Black Lives Matter

All lives matter, but we cannot honestly say that until our behavior demonstrates that Black lives matter.

But it is!

Supreme Court Justice Samuel A. Alito, Jr. is worried that those with “traditional religious views” would be “‘labeled as bigots and treated as such’ by the government.”

Damn straight! Those traditional views are bigotry!

What’s next? Worrying that the traditional views held by Southern whites about African Americans will also be labeled bigotry?

JX Layout Editor

jxlayout is dead! Long live jx_layout_editor!

The orange lines indicate which edges are fixed. The tab order is indicated by the small numbers. Everything else can be seen with a glance by hovering to get a hint window.

No, you’re not dreaming. You can now nest widgets inside container widgets. The JXScrollbarSet contains row header, column header, and table widgets, and you can see from the orange lines that they will expand/shrink correctly when the window size is changed. No more sub-layouts!

The Israeli-Palestinian Mess

There is no longer any question about who is to blame for the disaster. It’s the Israeli government. They allowed Hamas access to millions of dollars starting in 2014. Sure, the money was officially for humanitarian aid, but that wouldn’t have been necessary if Israel hadn’t bottled Gaza up like a prison in the first place.

Menu Editor for JX

It only took me 30 years to get around to it, and a week to build it. jx_menu_editor is now part of the distribution, in the tools folder. You build the menu visually in a table and then the code (header file and strings file) is automatically generated when you save.

The State of the World

…or at least the distorted view from the USA.

Africa is still the dark continent, i.e., very little light is shed on what is happening there. We hear about wars and massacres and that mining for electric car minerals is brutal, but nobody seems to really care. Everybody wants a 300+ mile range for their EV.

We don’t really hear much about anything south of the equator. Brazil got rid of Bolsonaro, but how are all the other countries doing? Only immigrants from those nations care since many still have families there.

But there is endless rage about all the people who come North to the USA, fleeing violence fueled by USA’s appetite for addictive drugs.

USA is a battleground. It’s a shooting civil war, with extremists killing innocent civilians. I hope we don’t elect a madman for president a second time. But even if we avoid that, the minority who has shoved their heads up their asses to avoid hearing or seeing anything related to slavery, poverty, mass incarceration, or any of the other country’s many sins still wields a disproportionate amount of power. This group wants to erase all civil rights and revert to the TV version of the 1950’s.

Ukraine is a battleground. Russia is controlled by a madman, throwing prisoners unprepared into the meat grinder. No matter how many weapons NATO provides, there are only so many Ukrainians.

Palestine is a battleground. Israel is controlled by madmen. Hamas is composed of madmen. Far too many innocent civilians have died on both sides. We can only hope the scale does not explode to include the entire Middle East.

India is turning into a violent, authoritarian, Hindu fundamentalist nation and is erasing women’s rights.

China is an authoritarian nation with its own separate internet and the power to control it. The power even extends to Chinese living in other countries.

Myanmar is consumed by a civil war.

Armenia and Azerbaijan are fighting over territory. Schools in the USA aren’t even allowed to teach about the Armenian genocide because that would annoy Turkey.

And the planet is basically screwed because there seems to be no hope of curtailing global CO2 emissions rapidly enough to avoid severe global climate change. Glaciers are already melting at an alarming rate.

UTF-8 Done!

The utf-8 branch has become the new main branch. All apps have been released on github. All releases are fully automated for Ubuntu, Fedora, and macOS.

The Israel-Hamas War

To be clear, the attack by Hamas that raped and killed so many civilians is pure evil. But so is the counterattack by Israel that continues to kill so many civilians. And so is the blockade that makes the Gaza Strip into the world’s largest open-air prison. And so are the attacks on Palestinians by Jewish settlers in the West Bank.

Israel was basically founded by Jewish terrorists (and they never really stopped), but as usual, the root of the problem is European meddling: first the Sykes–Picot Agreement and then the Balfour Declaration. The former stole Palestine from the Arabs living there, and the latter gave Zionists the green light to move in. When Britain tried to restrict the flow of immigration with the White Paper of 1939, it was already too late.

The Palestinians have every right to be pissed off and want their homeland back, but that does not justify Hamas’ atrocities.

P.S. A devout Catholic once told me that Israel owns the land “by right of conquest.” It really shocked me that they didn’t realize that “right of conquest” implies “might makes right.” Haven’t we moved past that yet?!?

The Castle of Cagliostro

How is it that I never heard about this movie before? It’s fantastic.

The back of the DVD case says that Steven Spielberg called it one of the greatest adventure movies of all time. He must have meant it, since he used the formula for almost all of the Indiana Jones movies.

UTF-8 Progress

I actually got JStyledText::CleanRightMargin working! Now I just need some more unit tests for various classes, and I’ll actually be able to merge the branch. I started this project back in 2016, knowing it would take a long time. Seven years!

How does Donald Trump change a lightbulb?

He holds the bulb and waits for the world to revolve around him.