MrMcCall

Eisenhower defeated Rommel, my friend, with Patton's brilliant help, dragging a limping Monty along by the hair. He was nearly sacked for insubordination.

The Germans only feared one Allied General, and it wasn't Monty (it was Patton).

If fact, Patton being relieved of command for slapping his soldier allowed him to serve as the uber-decoy in Great Britain to distract the Germans from being ready for a Normandy landing. God works in mysterious ways, indeed.

The Germans thought Patton's sacking for slapping a soldier was a ruse; that's how much esteem they had for him.

"They" defeated Rommel. No one can say whether he would have done so without Bletchley. Personally, I doubt he would have done so without the Med fleet utterly destroying all of Rommel's resupply train, but that's just my opinion.

That makes sense when one is used to the Visual Studio organization of solutions and projects, with some main method somewhere being the entry point, unless it's a WCF service or somesuch that gets run via a service manager.

I only used F# at its command line, fsi.exe, to give me commandline access to .NET for exploration, testing, and munging data. Over time, I built up quite a library of usable functions that I'd have the fsi.exe program pre-load when I kicked it off, leaving me at the prompt with all .NET namespaces and my code ready and accessible.

Once you get access to your database's data, it's easy to write queries against it and then play with the data. I could then port the F# processing bits that worked into my C# projects as necessary, but it was far easier to do it that way than to write the logic deep within complex multi-project solution files, where the various classes are spread throughout the projects' files.

I also just really enjoyed using F#.

I really like the four-part documentary series called "Staion X" which was all about Bletchly Park. It has numerous interviews with the folks that worked there -- they were a bunch of excellent oddballs, for sure.

It's a really fascinating perspective on WWII and how crap Monty was at being a general; he was reading the Germans' messages and still couldn't defeat Rommel. Only when the Med fleet intercepted and sank all his resupply ships did Rommel's crew finally lose.

The Germans' overconfidence in the Enigma machine was a big part of their downfall, especially once America's resources came to bear. Of course, that's what they deserved for having a leader speedballing meth and morphine.

All that said, the interesting historical twist is that no WWII history before the 1970s is accurate because all the Bletchly work was completely classified until one of their officers wrote a book about it. They cover that in the documentaries, too. There were men and women who had never told their families about what they did during the war, until the news finally broke. One mentioned how her daughter wondered why her mom knew that 'M' was the 13th letter.

> controlled by the F# Software Foundation, the .NET Foundation, and Microsoft.

It is controlled by Microsoft. It's not going on my Linux or BSD boxes.

I know how they work, and I want nothing to do with them.

I don't know what C# has for an interactive prompt nowadays, but F#'s commandline environment, via its fsi.exe, was a revelation back then. It prevented having to have entire solutions to contain test projects to explore different areas of the vast .NET framework, especially when just learning how to use specific methods or objects.

I don't doubt it, but I don't run Microsoft software any more. I've seen enough embrace, extend, and extinguish in my lifetime to not depend on them for my code's execution environment.

My current work needs nothing the .NET environment provides that I can't use python's standard libraries to get done, or bash and C if I need to.

But I'm lucky to no longer be in a corporate environment, so I don't need to consume commercial services, which was much easier using WCF within .NET. Back in my previous life, constructing n-tiered services on top of SqlServer using WCF was slick, indeed.

To any who are interested in how to construct such n-tiered applications simply but securely and precisely, I highly suggest Juval Lowy's IDesign system. He had three specific videos that I watched three or four times each until I understood his distillation of his vast expertise. Of course, Mr. Lowy is one of the co-designers of WCF, which was an excellent bit of tech.

For me, I already had all the featues I needed.

Plus, I'm not going to be downloading, configuring, or running any separate code at runtime. The project is the project, it's going to process some files, communicate with some services, and communicate with the UI, if any.

If I need to consume a service, it should be defined such that I manifest the interface module (perhaps via WCF) and then connect to it progressively from stub to ever greater functionality in test to final implementation. Trying to write a program to do all that at runtime is not sensible, IMO.

Metaprogramming via reflection, however, was useful for exploring the vast .NET framework, and I used those to great effect, especially in exploring .NET's various UI frameworks (WinForms and Silverlight), but never to create code at runtime via the emit functionality. No, that's my job: to emit code that is tested and works and is comprehensible.

Curried functions combined with that magnificent pipe operator, overlaid on the .NET runtime. Don Syme et al knocked it out of the park.

It's the one programming language that changed how I think about programming.

I'm only talking about the version before type providers. Then it got messy.

Before that, we could (and I did) recompile fsi.exe to do some custom prompt manipulation. It was a slog, but it worked, but then Microsoft faded from my life. Still, that early version (I believe 2.0) F# is just magnificent.

Scaled Ms. Holmes up to around 11 years, IIRC.

For their socio-economic status? Surely.

[ETA: Oops, the article is for "Scientific Ballooning". My bad. It's still a great balloon story.]

I can't believe they don't have Joseph Kittinger[1], who piloted the balloon that allowed him to parachute from the edge of space at 102kft, the first man to fully witness the curvature of the Earth, becoming the first man to fully witness the curvature of the Earth. That record stood until just a few years ago when Red Bull sponsored some guy to break it.

The original film is excellent. If you get the right documentary you can see him smoking a cigarette and giving his buddies double birds after he lands.

He should've aborted the jump because he had a hole in the arm of his flight suit, but he did what military aviators do, didn't tell anyone, and jumped anyway. He said while falling in space the couldn't tell how fast he was going because there was no friction yet. Only when he looked up did he realize that he was plummeting at very, very high speed.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Kittinger

One step closer to 'Sam Sheepdog vs Ralph Wolf'.

Our teacher explained to us that the most selfish thing one can do is serve the happiness of others, due to the universe's feedback loop that feeds the happiness we've sown in our treatment of others back into what we reap within our inner world.

This is the most fundamental law of the human universe, and we all live under its iron fist as its gears grind our life's chosen actions' butterfly wingbeats back into us in perfect harmony with the frequency we emanated out into others, consonant or dissonant, loving or selfish, kind or cruel, generous or callous.

In addition, there are amplifiers and attenuators for both the positive and negative, especially at the narrow ends of our potentials' bell curve, so we best be careful how we wield our free will and the energy we possess to affect the world.

Ignoring this law does not change a person's situation, just their foundation for how they construct their custom decision-tree methodology of preference and habit, thus establishing their inertias and ability to self-reflect. This is because we are free to ignore the truth, just as we are fully free to be the biggest narcissistic asshole we can be given our station in life.

To boot, we're all doing this within multiple layers of our cultures' inertias that contribute to our perspective, once again, as per our choices.

Within it all, at the very center, is the most precious and perilous gift in the universe: our free will, mind, and body co-existing tripartite on this beautiful planet Earth.

Of course. Very, very few people are fully cognizant of all their existing weaknesses; those are successively revealed as we make progress on the path of love. The spiritual path is not, to my knowledge, ever fully traversed in one fell swoop of Divine Grace; in fact, it is the protracted struggle that inculcates humility, kindness, mercy, and patience in the student, of which I am but a humble struggler, too. As such, in regards to their and my own desperate need for mercy, I must selfishly insist on being merciful to others, to sow for others that which I need to reap for my own spiritual advancement. It's a benign kind of selfishness that helps foster better and better treatment of others.

So, at least for me, it's a long slog through the morass of my life full of idiotic bad habits of attitude and behavior. No, these vices must be dilligently picked off one by one, whack-a-mole style, using our mind and practices. As we progress, we must develop our humility towards those a bit further back on the progression or even stalled before the starting block, remembering that we all started out from zero when we first decided to take the path of love.

Our struggles with our ego result in either developing a demeaning, self-righteous persecution of others via false pride (thus nipping our nascent spiritual progression in the bud, if not our ill-gotten confidence), or developing a humble gratitude to the universe and its Creator for helping us overcome that vicious beast and our weakness in confronting and defeating its many dimensions of vice, one after the seemingly endless series of others.

We must either humbly submit to kindness, gratitude, and patience or suffer defeat at the hands of an ego gone mad with ignorant power.

The greatest medicine and sustenance for surmounting such formidable obstacles in the ego is compassionate service to mankind, asking nothing in return, and consulting often with the Source for help, appreciation, and inspiration.

To those who haven't begun the journey yet, we must only offer our compassionate, kind help in the best way possible, with gentle touches of wisdom. That is the best way to testify to God's love we are to carry to one and all in our every intention, thought, emotion, word, and deed, purifying them incrementally over time. These are called by some "the fruits of the spirit", and are mentioned in this NT quote:

"You will know them by their fruits."

People can say whatever they want, but the truth of everyone's life shows more and more clearly upon our face as our years of living accumulate, and also in our tone of voice and content of our utterances, but most importantly in our desires and treatment of society's least valued members.

That why Rumi said, "You have no idea how little we care about what people say."

That's why being brutally truthful with yourself is essential in learning how to love others so as to actually become a good person.

The worst lies we tell are most often the ones we tell ourselves.

It's just like the low-achieving over-confident folks of Dunning-Kruger: they don't really care about the truth, they're satisfied just believing they're an expert. The real experts take a far different tac, one of humility and intense, honest work.

"Nothing is more important than compassion and only the truth is its equal."

> Be here. Be present.

Most especially be aware of others' happiness or misery, along with our own heart's intentions and actions and how they affect both others and ourselves. Our sense of inner peace is dependent on how our karma radiates back into our heart from how we have affected others. This is the most sublime rule of the universe: you reap what you sow, for good or ill.

Cultivate universal compassion and then shine its beneficient light on as many people as you can with real effortful service.

That is the purest heading for our moral compass, and it's always our choice both what we choose to do and how to course correct our ideals, attitudes, and behaviors.

We ALL need to self-reflect and -evolve for the majority of our life, slogging through mistake after failure after falling short of the mark, learning humility and perseverance and mercy for others who need even more grace than we do.

"Love is the astrolabe of God's mysteries." --Rumi

I'm not a frayed knot.

The happiness feedback from making others happier -- even if just less miserable -- is the most excellent feeling known to man. Once a person tastes it, nothing else will ever compare.

Lovingly serving others' happiness is a part of the asymmetric dynamics of the human universe, only accessible and operant in the world of free will and the ability to learn and manifest right from wrong, love from callous disregard or even cruelty, creation or destruction.

Peace be with you, though I hardly need say that to someone who already understands peace beyond what most can comprehend. Thanks for having your boots on the ground.

He only directed it. He didn't write it. That's the difference.

My intuition says that that is truly a film that portrays mankind's potential for humanity, not the depravity of BV.

Ironically, from IMDB's storyline for TEM, it says,

> Brutish Bytes, his "owner", only wants whatever he can get economically by presenting Merrick as a freak.

which is precisely what DL did in BV, but for drug-induced violent rape.

Side note: I loved Freddie Jones in Jeremy Brett's Sherlock Holmes' "Wisteria Lodge", though, ironically, that is the one episode with rape. Of course, it was in no way gratuitous, as it was TV, but obvious nonetheless. As well, she had deliberately risked herself on purpose in order to catch her husband's murderer.

It is truly amazing the depth and breadth of human evil encompassed by that Sherlock Holmes' TV series. I'd dare say they've got it all, by their mostly accurately following 130ish year old books. Doyle really understood human nature. I heartily recommend all 41 episodes, if only for Jeremy Brett's Holmes, but, really, it is outstanding in every aspect.

It's not obscene, IMO, it's DEPRAVED. It is disgusting, it is unnecessary, and it was made to make money.

That it was written, directed, and produced by a huge industry and then made available to be watched in a movie theater is all one needs to know about the machine that is Hollywood, the same machine that produced (no pun intended) Harvey Weinstein.

That is no coincidence, my friend.

> Or, that way the audience might wonder about the darker parts of 20th century Americana around them, much like Lynch did as a child.

I can't stand anything about 1950s America, but 2020s America makes it pale in comparison, and Lynch's America was on that horrible descent from "does good for the world" to "embraces totalitarians for profit".

How we make our money is a bellweather of the soul, as is the art we produce and/or appreciate. The question is, "Does it elevate humanity? Or not?"

Learning about evil is necessary on the path to wisdom, but profiting off titillating the impressionable is foolish and detrimental to society.

There are many ways to tell the story of Jeffry Dahlmer, and the choices a writer and director makes in that regard show those folks' character, or lack thereof.

> I suppose you also hate Dante's Inferno for similar reasons?

I don't hate anything or anyone, because hate and rage are solely negative, but, I didn't bother reading that middle ages tripe any more than I read "Wuthering Heights".

That said, reading it is just one dimension, seeing and hearing it on a giant screen being portrayed by attractive people is three or four dimensions.

> David Lynch is more ethical than you, I think, because he did not run away from the depraved but wanted to understand it

I've seen "The World at War". The "Genocide" episode is the last time I wept, seeing a dumptruck full of bodies get dumped into a trench.

I understand it better than you, my friend, because I also know how to get to "Blessed are the pure of heart, for they shall see God." I'm certainly not there yet, but I've made some bit of progress, after much trial and error.

David Lynch and TM are literally the antithesis of that attainment. He wrote and directed BV and profited off it. I think Marc Maron once described a "comic" that took a shit on stage; that ain't art, that's just disgusting.

"What a fool believes." --Michael McDonald

> he made great things.

Read https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0090756/parentalguide

Anyone who calls that great enjoys the perversion of mankind, and it is nothing less than that.

It's a sickness, and lots of people have it, and they're so sick they think they're just perfectly fine.

But everyone's choices are theirs to make, for good or ill, and we are all running up a tab, and we all must pay our bill. Some lucky few of us have a positive balance, because we embrace compassion with the art of our lives.

There are people whose going is the only time they're going to make the world a better place, for their simply no longer being a persistent negative influence.

They don't wanna know, so they have nothing to tell.

Well said and insightful, thanks.

And the name-comment synergy slaps, as the youngins sometimes say :-)

Do you also judge crack cocaine's value by its number of users?

I don't think most people are capable of doing a cost/benefit ratio calculation on how what they do affects the rest of the world, and the wealthy are far and away the worst abusers of this sadass truth.

"Why is poor taste ubiquitous?" --Eric Spieakermann in "Helvetica"

Because we live in a world who live to be titilated with the inane, lewd, and lascivious.

Like a brain-damanged Bower Bird's trashy monument to itself, he created monuments to the vapid and wasteful.

"Buh-bye." --David Spade's flight attendent character on SNL

> But does the process of institutionalizing those teachings not go against those exact teachings themselves?

Not so long as we keep our moral compass as we are taught, in that we are to love God with all our being and then love our neighbors as ourself. That Great(est) Command(ment) could and should be carried by all the members (or at least a majority) of any group to guide their ideals, attitudes, and behaviors, if they are trying or claiming to act on behalf of God's Will. It's just that so very few human beings are willing to put aside their personal selfish desires to "be the servant of all".

> At least for Christianity?

That Great(est) Command(ment) is for all human beings since Adam, which includes Islam whose adherents should be using it as their guiding principle as well, because the Quran says that the Gospels were sent by the same Authority that sent it. That command is the real "Sharia Law" that we all live under, however religious we are or not: that we will reap what we sow, so we better use our free will to sow loving service to others' happiness with our life's energy.

The pack mentality of our baseline mammalian body and brain exists in all human groups, religious or not. Jesus was specifically referring to out-groups of any and every kind when he said, "That which you do to the least of my brothers and sisters, that you have done unto me." That, of course, encompasses other ethnicities, forms of religion (including atheists), sexual preference, and gender identity. We must love them, but also not let innocents be harmed. It's a tightrope, for sure.

Put another way, the most important way we should share the Word is in how we manifest our ideals, attitudes, and behaviors in alignment with God's teachings of love. Without such a true commitment to living the truth, our speaking the words of a holy book mean little. That's why Rumi says, "You have no idea how little we care about what a person says."

It's also why the Quran says that "You will know those who believe in the entire Quran because they return bad treatment with love." One can pick any verse from any book to justify any kind of ill treatment. If one is truly guided by God's Love, we will apply stern rebuke and/or kind mercy at the proper moment for the proper reason and will create a cascade of positive societal effect, without any measure whatsoever of either selfishness, pride, oppression, hatred, or cruelty. The glory does not come from us nor go to us; it goes to the Father.

> the idea that Jesus was exactly the type of individual that the church would have been willing to purge during that time

Surely, though I'd guess "willing and determined" would be more accurate.

Nothing is more powerful on Earth than a religious organization, no matter how crooked and misguided, so long as they can convince their members that their dominance of others is based upon an inherent superiority, as the CC have long since cultivated, irrespective of Jesus' beneficient teachings of love and selfless, patient service to all humanity. (It is also evident here in America, though they be cruel hypocrites, the entire lot of them.)

This is because the primary purpose of ALL power structures is to maintain their power. Acting on behalf of God's Love, we must give all the glory back to Its grace in humble gratitude and act merely as footsoldiers, not as ruling kings. No, we are to lift others up, not further downpress them.

And Jesus is crystal clear about those who harm children.

Peace be with you, my friend.

Maybe he's referring to the suffering required to actually put the song together, from inspiration to pieces of structure to full structure to final polish.

Perhaps. I'm with you in your assessment, however.

These jazz folks didn't look they were suffering in doing this, but that doesn't mean their lives didn't have suffering before they gained acclaim and such incredible chops, or maybe they draw inspiration from the many people and cultures that have suffered:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3pYHCGYJbw0

I'm also reminded of Stevie Ray Vaughan's dedication before he performed "Riviera Paradise" on Austin City Limits: "This one goes out to everyone who's still suffering in any way."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3c_8VUL5jks

The beauty that was born from his suffering is certainly extraordinary, IMO, as is his song "Tick Tock", that he did with his brother Jimmy, in a message that should inspire us all on this day and going forward.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8uUTW9zPbM