Al Gore's Culti-Media Empire

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I am about sick of Apple.  Again.  Specifically the Cult of Chakra Khan over there on the Board of Directors, lecturing the masses, whitewashing his soiled massage towel of a reputation.

It’s been hard enough to survive the onslaught of junk bands which have enjoyed phenomenal support from placement in Apple products.  I enjoyed U2 a long time ago, Black-Eyed Peas exactly once, and Gorillaz never.  Why must that crap keep fouling my recommendations?

Really, Apple?  Must I be bombarded with this flaming lefty nonsense?  Microsoft stays out of it, and even the typically lefty Open Source community keeps it below the radar unless you’re on a forum.  But Apple has Al … Continue reading →

Osama bin Laden Conspiracy: Crazy Talk (for now)

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There are some things which don’t add up, but at this stage, that makes a lot of sense.  Calling it  conspiracy at this stage is crazy talk.  Here’s why:

People who have not dealt with what we might call an “operational” tempo and style of events, or those who have forgotten what that is like, will tend to find fault with minor discrepancies, and to lose their composure when large discrepancies are found. Some of the discrepancies are reports of the method and time of bin Laden’s demise, a photograph purportedly of bin Laden which is hardly dispositive, and an incredibly stupid decision to dump his body at sea*. At least that’s the story today.

No matter how queer this all looks, consider the alternative: a conspiracy to … Continue reading →

I'm With Barack

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I hope he doesn’t mind me being so informal.

I feel that partisan politics, which is a good and worthy form of discourse, not some sort of filthy taboo, should nevertheless stand at the shore and wait patiently for politicians and pundits to return from contentious overseas affairs.

There is an argument to be made that the subject is so important or time-sensitive that it trumps (how long will we have an asterisk after that word now?) everything else, but in reality, there are very few things so important AND time-sensitive.

Now is a time to stand united and face the next week.  America is going to need resolve in the face of potential retaliation attacks, and the temptation to declare victory and get the H out of … Continue reading →

DRAFT — The Marxism of President Obama: The Mask Falls (3)

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Third of three, shortly to be rolled into a single post, after, you know, editing (which will generate a fourth, but that’s another story).

Get In The Game

This speech revolves around paragraphs 50 and 51, to the extent that the rest of it begins to seem like mere padding, especially since there are only 60 paragraphs in the whole speech.  It’s as if he needed several pages of warm-up time, working up the nerve, to drop his proposition.  Can’t say I blame him.

Because he blames American corporations for the economy not responding to his stimuli, of course the solution must lie in changing the behavior of American corporations.  Paragraph 50:
[pullquote]American companies have nearly $2 trillion sitting on their balance sheets[/pullquote]

So if I’ve got … Continue reading →

The Marxism of President Obama in One Paragraph

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President Barack Obama is a modern American Marxist because he does not understand the way Capitalism works, which causes him to mis-diagnose the American economy.  When he says Capitalism, he is thinking of Mercantilism, and he casts about in time-worn fashion for something to replace it.  The two responses to the depredations of Mercantilism were Marxism and Capitalism, and since the President does not see a difference between Mercantilism and Capitalism, the only solution to him is Marxism.  He wonders why the rest of us cannot see it so clearly.

So there it is.  I continue to work on my analysis which has so far (to my surprise) led to the above conclusion.  That analysis is currently scattered over several blog posts in varying stages of the editorial … Continue reading →

SQL Query of the Day — Group By Year

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This fellow has a blog, and it’s good: Grouping datetime by date in T-SQL « SQL Disco.  Many times in SQL you need to group by year, or by date, and what you have to work with is a big nasty DATETIME field.  I needed to find out how many updates had been done each year, and I had gnat’s ass quality timestamps, down to the second.

I know what you’re thinking, but if you use CONVERT(dtgMyDate), you’re doing it wrong, as our friend at SQL DISCO points out.  In his example, he groups by day; in this one, I have modified it to group by year:

SELECT DATEADD(yyyy,(DATEDIFF(yyyy,0,dtgMyDate)),0),
COUNT(*)
FROM Table1 GROUP BY DATEADD(yyyy,(DATEDIFF(yyyy,0,dtgMyDate)),0)

You see what he does there? Instead of costly CONVERT, … Continue reading →