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The olden days (from about 1967) seemed more modern. Where are we going?

Note 1: VCDL seems to be claiming some credit for Bloomberg dropping out.
Note 2: Some cool photos, and a video in TFA blob:https://twitter.com/f95b50fd-01de-43d0-bf59-5dde05e5b11f

In effect, "Because I'm rich, I deserve to have a private army."

Virginia Gun Owners Shamed Michael Bloomberg at Election Eve Town Hall

Virginia gun owners and their allies have shown the rest of 2A Nation how to engage in ambush political warfare against the tyrannical impulses of Mini-Mike Bloomberg, a man who has pledged his personal fortune to strip Second Amendment rights from all Americans.

The scene was a Northern Virginia college campus this week, where Fox News provided the New York gun-control extremist with a town hall format to spew his nonsense on firearm restrictions, and on other topics.

There to provide pushback were the members of the Virginia Citizens Defense League—with an assist from my group, the Patriot Picket.

Bloomberg Town Hall protest

With more than 25,000 paid members, the VCDL has demonstrated to a national audience that it is one of the most politically astute gun rights organizations working at the state level. Their ability to turn out its activists on the ground, as well as on social media is legendary.

Anyone who saw coverage of Virginia’s “Lobby Day” rally attended by more than 25,000 armed patriots in late January has seen “VCDL power” at work.

At the town hall venue this week where Bloomberg hoped for a national media cakewalk, the VCDL played the inside game and outside game expertly, pressuring Bloomberg to resort to half-truths and outright fabrications about federal gun laws on the 60 minute live broadcast.

And while Fox News hosts Brett Baier and Martha McCallum had hoped to preside over a smooth and civilized blabfest, the VCDL was not playing along.

At one point, a VCDL activist leaped to his feet, out-of-turn, to challenge Bloomberg on his gun control mania—a disruption that prompted the Fox hosts to hastily throw their town hall coverage to a commercial break.

More about that in a moment. First, though, it’s worth noting that the VCDL laid the groundwork for Bloomberg pushback and disruption days in advance. Using VCDL “Action Alert” messaging, members were encouraged to snag tickets to the Fox News town hall.

They succeeded, and a significant number of VCDL regulars occupied seats for the show.

The “Alert” messaging also put out the call for 2A advocates to stage a sidewalk demonstration in front of the town hall venue before the broadcast got underway.

With help from my Patriot Picket team, the VCDL arranged for a gauntlet of gun rights sloganeering that bombarded all arriving Bloomberg minions and media members with freedom messages as they cued up for the event’s security screening.

Once inside, VCDL activists took seats while proudly displaying the now-famous orange “Guns Save Lives” stickers. Others attendees removed their coats to reveal orange “Guns Save Lives” shirts.

Before the live national broadcast even got underway, the GSL messaging was a shot across the Bloomberg bow—putting the little tyrant on defense from the get-go.

Incidentally, the right to wear the orange GSL stickers and shirts in the gallery came only after the VCDL folks fought for it.

It wasn’t clear whether it was a Fox News demand or a tantrum thrown by the Bloomberg minions on hand, but the VCDL prevailed in a pre-show debate over whether the stickers and shirts represented “political campaigning” from the audience. The VCDL people stood their ground and won the argument.

Their stickers and shirts qualified as attire protected by the First Amendment—a stand for freedom that would soon pay enormous dividends just as the town hall went “live” on the Fox network.

It should be noted that one of the great ironies of this spectacle of Michael Bloomberg hectoring a national audience about his wish to gut the Second Amendment was the choice of the venue itself. George Mason University, named after one of America’s greatest liberty-loving patriots.

When it came time to go live, the VCDL’s maneuvers paid off.

As the Fox camera framed up the very first Virginia citizen with a question for candidate Bloomberg, a “Guns Save Lives” shirt worn by a VCDL activist occupied most the frame.

And as the broadcast rolled along, the GSL stickers and shirts were visible in just about every audience cutaway for the rest of the broadcast.

Then came the moment near the end of the town hall, when the microphone was passed to Barstow, Virginia’s Clarke Chitty. Squaring up to Bloomberg, Chitty confronted the gun-grabbing billionaire with perhaps the greatest hypocrisy of the 2020 Democrat political season:

        “How do you justify pushing for more gun control when you have an armed security detail that is likely equipped with the same firearms and magazines that you seek to ban the common citizen from owning? Does your life matter more than mine, or my family’s, or these people’s?“

The audience erupted into wild applause—applause that Bloomberg attempted to quiet with a sputtering start to his answer that betrayed his embarrassment at being shamed.

Bloomberg’s response, though, was a cowardly effort to detour away from a direct answer to Clarke Chitty’s question.

Instead, the words of this Republican-turned-Independent-turned-Democrat smacked of focus-group testing—but nonetheless rang hollow for any gun rights advocates watching in the room, and even more importantly, at home.

Below, you can watch Bloomberg’s 3-minute snobbish, elitist self-justification of “guns for me, but not for thee”, but here’s a handy summary:

        “I am entitled to self defense because I am more important than you.”

Specifically, the part of Bloomberg’s non-answer that got the audience the most restive was the idiotic assertion that background checks don’t apply to internet sales or gun shows. As someone who has spent hundreds of millions of dollars challenging American gun rights, you would suspect Bloomberg would understand federal gun law by now.

Instead, it was astonishing to hear Bloomberg’s fairy tale.

        “The law does not apply to guns sold sold over the internet or in gun shows…why? Because those two things came after the law that applies to gun stores was passed, OK? And what I have tried to do is just get every state—because the federal government doesn’t seem to want to do it—to just check before they sell a gun to anybody to make sure they are not in one of those categories where people—I think most people would agree—should not have guns.”

Bloomberg had hardly finished when voices in the audience began yelling out comments in a manner not seen during the town hall’s previous 45 minutes.

One VCDL gun rights advocate who wasn’t ready to let Bloomberg’s falsehood stand rose to his feet to challenge Bloomberg on his falsehoods, and on his notion that self-defense was available by writing checks for armed guards.

His name: Thomas Speciale. He is not just any VCDL member.

He happens to be a contender for the 2020 Virginia Republican nomination for U.S. Senate. Speciale apologized to the Fox hosts for speaking out-of-turn, but he pressed on and shouted his question at Bloomberg.

        “Are those liberties available to the people of New York?”

The answer never came as Speciale’s disruption kicked off more protests from the audience to such an extent that Fox’s Bret Baier felt compelled to call for a commercial break.

Below is the video clip where Virginians refused to give Bloomberg a pass when he misrepresented the facts and distort the truth.

        Question: “How do you justify pushing for more gun control when you have an armed security detail that’s likely equipped with the same firearms and magazines that you seek to ban the common citizen from owning?”

        Bloomberg: I’m more important than you. pic.twitter.com/ywszQHcLoy

        — Caleb Hull (@CalebJHull) March 3, 2020

Thanks to the courage of gun rights advocates whose confrontation created the 2A pushback “highlight reel” above, those watching live and those watching via social media links can see just how dishonest Mini-Mike Bloomberg is about his claim that he is not threatening the 2nd Amendment.

Cam Edwards, a Virginian, nationally known gun rights advocate and blogger, was one of those Fox viewers who was incensed to hear that Bloomberg justified his use of an armed security team as something that only wealthy elitists politicians deserve.

Appearing as a call-in guest on WMAL-FM in the nation’s capitol, Edwards shredded Bloomberg’s notion that other Americans were welcome to protect themselves as long as they hire retired cops at great expense, as Bloomberg has.

        “Here is what Mike Bloomberg does not understand, which is that 18 million American conceal carry holders—we pay for our own security, too. We just can’t afford to outsource it to a private army of former cops. This was a very revealing moment for Mike Bloomberg. His arrogance and elitism were on full display and I hope Americans were watching.”

They clearly were. Despite the millions of Bloomberg dollars poured into Virginia Democrats’ coffers, a money dump that gave Democrats control at the statehouse this year, it’s clear the Bloomberg bribes did not pan out for the paymaster.

For it was only 24 hours after Bloomberg tried to talk up his infringement schemes at a university named after one of America’s greatest patriots that Virginia Democrats went to the polls and gave Joe Biden the win in the Super Tuesday voting. Bloomberg did…poorly.

And now news comes today that the anti-gun authoritarian has called an end to his fantastically expensive, fabulously unproductive campaign.

If we had anything at all to do with that outcome, it was all worthwhile.

 

https://www.thetruthaboutguns.com/virginia-gun-owners-shamed-michael-bloomberg-at-election-eve-town-hall/

The holy grail of a perfect Hello World program may never be found.

I found the Java Enterprise Edition Hello World

With the right drugs I think I can do better.

C      ************************************************
C      Program to print Hello World to the console.
C
C      Copyright (C) 1979 Hello Worlds Expeditions.
C      For a better exploration of habitable Hello Worlds.
C      A subsidiary of Tinfoil Cat Holdings.
C
C      ************************************************
PROGRAM HelloWorld;

ENVIRONMENT DIVISION.

#include<stdio.h>

#define while if
#define struct union

DATA DIVISION.
   CONST
      Message = "Hello World";
      Times = 10;

   VAR
      I: Integer;

BEGIN
   FOR I := 1 TO Times DO {
      10 System.out.println (Message);
      20 GOSUB 10
   }
END.

Edit: a few additional improvements.

PITTSBURGH — There is a battle going on here within the Allegheny County Democratic Committee, a formidable force of centrist, conservative, and liberal Democrats whose backgrounds range from union halls in the city to the businessmen and women who have spread out into the leafy suburbs that hug the city limits.

A key figure in the battle is committeewoman Heather Kass, who is running for the state House. Several years ago, Kass's social media posts criticized Obamacare and the distribution of free Narcan for addicts — and insinuated support for President Trump.

Fortunately for Kass, she received 49 votes from the committee to secure its endorsement. Her opponent, liberal activist Jess Benham, received just 19.

That’s when things got interesting. Darrin Kelly, an influential local labor leader, issued a statement blasting Kass’s previous statements. The party hierarchy followed that up by saying her social media history was disqualifying.

The fight soon unraveled in many different directions and tested a party that has comfortably come together and built a force that helped keep a Democrat as the chief executive officer for five consecutive terms and the majority of the county council seats.

Now, accusations of disloyalty and closet Trumpism are being tossed around by the liberal wing of the party. The factions that once worked together well enough to enjoy a healthy coalition are splintering.

Party Chairwoman Eileen Kelly held a press conference defending the endorsement process and encouraging forgiveness of Kass’s past social media posts. But in response, local elected Democrats demanded her resignation, including two of the county’s congressmen, Rep. Mike Doyle and Rep. Conor Lamb.

        There's a reason why people listen when @Darrinkellypgh speaks. He tells it like it is.

        I agree. It's time for the Chairwoman to step aside. https://t.co/v1Dr9z730f
        — Conor Lamb (@ConorLambPA) February 21, 2020

Two things are worth watching: The chairwoman is probably going nowhere, and the April 28 Democratic primaries in Pennsylvania are going to be a spectacle. This county isn’t the only one in the commonwealth with fractures within the party. Roughly 250 miles due east along the Lincoln Highway, Lancaster County is also experiencing some serious turmoil within its party ranks.

Unlike Allegheny, Lancaster is considered a red county. Yet despite giving Trump a majority of its votes in 2016, Democrats (under Chairwoman JoAnn Hertz) fought and flipped traditionally Republican-held suburbs in the 2017 and 2019 local elections.

As thanks, Hertz was given the choice of either facing public criticisms from within the party ranks or resigning.

Forced out, Hertz was replaced in a committee election by Diane Topakian, a retired Service Employees International Union political organizer who is from the most liberal side of the party.

Places such as Allegheny and Lancaster counties have made strides in elections with Democratic candidates who ran and won as centrists. Once they are elected, however, local party apparatuses start to demand more fidelity to liberalism, and the national party stresses it in messaging. But these are the kinds of places where any gains that were made since Trump was elected may start to fall apart.

The ideological balance in this country remains firmly center-right. Yearlong 2019 Gallup poll numbers based on combined data from 21 of its telephone surveys show 37% of the country, on average, identifies as conservative, 35% as moderate, and 24% as liberal.

It also found that Republicans tend to be less fractured. They have their differences, but in the end, they conform around conservatism.

Democrats are more fractured. Survey results strikingly reflected what happened in Allegheny and Lancaster counties. As Gallup said, "Even though liberalism has been on the rise among Democrats, it is not yet the clear majority position, perhaps leading to the strong intraparty clashes." This has been seen at the local level in Allegheny and Lancaster counties, as well as the national level, in Democratic Party presidential debates.

A Democratic presidential candidate is not going to win or lose based on how fractured his or her party is. That will depend on how well the candidate can coalesce the party and motivate people to show up for him or her.

What is happening in Allegheny and Lancaster counties and countless other counties across the country shouldn’t surprise anyone. It has been reflected in every single Democratic debate of this presidential cycle.

This didn’t start yesterday, last week, or in reaction to Trump or Hillary Clinton. This party has been trying to shed its centrist members since the presidential campaign of Al Gore, and it tipped the scales with President Barack Obama — who waited until his second term to dismantle the New Deal coalition in favor of the ascendant coalition of young people, minorities, women, and just enough white, working-class voters.

Clinton failed to include the working class in her coalition and lost. If these smaller county parties mimic that in 2020, and if the Democratic National Committee and its presidential nominee follow suit, Democrats will struggle locally and nationally. The result will be fewer locally elected Democrats, a slim-to-none congressional majority, and four more years of Trump.

What I find interesting is, how this echoes the 2016 election. Democrats around the country told the party that "We want this" or "We want that". But, the party rejected all of that, and tried to ramrod Hillary into office.

Same thing here - toe the party line, or you're out.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/centrists-flirt-with-democrats-and-the-party-rebuffs-them

Capitalism is a force for good, if restrained. Unrestrained capitalism is a force for evil. In the middle of the twentieth century unrestrained capitalism led to the German Nazis and the Italian fascists.
        The fascists in Italy and the communists in the USSR claimed their governments to be socialist, despite the fact that under communism, government controls industry, while a fascist government is controlled by industry.
        In a socialist government, like some European nations, capital works for society, which controls government and regulates industry so that it benefits society. In a capitalist country, like the USA (which keeps creeping farther away from socialism and closer and closer to Fascism), society works for capital, to the benefit of the rich and the detriment to everything and everyone else.
        It pollutes the planet, but capitalism as practiced in America doesn’t care. It impoverishes people, but capitalists don’t care. It causes crime and violence, but capitalists don’t care. Capitalists only care about money.
        Capitalism worships money. Many capitalists claim to be Christian, or Jewish, or Muslim, or Hindu, but none of them really are; as the Christian Bible says, no one can serve two masters; he will love the one and hate the other; and the love of money is the root of all evil.
        Many Christians think capitalism is good, and socialism is evil, because so many socialists are humanist, atheist, or even Satanists. But socialism is neither humanist (although it is good for humans), atheist, nor Satanic. It has nothing to do with any religion, or lack of one. It says society should control government and industry, not the other way around.
        The capitalists have caused American minds to be really twisted. They have not only made socialism to sound like heresy (which it is, to one who worships money), but the word liberal, as well. But look what those words really mean: liberal and generous are synonyms, as are conservative and stingy. If you call yourself a conservative, you’re saying you’re stingy and will refuse to share.
        Do you want a stingy America or a generous America?

The Alt-Wrong have got themselves an Anti-Greta by the name of Naomi Seibt.

The 19-year-old German is a Climate Change Denier and Islamophobe. She is also apparently a member of and speaks to the far-right Alternative für Deutschland, an organisation associated with Brexit's very own Nigel Farage.

Apparently Seibt will be addressing the conservative CPAC this week in the USA along side Trump and Pence.

A journal entry that simply restates a comment I just wrote.

Memory closely integrated with processors at the chip level makes sense. You would upgrade memory and processing power together.

Another thing I think will eventually happen, but that will be controversial.

Hardware assisted GC

Note that all modern languages in the last 2 freaking decades have garbage collection. Remember "lisp machines" from the 1980's? Like Symbollics? Their systems didn't execute Lisp especially fast, but what they did was provide hardware level assistance for GC which made GC amazingly fast.

I look at the amazing things JVM (Java Virtual Machine) has done with GC. If only the JVM's GC could benefit all other languages (Python, JavaScript, Go, Lisps, etc). Of course, those languages could use JVM as a runtime. And GraalVM _might_ make something like that happen where lots of different languages run in the same runtime and can transparently call each others functions and classes and have a common set of underlying data types. Red Hat's Shenandoah and Oracle's open source ZGC are amazing garbage collector technology. Terabytes of memory with 1 ms GC pause times. Now imagine if you had hardware assistance for GC. (btw, why is Red Hat investing so much into Java development? I thought they were a Linux company? Could Red Hat, which is a publicly tiraded company, have some economic reason Java is making them lots of money?)

Rationale: GC is an economic reality. Ignore the whining of he C programmers in the peanut gallery for a moment. They'll jump up and down and accuse other professionals of not knowing how to manage memory. Ignore it. Why do we use high level languages (like C) instead of assembly language? Answer: human productivity! Our code would be so much more efficient if we wrote EVERYTHING including this SN board directly in assembly language!!! So why don't we??? Because, as C programmers are simply unwilling to admit, the economic reality is that programmers are vastly more productive in higher and ever higher level languages. Sure there is an efficiency cost to this. But we're optimizing for dollars not for bytes and cpu cycles. Hardware is cheap, developer time is expensive.

Slight aside: ARM processors already have some hardware provision for executing JVM bytecodes (gasp! omg!).

I'm surprised that modern Intel or AMD designs haven't introduced some hardware assistance for GC.

Symbollics hardware, IIRC, had extra bits in each memory word (36 bit words I think) to "tag" the type of information in every word. Then a way to efficiently find all words that happened to be a "pointer". A way to tag all words that were "reachable" or "marked" from the root set, etc.

Maybe this can happen if memory and processing elements become highly integrated and interconnected. Hardware design will follow the money just as programming languages and technology stacks do.

Others will believe that system design will stand still to conform to a romantic idealism that was the major economic reality once upon a time.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

Nobody's crystal ball is perfect. But I did expect in the early 90's that most new languages would start having GC, and that did begin to happen about 2000.

Senile Senior software developers look at the business case beyond how personally amusing all this fun technology is.

Is there a way to bypass this nonsense yet? Some proxy application or even a hardware LAN interposer that can fake the latest version of papers-please and just let me connect to boring web pages without getting "Unable to complete secure transaction" ?? I don't even care if it routes all my traffic through China or the NSA. I just want a workaround for these arbitrary blocks.

Just now I modified a utility to spam HTTP requests with a custom user agent containing a few choice words. See, I can act like a dick too. But soon the entertainment value of this will wear off. And I would like to again be allowed to choose what browser I use.

Submission in the queue at the time of writing: https://soylentnews.org/submit.pl?op=viewsub&subid=39288%ACe=&title=FCC+Forced+by+Court+to+Ask+the+Public+(again)+If+They+Think+Tearing+Up+Net+Neutrality+Was+a+Really+G

I have just left a comment for the FCC to consider, and I hope that you will too. As noted in the submission, the court ordered comments are obfuscated by the FCC, apparently in the hopes that no one does comment in favor of Net Neutrality. Ajit Pai is a sweetheart, isn't he?

Web address for commenting: https://www.fcc.gov/ecfs/filings/express

The first block at the top of the page is "Proceeding(s)", where you will enter 17-108 Once that number is entered, you find a dropdown menu, from which you select "17-108 | restoring internet freedom".

From that point, it's a normal page, where you fill in your name, address, email, and who you represent. Miss any of those required boxes, and your comment won't be counted I suppose.

At the bottom, there is a box that you can tick, if you want email confirmation that your comments were recieved.

Also at the bottom is a warning,

Note: You are filing a document into an official FCC proceeding. All information submitted, including names and addresses, will be publicly available via the web.

Don't type anything into the form that you don't want law enforcement to follow up on. ;^)

I think I still burned them, without saying all the things I would like to have said. Be imaginative, and/or be factual, but get your views recorded. Let's not allow Ajit to smother Net Neutrality again!!

Edit: Your email confirmation will contain your full comment, along with all the information you entered into the various boxes. More, that email has the exact formating of your comment as you typed it. When you submit the form, it appears that the formatting (paragraphs, etc) is lost. What you see on the final page is a single paragraph, all mashed together.

And so I've managed to get my hands on a few FIDO2 keys, and have begun using them to provide two-factor authentication for my systems. I'm trying to figure out how to use them to provide an extra layer of security for my local systems, though a lot of such support seems to be experimental as of now. PAM has had support for FIDO2 for a while, so that's something I'm thinking of setting up. There's a project to help provide FIDO2 support for encrypted volumes, though the project appears to support only Arch for now. I'll see what I can do about getting Debian/Ubuntu support for it too, but adding this to my laptop's encrypted volume looks like something that will need to be done after I am able to make a full backup. Seems like a small hacking project I can try though. Password managers don't yet seem to have much support, but that seems to be changing, and I'll see about contributing to those efforts too. FIDO2 support for SSH is already in the mainline branch from what I can see, but I'll wait for it to filter to the distro packages.

What seems to be a bit more concerning is how few online services have support for this. Google seems to have some pretty good support for it, and a good thing too, since my GMail accounts are the "password reset central" for many of my other accounts. Namecheap seems to have good support as well. There are some very strange omissions though. First of all is Amazon. They don't support FIDO2 but supposedly support TOTP two-factor auth, but the only backup authentication they provide if the TOTP authenticator is lost is via SMS. That means entrusting to my mobile phone provider the security of my account, so forget it. I'd rather get a list of backup codes that I'd keep in a safe place the way most other TOTP implementations out there do. PayPal also has no support for FIDO2 and they have a similarly broken implementation of TOTP which also uses SMS as the only backup method. And Amazon and PayPal are both board members of the FIDO alliance and had a hand in the drafting of the standards. I get that these are relatively new standards but it still seems rather inexcusable for them not to provide proper 2FA support when these are exactly the sorts of high-value accounts that would benefit the most from 2FA. Hopefully they can get on the ball soon, but I'm not holding my breath.