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Folks, we all know that Islam is the biggest, biggest danger in the world today. We've seen attacks in Manchester, in Kabul (150+ killed!), in London where they have that awful mayor and on Monday in Orlando. Terrible, terrible attacks. Very sad. Sick. Katie McHugh is a brave lady. She dared to speak the truth about Islam, said what we all know is the truth. "There would be no deadly terror attacks in the U.K. if Muslims didn’t live there." That's what she tweeted. That's exactly what she tweeted. Now she's fired! The very politically correct Breitbart News, where Katie was an editor, fired her for telling the truth. This is how the FAKE MSM treat their own. This is why the MSM is nothing but lies. When journalists dare to tell the truth, they're fired! Katie needs your help. Needs your money. As you know, I've promised to repeal Obamacare. Repeal it and replace it with something much better. Repeal and replace. Have you heard that expression before? I came up with it myself. You're going to love what the American Health Care Act does to the taxes, especially the tax on your investments. Believe me, you'll love it. Totally getting rid of that unfair tax. Waiting on the Senate to pass that. But in the meantime, Katie very unfairly lost her job and she'll be losing her insurance. If she hasn't already lost her medical insurance. Because her insurance was through her job. And they fired her. That means she needs to pay her medical bills and she's asking for donations. Believe me, ladies can "rack up" huge medical bills. Rack up, get it? Because boob jobs cost a lot. When they're done right, they cost a lot. But they're totally worth it. Follow @k_mcq and donate through the link. https://t.co/IRAUOj6pIL

I somehow managed to get the PIC programming method described here to work, and now I have incorporated a PIC16F1455 into my random number generator circuit. I added a header to enable programming of the PIC from within the main circuit, and the setup looks like this. Schematic here. Now I need to figure out how to write the firmware for that PIC so that it will look like some kind of USB device when I plug it into a PC, and it can feed all of that random bit data coming in through RC3 (Pin 7) over the USB interface. Github project here. Looks like this is going to be a much more complicated business than designing and building the circuit in the first place!

I found a few resources on the USB programming aspects here, here, here, here, and here. I would like to avoid using the XC8 compiler or any of Microchip's proprietary libraries as far as possible, and build the project entirely using SDCC and Free Software libraries only.

I stumbled over this story, and thought some Soylentils might appreciate it.

It’s not easy living in today’s world if you are one who is attempting to live up to other people’s expectations. It’s an unhealthy way to go through life. For too many young women around the world, the imperfections they find can be damaging to them, especially when others are so willing to point them out.

Tthere is at least one Brazilian model who refuses to go along with the hype, and has instead, turned her ‘imperfection’ into a prized part of herself.

The 24 year old model, Mariana Mendes, knows all about imperfections, as she’s reminded of it every day in the mirror. Born with a black hued birthmark that covers a large portion of her face, the mark is medically termed congenital melanocytic nevus, and for most of her life, she was told that it was ugly.

But Mendes doesn’t see it that way. She is well aware the the mark is there, and she knows that many view her as different…Yet she instead believes that the mark makes her unique.

At the age of 5, because her Mother feared that Mendes would be bullied throughout her life, she underwent multiple surgeries to attempt to lessen the color of her birthmark. Yet, after enduring a year of medical procedures, Mendes decided she wanted to stop any treatment.

“My mom was worried. She didn’t want me to suffer any bullying, but I don’t remember ever having any problems in school. When I was 6, she asked me if I wanted to continue with the birthmark removal procedures that I did in Sao Paulo. I told her no.”
It was the very same birthmark on her face the pushed her to embrace it. She wasn’t going to let a mark define her, and instead sought to be an example to people everywhere to accept themselves, and find their self-confidence as she has.

“I feel more beautiful and totally different from other people because I have a nevus. Having a nevus that is as large as mine is not common, so of course there are many people who stare and who don’t like it, but I don’t care.”Mendes often will come across people that mistakenly assume that her mark is makeup. “A lot of people ask me about my birthmark, sometimes they think it’s makeup or a tattoo but I don’t mind and explain it to them.” Even though she is not without the average instigators in life – you know, those people whose only pursuits seem to be making others as miserable – Mendes has learned to just brush them off:
“I’m proud of having a nevus, it’s a part of who I am and how I learned to like myself…I find living with a facial nevus very easy because I like it a lot and I want others to feel as confident as I do about their nevi.”

All of us have our own imperfections that are totally out of our control. Embrace them, or lean to deal with them. Learning to live with the things you have no control over can be a refreshing, and liberating way to live one’s life.

Click the link, to see some photos of her. It took a moment for my eyes to decide that the blemish is hers, and not an artifact of a crap camera or photoshopping. But, she's quite pretty!

http://joeforamerica.com/2017/05/girl-born-black-face-mark-called-ugly-not-anymore/

Video of a photoshoot here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jR7w_Vhv95E

I’ve built a simple inductance meter based on an Arduino Pro Mini. Here’s a picture. The inductance measurement circuit is based on this but I have made some minor modifications to make use of an I²C LCD I managed to get for cheap and provided for an LM7805-based regulator so it could be powered from a 9V battery. The two large maroon things between the LM339 comparator IC and the Arduino (the board with the surface mount chip and the red LED) are a pair of 1 µF PET capacitors in parallel for a total capacitance of 2 µF. This is set in parallel with the test inductor to produce a tank circuit. The Arduino sends a 5 ms pulse into the tank circuit, which sends its response into the LM339 comparator, and the output of the comparator is a damped square wave at the resonant frequency of the tank circuit. The Arduino can measure this resonant frequency by measuring the width of a pulse it receives from the comparator. The theoretical resonant frequency of the tank circuit is 1/2π⋅√LC, and given that the capacitance is known it is possible to solve for the inductance L = 1/4π²f²C. Seems to work well enough, although actual inductors whose inductances are known are in short supply. The test inductor I have used in the picture is a ferrite core inductor I salvaged from a dead CFL bulb. I’ve tried winding and unwinding coils from it and it seems that the inductance changes, so I think it works, sorta.

Next step will be to perform calibration. I need to somehow find actual inductors with an inductance known to a high tolerance, and use them to calibrate the circuit. Those aren’t easy to find in the electronics stores around here. And then I need to fix up the case. I managed to fortuitously find that plastic box which fits the prototype circuit boards I have almost perfectly (it’s actually one of a set of three food storage boxes I got from the equivalent of a dollar or ¥100 store here). Now I need to find a way to make clean holes in the lid for the LCD, the probe terminals, and the power button. I’m not using a box cutter to do that… I’m too clumsy to do that properly and mistakes will result in waste. I’ll probably just glue the standoffs that hold the circuit board up to the bottom of the case, so it will be necessary to unscrew the circuit board from the standoffs to replace the battery, which I will also have to fix to the bottom of the case somehow. Enclosures are harder than they have to be. I’ll go scouting around for 3D printing services when I have the time, so I can make a real honest to goodness case.

In the future I’ll perhaps make a few changes to the circuit so it can measure capacitance as well, but in order to do that I’ll need an inductor with a known inductance, and then it will be the test capacitor in parallel with the inductor forming the tank circuit. It will just be a matter of adding a reed relay controlled by a switch and the Arduino to alternate between L and C measurement.

And so my first attempts at programming a PIC seem to have failed. Upon further research, there seem to be two main ways of programming PICs, one of which involves using either a high voltage (at least +8Vdc, up to +13Vdc on older devices) on the PIC’s MCLR pin or a low voltage +5Vdc on the same pin. Not sure if the latter method is enabled by default on new PICs straight from the factory though. If it isn’t, that might be why my efforts aren’t working. I’m going to have to shop for some new parts to build a PIC programmer that can do high voltage programming, just to be sure. This looks like another promising circuit and method to try. If it works on the breadboard I’ll solder it onto one of my prototyping boards along with a ZIF socket and start using it to do my PIC work.

I graduated college with a degree in electronics and computer engineering eighteen years ago, and haven’t seriously done hardware almost since then. After I wound up looking for hardware random number generators in an attempt to respond to a post here, I decided to try building one myself, based on the design here. I ordered a few Picaxe chips just for the purpose, though I wound up using a circuit design based on this instead but used a 74LS14 Schmitt trigger inverter instead of the 74ALS04 described there. As suggested on the link I used a MAX232 RS-232 Line Driver to generate the 16 V the transistors use to generate avalanche noise. Unfortunately, the Picaxe-08M2 could only send the random data back at 2400 baud, and so I wired the same circuit up to a cheap Arduino Nano clone and managed to at least get 115200 baud. Going to higher baud rates doesn’t seem to improve data transfer speed.

The random data it generates seems to be very good though, and passes the ENT and FIPS 140-2 tests. The Dieharder tests almost all pass, with only two or three getting a Weak rating, but from what I can see even that is already very good. Just seems to mean that I might not have completely eliminated the bias from the circuit using the von Neumann algorithm alone. The hardest part about this project seems to be getting the random data out of the circuit and into my computer at a reasonably high speed. And that leads me to USB, which looks to be rather complicated. ordered a few PIC16F1455 microcontrollers which should be able to do full speed USB at 12 Mbps, which is good enough for my purposes, although it looks like getting that to work is going to be complicated to say the least.

My PICs just came in today. Later, I’m going to start with getting them programmed with some basic stuff and try to get familiar with the toolchain (SDCC), start with the “hello world” of getting the microcontroller to flash a LED, using my Arduino as a programmer, and then try to figure out how to do the rest later on. Once I have a working design I’ll upload it somewhere, both the hardware designs and the software.

Sanctuary Bills in Maryland Faced a Surprise Foe: Legal Immigrants

ELLICOTT CITY, Md. — When lawmakers in Howard County, Md., a stretch of suburbia between Washington and Baltimore, declared their intention to make the county a sanctuary for people living in the country illegally, J. D. Ma thought back to how hard he had worked studying English as a boy in Shanghai.

Stanley Salazar, a native of El Salvador, worried that the violent crime already plaguing Maryland’s suburbs attributed to immigrant gangs would eventually touch his own daughters.

Hongling Zhou, who had been a student in Beijing during the Tiananmen Square uprising, feared an influx of undocumented immigrants, and their children, would cripple the public schools.

At first blush, making Howard County a sanctuary for undocumented immigrants had seemed a natural move: The county has twice as many Democrats as Republicans and a highly educated population, full of scientists and engineers. One in five residents was born abroad.

But the bill met stout opposition from an unlikely source: some of those very same foreign-born residents.

In passionate testimony before county legislators, and in tense debates with liberal neighbors born in the United States, legal immigrants argued that offering sanctuary to people who came to the country illegally devalued their own past struggles to gain citizenship.

Some even felt it threatened their hard-won hold on the American dream.

Their objections stunned Democratic supporters of sanctuary here and helped bring about the bill’s demise in March. A similar proposal for the state collapsed this month in the Maryland Senate, where Democrats also hold a two-to-one advantage. Some of the same immigrants spoke out against it.

The failure of the sanctuary bills in Maryland reveals a potentially troublesome fissure for Democrats as they rush to defy Mr. Trump. Their party has staked out an activist position built around protecting undocumented immigrants. But it is one that has alienated many who might have been expected to support it.

What follows are the stories of four immigrants in Maryland who oppose sanctuary status — people whose voices have rarely been heard in the long debate over how to fix the nation’s immigration system.

Some supporters of sanctuary had dismissed them as white-collar professionals whose personal struggles could not compare with those of undocumented people now facing possible deportation.

But anyone who thought their journeys were easy, these immigrants said, has never walked in their shoes.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/08/us/legal-immigrants-who-oppose-illegal-immigration.html?_r=2

Please, click the link, and read their stories.

I'm not doing this up as a proper story right at the moment because I'm not feeling especially professional and I prefer to be when talking about site business as a staff member. That said, this needs some attention.

A combination of personal issues and burnout have caused staffing on the site to drop annoyingly low. Here's the current shortfalls in staffing:

• Half a dozen or so Editors. We could use ten. Preferably folks not on a GMT or east coast time daylight hours schedule.
• Two perl coders. NCommander is still around doing systems and infrastructure but it's just me and paulej72 writing perl for the site currently. We realistically need four to six.
• Two board members. We need a bare minimum of three to prevent tie votes.
• Zero treasurers. The two board members have been covering this but we need someone who's good with finances and can keep track of everything officially.
• Zero artsy types. All UI design choices and graphics are currently done by us code monkeys, this is far from ideal.
• Zero wiki admins. We usually have to figure out who even has emergency backup access to it when something needs administratively done.

Again, this is not an official call to arms. This is me being annoyed at the state of things and venting. Board and treasurer decisions will be made by the board and it's not even my place to ask for recruits, so I'm not. That said, if you want to volunteer for any staff position, we're always open.

Best way to get in touch is to contact us on IRC (look over to the left) but don't expect an immediate response because we're often busy doing Life Stuff. Email works as well. themightybuzzard@soylentnews.org or any other staff member will get you forwarded to someone happy to help you on your way to exploitation.

Fictions of fascism: what twentieth century dystopia can (and can't) teach us about Trump by John Gray

Dystopian novels of the 1930s and 1940s feel topical once again – but how much do they tell us about Trump and today’s populist upheavals?

A 20th century novelist pictured a Nazi diplomat ruminating over the grand objectives of the regime he served:
"D“Don’t you realise that what we are doing is a real revolution and more internationalist in its effects than the storming of the Bastille or of the Winter Palace in Petrograd? . . . Wipe out those ridiculous winding boundaries . . . wipe out . . . the influence of the churches, of overseas capital, of any philosophy, religion, ethical or aesthetical system

of the past . . . There are no more impossibilities for man now. For the first time we are attacking the biological structure of the race. We have started to breed a new species of Homo sapiens. We are weeding out its streaks of bad heredity. We have practically finished the task of exterminating or sterilising the gypsies in Europe; the liquidation of the Jews will be completed in a year or two . . . We are the first to make use of the hypodermic syringe, the lancet and the sterilising apparatus in our revolution.”

The writer was Arthur Koestler, and the book Arrival and Departure (Vintage Classics), first published in 1943. We are living in a time when many believe we are seeing a resurgence of fascism, yet so far Koestler’s semi-autobiographical novel has been neglected. This is a pity, as he did not invent the type of Nazi whose terrifying visions he put into the mouth of Bernard, the fictional diplomat. Travelling across Europe as a journalist and undercover communist in the 1930s, Koestler must have encountered many who shared this view of the world – one that departs in a number of ways from the view of fascism that most modern liberals have today.

Under the impact of the rise of Donald Trump and with the growing strength of European anti-immigrant parties, fascism is equated nowadays with extreme versions of nationalism. However, as Koestler shows, many Nazis and fascists regarded nation states as relics that would be subsumed into a new, pan-European order – a project that was revived by Oswald Mosley after the Second World War under the rubric “Europe a Nation”.

Fascism is now being seen as an ideology of irrationalism that was hostile to science and reason. But while some fascists preached “thinking with the blood”, others, like Koestler’s diplomat, gloried in the new powers conferred by modern science. As the historian Lewis Bernstein Namier wrote in 1958: “Hitler and the Third Reich were the gruesome and incongruous consummation of an age which, as none other, believed in progress and felt assured it was being achieved.”

In some ways interwar fascism was a parody of the progressive thinking of the time. In Spain and Portugal, the Balkans and Vichy France, many fascists wanted to roll back the modern world – a project that appealed to figures such as T S Eliot and G K Chesterton, who hankered after the cultural homogeneity of medieval Christendom. Yet many others were at one with Koestler’s diplomat in believing that modern technology opened up the prospect of remaking humankind on a “more advanced” model.

Such views were not confined to the far right. The “evolutionary humanist” Julian Huxley, for many years a prominent member of the British Eugenics Society, advocated “preventing the deterioration of quality in racial stock” throughout the 1920s into the early 1930s. “Racial science” was not a Nazi aberration.

Attitudes that many have seen as defining features of fascism can appear at many points on the political spectrum. Anti-Semitism has been a feature of fascist movements everywhere, and hatred of Jews was the core of Nazism. But anti-Semitic attitudes are not the exclusive property of the far right. After its foundation, the state of Israel was attacked by the left under the banner of anti-colonialism. Clearly, anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism are analytically distinct positions; but when criticism of Israel’s policies occurs in the context of talk about “Zio media conspiracies” – as has been the case recently among certain sections of the left in Britain – the two become functionally equivalent. The emergence of a left-liberal anti-Semitism is a defining fact of our age.

The rest of this "long read":

http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2017/03/fictions-fascism-what-twentieth-century-dystopia-can-and-cant-teach-us-about

She was gone again, shortly before my elderly cat died. I refer to my muse, of course.
        I looked everywhere I could think of, to no avail. Stolen again? I went for a walk, on the lookout for that aged black aged Lincoln with that blonde and that brunette and the kind of weird-looking driver, the ones who stole my muse before. It cost me fifty bucks to get her back!
        They had been right about the weather.
        But this time, there was no ransom note, or any other sort of clue. Almost every day I would go walking, in search for, if not my muse, an idea for a story.
        Maybe she had gotten trapped in a tavern. I went there looking for her, or an inspiration. I had no luck.
        Weeks went by with no trace.
        I was starting to get worried; had the Grim Reaper taken her, too?
        Finally I got a text message: “On vacation, asshole. I’ll be back when you quit crying over that damned cat.”