Month: November 2003

Check out the “Are You an Austrian?” quiz at the Mises Inst. I scored 94/100 (96, if I hadn’t misread a question.)
Not surprisingly, the two questions I got “wrong” are the Mises Institutes’ take on “market anarchism” and pacificism. Ex: “A market society needs no antitrust policy at all; indeed, the state is the very source of the remaining monopolies we see in education, law, courts, and other areas.” and “Security [ie: the military], like any good desired by individuals in society, can and is provided by the market economy, which is to say, by individuals organizing themselves voluntarily within the matrix of private property and exchange.” (Emphasis mine)

Last time I checked, Ludwig von Mises himself was no anarchist. Which brings up the question – is Austrian economics defined by what the actual Austrians thought, or what Rothbard’s anarchist followers believe?

Laurel mentioned a story about “a group of students at Stanford University in California [who are] demanding the ouster of the editor of the school’s student paper because it published an ad with pictures of Palestinians celebrating the 9/11 attacks.” The story inspired be to make the below image, which I recommend you add to your own website and link to http://campustruth.org

Here is the code:
<img src="http://rationalmind.freecapitalists.org/images/ProIsrael1.gif" alt="The Truth About Israel" width="160" height="105" border="0">

The Onion: Americans Demand Increased Governmental Protection From Selves.

I was browsing Google News today, and came across this editorial. The best part:

I feel obligated to point out the fundamental flaws in the Objectivist Club as a forum for discussing ideas…. The Objectivist Club’s constitution states that its mission is “to study, discuss and debate, using reason, the content, validity and application of Objectivism, and to disseminate Objectivist ideas.” In contrast, in its constitution, the Philosophy club states that its aim is to host, “events [that] will allow for thought-provoking, respectful discussion with peers and professors in the absence of classrooms, grades, competition, or judgment, for in such a context, people may best develop and clarify their thoughts to themselves and others… Does [the Objectivist Club] sound like a place where a free exchange of ideas occurs without competition or judgment?”

I don’t know about Drexel, but I went to a number of philosophy and agnostic club meetings at A&M. The usual format is usually as such: a speaker, usually a professor, wows the audience with an unintelligible attempt to prove that X is a “social construct” using enough logical calculus to make even a math major cry for mercy. Afterwards, the members (who have no clue what was just said, but feel enlightened already) gather into a circle and utter pronouncements such as “I get physically sick at seeing the suffering of others” (direct quote) at which point all the other members wow and feel even more enlightened. If there are enough upperclassmen who haven’t dropped out yet, the members usually proceed to one of the local bars and proceed to reach new levels of self-actualization with the aid of large volumes of booze, but without the aid of “judgement” or “reason.”

CBS has some interesting revelations about Arafat’s finances. According to the story, he embezzled 1 to 3 billion dollars and directed it to his secret accounts in Israel and the Cayman islands. His wife receives a $100,000/month stipend for a lavish Paris mansion. He has looted billions from money that Israel gives to support the PLO, as well as the aid given by the US and other sources. He “financed a vast patronage system” to support his regime. He maintained “a system of monopolies in commodities — like flour and cement — that Arafat handed out to his cronies, who then turned around and fleeced the public.” The story just gets better and better: “The PLO’s former treasurer told us he saw Saddam Hussein hand Arafat a $50 million check for supporting him during the first Gulf War. And there were other large gifts from the KGB and the Saudis.”

What the article doesn’t mention, is that Arafat’s corruption has been pointed out by Palestinians before: however they were harassed, imprisoned, or usually murdered before the western media paid it any attention. It was only the mass public revolt by the Palestinian public (How many papers printed that story?) that forced him to appoint an honest finance minister.

I was surprised to learn that among the billions looted by Arafat were millions in tax funds that Israel gave to support the PLO according to the Oslo accord. I don’t have any words to describe how atrocious and inexcusable it is for the Israeli government to agree to finance its own destruction by money stolen from the very citizens it exists to protect.

Masturbation is like owning a Ferrari and driving only in first gear, a senior Catholic theologian said in an article published Wednesday.

“Driving only in first gear, not only do you prevent the Ferrari expressing its full power, but gradually you wear it out and thereby ruin a masterpiece of technology,” Father Giordano Muraro wrote in the magazine Vita Pastorale.

I’m spending the day creating a new gallery for my photo album. With 3,200 images taking up 880MB of space, this is truly a monumental task. You can keep track of my progress here.
Update: My new album is finished! What do you think of the theme?

Last Wednesday, I presented a talk on capitalism for the A&M Objectivism Club. My speech was fairly awful, but afterwards, I converted my outline into an essay to add to this site. After finishing the first part, I noticed an unread copy of “Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal” sitting on my bookshelf – one of a dozen books I bought for my recent birthday. I decided to hold off writing the last part until I finished it, but that will take at least two weeks because I’m participating in the business school’s CASE competition. Big bucks and lucrative job offers are at stake, so not much bloggin’ this week, I’m afraid. However, if you’re interested in a design for an enterprise-level email marketing system, let me know.

Did you know that Al-Qa’ida has an official website? Unfortunately for Al-Qa’ida, its former webmaster met an untimely demise in Saudi Arabia last month, but their website has been up and down since then under various domains. The site is no joke: “Al Qaeda is said to use this site as a means of communicating with their cells.”
I did a little background checking on the web servers providing the hosting and DNS services. Three locations came up: Madinah, Saudi Arabia, Ashburn, VA, and Houston, TX. I’m suprised they didn’t just host it in NYC.
For a sample of the content, check out this Free Republic post. Needless to say, a number of web servers in Ashburn, Houston, and Saudi Arabia were hacked last month under not-so mysterious circumstances.
(See for yourself: do a WHOIS on islamray.org and faroq.org)

Update: Wired reports that “[The Al-Qa’ida] site is familiar with certain hosting companies, exploiting their security problems and cracking confidential passwords.” I’ve never heard of a “site” that could hack, but I can’t say whether the web hosts in question knew which sites they were (are?) hosting. If you’re wondering whether terrorist groups really have the balls to host their websites in America, I suggest you check out this tutorial on how to shut down a Hamas website.

Almost 60 percent of Europeans say that Israel is a larger threat to world peace than North Korea, Iran or Afghanistan, according to a poll scheduled to be made public Monday by the European Commission.
Some 58 percent of those polled said the United Nations should manage the reconstruction of Iraq, compared with 44 percent who said the Iraqi provisional government should and 18 percent who said it was a job for the United States.
But 65 percent said they thought the United States should pay for the rebuilding of Iraq.
A majority of Europeans surveyed (54 percent) said they were not favorable to sending European peacekeepers to Iraq. And more than two-thirds said that the war in Iraq was not justified.
By contrast, 41 percent of Americans said they sympathized with Israelis and only 13 percent with the Palestinians.