Friday, November 9, 2018
Interior Secretary, Ryan Zinke exploring role as Fox News contributor - sounds about right. Yes, the guy who rode into D.C. on a horse. Please find the man a sad horse to ride home.
Tuesday, November 6, 2018. U.S. Election Day
Yes. Yes, they’ve done a fine job for “you”. But what about the rest of us? Moreover, what about the “us” in perpetuity, those who will have to deal with the erosion of civic norms?
I’m an atheist, but I’m familiar enough with the Christian canon that this photograph of “President” Trump with “journalist” Sean Hannity reminded me of a verse from the Gospel of Matthew (Chapter 16, verse 26):
“For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?"
It seems like we’re witnessing the end-game of winner-take-all politics, norms, democracy, decency, and truth be-damned. We’re exchanging stability and civic norms for “winning.”
Saturday, October 13, 2018
First lady says ‘I really don’t care’ jacket was meant to troll press (Source) - so says the woman who claims to be the most bullied person ever. (Source)
Monday, October 9, 2018
Hello babies… “Hello babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. On the outside, babies, you’ve got a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies-“God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.”
Kurt Vonnegut God Bless You Mr. Rosewater Conservative statistics I almost never agree with Bret Stephens, but this piece in the Times in one of his more Trumpian abuses of statistics.
Scripting thumbnail image file creation on macOS
One of the sites that I manage uses a jQuery-based image gallery to display images in a grid. The script decides which thumbnail to use based on how large and image is needed. A series of suffixes à la Flickr^[Well, sort of. I don’t think this is exactly what Flickr uses; and I made up the _q suffix for the less than 500px image.] is used to signify classes of image size.
Sunday, October 7, 2018
Republicans reprising their classic role of sore winners.
Friday, October 5, 2018
This article by Christopher Browning published in The New York Review of Books puts the unprecedented polarization of American political life in an eery historical context. As he puts it, “Trump is no Hitler and Trumpism is not Nazism” but certain parallels are inescapable. The article surfaces an old question that I’ve harboured for almost a decade - Is the chaotic concentration of all power the intentional end-game of the Republican party or did they simply provoke the worst darkest tendencies of voters, only later finding they couldn’t control what they started?
Thursday, October 4, 2018
This piece in The Atlantic by Adam Serwer is a reminder that for Trump’s supporters, cruelty isn’t just a side-effect of Trumpism. It’s a feature. That the current U.S. president chose to mock the victim of a sexual assault by a Supreme Court nominee is hardly surprising. But what little hope I had for Trump supporters, particularly those at the Mississippi rally who joined Trump in his mockery, is gone.
Searching the Russian National Corpus
A method of searching the official Russian language National Corpus using Python and SQLite.
Monday, September 17, 2018
Oh, those fiscally-responsible Republicans The president of debt Axios has an article on Trump’s love of debt. He’d borrow the first installment from Russia.