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Children as young as 10 are being recruited to fight for the Palestinian cause.
…
The recruits, some of whom are dwarfed by their AK-47 assault rifles, are taught how to carry out ambushes.
They are also made to do an obstacle course, crawling under barbed wire and leaping through hoops of fire while their instructors fire live bullets overhead.
The camp is run by a group called the Popular Resistance Committee, which said the next generation of Palestinians needed to know how to fight the Israeli “occupation”.

Personal Update

I haven’t blogged much lately, so it’s time for an update on the recent goings-on in my life. I mentioned a while back that I had a great internship coming up in San Antonio. Unfortunately, the company reneged on their offer on the last minute, so I took summer classes and worked for the first half of the summer, which kept me very busy, but will allow me to graduate in August. Fortunately, I found another internship working on the website of the Ludwig Von Mises Institute in Auburn AL, where I am currently staying and working. I will be here until the end of their summer conference, by which point I hope to find some long-term employment.

The more immediate reason for the lack of updates is that I wasn’t able to take my desktop with me, and due to a combination of lack of planning and the incompetence of Dell customer support, I won’t receive my new laptop till at least Monday. My email access will be sporadic for a while, but I can be reached at heroic(at)gmail.com or veksler(at)mises.org

Happy 4th

Things that give me a greater appreciation for the 4th:
China is planning to begin censoring and monitoring over 220 billion SMS messages sent each year by cell users. It already censors email traffic and web sites.

In an all-to-common incident in Israel, “four gunmen from an armed group in the Fatah movement loyal to Palestinian Athority President Yasser Arafat” gunned down a ‘collaborator’ in a Palestinian town “who was accused of betraying the whereabouts of wanted militants to Israeli forces and of sexually molesting his two daughters.
The man, Muhammad Rafiq Daraghmeh, 45, was riddled with automatic weapons fire after he answered “yes” to both accusations and a hrong of onlookers chanted, “Kill him, kill him!” Relatives said his family had disowned him.”

Typically, the MSNBC article containing the story was titled “Israel kills three in Gaza Strip” I suspect that the elderly and frail-looking man was only guilty of one of the “crimes,” but that was more than enough for the Palestinian lynch mob, which has a habit of tearing apart martyrs and victims and taking home body parts as mementos.

first private manned space flight

The world’s first private manned space flight is scheduled to start tomorrow, at 6:30 AM P.D.T. I don’t know about you, but I plan to watch it live on MSNBC.

Do you remember the NASA scramjet test a few months ago? That was model rocketry compared to this. This is history folks, and if a successful flight can tap into the American spirit sufficiently to launch an era of private space exploration, you students might be around to tell your grandkids on Luna 3 about witnessing this event.
The challenge facing space exploration today is not technical – that problem was solved 43 years ago. Today’s challenge is philosophical – a question of whether the spirit that powered the Wright Brothers on a windy day in 1903 has sufficiently resisted creeping statism, collectivism, and mysticism to soar once again.

Fun with XML

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

Robot House Builder

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?