URLs du Jour

2017-05-23

■ We are up to Proverbs 26:27:

27 Whoever digs a pit will fall into it;
    if someone rolls a stone, it will roll back on them.

Also known as: what goes around, comes around; a man reaps what he sows; etc. The ancient Israelis knew about karma, man.

■ David French on last night's horror: Manchester: The Chilling Sound of Terror.

There is no reasoning with this hate. There is no “legitimate grievance” with the West that triggers such violence. It is the product of fanatical devotion to the most evil of all causes, a cause that perversely promises paradise for the slaughter of innocents. There is no way for the West to be “good” enough to appease terrorists. There is no policy short of religious conversion that will cause them to relent. The best deterrent to jihad is the obliteration of jihadists. They thrive on victory, not defeat.

Tonight, sadly, they won a victory, and here’s all you need to know to understand the character of our enemies – they relish the sound of young girls’ screams.

How many more wake-up calls will Western Civilization need?

<voice imitation="professor_farnsworth">Good news, everyone!</voice> According to Chris Edwards at Cato: Trump Budget to Cut Federal Pensions.

The Washington Post said [predictably - Ed.], “The thought of Trump’s assault on federal retirement programs becoming law enrages federal employee leaders.” It certainly does. The paper quotes union leaders calling the proposals an “outrageous attack,” “downright mean,” and “beyond insulting.”

On the contrary, trimming the 47 percent advantage in benefits enjoyed by federal workers is a sensible attack on overspending. Furthermore, it is mean and insulting to taxpayers to give gold-plated pensions to workers inside the government bubble, especially since those favored few also have much higher job security than the rest of us.

Somedays, the Trump Administration is a trainwreck, but it occasionally does something good.

■ The College Fix winds up the story of Paul Griffiths, formerly of Duke Divinity School: Professor who called diversity training a ‘waste’ resigns after dean punishes him. Quoting from Griffiths' statement:

It’s over because I recently, and freely, resigned my chair in Catholic Theology at Duke University in response to disciplinary actions initiated by my dean and colleagues. Those disciplinary actions, in turn, were provoked by my words: critical and confrontational words spoken to colleagues in meetings; and hot words written in critique of university policies and practices, in support of particular freedoms of expression and thought, and against legal and disciplinary constraints of those freedoms. My university superiors, the dean and the provost, have been at best lukewarm in their support of these freedoms, preferring to them conciliation and accommodation of their opponents. And so, I reluctantly concluded, the word-struggle, the agony of distinction and argument, the search for clarity by dramatizing and exploring difference—these no longer have the place they once had in the university.

The heretic against the religion of progressivism has been cast out of the temple.

Heat Street's Emily Zanotti reveals: ‘Star Trek: Discovery’ Under Fire for Not Casting Enough White Dudes.

The series stars  Sonequa Martin-Green as a high-level officer on the ship who has most of the show’s adventures (the captain, a white man, is just there for window dressing). Michelle Yeoh stars as another ship’s captain, who aides Martin-Green, and the two lead a cast of humans and aliens charged with saving the galaxy, before the events of Star Trek: The Original Series.

Well, for one thing: Michelle Yeoh. I hadn't planned on shelling out any money to watch Yet Another Star Trek series, but… Michelle Yeoh. Hm.

Yeah, get over it, fellow white dudes. As Ms Zanotti says: "But, it turns out, not just progressives can be snowflakes."

■ At the Free Beacon, Sonny Bunch does the world a great service by saying what needs to be said: Best Burger Chain? Five Guys, Obviously. Sonny's got opinions:

Obviously, Five Guys is the best. And Five Guys is the best because it has the best array of toppings. But with so many options, how do you know which ones to get to maximize the burger-to-topping ratio without overwhelming the burger itself? Behold, the perfect burger:

Five Guys Cheeseburger, with ketchup, mayo, mustard, pickles, sauteed onions, mushrooms.

That's it. That's the perfect burger. Put nothing else on it (lettuce? gtfo) and leave none of the above off of it (I don't care if you don't like mushrooms, develop your palate you philistine). Don't @ me, I don't care about your garbage opinion.

I'll try that. But… pickles and mushrooms? OK. I usually go for the jalapeños and barbecue sauce, but hey.

Of the top ten list Sonny discusses, we only have three in our area. Seacoast New Hamphire is not a burger hotspot.

I'm a little puzzled by Fuddruckers' omission from the top 10 list. I've not been there a lot (the nearest one to Pun Salad Manor is in frickin' Methuen MA), but my memories are fond.

■ Eric S. Raymond has a project to resurrect ADVENT, the adventure game that we geezers played in the 1970s on the timesharing PDP-10, when and if we could: The Adventure begins again.

Though there’s a C port of the original 1977 game in the BSD game package, and the original FORTRAN sources could be found if you knew where to dig, Crowther & Woods’s final version – Adventure 2.5 from 1995 – has never been packaged for modern systems and distributed under an open-source license.

Until now, that is.

Eric's discussion of the mechanics and esthetics of translating ancient memory-optimized Fortran code into something slightly more modern is excellent reading for software geeks. (As are the comments.)