Apparently the Alliance Defending Freedom (That last word used to be Force) lost in their bid to have the hold maintained on Prop 8.
I could have told them that’s the case. They did not understand that even though the bigots were denied Section III Standing it is STILL a disposition of the case, effectively deferring back to the CA Supreme Court’s findings and judgement that Prop 8 was IN FACT unconstitutional.
The bigots draw from a fairly shallow pool there.
Now this is interesting regarding Firefox 22 and Sage 1.4 and 1.5.
I know my feeds have updates because some of them I subscribe to on Facebook and I see they’ve updated there. But I can click the fucking Refresh Feeds button ad infinitum and the feeds don’t update. What the fuck!
So I find myself doing development in Visual BASIC for Applications again. It’s central to all Microsoft Office applications. In essence it lets one perform conditional logic. Some of that functionality is already present in applications like Excel. As an example you can do IF tests, Data Lookups, etc. But it’s severely limited.
So I’m designing a spreadsheet with a dropdown box. In Excel 2007 if you just use the standard dropdown it won’t let you reference it in VBA.
Instead you have to use an Active-X dropdown box. Great.
Now I’ve always been able to basically say ‘a = dropbox1.value’ to get the selected value. But as I said, using the standard Excel dropdown resulted in the object not being accessible. Great.
But Active-X acts just like the old style. All I had to do is snag:
listItems = ListBox1.Value
And then do my case on istItems. Since I had configured the ListBox to be single selection and since there’s only one data field in it I didn’t have to sweep through it. Much easier.
I thought it might be a Firefox rendering issue – and it partially is. Firefox compresses the post titles down to a vertical column that is hard to read. And right now I’m posting this via Google Chrome 27.0.1453.116.
But it looks as though WordPress has made some changes. I hate the new layout for blog admin btw. But better – a feature that replicates across Firefox 22 and Chrome 27.0.1453.116 – when you go to EDIT a post it loses the text of the post in the editor.
So to the folks at wordpress – fix it please.
So I note my browser updated to version 22 of Firefox. And as is the case with each new revision of this browser it fucks something up. This time Sage 1.4.15 doesn’t work anymore. It won’t update the feeds.
You people at Mozilla need to get your collective shit together. I’m about to drop kick this browser but alas, I kept it prior because I couldn’t find a decent RSS reader for the likes of Chrome and Safari. But now all bets are off.
But interestingly – I went and googled “Sage RSS”. Found out that version 1.5 is available for Firefox, yet Firefox Add On’s didn’t know about it. So I downloaded and RSS feeds are working.
Maybe it’s just me had posted this. I’m stealing it in order to add a little snark.
The storm done blown over by now children. You can come out from under the shroud of bigotry you’ve been carrying for so long.
But I already see we’ve heard from both Brian Brown and Maggie Gallagher that this is a dark day for the bigots.
Must suck to be them. From someone in the camp of the love that doth not speak it’s name I can say it’s about time their religious animus gets put down like the rabid dog that it is.
At first brush I consider they took a punt on the Prop 8l case. But in their dismissal of standing one thing that is obvious to me is that the bigots can no longer claim standing in states where voter initiative was used to write discriminatory laws. Precedence so to speak is present in there.
In the states that have Constitutional amendments I expect to see a number of federal lawsuits against sitting governors, legislators and the like and when they fail to defend the discriminatory law we win by default since the bigots can no longer claim any harm and therefore no standing in a federal case.
Here’s the Prop 8 decision:
Now on DOMA – I was pretty sure the court would affirm that it is unconstitutional. That they did it under the fifth amendment is interesting.
In case you’re not familiar, here’s the text of the 5th with the relevant element in bold.
No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.
Here’s the DOMA Decison:
Life, liberty and property. Does that ring a bell for anyone or did you forget about the Tradition, Family and Property (TFP) dolts.
I find that very interesting that the court chose to go this route. It was in my opinion the easy way out. But it’s effective since it demolishes section 3 of the DOMA law, and therefore most of the DOMA law by default. It is a serious offense to deny a citizen of the U.S. rights to life, liberty or property. It’s an idea that extends from the foundational document of the United States, the Declaration of Independence itself.
But in the end summation what the Supreme Court did was to setup thirty-seven little legal challenges to discriminatory laws and amendments that will resonate onward for a few years.
And of course the bigots at NOM are going a little crazy. It’s because they know this is the end of the line for them. They’ve tried the legislative route and by and large been successful at hoodwinking the public some 31 times. But that tide has turned. They’re on the ropes.
So congratulations to California – marry at will. And to the rest of us we can now marry the person of our choosing in New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Maine, Vermont, Minnesota, Iowa, Delaware, D.C., Maryland, and Washington and have it RECOGNIZED under some eleven hundred Federal law;. Things like inheritance taxes, survivor death benefits, and a whole host of tax benefits.
So I see Attorney General Eric Holder is saying he’ll pounce on blatant violations of voting rights. Good, that’s one part of his job.
But another comes immediately to mind. All this Too Big to Fail shit. Where the hell is DOJ on this? I mean in the 1980’s they managed to breakup the biggest monopoly going, The Bell System. Granted, it’s pretty much come back together again but for wireless not wired.
But why not break the big banks into a million little pieces? Sure they might be too big to fail but they’re not too big to break them up. It’s something the attorneys at the DOJ would just love to sink their teeth in and they have or should have the institutional acumen to do it.
So I have to ask, why not?
So I was watching this video of Christopher Hitchens stating that there is “No creationism debate, it’s over.”
Hitches brought up the Golden rule, aka do unto others and you’d have them do unto you. He theorizes that this is the default human state and has been responsible for the progress made by societies.
That got me to thinking. For example – I know the Code of Hammurabi was written sometime around 1700BC. And the Juedo-Christian Old Testament came about sometime between around 532 and 322BC. The New Testament came about sometime after 100AD. And in fact I was watching another YouTube video of a Christian wing-nut trying to make the case for a trinitarian or tri-partite god. What most Christians don’t know is that little innovation didn’t come about until 325AD and the First Nicean Council.
We also know that pagan celebrations were co-opted in order to spread Christianity. Then of course there’s the fact that up until Gutenberg and his printing press in the 15th century all Bibles were copied by scribes. This introduces a coupe of possible problem areas.
The first is translation error. If you’re familiar with another language you know that certain terms don’t translate. So a certain amount of translation error when the texts went from what is likely Aramaic to Greek and then to English, let’s just say a lot probably got lost in translation.
Then there’s copy error – this came in when scribes would editorialize or correct the text for flow issues.
You see where I’m going right? It’s all just made up power structure. Every last bit of it.
It finally struck me, the reason I dislike reality television programming.
Reality programming caters to and celebrates mediocrity. It’s really that simple. I’ve in the past called it lowest common denominator programming but this is the refinement of that idea.
The celebration of mediocrity. We see it in our schools when just average students are given stars on their papers, or how parents think their kid is ‘special’. That’s mediocrity.
Esteem isn’t esteem when we celebrate it. It’s to be earned through learning and work.
My goodness, I’m starting to sound like a puritan!
Spewing Truth in the face of Lies 