Gary Coulbourne

Have any of you looked into Go at all? golang.org

Air travel with chronic pain sucks. And as I dug into a post about the suckage, I discovered that this is a *big* topic! When the outline reached 500 words, I realized that I needed to break this post into parts. 

Minimizing the Pain on the Plane, Part 1 of 4

A reader here mentioned that I have not addressed the issue of pain during air travel. Travels With Pain is only a few months old, so there are lots of topics that I haven't covered yet, and probably a whole bunch of topics I won't necessarily think of myself. If you've got a trip coming up and want advice, if you're looking at a method of travel I haven't talked about, if you want information about a destination...let me know! I want to create a useful and fun blog, and I can't do that without a community of active readers. You folks here--folks who travel and want to travel with chronic pain--are my core community. Any advice and suggestions you can give me for Travels With Pain will only make it better.

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Continued from November 7th at the Adams County Fairgrounds nature preserve:

We came upon this red-tail further up the trail, near my tree area.
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Mooned!
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Saturday, November 7th, the boys and I went to visit my tree at the Adams County Fairgrounds nature preserve. It was absurdly beautiful out, the golds, browns, and reds highlighted, and all a sunny 72 degrees.

At the initial fork in the path we saw a large bird in a tree across the river:
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Curious, Jay climbed the hill a little ways to glean a better view. 'twas a golden eagle, intently eying a bird on the ground!
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After the eagle took off, the bird on the ground made off in the opposite direction. It was a red-tailed hawk (it's blurry in the pic)!
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This is a mass email that needs to be circulated. Just getting folks to run in a space has been a tactic for years to keep us on the ballot - except in OK as we all know. 'Firecracker' Norm Westwell advocates just filing and collecting the mail for the first year. He is now a school board member in Orange County - acquired on his 2nd run - and well on his way to abolishing the school board given his last movements and several other board members not keeping their pants nor mouths zipped. ;-) (Firecracker is the nickname acquired as he initially ran to have the freedom of firecrackers back on the beach as when he was a kid growing up around OC.)

Note the final paragraph. Gee, Libertarians bitch to one another? NAH! They wouldn't do that! ;-0
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November 9, 2009

Dear Friend of Liberty,

I want you to run for office.

You may have already responded to my call to run for office and asked me how to go about it. Don't take it personally if I've failed to respond to any of your questions. I'm getting more and more emails, so the percentage of people I can respond to personally is going down. I need to give priority to questions from Libertarian National Committee members and Libertarian state chairs. Besides me, we just have three full-time staff members and three part-time staff, and they are doing their best to help.

Although we have a small staff, we're busy organizing and re-engineering our processes to maximize our effectiveness with the resources you contribute.

Here's a summary of how to run for office as a Libertarian:

1. Fill out this form. The form generates an email to your state party and puts you in our national candidate prospect database.
http://www.lp.org/run-for-office

2. Contact your state party and local organizations by email or phone. State and local parties are your first means of support. Some states are more organized than others. Our national office will monitor state progress, and we will try to help out later as much as we can where gaps exist.
http://www.lp.org/states
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I will try to keep this concise, though I am known for my ability to blah-blah-blah about anything. ;) This isn't specifically pain-related, but I think y'all can help me anyway. 

I have some sort of unidentified auto-immune disease like CFS or fibromyalgia; due to my other health issues it's pretty much impossible to determine which symptoms belong to which Issue, and I haven't pushed really hard for an "official" diagnosis. Having a word for it doesn't make it suck any less, so whatever. :) 

So...I've gotten myself in a really annoying position. My SO and I moved a few months ago. Prior to the move I hadn't worked in almost a year (just been going to school), because between my SO and student loans, there was enough money to support us (and my schooling). Since we moved money has been real tight as he has been trying to get established in a new city/state and my loans haven't come in yet and school is like 5x as expensive as an out-of-state resident, so I took a job. It's a part time job - about 30 hours a week - but I'm working six days a week on top of taking 9 credit hours at college.

( By some miracle, I've survived this situation for the last two months...  )

I'm trying to save out PNG files via ImageMagick/MagickWand. Here's my code.

• It saves out truecolor fine
• It saves out truecolor with transparency fine
• It saves out colormap/indexed as all-black images.
• same with colormap with transparency.

I want to do colormap/indexed images primarilly.

The MaickSetImageColormapColor() call returns False. I'm thinking that perhaps I'm not setting up the file type properly, but I don't know enough to know what i'm doing wrong.

Can any of you help?

My newspaper is notorious for spelling errors, having the bulk of its writing come from the AP, and not, in general, being that great a paper: except when it comes to editorials.

Read this and tell me if you think its libertarian or not.

Its from Upstate New York, right next door to the special election in NY-23 that recently played out. The variety of conservatism or Republicanism up there is not at all like the stuff you hear from Rush Limbaugh. Sure, they're Christian, and they're conservative--but the majority believe its not their place to judge gays, there are exceptions to being pro-life (well, at least my mom holds that view), and in general, the government should not be telling people who to marry or run their bedrooms. Its far more libertarian than conservative, although it definitely has a cultural conservative tint to it. Maybe "paleolibertarian" is the word. I was particularly enthused by this paper also bashing Republicans and Conservatives (which are a very large third party in New York State.)

Well, anyways, I thought you might get embolded by seeing at least one paper that was embracing libertarian rhetoric. At least some of the media has gotten the message.

This morning I went to the Mega-church 3 blocks away from my new abode. It was on my list of experiences of the 'Leaving America, must do' visiting contemporary events of these times particularly avoiding them having lived in Texas for several years.

http://www.centralchristian.com/onlinecampus/

I was completely DUMBFOUNDED by the mass media show to mass consumerism from bookstore, coffee shop, online donations, videos, Universities to "Neon Faith" (this is Vegas) movement - better than some of the shows i've seen on the strip complete w/ banal Christian rock band.


AND THESE GUYS PAY NO TAXES!!!!. L. Ron Hubbard, founder of Scientology and mass-sci-fi writer fame, had it right apparently from statements of forming one's own religion as the ultimate business model. What prosperity would each family in America be able to experience if we didn't have to pay any taxes like these folks? I've known of people who have followed the 'in-solo-corp' model never filing income tax or paying sales tax again as it's all for their 'church' etc. but they're usually way under anything close to $100K.... and then there was the internet site we all joined during the dotcom boom for small dollar shits' n' giggles, getting others to join - man, if i had 10 more i could have been a SAINT!



So, Discussion... I sincerely doubt given the lack of separation between church and state in this country that there will ever be a change in the tax code for these folks despite the fact that our founding fathers never foresaw the boom in christian businesses to mass-book sales, religions intertwined w/ parties and Religious PACS as major forces, nor would they have seen Churches as the 'ultimate business model' (well, there was the Catholic Church & church of England but that's a whole other discussion) but this just doesn't seem 'fair' whatsoever. I'm reminded of my Grandparents stopping through Jim & Tammy Faye Baker ala' Jesus-land complete w/ Jesus water slide while enroute through on vacation to see us sometime in the 80's before the big 'fallout.' And then all the beggars around ornate, ancient cathedrals worldwide... topics in themselves...



But bottom line question - why shouldn't we tax them at some small amount in the States as the REST OF US = individuals to legit 'for-profit' businesses - are being practically taxed to death?

What do you now about Ufa-city?




( Ufa this is... )

Can you help me, if are you like this video?

I've been studying Latin for a month now and don't want to derail myself by making little mistakes in comprehension. The following lines are from a practice exercise in a book I've been using to study. The answers in the back are questionable, and so I was wondering if anyone could share their translations of these three simple phrases.

1. Ante templa stabant.
2. Femina grata est.
3. Puellae natabunt.

Thank you!

I'm looking for a good commentary on Horace's Satires and/or Epistles. Any recommendations? (I can read English and German.)

“But instead of working toward the elimination of for-profit insurance, H.R. 3962 would put the government in the role of accelerating the privatization of health care. In H.R. 3962, the government is requiring at least 21 million Americans to buy private health insurance from the very industry that causes costs to be so high, which will result in at least $70 billion in new annual revenue, much of which is coming from taxpayers. This inevitably will lead to even more costs, more subsidies, and higher profits for insurance companies — a bailout under a blue cross.
Congressman Dennis Kucinich

Is he actually admitting that health care is currently not really a free market?

http://www.lewrockwell.com/grigg/grigg-w115.html

IMHO, the article doesn't go far enough discussing all the people who are harmed by basic arrest tactics, how much money is made by issuing tickets (though there are several settled legal cases learned about in law school) resulting in people who have to hire attorneys and how much it costs the state to imprison people who are then never-charged or get off when they've paid said attorney to remind the state they are innocent... but yet have the fingerprints forever on a DB.

and for those who don't know, the Las Vegas PD have killed two other folks in the inside of a week - death grip and another w/ taser. yes both had health problems but the entire situations are suddenly obfiscated. today's missive from Peter McFarlane at Q Bytes regales the UK police en-masse raiding secure lock boxes at various banks. "But we are not here to scare you. At Q Wealth we believe in presenting practical solutions for your freedom, wealth and privacy. What lessons can we learn from this fiasco?

In my view, the UK and the USA are probably the countries with the most out-of-control governments in the whole world. The expectation of privacy, and being considered innocent until proven guilty, seem to be things of the past in those countries. Others, in particular Australia, are playing catch up very fast. These are the kinds of places where raids like this could be expected again in the future."

Okay, so I have to parade my accomplishment around shamelessly, since I'm shamelessly promoting Libertarianism.

I live in Winston-Salem, NC, the fourth largest city in North Carolina and finally (a small accomplishment, but an accomplishment-don't dare rain on my parade damnit!) published one of my "Letters to the Editor".

I invite you to take a look. Mine is the third one down called the "New Motivation for Schools":

http://www2.journalnow.com/content/2009/nov/06/its-time/opinion-letters/


Read some of the responses as well! The thread gets kinda interesting.

The full text as published in the Journal is below:

New motivation for schools

I am writing to comment on the Nov. 1 New York Times article you reprinted, "States lower academic proficiency standards." New motivation is needed to get our public schools to teach our children properly and deserve the tax money we, the taxpayers, are forced to give.
The Libertarian Party has it right when stating that competition is a good way to motivate public schools (which would be competing with private and charter schools for money) to actually teach our children instead of dumbing them down and passing them along to graduation without the ability to read or write.
ZEKE COCHRAN

Kernersville


And if anyone out there in the journalsphere happen to be native to North Carolina and would like to see whats going on in the NCLP...you can subscribe to our blog:


style="border: 0px;"
alt="Click to join LPNC"/>

In any case, thanks for looking!

 

Zeke
 

Click to join LPNC

This must be a first. While squishy small-l libertarians have done well to rise in their places in the media, this may be the moment where the Libertarian has finally arrived. Beck is out and recovering in the hospital with an appendix rupture (I think), so Judge Andrew Napolitano subbed on FNC this afternoon. No, that's not the big deal. After all, this year started with Walter E Williams subbing for Limbaugh, so unambiguous Libertarians have hosted top-rated shows before.

What makes this segment special is that Napolitano was hosting, and his panel was John Stossel and Peter Schiff. Finally, all of my biases can be reinforced in one glorious mainstream echo-chamber! Normally, I have to watch a Reason TV video for this sort of validation. Question, are we ready for prime time? 
Exit question: Are they sellouts for being popular? Libertarianism isn't grunge or punk, but it seems that way often.

From the Queens Chronicle.

Not sure if anyone really cares, but I thought it was interesting that a candidate endorsed by the Libertarian Party won a seat in the largest city council in America (at least, I think NYC is the largest.) Under New York's electoral fusion system, Halloran was on the party lines for not only the Libertarian Party, but also the New York Conservative Party, the New York Independence Party, and of course, the Republican Party. I wonder how much "libertarianism" will influence him considering this broad electoral alliance.

What pisses me off is that Halloran's opponent, a Democrat, actively circulated fliers in the district telling people not to vote for this guy because he's a pagan. So much for Democrat values and whatnot. And in New York City, no less!

I'm also glad that a candidate endorsed by the United Federation of Teachers lost. Even though its a tiny victory, I always get a surge of happiness in my heart whenever that organization of putrified pond scum gets thwarted.

I found these videos a while back from a user whose pseudoscience debunking series I followed, and still follow. I thought these were pretty insightful and simply had to share! There's, like, eight of them, each one being about ten minutes long. Enjoy! If you have the time.




( Moar Here! )

Microsoft announced another 800 layoffs yesterday. I was not one of them, thankfully.

I found out about them as I was waking up in my hotel room yesterday morning, as whatever radio team was on at the time happened to be talking about it just as the alarm came on.

That certainly woke me up in a hurry!