Your Spam Filter Is Your Problem, Not Mine
If I send you an email and it's intercepted by your spam filter, that's your problem not mine. I've had people send me email telling me about how their spam filter blocked my email. Thanks for the info but that's a problem you need to deal with. There is absolutely nothing I can do about it. My email is functioning properly, your spam filter is not. It's your problem. Fix it. Add me to your safe list.
Microsoft Verification Email Blocked By Microsoft SPAM Filter
This should be appended to the definition of ridiculous.
I just signed up for some kind of webinar from Microsoft about Exchange Server. After entering all my information and pressing "Continue" only to have it predictably lose all my information and make me enter it all over again (so 1995), I press continue once more and it tells me it has sent a verification email to my Hotmail account.
So, I guess even though I am now fully logged in and harnessed to my Big Brother is Watching.NET account as it so coldly demanded after expunging all my previous information, it still needs to verify that it can send me spam?
So I wait. No email. Since they have so effectively broken the back button in their signup process, I am quite reluctant to go through it again. I choose to wait. Eventually I wander over to my Hotmail junk mail and look, there it is.
Huh? You send me an email to verify that you can send spam to the email account you created for me when signing up for your Big Brother.NET account that you required I sign up for, but then you helpfully block your own verification email as well as rendering the verification link in it unclickable? Microsoft can't manage to put their own mail servers on a Hotmail safe list?
Here’s The Actual Muhammad Cartoon
You'd think a cartoon that has gotten so much attention would be a little easier to find on the internet. I guess the protests are working. Anyway, so here one of them, seems there where 12?
Pretty damn offensive, huh? Completely baffling to me. Am I not the only one that looks at the cartoon and says, you have GOT to be kidding. That's it? I was expecting Jesus having his way with Muhammad's ass, or Jesus, Moses and Muhammad in a circle jerk or something (yes, telling isn't it).
Now in "retaliation" an Iranian newspaper has started a contest for the most offensive cartoon about the holocaust? Huh? What does that have to do with the Danes and Muhammad? Are the Danes Jewish? I don't get it.
"The Western papers printed these sacrilegious cartoons on the pretext of freedom of expression, so let's see if they mean what they say and also print these Holocaust cartoons"
How are cartoons making fun of genocide motivated by racism in any way sacrilegious? Seems to just illustrate their racism to me. But whatever, bring it. Yea, lets start a fight over who can be more offensive, cause I know we'd win that one. I will start working on my version now, I can picture it already and it's amazingly offensive. Shit, you thought that was offensive... you're gonna blow up the world when you see mine.
This from the New York Times, At Mecca Meeting, Cartoon Outrage Crystalized:
The closing communique took note of the issue when it expressed "concern at rising hatred against Islam and Muslims and condemned the recent incident of desecration of the image of the Holy Prophet Muhammad in the media of certain countries" as well as over "using the freedom of expression as a pretext to defame religions."
Umm, well in my mind that's one of the main reasons for freedom of expression, defaming religions. But anyway, so to express their concern at the rising hatred against Islam and Muslims, they start the Danish embassy on fire? Umm..., so people liking you better now? Guess you showed them to think you were all just crazed lunatics.
The leader of Lebanon's governing Hezbollah faction observed that the whole episode could have been avoided if only the novelist Salman Rushdie had been properly slaughtered for writing "The Satanic Verses." Too bad he's not running the world, huh? I guess it can get worse than Bush as president and a congress-full of yellow Democrats. Bush should exploit that angle to improve his ratings.
The French Democracy
The French Democracy is a short film on the recent riots in France. It was made by Alex Chan, Parisan-born but of Chinese parents, to "to correct what was being said in the media, especially in the United States" about the riots. He used a techinique called machinima--using a video game engine to make his movie.
It's a really interesting way to tell a story and useful way to enlighten the discussion. Worth a watch.
PT-141, Sex in a Bottle, Coming Soon
Move over Ecstasy. In final testing and about 3 years away, PT-141 is a revolutionary new drug that makes you horny, makes you wanna take of your clothes and have sex. It's is a nasal spray that increases libido by acting directly on the brain in the regions that are activated when you're horny, not on the bloodstream like Viagra. It actually effects desire, makes you want it. It works for both men and women. It's non-addictive and has no serious side effects. As Mark Morford puts it:
"[It's] the cheap, easy-to-use, hassle-free sex drug everyone's been waiting for. It is nirvana, the magic bullet, the simplest route to quickie sex you've ever known. It could be the greatest thing to happen to sex in 50 years. And also, of course, the worst.
Makes you want to try it, no?"
It's the first derivative of the drug Melanotan, dubbed the "Barbie drug," a drug discovered by researchers looking for a drug that would tan your skin using it's own natural pigment, melanin, protecting you from ultraviolet rays. During testing they noticed that as well as making you tan, it had the unintended side effects of curbing your appetite, softening your skin, making your hair shiny, and making you incredibly horny. Isn't nature ironic? So the relation between those things it wasn't all media influence. Turns out that was just too much packed into one drug for it to be marketable, so PT-141 tones it down and bit and just makes you incredibly horny.
So, things are looking up. I like the idea of spraying it into the air at dance clubs (as long as it's consensual, of course). I could definitely see it decreasing the divorce rate and, well, having positive effects on quite a lot of things. Like, what would the world be like if this guy actually got laid. Might not have so many hateful people in the world, right? I mean, the sexual revolution of the 60's, I wasn't around but as I'm told it had at least something to do with a new drug, LSD. Well, maybe this will be our version. A sexual-medicine advisor on the trials says:
"It's not merely allowing a sexual response to take place more easily; it may be having an effect, literally, on how we think and feel."
Better living through chemistry, I'm all for it. If they come out with an HIV vaccine at the same time, things could get quite interesting. Anyone got any ideas for a brand name? I vote for "Lust Dust."
Vizu is like flickr for polls
I ran across this new site called "Vizu":http://vizu.com/ that's all about creating polls. It's very Web 2.0 with a bunch of Ajax submitting, RSS feeds of lots of useful information, and an easy copy/paste iframe to post the poll to your blog. If you sign up it makes anonymous use of your demographic information to provide further analysis of poll results. Seems pretty interesting and if it ever gets as popular as "flickr":http://flickr.com/ or "del.icio.us":http://del.icio.us/ then it could become really useful.
Here's a few of the "polls I've made":http://vizu.com/polls-by-member.jsp?member=derek73.
Why Immediate Withdrawl From Iraq Makes Sense
Luke forwarded me this article, Michael Schwartz on Immediate Withdrawal which elaborates nicely on the following four reasons why immediate withdrawal from Iraq makes sense.
* The U.S. military is already killing more civilian Iraqis than would likely die in any threatened civil war;
* The U.S. presence is actually aggravating terrorist (Iraqi-on-Iraqi) violence, not suppressing it;
* Much of the current terrorist violence would be likely to subside if the U.S. left;
* The longer the U.S. stays, the more likely that scenarios involving an authentic civil war will prove accurate.
Before reading that article I definitely was more sympathetic to the claim that leaving now would leave the country in anarchy/chaos. Now I'm not so sure that we're not the cause of the anarchy/chaos.
Real Campaign Finance Reform
In the US we should be pretty aware that the outcome of our elections are largely influenced by how much money each candidate can raise. Whoever can raise the most money has the most chance of swaying the uninformed 'swing' voter, or hiring the best advisor that can dice the polls to figure out which issues will give them the slight majority. Politics becomes about raising money.
Every time I heard desperate pleas for money from politicians I wonder, what do you need my money for? To buy back public airwaves from the people we licensed them to? To pay even higher priced consultants to slice and dice the polls? I thought I voted with my vote, not my dollars. What about those that don't have dollars? Seems to me they have much less of a vote in this democracy. Hell, if you have enough money you can just fund your own campaign, al. la. Ross Perot. Not exactly equal opportunity.
h2. It's morally wrong for politicians to accept money from people. Period.
I feel it is morally wrong for elected officials to accept money that isn't their salary. When an elected official accepts money from someone, any human is going to feel obliged to treat this person differently than the person that has contributed nothing. It's common courtesy. But this is in conflict with their responsibility to represent all of their electorate equally, not based on how much money they have. In fact, since everyone else does it, all elected officials are effectively required to to accept gifts to compete. Why do we force our elected officials to be beggars?
I know the current reality of our election campaign system is mired in a much different arrangement, but still my "naive, absent of reality" opinion is that _money_ should not be a factor in our elections, and it's the responsibility of the government we've created to ensure that happens. Elections are the one thing we can all agree is the responsibility of our self-government, the one thing that makes the rest of our democracy work. But the reality in the US today is that even though we all have a 'vote', those with money can use that money to make their 'vote' much more valuable that those without any money. The "McCain/Feingold reforms":http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d107:H.R.2356:a may make this even worse, as now campaigns need these extra "vote with your dollars" votes even more. We need to fix that.
h2. How do we fix it?
I would start by making it illegal for elected officials or those running for elected office to accept gifts or money from any private, corporate, religious or non-profit entity. All election campaigns should be 100% publicly funded. Arguments about the cost of that are silly. If we can all agree that elections are a primary responsibility of government, then we can agree that this responsibility can require commensurate funds.
Second, instead of charging station owners for a license to broadcast on our airwaves, then them charging us back to them for the right to conduct the people's business on those airwaves, lets just not give it to them in the first place. The license comes with the burden of broadcasting election commercials. Decrease the license fee if you need to. I'm fine with our government bearing the financial brunt of that burden, whatever it may be. The 2004 Presidential and Senatorial campaigns spent about "$4 billion dollars":http://www.opensecrets.org/pressreleases/2004/04spending.asp. Considering we pay about "$300 billion":http://civilliberty.about.com/od/uspoliticsandpolicies/i/e2004NatDebt.htm per year to service our nation debt ("incurred almost solely by Regan/Bush I/Bush II":http://www.ctj.org/html/debt0603.htm), I wouldn't have any issues if the cost to do this ran into the $10-20 billion/year range. It should be one of our government's main roles to equalize the situation, to remove money from the equation as much as possible.
Third, I would pay these elected officials a lot more. If senators made $5 million a year, they would have a harder time being swayed by the $250,000 yatch some lobbyist could give their nephew. If we're going to do this we should make their salaries on the same level as corporate leaders of similar stature. Perhaps we should even tie their salaries to the average of corporate leader's salaries; it could serve as incentive to make sure businesses prosper. But we should pay them enough that other people's money won't sway them. Again, paying our elected officials is one of the few things we can all agree our government should be responsible for, the comparatively miniscule about of money required to pay them well shouldn't be a factor.
h2. But if you don't give money ...?
A question I'm not sure about, how to you qualify to have your campaign funded? I think it should be as open and available to anyone that wants to run as possible. But it shouldn't be _too_ easy either. Being a public official requires _work_, so _work_ should be required to become one. I just would like that _work_ to be something other than raising money. Being good at getting people to part with their money doesn't necessarily mean they'll be a good elected representative.
Currently we show support by giving money. If you can't give _money_ to candidates to express support, how do we ensure that the people running, and spending public money on those campaigns, aren't running a boondoggle and actually have or could get some support among the electorate? (Even if a big chunk the money we spent on publicly funded election campaigns was wasted on boondoggles, we'd still have a better system that we have today, imo. The machinery of democracy is a better place than most to throw some cash around.)
Perhaps a solution would be to provide the option of altering the distribution of campaign contributions derived your own taxes? If you didn't alter it, as most people would do, your tax contributions allotted for campaigns would be split evenly among all the campaigns. If you really cared about a campaign, you could direct some of your already allocated tax dollars specifically to that campaign.
Also, what about the rich using their own money to outspend competitors? Do we ban people from spending their own money on their campaigns as well?
What do you think?
Why I Support A Gas Tax
Oil is a finite resource and as it runs out, gas _will_ be $5/gal someday, it's only a matter of when. The only responsible objective is to find an alternative. I support a gas tax because I'd rather use that money _now_ to help find alternative fuels and clean up the mess we've made, rather than give it to the Saudi's so they can build the "world's biggest island":http://www.thepalm.ae/ and the "world's tallest":http://wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=38413 "building":http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn6781.
I do think it's .. ironic that American's have paid Bush's tax to the Saudi's 10 times over by now in increased gas prices. A link between oil money and terrorism is at least as viable as a link to drug money. But our government doesn't put that in commercials. We pay the expenses for both sides of our war in Iraq.
I've gotten several emails from people over the last few days about boycotting certain gas companies. One mentioned $46 billion dollar net losses for oil companies if the US didn't by oil for one day. Needless to say I won't be buying any gas that day (I don't drive a car). But the rest of America will. Because they have no other option. And we never will have any other option as long as the gas flows cheaply. Gas for $1/gal is immoral, in my opinion. We need find better things to spend $46 billion/day on, and hopefully better people to give it to.
A Most Ironic New Name for Creationism
The new name for creationism is most ironic, I must say. Am I the only one that sees the irony? Intelligent Design? It's like they were sick of looking unintelligent so they decided to come up with another name, but the best they could come up with was to just put the word "intelligent" in the name. Not a very intelligent name.
How does one "teach" Intelligent Design? Point out everything uncanny about the world and say, "See, doesn't it seem like there's some 'intelligence' behind that?" Evolution has fossils and now "amazing digital organizms":http://derekgulbranson.com/2005/08/06/digital-organisms-refute-intelligent-design to study. What does Intelligent Design have for science students to study? Intelligent Design is an opinion, a faith, not a science. It's the exact kind of thing science was created to save us from.
I used to look around the world and think, there is no way that all this could have just _happened_. We go from hydrogen atoms all the way to buildings and societies, and our only explanation is just random mutations and time? I guess the more I learn about the world and how it works and the evidence behind that, the more start to feel like the world really is that crazy and amazing, no "Giant Spaghetti Monster":http://www.venganza.org/ is needed.
Creation was the only theory we had before we had science. The Church inflicted death on anyone that came up with another theory. I think it wasn't until the 1800's that the Catholic Church finally let Galileo out of hell for saying the world was round. So, I wouldn't look to the religious right for answers about the true nature of the universe. It's not very open source or democratic over there. Just lots of being offended and fearful when someone poses ideas that threaten their house of cards. Anyone that believes things don't evolve is an idiot. Evolution happens, you can debate when/how/where/what, but you can't just say it doesn't happen.