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Month: June 2011

Republicans and Socialism

>In the U.S.A. Homeless go without eating.

>In the U.S.A. Elderly go without needed medicines.

>In the U.S.A. Mentally ill go without treatment.

>In the U.S.A. Troops go without proper equipment.

>In the U.S.A. Veterans go without benefits they were promised.

>Yet we donate billions to other countries before helping our own first. Have the guts to re-post this. 1% will re-post and 99% Won’t have the Guts

I’ve been seeing this message posted around on Facebook and other social networking sites quite often over the last month. Rather than replying to each message and falling for the [someone is wrong on the Internet](http://xkcd.com/386/) trap I’m just going to passive aggressively write about it on my blog.

I’ve also noted that all of the people who do post this hate Obama, are Republicans, and say they are Christians of some variety. That has to cause a lot of internal conflict. Whining that we don’t provide enough social programs while you and your party vote against them, seeing people in need and not helping them when your religion says you should, and telling everyone that they are too “chicken” to repost the same thing doesn’t seem very Jesus-like.

Don’t worry, I know you are just posting this because all of your friends posted it and it seemed like a good idea at the time. I know you aren’t really that dumb; that you don’t actually vote with your party AGAINST the very things you think are wrong with this country. I know that you actually fact-checked it and thought it would be ironic if you changed your political affiliations to Republican and religious views to Christian before posting this; I know I would.

>In the U.S.A. Homeless go without eating.

Yes, that’s right, because having homeless shelters and other social programs to help homeless people is SOCIALISM.

>In the U.S.A. Elderly go without needed medicines.

Yep, that’s because having a Government run healthcare system that can care for them and pay for their medicines is SOCIALISM.

>In the U.S.A. Mentally ill go without treatment.

Hm, this still falls under the Government run healthcare system but we can’t have that because it is SOCIALISM.
>In the U.S.A. Troops go without proper equipment.

It’s been 10 years (almost) since we started the war so I’m kind of fuzzy on exactly why we didn’t have proper equipment but I’m pretty sure it had something to do with a Republican President deciding that we needed to go to war NOW…then after we’d just started that war, decided that we needed to invade ANOTHER country so there wasn’t enough equipment to go around.

>In the U.S.A. Veterans go without benefits they were promised.

Here we are with that Government run healthcare thing again, which is exactly what the Veteran’s (VA) hospitals are. I’ve not met any Veterans that haven’t received the benefits that they were promised so I cannot fully comment on this one, however, as I’ve noted hospitals that deal especially with Veterans are Government run. That means they come from SOCIALISM.

>Yet we donate billions to other countries before helping our own first. Have the guts to re-post this. 1% will re-post and 99% Won’t have the Guts

We do donate billions to other countries, we also spend billions of dollars a month fighting those 2 wars that that one Republican President started. Think about just how much a billion dollars is, hint: it is a metric fuck load of money, from [CostofWar.com](http://costofwar.com/en/) you can see how much we’ve spent already, now look at how much [1 trillion dollars is](http://www.pagetutor.com/trillion/index.html).

We do help our own country first, we spend a substantial portion of the country’s budget on programs like Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare, Pensions, and Welfare, which are all used to help the people mentioned above and SOCIALISM. Take a look at the [proposed](http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/newsgraphics/2011/0119-budget/index.html) [budget](http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/budget_pie_gs.php).

Also, note that these programs are paid for from your [FICA](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Insurance_Contributions_Act_tax) taxes (Social Security and Medicare). Note that the amount we’ve spent on the war already is more than the amount that we need to run [Health and Human Services](http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/newsgraphics/2011/0119-budget/index.html) for an entire year. Another side note, if the FICA tax increased by the amount each American spends on private health care (while working for a Corporation who meets employees half way on the premiums, for those of you who work for yourselves you know just how much money you have to spend on health care each month without a Corporation to match it) Government run health care would be possible.

I know I’m glad we hate that evil SOCIALISM so much, it would be RETARDED (see what I did there) to let poor people who can’t afford health care have it. Also, why should my tax dollars go to pay for some homeless person’s frost bite? It’s not like I made him homeless, that’s his own damn fault.

Don’t even get me started on old people, they are old, they’ve lived a long time, they’ll probably die soon why should I pay for them to have health care? Everyone knows that old people have all sorts of diseases and expensive medicines, I don’t want to pay for that. Wait, what? So what if these old people helped stop Hitler, or helped keep South Korea its own country, or built the companies that we are working for now? What have they done for me lately? Nothing but take my FICA taxes, that’s what.

The Military is evil because they are the product of SOCIALISM. I don’t know of a single corporation in the world that could actually staff a standing military with the equipment/personnel our Government can. Even the major ones that are “armies” Xe (Blackwater) and Haliburton don’t have any where near the amount of money it takes to run an actual armed force or provide national defense. The Military is completely funded by the people and tax dollars, SOCIALISM, kind of like public schools, SOCIALISM, first time home buyer loans, SOCIALISM, college grants, SOCIALISM, public fireworks, SOCIALISM, public roads including Interstate highways, SOCIALISM, state parks, SOCIALISM, national parks, SOCIALISM, city parks, SOCIALISM, almost all infrastructure, SOCIALISM, and Libraries, SOCIALISM. See how that evil socialism sneaks its way into everything you ever liked?

So, America, let’s get rid of this shitty socialism thing that has crippled our nation for so long. We don’t need it!

PostgreSQL CREATE LANGUAGE statements.

Over the last week, as part of my work, I needed to install, enable, and test 3 different procedural modules for PostgreSQL: PL/Tcl, Pl/Perl, and PL/pgSQL. By far the easiest was PL/pgSQL since it comes enabled by default on the database, a user simply needs to run:
CREATE LANGUAGE plpgsql;
After connecting to the database that you want it installed in, e.g., psql -U user.

This doesn’t work if your other languages aren’t installed into the database, you’ll get this error:

Same with PL/Tcl.
At this point you can spend a couple hours reading through this:

http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.3/interactive/xplang-install.html

And this:

http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.3/static/sql-createlanguage.html

You’ll get pretty much no where since the only information about installing a procedural language is one that is already installed (very helpful, thanks).

The documentation does allude to some of the helpful pieces in getting the procedural language installed but it doesn’t explicitly state what you are supposed to do. I’m going to do that now. You need to run this command:

From this command you can see that we currently have 3 languages installed PL/pgSQL, PL/C, and an internal language. Note: PL/Tcl and PL/Perl are not installed here, so they can’t be used with the CREATE LANGUAGE command. As long as you’ve installed the correct RPMs or .deb files you will be able to see them here:

This is a list of all of the languages available as a template in your database. Here’s where the docs stop being helpful at all: There is nothing telling you how to manually install pl/tcl or how to manually install pl/perl into a postgres database. Sure, the docs say, if you are installing PL/pgSQL then you can do x…but x doesn’t work the same for PL/Tcl or PL/Perl. There are pages of docs on the handler calls and validator information (this plus a couple thousand lines of C and you’ll have a great validator).

Here’s really how to do it:

CREATE LANGUAGE pltcl;
CREATE LANGUAGE plperl;

That’s it. Because these languages are installed in the pg_pltemplate they only require the create language command so after logging into your database and running the 2 commands above you’ll be able to add them to databases as the user like this:

So, now, look through the docs again – yes _all_ of them. I’ll wait. OK, back? Good, you may say “All of these steps are there; you should have just read more carefully”. True maybe I should have read more carefully, I spent hours going over the documentation and searching, BUT it was on different pages and scattered throughout the entire documentation set for PL and each of the different PLs.

A quick recap of what you need to do to install PL/Tcl manually:

1. Run: select * from pg_language;
2. See if your language is already installed.
3. If not, then you need to make sure it is installed in the system.
4. To see if it is installed in the system run: select * from pg_pltemplate;
5. If your modules are there run: CREATE LANGUAGE pltcl;
6. Log in as the database user and run create language pltcl; to install it for that database.

A quick recap of what you need to do to install PL/Perl manually:

1. Run: select * from pg_language;
2. See if your language is already installed.
3. If not, then you need to make sure it is installed in the system.
4. To see if it is installed in the system run: select * from pg_pltemplate;
5. If your modules are there run: CREATE LANGUAGE plperl;
6. Log in as the database user and run create language plperl; to install it for that database.

That’s it. You’re done. You can go about your business.