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Holy crap, can you even imagine the response if Obama had proposed extrajudicial confiscation of guns?!

Trump: 'Take the guns first, go through due process second'

My wife had her surgery today: everything went well and she'll be in the hospital for a day or two or more.

Now that all is fine, I'm left wondering how much it would have cost us if our health care wasn't free. Enough to bankrupt us? Huh.....

As an aside, while waiting (we got up at 4am to be there for 6am for her surgery at 8am and she was in her room at 2pm) I was reading Isaac Asimovs 'study' of the old testament.

According to him, In The Beginning the Bible talked about, basically, polytheism:

"God
The Bible centers about God, and God is brought into the tale at once:
Genesis 1:1
  In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

The Hebrew word, translated here as God, is "Elohim" andthat
is a plural form which would ordinarily (if tradition were defied) -be
translated "gods." It is possible that in the very earliest traditions on
which the Bible is based, the creation was- indeed the work of a
plurality of gods. The firmly monotheistic Biblical writers would carefully have eliminated such polytheism, but could not perhaps do any-
thing with the firmly ingrained term "Elohim." It was too familiar
to change.
. Some hints of polytheism seem to have survived the editing. Thus,
after the first created man disobeys God's injunction not to eat of the
tree of knowledge, God is quoted as saying:
Genesis 3:22. . . . Behold, the man is become as one of us, to
know good and evil.. . Then too, still later, when God is concerned over mankind's ar-
rogance in attempting to build a tower that would reach to heaven,
He is quoted as saying:
Genesis 11:7. Go to, let us go down, and there confound their
language . . . It is possible to argue that this is not true evidence of early poly-
theism. God might be viewed as using the royal "we"; or as speaking
to an angelic audience; or even, in the Christian view, as speaking in
the persons of the Trinity.
Nevertheless, as far as we know the history of religion outside the
Bible, early beliefs were always polytheistic and monotheism was a
late development in the history of ideas."

I didn't know this. Interesting. (Copy/pasta from pdf is problematic: it seems to go through OCR which is not perfect. Hoping I didn't miss any fixes).

To me, the only 'true' word of God we have are the ten commandments. Why would anyone try to seek the word of God(s) in the Bible (written by imperfect people long after the events) when you just have to look at the Ten (taken down by an imperfect person and translated by imperfect people).

To me, the Bible just boils down to "be a good person". The ten commandments lay out a guide how to do that.

My wife's surgeons and anaesthesiologists were good. Very good.
Or, at least, good enough, thank god(s).
;)

He livestreamed his own murder on Facebook in a North Carolina town

Man fatally shot on Facebook Live had been outing suspected drug dealers, sources say

LiveLeak.

As of the latest reporting by the Treasury Department, the US gross national debt rose by $41.5 billion on Thursday, February 22, to a grand total of $20.8 trillion.

Here's the thing: On September 7, 2017, five-and-a-half months ago, just before Congress suspended the debt ceiling, the gross national debt stood at $19.8 trillion.

At that time, I was holding my breath waiting for the gross national debt to take a huge leap in a single day - as it always does after the debt ceiling gets lifted or suspended - and jump to the next ignominious level. It sure did the next day, when it jumped $318 billion.

And it continued. Over a period of 8 weeks, the gross national debt jumped by $640 billion. Four weeks after that, it had ballooned by $723 billion, at which point Fed Chair Yellen - whose cheap-money policies had enabled Congress to do this for years - said that she was "very worried about the sustainability of the US debt trajectory."

Then Congress served up another debt ceiling.

That debt ceiling was suspended on February 8, at which point the gross national debt began to surge again, adding $1 trillion ($960.4 billion rounded to the nearest 100 million), a 5% jump in the gross national debt in just 5.5 months

The US's national debt spiked $1 trillion in less than 6 months

Melania Trump re-emerges amid marriage scrutiny

Can Trump succeed where FDR and Bill Clinton failed?

Appearing in court today, former Trump campaign aide Rick Gates pled guilty to one count of conspiracy against the United States and one count of making false statements to the FBI and to the Special Counsel at a meeting last month. In preparation for the guilty plea, Robert Mueller filed superseding criminal information earlier today which alleged Gates and Manafort laundered tens of millions of dollars that they earned through their work for the Ukrainian government.

So that puts the Mueller Score at 5 guilty pleas and 19 indictments.

Rick Gates pleads guilty to conspiracy, lying to investigators

Florida governor Rick Scott's three-point plan requires gun buyers to be 21 and up

Scott's plan also includes prohibiting a person from having or buying a firearm if he or she is subject to an injunction for protection against stalking, cyberstalking or domestic violence.

Cyberstalking is serious business.

This article makes some fascinating postulations about religious belief and the purpose it serves, as well as the question of judging the rationality of beliefs versus the rationality of actions. It's a tough read, but I found it fascinating.

Kylie Jenner just wiped $1.7 billion off Snap’s market cap, and the worst isn’t over for the stock

In One Tweet, Kylie Jenner Wiped Out $1.3 Billion of Snap’s Market Value

Why Kylie Jenner May Be to Blame for Snap's Recent $1 Billion Loss in Value

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This is about a 12nm "Zen+" chip coming out this year, not "Zen 2".

AMD Ryzen 5 2600 Pinnacle Ridge Processor Single And Multi-Core Benchmarks Leak

The Ryzen 5 2600 is a 6-core/12-thread processor with a 3.4GHz base clock and 3.8GHz boost clock. It also has 3MB of L2 cache, 16MB of L3 cache, and a 65W TDP.

In Geekbench, the chip scored 4,269 in the single-thread testing and 20,102 in multi-threaded testing. Compared to the Ryzen 5 1600, which is a 6-core/12-thread processor clodcked at 3.2GHz to 3.6GHz with the same cache arrangement and TDP, the Ryzen 5 2600 is anywhere from 7-15 percent faster in single-threaded performance, and 22-31 percent faster in multi-threaded performance. The ranges in percentages take into account different scores in Geekbench's database.

Even if going by the low end numbers a 7 percent jump in single-threaded performance and 22 percent gain in multi-threaded work chores is a nice upgrade. Part of the difference is obviously attributable to faster clockspeeds, but performance optimizations underneath the hood also play a role. The gap could be even wider when Pinnacle Ridge ships too, as AMD and its partners will have had more time to polish up drivers.

AMD Ryzen 5 2600 spotted in Geekbench database

Previously:

AMD Expected to Release Ryzen CPUs on a 12nm Process in Q1 2018
AMD at CES 2018