October 23, 2013

"Of all the preposterous assumptions of humanity over humanity...

http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/19119-of-all-the-preposterous-assumptions-of-humanity-over-humanity-nothing

October 22, 2013

This one time at band camp...

October 22, 2013

"Legacy Computer Systems": Interesting take on the ACA rollout problems

Via Josh Marshall at TPM:

Misunderstanding the Problem?

Are we not grasping the nature of the problem itself? TPM Reader ST says the issue isn't so much the website as legacy computer systems throughout the federal bureaucracy and the need to stitch them all together until a single interface.

From a TPM reader:

(snip)

The Healthcare.gov site itself is just like a server in a restaurant. The server may be the main point of interaction you have -- bringing you menus, taking your order, and bringing you food - but without the kitchen, there's no meal. And yet when a kitchen messes up and can't get food out, the server often unfairly gets blamed. And it doesn't matter if you have the best waiter in town if the kitchen can't get its act together.

Healthcare.gov is basically just showing you your menu of insurance options, taking your order for insurance, and bringing everything back to you when the order is complete. In tech terms, it's just the front end. All the heavy lifting takes place on the back end, when the website passes your data to an extremely complex array of systems that span multiple agencies (like so many cooks in a kitchen). A central processing hub needs to get data from each of these systems to successfully serve a user and sign up for insurance. And if one of these systems -- several of which are very old in IT terms-- has a glitch and can't complete the task, the entire operation fails for that user. Only if everything works perfectly, and the data gets passed back to the website, does the user have a good experience with Healthcare.gov.

The problem is that throwing more capacity at the website itself, or praising or criticizing how it was built, is as useless as criticizing a server when it's the kitchen that messed up. Maybe cathartic, but not much else.

The complexity involved in making all these systems work together is tremendous. Reader RN doubted that there are 500 million lines of code involved, but if you add up what originally went into building 10 or so huge systems, across multiple agencies, plus all the stuff to make them work together, 500 million lines of code might be realistic. (Especially as many of these systems are old and have been patched and built onto many times.)

The rest: http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/misunderstanding-the-problem

Thoughts?

October 22, 2013

Ted Cruz Is the Republican Party

Although many pundits describe Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) as on the fringes of the Republican Party, a new Democracy Corps poll finds he's actually right in the ideological middle.

Tea Party and evangelical segments of the party make up over half of all Republicans, and these groups think very highly of Cruz. He scores an 81.8 positive rating among Tea Partiers and a 75.9 rating among Evangelicals.

Among moderate Republicans, who make up just a quarter of the GOP, Cruz scores a 51.0 rating.

The rest: http://theweek.com/article/index/251460/ted-cruz-is-the-republican-party

Own it, GOP.

October 22, 2013

America on Fire

Peter G. Peterson, a Wall Street billionaire, in
New York in a Jan. 29, 2008 file photo.
(Photo: Fred R. Conrad / The New York Times)

America on Fire
By William Rivers Pitt
Truthout | Op-Ed

Tuesday 22 October 2013

At this moment, a sizable percentage of southeastern Australia is on fire. More than 62 separate wildfires are raging, the three largest of which are poised to merge into a single monstrous "mega-fire" that could eventually threaten the suburbs of Sydney, or even the city itself.

Hundreds of homes have been destroyed, power has been lost in thousands of others, and the entire state of New South Wales is under a state of emergency. If those three large fires merge, fire officials are deeply pessimistic about their ability to get the situation under control.

The rural area where the conflagration began is prone to wildfires, though not at this unprecedented scale, but that did not stop New South Wales Premier Barry O'Farrell from successfully spearheading an effort to slash millions of dollars in funding from the Rural Fire Services that are now desperately trying to contain the destruction.

Mr. O'Farrell is a fiscal conservative, because of course he is. "There is not much we can do except wish those extraordinary volunteers and paid firefighters out there every success and every luck," said O'Farrell earlier this week.

He's exactly right, too. Cut their funds and wish them luck as the flames lick their heels. It's the conservative way.

Here on the other side of the world in America, another sort of fire is threatening to burn out the futures of millions of people. A bunch of billionaires are working hammer and tong with their bottomless pockets, their hired Congressional stooges, their idolaters in the press, and all those useful idiots who hate government but love Medicare and always vote to destroy Social Security and Medicare, because government programs that actually work really well are the enemy, and must be scourged.

The rest: http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/19548-america-on-fire

October 18, 2013

Blarf blif blib blarb blub gloop foop foop foop nerp dwinkle voon plif...

...plerfle plaffub blerfle blarg blarg foon foon foon foon arglebloo.

Because, sometimes, gibberish is the only reasonable reply.

Tea party leader proposes ‘class action lawsuit’ against ‘homosexuality’

A tea party leader and former Baptist pastor — who believes that AIDS is God’s judgement against LGBT people — this week proposed filing a “class action lawsuit” against “homosexuality.”

At a Tea Party Unity event on Thursday, LGBT activist Peter LaBarbera told group Chairman Rick Scarborough that Fox News should be pushed to cover “these wonderful stories of happy men and women who have left the homosexual lifestyle” like they covered African-American conservatives.

“We need to work on our conservative, alternate media and say, ‘Look, don’t do the pro-gay thing, why don’t you rather step out and support these ex-gays?’ We should encourage Fox News to tell their stories,” LaBarbera said. “Fox is now telling the stories of black conservatives because the other media is not doing that, we should all get on Fox and say, ‘Come on, tell these stories, these wonderful stories of happy men and women who have left the homosexual lifestyle.’” Scarborough, however, had a different plan for fighting what LaBarbera had called “the pro-gay thing.”

“Peter, the whole issue of a class action lawsuit, you and I have talked about this a little bit,” Scarborough pointed out. “I just wonder if you’ve explored that, talked to anyone about it.”

The rest: http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/10/18/tea-party-leader-proposes-class-action-lawsuit-against-homosexuality/

October 18, 2013

Flat-out full-bore bull-moose gold-plated way-out-in-the-blue CRAZY-ASS SHIT right here.

Cruz' Father Suggests Ted Cruz "Anointed" to "Bring The Spoils Of War To The Priests"
Bruce Wilson
Talk To Action

10/16/2013

"The pastor (Huch) referred to Proverbs 13:22, a little while ago, which says that the wealth of the wicked is stored for the righteous. And it is through the kings, anointed to take dominion, that that transfer of wealth is going to occur."

- Rafael Cruz, August 26, 2012

In a sermon last year at an Irving, Texas, megachurch that helped elect Ted Cruz to the United States Senate, Cruz' father Rafael Cruz indicated that his son was among the evangelical Christians who are anointed as "kings" to take control of all sectors of society, an agenda commonly referred to as the "Seven Mountains" mandate, and "bring the spoils of war to the priests", thus helping to bring about a prophesied "great transfer of wealth", from the "wicked" to righteous gentile believers.

Rafael Cruz' dominionist sermon given August 26, 2012, at the New Beginnings Church of pastor Larry Huch, in Irving, Texas has already received considerable scrutiny due to an excellent Huffington Post commentary by Methodist Associate Pastor Morgan Guyton, who noted the explicitly dominionist nature of pastor Cruz' sermon, which concerned the divine mandate for believers, with anointing of "kings" in their respective spheres, to take control over all sectors of society.

Cruz spoke of "Kings who are anointed to go to war, win the war, and bring the spoils of war to the priests."

The rest: http://www.talk2action.org/story/2013/10/16/143336/01

October 18, 2013

The Knight Who Says "No!"

October 17, 2013

Dear Keyboard Manufacturers Of The Future

Greetings.

I am no Luddite, nor am I one to blithely throw over tradition, continuity or well-settled patterns. Some things are just because they are, and I am perfectly fine with that. I improvise, I endure, I tolerate...which is why I know the "qwerty" keyboard configuration is likely here to stay.

That having been said, I come to you on bended knee to request a small, unobtrusive change: can you please, for the love of all that is holy and good, do something about the "Caps Lock" key? Could you, perchance, move it to the upper far right corner of the keyboard, above the number-pad configuration? Barring that, could you adjust its sensitivity so that one must hold it down for a full two seconds before it activates?

You see, I am one of the eleventy-billion people on Earth who are not 70-wpm typists who can bang out a missive while looking out the window. I look up, I look down, I look up, I look down when I am typing, and far too often, my rogue left pinky finger will delicately brush the "Caps Lock" key, and before I know it, I have writTEN HALF A PARAGRAPH IN THE UNFORTUNATE STENTORIAN SHOUT THAT CAPITAL LETTERS DENOTE IN THIS DIGital day and age.

I am but one man, your humble servant. Any such adjustment along these lines will be greeted with ravishing gratitude.

Yours Most SinCERELY,

A FAn

October 17, 2013

I really needed this. So, I imagine, do you.

Man Picks Up Restaurant Tab After Overhearing Strangers Getting Diagnosis

A waiter at a Boston-area restaurant witnessed an act of kindness on Tuesday night that's warmed hearts across the internet.

"While waiting tables tonight, a mother and daughter started crying mid-meal. I had no idea what happened until a single guy at the table next to them handed me this note [seen below] with his bill," wrote the waiter in a Reddit post. "Faith in humanity, restored."



HuffPost reached out to the waiter, who clarified that he couldn't confirm the relationship between the two women, but he was fairly certain they were mother and daughter. After they'd ordered, the woman whom the waiter believes was the daughter took a phone call. Both women then started crying.

What happened next was truly heartwarming: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/16/stranger-overhears-diagnosis-pays-tab-_n_4109542.html?utm_hp_ref=mostpopular