Defense Secretary Ash Carter: We Might Be Going Back to Fight in Combat in Iraq Again (and Syria Too)

shrimpThis is what happens when you ask a “community organizer” to do a president’s job:

Defense Secretary Ash Carter: We Might Be Going Back to Fight in Combat in Iraq Again (and Syria Too)

Obama fails. It’s what he does.

(Quick aside: Bob Dole disapproves of this use of the third-person to refer to oneself.)

Obama has once again proven the long-known wisdom — of which he was ignorant, and when it was told to him, he jeered at it, because it conflicted with his “new” thinking — that the surest way to waste men’s lives in pointless warfare is to adopt a craven, cowering position and invite aggression.

All hail the Eternal Failure and Bringer of Destruction, Nobel Peace Prize Winner Barack Obama.

They are resorting to Orwellian double-speak to not call it combat, because, of course, Obama declared the end of combat action in Iraq, and Obama is a vain and weak man who mistakes himself for a god.

So they’re calling it “direct action on the ground.”

Pew Research Center: Gun Deaths Down 30% Since 1993

 

 

 

Imagine how much lower it would’ve been if shitholes like Chicago and Baltimore had proper mayors and city councils instead of the corrupt excuses for the same with which they’ve been saddled.  Even with that not being the case, this kinda blows a hole in the case for gun confiscation that all the usual suspects have been making lately:

(source: Pew Research Center: Gun Deaths Down 30% Since 1993)

So this is why new files weren’t showing up

Nothing like changing the default behavior of a program in a point release so that users then wonder why it’s not behaving as it should:

ownCloud 8.2 Release Notes

Changes in 8.2

filesystem_check_changes in config.php is set to 0 by default. This prevents unnecessary update checks and improves performance. If you are using external storage mounts such as NFS on a remote storage server, set this to 1 so that ownCloud will detect remote file changes.

Nearly all of the files on my ownCloud server are accessed from Samba shares on the same server; ownCloud is basically how I access my files away from home.  If it’s not monitoring filesystem changes, it will rapidly fall behind on which files have been created and deleted.

Until v8.1, it monitored filesystem changes in the default configuration.  I upgraded to v8.2 over the weekend, which no longer does that unless you add an option to the config file to reenable it.  Grr.

The state of free speech in academia

Nazi book burningNot much different than shown in the photo:

How Wesleyan’s Attempt To Stamp Out Words Inflames Them

For anyone interested in freedom of the press, October 18, 2015 is a day that deserves to live in infamy. That night, for what may be the first time in the United States, the student government of an elite American university stripped funding from that university’s campus paper—for the offense of running a conservative op-ed.

The Wesleyan Argus published the op-ed in question on September 14. Conservative student columnist Bryan Stascavage’s article was titled “Why Black Lives Matter Isn’t What You Think.” Stascavage, who, by his own admission, was conflicted about his opinions on the movement, raised some rather moderate concerns about its propensity towards excusing, or even encouraging, violence toward police officers. He invited students to question if a more considered approach to police violence was necessary.

For his efforts, he was branded a racist, and a group of radical “student of color” activists started a petition to defund the campus paper that published his piece, and—and I swear I’m not making this up—to burn any copies of the paper found carrying the offending article. Yes, apparently publishing an op-ed that was merely undecided about the question of #BlackLivesMatter was enough for some activists to argue for book burning and press closure.

Alcohol abuse…in space!

1445869708280I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of hashers suddenly cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced:

Comet Lovejoy appears to be a well-stocked bar in space

If you are looking for a good time, it might be worth stopping by Comet Lovejoy.

That’s because the famous comet is releasing huge amounts of alcohol as well as a type of sugar in space, according to NASA. This marks the first time that ethyl alcohol, the same type found in alcoholic beverages, has been observed in a comet.

“We found that comet Lovejoy was releasing as much alcohol as in at least 500 bottles of wine every second during its peak activity,” Nicolas Biver of the Paris Observatory, France and the lead author of a paper on the discovery published in Science Advances, said in a statement.

It also raises the prospect that comets could have been a source of the complex organic molecules required for the emergence of life. The team found 21 different organic molecules in gas from the comet, including ethyl alcohol and glycolaldehyde, a simple sugar.