Don't listen to the crowd, they say "jump."
Till just commented that all my blog posts are showing on Planet PHP, not just the PHP ones. My apologies to everyone; I thought the Planet was using only my PHP feed. I have emailed the administrators with the correct URI for the PHP-only feed. Again, very sorry to have spammed everyone with non-PHP content.
This critique started when some women systematically looked up at the top of society and saw men everywhere: most world rulers, presidents, prime ministers, most members of Congress and parliaments, most CEOs of major corporations, and so forth -- these are mostly men. Seeing all this, the feminists thought, wow, men dominate everything, so society is set up to favor men. It must be great to be a man. The mistake in that way of thinking is to look only at the top. If one were to look downward to the bottom of society instead, one finds mostly men there too.
via USA Sentinel - The Apex Fallacy: An Interview with Dr. Helen Smith by Bernard Chapin , 10/23/08.
I think that there is probably a special place in hell reserved for politicians who betray our nation's most helpless children for the benefit of a sullen and recalcitrant teacher's union. There they spend all eternity explaining to their victims why they couldn't possibly have risked their precious babies' future in the public school system, yet felt perfectly free to fling other peoples' children into it by the thousands.
via Megan McArdle.
I am not a Constitutional Law scholar, but this looks pretty good to me, and very much within the spirit of the Tea Parties:
http://federalismamendment.com/
You can grab the amendment document here:
http://federalismamendment.com/The_Bill_of_Federalism.pdf
These look to be the kind of smaller-government Federal modifications, and ways to more-properly restrict the overreaching Federal government. A short run-down:
From PowerLine:
On April 21, the Special Inspector General for the Troubled Asset Relief Program Act of 2009--"SIGTARP"--submitted his quarterly report to Congress on his office's activities in relation to the TARP program. The report is a disquieting document that should be read by every American--certainly be every taxpayer.
The Inspector General's report documents the stunning and at least partly illegal expansion of TARP from the $700 billion originally allocated by Congress to what is now a $3 trillion complex of programs. This chart shows the various programs that are now included within SIGTARP's oversight, and how they have expanded from the initial $700 billion. Note that some of the programs are still incipient; $3 trillion is by no means a final number.
...
What conclusions can we draw? 1) The government's $3 trillion and counting TARP program represents the greatest opportunity for sharp operators to profit at taxpayer expense in history. 2) The Obama administration is either in favor of giving Wall Street sharks this opportunity or, at a minimum, doesn't much mind doing so. (If this seems odd, remember where Obama got the biggest chunk of campaign contributions in 2008.) 3) It may be that the TARP complex of programs is the beginning of a national-socialist type takeover of the financial services industry by the federal government. Thus, 4) we can only hope that this turns out not to be the case, and TARP is only the biggest--and perhaps, by the end of the day, the crookedest--waste of taxpayer money in history. Finally, 5) so far the only person or organization who appears to be looking out for the taxpayers is the Special Inspector General. We will be reading his future reports with great interest.
From http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2009/04/david-walker-why-.html:
Unless we begin to get our fiscal house in order, there's simply no other way to handle our ever-mounting debt burdens except by doubling taxes over time. Otherwise, our growing commitments for Medicare and Social Security benefits will gradually squeeze out spending on other vital programs such as education, research and development, and infrastructure.
Another great line: "...additional accumulations of debt are, absent dramatic reductions in the size and role of government, basically deferred tax increases."
My buddy Benito has a nice writeup of his Manhattan Project, in which I have been a subject. The things we do for science. ;-)
I was part of the organizing committee for yesterday's Tax Day Tea Party here in Memphis. That sounds kind of formal; it was just a bunch of folks who found each other on the internet and (with some amount of arguing, mostly from me ;-) got an event put together. Talk about an emergent phenomenon.
I can only call it a resounding success. We had at least 4000 (yes, four thousand or more) people in attendance, according to the professional sound crews in attendance and media folk who were on site. You'd be hard pressed to discover that from newspapers or television reporting today.
We're not the only ones who had high attendance; see more here http://pajamasmedia.com/instapundit/76810/ and elsewhere.
My duties kept me from actually watching any of the speakers. I helped direct traffic for 3 hours to get people safely in and out, with three other guys handling the arrangement of parking everyone on the grass (the lot overflowed immediately). That 4000 number seems pretty likely to me, given the traffic.
If you are interested in the Memphis Tea Party, take a look at thememphisteaparty.com website, or our Facebook group page, or contact me directly if you like.
I expect at some point I will write more about this. There's more to it than I'm hearing about on the news, for sure. One wonders how far it can go.
UPDATE: Oh, and the Facebook page for the Tax Day event itself is here.
UPDATE 2: Some of the Facebook albums:
Given yesterday's news that Honda can now connect thoughts to robotic actuators, we have been given permission to talk about the Solar PHP implementation of that interface: Solar_Mind_Read.
<?php
class Solar_Mind_Read extends Solar_Base {
protected $_Solar_Mind_Read = array(
'mind' => null,
);
protected $_mind;
public function __construct($config = null)
{
parent::__construct($config);
$this->_mind = Solar::dependency(
'Honda_Thought_Interface',
$this->_config['mind']
);
}
public function fetchIntent($search)
{
return $this->_mind->recall($search);
}
public function doWhatIMean($subject, $callback)
{
$intent = $this->fetchIntent($subject);
return call_user_func($callback, $intent);
}
public function fetchPhpCode($task)
{
throw $this->_exception('ERR_NOT_IMPLEMENTED', array(
'task' => $task,
));
}
}
?>As you can see, we leverage Solar's base class and inherited configuration, along with its existing dependency injection functionality, to receive an existing Honda "thought" object at construction time. We can then see what the user's intent is given a particular subject using the fetchIntent() method.
Even better, we can pass a callback to the doWhatIMean() method. This means that the user will always get what he wants, not merely what he asks for.
Finally, as a developer tool, the fetchPhpCode() method will take a task description and generate PHP code for it. We are waiting on a related patch to the PHP RunKit extension for this to be fully implemented. In the mean time, the automatic exception system finds the right exception class and throws it, with localized translation, and information about the task.
Once Solar_Mind_Read is complete, we believe we will be able to move on to Solar_Mind_Write. Together, these tools should help the developer with convincing his clients that what they really need is something that's easier to implement, and then with actually implementing it.
Thanks for your attention; we hope this April Fool's Day article piques your interest in the power of the Solar Framework for PHP 5. Many thanks to Clay Loveless for the subject idea. :-)
Those of us who are developing Solar (or using it on our day jobs) are usually too busy adding value for our users to blog about the project on a regular basis. However, in the breaks available, we occasionally see these rays of light:
Thanks for taking the time, guys!