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So a lot of folks had a lot to say about my last journal entry. For a little bit I was responding to various comments. After a while though I became a whole lot more interested in the types of objections I was seeing. Not refutations, mind. There were zero of those. Not one.

Seriously, not one of the ranty hate nuggets made even the slightest claim that the plan I laid out, if followed conscientiously, would not produce some very decent human beings. Every last one dealt with how others have practiced Christianity throughout the years, told me I didn't understand the source materials, or other utterly irrelevant to the point of the journal entry arguments.

It really amazes me how many people very obviously have a chip the size of Texas on their shoulders about any mention of Christianity or Jesus, to the point that they cannot even study or discuss it without seeing anything but what they want to see. They have pre-judged (literally what the word prejudice means) it as the worst thing ever and will not allow themselves to even understand discussion that does not align with this.

It's sad, really. I hate seeing minds not just closed but closed, locked, the key melted down, welded shut, and guarded by rabid tasmanian devils. If you're unwilling to consider the possibility that you're wrong, you're completely unable to improve yourself. Ever.

Most know Free Agents such as myself as "Vigilantes", but I actively discourage the application of "Vigilantes" do those who really _do_ aim to do right by others.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Clark County (Washington) Sheriff's Department as well as the Multnomah County (Oregon) Sheriff's Department _all_ know very well that I _relentlessly_ hunt down Child Pornographers.

To the extent I can come up with one such that is within the reach of at least INTERPOL, I file a _detailed_ report with the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center.

While to the very best of my knowledge my IC3 reports have yet to lead to actual prison sentences, I can claim some success, in that I've gotten two _particularly_ egregious E-COMMERCE - "ADD TO CART" - SITES taken down; that same IC3 complaint led to a _modest_ reduction in CloudFlare's _similarly_ egregious_ caching of Child Sexual Abuse.

I had to laugh just now when searching for a particularly well-known - former - Child Pornographic Actress; she was during her... uh... "career"... even _more_ widely known for her Still Photo work so from time to time I search for some of her such Photos for the most part at Bing Image Search.

(This because Satya Nadella is surely so-egregious himself; that is, if you catch my mother fucking drift.)

And why did I have to so laugh?

This because Bing Image Search quickly turned a quite a low low low price of a particularly hard-to-find... uh... "collectible"... Still Work set, but with the at-first puzzling result that at the actual eCommerce site that TURNS RIGHT UP IN IMAGE SEARCH, that very same Still Work set did _not_ turn up in a great _many_ purely-local searches I tried.

As For Why I'm a Free Agent?

When I find the man who published my own Still Photo work, I'm gonna tear him a new one with the rusty entrenching tool that I keep in my toilet bowl for just such an occasion.

Right, first off, I'm not a Christian. I was previously and did grow up with plenty of exposure to it though and there's a lot to be said for the source material. So this is an attempt to inform folks how to do it properly if they're going to do it. If done properly it can make for some extremely decent people and a pretty serene life. A lot of people noob that shit up though, so church should be treated as Stack Exchange; advice should be thoroughly examined before taking any of it.

For starters, skip the Old Testament for now. It's a previous major version and there were plenty of refinements and even breaking changes between 1.0 and 2.0. There are also bits that are universally applicable and bits that were only applicable to a specific person at a specific time (you know, like that bash script you whipped up to do something once and then never used again). There's plenty back there that's still useful but you need to be equipped to be able to distinguish it from what isn't and nobody is right off the bat. Reading it now will only confuse you and even send you down entirely the wrong path. That's how you end up with things like Crusades, the Inquisition, pulseaudio, and systemd.

Now there's a hell of a lot of text in even the New Testament but every last bit of it boils down to one of two precepts:

1. Love God above all else.
2. Love your neighbor as you love yourself.

Got those? Okay, moving on. All the other bits of the New Testament should be treated like /bin/dd. Which is to say, if you don't understand how to use them, do not fucking use them. RTFM until you do. Which is to say, if you can't figure out how any given bit is an example of how to better do one of those two precepts, do not incorporate it into your life until you do or you run a serious risk of fucking shit up beyond belief.

A really good beginner bit is: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. It's dead simple to see how that falls under #2 and pretty easy to tell if you're fucking up on. Granted, until you've had practice implementing it you're mostly going to spot the bugs in hindsight but as you gain experience you'll be able to spot them before you run any code.

Pretty simple, yeah? It's a shame simple ain't the same as easy but that's life for you.

Now when you know your way around the New Testament backwards and forwards, or at least know how to use apropos, whatis, man, and the like to find what you need, by all means go back and read the Old Testament. Keep in mind it's there for historical reasons only. Not human or universal history, mind you, the history of your religion. Actual history ain't the province of religion; teaching you how not to be a shitbird like Lennart Poettering or Bill Gates is. Anything that looks like history should be read as a story and valued only for what it can teach you about how to achieve this. Arguing the facts of something you have no personal knowledge (not faith, knowledge) of is not the way to be anything but a dick.

That's really all there is to it. There's plenty of specific expertise you'll pick up as you go but every last bit of it derives from what you've just read.

An election may have been stolen in North Carolina. While evidence continues to be gathered, officials are investigating whether a paid Republican campaign contractor collected mail-in ballots from likely Democratic voters and never turned them in, possibly changing the result of the election. It’s a crisis of democracy: State election officials told a hearing Monday that North Carolina’s 9th Congressional District was subject to a “coordinated, unlawful, and substantially resourced absentee ballot scheme” orchestrated by a GOP operative.

Here’s my question: Where is the voter fraud crowd? You know, the folks who cry “crime” when two people named John Smith vote in the same state? Their silence in the face of seemingly serious election fraud reveals their fundamental bad faith and hucksterism.

I served with many of the celebrities of the voter fraud pack when I joined President Trump’s Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity in 2017. ... The documents that were released reveal the truth: Contrary to statements by the White House and Republican commission members such as vice chairman Kris Kobach, the Kansas secretary of state, the commission uncovered no evidence of widespread voter fraud. ... Kobach claimed the few instances of fraud were “the tip of the iceberg,” the judge, a George W. Bush appointee, concluded that “there is no iceberg; only an icicle largely created by confusion and administrative error.” Despite this resounding defeat, Kobach continues to rely on the same discredited statistics, and voter fraud remains a top-line GOP concern.

Now that North Carolina is investigating what could be systematic election theft, you’d think people so committed to seeing fraud where it doesn’t exist would be sounding the alarm. What’s alleged in North Carolina’s 9th Congressional District is not an occasional individual registering to vote when she is ineligible, but a sustained program to steal the votes of others.

Why doesn’t the ‘voter fraud’ crowd care about what happened in North Carolina?

UPDATE: North Carolina Elections Board throws out the tainted results and orders a new election!
North Carolina elections board orders new House election after ballot tampering scandal

Voters will go back to the drawing board with new primary elections in the Ninth District after the board’s vote.

Still nothing funny about tired .@nbcsnl Saturday Night Live on Fake News NBC! Like many, I don’t watch Saturday Night Live (even though I past hosted it). But I watched parts of it during, or over, the wonderful President's Day Long Weekend. Total hit job on me. Really bad television, no longer funny, no talent or charm. ZERO. .@DonCheadle, horrible Fake Hockey Jersey. Gary Clark (Jr.), such a dumb song. And the Baldwin impersonation STINKS. Just can't get any worse. Time to retire the boring and unfunny show. Question is, how do the Networks get away with these total Republican hit jobs without retribution? Likewise for many other shows? It is all nothing less than unfair news coverage and Dem commercials. Should be tested in courts, can’t be legal? Only defame & belittle! Very unfair and should be looked into. This is the real Collusion! breitbart.com/entertainment/2019/02/18/watch-don-cheadle-promotes-breitbart-boycotters-sleeping-giants-on-saturday-night-live

I had some extra money from the company Christmas bonus, and decided to use it to buy another one of these single-board computers. I have a few of them lying around, including an old Raspberry Pi Model B with a broken memory card slot, and an ODROID C2 that has been my workhorse NAS server, torrentbox, and HTPC for the past several years. I heard about the ROCKPro64 from someone here (thanks, coolgopher!), and saw how they had some pretty damn sweet-looking silicon with better I/O than USB, and a mean-looking NAS case which I could deck out with two drives.

So I ordered one from them, and I was at first rather disappointed at their rather tardy customer service as it took them more than a few days to respond to my emails following up on my order. Eventually, it seems they decided to stop ignoring me and they began corresponding with me properly, and I got my stuff soon enough.

All of the spinning rust drives I own are Western Digital: they're the only manufacturer I've had much luck with. I have a 1 TB WD Elements I bought in 2009 that I have to give them full marks for, since at one point I tripped on one of the cables while I was copying some stuff to it from my computer, sending the whole thing flying with a crash to the floor. I was terrified that the drive might be destroyed, but not only was it not destroyed, it is still working fine a decade later. It didn't see a lot of heavy use thereafter though, plugged in once in a while whenever I needed to back up my files or whatnot. Not so though with some of the other WD drives I have though. My current ODROID-based HTPC/NAS system is based on a 3TB WD My Book, and it has worked well with almost continuous use for the past three years. I've never had that kind of luck with Seagate or other manufacturers on the other hand.

And so once I got the gear from Pine64, I started building the system. I had a 3TB WD Blue lying around that I originally planned to set up as extra storage for the ODROID but never got around to setting up, and bought another 4TB WD Blue to fill it up. Building up the ROCKPro64 NAS case was not so easy though, as the interior of the thing has very little extra room. Cabling the drives in particular was rather tricky, and they had to twist and turn. Now I'm getting some I/O errors from the drives as I copy some data from the 3TB to the 4TB. I'm not yet sure if it's because I've finally gotten a bad disk from WD, or if it's because of the ugly cabling on the inside. The drives pass SMART, but the kind of ugly, twisting cabling I've had to do inside the case is also a possible source of trouble.

I'm going to try to rearrange the cables again, and perhaps buy new SATA cables tomorrow as the cables that Pine64 sent me along with the case might have problems. I've noticed that swapping the cables around seems to change which drive experiences errors, so that might be it.

On President's Day, we celebrate the American President, the bulwark of our national prosperity and the cornerstone of our national greatness. We commemorate the achievements of this skilled businessman/actor and recognize his courage, will power, and ambition -- all values we cherish as Americans. In that spirit, we continue to seek new horizons for greater greatness and further opportunity on land, in sea, and in space.

NOW, THEREFORE, I, DONALD J. TRUMP, President of the United States of America, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and the laws of the United States, do hereby proclaim February 18, 2019, as President's Day. I call upon the people of the United States to observe this day with appropriate ceremonies and activities. I also direct that the flag of the United States be displayed on all public buildings on the appointed day in honor of our magnificent leader and all who have contributed to shaping this Nation.

After writing some scripts around espeak, I'm working through a very large backlog of text. I have espeak reading at twice its default rate of 150 words per minute and I sometimes "read" more than 100,000 words per day.

Unfortunately, my backlog includes SoylentNews. For more than one year, I've not been following SoylentNews very closely. Indeed, I've only been skimming SoylentNews since Apr 2018. So, I plan to read articles of interest on SoylentNews from Nov 2017 to present. I also plan to summarize the more thoughtful comments and the wittiest trolling. A digest may be intermittent and may purposefully lag by one year so that it acts as a retrospective.

Would this be useful? Is there anything that I should include or exclude? For example, I find astronomy presentations to be fascinating but I find astronomy articles to be samey. Even when an astronomy article gets my attention there isn't much I can contribute by commenting. I'll also avoid regional politics. To me, US politics seems like an endless procession of people who have escaped my attention. (I think Charlie Brooker and/or Adam Curtis had a similar opinion about political news.)

Folks, I don't think I need to do a Proclaimation to make this one a VERY SPECIAL day. A day with a lot of heart. 💕 One year ago today, a horrific act of violence took the lives of 14 students and 3 educators in Parkland, Florida. ❣️ On this somber anniversary, we honor their memory and recommit to ensuring the safety of all Americans, especially our Nation’s children. And believe me, the children are much safer today. Because we did the Ban of the deadly Bump Stocks. Little piece of plastic -- sometimes Metal -- that can turn an ordinary gun into a Weapon of Mass Destruction. 💘 And more importantly, we now have a Ratings System for Video Games. That's a big thing. A year ago, nobody thought that was possible. We made it happen -- together. And we're only getting stronger together. America First!! whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/presidential-message-school-safety-remembering-parkland-tragedy
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Paul Manafort "intentionally" lied to special counsel Robert Mueller's office, breaking the plea agreement that made him the star cooperator in the Russia probe, a federal judge found on Wednesday.

Manafort "made multiple false statements to the FBI, the OSC and the grand jury concerning matters that were material to the investigation," including his contacts with his Russian associate during the campaign and later, Judge Amy Berman Jackson wrote on Wednesday.

Manafort was convicted of various financial crimes in August, and then cut the deal to plead guilty to two charges of conspiracy and witness tampering in September.
In all, Jackson determined Manafort intentionally lied about $125,000 he received for the legal bills, about another unnamed Justice Department criminal investigation and about his interactions with his longtime Russian associate Konstantin Kilimnik while he was campaign chairman and later.

Jackson noted twice in her order that two of the topics Paul Manafort lied about, Kilimnik and payments he received for his legal bills were "material to the investigation."

Judge voids Paul Manafort plea deal, says he 'intentionally' lied to the FBI, special counsel and grand jury

Boy, they sure do lie about Russia a lot!