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A: It was a bunch of skiing enthusiasts who went to Tahoe without bringing the car chargers for their iPhones.

This joke is my own original work. I'm going to milk it for all it's worth.

The original 43

Plus, turns out the shithead who murdered 17 kids yesterday was a white supremacist.

But yeah...both sides are totally the same.

One of Trump’s first acts as president made it easier for the mentally ill to buy guns

So, most people know I've been using Linux since mid-2004, and that I started with Gentoo...which, yes, is the equivalent of learning to swim by donning a bacon bikini, rubbing yourself in A1 Steak Sauce, and jumping in the Amazon in the middle of piranha season.

Over the last 13+ years, Linux has...changed. A lot. I am sorry to say that I don't believe most of the changes have been good ones: GTK 3.x, the fiasco that was the KDE 4 series, RedHat aiming to become the next Microsoft, and the crux of the former, SystemD. Yes, I am a SystemD hater, and I make no apologies for it. It does things wrong, it does not even pretend to follow the Unix philosophy, and its syntax and "feel" remind me more than anything of PowerShell, which has to be the most bloated, flabby, weak, user-hostile CLI environment in history.

I also don't have a lot of money for hardware; this post is being typed on a used Thinkpad T440s I was lucky enough to acquire for $200 on EBay from a trusted source. And, being that i work 55+ hours a week *and* do anti-human-trafficking stuff, I don't have endless time to piddle around with Gentoo any longer. Much as I love the near-insane levels of control and configurability it offers, my poor ULV mobile i5 CPU just can't take that level of abuse for long.

So...I'd been distro-hopping for a while, playing with Devuan, Slackware, Artix, Obarun (unsuccessfully; the fucker just wouldn't install and I have no idea why), even FreeBSD.

And then a friend from college, the one who got me into Linux all those years ago, suggested Void.

Now, I'd heard of Void before, but had never even visited the homepage. Doing so left me somewhat underwhelmed, but intrigued; it was very businesslike. There wasn't the patronizing aura of the *buntu family, the slightly notionally-cabbage-smelling, half-baked feeling around Debian, or the complete unprofessionalism of umpteen hojillion other flavor-of-the-week distros.

If anything, it felt like FreeBSD, which I had limited success with and mostly enjoyed, but which didn't let me do a few things I really had gotten used to on Linux. So with Matt's encouragement, I downloaded the Xfce installer, backed up my stuff, cleared out my HDD, and booted it up.

It was a revelation. I don't know how else to describe this. Aside from the slightly WTF choice of using CFDisk, the installer was a no-nonsense NCurses-based affair that reminded me in all the good ways of the Slackware and FreeBSD bootstrappers. It was one of the most painless and ye-gods-FAST installs I had ever seen. Rebooting worked immediately; I was presented with a vanilla Xfce desktop and a very minimal set of programs, which is how I like it.

Two things immediately stood out: the first is the package manager, the XBPS suite (xbps-* commands). I can't say enough good about this; it's like Arch's Pacman for adults. it feels like the lovechild of Apt and Pacman in all the best ways, and it is *blazing* quick. It also has an xbps-src build system, which is to xbps something like the *BSD ports tree is to FreeBSD's pkg utility. It even acts a lot like the ports tree.

The second, and the thing that has made me a Void fangirl for life, is the Runit init system.

OpenRC isn't bad, and I'll take just about anything over Gawdawful SystemD, but Runit feels like alien technology. It is incredibly fast, it's very simple to administrate--just symlink stuff from /etc/sv to /var/services--and it will even, something like the Minix reincarnation server for its drivers, automagically restart crashed services for you!

Did I mention fast? Because this thing goes from "pushing Enter on the GRUB prompt" to "SDDM login screen ready for my credentials" in 10 seconds. 10. I counted. 9-and-a-bit, actually, but close enough to 10 to say 10.

If you run Linux, if you *love* Linux, try Void. You won't regret it. It will change the way you think about Linux. It sweeps away all the bad decisions of the last half a decade. Stuff Just Works. It's the most stable Linux I have ever used, and this despite being nearly as bleeding-edge as Arch. Runit is the star of the show and I wish it were standard on every distro. Do it. You won't b disappointed. Enter The Void.

Folks, this month is very special. Because I've proclaimed what I call National African American History Month.

Let me tell you, last February I toured our National Museum of African-American History and Culture. And they had a stone there. The slaves would stand on it. And get auctioned off. And I said to myself, "boy, that is just not good, that is not good.” They had little metal things, like handcuffs, that they put on the little slave children. And I said to myself, "that is really bad!" Sometimes handcuffs are fun. Trust me, it's not fun to put them on children. It's very sick, or bad.

So now I'm saying to all Americans, let's COME TOGETHER. 💕 As One Team, One People, One American Family! To celebrate the extraordinary contributions of African-Americans to our nation. Let's turn our thoughts to the heroes of the civil rights movement whose courage and sacrifice have inspired us all. Frederick Douglass, he's done an amazing job. Rev. King is being recognized more and more. We've got so many great people. Proclamation: 45.wh.gov/c9Gvt9 pic.twitter.com/Nx0AEKZy5p

...Instead He’ll Run A $1 Trillion One.

  Fourteen months before he was elected president, Donald Trump vowed to make sure the country would never again run a $400 billion budget deficit.

“Well, he’s right about that,” laughed Capitol Hill budget veteran Stan Collender on Monday.

Because, as it turns out, Trump kept his promise ― only not in the way his supporters might have hoped.

In the first budget cycle fully under their control, Trump and the Republican-run Congress are likely to run a deficit that will top $1 trillion, some two-and-a-half times as big as the one Trump had complained about at his Sept. 30, 2015, rally in Keene, New Hampshire.

I've been thinking about time this morning. How just a little of it can make a world of difference.

When I was a wee little kid, David Allen Coe put out a song called If That Ain't Country. The song's got nothing to do with race but somewhere in it there's the phrase "workin' like a nigger for my room and board". That phrase, and the change in its meaning over the years, is a particularly interesting example.

The song was released in 1977, so forty years and change ago. Back when it was released, there was no question in anyone's minds that "workin' like a nigger" meant working your entire ass off. Say precisely the same words today and (aside from getting screeched at by social justice types, physically attacked by any black folks in earshot, and receiving disgusted looks and head shakes by pretty much everyone else) it's going to convey the exact opposite sentiment. I find that intriguing. And, frankly, quite depressing.

Depressing because of the way the change in meaning came about. Let's talk about that for a bit.

An adult black man black in 1977 expected to have to work his entire ass off if he wanted anything other than ghetto life for his family. Make note of that entire sentence there; every word and clause of it is extremely important.

Essentially not one bit of that applies to an average adult black man in 2018.

The prevailing wisdom in the black community in 2018 is that no matter how hard you work, "institutional racism" will keep you from ever getting ahead in life if you follow the rules. The quotes around that phrase are there because, while it is said on a remarkably frequent basis, it is a fundamentally disingenuous concept. "Institutional <type of discrimination>" essentially means "we need something to blame for <group>'s lack of success but lack any proof of actual <type of discrimination>, so we're going to call it institutional and eliminate the need to back up our claim".

Why do they believe that? Because it's all they've been told since MLK was murdered. Anyone claiming to support the black community and spouting anything except "oppression, oppression, oppression" has been vilified and cast out. Non-black people not toeing the party line are called racists and black people who dare disagree are called Uncle Toms. After several decades of this, the black community has almost entirely lost what MLK was essentially the last one to be allowed to preach: Hope.

Let's be real clear on this, no group or individual is ever going to succeed at anything in life without hope. If you do not have hope, you will not even try, which guarantees that you are not going to succeed. Making no effort to succeed does not go unnoticed by those around you either, thus the change in assumption regarding the work ethic of a generic black man.

Thus also my utter contempt for those who profess the loudest to support the black community while nothing but doom and hopelessness passes their lips when speaking to said community. They have robbed entire generations of a race of the hope of a better life that should be their birthright as Americans. And they've done it while lining their own pockets.

Don't get me wrong, I'm fully aware of a large group of, let's call them fools for kindness's sake, who genuinely believe the black man is oppressed to the point of hopelessness. I have nothing to say to them, because trying to convince a fool that they are foolish is itself foolish. I really wish they could be made to see that taking someone's hope away absolutely ensures their failure though.

That's pretty much all I have to say about the changes in conventional wisdom on their work ethic but do you remember that sentence I told you to remember? I'd like to address another part of it while I'm at it. Specifically the bit that said "if he wanted anything other than ghetto life for his family".

Unfortunately, that desire no longer exists on average. Primarily because it is based on the assumption that he has or even desires a family. This is not in fact the case anymore. Of the black babies that dodge Planned Parenthood's stated anti-black eugenics agenda long enough to be born (and in NYC one year this decade (I forget which and can't be arsed to look it up), that was less than half of them) , over three quarters of them are abandoned by their fathers.

Being raised in a single parent household is the single largest predictor of future poverty in the US. So, unlike imagined oppression, this actually does put future generations of black children at a factual and serious disadvantage in life.

And, no, the absent black fathers are not all victims of the justice system and in prison. Factual, verifiable numbers call you an idiot for even thinking that.

Now, I don't know precisely why most black fathers are not living in a traditional nuclear family with their children and children's mother. I believe that a good chunk of it is their self-destructive culture but I can't honestly say how much. I can say it's a fucking tragedy regardless of why it's occurring though.

What does all of the above boil down to? That the black man was objectively better off when he was actively, openly, and legally discriminated against than he is now. And that there are a whole lot of people in this world that are in desperate need of a good ass-whooping.

- a method." -- Caltech mathematician Tom Apostol

        sleep( 10 ); // MDC try to fix fast user switching with a horrible hack

Thoughts and prayers with the families of the 71 Saratov Airlines passengers & crew who died. ✈️💥 No survivors.⚰️⚰️⚰️

And with the survivors, and the families of the victims, of the firey helicopter crash in the Grand Canyon. 🚁🔥

Very sad for me personally. Since taking office I have been very strict on Commercial Aviation. So there were Zero deaths in 2017, the best and safest year on record. 2018, not so great. We must work much harder and get very, very tough on the airlines. Jimmy Carter, President Carter, was a DISASTER for our airlines! Our airlines have been in the shitter since he signed the Airline Deregulation Act.🚽 pic.twitter.com/y8vikN1akP

Forty-five minutes later and it's still installing dependencies. The hell is goffice?

All I wanted was to do my income taxes on my Mac. Perhaps if I settled for my Windows box those taxes would have been done by now.