In case my throngs of faithful readers are losing sleep over my lack of updates lately, let me assure everyone that all is well, and I am up to my usual escapades designed to keep me away from academics as much as possible.
If you care to see what I’ve been up to, check out the popular pictorial depictions here, here, and here.
I have also been busy on TexAgs, spewing my radical views and generally trying to get on people’s bad side in various other ways.
ZAMBIAN PRESIDENT LEVY MWANAWASA
Now here’s a world leader who’s really scores high on the idiot quotient. Zambian President Levy Mwanawasa, who has refused donations of genetically modified corn from the U.S. to solve his country’s hunger crisis, has asked his starving countrymen to remain patient while “scientists investigate the issue.”
Last month, Mr. Mwanawas’s government rejected corn donations from the United States, the largest donor of food to alleviate the southern African famine, because some of the American corn was genetically modified. Talk about political correctness gone mad. The Zambian government — taking its cues from the well-fed environmentalist lobby in Europe and America — said it was worried about the danger genetically-altered corn could pose to the health of recipients of such food donations. Better that they starve to death, it would seem, than have their health potentially threatened by environmentally-unsafe agricultural products (which, by the way, United Nations agencies have certified as safe).
Well, that’s one way to deal with environmental hazards, as defined by the environmentalist fanatical fringe. Let people die, rather than be exposed to politically-incorrect food stuffs which might, um, damage their health.
And what a neat solution it is from the point of view of the affluent, well-fed environmentalist activists in the West who have foistered this half-baked science on the Third World. These designer activists can happily depart their favorite gourmet eateries with full bellies every evening, head home to their comfy brownstone abodes for the night, and happily fall sleep knowing that they have once again thwarted the greedy American agribus monster — saving the hungry of the Third World from the horrible evils of genetically-altered food. After all, better dead than wrongly fed, they’d probably argue.
Unfortunately, none of it will be of much comfort to the millions of starving people in Zambia as they waste away from hunger.
(from http://www.iconoclast.ca)
In reponse to my last post, I have written a story at Movementarian.com
“PHILADELPHIA, PA – In an unprecedented move of bipartisan cooperation, Bush has proposed and Congress has passed a new Constitution and Bill of Rights to serve a new governing document for the Equal States of America©. The move came after the leaders of both parties openly admitted that they had been blatantly ignoring the old Constitution for years, not to mention to the publicly hallowed but usually ignored Bill of Rights”
Hello again to my hordes of faithfull readers [sarcasm]
I’ve gotten over my cold/fever and am feeling much better, plus I’ve been busy with the various clubs that I’m in.
I’m taking four out of five classes at the Bush school which are fairly interesting, but there is on in particular — Constitutional Rights and Liberties which has been….annoying me to no end. More specifically, reading the textbooks for the class nearly makes me sick every time I pick up my books. Let me give you some examples of the questions the authors poses:
“What are rights and liberties if you lack the resources to take advantage of them?”
“What use is freedom of speech if no one can hear you?”
“Is it possible for the welathy few to dominate public debate and stifle the ‘free marketplace of ideas’?”
and my favorite,
“Does the Constitution protect us from private institutions which interfere with our liberties and rights?”
Hey, Mr Sulivan, do you have any idea what rights are? How about the initiation of force?
Apparently not, as he subscribes to the ideology that everyone is guaranteed the “right” to a paycheck, food, housing, healthcare, cable television, and a spot to spew his rhetoric as part of his “constitutional rights” to everyone else’s life, liberty, and property –an ideology also known as “socialism,” “communism,” and more recently, “democracy.”
But it was good while it lasted: 
The project that has been keeping me busy for the last three weeks, Movementarian.com has gone live! It’s our third day since the big opening, and our hits have already passed 5600.
I have not had time to write too much for it yet, but check out my piece titled Sexual Frustration Caused by Porn Industry
More to come soon!
Despote environmentalist and “post-modern” myths to the contrary, technology is a Good Thing. Many liberal profs will spread BS about how the 20th century demonstrated the “evils of technology” but I don’t buy any such thing. Technological progress is driven by the individual innovation and requires certain conditions to take place. While it is possible for technology to be used for evil purposes, as it was in Nazi Germany, only a society which rewards individual self-interest will progress technological in the long run, because only such a system will encourage men to take risks, devote years of their lives, and attract investment from other men who are free from control to invest in good ideas.
Both innovation and investment are key to progress. For example, Germany developed a nuclear and jet program much sooner than the US, but the totalitarian system did not deem nuclear research or fighter jets a high enough priority to do much damage to the allies. The United States on the other hand, provided the technology to mass produce conventional and nuclear weapons because it had a clear and proper moral purpose and the semi-free economy to support it, while Germany diverted vital resources to concentration camps and focused on the wrong technologies, losing the war.
Thus, technological progress, whether civilian or military, will only occur when some degree economic and political freedom exists to stimulate and direct innovation and development in the right direction.
Anyways, I was looking through my server logs, as I often do, and I found not only the usual traces of automated hacker attacks (which are logged in detail) but some disturbing search terms. It turns out that search term “+child +penis +img” in google, displays the Aggie Review website as the first search result! I realized that a satirical article someone wrote about the Vagina Monologues, was leading all sorts of unsavory people to my site. Now, I don’t plan to report them, or the random hacker to the FBI, but it is strange to how the net attracts all these people to my server, especially since it’s only been up one month.
A better example of the net at work, was the girl in Toronto who was searching for information in her hometown of Vinnitsa – which just happens to be the name of one of the photos in my photo collection, as I am from there as well. Because of Google’s amazing search technology (and my website skills) I was able to connect with another person, who randomly matched a word that that we shared, and as it turned out, a lot more as well.
(This is an update of an earlier post)
So I’ve already gotten in trouble once for publishing security exploits, but I think it’s worth chancing it again to make my point. I went by the Student Activities office today to get a subdomain name, and decided to ask for the SOFC # for the Libertarians. The nice girl at the desk promptly looked it up for me, and then when I asked her about the procedure for changing passwords, she wrote down the password for the group’s account as well. Since I had mentioned in passing my membership in another group, she wrote down their SOFC # and password as well. At no time did I actually say that I was an officer in any of these groups, show any identification or even ask for the password – I simply asked how to go about getting to it, and she provided passwords for two groups for me. Then I proceeded to the computer office to get a new subdomain for another group I’m webmaster of – again, no confirmation of my identity or membership status was necessary. Now I’d like to think that my trustworthy appearance and rugged good looks persuaded the girl at the info desk to be generous with the info, but somehow I doubt that’s the case, and that worries me because many groups keep significant sums of $ in their accounts, and this is less than stellar security, despite the huge bureaucratic mess than a group has to go through to get organized and maintain their mandatory bank account with SOFC.
This reminds me of the policy at Evans library to force changes to passwords every 90 days. As a result, many staff members write their passwords on sticky notes on their monitors, and one of the library admins advised me to amend a “02f” “O2s” and so on to a “base” password as a way of remembering it, which I suppose is the advice she gives to everyone else….kinda defeating the purpose?
But, hey, what do I know, maybe Aggies really don’t lie cheat or steal after all.
Ten days ago, I requested a room for the Libertarians. I had to get my advisor to sign a form where I picked my top preferences for meeting rooms because there was no way to look them up (or so the person at the registration desk said.) This means, that everyone who reserves rooms has to hope to not request the same day as any other group. Then today, I went to pick up the schedule, and they said they couldn’t find it. After about 30 minutes (not kidding) of looking, they found that it had been misfiled under the wrong file. Now it wouldn’t be too hard to put all this info online to eliminate security risks, calendar mix-ups, and several jobs, but this is a bureaucracy we’re talking about here. Government jobs contribute to “aggregate output” — right?
Like many bureacracies, Amtrak just refuses to die. New evidence of incompetency causing the latest accident as wel as an incident where man suffering a heart attack on a rush-hour commuter train was forced to wait while the train made scheduled stops to pick up passengers before reaching paramedics in Boston don’t seem to deter Amtrak bureacrats from asking for more $, leading to a “a $64.7 billion transportation bill that would provide $1.2 billion for Amtrak.” Bush has proposed a more typically “conservative” $521 million, as an “emergency measure”. Meanwhile, if you look up Amtrak’s “
Legislative Grant Request” (a document begging for more federal money) they claim to attain profitability by Dec 2002 “just around the corner”, just as they have been claiming for the last dozen years. It’s unclear how this is possible considering that they have a huge and growing deficit and a large % of their cars is down for repairs without the funds to do any. Meanwhile their high speed train initiative has stalled, while Japan has had low cost commuter trains going over 170mph for years.
Socialism anyone?