4-30-16 Hodgepodge

Good News/Bad News for the GOP

Kimberly Strassel of the Wall Street Journal argues that GOP delegates are not actually "pledged" to vote for anyone at the upcoming convention in Cleveland. This would seem to be good news for anyone concerned about that party nominating Donald Trump for the presidency:

But aren't his delegates "pledged" to vote for him on the first ballot, regardless? A vocal -- and growing -- faction of delegates is saying they are not. A ringleader is Curly Haugland, an unbound delegate from North Dakota, and a longtime member of the GOP's rules committee. In an open letter in March, he argued that there was only one convention in history (1976) in which GOP delegates were "bound," and that this requirement was rescinded in 1980. He says delegates can vote their conscience.

And many of these Trump-pledged delegates despise the Donald.

The bad news is that we're talking about the Republican Party here. This party has failed for decades to stand up to the Democrats because it offers no positive case for freedom. No wonder a bully like Trump saw an opportunity and stormed in. He will (and has been) responding to the above possibility by claiming that the party's rules are "rigged" against him although the opposite case is more arguable. Will the party stand up to this by sticking to its guns or will it capitulate? I think the odds are higher of the latter, but would welcome the former as a sign that there is some hope for the GOP.

Weekend Reading

"Communism may be in the ash heap of history, but the ideas underlying Communism, such as hostility toward capitalism and the system of wealth creation, appear to have taken over both the political left and right." -- Michael Hurd, in "Koch's Shift Left Disappointing, Sad" at Newsmax

"Your job is to simply be yourself; the trusted friend or family member that you always were." -- Michael Hurd, in "How to (Not) Comfort the Grieving" at The Delaware Wave

"Requiring accountability is an effective way to get rid of the urge to control others." -- Michael Hurd, in "How to Get More Control Without Being Controlling" at The Delaware Coast Press

"When politicians tell doctors what they must (or must not) say to patients, they interfere with the physician's ability to give his best professional advice to patients." -- Paul Hsieh, in "Protect Physician Free Speech in the Office Visit" at Forbes

Death of the Mid-Range Computer?

Open source guru Eric Raymond has argued for some time for a convergence of computing platforms to something like a smartphone (that could be plugged in to a keyboard and large screen). He recently noted further movement in that direction:

We've now reached an interesting midway point on that road. The (stationary) computers I use are in the process of bifurcating into two classes: one quite large, one very small. I qualify that with "stationary" because laptops are an exception for reasons which, if not yet obvious, will be in a few paragraphs.

...

My other two stationary production machines are, as of yesterday, a fanless mini-ITX box about the size of a paperback book and a credit-card-sized Raspberry Pi 3. They arrived on my doorstep around the same time. The mini-ITX box was a planned replacement for the conventional tower PC I had been using as a mailserver/DNS/bastion host, because I hate moving parts and want to cut my power bills. The Pi was serendipitous, a surprise gift from Dave Taht who's trying to nudge me into improving my hardware hacking.

It is interesting that my new main computer, a desktop with plenty of room for more RAM and more hard drives, might actually be my last desktop.

-- CAV