Mac Nerd Post: MacPorts and XCode

I’d been pretty frustrated with MacPorts (née DarwinPorts) over the past year. stuff just seemed to break a lot, or not build for me, or whatever. It was frustrating, and it drove me to “roll my own” copies of a lot of software, which was a huge hassle.

I’ve been trying to follow this Haskell Wikibook on and off lately and one of the things that hosed me was that the installation instructions for the Haskell compiler, GHC, are basically “install it with Macports!” And it wouldn’t. It wouldn’t work for me. Errored out again and again. Finally I googled up the error message and found out that it was associated with having the wrong version of Xcode installed for your version of MacPorts…

The who what? Version of Xcode? I never checked my version of Xcode… glory be, there were new ones. I’m used to Macs telling me automatically when updates of anything are available, not seeking them out on Apple’s web site. I had no idea I was behind.

I wiped out my MacPorts directory and GHC built for me the first time. (Took forever, but it built cleanly the first time, no effort required beyond the command “sudo port install ghc.”)

MacPorts and I are friends again, and my home-compiled copies of a lot of stuff are going away.

Ron Paul: Candidate of Choice for Libertarian Geeks… And anti-Semitic Racist Fundie Nutbags

Texe Marrs’s book, Codex Magica, is a wonder to behold. There’s a copy in my local Barnes & Noble. I couldn’t ethically buy it and support him, but paging through it is like watching a train wreck; you can’t look away. It purports to reveal the secrets of the Illuminati, which seems to be, mostly, Freemasonry writ large, and which seems to subsume both Catholics (especially Jesuits) and Jews. Most of the book is an exposé of the terrifying extent to which the Illuminati have infiltrated the power and media structures of the world, and the proof is all signs and gestures. Just about any hand gesture or bodily position is interpreted by Marrs as Masonic, Cabalistic, or otherwise “Illuminist,” leading to proofs that Napoleon, Washington, Hitler, Stalin, the Statue of Liberty, and Jerry Seinfeld are all Masonic co-conspirators.

Anyway, I was looking up Texe on Wikipedia and it mentioned he was a big supporter of Ron Paul, Libertarian Republican, darling of Digg and Reddit. The candidate of choice for people who, as mph once put it in another context, are “too emo to listen to Rush Limbaugh but like the way he speaks truth to power.”

Texe confirms it on his own site. He speaks admiringly of the segregationist candidacy of George Wallace, who dared to challenge the Zionist-Masonic-Illuminati-controlled Democrats and Republicans, but who was shot by a “‘Manchurian Candidate’ assassin”…

Say what you want about George Wallace. He wasn’t in the pockets of the wealthy and the elite. Nor was the Alabama spitfire politician in the employ of the powerful Jewish Zionist lobby. He was truly an American Independent.[…]

Sadly, the same is not true for today’s presidential candidates. Except for Congressman Ron Paul (R-TX), every single one of them is a manipulator and deceiver whose political philosophy and views are predictably homogenized. Democrat or Republican, these men and women are as worthless as perfume and lace on a horse saddle. They’ve all long ago sold their souls to their Zionist slavemasters, for whom they obediently carry water and chop firewood: “Massah, is they’s anythin’ else yo might require of me today? Oh, thank yo, Massah, thank yo for the shekels yo put in mah pocket. Thank yo, kind suh!”

Yikes. Of course, the Ron Paul fans can laugh at me too, because Texe Marrs is on my side in opposing the Iraq War…

BTW, he also reveals on that page why he’s on the side of the conservatives who were angry about the immigration bill. You see, one of his favorite books reveals that untrammelled immigration and the erasure of national borders was a big part of the plot of the conspiratorial Jews (slash Masons slash Catholics slash Illuminati of course)… Which book? Why, the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion.

The Protocols and Ron Paul! Go Texe!

Postal Inflation Calculator

Postal Inflation Calculator

This is a calculator which tracks how amounts of money in different time periods correlate in terms of the number of stamps they could buy.

It has been claimed (via mph) that since the post office cannot legally make a profit, its stamp prices will accurately reflect its operating costs, and therefore stamp prices are an easy way to track real, effective inflation, which is much higher than the Gummint admits. I don’t know whether that’s true, but if you want to assume it is, here are the consequences.

I wrote this late last night rather than going to bed on time for some reason.