Category: Uncategorized

Charles Krauthammer: “While no one was looking, something historic has happened in the Middle East. The Palestinian intifada is over, and the Palestinians have lost.”
There are some great lessons in there for American foreign policy, so read on.

I recently updated to FireFox .9, the latest and greatest web browser from Mozilla.org

I then installed Bookmarks Synchronizer, a Firefox extension that allows me to synchronize my bookmarks by uploading an XML file to my website every time they are updated.

I wanted to provide a nicely formatted page on my websites, so I found an XSL transform to convert the XML file to HTML on the fly. I then wrote a PHP script which takes an XML file and XSL transform and outputs the processed HTML or XML.
You can view the result of my handiwork here: http://rationalmind.freecapitalists.org/bookmarks

(That URL actually loads http://rationalmind.freecapitalists.org/?file=XSLT&xml=david/bookmarks.xml&xsl=david/bookmarks.xsl)

If you would like to try this yourself, the code is below:
Continue reading Fun with XML

This is interesting: a USC researcher has created a robot that will be able to build an entire house in hours, without any human intervention. The NSF-funded project might be more PR hype than fact, but if legit, it may be the beginning of a revolutionary new way of building low-cost, custom-designed houses.
It’s interesting to see how prevalent the environmentalist and socialist propaganda is in that article alone: It spends several paragraphs praising the federal programs that subsidized it, the “environmental characteristics” the “highly-insulating” properties, the benefits for “low-income housing”, the potential applications on “Moon or Mars”, and the easing of “pressure on congested transport systems and cutting transport-related air pollution.” Is this a sign of government-sponsored research, government-funded publications, or a response to the anti-industrial attitude?

During my lengthy and extremely boring graduation ceremony last year, I passed the time by snickering at the thesis topics of the liberal arts majors. The topics I saw were typical of the BS that passes for research in the humanities these days: critical (Marxist) theory, obsession with sex, and “ethnic” (anti-Western) studies. I was reminded of them by Mike S. Adams recent column on the bullshit topics academics specialize in. I decided to check out my own Texas A&M’s departments, and found much of the same. The biggest bullshit-generators in academia are the political science (something I have four years of firsthand experience in), philosophy (which has been mostly reduced to nonsense) sociology (which is not even a valid concept), and especially the English department, which tends to be the farthest removed from reality, having little or no training or reliance on scientific rigor, logical thought, or historical lessons.

For you students: have you ever checked your what passes for research in your school’s humanities departments? Continue reading “Dialectic post-postmodern Afro-Latin critical gender theory”

This is kinda interesting: the last surviving widows of the Civil War on both the Union and Confederate sides died within the last year. For the historically challenged, the war ended in 1865, 140 years ago.

I decided to clean up my bookmarks a few days ago, after accumulating nearly 2000 links over seven years of web surfing. The growth of my bookmark list has dropped drastically lately, because Google makes finding sites so easy that I rarely bother to save them anymore. Anyway, I trimmed the bookmarks to a manageable 600 and uploaded it for my (and your) reference.
You will notice that I have few blogs in the list, because I manage those separately in my RSS reader. You can also get an OPML list of the right-side links on my blog. Also of interest: if you want to speed up your PHP website, I have some tips for you.

You won’t find a glowing tribute to President Reagan on this blog. He was a champion of liberty and free markets in words, but not in deeds or on principle. He may have hastened the end of the Cold War, but he certainly didn’t “win” it. I believe that his chief virtue is what many commentators call his “optimism.” What they leave out is what he was optimistic about – freedom and the moral certainty in American ideals, – as opposed to welfare statism and internaltional multilateralism. And now for the quotes:

From Ronald Reagan:

“Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.”

“There are no such things as limits to growth, because there are no limits on the human capacity for intelligence, imagination and wonder.”

“Let us beware that while Soviet rulers preach the supremacy of the state, declare its omnipotence over individual man, and predict its eventual domination over all the peoples of the earth, they are the focus of evil in the modern world…. I urge you to beware the temptation … to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire, to simply call the arms race a giant misunderstanding and thereby remove yourself from the struggle between right and wrong, good and evil.”

From Ray Charles:

“I never wanted to be famous. I only wanted to be great.”

“Music was one of my parts… Like my blood. It was a force already with me when I arrived on the scene. It was a necessity for me – like food or water.”

(On Addiction) “I did it to myself. It wasn’t society… it wasn’t a pusher, it wasn’t being blind or being black or being poor. It was all my doing.”

According to Bruce Bartlett, the 18th century “dead dinosaur” theory of the origin of oil may be wrong. According to the abiotic theory, used for the last 50 years to successfully find oil reserves, petroleum has an inorganic origin far below the earth’s crust. This would mean that the amount of oil reserves could be far larger that conventional wisdom suggests. If you factor in the potential of technology and economic incentives, the oil supply becomes virtually unlimited.

The North Texas Church of Freethought offers a capitalist and a leftist version of Grace. Here is the “capitalist” version:

For what we are about to eat, may we be truly grateful. Thanks to the farmers who grew the food, the factory workers who made the tractors they used, the mechanics who maintained them and the engineers who designed them in the first place. Thanks to the truck drivers who shipped the food to the supermarket, and the supermarket that made it available to us. A special thanks to our employers or customers who paid us, so we can buy the food. And, of course, let us not forget the free market systems that makes all those people work together to produce this meal. In the name of the cent and the almighty buck, Amen.

Now check out the website for the leftist version.

Here is a list of the top six things the government can, should, and won’t do to greatly reduce gas prices and six things that are likely to either have no effect or raise them, but are frequently done anyway. (The following post comes from a recent reply to an online forum.)

Top six ways to reduce gas prices:
1. Eliminate direct and indirect sales taxes on gas. (Road money has to come from somewhere of course, but taxes on gas do not provide an efficient means of paying for them.)
2. Eliminate state and federal regulations regarding contaminants and fuel mixtures.
3. Break up the OPEC monopoly by forcefully privatizing oil production in the Middle East.
4. Eliminate anti-trust regulations, especially against oil and processing companies.
5. Sell federal lands, especially in Alaska.
6. Eliminate emissions regulations on cars.

Top six things the government is likely to do that will raise or not affect gas prices:
1. Fuel-efficient cars, and especially federal subsidies for them. The impact on worldwide oil use is too small to matter, but car manufacturers must pass on extra production costs to consumers.
2. The war in Iraq. Obviously, this has raised, not reduced oil prices, as expected.
3. Government price controls on gas. Socialists who think that market prices are set at the whim oil companies while government prices are set according to some form of bureaucratic omniscience are deluding themselves.
4. Boycotts on gas buying = total economic ignorance not worth a response.
5. Public transportation and car-pooling. This may reduce the cost of transportation for individuals, but it will have little impact on global oil prices. Meanwhile, public transportation is subsidized by higher gas taxes.
6. Government-mandated “clean” energy and electric cars. Where do you think the energy for electric batteries comes from? Magic? Like recycling, if it’s not chosen by the market, it’s more likely to waste, not save energy costs.

More ideas.