The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

How Do You Not Post ‘Bacon Lube’?

Posted on | December 5, 2011 | 10 Comments

by Smitty

I guess this is not a real-world product. However, the enterprising baconophiliac might do something clever with bacon lip balm and some glycerin. However, I’m not a chemist or a doctor: any side effects should be blamed on Stacy McCain.

Category: Bacon

God Bless You, Mary Zenecki!

Posted on | December 5, 2011 | 55 Comments

News from Virginia via Quinton Report:

A skeleton, dressed as Santa Claus, nailed to a cross, was torn down by an enraged woman outside of the Loudoun County Courthouse.
The display was legally there, with the consent of the county, officials said.
Mary Zenecki, a county resident, wasn’t having it. She, piece by piece and bone by bone took “Skele-Claus” off the cross and laid him on the courthouse’s lawn. . . .
The display was put there by Jeff Heflin. He applied for approval with the Loudoun County Board of Supervisors to put up his anti-Christmas Season display.
“It depicts how society’s materialistic obsessions and addictions are killing the season’s peace, love, joy and kindness,” Heflin said. . . .
The leader of the Northern Virginia Atheists, Rick Wingrove, says tearing down the display was illegal, and people should keep an open mind.
“Offense is in the eye of the beholder. We’re offended by the religious displays on government property. We think it’s constitutionally improper,” Wingrove said. . . .

Jeff Quinton comments: “[W]hat would the reaction be in both the media and in public opinion if this was a display mocking the religion of Jews, Muslims, or any other non-Christian faith?”

 

Category: Christmas, Quinton Report, Religion, Virginia

UPDATE: This Post Was A Mis-Read
@VodkaPundit Insults Virginia

Posted on | December 5, 2011 | 9 Comments

by Smitty

UPDATE: Upon a closer reading, I see that Green really only pointed to VA going to Obama in the update, in a wild contingency meant to show what BHO would have to do to have a glimmer of a chance. Accusation retracted, switching to decaf.

In Wargaming the Electoral College, Stephen Green has the temerity to assert that Virginia will go to #OccupyResoluteDesk next November. Lay off the absinthe, man! I realize you’re trying to make something of an interestion post out of the 2012 election, but come on: we brought in Bob McDonnell by a 17 point margin in 2009, and further increased GOP control this year.

I predict that by the time next November finally arrives, BHO will be in such bad shape that Virginia would vote for Snooki over him.
Oh, and by the way: what is the over-under on Hillary replacing Biden on the Democrat ticket?

Category: Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, VodkaPundit

SANTORUM VOWS: ‘NO SURRENDER!’

Posted on | December 5, 2011 | 25 Comments

Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum has published a full-page ad in Iowa newspapers in which the former Pennsylvania senator vows to “protect America’s moral foundation.”

The new ad, clearly aimed at social conservatives who are a key GOP constituency in the Hawkeye State, is timed to coincide with Santorum’s three-day “Faith, Family and Freedom” tour of Iowa, which began Sunday in Sioux City.

“I believe what makes America exceptional is not just our economic potential or our remarkable innovation, but the fact that we are a moral enterprise,” Santorum says in the ad (click here to view in PDF format). “As President, I will protect America’s moral foundation, empower American families and build America’s economic freedom. And I won’t compromise on my values to do so.”

In a press release, the Santorum campaign said the new ad will appear “in several major Iowa papers” including the Des Moines Register.

RECENTLY:


Category: Election 2012, Iowa, Republicans, Rick Santorum, Rick Santorum

Henry Grady Weeps

Posted on | December 5, 2011 | 10 Comments

Henry Grady monument, Marietta Street, Atlanta, Georgia

Among the many wonders of modern technology is its ability to transcend space, enabling communication between people who share some connection, but who might never cross paths in the real world.

My column today at The American Spectator somehow drew the attention of an academic at an institution of higher learning in California. He sent an e-mail praising my column, explaining that he’d followed the link to my blog, where he’d read the “about” page and learned that I am an alumnus of Jacksonville (Ala.) State University. The professor informed me that he is an alumnus of Troy (Ala.) State University, hated arch-rival of my alma mater, and he further explained that his brother is employed as a staff writer for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Of course, I was obliged to send him this cordial reply:

Dear Professor –:
My pleasure to make your acquaintance, sir, and my condolences on the misfortune of your education.
Like we always said at JSU: If you can’t go to hell, go to Troy.
Also, please extend my sympathies to your brother for his heroin addiction or whatever other source of financial desperation compels him to work for the decadent descendants of the Cox family. I’d go back to driving a forklift before I’d ever allow my byline to appear in one of their wretched papers.
As an Atlanta native, born down on Boulevard at what used to be Georgia Baptist Hospital, I grew up reading the Journal every afternoon. When I later stumbled into a journalism career, my ambition naturally was some day to work for my hometown paper. Like every aspiring newspaperman in those days, my dream was that when I grew up, I’d be Lewis Grizzard.
It took me years to work my way up from a $4.50-an-hour job as a staff writer at a 6,000-circulation weekly to become an assistant editor and columnist at the Rome (Ga.) News-Tribune.
And then came that sad day when Grizzard died. My editor in Rome actually suggested I should apply for the vacancy left by this much-mourned passing, but I didn’t dare. Surely, I told my boss, that spot was coveted by every man on the AJC staff, and if I were to apply and somehow be lucky enough to be chosen, all those people would hate me for it.
Besides, I wasn’t half good enough to replace Saint Lewis.
Imagine my shock, then, when it was announced that Grizzard would be replaced by the execrable Rheta Grimsley Johnson, an unfunny feminist from out of town.
This was like a heavenly omen to me, a fiery comet blazoning a message across the sky: GET OUT OF GEORGIA!
Two years later, I won a national award for some columns I’d written and a year after that (1997) I got hired by The Washington Times. Shortly after I started my new job in D.C. as an assistant national editor, the Lewinsky scandal broke, and my first thought was, “What a shame that Lewis didn’t live long enough to write about this.”
By the time he died, Grizzard’s column was the only thing worth reading in that damned Atlanta paper, which has been run into the ground by the degenerate offspring of the Cox family. There are some folks down home who swear they’ve seen the statue of Henry Grady on Marietta Street weeping actual tears.
I understand there are many decent and well-meaning journalists who, due to circumstances beyond their control (including heroin addiction, bless your brother’s heart), have no other choice than to work for those vicious Cox people and such of their carpetbagging kin as that worthless Kennedy fellow.
But as for me, like I say, I’d rather go back to driving a forklift.
Sincerely yours,
Robert Stacy McCain

If you’ll look at the top of the page, you’ll see a motto about ruthlessly writing the truth. The decline of the Atlanta papers is a lamentable truth. Perhaps one day the Cox family will sell the paper whose once-proud reputation they’ve ruined. And if the buyer were to be somebody an honest man could respect, then maybe I could go back home.
 
 

Category: Journalism

Software Enhanced Politics: Perl Flip-Flop

Posted on | December 5, 2011 | 5 Comments

by Smitty

Coding is actually fun, not that I have time to do much anymore, because you can work on small problems and actually solve them. In politics, you talk about solving problems as though a closed-form solution was somehow obtainable. In the blog world, you can compare this site to a retail shopping trip to a department store. Your web browser is the sales associate, busily getting the shoes in hopes of a fit. The database is the store-room, with all the merchandise arranged to cram in the most stock, while still retaining easy access, if not best display. The internet and web server is all of the streets and traffic signals between your house and the parking lot, doing all of the utterly boring work of moving traffic along according to some relatively stable protocol, say HTTP.

The wildly dynamic work of getting just the right style of shoe in the right size and determining that the shoe fits, so that you can wear it, lands on the scripting engine. This particular blog is composed in WordPress, which is to the PHP language what Legalese is to English: sure, WordPress is PHP, but brings enough specialization to the task that you can’t just buy a PHP cookbook and expect to get very far with the WordPress codebase.

Who cares about these details? You wanted a blog post, not a meditation on coding. If all of the infrastructure works, you get the post, and the tools involved fade like presidential campaigns long since suspended. It matters not if the blogging tool is implemented in PHP, the relatively clean looking Python, or the quirky, idiomatic Perl.

Now and then, though, you get some reflection of software programs into political programs, of geek code into legal code, of information state into nation-state. This happened when I saw a post on the Perl ‘flip-flop’ operator. In electronics, you have the concept of the bi-stable multivibrator, which is far less kinky than it sounds. It’s essentially an electronic light switch, flipping on, or flopping off based upon an input, but, most importantly, staying that way, like an unprincipled politician awaiting the next lobbyist to flash some cast and adjust a vote.

Perl’s gift to software is to have more operators than the Democrat Party. So many, in fact, that some joker arranged them as a periodic table. Perl really fetishes operators, having around an order of magnitude more than most other languages with which you’d care to tangle. The subject of the post is the flip-flop operator, which has massive political application.

Perl 5 has a binary operator called flip-flop that is false until its first argument evaluates to true and it stays true (flips) until the second argument evaluates to true at which point it becomes false again (flops). This is such a useful operator that Perl 6 also has flip-flop, only it’s spelled ff and has a few variants:

ff
ff^
^ff
^ff^

The circumflex means to skip the end point on that end.
Perhaps some examples are in order …

for 1..20 { .say if $_ == 9 ff $_ == 13; }
# 9 10 11 12 13

for 1..20 { .say if $_ == 9 ff^ $_ == 13; }
# 9 10 11 12

for 1..20 { .say if $_ == 9 ^ff $_ == 13; }
# 10 11 12 13

for 1..20 { .say if $_ == 9 ^ff^ $_ == 13; }
# 10 11 12

As with a political tool, the software tool should provide maximum capacity to obscure meaning. This blog holds forth the hope that proper grasping of the nuances of the flip-flop operator will lead to greater dexterity in the assumption of positions which candidates have previously opposed. For example, usage of the flip-flop operator can allow simultaneous treatment of terrorism as a law enforcement issue on the one hand, while employing armed drones to atomize terrorists on the other, even if the terrorists are U.S. citizens, without the sordid embarrassment of a software crash. A physical light switch operated at modern political frequencies would shatter like a teleprompter falling to the cold, hard, real ground. The ephemeral nature of software brings to politician to that nirvana-like state of being able to hold two positions simultaneously. If the flip-flop operator were any more powerful, they should have to call it the Progress operator.

Category: How This Here Internet Thingy Works, Politics, Uncategorized

Tepid Star Wars Fan At Best, But This Made Up For The Hype With Cool

Posted on | December 5, 2011 | 1 Comment

by Smitty

via Miss Cellania

Category: Video

A Shot To The Dome Of Security Theater?

Posted on | December 5, 2011 | 7 Comments

by Smitty

Roger Kimball

Right now, we spend billions of dollars on a new government institution (the TSA) which invades people’s privacy, clogs our airports, and doesn’t really do anything to make flying safer. Why not dismantle the whole thing and hire a couple thousand sharp shooters? We place one or two on every flight up by the cockpit behind some bullet-proof plexiglass. Ahmed gets restless, bang! He gets his 72 virgins. When I asked about reading him his Miranda rights, Andy suggested the perfect abridgment: “You have the right to remain silent,” which, in the circs., he was certain to do anyway.

Among the stronger criticisms of W is the whole Department of Homeland Security. Sure, using security theater as a front for a jobs program was brilliant. W bought all of the value of ‘taking action’ and helping ‘create jobspositions’ with precious little flack for Democrat-style money wasting, because it was all done under the ‘security’ fig leaf.

And yet the GOP has to be dragged kicking and screaming to the notion of scaling back the federal government. GOP: the TSA is precisely the sort of overpriced, ham-fisted, ineffectual noise that got the Revolution going back in the late 1700s. Right now the list of Executive agencies that the GOP candidates is too, too short. As the primaries roll on, the GOP axe list should grow, just so BHO can look sillier defending the Executive bloat.

via Instapundit

Category: Republicans
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