2.2.11 by Tim + 83 comments!
Latest spam highlights- portuguese! If you happen to be looking for “Replicas de relogios famosos com a melhor qualidade,” you know where to look (in the spam comments). Also, “Tired of getting low numbers of useless visitors to your site?”. Judging from the amount of spam here, yes, what this blog clearly needs is a higher number of useless visitors.
Anyways. I am not planning on making any sort of political point here, I just find this funny. Very recently I’ve started reading the news from cnn.com, and I usually skip over titles of articles that seem really uninteresting/unimportant. But when I saw one the other day about the prime minister of Canada visiting the white house I was really curious what sort of things they would talk about, so I checked it out. From http://www.cnn.com/2011/POLITICS/02/01/us.canada/index.html
“Harper and Obama will discuss the bilateral relationship between the North American neighbors and key global issues, according to a White House statement Tuesday.”
Sooooo I laughed for a bit, and then remembered that you can find all of the white house statements on it’s website. So for a little more detail, here is the white house’s statement, in its entirety.
“President Obama will welcome Prime Minister Stephen Harper of Canada to the White House on Friday, February 4. The two leaders will discuss our important bilateral relationship and key global issues.”
11.3.10 by Tim + 113 comments!
I recently re-read a book entitled Siddhartha, and I think it’s great. It’s all about this kid Siddhartha who is trying to find enlightenment in India around the time of the Buddha, inspiring Herman Hesse to say all sorts of beautiful and/or insightful things along the journey. It makes me want to eat healthier food, it makes me appreciate everything a lot more, it makes me want to go outside and just be there. I highly recommend it.
Slightly less conventional literature: The infinity plus one document, or “How to Join the Hidden Brotherhood and Enjoy a Wonderful New Life of Money, Friends, and Power”. It’s presented as a collection of 27 writings, in non-linear novel format, allegedly typed up by Rev. Doktor Christopher J. Staley from a “shaggy mass of papers scattered with scrawls and doodles stuffed into a manilla envelope” that he received by mail from a man named Griston Reeves who he met while drunk in a restaurant called Big Roy’s Eggy Wegg. It’s trippy, sometimes unsettling stuff, but very well written. It’s long, but I would recommend it as well. This one i found online, and you can find it here. there’s no contents page, so you’ll have to substitute chapter numbers in the url yourself.
This post means that the last three are mine. Someone else write something! I am still trying to moderate comments from time to time. new spam quote! “What blog platform are you using? I’ve been looking for a new one, and this seems much cleaner then wordpress.”
10.1.10 by Tim + 86 comments!
There are so many spam comments. I’m coming around every once in a while to mark them all as spam, let me know if I mark anybody’s comment as spam accidentally and I’ll put it back. Incidentally, my favorite spam comment: “Keep up the amazing work!! I love how you wrote this and I also like the colors here on this site.” I’ve got these in an rss feed so I’ll see if anybody else writes anything, but just out of curiosity, is anybody seeing these?
I’ve been tinkering with freenet recently- not the internet service in town (”it’s not really free”) but a network designed for complete anonymity. the concept, as well as i understand it, is that every computer with access to it runs a node, which stores a certain amount of information (websites, media files, all sorts of things) encrypted on the hard drive. When someone wants to add something to the network, it’s “injected,” and stored on many computers. When they want to retrieve it, it’s searched for (by it’s decryption key) on the decentralized network. The encryption uses public and private keys, so that once something is posted, anybody can read it and verify which user posted it (if they want that to be known) but ideally it’s impossible to identify what real person corresponds to which user.
for people in countries with more oppressive governments, it’s been used as a communications network, or as a way to secretly mirror websites that their access to is blocked. It’s been used as a way to host animal and earth liberation front texts. and it’s also been used for hosting even more questionable materials, such as child porn, and countless guides on how to create explosives, poison people, and coordinate arson using timed devices. But I like it. the incredible search process and the paranoid encryption involved in any network request makes even css difficult, forums nearly impossible, and embedded flash absolutely out of the question. every page is reduced to a simple ’90s-esque style. most pages you find have been abandoned in the last few years, but if you look for a while you might find one that’s still active.
Anyways, privacy blah blah blah no government monitoring blah blah blah pretty sweet. If anybody posts anything up on it, let me know (in person or encrypted of course!)
9.16.10 by Tim + 86 comments!
This is pretty short, I just have one story that I’ve been meaning to write about for a while, and then a quick quote.
I was in Savannah, GA a ways back, and in the hotel room there was a small book about the city. The section that caught my attention, oddly enough, was about religion. It discussed the general religious history of savannah, showed some pictures of pretty churches, and then talked a little about the wide variety of religious beliefs present there today. Apparently, all sorts of religions are present in Savannah today, christianity of course in its many varied forms, judaism, islam, and “even paganism.” Which was all fine. Then the last line went, from memory, something like this: “No matter what your faith, you are welcome in savannah, as long as you believe in something.”
Dear Savannah Tourism Commission, way to completely screw up what was supposed to be an inclusive statement.
“Even in our own lifetime, we can recall how Britain and her leaders stood against a Nazi tyranny that wished to eradicate God from society and denied our common humanity to many, especially the Jews, who were thought unfit to live. I also recall the regime’s attitude to Christian pastors and religious who spoke the truth in love, opposed the Nazis and paid for that opposition with their lives. As we reflect on the sobering lessons of the atheist extremism of the twentieth century, let us never forget how the exclusion of God, religion and virtue from public life leads ultimately to a truncated vision of man and of society.”
Thank you for that, Pope Benedict XVI.
3.3.10 by LucasWBSmith + 75 comments!
Last night the Senate was preparing to vote to extend unemployment benefits for 30 days. Sounds like a good idea right? Apparently not, Senator Bunning of Kentucky used parliamentary procedure to sink the bill. His argument was that no one is considering how to pay for unemployment benefits, so he decided to leave thousands of Americans hanging in the wind. Have we really gotten to the point where fiscal conservatives are sacrificing the well being of the average American for political points?
It certainly seems so.
The recent halt to unemployment benefits has left 400,000 Americans without income. That means 400,000 will be unable to afford the basic neccessities. WAY TO GO BUNNING! Additionally, 7 states have been hit especially hard.
And guess what? Heeeeeeeeeeee is back! Thats right, Senator Bunning is back on the floor holding up the passage of the bill again, hopefully this time he won’t last.
The solution is obvious, get Bunning to leave the room. THAT IS ALL THEY HAVE TO DO. Bunning just has to leave to pee and bang we have unemployment benefits.
The worst part is that the Democrats talked the talk threatening to stay on the floor till the bill is passed. But Bunning call them on their bluff and the DEMOCRATS ended the session. THEY JUST GAVE UP. Its time for the Democrats to stop just talking and start walking. Not just on unemployment benefits, but in general. They must stop compromising and start doing.
Apparently, members of Congress have staged an intervention to help Bunning with his obsessive need to object.
I believe that eventually Bunning will stop and it will be renewed. But why did this even happen? We shouldn’t be debating on whether or not to leave Americans with out income. It should be so simple. The good news is that Senator Bunning is retiring at the end of his term. Probably a good idea because I doubt he would get reelected, since 3,181 of his constituents just lost their benefits.
Here are some articles
http://www.csmonitor.com/Money/new-economy/2010/0302/Seven-states-hit-hard-by-Jim-Bunning-s-delay-on-unemployment-benefits
http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/02/400000-will-lose-jobless-benefits-next-week/
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/02/AR2010030201150.html?hpid=topnews
http://www.cnn.com/2010/POLITICS/03/02/jobless.benefits.bill/?hpt=T2
FIND OUT HOW IT EFFECTED YOUR STATE
http://www.nelp.org/page/-/UI/march.PR.chart.pdf?nocdn=1
AND TO TAKE A STAND
http://www.ombwatch.org/node/10802