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"I assured Trump on multiple occassions that we weren't investigating him, but he fired me to stop me investigating him." - near quote.

FFS - you can't have it both ways, man. You did enjoy a nice credibility rating. Today, you blew yourself out of the water. Sure, the partisans on both sides are going to work this to death. But, credibility you do not have. A statement like that doesn't come from a lawman, it comes from someone trying to play politics.

The thing is, I have little idea what Comey's politics are. It has often been suggested that Comey might be under duress from the Clinton clan. Haven't made my own mind up on that. Some things suggest that might be true, but then, Comey released statements that undermined Clinton's campaign.

Maybe Comey is actually working for Russia?

This guy is a mess, that's for damned sure.

"I assured Trump on multiple occassions that we weren't investigating him, but he fired me to stop me investigating him."

I sent something similar to a friend who gave me two audio amplifier boards:-

I've failed with the PAM8403 audio boards. Removing the 22nF capacitors seems to tie output to supply Voltage. This may be due my poor unsoldering or the 22nF capacitors having oscillator functionality in addition to blocking DC drift from audio input. It may be possible to connect the 22nF capacitors to ground (for the purpose of oscillation?) and connect signal behind the capacitors (for the purpose of permitting DC drift for motor control).

People at my makerspace are quite amused that a turtle or tank robot could be controlled with stereo audio output and an 80 cent audio amplifier. Four or more PAM8403 chips multiplexed with a 4052 chip or suchlike and controlled with two or more GPIO pins would be particularly cheap but effective.

After a technical argument at the makerspace about Lego motor specifications, it was determined that approximately all Lego motors (from 3V to 9V, excluding servo motors) may be compatible with a PAM8403. This applies much more generally - if a PAM8403 chip can be made to work with a DC offset.

Also, two of the amateur radio enthusiasts and electronics experts at the makerspace were particularly impressed by the size and cost of PAM8403 boards. However, they confirmed that D-Class amplifiers cannot be ganged.

If anyone can get this working then you'll be *very* popular.

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 been documenting work (and re-using some code from an under-funded project which came to a grinding halt when my last SD card burned out). As part of the documenting process, I've been dubbing audio on OpenOffice presentations. I've automated this process and the workflow is conceptually simple: .odp -> .pdf -> .png -> (quite a few more steps) -> .mp4 container with H.264 video at 10 frames per second and MP3 audio at a maximum of 128kb/s quality.

Software requirements are as follows: Unix type operating system with bash, make and perl on command path, OpenOffice or LibreOffice on command path, pdftocairo or pdftoppm on command path, ffmpeg or avconv on command path.

The directory structure is relatively simple (compared to previous projects). Populate a leaf directory with the given Makefile and an OpenOffice presentation with any name. (Or a PowerPoint presentation, if you really insist.) If multiple presentations exist in a directory, the one which numerically sorts last is chosen. This allows crude versioning to occur within a directory. Anyhow, with these two files present, type:-

make slides

and the directory will be populated with .png files - one for every slide in the presentation. (This workflow specifically doesn't work with animated images or embedded video. Feel free to add features as required. Likewise, script may fail to batch convert .odp to .pdf if OpenOffice or LibreOffice is running in foreground. Feel free to detect or correct this problem.)

With your preferred image viewer, step through slides and record audio for the presentation. Edit audio and place .wav or .mp3 with any name in the same directory. If multiple audio files exist in a directory, the one which numerically sorts last is chosen. This further allows crude versioning to occur within a directory.

Next comes the tricky part: slide transition times defined in a .csv file. The .csv file should be in the following format:-

01,1:06
02,2:33
03,5:04

where the first column is the slide number and the second column is the absolute time within the audio at which the slide should be *discarded*. (So, the last entry should be the duration of the audio plus maybe a small margin of error.) Times may be specified in seconds; minutes and seconds; hours, minutes and seconds; all with or without fractional values. Times are rounded down to the nearest 0.1 second.

Numbers in the first column should follow the numerical format of pdftocairo and therefore some slides may require one or more leading zeros.

With the audio track and transition times present, type:-

make this

and wait for the presentation to be made at 1024×768 pixels, 512×384 pixels, 256×192 pixels and audio only.

If making multiple presentaions, the second optional Makefile provides additional functionality for directory recursion and consistent titling across multiple presentations. Specifically, branch directories form sections and subsections. Each section (and suchlike) may optionally have one slide (plus audio) which prefixes every video and may optionally have one slide (plus audio) which suffixes every video. These "bookends" may be nested such that a video may be of the form:-

• common title
• section prefix
• subsection prefix
• content
• subsection suffix
• section suffix
• further info

However, this configuration is significantly more fiddly and knocks all of the timings in the .csv files.

I'll be using these scripts to process about 800 slides in 60 presentations. However, I've yet to record the accompanying audio. This will require about two minutes of audio per slide and, for me, before audio editing, that requires at least five minutes per slide with a hot microphone plus additional time to practice. So, I've got at least 4000 minutes of talking and I'll require significantly more time to edit and check my work.

Understandably, this task got me thinking about accelerated learning and it is my belief that 400 hours of finished presentations could form the vast bulk of a rigorous degree education.

Script to make one presentation:-

begin 644 Makefile.gz
M'XL(`!6B'UD"`[T8:7/;MO)S^"MV:+DB)8&'?"5RE,AM_5)/ZR23>-+WQO*+
M*1*24),$'T'*<FSWMW?!0P=U.)V7-!F3Q![8Q6)/[9BIB,T!"TT:3B!P;JBB
M[,"[B(;OAD/F4C@+HI@*`1<<3E*/<?,3\RB']PBD8>(DC(?P$P\G-!;XB;S:
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MZ/<K]/M5^O9^95VA;U?H]ZRE]8&UK.^!O5]9/\_7"/"92`Q73$",>>I[,*#`
MAY"@;88\#CH$23B`R_TT",'N0)@&-&:NXX-(\0*FDEKX:'*X9<D8?.IX+!S!
M%QIS82PQMSO@I7%^(;@W>$Q$OG,'+`1!71YZ`F['-$;!L>-**I0Q<?R4"G`0
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MP]A6>W]Z=/B\1.W-40=V>[KW?'\-IGUP.+5?M-=@8LX3(XCV9H":EIG6ULD6
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MP#"D`8,;C\7R-Z8?3SZ>ZG7T-!?[WBB&!M2QA)7P19;$B7$V+WZP(_PVI+&L
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MY!OGW`.D:&\GF7[9CD_BE)9FM3MK^L!*8X#@;+[$J0&TWLF'-Y_R!@QZHU;>
M]:A2AOIHJ*9JJ(VB@Y!#QF.!E^90'[MY(P;8B.&81Z?4U=0R%(I;5O4ZG&-R
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F9WGA'/6[]F1=:.[^9S?8]<CN+[OGNQ^OUVB(&>(O29%TT_H7````
`
end

Optional script to make multiple presentations:-

begin 644 Makefile.gz
M'XL(`#NB'UD"`\U7>5/;1A3_&WV*5R%'DD&'Q6$P<0:2>A*F)702AK9#&"Q+
M*WN#KM%*PN;(9^];R?(%>*"E3&!&N_ONW[ZWN\^KOQ@92XP>#0T2YA#8ET00
M5N$X)N&QYU&'P&$0)X0Q.(G@('-I9)Q2ET3P!Q))F-HIC4+X$(4Y21A.45?Y
MH%IFHPDG`\(9+$I2F@6ZL(H\SC"MA@4LM9-T2F@"LW,R65O6W'IS@;]I;<^O
M-\RY]98YK[_5V%Q8[Y1K)&2,0.2!X9+<8*E+0[!#MUQ>DR3"'1F!3P.:0HQ`
M[![U:3K2!:'SUTGG<Z-MYU00;-]O@>,3.[R@)J0#RH2554B(DR6,Z,)*3!(?
M-`+RU8#Z1'&)1T/B*I(T:+^M&T>XYQ[2WZGJ#2?]8,:W"=$P(K;'1BPE@2(Z
M+L@B_J-4,>X5^0)T+ZIWLB!4(;2$E20`S0,:]+6Z'H?]BH"I].A0EY0R?+6B
ML\R;IY>VIJ@0T*OA*7R6B/A>MOAF.D6%I:!';@QI!'KL>L(*B\H:U;0!L5V?
MEZFFC44UE$(AZ/I(=$'+H5XHWT)J4PR_T87;6_@FK$18ZR]AQZ>]A+R$(<_V
M&>&@HYB?+DSO:+V8!Q2+M42NE7F;M<5M3VW]`.M=6<9AYONH@&RTL41CF3'4
M#_*EWA[G38*=J<:9A'+A(J&<CHLTBF,4QR5HS+%]@ONF#:%AXJ&?$D;0;)K`
MZ8!S_/S))39!^P3-[9UE*#&*\3X7SAR;XBE_#7>3M$ZAHU.$GO,+%7?)SCD'
M-#^*8NZ#%CO6*,0TIY7C/=0;6MOH-<5[#&.FPPLO2&&4Y9N6&8.68%!CG<E)
MKIQ[04SZ_Y/M$M@C\5O_PH?UQ/A?R':5&#?K@<W?.'T&#;V'&DFS"?=\V\'A
MRL[GCAP6`>DG)`99.;.UZ_,S4]L]KY]AU6SOG&NWY4VLRK.UH@5V#":"*2:-
MEKT`K<"`)!N">`.K<X`O$F'IO5M]8<]^7@0]Y#7,XN\)<!;*C-Y+YW^"U=C8
M:NXBK/(I?)G$+#ZK#R;F9T3P<&(>@U,D1NA%T24)7=:J.J!7:Q@JSV7/P'R\
M3XNNX=4"*%V6[HE+T]:T-7E.^_&L%N.);83@4I9>4`M#4C!Z78<W;R"X=&D"
MLJ2\/_C:465L`QV\(N,$ZB#KNE'19U6P7\=6)LP"DE!'BZY"@FN'/^N5&1U%
MY"(L2?GX^_%[=:YFNU6US)MTGJT_O@9X2Y%X"^'VKRGBV"VBFC)*PZ5V#R6L
MY2+#Z^7\-,DFV]IHS=26%R5847[;W,/OVQW^75M3;Y!,;&<`DN2"LG_PY>.I
M>A-G;`#[_75)ZGP^O1&Y#_%.%PU1%^N&.$1-'<7O[L9\OAWB7?M[1$-%!'%]
MOZ_ND2%Q%%%2C@Y^ZZ@PSK*(I[XJ7)!Y8?3E<HR+T6%Y,?*+I9C@U2)78/CO
M!C+D/W.`!]1&X[\>?E$USM4DY>3PJ*.*/''S3ANE_E09E=IB-[YRL289<8$-
M];HQ'(Y7,C-*B]5S@M]R_NA'D@Q#[A:NQRYX+.C#M5,":[6_:T'-U6J?:D>U
0K]T'(C0%X1^4/-2PZ`X`````
`
end

(Usual instructions for uudecode process.)

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.”

Why on EARTH do financial institution's sites load so SLOWLY in a web browser?

I've dealt with 5 different institutions, that maintain web sites. (believe it or not, there are some that still do not have websites!)

The bank that I am currently with generally takes 30 to 45 seconds to load their pages. Granted, I'm in the middle of Outback, Nowhere, and my ISP really sucks. But, I can browse the web, and pages load in a couple seconds. On a bad day, pages I visit frequently might take as much as 10 seconds. And, of course, on a really bad day, I just give up and read a book. But, the bank's pages on a good day take as long or longer to load as other pages take on bad days.

Now, I've never made even the slightest attempt to scan or analyze any bank's web page. There are so many horror stories. Customer Helpy Helperton sends an email, "You web site is insecure and misconfigured." and the very same day, the FBI is kicking down his door, hauling him and his computers off to jail and/or impoundment.

How the hell do you even get the message across, without risking prison?

What the hell are they doing wrong? Not enough bandwidth? Not enough memory on the servers? An excess of (probably ineffective) security? Or, do they do this on purpose, to ensure you can't hack them quickly?

Seriously, I've not yet seen a bank or credit union web site that is any more responsive than a tree sloth.

Or, is it me? Does NoScript and other security stuff slow me down when I visit their sites?

I'd sure like to know what's going on, but again, I'm afraid to even try to inspect their web sites. (That presuming that I'm smart enough to learn anything from the analysis.)

Comments?

Guys, I lurve arguing with you lot dearly but when I look at my message box and it says I have 35 messages from comment replies after taking a two hour nap, that's just too many to bother with. Anything over 20 and I'm probably just going to skip replying to any of them. My apologies.