SoylentNews

I suppose that I had more than half the bits and pieces of this story, but I never managed to put them together like Caleb T. Martin has done.

http://www.mintpressnews.com/truth-syria-manufactured-war-independent-country-2/216688/

Education, health care and national rebirth
The independent nationalist Syrian government, now being targeted by Western foreign policy, was born in the struggle against colonialism. It took decades of great sacrifice from the people of Syria to break the country free from foreign domination — first by the French empire and later from puppet leaders. For the last several decades, Syria has been a strong, self-reliant country in the oil-rich Middle East region. It has also been relatively peaceful.

Since winning its independence, Syria’s Baathist leadership has done a great deal to improve the living standards of the population. Between 1970 and 2009, the life expectancy in Syria increased by 17 years. During this time period infant mortality dropped dramatically from 132 deaths per 1,000 live births to only 17.9. According to an article published by the Avicenna Journal of Medicine, these notable changes in access to public health came as a result of the Syrian government’s efforts to bring medical care to the country’s rural areas.

A 1987 country study of Syria, published by the U.S. Library of Congress, describes huge achievements in the field of education. During the 1980s, for the first time in Syria’s history, the country achieved “full primary school enrollment of males” with 85 percent of females also enrolled in primary school. In 1981, 42 percent of Syria’s adult population was illiterate. By 1991, illiteracy in Syria had been wiped out by a mass literacy campaign led by the government.

The name of the main political party in Syria is the “Baath Arab Socialist Party.” The Arabic word “Baath” literally translates to “Rebirth” or “Resurrection.” In terms of living standards, the Baathist Party has lived up to its name, forging an entirely new country with an independent, tightly planned and regulated economy. The Library of Congress’ Country Study described the vast construction in Syria during the 1980s: “Massive expenditures for development of irrigation, electricity, water, road building projects, and the expansion of health services and education to rural areas contributed to prosperity.”

Compared to Saudi-dominated Yemen, many parts of Africa, and other corners of the globe that have never established economic and political independence, the achievements of the Syrian Arab Republic look very attractive. Despite over half a century of investment from Shell Oil and other Western corporations, the CIA World Factbook reports that about 60 percent of Nigerians are literate, and access to housing and medical care is very limited. In U.S.-dominated Guatemala, roughly 18 percent of the population is illiterate, and poverty is rampant across the countryside, according to the CIA World Factbook.

What the Western colonizers failed to achieve during centuries of domination, the independent Syrian government achieved rapidly with help from the Soviet Union and other anti-imperialist countries. The Soviet Union provided Syria with a $100 million loan to build the Tabqa dam on the Euphrates River, which was “considered to be the backbone of all economic and social development in Syria.” Nine-hundred Soviet technicians worked on the infrastructure project which brought electricity to many parts of the country. The dam also enabled irrigation throughout the Syrian countryside.

More recently, China has set up many joint ventures with Syrian energy corporations. According to a report from the Jamestown Foundation, in 2007 China had already invested “hundreds of millions of dollars” in Syria in efforts to “modernize the country’s aging oil and gas infrastructure.”

These huge gains for the Syrian population should not be dismissed and written off, as Western commentators routinely do when repeating their narrative of “Assad the Dictator.” For people who have always had access to education and medical care, it is to trivialize such achievements. But for the millions of Syrians, especially in rural areas, who lived in extreme poverty just a few decades ago, things like access to running water, education, electricity, medical care, and university education represent a huge change for the better.

Like almost every other regime in the crosshairs of U.S. foreign policy, Syria has a strong, domestically-controlled economy. Syria is not a “client state” like the Gulf state autocracies surrounding it, and it has often functioned in defiance of the U.S. and Israel. It is this, not altruistic concerns about human rights, that motivate Western attacks on the country.

Half a century ago I was reading a book by Isaac Asimov. I don’t remember what book, but I know it wasn’t I, Robot because I looked last night and it wasn’t in that book. But in the book, whichever one it was, Dr. Asimov wrote about the origin of the word “robot”; a story by Karel Capek titled R.U.R.: Rossum’s Universal Robots.
        I searched every library I had access to, looking for this story, for years. I finally gave up.
        Then a few weeks ago I thought of the story again. I have no idea what triggered that thought, but it occurred to me that there was no internet back then, and since the book was so old, it would probably be at Gutenberg.org.
        It was! I downloaded it, and to my dismay it was written in Czech. So I fed it to Google Translate.
        Thirty five years ago when I was first learning how computers work and how to program them, I read of a program the US government had written to translate Russian to English and back. To test it, they fed it the English phrase “the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.” Then they fed the Russian translation back in. The re-conversion to English read “The wine is good, but the meat is spoiled.”
        I figured that in the decades since their first efforts at machine translation, it would do a better job.
        I figured wrong. What came out of Google Translate was gibberish. It does a good job of translating single words; paper dictionaries have done this well for centuries. But for large blocks of text, it was worthless.
        When I first saw the Czech version I could see that it was, in fact, not a novel, but a stage play. I kept looking, and found an English language version translated by an Australian. It’s licensed under the Creative Commons, so I may add it to my online library.
        Wikipedia informed me that the play was written in 1920, and a man named Paul Selver translated it into English in 1923. So I searched Gutenberg for “Paul Selver” and there it was! However, it was in PDF form. Right now I’m at the tail end of converting it to HTML.
        After reading it I realized that this story was the basis for every robot story written in the twentieth century, and its robots aren’t even robots as we know robots today. Rather, they were like the “replicants” in the movie Blade Runner—flesh and blood artificial people. That movie, taken from Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? would have actually been a sequel to R.U.R., had R.U.R. ended differently.
        The Terminator was R.U.R. with intelligent mechanical robots instead of artificial life. Their aim, as the “robots” in Kapek’s story, is to destroy all humans.
        Asimov said that his robots were an answer to Frankenstein and R.U.R. He thought the very idea was ridiculous, so he made his own robots inorganic and mechanical rather than organic, and added his “three laws of robotics”. His laws weren’t physical laws like the inability of anything to travel faster than light, but legislation; similar to Blade Runner, where the artificial people weren’t allowed on Earth. In a few of his books, like The Caves of Steel, robot use on Earth is strictly limited and controlled and people hate them.
        I thought Asimov had the first mechanical, non-magical robots, but I was wrong. There were fictional mechanical robots before Asimov was born. The first US science fiction dime novel was Edward S. Ellis’ 1865 The Steam Man of the Prairies, with a giant steam powered robot.
        One thing that put me off about this play (besides the fact that it’s a play, which is far better watched than read) was that the original story was written in a language I don’t understand. That’s why I don’t read Jules Verne; his stories were written in French, and I don’t speak that language, either.
        I dislike translations because I used to speak Spanish well, according to South American tourists, and a smattering of Thai. And I’m a reader. It’s more than just the story, it’s how it’s written. There are word plays and idioms that are impossible to translate. For instance, a beautiful English phrase that uses alliteration would lose its beauty in any translation. And, there are no boring stories, only boring storytellers. I suspect that Kapek may have been an excellent writer, but Selver wasn’t, to my mind. Little of the dialog seemed believable to me.
        But in the case of this story, even the poor translation (Wikipedia informs me it’s abridged) is worth reading, just for the context it places all other robot stories in.
        It will be at mcgrewbooks.com soon.

Got to say, the green look on the site is actually *really* nice. If it was a few shades darker though, we'd be too close that the site that shall not be named.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/26/us/politics/trump-health-care-conservatives-congress.html?_r=0

WASHINGTON — Whenever a major conservative plan in Washington has collapsed, blame has usually been fairly easy to pin on the Republican hard-liners who insist on purity over practicality.

But as Republicans sifted through the detritus of their failed effort to replace the Affordable Care Act, they were finding fault almost everywhere they looked.

President Trump, posting on Twitter on Sunday, saw multiple culprits, including the renegade group of small-government conservatives in the House Freedom Caucus and outside groups like the Club for Growth. Those groups, which do not always work placidly together, had aligned against the president and Speaker Paul D. Ryan, the ultimate symbol of their dismay with the entrenched ways of the capital. At the same time, some saw the president as pointing a finger at Mr. Ryan when Mr. Trump urged his Twitter followers on Saturday to tune in to a Fox News host, Jeanine Pirro, who went on to call for Mr. Ryan’s resignation.

For eight years, those divisions were often masked by Republicans’ shared antipathy toward President Barack Obama. Now, as the party struggles to adjust to the post-Obama political order, it is facing a nagging question: How do you hold together when the man who unified you in opposition is no longer around?

(f) Suspension of entry or imposition of restrictions by President
Whenever the President finds that the entry of any aliens or of any class of aliens into the United States would be detrimental to the interests of the United States, he may by proclamation, and for such period as he shall deem necessary, suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens as immigrants or nonimmigrants, or impose on the entry of aliens any restrictions he may deem to be appropriate. Whenever the Attorney General finds that a commercial airline has failed to comply with regulations of the Attorney General relating to requirements of airlines for the detection of fraudulent documents used by passengers traveling to the United States (including the training of personnel in such detection), the Attorney General may suspend the entry of some or all aliens transported to the United States by such airline.

___________________________________

There you have it, boys and girls. Trump has the authority to ban just about anyone from entering the United States, for almost any reason. It's the constitution. It's the law. Section 212(f) of the INA, 8 U.S.C. 1182(f)

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/8/1182

The court really has no jurisdiction over Trump's executive order. If the court asserts jurisdiction, any judge who find against Trump is acting unconstitutionally. Any judge who finds and acts against Obama's executive order should be disbarred, and removed from the bench. It's really that simple.

Now, you want to know who DOES have authority to dispute and over rule Trump's executive order? Do you need to be told who has that authority? I'm certain that some of you special snowflakes do have to be told. CONGRESS has that authority. CONGRESS can override an executive order. If congress reaches a consensus that the president is acting improperly, then congress can take one of several actions, up to, and including, voting on an act to over rule the president's executive order.

Liberal judges don't want you to understand constitutional law. They don't want you to look up the law. The law supports Trump's executive order. No judge has the authority to over rule an executive order. No citizen or non-citizen of this country has standing to sue Trump's executive order. Only CONGRESS holds the authority to force the president to recall, or rescind, or cancel an executive order.

IF - and I stress IF - congress should pass an act changing the law, and dictating who may and who may not enter the country, and the president should act contrary to the law passed by congress, THEN, congress would have the authority to impeach the president.

Have you noticed? No judge has the authority to impeach the president. Only congress can do that.

Trump can thumb his nose at those judges who have ruled against him. He could conveivably have them arrested, and charged with any number of crimes. Charges of treason may even be justified.

How many people remember that the president appoints federal judges - but no judge can appoint a president?

Of course, it is nothing new for liberal judges to usurp the law of the land.

Discussion, please. Let's see just how far out in left field some of us can get.

That link, again - https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/8/1182

So I finally got too fedup with the modern breakage that is called desktop environments on Linux, grabbed the source code to CDE, and compiled it. I *finally* have an environment that works with multimonitor without being complete crap. After a bit fiddling with the X defaults database, it's quite usable.

Imgur Proof (warning, high resolution)

Honestly, compared to MOST of the other DEs I've used, this is damn heaven at the moment. With a bit of work to get to support XDG groups, some app fixing, and a little polish, CDE probably could wipe the floor as far as usability goes.

Alright, I'll confess.

In 1978, our ship docked in Venice, Italy. Docked nearby was a Russian tour ship. Little did we boots realize that the tour ship was a cover for something far more important.

Our crew was formed into ranks, and marched over to the tour ship our first night in port. We were all hypnotized by Russia's Hypnotoad, and given the agenda of the future. Russia was preparing, already, to cave in on the Cold War. But, they were also preparing their revenge.

During the briefing, we learned that the Russians had a tame Orangutan in a sleeper cell in New York. The Orangutan was to be Russia's "Trump card", so to speak. All of us were informed that the Orangutan would one day run for President of the United States, and that we would recognize him when the time came.

Almost all American servicemen were briefed between the years of 1970 and 2010. And, all of us veterans were prepared to vote Trump when the time came. A lot of civilians, too, of course, but all of us veterans voted Trump. Well, except for a few whose hypnosis didn't work very well.
__________________

Alright, I was shooting for funny. My story isn't really all that funny though. What's REALLY FUNNY is, a lot of progressives will believe my bullshit story. Yeah, there WAS a Russian cruise ship in Venice. That's where this story's connection with reality begins and ends.

This one is a first for me. The IRS has never called me before - either for real, or as part of a scam.

"This phone call is to inform you that you have been named in a lawsuit by the Internal Revenue Service. If you wish to settle the claim against you before the suit is filed, you should call 6466326448. Thank you, the Internal Revenue Service."

I wish I had recorded it, to be sure that I got the phrasing precise, and the phone number accurate, but there it is, very close to what I heard. Note that neither my name, nor my wife's name was used - no names at all. Some mysterious "you". I used Google Talk to try calling the number, and got some tones, and a message that the number is not in service.

Funny that they didn't repeat the phone number - even scammers know that people don't always have a pen and paper in reach. I would think the scammers would want to make sure that the victim knows what number to call, so he can be properly scammed.

Ahhhh - looking at the telephone, I see that I got the number wrong - it is 6466321448. Dial that number, and I get a busy signal. I know it's the busy season, but, doesn't the IRS have like unlimited phone lines coming in? Gonna try a couple more times, just to get an idea how the scam works . . .

entering the number into Google leads me to this page, http://mobilecallertracker.com/phone-search/6466321 and 2/3 down the page, I find the number. So, the IRS callback number is a mobile phone? Wow - THAT is interesting!! I've heard that landlines are pretty much obsolete, but the IRS is all mobile now?

Well, still busy - I don't want to spend my day trying to scam a scammer. Maybe I'll try a couple more times later today.

Suggestions, anyone? I suppose I should inform my local sheriff's office of this call - maybe they will ask the local radio stations to warn their listeners - or something.

https://www.irs.gov/uac/stay-vigilant-against-bogus-irs-phone-calls-and-emails

https://www.treasury.gov/tigta/contact_report_scam.shtml

Online complaint made - I guess I've done my civic duty of the day.

(Illustrated version here)
        After buying copies of books from my book printer, finding errors to correct, and giving the bad copies to my daughter who wants them, rather than discarding them I realized I was stupid. It would be a lot cheaper to buy a laser printer.
        An inkjet wouldn’t work for me. The printer is going to be sitting idle most of the time, and inkjet nozzles clog; I’ve had several, and all clogged if you didn’t use them at least every other day. Plus, the ink dries out in the cartridges. Being a powder, toner has no such problem.
        So I went looking at the Staples site, and they badly need a new webmaster. This little four year old laptop only has a gig of memory, and a lot of people have far less. The poor little machine choked. That damned web site took every single one of my billion bytes!
        Or rather than firing him, make him design his websites on an old 486. Or even 386.
        So what the hell, I just drove down there; I didn’t want to wait for (or pay for) it to be shipped, anyway, I just wanted to see what they had.
        Buying it was easy. They had exactly the printer I was looking for; Canon, a name I trusted since we had Canons and other brands at work, wireless networking, and not expensive. They had a huge selection of lasers; it’s a very big store. I paid for the printer and sheaf of paper, and man, lasers sure have gotten a lot less expensive. I expected at least $250 just for the printer, maybe without even toner, but the total including tax and paper was just a little over a hundred.
        When I got home, of course I pulled out the manual like I do with every piece of electronics I buy—and it was worse than the “manual” that came with the external hard drive I ranted about here earlier. Cryptic drawings and very little text. At least the hard drive didn’t need a manual. All there is is a network port, a USB port, a power socket, and an on/off button. Plug it in and it just works. With the printer, I really needed a manual.
        Kids, hieroglyphics are thousands of years out of style and I don’t know why you’re so drawn to emoticons, but there was an obvious reason for these hieroglyphics: globalization. Far fewer words to be written in three different languages.
        I could find nothing better on Canon’s web site. So I followed the instructions in the poor excuse for a manual for unpacking it and setting it up, as best as I could.
        I couldn’t find the paper tray.
        I’ve been printing since 1984 when I bought a small plotter and wrote software to make it into a printer. Afterwards I had ink jets at home until now, and lasers at work. All the lasers were different from each other in various ways, usually the shape of the toner cartridge, but all had a drawer that held the paper no matter what brand of printer.
        I couldn’t find it. Sighing and muttering, I opened the lid to the big laptop and copied the CD’s contents to a thumb drive to install the printer on the smaller notebook. There’s no reason to make two calls to tech support, because an installation screwup is never unexpected when you’ve been dealing with computers as long as I have.
        And why send a CD? Fewer and fewer computers have CD or DVD burners any more. Why not a thumb drive? All computers have USB ports these days, and have had for over a decade.
        The installation was trouble-free but still troubling; I didn’t think the wi-fi was connecting, as it said to hold the router button until the blue light on the printer stopped flashing. I held the button down until my finger hurt and was about to call tech support, but as I reached for the phone the light stopped flashing and burned steadily.
        Maybe it was working, but I’d have to find the paper tray to find out. But it had installed a manual, one I couldn’t find. So I plugged the thumb drive back in and searched it visually with a file manager, and found an executable for the manual. Running it took me to an offline web page which wasn’t too badly designed, but I would have far preferred a PDF, as I could put that on the little tablet to reference while I was examining the printer in search of where to stick the damned paper, instead of a bulky, clumsy notebook.
        I finally found it, and it wasn’t a tray, even though that’s what the documents called it. I haven’t seen anything like it before, and the documentation was very unclear. But I did manage to get paper in it, and sent a page to it, and it worked well.
        Meanwhile, I wish Staples would fix their web site, and Canon would fix their documentation.
        When did clear, legible documentation go out of style? Hell, the lasers we had at work didn’t even need docs. Good thing, too, because IT never left them when they installed crap. Another reason I’m glad I’m retired! Work sucks.
        At any rate, a few hours later I printed the cleaned up scans of The Golden Book of Springfield so I could check for dirt I missed looking on a screen. I saved it as PDF and printed it from that. And amazingly, this thing prints duplex! It only took fifteen or twenty minutes or so to print the 329 pages.
        I’m happy with it. Man, progress... it just amazes me. But when I went to print from Open Office, the word processor I’ve used for years, I didn’t try sending the print job to the printer, but it looked like Oo won’t print duplex.
        Then I discovered that they may stop developing Open Office because they couldn’t get developers; the developers were all working on Libre Office.
        Damn. The last time I tried Lo it didn’t have full justification, which was a show stopper when I’m publishing books. I’d tried it because someone said it would write in MS Word format. I was skeptical, and my skepticism was fully warranted. It could write a DOC file, but Word couldn’t read it. Plus, of course, the show stopping lack of full justification.
        I decided to try it out again, since Oo may be doomed… and man! Not only does it have full justification, it has a lot Oo lacks that I didn’t even know I needed. It appears to now actually write a DOC file that Word can read, even though when you save it in DOC the program warns you it might not work in Word.
        And it might… I haven’t tested it… might arrange pages for a booklet. I’ll test it with this article… when it’s longer than four pages, as it is now.
        This was all over the course of the last week as I was working on a PDF of the Vachel Lindsay book. The computer nagged me that the printer was running low on toner (it has a small “starter” cartridge), with a button to order toner from Canon. I clicked it, and damn, the toner cost almost as much as the printer did.
        Then I ran out of paper, so I went back to Staples, where I discovered that the printer I had paid eighty something plus tax for was now twice that price! So I got the toner and five reams of paper.
        At any rate, I tried to print this as a booklet, and this is what came out:

        It’s backlit; the picture on the top left and the grayer text on the bottom right are on the other side of the page.
        But a little fiddling and yes, it will print booklets. It isn’t Libre Office doing it, it’s the printer itself!

        I like this printer. I’ve figured it to about a penny per page, and I don’t think that’s too expensive, considering a page is both sides.
        And then I had this document open in Libre Office, tried to insert a graphic (the second one in this article), and it simply didn’t insert. Maybe it doesn’t like JPG files, I don’t yet know. A little googling showed me that I’m not the only one with this problem, and none of the fixes I found fixed it. I have Open Office open now.
        And here I was going to uninstall Open Office. I’d better not, I guess. I’ll need it if I want to insert a graphic; inserted in Oo they show in Lo. Puzzling.
        A week later and I’ve found that sometimes it will insert a graphic, but only if you go through the menu; using text shortcuts never inserts it. And sometimes it simply doesn’t insert the picture, and sometimes it says it doesn’t recognize the format when I’d just put the same graphic in another Lo document.
        Well, I’m not uninstalling Open Office yet, anyway. Not until Lo solves the graphics show-stoppng bug.
…
        I wrote that a few weeks ago, and have been using both. Libre Office has a horrible problem with keyboard shortcuts, and those shortcuts save a LOT of time. But except for its horrible bugs, it’s a better word processor than Open Office. So both will remain installed.
        It’s possible I may uninstall Microsoft Office, depending on how well Lo’s spreadsheet works. I haven’t even fired it up yet, but Oo’s spreadsheet is almost useless.
…
        The above is several months old now. Lo does lack one important thing Oo has: controls to move to the next or previous page. Not good when you’re writing books. Also, it still has graphics problems. Often, simply opening a document in Lo removes any graphics.
        After sitting idle for a month or so, I needed to print a return label. I’m starting to become wary of buying anything from Amazon. I’d bought a new battery for this laptop a year or two ago, and the battery came from someone other than Amazon, and it was the wrong battery. I got the right battery directly from Acer.
        Then I ordered a long throw stapler to make booklets with, and staples for it. The stapler came a week later; no staples. So I bought a box from Walgreen’s. A week later, the staples came, again not from Amazon, and they had simply thrown the box of staples in an unprotected envelope. The box was smashed, the rows of staples broken.
        Then I ordered a DVD, Star Wars: The Force Awakens. I watched the first six, put the seventh in the DVD player—and it was region coded for the UK! Some company from Florida sent it. WTF is wrong with people? So I needed a return label.
        It wouldn’t print; it just hung in the print queue until it timed out. After a little digging, I found that the router had assigned a new IP address to it.
        So after a lot of googling, I gave up and cringed; I was going to need tech support, which is usually a nightmare. I wind up on the phone talking to someone with an accent so heavy I can barely understand them, if at all, who is ignorant of the product and reading from a checklist.
        I found Canon was one of those few companies that actually care about keeping their customers happy. Support was over email, painless, and effective.
        I have to say, it’s the best printer I’ve ever owned.

Some highly paid people seem to not be very good at thinking straight... or at all.

We’ve all seen robot bartenders in movies: Star Wars episode one; The Fifth Element; I, Robot, etc. Ever notice that human bartenders often have a lot of screen time in movies, but robot bartenders don’t? The reason is simple: robots are boring. Which is why we won’t see many robot bartenders in real life, and this real life robot bartender is going to go over like the proverbial lead balloon.

I suspect that the engineer who designed the thing doen’t frequent bars, but likes science fiction movies, because nobody goes to a bar to drink. From my upcoming Voyage to Earth:

“Is Mars still short of robots?”

“Not since that factory opened two years ago.”

“I’m surprised you don’t have robots tending bar, then.”

“Screw that. People don’t go to bars to drink, they go to bars to socialize; bars are full of lonely people. If there’s nobody to talk to but a damned robot they’re just going to walk out. I do have a tendbot for emergencies, like if one of the human bartenders is sick and we don’t have anyone to cover. The tendbot will be working when we’re going to Earth, but I avoid using it.”

Someone who doesn’t visit bars inventing something to use in bars is about as stupid as Richardson in Mars, Ho!, who assigned a Muslim to design a robot to cook pork and an engineer who didn’t drink coffee to make a robotic coffeemaker.

Just because it works in the movies doesn’t mean it works in real life.