A Spammer's Club?

Wired has an article on “A Support Group for Spammers” if you’re into that stuff. If you hate spam as much as I do, I recommend one of the server-side filtering tools, such as SpamAssassin. It filters out over 99% of spam when properly configured. If your ISP doesn’t provide you with a proper spam filter, ask me, and I’ll give you a free full-featured @freecapitalists.org or @objectivismonline.com email account.

"The Ten Commandments versus America"

Check out Harry Binswanger’s editorial The Ten Commandments vs. America. I think Harry’s theme is a good way to point out the contradictions between Christian and American values. That and the quotes on the Religion vs. America page @ ARI. It’s scary how many otherwise intelligent people claim that “America was not founded on a principle of separation of church and state.” (If you read the Monday’s op-ed in the Batt, you know who I’m talking about.)
Btw, the editorial started as a post on the HBL listserv. At $10 a month, the subscription is a bit pricey for a college student like me, but the high quality of the content is hard to beat.

Not satisfied with forcing flush-twice (or thrice, if you’re in CA) toilets on unsuspecting Americans and creating numerous toilet smuggling outfits along our borders, enviro-wackos are pushing the “dry flush” variety to developing countries . These monstrosities start around $2000 and closely resemble the unsanitary, disease-ridden, unheated, and putrid outhouses our ancestors had to use before the invention of flush toilets. The new variety “improves” on that design by forcing you to regularly empty the toilet — presumably on your crops. After all, we wouldn’t want to deprive ringworms and other assorted parasites of their “right” to continue infecting us.
(Props to Tim for the link.)

The Joys of Blogging

Going along with the theme of my previous post, I would like to review the progress of this blog, and perhaps inspire some of my readers to start their own (and feed my already super-sized ego.) I started blogging 16 months ago to improve my writing, thinking, and web-design skills. 595 entries later, the blog has been far more successful than I expected. My literary abilities still need much improvement, but there have been many tangible results. Traffic has grown from nil to 2155 unique hits and 5364 visits this August. Google and Blogshares count 75 and 44 links to my homepage, respectively. When the value of incoming links is measured, my site is in the 644th place (with .0082% marketshare) among the Blogshares top-valued blogs, placing it in the top 1% of blogs by any standard. The success of my homepage has inspired me to start several other sites, and several people to start their own blogs, some of which may soon outpace mine in traffic. Many of my sites are growing at near-exponential rates, which makes me excited for the future and worried about how much it will cost me to host everything.

Although I blog primarily for myself, I appreciate all the tips and comments I get. My fall schedule will allow me little time to read the news and surf the blogosphere, so I’ll be even more dependent on your submissions. To help my marketing efforts and test my new polling script, please let me know how you came across my site.

The first day of the rest of my life…

Tomorrow, I start my first full-time semester in grad school and my first “serious” job. I don’t consider these events very important in themselves, but in a way, tomorrow is the first day of the rest of my life. Unlike my liberal arts education, the classes and the job I have now are aimed at preparing me for my future vocation and formerly tentative musing about my future have been replaced by a clear focus on where I want to be, and what I must do to get there.

During the four years of my undergraduate education, I went through a process of intellectual discovery and application of my knowledge to my values and goals. I think that skipping the usual “rebellious teen” phase made my exposure to the vast variety of influences on campus more earnest and open-minded. For good and bad, my passion for ideas took me from one group to another as I sought to find people who shared my view of the world. For various periods, I was a webmaster of the Aggie Democrats, my corps outfit, the Aggie Libertarians, the Aggie Review, and then the Objectivist Club. I saw the consequences of corrupt philosophies firsthand and I finally found one that made sense. I am just beginning to integrate my philosophy with my life; and while the details have yet to be filled in, I am certain of my values and of my goals. I know who I am and what I want to become. In the words of Ayn Rand, I am “a being of self-made soul.”

More on the Patriot Act

Many people sent me links to various critiques of the Patriot Act. For the reasons I mentioned in my original post, it’s very difficult to find objective evaluations of the law. Two stand out: this one by Reason magazine and this editorial on Capitalism magazine.
After doing some reading, I’ve been convinced that the Act has major flaws, of which the primary one is not that it gives too much power to the government, but that it is too vague about which powers it actually provides for. The great danger of a tyranny is not that it has too much power, but that its power is expressed by the arbitrary and unpredictable whims of some bureaucrat or dictator. I stand by my original claim however: unrestricted liberty requires a system of objective laws, under which the government has all and only the power it needs to find and punish criminals.