Mon Aug 13 09:14:21 EDT 2018

Slept from eleven-thirty to seven. Woke briefly around four.

High of eighty-five and mostly sunny today.

Work:
- Check if FADV integration is fixed
  Done. It's fixed.
- Check if AT&T email block was lifted for our new IP
  Done. It's fixed.
- Add partitions on Nostromo (ticket 5691)
  Done.

Thirty-minute walk at lunch.
Hot.
Heard cicadas, saw a little white butterfly.

Home:
- Read
  Done.
- Work on Zerapis
  A bit.

I'm enjoying Snow Crash.
Interesting to consider that Stephenson wrote it more than a quarter-century ago.

http://thephilosophicalsalon.com/the-cia-reads-french-theory-on-the-intellectual-labor-of-dismantling-the-cultural-left/
> While other tentacles of the worldwide spy organization were involved in overthrowing democratically elected leaders, providing intelligence and funding to fascist dictators, and supporting right-wing death squads, the Parisian central intelligentsia squadron was collecting data on how the theoretical world’s drift to the right directly benefitted US foreign policy. The left-leaning intellectuals of the immediate postwar era had been openly critical of US imperialism.
> Given the leftwing leanings of these anti-Marxists in their youth, they provide the perfect model for constructing deceptive narratives that amalgamate purported personal political growth with the progressive march of time, as if both individual life and history were simply a matter of “growing up” and recognizing that profound egalitarian social transformation is a thing of the—personal and historical—past. This patronizing, omniscient defeatism not only serves to discredit new movements, particularly those driven by the youth, but it also mischaracterizes the relative successes of counter-revolutionary repression as the natural progress of history.
> This is extremely important for understanding the CIA’s overall strategy in its broad and profound attempts to dismantle the cultural left in Europe and elsewhere. In recognizing it was unlikely that it could abolish it entirely, the world’s most powerful spy organization has sought to move leftist culture away from resolute anti-capitalist and transformative politics toward center-left reformist positions that are less overtly critical of US foreign and domestic policies. In fact, as Saunders has demonstrated in detail, the Agency went behind the back of the McCarthy-driven Congress in the postwar era in order to directly support and promote leftist projects that steered cultural producers and consumers away from the resolutely egalitarian left. In severing and discrediting the latter, it also aspired to fragment the left in general, leaving what remained of the center left with only minimal power and public support (as well as being potentially discredited due to its complicity with right-wing power politics, an issue that continues to plague contemporary institutionalized parties on the left).
> Second, the power brokers of the present have a vested interest in cultivating an intelligentsia whose critical acumen has been dulled or destroyed by fostering institutions founded on business and techno-science interests, equating left-wing politics with anti-scientificity, correlating science with a purported—but false—political neutrality, promoting media that saturate the airwaves with conformist prattle, sequestering strong leftists outside of major academic institutions and the media spotlight, and discrediting any call for radical egalitarian and ecological transformation. Ideally, they seek to nurture an intellectual culture that, if on the left, is neutralized, immobilized, listless and content with defeatist hand wringing, or with the passive criticism of the radically mobilized left.

https://vorpalmace.blogspot.com/2018/08/review-dragons-secret.html
> The Dragon's Secret is […] one of the biggest surprises of the year, for it is the first module released by industry veteran Jennel Jaquays in three decades.

https://www.reddit.com/r/golang/comments/96yd0t/gosqlitelite_a_new_light_weight_sqlite_package/e44grq7/
> […] connection pooling is inappropriate for an embedded database like SQLite and I would recommend that you open a new connection for each request. Connections are light weight and do little more than open a file handle. You wouldn't pool file handles for an HTTP server, right? This ensures that each request is separate and they don't affect each other other than the normal rules of SQLite database/table locking.

Lunch: coffee, chicken wrap
Dinner: sausage sub, ice cream