Truth, Justice, and the American Way

I recently had occasion to configure my first Windows 2003 server, so I decided to write down some guidelines to aid the configuration and keep it secure. Before long, I had a lengthy list of boring rules, so I decided to make a list of commandments for managing web servers. Here is the result – the Twelve Commandments of Web Server Management. If I left out anything, thou shalt leave me a comment! (more…)

I’ve posted my latest post on my forum: Aids Reduces African Life Expectancy To 33: What are the root causes of the crisis?

Two cool tricks: put your Firefox install on a flash drive, and get a notification agent for Gmail.

If you are a TAMU student, I highly recommend participating in the economics experiments this summer and fall. Two years ago, I made boatloads of money ($50-$100/session) in the experiments with a bit of game theory and basic knowledge of human psychology. I’m not sure what this has to do with economic theory, but if the department insists on wasting $ on experiments that demonstrate the obvious, I’ll be glad to help them part with it.

Update: I started an album for my Auburn photos.

For anyone interested in such things, here are photos of beautiful Auburn, AL and my beautiful new laptop:
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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”.

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

Jonathan Hoenig on SmartMoney: Get Off Our Backs!
Found via my daily fix of AR.

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.

A rare flash of honesty from the Clintons: “We’re going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good.”

Cool: Textalyser, a free online text analysis tool. Among other things, it will analyze the complexity and readability of any text or website.

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.

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.net/bookmarks

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

If you would like to try this yourself, the code is below:
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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? (more…)

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.