Category: Uncategorized

The next miracle of genetic engineering has arrived: glow in the dark fish!

Eco-freaks are already moaning:

“It’s biological pollution,” said Andrew Kimbrell, executive director of the Center for Food Safety. He said that even if the GloFish was not dangerous, failure to regulate it would set a precedent allowing many other ornamental fish to enter the market unimpeded.

The fish may actually be the first positive thing to come from environmentalism: they “were originally bred to help detect environmental pollutants.”

The United States, South Korea, Japan and the European Union decided today to suspend construction of two nuclear reactors in North Korea. The nuclear reactors being built for North Korea are extortion payments by western nations meant to delay plutonium production at North Korea’s other nuclear plants (built with western aid as well, of course.) The suspension comes several months after North Korea announced that it was building nukes aimed at annihilating the United States because Bush called it “evil.” Not to worry, the suspension is only for a year, after which our government will resume helping North Korea develop the technology aimed at our destruction.

Meanwhile, aid shipments to support North Korea’s army are continuing by the west. CNN explains why a nice little communist dictatorship like North Korea is in such dire straights:

The isolated, hardline Communist state of 23 million people — branded part of an “axis of evil” by U.S. President George W. Bush — has been hard hit by several years of natural disasters, chronic food and energy shortages, and economic mismanagement.

Damn those isolationist bastards in the Bush administration for causing poor old North Korea such troubles! And here I thought it had something to do with North Korea being a brutal slave state. Silly me.

Not everyone is lining up to support everyone’s favorite dictator – “Japan suspended food aid after relations soured over the North Korean government’s handling of conflicts between the sides, especially the kidnappings of Japanese citizens to train North Korean spies.” How dare they think that the kidnapping and torture of their citizens and a few ballistic missiles lobbed at them justifies taking aid from millions of starting Korean soldier..err farmers. North Korea has responded by demanding that it is Japan that is responsible for atrocities because “all the crimes committed by Japan [before WWII] were war crimes and the most hideous human rights abuses which should be punished irrespective of the then domestic law or the statute of limitation.”

The Glorious Leader himself is sticking to his usual line: “This shows that it is only right for us to increase the nuclear deterrent force.” Wow, this guy can’t go wrong. He threatens to build nukes, and gets free nuclear plants. The more millions he starves to death, the more aid he gets for his military. He kidnaps and tortures Japanese citizens and he gets media sympathy for Japanese century war crimes. The more he shows the world what totalitarianism is really about, the more sympathy, pity and aid he gets. There’s never been a better time to be a communist dictator.

Now here is a job my advisor didn’t tell me about : tech suport for the mob.

With the coming of winter, I’ve added a third “space heater” to my room and posted new shots of me at work. If you haven’t seen my photo gallery at all, you should go to photos.freecapitalists.org…now.

I also wrote an autobiography for my about page. What do you think?

In the first 15 days of November, I had 1008 unique search engine hits from Google, contributing to most of my 38,181 hits and 4,258 visits. Here are the top 8 queries:

1. jewish racism
2. cultural misunderstanding
3. html compression
4. george bush award for excellence in public service
5. middle east terrorism
6. victorian morality
7. arguments for fox hunting
8. prostitution and religion

Looks like the FBI is finally prosecuting eco-terrorist organizations for being the criminal conspiracies they are.

I was browsing the web, when I came across the “Kabbalah Centre.” It’s basically Madonna’s attempt to make some money from the New Age movement. I was sure that this was a new age deal when the first thing the video on the homepage said is “Kabbalah is NOT a New Age movement.” The web site is actually very well designed, and sells all sort of neat stuff, like a $36 piece of string (“The Red String protects us from the influences of the Evil Eye”) and $20 t-shirt with mystical “ego-conquering” powers (“Simply focus your eyes on the letters, then visualize destroying your ego.”)
Anyway, Rabbi Madonna has some advice for doctors:

A patient was rushed into the ER with a heart attack. …. I asked that he be taken to the lab, and his heart actually stopped twice on the way. As it turned out, his right coronary artery was completely blocked. We worked on him for about 30 minutes, but nothing was helping. Whatever we tried failed. I felt so helpless. My last option was to start meditating intensely upon the healing sequence..Out of nowhere, the blocked artery opened!And even for network administrators:

Hebrew letters transmit spiritual signals. In the language of the Internet, they do it in broadband. Consider them T3 lines. Faster than DSL. Quicker than cable modems. They’re like fiber optic lines carrying the full spectrum of cosmic energy. I gotta get some of that kabbalaic T3 ego-conquering power, baby, yeah!

Police on Friday removed the corpse of a man believed to have hanged himself at least a year ago after builders and students at Budapest’s University of Arts had initially mistaken it for a modern sculpture.

The Bush administration is getting a lot of heat for the steel tariffs Bush agreed to impose on foreign steel importers, and rightly so. In granting the tariffs, Bush betrayed his alleged free-trade principles in a pragmatic move that is costing him much more than he bargained for. I hope not only for Bush’s sake, but much more for the sake of the economy that my income depends on, that he sticks to his principles on free trade. (And on national security, if that’s not asking too much.)

While the case against steel tariffs should be obvious, the bigger lesson is lost on the nations and organizations (such as WTO) threatening “retaliatory” tariffs. Their assumption is that trade is a zero-sum game, where the tariffs of one nation somehow “steal” the wealth of another. In retaliation, they threaten their own tariffs, won’t return the stolen wealth, but are supposed to put a stop to the leakage of any more. This is mercantilist nonsense, of course. Just like trade between any two individuals within a country, international trade is a case of voluntary exchange to mutual benefit. Tariffs imposed by any nation harm the producers of foreign exports in addition to the consumers within that nation. This applies equally to “first-strike” tariffs as well as to retaliatory tariffs. While retaliatory tariffs are a politically effective move because they can be targeted at politically nimble exporters to generate opposition within the “enemy” nation, the proper policy of any free country is to establish unconditional, unilateral, and permanent free trade. (With the exception of countries that pose a military threat, that is.)

As an aside, it is often argued that American steel manufacturers should get special treatment because European steel manufacturers get massive aid from the government. People fail to realize that European taxpayers are in effect paying for a large chunk of the steel we import from Europe. High American tariffs on imported steel are in effect a wealth transfer directly from the pockets of European taxpayers into the vault of the U.S. treasury dept, which has gained $650 million of hard-earned European money from imported steel tariffs since March 2002. On the down side, $680 million has been lost by American consumers due to the higher price of steel at home.

In a related note, check out Bruce Bartlett’s latest article, which explains why “the existence of a surplus or deficit may tell us exactly the opposite of what the mercantilists believed. Deficits may be a sign of strength, while surpluses are a sign of weakness.”

Much debate has been raised recently about the wisdom of online and electronic voting. Much of it has been confused by ignorance and fear of technology. As an “amateur expert” in computer technology and information security, I can say with confidence that electronic voting systems are inherently more secure, accurate, and less tolerant of tampering than any paper-based system could ever be.

Let’s examine some arguments against online voting, as the most commonly attacked version of electronic voting:
Continue reading “Why Online Voting is a Good Idea”