The Rational Mind

Plans to build a major new medical laboratory in England were scrapped Tuesday in the face of protests by animal rights groups, who claimed the decision as a major victory….Cambridge University said the project, which would have used monkeys for neurological testing, would no longer go ahead and cited spiraling costs over security needed to keep out anti-vivisectionist groups.
…The university and the publicly funded Medical Research Council (MRC), said the decision was a great disappointment as the laboratory would have attracted scientists from around the world to work on diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s….”The research is vital and ‘vital’ means likely to save lives,” he said. “This research will go on elsewhere…in the world.”

Once again, the sick eco-freaks behind the “animal rights” movement show what they really hate: technology – and the human lives it saves.

Check out this email I just got:

Please I need urgent assistance and advice.
My name is Jume Hasa Hussein. I am daughter of Sadam Hussein, former ruler of Iraq Islamic Republic now in captivity. I was a student of Environmetal Microbiology at Islamic University Al-Athmia before the United Nations weapons inspectors arrived Iraq and subsequent outbreak of hostilities between my father and the Coalition forces. Eventually, my father was arrested at Ad-Dawr, Tikrit on the 13th day of december 2003. To my understanding, the american soldiers have narcotized my father.
There is a saying in Iraq “a lion in a cage is still a lion”

Continue reading "from sadam's daughter"

Check out John Stosell’s “List of Popularly Reported Misconceptions.” Every one of them should be obvious to any educated individual with an ounce of independent thought. That they are rarely recognized as such in the media and elsewhere is a sad testament to irrationalism of our society.

This is one of the reaons I want a parrot: “inner thoughts of Britain’s wartime leader Winston Churchill live on, thanks to the foul mouth of his 104-year-old parrot who lives at a garden centre in southeast England.” Also check out JJ’s take on it.

Israel is releasing over 430 terrorists (many of whom are known to have planned and carried out terrorist attacks) in exchange for a single businessman abducted in 2000 by the Hezbollah. While this is a great example of the difference between the value Israelis and the terrorists place on human life, I wonder how many more people will be killed/abducted by the 400 released terrorists. What do you think? How do you think American politicians would act in such a situations?
From the article:

“[the] next phase in the deal may involve Iran, which along with Syria is the main financial backer of Hezbollah”…
Some Israeli commentators and right-wing politicians worried that the deal rewards terrorism and could lead to other kidnappings…Asked if Hezbollah would seek other hostages if these deals fell through, Sheik Nasrallah said at the news conference: “Yes. Of course.”

I’ve long wanted to live in a major city in or near New York City, but recent political trends have changed my mind. Here are some of the more outrageous examples:

• New York has a “Department of Homeless Services,” which, among it’s other activities, is giving away $10 million in cash to the “homeless.”
• Washington DC “will soon install plain white condom dispensers in select government offices and begin distributing the contraceptives for free.” The city “plans to pass out about 550,000 male condoms, 45,000 latex dental dams and about 30,000 female condoms in a variety of venues, including the public school system, which gives out 50,000 condoms a year.”
• I will pay 50.8% more in state and local taxes in New York than I will in other states.
• And finally, due to a new law sponsored by Governor Pataki, I risk a jail term of up to 25 years if I take my gun to New York. (It’s illegal to sell even a toy gun!)

I’m currently trying to choose a template for ObjectivismOnline, and I would like your help in picking one from among the finalists. Please go to here and select one of the templates from the “Template Chooser” on the bottom of the left side. I’ve listed my favorite ones in the poll below. Please vote on your favorite one or send me a message if you like another – there are 53 to choose from. (Note: many of these currently don’t work in IE, so you may want to try a different browser.)
Thanks!

A leading physicist claims to have figured out why the U.S. Postal Service loses a lot of mail and delivers most of the rest late — post offices are “architectural anomalies” that cause time warps, wreaking havoc with letters, packages, sorting machines . . . and sometimes even mail carriers themselves.

While the Post Office is indeed stuck in some ancient pre-industrial era, a more likely explanation for why I had to wait in line for an hour to send a package this Tuesday is that incompetent government bureaucrats don’t have to care about the service they provide because of a coercive government monopoly that prevents infinitely more efficient private carriers from competing with them.

Federal officials who recently reported that over 140 million Americans are fat are now saying that at least that many are ugly. And the solution they’re proposing is a law that would encourage or even require “facially challenged” citizens to cover up with masks, Weekly World News has learned.

But the news isn’t all bad. According to sources at the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, those among you who are real homely will be able to choose from a wide range of “beauty masks,” including Elvis in his prime, J.Lo, Brad Pitt and Julia Roberts.

The dramatic move comes as the Feds are reeling from a global perception that most Americans are grossly obese when, in fact, only half are.

I wrote my first Perl script today after three hours of fumbling around in a totally alien syntax. Score one for goal-directed action. I generally avoid Perl like the plague, but it was the only way I could find to do a bulk import into the MT email DB_File notify database. I’ve also written a script to export posts from a SQL/MS Access based database into the MT import format. Let me know if you want either. The scripts are for Mises.org Blog, which I’ve been configuring and tweaking the last two days.

I’m also working on the re-release of ObjectivismOnline.net, which should go live sometime in early February. I scrapped the old PostNuke CMS for Mambo, a clean, fast, and powerful CMS. The new website will feature a meta-blog, for which I am currently seeking writers. Here is the “official” announcement:

Do you want to take a leading role in America’s intellectual renaissance? Then consider joining the team at ObjectivismOnline.net. We are looking for contributors to a new pro-reason, pro-capitalism meta-blog. (A meta-blog is an aggregate web log consisting of original content and links to content at other sites.) We are also accepting essays, editorials, letters to the editor, and reviews to include in other parts of our website.

Interested individuals should contact .. me. The website is still a work in progress, but the forum is growing rapidly and being frequented by several Objectivist philosophers, notably Amy Peikoff, Greg Salmieri, and me 🙂