Fact Check: About Those Comparisons Between Trump and Clinton on ‘Hush-Money’ Payments

While the two events might initially appear similar — two former presidents paying money to women with whom they had sexual relations — it is important to acknowledge the full context surrounding the two events. When that context is taken into consideration, the two events stop looking similar.

The largest and most important difference is that Clinton and Jones mutually reached an out-of-court settlement stipulating that Jones would receive $850,000; Trump privately arranged his payments in order to keep Daniels from speaking publicly in the first place.

Source: Fact Check: About Those Comparisons Between Trump and Clinton on ‘Hush-Money’ Payments

If you want to split hairs to try to find a distinction between these two scenarios, how about I also point out that Jones was accusing Clinton of sexual assault, and whatever interaction Daniels had with Trump, it was at least consensual. So, you’re absolutely right, Jack Izzo of Snopes, these two cases aren’t very similar at all, are they?

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Corporate IT “Support”

I couldn’t mount network drives on my work laptop, so I opened a ticket. That was FIVE weeks ago. The ticket was closed by the first person after 3 days without even contacting me. I immediately re-opened it, and it proceeded to worm its way through an additional EIGHTEEN people, and finally came back to the original person who closed it, who — for at least the 4th time in the email chain — asked me questions I had “pre” answered in the original complaint.

Disgusted, I finally took a couple of hours, and figured it out myself. When I was finishing up, and documenting the fix on the ticket, the first guy contacted me on Teams, and asked me to bring the laptop into the office and try to do what I’ve shown over and over in screenshots couldn’t be done.

I guess I’m just lucky that I have admin rights on my laptop.

FWIW, the problem started when I installed WSL to test using for developing Rails apps. When I recognized the coincidence, and since I hadn’t actually used it yet, I uninstalled the Ubuntu image. This wasn’t enough to fix the problem.

The error message was clearly about not being able to resolve machine names, but I didn’t want to monkey around with the resolution settings because #CorporateIT does nasty things to our laptops, and I was afraid of screwing up their configuration.

I finally removed WSL entirely, and got a different error message when trying to mount a drive, which led me to this Stack Exchange post. I copied the registry setting from a computer which works (which was the same as what was listed in the top answer), and all was sorted again.

To me, the worst part of this charade is that the “original” guy will get the credit for “resolving” the issue, and that really burns me.

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The Downfall of the West

I’m watching the end of civilization in real time on Twitter. Between Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan, I’m watching Europe eagerly import the same culture that has made the Middle East a nightmare for the past 1,400 years.

I have several questions.

Who’s deciding to do this? There has to be a significant coalition of people who are all working together to accomplish this. This would involve people at all levels of government.

Who’s funding it? Moving this many people at roughly the same time (granted, over the course of a few years) takes money. A lot of it. Who’s paying for it? George Soros? Embezzled tax monies?

Finally: why? What’s the goal? Of all the questions, this seems the most straightforward to answer, and it’s the most depressing of all.

White liberals are dooming Western society in a mass self-immolation event. They seem to literally prefer the end game of an Islamic state to the current Christian-themed free society. If they think that fundamental, evangelical Christians are somehow repressive of their personal liberty, just wait till they see what’s waiting at the end of Sharia law. How can people be so obtusely oblivious and hypocritical?

For instance, look at the “queers for Palestine” protests. I literally can’t even. Islamic states would literally stone those protestors to death for their lifestyle and their dress. What on earth are they thinking!? The enemy (Palestinians) of their enemy (Zionist Israelis) is most-definitely NOT their friend.

The video is only 12 minutes, but here’s the full transcript, because I think this is so important.

Hello, Hungary, hello, Budapest, hello, fellow Europeans and American friends. Thank you so much for having me. Allow me to skip formalities for a moment and dive right into a subject that is not so cheerful, but very, very necessary to discuss.

Let me walk you through the past seven days in Europe. This week in Stockholm, three elderly women in their 70s were stabbed in broad daylight on the streets. In London, four people were stabbed in a time span of just 42 hours.

In Paris, hundreds of African migrants took to the street to riot. And in Brigolo, also in France, yet another church was burned down to the ground. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is just a few incidents in just a couple of days on our beautiful continent.

But we all know that these incidents aren’t incidents anymore. If there’s one thing that’s for sure, it’s that we know, and our governments also know, that there is a link between mass migration and crime. In a Dutch city of Dordrecht, something interesting happened the other day.

They announced, and this is a small city in the Netherlands, in my home country, that a new asylum center will be put in that little town. And what did the municipality do? They said, we are going to offer citizens who live in the vicinity of this center a thousand euros to take extra safety measures. Our new reality in Europe consists of frequent rapes, stabbings, killings, murders, shootings, even beheadings.

But let me be clear about one thing. This did not used to happen before. This is a newly imported problem.

Samuel P. Huntington predicted this over 25 years ago, when he wrote, and I quote, in the new world of mass migration, the most pervasive, important, and dangerous conflicts will not be between the social classes. They will not be between the rich and the poor. They will be between peoples belonging to different cultural entities.

Tribal wars and ethnic conflicts will occur within civilizations. Well, boy, was he right. And the worst part is, we as a society seem to have become indifferent to it.

When another white boy or white girl dies at the hands of an immigrant, we might shake our head, we might let out a sigh, we might even get angry for a minute or two, and then we go on with our lives. We offer the family thoughts and prayers, but nothing ever changes. Ladies and gentlemen, what does that say about us? This is the response of a society that has already given up.

A society that has already accepted its defeat. But is this true? Have we given up? Do we really accept the new reality that our globalist leaders have in mind for us? I know one thing for sure, and that is that if nothing changes, if we don’t start to seriously fight for our continent, for our religion, for our people, our countries, then this time that we live in will go down in history as the time in which Western nations no longer had to get invaded by hostile armies in order to be conquered. This time will then go down in history as the period in which the invader was actively invited in by a corrupt elite, and not only did this corrupt elite invite the enemy in, they made the native population pay for it too.

Everyone who has eyes can see it. The native white Christian European population is being replaced at an ever-accelerating rate. Let me back this up for you with some statistics from my home country.

Let’s take Amsterdam, the capital. Amsterdam currently consists of 56 per cent migrants. The Hague, 58 per cent migrants.

Rotterdam, almost 60 per cent migrants. And, of course, most of these immigrants come from non-Christian, non-Western, African and Middle Eastern countries. Conclusion, the Dutch population is already outnumbered in the majority of our cities.

But let’s look onwards. London, 54 per cent migrants. Again, conclusion, native population outnumbered.

Brussels, colour me shocked, 70 per cent migrants. Conclusion, native population majorly outnumbered. And other Europeans will, of course, follow suit soon if they haven’t already.

So, I’m going to draw the forbidden conclusion here. The Great Replacement Theory is no longer a theory. It’s reality.

And what’s interesting about replacement is that the establishment will either deny its existence or, when they admit to it, they say that it’s a good thing that the native European population is soon no longer a majority on its own continent. Dutch national disgrace and dubbed climate pope, Frans Timmermans, already stated in 2015 that diversity is humanity’s destiny. And that Europe will be diverse.

And, of course, by now, I think we all know what they mean with the word diversity. It means less white people, less of you. Imagine this in an Asian or an African country.

Imagine their leaders rejoicing in the fact that their people will soon no longer be a majority in their own country. Absolutely unthinkable. Unimaginable.

So, what in the world is wrong with our leaders? The underlying sentiment of what they say is always the same. Our establishment claims that white people are evil and that our history is somehow fundamentally different from that of others. Consciously or unconsciously, they have sucked up the lies and the anti-white dogmas of the neo-Marxist critical race theory.

That’s why the totalitarians in Brussels are trying to force you, the Hungarian people, a sovereign nation to accept immigrants despite the fact that the population has said no and so has the government. But make no mistake, the majority of the Dutch people haven’t asked for this either. Just like Brussels is forcing Hungary to accept these words of immigrants, they are doing the same now even in the smallest of towns in the Netherlands.

No part may remain Dutch in the traditional sense of the word. No part of Europe may remain European. And it’s not difficult to understand why.

If the old Europe still exists in certain places, then people will be able to compare the new Europe to the old and newsflash, they will prefer the old. That’s why the Eurocrats hate Hungary so much. And their message is clear.

Our way of life, our Christian religion, our nations, they have to go without exception. Their vision of the future is the neo-liberal, unrecognisable Europe, where every city becomes kind of like Brussels. Ugly, dirty, unsafe, zero social cohesion, where the buildings are constantly under construction and they never, ever seem to finish, and even when they do, the end result is uglier somehow than what they started with.

And what are we left with? A permanent state of isolation, confusion, and disorientation. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the New World Order. So what’s the antidote? A strong, Christian Europe of sovereign nation states.

That’s why we need to outright reject the lie that nationalism causes war. It’s not nationalism or national sovereignty that causes war. It’s expansionism.

And where in Europe do we find that nowadays? In one place and one place only, Brussels. Isn’t it funny how the same people who erode our national sovereignty and love to do it, give it all up to the Eurocrats there, that those people are now telling us that we need to spend billions and billions of euros on the national sovereignty of Ukraine? It’s a joke, honestly, and it’s a pretty sick, expensive, and dangerous joke. During a recent interview, I got asked by an interviewer, do you think that you ever go too far? Do you think that you’re ever too radical? I thought about it for a second, and I said, no.

No, I don’t think I go too far. Truth be told, ladies and gentlemen, I think we in Europe do not go far enough. I think that if we really think about the organized, structural attack on our civilization, that we don’t do enough.

Do we do enough to stop the attack on our families, on our continent, on our countries, on our religion? When we hear about another murder, another stabbing of a young, innocent child, do we do enough? When we know that our national sovereignty has been given up in less than a century to Brussels, do we do enough? When we hear that Christian kids in Germany are now converting to Islam to fit in, do we do enough? I don’t think so. The totalitarian institute of the European Union needs to come down. Let me be clear, I don’t believe in reforms.

When the foundation of your institution is rotten, and that is the case in Brussels, you can rebuild the house on top of it all you want, but it’s still going to crumble. So the only answer is the Tower of Babel needs to be destroyed. Ladies and gentlemen, we are the daughters and sons of the greatest nations on earth.

And we need to ask ourselves, what has happened to us? Where do we come from? And more importantly, where are we going? Our elites have declared a war on us, and now it is time for us to put on the full armor of God, fight back, and win. Thank you so much.

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Glory Days

BeOS

I legitimately miss this age of computing. RedHat Linux 6, Windows 98 and NT 4, Mac OS X, Solaris, HP-UX, IRIX, AIX, and BeOS. It was a great time to be a “computer guy.” We were all trying to figure out what it could be. Now we have <gestures at everything>… this.

Fun fact: Be (the company) noticed this screenshot and comments I made about their OS on my website back in those days, and sent me an actual CD with the latest version.

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Pain is Your Body’s Way…

Chronic pain is your body’s way of telling you that you’re a horrible person, and that God hates you.

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My Whole Life is Crappy Web Sites

This Nonsense

This is a snapshot of my inbox. I think it tells the story well enough that it doesn’t need explanation. This is my life: battling crappy web sites. All day. Every day. This is all of our lives now. We gloss over this constant, digital friction in our lives, but I remember when it wasn’t like this, and it drives me crazy.

The best part is that all of this nonsense was to figure out that this account has been closed, and the remaining whopping $8 has been moved to another, similar service, where I don’t even know how to get started to get to this point with that service. So there’s another battle looming. I’m not done. I’m never done.

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My Limit

I’ve seen about 18 doctors in the past 3 years. I’ve honestly lost track. Every single visit was about one thing: I’m in constant, extreme pain. Yet every single doctor has refused to prescribe me ANYTHING to help with the pain. Not one. Not one time.

I just saw 2 pain specialists today, and they wouldn’t do it either. I was told that it would interfere with treatments. First, I can NOT take pain meds when we do procedures, you know. I mean, we all understand that, right? Second, it’s taken me THREE MONTHS just to get that appointment because of our stupid insurance system, and now it’s going to be ANOTHER month before I come back for the first treatment. Can I not get something for this next month of waiting around? No, go home and suffer in silence until you’re summoned again.

I’m just so utterly exhausted and angry and worn out. I’m LIVID. I’ve been LIVID for HOURS now. I understand that doctors not wanting to prescribe pain meds is a giant overreaction to too many opiates in treatments, but of all the situations where pain meds might be called for, this seems to be the TEXTBOOK case, and I get NOTHING. For over 3 years now. Endless, constant pain, and all the mental anguish that implies, but I’m just supposed to see counselors and pray.

I’m sorry, I don’t have magical powers. Whatever mental, emotional, or spiritual reserves I could have used to simply “deal with it” were exhausted a LOOOONG time ago. I’m sitting here at an 8 this evening, and I want to throw things through walls, break windows, and trash my stuff like I was a drug-abusing rock star in a hotel room in the 80’s. The Bible says God won’t put more on you than you can bear. I’m declaring I’ve officially hit my limit. Your move, God.

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Well, Crap; There Goes another $110

Meet the new C64 Edition from the 8BitDo Keyboard line. Packed with programmable keys and an intuitive control panel.. Compatible with Windows and Android.

This hits all the right notes for me. I recently bought a full set of SA Retro keycaps for my WASD CODE v2 (in blues), on my Mac. While pricey, I love them. I get warm fuzzies every time I sit down at it. I use this board on my Mac, and out of a dozen mech’s I’ve tried, I just don’t think it gets any better than a WASD.

The article also mentions new buckling spring boards. I have a Mini M from Unicomp on my work computer. The action doesn’t seem as crisp as I remember on actual Model M’s from back in the 80’s, but given that it’s supposed to be the same internals, made on the original tool dies, I have to chalk it up to memory. I like it too.

For “just” $110, I will probably buy one of these. I don’t have a Kailh-based board, though I’ve liked the feel of that brand of switches in various testers I have.

Sigh.

<gets out wallet>

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Baldur’s Gate 3 boss blasts publisher “greed” behind layoffs | Eurogamer.net

“It’s always the quarterly profits,” he continued, “the only thing that matters are the numbers, and then you fire everybody and then next year you say ‘shit I’m out of developers’ and then you start hiring people again, and then you do acquisitions, and then you put them in the same loop again, and it’s just broken… “You don’t have to,” Vincke went on. “You can make reserves. Just slow down a bit. Slow down on the greed. Be resilient, take care of the people, don’t lose the institutional knowledge that’s been built up in the people you lose every single time, so you have to go through the same cycle over and over and over. It really pisses me off.”

Source: Baldur’s Gate 3 boss blasts publisher “greed” behind layoffs | Eurogamer.net

This isn’t unique to the gaming industry. This is the same problem all corporations have had since the 80’s. The problem is tying executive compensation to stock options. The “number must go up,” no matter what, so that the charade of the stock price being tied to news about the company’s financial position can continue, and thus everyone in management and the Wall Street banks makes money. Until this loop is broken, this short-term thinking will continue, in every industry and every large company in the US. (And as private equity continues its death march from coast to coast, there won’t be any small companies soon, anyway.)

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Introducing Surface Pro 10 for Business and Surface Laptop 6 for Business | Microsoft Devices Blog

AI-powered PCs built for a new era of work We are excited to announce the first Surface AI PCs built exclusively for business: Surface Pro 10 for Business and Surface Laptop 6 for Business. These new PCs re

Source: Introducing Surface Pro 10 for Business and Surface Laptop 6 for Business | Microsoft Devices Blog

I just love how Microsoft sticks “FOR BIZNESSSSSSS!” on the end of things. “Skype FOR BIZNESSSSSSSS!” “Teams FOR BIDNESS!” “Outlook FOR BIZNAAAAAS!” Sigh. How can you take this stuff seriously? Anyway.

Windows stays because Microsoft caters to corporations which abuse the poor, defenseless OS into doing things like locking users out of changing the desktop background and the sleep timeout. Until Apple offers power-hungry corporate IT middle managers the same level of user-hostile malfeasance in the name of “security,” Microsoft will hold the high ground in corporate deployments.

This becomes a self-perpetuating cycle of not-so-micro-aggressions, as it continues to skew all the Microsoft-bought-and-paid-for Gartner polls that show how much more prevalent Windows is over OSX, and self-justify corporate America that they’re doing the right thing. This, in turn, leads to an entire sub-industry of corporate “security” software which must be installed on Windows, because, bought-and-paid-for auditors told them they had to.

Thus, I wind up with a corporate laptop with something like 3 or 4 different “endpoint” security products installed on it, and something like 30-40 different scripts and checks that run almost by the hour to make sure that the inherent weaknesses of Windows hasn’t compromised our precious meeting PPT’s, which corporate IT considers as sensitive as the US nuclear arsenal codes.

Apple offers an alternative to this madness, and I’m very glad they do. I would rather they stay as they are rather than corrupt their ecosystem in this way to make some corporate sales, and I will happily continue to use my personal MBP to do as much of my work as I can.

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