Humor4u

As the climate shift slash carbon tax credit swindle melts down and dissipates, the elites have decided a whole new approach is in order, the branding for the new proposed tax payer skim is called a "No-Regrets Strategy." Remember this phrase, it is sure to make the rounds shortly. It is a soon to be announced strategy under the guise of adaptation through paying "insurance" to fund safeguards against extreme weather events. Climate talk shifts from curbing CO2 to adapting June 15, 2013 WASHINGTON (AP) -- Efforts to curb global warming have quietly shifted as greenhouse gases inexorably rise. The conversation is no longer solely about how to save the planet by cutting carbon emissions. It's becoming more about how to save ourselves from the warming planet's wild weather. It was Mayor Michael Bloomberg's announcement last week of an ambitious plan to stave off New York City's rising seas with flood gates, levees and more that brought this transition i...

INTERLUDE Stay tuned...

It's Friday: must be time for another DevBytes episode. Finally, here is the DevBytes episode around the ListView animation demo in the talk A Moving Experience that I gave with Romain Guy at Google I/O last month. The code is nearly the same as that in the I/O talk, except I tweaked it to make it more general-purpose. Specifically, it no longer depends on the setHasTransientState() method (introduced in Jellybean 4.1) to keep the views around while fiddling with layout. Instead, it uses an adapter with stable itemIds, and uses those Ids to track where the content is before and after layout. As written, the code is still dependent on Android 4.1, but that's only because of the use of ViewPropertyAnimator.withEndAction() method, which is really just syntactic sugar around adding a listener and running the end-action code in the onAnimationEnd() callback. So you could totally port this code all the way back to Android 3.1 (when ViewPropertyAnimator was introduced) or even 3.0 (...

Throughout history many regimes used brutal tactics to control and manipulate populations, either their own or someone elses. The tactic is based on fear and intimidation regardless of degree. If things are learned from nature... then "Law of the jungle" fits the bill. Fear and intimidation was a common form of population control, it's adherents ranged from the school yard bully boy to the highest ranking elitist leadership. The tendency is probably stoked by the inclination of the perpetrators to be of  psychopathic tendency. Left unchecked these animalistic intellect despots wreak untold misery and carnage across the populations they invariably subjugate. So prevalent was the phenomena of psychopathic solutions to elicit compliance to imposed "rules" of societal behaviour... a specific term was coined for the practitioners of it. The thought being of course, civilized governance should not be predicated upon fear and intimidation of its "subjects," d...

Who doesn't know the secrets? Who is not a suspect? Leak risk: So many security clearances In the mammoth national security community, any one of the nearly 5 million Americans with a security clearance could become a leaker. The dramatic disclosures by Edward Snowden show just how vulnerable even the most rigorous screening can be to contractors or employees who’ve made up their minds to share the nation’s secrets. The process for clearing trustworthy men and women is intense – but imperfect. And with so many people who have access to classified information, there are limits to how much the government can do to stop determined leakers. Do I see anyone asking why the "leakers" feel the need to leak? Would that not be the first question... unless the answer is already known! At what point in time do you realize that inflated, bloated anything cannot be good... especially when loaded with unsavory or contentious content and very conscientious citizens? The recent spate of w...

The classic misdirection... The debate has become one of privacy, while security goes out the window!  The What, Why and How... Data mining and strip mining of natural resource may have a lot in common. If you spend $1 trillion on mining equipment and the operation yields only one unit of product for every 1000 units of overburden you have a seriously flawed operation which cannot ever succeed. To succeed a stripping ratio of 5 to 1 would need to be achieved, continuing to mine worthless material is not only futile and costly it is ineffective and does not produce the desired result. When looking for highly critical "intelligence" data this could even prove fatal.  Reducing the size of the haystack increases the chances of finding needles, while... of course... adding insane amounts of hay decreases the chances and soon finding needles is next to impossible. Who in their right mind would operate such a low or zero yield operation? Unless... "All premeditated absurdity is...

To be fully aware of the insidious encroachment of a philosophy called political correctness, or more rightly Cultural Marxism, it is beneficial to have lived in a time when the notion was regarded as ludicrous if not absurd. The fundamental premise is quite simple, it represents a virtual gagging filter placed between the thoughts of an individual and the vocal expression of them. Quite simply it is a social conditioning designed to seriously limit free expression and exchange of ideas.  The consequence of applying such constraints is far reaching and the unintended invariable negative consequences are yet to be fully experienced. In cultures where the heavy hand of marxist governance plays out, we easily see a cowed and beaten population creeping fearfully about their daily lot, which invariably is miserable. Any sign of protest or whisper of discontent is swiftly dealt with--brutally.  In short, Cultural Marxism is a sledge hammer tool used to enforce subjugation of a popul...