Government Can Not Grant Freedom

from Adrian Murry’s facebook post

One thing I have learned over the last five years of politically righteous indignation is that if we protest from a position of victimhood we too easily enable ourselves to be victims. My outrage since The Great Mistake of 2008 has been the government’s increasing ability to victimize its people, to turn citizens into subject and subjects into serfs. It dawned on me all too slowly that there is little point and no avail protesting to the government about this on the grounds of the virtues of liberty, just as there is little to be gain from petitioning the rapist for passion and decency. Both will merely turn a deaf ear.

… With some inspiring exceptions, politicians have primarily excelled at being self-serving hucksters, going back to the Roman Senate. Indeed, who could not envision the backroom dealing, ruthless ambition and deliberate betrayals of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar playing out in today’s United States Congress?

Such was true in America a century and a half ago, when the open and honest corruption and bribery of the day paled in comparison to the sophistry of the sleaze creatively not on display in government today. One need only consider that when you have Wall Street bankers regulating the banking industry, executives from agribusiness running the Food and Drug Administration, union flacks heading the Department of Education, military contractors in charge of the Pentagon and, of all people, insurance and pharmaceutical companies controlling our healthcare system, you can pretty much take it as a given that the country has been lost. Stick a fork in it. The United States of America is done.

But that does not mean we need to give in. We just need to understand that the dark side is playing a different game than we are. They’ve moved on to a higher form of chess while we’re all arguing about the proper rules for Go Fish. They are not listening to what you’re saying because they don’t care what you want, except to the extent that you might possibly though not probably impede their ability at being reelected to the House of Calliopes and Cascading Cash. The best way to ensure that is to divide you up into so many interests and factions and spheres that you will never be able to mount an effective opposition. We’re all too busy fighting among ourselves to fight them.

To live lives of free and independent people, beholden and bound only to our God, we must first free ourselves from the notion that we must be dependent on government to grant us our freedom. Government has no such power and, if it did, is unlikely to exercise it. By believing we must petition government for freedom, we are conceding that we are either prisoners or slaves.

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blinksticks showing opposite colors

A few hours of tinkering with the new blinksticks, here is what I came up with:

The light on the right is set to a random color every 1/2 second.  The stick on the left morphs to the opposite color.  Pretty cheesy, but I’m learning to program in python!

code available at:

http://briangallimore.com/websvn/wsvn/blinkstick/opposite.py

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Blinkstick – a single pixel controlled by USB

I ordered 2 blinkstick kits a while back — they came in today!  I dug out the soldering iron and assembled them.  Within a few minutes I had the blinkstick python libraries installed on my computer.  Now I’m wondering what gEEky task I’m going to make these LEDs do.

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Subversion (svn) on shared web host (bluehost) and Linux client setup

This explains how to configure and use a Subversion client from a GNU/Linux box*  to connect to a Subversion server on a shared web host account.  (bluehost.com)  If you have already set up a shared key for password-less ssh access (see use ssh without a password post), then step 3 can be omitted, but step 3 is useful in case you want to give other people access to a repository on the web host server without giving them full ssh access.

* = I’m guessing any flavor of *nix will work– I use LinuxMint, which is based on Ubuntu

Steps 1 to 3 are performed from the web server (a ssh session to the server)

Step 1 Check to make sure Subversion is installed, or install it.

[~]# svn --version
svn, version 1.7.4 (r1295709)
 compiled Apr 5 2012, 16:46:24

Continue reading

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use ssh without a password

Use a public/private key pair to avoid having to type in your password every time you open up a ssh session:

1- Generate a keypair, install the public key on the server and ‘authorize’ it.

2- Copy the private key(s) to the ‘~/.ssh’ directory on your local machine.

3- Set the permission of your private key files to no access for group and world.  (600)

brian@Mint13desktop ~/.ssh $ ls -l
-rw------- 1 brian brian 1743 Dec 19 20:40 id_dsa
-rw------- 1 brian brian 1768 Dec 19 21:28 known_hosts
-rw------- 1 brian brian 1424 Jun 1 2013 known_hosts.old

4- Edit ‘/etc/ssh/ssh_config’ with a line starting with ‘IdentityFile’ for each of your private keys

 IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_dsa

5- connect without having to type a password!

brian@Mint13desktop ~ $ ssh username@briangallimore.com
Last login: Thu Dec 19 20:28:15 2013 from ****.net
username@briangallimore.com [~]#

(local computer is LinuxMint 13, remote is Linux web host)

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Use Logix GSV WallClockTime for Pulse Bit

If you are using the AB ControlLogix platform and want a bit to cycle on and off at a consistent rate, you can address one of the bits of the register that represents the clock microseconds.  (GSV WallClockTime)  The register containing the microseconds is the 7th element in the array:

Screenshot from 2013-12-16 16:16:07

The scan time of the PLC will dictate how fast the register will update.  I was running under 1ms and the periods longer than 8ms were measurable.

Screenshot from 2013-12-16 16:15:55

Reference the bit with the desired period you want to trigger off of:

Screenshot from 2013-12-16 15:54:21

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Gallimore Family Pictures – December 2013

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Thankful for Liberty

The story below tells an alternate history of the first thanksgiving, one I believe is more meaningful and unfortunately not likely to be passed along in an era when the politically correct narrative rules.  The words below are from Michael Quinn Sullivan‘s recent newsletter.

QUOTING…  “Freedom is a fragile thing and is never more than one generation away from extinction. It is not ours by inheritance; it must be fought for and defended constantly by each generation, for it comes only once to a people.” — Ronald Reagan

As we gather with family and friends this week to celebrate Thanksgiving, it’s a good time to reflect on what our ancestors were truly thankful for, on that very first thanksgiving.

Interestingly, the real story of Thanksgiving isn’t found in the syrupy-sweet stories of our youth. Instead, it’s that our earliest settlers decided to reject socialism’s central planning and embrace liberty. It’s a decision we must similarly make every day.

Continue reading

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Canada’s Top Ten List of America’s Stupidity

10) Only in America … could Democrat politicians talk about the greed of
the rich at a $35,000.00 a plate campaign fund-raising event.
9) Only in America … could people claim that the government still
discriminates against black Americans when they have a black President, a
black Attorney General and roughly 20% of the federal workforce is black
while only 14% of the population is black. 40% of all federal entitlements
go to black Americans – 3X the rate that go to whites, 5X the rate that go
to Hispanics!
8) Only in America … could they have had the two people most responsible
for our tax code, Democrat Timothy Geithner (the head of the Treasury
Department) and Democrat Charles Rangel (who once ran the Ways and Means
Committee), BOTH turn out to be tax cheats who are in favor of higher taxes.
7) Only in America … can they have terrorists kill people in the name of
Allah and have the media primarily react by fretting that Muslims might be
harmed by the backlash. Continue reading

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Pics and Memes – October 3, 2013

This gallery contains 15 photos.

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