Is Zen Buddhism?

Hans-Werner Sahm

The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences

“War and the military are, without question, among the very worst of the earth’s afflictions,” an American conservative of distinction once wrote, “responsible for the majority of the torments, oppressions, tyrannies, and suffocations of thought the West has for long been exposed to. In military or war society anything resembling true freedom of thought, true individual initiative in the intellectual and cultural and economic areas, is made impossible—not only cut off when they threaten to appear but, worse, extinguished more or less at root. Between military and civil values there is, and always has been, relentless opposition. Nothing has proved more destructive of kinship, religion, and local patriotisms than has war and the accompanying military mind.”

That was Robert Nisbet in 1975. In The Conservative Intellectual Movement Since 1945, George Nash identified Nisbet, along with Russell Kirk and Richard Weaver, as one of the three most noteworthy of those intellectuals he identified as traditional conservatives

Twilight of Conservatism

Banned and censored album covers

"You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you" --Leon Trotsky

Pentagon investigations in to prisoner deaths are "grossly inadequate and flawed", according to Human Rights First (HRF), "a 25-year-old lawyers' group":

"...criminal investigators have routinely failed to interview key witnesses or collect and maintain usable evidence, such as body parts or basic ballistics evidence, for possible prosecution"

"In addition, commanders have often either repeated failed to even to report deaths of detainees in the custody of their command, or delayed reporting them for days or even weeks after they occurred, greatly complicating efforts to collect relevant evidence. In one case, a death of an Iraqi detainee was not reported until a year later, and the case was closed without any determination of the cause of death"

Let Those Dopers Be (Thanks to Mike!)

Myth: Hitler was a leftist.

Fact: Nearly all of Hitler's beliefs placed him on the far right.

Programmers Need To Learn Statistics Or I Will Kill Them All

The residents of Fallujah, 40 miles west of Baghdad, nicknamed soldiers at the nearby base "the Murderous Maniacs," New York-based Human Rights Watch said. "The soldiers considered this name a badge of honor."

Soldiers in the Army's elite 82nd Airborne Division vented their frustration by systematically torturing Iraqi detainees from 2003 into 2004, hitting them with baseball bats and dousing them with chemicals (according to HRW)...

The Ten Worst Jobs in America
The Ten Stupidest Utopias

"But why should we hear about body bags, and deaths, and how many, what day it's gonna happen, and how many this or what do you suppose? Or, I mean, it's, it's not relevant. So, why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that?"

--Barbara Bush on Good Morning America March 18, 2003

'Satanist' dances on Reagan's grave

None Dare Call It Stolen

Leaked email from US military prosecutors desribes Guantanamo tribunals as "rigged" and "a fraud on the American people"

"The White House on Thursday threatened to veto a massive Senate bill for $442 billion in next year's defense programs if it moves to regulate the Pentagon's treatment of detainees or sets up a commission to investigate operations at Guantanamo Bay prison and elsewhere..."

PATRIOT act being used to go after "common criminals" instead of against terrorists, as it was supposedly created to do. Story here

"If tyranny and oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy." --James Madison

Ever had two sound files which were identical, except for the quality they were encoded at, and wanted to find out if one really sounded better than the other?

Of course, if there's a great difference in quality then just playing one after the other will be enough to tell. However, it's more difficult to tell if the files are close to each other in quality.

That's where my little s0ngfr0g program comes in. It will play short, random segments from each file and let you vote on the quality of each segment. The file that has the most votes overall is considered to be the better sounding file.

The hope is that listening to short, identical segments from each file, back-to-back, will give you a good idea of their relative quality. Also, the file that's being played will be hidden from you until all the voting is over, so that knowing which file the sample came from won't bias your decisions.

The name s0ngfr0g comes from the program jumping around to different parts of the songs it plays.

This program requires:

perl (tested on v5.8.5)
xmms (tested on 1.2.10)
xmmsctrl (tested on 1.8)

NYT reports details of prisoners being tortured to death at Bagram air base in Afghanistan

"Private capital tends to become concentrated in few hands, partly because of competition among the capitalists, and partly because technological development and the increasing division of labor encourage the formation of larger units of production at the expense of the smaller ones. The result of these developments is an oligarchy of private capital the enormous power of which cannot be effectively checked even by a democratically organized political society. This is true since the members of legislative bodies are selected by political parties, largely financed or otherwise influenced by private capitalists who, for all practical purposes, separate the electorate from the legislature.

The consequence is that the representatives of the people do not in fact sufficiently protect the interests of the underprivileged sections of the population. Moreover, under existing conditions, private capitalists inevitably control, directly or indirectly, the main sources of information (press, radio, education). It is thus extremely difficult, and indeed in most cases quite impossible, for the individual citizen to come to objective conclusions and to make intelligent use of his political rights."

from Albert Einstein's Why Socialism?

"I didn't even start dropping out until my mid-20's... In fourth grade I wanted to blow up the school, but I didn't know how... In high school.. I wanted to go live off the land in the Idaho wilderness, but actually doing it seemed as remote and difficult as going to the moon... [now] I'm a specialist at eating garbage -- as I draft this I'm eating a meal I made with organic eggs from a dumpster, and later I'll make a pie of dumpstered apples. I live on under $2000 a year, I have no permanent residence, and moving to the Idaho wilderness now seems like a reachable goal -- but no longer the best idea..."

"Before, I just intellectually thought it was a bad idea to go to war in Iraq. When I saw the faces of the people, the people I was hurting, that I was assisting in hurting I really began to change on a spiritual level...

I looked at these guys and I thought, 'Man, these are young, poor, uneducated guys who didn't have a lot of choices in their life and are forced to fight us'...

And I looked at the guys in my own unit and I thought, 'Man, we're exactly the same... all the guys in my unit were young, poor, didn't have the best education, didn't have the best choices in life'

And when I came to that realisation I felt all my fighting spirit just sort of bleed out of me..."

A consciencious objector talks about his experience in Iraq: Part One and Part Two

Informative animation on what's wrong with Bush's Social Security plan.

"Washington has for the first time acknowledged to the UN that prisoners have been tortured at US detention centres in Guantanamo Bay, as well as Afghanistand and Iraq, a UN source said... UN sources said it was the first time the world body has received such a frank statement on torture from US authorities."

Torture Works

1984comic

A newly leaked memo said the only way the allies could justify military action was to place Saddam Hussein in a position where he ignored or rejected a United Nations ultimatum ordering him to co-operate with the weapons inspectors. But it warned this would be difficult. "It is just possible that an ultimatum could be cast in terms which Saddam would reject," the document says. But if he accepted it and did not attack the allies, they would be "most unlikely" to obtain the legal justification they needed. The suggestions that the allies use the UN to justify war contradicts claims by Blair and Bush, repeated during their Washington summit last week, that they turned to the UN in order to avoid having to go to war. The attack on Iraq finally began in March 2003.

Epidemic Computing at Cornell

Teacher in Spain censored for defending filesharing.

A great NPR program about religion in politics in America

In Pursuit of the Gold Star: Diary of a Law Student
from Unbound: Harvard Journal of the Legal Left

"Rhetoric is a quarrel with others; poetry is a quarrel with oneself." William Butler Yeats

Now why would anyone throw photos like these away? (the archives are even better)

Eighth Annual ICFP Programming Contest

And remember kids, when you live in a police state you should always obey the police

Primer: the best movie I've seen all year...

I recommend not reading anything about the movie ahead of time, because half the fun is figuring it out for yourself... and you have to be patient at the beginning, as it starts out pretty slow... but it's worth it... just pay attention!

After you've seen it see it again until you understand it as best you can, then watch the director's commentary. Then read the Imdb and PrimerMovie message boards. And finally, there's this.

Why amateur radio is essential

Video of Morse code vs SMS text messaging on Jay Lenno

Then:

NPR's original mission statement in 1970... called for "some hard news, every desire to serve an alternative audience: "urban areas with sizeable nonwhite audiences," "student groups studying ecology," "groups with distinct lifestyles and interests not now served by electronic media."

The first broadcast of All Things Considered led with the segment about the protest rally, followed by a zesty array of stories: a roundtable discussion with reporters from the Christian Science Monitor, which seguéd into a reading of two antiwar poems from the era of World War I; a dispatch from a barber shop in Iowa whose proprietor was reeling from lost income as more men chose to wear their hair long; a portrait of a nurse turned heroin addict; and, finally, a discussion between Allen Ginsberg and his father, Louis, about the merits and shortcomings of drug abuse...

And now:

On the weekend of March 19, 2005, [the day of demonstrations marking] the second anniversary of the Iraq War... NPR's programming choices that weekend [were]: "a 'patriotic,' feel-good West Point piece; sports fans' feelings toward a baseball player (yes, steroids); more feel-good filler about an Iraqi-American painter and her use of color; Bantu Refugees Adjust to New Lives in America. Quote from the story: 'we give the government of America the high five'; Army Chefs Battle for Best-Dish Honors; a singing physics professor."

In October 2002 political correspondent Mara Liasson, in an appearance on Fox News Sunday, assailed two Democratic Congressmen for traveling to Iraq. "These guys are a disgrace," she said. "Look, everybody knows it's...Politics 101 that you don't go to an adversary country, an enemy country, and badmouth the United States, its policies and the President of the United States. I mean, these guys ought to, I don't know, resign." In the same vein, Weekend Edition Saturday host Scott Simon -- who was an antiwar activist at the University of Chicago in the Vietnam era -- wrote a swaggering essay for the Wall Street Journal editorial page on October 11, 2001, titled "Even Pacifists Must Support This War," and, in a March 2003 speech in Seattle, he reportedly expressed support for the US invasion of Iraq...

Excerpts from Scott Sherman's account of NPR's sad road from alternative media to "respectibility" in Good, Gray NPR

Just wrote a very simple flashcard program, which I call flashleit, that uses the Leitner system to sort flashcards in such a way that difficult questions are asked more frequently.

The program only requires Perl and the standard UNIX/Linux utilities like "ls" and "mv" to run.

Its main advantage over similar programs lies in its simplicity. It stores its data in regular files and directories, requires no fancy/fat libraries, and gives users the freedom to create and edit flashcards using their favorite editors or even directly from the shell.

I've tried to make everything simple and transparent. I hope you find it useful.

Here is the best Linux program I've found yet for learning morse code.

Performance Measurements of Some NiMH Battery Chargers

Other interesting chargers:

LaCrosse BC-900
Maha MH-C401FS
Green Batteries chargers

Two NetFlix-like services that carry foreign and independent films you won't find on Netflix:

GreenCine and Film Movement

Can't agree with everything on the 100 years of ART cinema (from a spiritual perspective) movie list, but the fact that it has two of Tarkovsky's best films in the top 5 says a lot.

DokuWiki "is... mainly aimed at creating documentation of any kind. It is targeted at developer teams, workgroups and small companies. It has a simple but powerful syntax which makes sure the datafiles remain readable outside the Wiki and eases the creation of structured texts. All data is stored in plain text files – no database is required."

pngrewrite: "a little utility that reduces the unnecessarily large palettes that too many programs write into PNG files. It also optimizes transparency settings, and reduces the bits-per-pixel if possible. Handy for post-processing images before putting them on a web site."

I am starting to learn American Sign Language. The first step has been becoming proficient in the Manual Alphabet.

In order to practice signing letters that I was having trouble with I wrote this perl script, which will search through a dictionary for words containing specific letters.

Enjoy!

Word of the day:

jipijapa: A certain plant used to make Panama hats.

I just love how it sounds. :)

Just wrote a little GUI frontend for wmconfig... you can get a copy of it here.

It requires perl and Zenity

Strange Daze
Just your everyday alien conspiracies, sanity-shattering Lovecraftian demons, etc...

Darfur war through children's drawings

White House exerting more overt influence on PBS

Just wrote an everything2 New Writeups XML Ticker to RSS converter.

You can get it here.

I myself use it with snownews

What is scientism?

Girl vs pig
3
6
107
133

Myyrakuume

Karu Luonto

Achewood

Abandoned Places

Rate my gasmask

Bunny Suicides

I've just finished a no-frills chess ladder management program that I wrote in perl. Enjoy!

Human Rights Watch demands independent investigation in to Rumsfeld's role in torture scandal

America outsourcing torture

GasBGon

ChessGraphics

Dabora Gallery in NYC

Deathwatch

Advertisement alluding to famous depiction of Christ banned

Coming soon to a kangaroo court near you!

Carlos Betancourt

Arturo Rivera
more...

Francisco Toledo, "Rabbit Beheading Bean"

Gabriela Morawetz

Scott Treleaven

MailArt Forum
The Commodification of MailArt and MailArt scams

"On July 23, 2002, a skinny, bookish physics professor coughed up th slop of his internal organs and drifted off into a permanent sleep. Surrounding him were mountain men, skinheads, and former commies and anarchists who had given up their lives to hunker down in this godforsaken West Virginia compound. All had discovered him, in one way or another, through the written word: a vast legacy of thousands of self-published pages that with the leader’s passing formed the group's most precious asset.

This was the death waltz of Dr. William Pierce, acclaimed by a tiny subculture of "intellectual" racists, neo-Nazis and Klansmen as a milquetoast furher who would lead the white race to victory in the coming Racial Apocalypse..."

Cali Ruchala in Xerography Debt 13

Lee Bontecou

Ralph Hamilton

Tom Uttech

Beatrice Helg

Eccentric Chess Players

Children's art of the Spanish Civil War

"The White House is defending its practice of distributing government-funded video news releases to TV stations with the hopes that the stations will air the segments as real news.

On Sunday the NYT featured an extensive front-page investigation detailing the extent that pre-packaged news releases, produced by the federal government, are being used by television stations across the country. The Times reported at least 20 federal agencies, including the Pentagon and Census Bureau, have distributed hundreds of TV-news segments in the past four years. Many were then broadcast on local stations without crediting the government as the source of the information.

On Monday White House Press Secretary Scott McLelan claimed the videos are appropriate as long as they're factual. Last month the General Accounting Office, however, ruled that the videos violate laws that ban covert propaganda. But the Bush administration is ordering all agencies to disregard the GAO's directive."

from DemocracyNow

Atomic chess is like normal chess with the following modifications:

Pieces explode, leaving squares empty. After a capture is completed, the capturing man explodes. The square that the capture occurs on is 'ground zero'. All pieces (not pawns) that are on squares adjacent to ground zero (horizontally, vertically and diagonally) are destroyed in the explosion...

You can play Atomic chess on FICS

Chess ratings and titles explained

Chess Tip of the Day: "It is often better to leave a permanently weak pawn untaken. The idea is that sooner or later the enemy will be induced to use his pieces to protect it, and perish by cramp." --C.J.S. Purdy's "Fine Art of Chess Annotation and Other Thoughts" (Volume One)

While looking for the light, you may suddenly be devoured by darkness and find the true light. --Jack Kerouac

I occasionally play works by contemporary composers, and for two reasons. Firest, to discourage the composer from writing any more, and secondly to remind myself how much I appreciate Beethoven. --Jascha Heifetz

My talent as an artist is to walk across a moor, or place a stone on the ground. --Richard Long

Whatever speech I hear, no matter who is speaking nor what he says, my mind is already working to find the musical equivalent for such speech. --Modest Mussorgsky

Of course, to start with, I love all my pupils. Then I find the talented ones. They are always the most arrogant. --Alexandra Danilova

Second and Meta- Moore's Laws

Just what is it that psychedelic experiences reveal?

Manos, the Hands of Fate

Guantanamo prisoners stage mass protest, some by strangling themselves and performing "self-harm incidents"... What, I wonder is the formal function of the "behavioral health services unit"

Satirist of Pope fined in Poland

In May of last year Symour Hersh wrote about a secret Pentagon unit that was responsible for the torture going on in Abu Ghraib and around the world.

Today the government reveals the existence of this unit, and Hersh is vindicated.

Hersh, you'll remember, is that reporter who recently revealed there are US special forces units in Iran, scouting for targets in preparation for another war.

Flu activity from the CDC

More signs America is getting ready to invade Iran next

New chemical warfare

Power of Nightmares author answers questions for the BBC