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Yeah, so someone suggested a pretty good name for the April 1st theme and I utterly lost track of it. Which is a shame because it's currently named "april1". Anyone have a link, remember what it was, or have a suggestion of their own? Best my brain is kicking out is GeoShitties and I don't particularly want to put "shit" in community-facing site stuff (code comments are another matter entirely).

Mediocrity loves company, and the way it leverages the weak-minded is through highly selective compassion. But so long as you have no memory, no power of reason and no experience of life, this selective compassion sounds, well, compassionate.
I have a new favorite word: mediocracy. It means ‘rule by mediocre people’. I like it because it describes one facet of what I call Total Insanity – or that system under which we are, for now, living.

Under a mediocracy there are no objective standards. There are just feelings. It can – and will – use them to justify everything from opening the floodgates to an invasion of Europe, to feeling the pain of a 52-year-old father of seven who abandoned his family so he could live authentically as a six-year-old girl.

By waving the flag of selective compassion, mediocracy is forever misty-eyed at some new reason to undermine real culture, decency, manliness, and discipline.

However, what it hates more than anything is achievement. It talks about achievement, but only in a bland, touchy-feeling sort of way. In reality, its achievements are merely expressions of new ways to facilitate being weak and deluded; or roundabout ways of expressing such things in terms of ‘compassion’.

New no-tackle rugby
When you understand the agenda, it all gets quite dull after a while. But I was amused to see where the guns of compassion have now fixed their sights: school rugby.

The problem with rugby – at least within the context of schools – according to the self-appointed gurus of gush, apparently, is tackling.

In a Guardian piece about a letter – one breathlessly entitled UK health experts call for ban on tackling in school rugby – we are told: “The letter is the first stage of a campaign that will include a petition on the change.org website which, if it receives 100,000 signatures, will trigger the consideration of a debate by MPs on the issue.”

Now the gush police love online petitions. You can get 100,000 people to sign practically anything if you make it sound worthy enough. So long as it doesn’t require any effort or financial input on the part of those whose buttons you are pressing, they will press yours in return to give you the votes you need.

The driver for this new round of tosh is the fact that ‘more than 70 doctors and health experts have called for a ban on tackling in school rugby games.’

Most people who read the article will just scan the list of names featuring the title Doctor and think it must be a good cause. But, in reality, the document has two core signatures: those of two professors in areas which sound more related to social engineering than to anything physical (Sport and Masculinities – whatever that is – and Public Health Research and Policy).

The remaining signatures are ‘supporting’, of which two are actual practicing doctors (i.e. people who receive patients).

The rest are academics in such hard-hitting disciplines as Institute of Human Identity (Dr. Charles Silverstein) and Health Inequalities Group (Robin Ireland). The closest most of these people will have come to a sporting injury will be a paper cut from picking up a dissertation from the wrong angle.

This, clearly, has nothing to do with rugby and everything to do with imposing yet more unreality on the human tribe.

I was not a rugby player myself; I preferred soccer and athletics at school. But I have played rugby, and I am bright enough to understand one of its key features: it is meant to hurt. That’s why boys play it.

Getting punched and kicked when you’re nine is no great tragedy. Living in a hermetically sealed, bubble-wrapped environment without punches and slaps and kicks until you are twenty-something, and having no chance to test yourself, to build up stamina, courage, strength and will: that is a tragedy.

By the time these social engineers finish with school rugby, there will be no goal posts; you’ll just pass the ball around in a big circle making sure everyone gets a turn – being particularly careful to see that people in wheelchairs get two turns. You’ll score a try by explaining how much you feel you deserve one. But it won’t be a try for your side. The points will be shared among the players on the basis of who is most deserving. And when it’s over everyone will get a medal.

https://www.rt.com/op-edge/334733-education-mediocrity-rugby-feelings-compassion/

Imam Mohammed writes:

Following are excerpts from Sahin's article, titled "Monkeys Evolved from Humans." [2]

"Chromosomal Anomalies" In Monkeys "Have Never Led To The Birth Of Human Beings Or Of Monkeys Resembling Human Beings"

"Monkeys are animals that look like humans. Humans have 46 chromosomes and monkeys have 48. Since these chromosomes are similar in structure, these species can transfer from one to the other. When we, physicians, examine anomalies in chromosomes, we find that human chromosomal anomalies lead to the birth of humans similar to monkeys, as in cases of microcephaly, in which newborns resemble monkeys in form, intelligence, behavior, and social life. Such [deformed humans] must be kept under strict control. The numbers of such cases is not negligible.

"In monkeys too there are chromosomal anomalies, but these have never led to the birth of human beings or of monkeys resembling human beings. We understand from this that humans are not derived from monkeys, but that monkeys come from humans. There are many factors in the creation of such anomalies, among them divine, environmental, and chemical."

"Those Among You Who Violated The Saturday [Sabbath] Prohibitions... Will Become Miserable Monkeys [Koran 5:60]"

"Our God, the Creator of the universe, has also confirmed these truths. 'You know those among you who violated the Saturday [Sabbath] prohibitions. For them it is said that they will become miserable monkeys [Koran 2:65].'

"Also: 'Whomever Allah has cursed and punished, and those He turned into monkeys, pigs, and Satan worshippers, occupy the worst place [in His eyes], and they are perverts that have deviated from their path [Koran 5:60].'

"'And when they became arrogant and did not change their ways, they were told to become low and contemptible monkeys [Koran 7:166].'

"The [Koranic] verses above show us that monkeys have come from humans. Allah always tells the truth."

The Theory Of Evolution Is "An Opinion" By "A Jew Called Darwin"; "The Gorillas And Chimps Living Today In The Forests Of North Africa Are Cursed Jews"

"The theory of evolution was put forward by a Jew called Darwin. Therefore, it is an opinion. The aim of this theory is to turn the non-Jews away from their religion, to harm their faith, and to make them suspicious about their religion. Darwin, being a Jew, believed, lived, and was buried according to his religion. His real targets were the Muslims. Most likely, Darwin knew about these Koranic verses. In the Holy Koran, Allah responded very well to these perverts.

"Jews, who are well organized in the world's financial and scientific institutions, are so powerful that they terrorize the world of science. Through propaganda and through the reiteration of this nonsense, they have brainwashed and imposed this opinion as a rule, and sold this deception as scientific reality. Even some ignorant theologians have believed the propaganda of this theory...

"I believe that the gorillas and chimps living today in the forests of North Africa are cursed Jews. They are perverted humans that have mutated. This thought is much stronger and scientific than Darwin's theory. But we the Muslims, who believe this, do not have banks, money, or the organization inside the world of science [like the Jews have]. Neither do we have propaganda outlets, in order to scream this truth. But we have our intellect, we have our faith, and we have our Allah. Alhamdullillah [with the grace of Allah]."

http://www.memri.org/report/en/0/0/0/0/0/0/9008.htm [memri.org]
http://www.antisemitismwatch.com/tag/seyfi-sahin/ [antisemitismwatch.com]
https://www.rt.com/news/332514-turkey-darwin-jews-monkeys/ [rt.com]
http://www.diken.com.tr/vahdet-yazarindan-tersine-evrim-teorisi-afrikada-yasayan-sempanzeler-lanetlenmis-yahudi/ [diken.com.tr]

The caucuses? There's something wrong there.

Hillary got schlonged in New Hampshire, but she came away with more delegates than Bernie? What's up with that? Did Hillary pay for all those delegates in advance?

Ohhh, so THAT is why she's been getting zillions of dollars for prostituting herself to foreign interests! Makes sense now!

Hey, you really need to look into the corruption at Demcratic headquarters. Find out who got all that money for the delegate sale!

Ya know, this is mildly humorous. So few people understand why Trump is so popular. Prepaid delegates explains a lot of that. People are tired of the elites deciding in advance who is going to be president. We, the people, are quite tired of choosing between a shit sandwich or a shit sandwich. You don't understand it, Shrillary doesn't understand it, the DNC doesn't understand it, nor does the GOP understand.

We are simply tired of the corruption.

Super delegates my ass.

I get his newsletters. I don't know why, I've thought several times about unsubscribing. He whores himself to various corporations, pushing junk that almost nobody needs. Tactical pens? Today, it's a tactical crossbow. Ehhhh -

But, he does make some observations that are spot on the money. Today's email:

  Hillary Lost Because She Lied
By DICK MORRIS
Published on DickMorris.com on February 11, 2016
New Hampshire exit polls in the Democratic Primary indicate that Bernie Sanders defeated Hillary Clinton among self-described liberals by 60-39. Okay. But he also beat her among moderates and conservatives by a nearly identical 60-37 margin.

They also show that among the one-third of all voters who said "honesty and trustworthiness" were the most important qualities of a candidate in determining their vote, Sanders beat Clinton by 95-5.

  These data indicate that Sanders' victory was not the result of an ideological vote for a socialist but was due to a personal repudiation of a liar. It was Hillary's dearth of personal ethics and her lack of veracity, not her political ideology or her issue positions, that led to her smashing defeat in New Hampshire.

So when Hillary sought to co-opt and plagiarize Bernie's rhetoric in her concession speech, she did nothing to solve the problem that brought her low. Nor will any shift in her message or beheadings of her staff do much to help her.

It is not her position on the banks, TARP, Glass-Steagall, or campaign finance reform that is dragging her down. It is her email scandal, Benghazi, and her personal speeches for fees that are causing her candidacy to crash.

Hillary can change her issue positions as frequently and as totally as she changes her hair style. She can flip on the Keystone Pipeline and flop on the Trans Pacific Trade Deal. But she cannot go back and delete her lies, evasions, half-truths, and distortions. They live on video tape and in our memories, ready to spring to life as soon as she lies again.

This personal reputation is not something a new consultant can fix. All the king's horses and all the king's men cannot put Hillary back together again.

New Hampshire means Hillary is outed. It's downhill from here.

So, looks like the 16.02 site upgrade is mostly going to be a features upgrade rather than a bugfix upgrade, though there's some of that as well. There's one thing going in that there's an outside chance may annoy some people though: the new mobile layout. To be very clear on this, the mobile layout will be served to anyone with a horizontal screen (not browser window) resolution of 800 pixels or less. The only way you'll see it on your desktop is if you're still running 800x600 or lower resolution, in which case you really should get with the whole 21st century technology thing.

We're going to be doing the site upgrade the first weekend of February but if you want to give it a look early head over to https://dev.soylentnews.org/ and have a look around. Bear in mind we ain't foisting beta code on you lot with this, we're foisting pre-alpha code that took all of maybe half an hour to do up on you. This is not what the finished product will look like, it's just something to make life easier on mobile users while we write up something that doesn't suck. If it sucks too hard and you all bitch that you want the old layout back though, it's a matter of minutes to fix and revert until we have something worth calling a proper mobile interface.

Let me know what you think here.

"We started to record meteorology at the coldest point in the last 10,000 years."

https://vimeo.com/14366077

Millions of Americans may be drinking water that is contaminated with dangerous doses of lead. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) knows it; state governments know it; local utilities know it. The only people who usually don’t know it are those who are actually drinking the toxic water.

The problem stems from a common practice in which water utilities replace sections of deteriorating lead service lines rather than the entire lines, commonly known as partial pipe replacements. It is a course of action that can do more harm than good.

“It’s scary and the magnitude of this problem is huge,” said Dr. Jeffrey K. Griffiths, a Tufts University professor of medicine and public health, who recently chaired an expert panel advising the EPA on the problem. “I didn’t realize how extensive the lead exposure still remained. … EPA is really deeply concerned about this …. This was not something they expected.”

There's also a relevant quote to an issue I was concerned about in the Flint story, namely, how does a household have lead concentration levels far above that measured elsewhere in the city?

When water leaves a treatment plant, it is usually lead-free. From the plant, water flows into large pipes, called mains, which are usually made of cast-iron or concrete and run under streets. From the main, water flows through a smaller pipe called a service line, which carries it to the customer’s tap. That service line is where contamination can begin. Lead service lines are found in many states, but are especially common in older neighborhoods in the Midwest and Northeast. Most water systems stopped installing them in the first half of the last century. And there is generally less lead in water now than in years past.

But, if the service line is made of lead, as are between 3.3 and 6.4 million, according to a recent report from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, fragments of corroded lead can chip off and be swept into tap water. Additional lead can also get in as the water runs across lead-soldered joints or comes into contact with brass or bronze fixtures. Until recently, such hardware was allowed to be advertised as “lead-free,” even if it contained up to 8 percent lead. A federal law reducing the acceptable amount of lead in these plumbing fixtures to .25 percent will take effect in 2014, although Vermont and California have already adopted such rules.

Partial pipe replacements can physically shake loose lead fragments that have built up and laid dormant inside the pipe, pushing them into the homeowners’ water, and spiking the lead levels, even where they previously were not high. In addition, the type of partial replacement that joins old lead pipes to new copper ones, using brass fittings, “spurs galvanic corrosion that can dramatically increase the amount of lead released into drinking water supplies,” according to research from Washington University. Similar findings have been published by researchers at the Virginia Tech and elsewhere.

In other words, if a lead fragment from upstream pipe chipped off, it could create elevated lead levels in a single home for a period of time without affecting neighboring homes.

Now, despite all this, I'm still not sold on the claim that elevated lead exposure is due solely to the actions of Governor Snyder and his appointed subordinate in Flint. There are other mechanisms and ways to screw up that can cause elevated lead levels.

The Flint story mentioned the Walters family who had their water tested with concentrations reaching 400 ppb (parts per billion) at one point. That could be due to mechanisms that had nothing to do with changing the water supply (though making the water supply more acidic probably would have made the problem somewhat worse).

Well - I struggle to manage RAID arrays and LVM's. I needed to create a new volume tonight, and I set out to refresh my memory, and spent at least an hour going over the finer points of doing it all. Stumbled over this, installed, and created, formatted, and mounted my new volume in about a quarter hour.

For Arch users, it is in the AUR. For CentOS and Ubuntu users, instructions complete with images are available at the link:

http://www.howtogeek.com/127246/linux-sysadmin-how-to-manage-lvms-with-a-gui/?PageSpeed=noscript

Introduction

The Logical Volume Manager or LVM, has already been covered on HTG as well as why you should use it. As LVM is becoming more and more mainstream, where some of the major distribution players like CentOS and Ubuntu with their latest 12.10 release, now installing on LVM by default, you may come across it sooner then you might think. With the above it will probably won’t be long before the time that you would want to administrate an LVM, to increase the space available on the volume for example… with that said, what could be more pleasant then having a nice graphical interface to do the job? Nothing, so lets install one.

____________________________________

Note that the poor grammar was copy/pasted from the original. Administrate? WTF? Ehhh - I probably shouldn't make fun of someone who has helped me out, but, geez Louise!

http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm199900/cmselect/cmhaff/95/95ap25.htm

This is fascinating reading. Virtually all the "studies" that supported gun control in the UK are discredited. Statistics are exposed as either outright lies, or extremely flawed. The methods by which different nations define and account for homicides, violent crime, and gun law violations are explained in some cases, and the impossibility of comparing those statistics is exposed. Basically, if you take the time to read this wall of text, you cannot help realizing that the entire gun control lobby has intentionally misled the masses.

I am still absorbing it. Need an example to whet your appetite?

" 52. To further its own claim of a correlation between gun ownership levels and homicide rates, the Home Office paper cites a comparison between Seattle and Vancouver which showed that the homicide rate in the US city was two thirds higher than that of the Canadian city, all the difference being attributable to gun homicide. That study was somewhat discredited when other researchers showed that the entire difference could be accounted for by demographic factors. Both cities have similar white populations and large ethnic minorities. In Vancouver, the ethnic minority is largely Chinese and Japanese whose homicide rate is far lower than that of the white majority. In Seattle the ethnic minority is black and their homicide rate is 10 times higher than that of the white population. Virtually all the difference between the two cities could be accounted for in that way."

58. Their published results raise some important questions. The supposed direct comparison of gun and non gun homicides fails even to attempt to control for any variables, and in particular for levels of existing gun control. It is known, for example, that the homicide rates in some US cities where guns are effectively banned is extremely high, with Washington DC showing a rate of about 80 per 100,000. In less populous areas, the homicide rates are entirely comparable with European and British levels. Centerwall notes that in Vermont where there is effectively no control on firearms, the mean annual rate of criminal homicide over a four year period was 0.4 per 100,000 whilst North Dakota levels were even lower. Had the comparative figures used Britain, instead of England and Wales, we would find that these US States were lower than those in this country, for Scotland has a homicide rate considerably higher than that of England and Wales.

65. The authors of the UN Report draw a series of conclusions which are not justified by their own evidence. The only conclusion which can safely be drawn in that there is no casual relationship between the number of firearms in a State and the levels of death through homicide, suicide or accident.

  84. The debate seems to assume that the United States is a homogenous unit, but that does not seem to be the case. Homicide rates vary from the extraordinarily high level of about 80 per hundred thousand in Washington DC which has a total ban on the ownership of most firearms, to rates less than those in the UK and Europe in States like Vermont which does not allow any restrictions on firearms ownership.

86. In the United States the distribution of homicide and particularly firearms homicide varies very widely between racial groups, as it does in other countries. The large and well established Japanese population in the San Francisco area has the same access to firearms as any other group, but their rate of homicide has been shown to be slightly lower than the homicide rate in Japan and very much lower than other groups in the same area.