, then you create a post_type for Dog and for Cat. Each dog and cat has their own page. Any extra information about them gets dumped into a postmeta table. In that table is a field called "value" where you can dump anything you like - but here's the thing: for every value you need to store, you're not only forcing a read/write each time, but you're dumping a ton of data for every entity/object/post.
I have a way to deal with that, fine, but everything is a post?
In other words, I've always known that programming and the database schema should represent reality as closely as possible. And hey, guess what: a fundraising campaign is not similar to a basketball drill is not similar to a blog post. The post metaphor is brilliant for organizing and displaying pages about content, but it falls far short of being true to life for everything.
For example, creating an accounting system in WordPress seems ludicrous because it's the wrong tool for the job. But I think it depends on how you do it, and I think I have a way to achieve something like that.
Why does this matter? My work on 247Toolset, as it turns out, bears resemblance to WordPress in its approach to themes and functionality. Nothing special about that - many other custom sites do this very thing. But some of the special features of 247Toolset might be easily adapted to WordPress plugins.
So, I have a few ideas about what might grab the WordPress community. I'll be testing them out later. In the meantime hopefully, I hope to have enough development accomplished by Monday to impress a new client.
So I picked up the Samsung Galaxy Note II as a replacement phone for my oft error prone LG Revolution, which sucked battery life like nothing you ever saw.
The Galaxy comes with a stylus and a notes program that allows me to create art on my phone again, but this time in full colors. I can even create a palette and do color picking.
Rush thinks turnout will be huge. Could be, but I doubt it. For a few reasons:
1) Most of us learned that standing around with signs in our hands doesn't really accomplish anything. 2) "IRS" intimidates people. 3) Again, I haven't had one phone call or email from anyone I know about this.
So the media spin from this will likely be, regardless of turnout:
"Tea Party Fizzle"
Look, if there's a strategic plan of action for defeating this, it ought to be:
- Scour for and report voter fraud. Lean on lawmakers to support anti-fraud measures. - Find, encourage, and support great candidates. - Work to reach and educate low-information voters. - Create a talent registry so that you can find the people you need. (No one is interested in this.)
Standing in front of the IRS office? It won't accomplish anything. Might as well type diatribes into a blog that relatively few people read.
I'm watching with a mixture of horror and amusement what's happening in the United States. It's all very simple.
You have a president who frankly doesn't care about the laws of the nation. He has an agenda, and he's off to pursue it, legality be damned. He puts the "bully" in bully pulpit, and he aims to bully those who disagree with him.
You have a media that just really likes this guy.
You have comedians who really like this guy.
Both of which mean that the truth about what he's doing and mockery of what he's doing won't happen.
There is a small, but highly informed section of citizens who see what's going on... they disagree with it, but feel pretty powerless to stop it.
The political opposition to the president gets more negative press than the criminality of the president and his administration. They're too scared to do anything about it, and they're figuring that they're better off to just wait it out until 2016.
The bottom line: he's untouchable, and the publicity of his crime is only going to embolden him. He's getting away with it. He's the new OJ, because we have a rather large group of Americans hoping like crazy that he beats the rap.
A scandal is when you walk into the CEO's office and he's boning the secretary during lunch hour. Wrong, but not illegal. To be blunt, these aren't scandals that are taking place. The president and his people aren't telling the truth, under oath, and they're misleading the American people and they're working really, really hard to intimidate those that oppose him. They're using heavy-handed agencies like the IRS to do this. That's crime.
So President Empty Chair says that he didn't know anything. His AG says that he doesn't remember. Nobody knows anything, and at this point, what difference does it make - to quote his former Secretary of State?
All of the conservative commentariat are all bug eyed about this stuff, but they're just gonna belly-ache on their blogs about it and nobody cares. I know because I've reached out to some really big names and all they care about is writing and the web traffic that they generate.
Horror? You betcha.
Amusement? You bet - it's amazing to think that the most powerful country on the face of the earth has been rendered powerless by its political class. Meanwhile, idiots like Rubio run around trying to pass amnesty for millions. That's like buying a new table for the dining room while the house is on fire. There will be a bunch of hearings, but they won't be covered, the truth won't filter out to the public, and people will support Ben Gazi for office in 2014. His name will kind of ring a bell for people, but they won't be able to tell you what he stands for.
Nobody in America cares.
The Tea Party is going to show up and stand around and protest the IRS this week and you know what? It won't make one bit of difference. Voter fraud will still happen in 2014 and 2016 in select areas of the country and nobody will care and we'll get more of the same.
There's a very small contingent of the country that has adopted a "let it burn" attitude. Effectively, they're saying, "If you want totalitarian socialism, have at it." Like Detroit, it will all be bankrupt soon enough, and you know what? No one will care.
But maybe we can all sit around and commiserate with each other on our Obamaphones - at least until they confiscate them.
This wasn't hard to see coming. I don't have a college degree. I'm no genius.
But if anyone actually thought that this clown would actually try to create a fair, transparent, workable government for the people... well, let's just say that you haven't paid attention.
There is no such thing as "good government." The root word of "government" is "govern" which means to "control." Do you need to be controlled? Do you like being controlled?
No?
Then why in the world would you believe that there can be a benevolent government?
The IRS will be in charge of many of ObamaCare's financials. The IRS was just caught using political considerations for its determinations.
I don't care whether it's Republicans or Democrats in charge - I don't want the IRS anywhere near my family's health care decisions. I don't want political considerations having anything to do with my family's health care decisions.
