Disjointing the World Protects Us Against Global Manipulation

Here is some attempt to begin wrestling with this issue. However, their conclusion of Let go! is dissatisfying. No one either wants to or is able to actually let go. This quasi-Buddhist mantra is a lame duck excuse to quit worrying so much about something that is so important it ruffles your feathers all night long, yet so vague or ambiguous that your brain aches each time you consider the problem. In a later post, though, he gets it right, especially about the direction of commerce and the online community.

This guy grapples with a specific aspect of the issue much better. He is worth reading.

Here is another aspect of this particular topic about only one company invading the community of citizens. Yet, he looks at it as if he were himself a fledgling company, so-to-speak. His perspective is quite commercial, while missing the whole point. If someone is siphoning your thoughts off your blog, allowing others to converse about it at their place, but not letting you know about it, then you are being pimped and bannished from the conversation that you are generating. THAT's the rub!

Open Source, the Net and media piracy all have strong implications in this mess! Don't get me wrong though; I don't blame any of them. They are all consequences of transcendence beyond borders, as also are the new Germany, the European Union and the U.S. war in Afghanistan-Iraq-soon.to.be.Iran!

In short, the corporations deserve what they are getting. I DO blame them for many of the modern illnesses, starting with pollution, child labor, sweat shops in S.E. Asia, insatiable hunger for war-mongering, manipulation of the sinful nature in us through commerce and advertisements, unrighteous use of the law against people (through lobbying, raising the status of the corporation to higher legal entity than the citizen, curbing citizen's abilities to sue the companies while also limiting the citizen's use of bankruptcy as a defensive tool against their excessive fees and cruel attitudes in collecting debts). I have watched corporations ruin families' and individuals' lives and have been there to try to help these same people pick up the pieces.

I am opposed to Microsoft's bold attempts to monopolize their industry and expand into others with the same attitude. I am opposed to the passive attitude of the individual toward this sort of totalitarian attitude. I am opposed to the careless steward who abuses the people with whatever power they can grasp. I am opposed to the individual who has only their attitude to assault others with and they do not refrain from creating chaos or at least anxiety just to see that they can. The poison runs down hill, like Reagan's Trickle Down Economics.

Iran - Bush wakes up to it!

In case you missed it in the news, we have proof that U.S. President Bush is slow on the uptake. In this article by the Washington Post, from the 12 April 2008, we read that the Bush Administration has decided that Iran, not Al Queda, is the top threat to U.S. attempts to stabilize Iraqi democracy.

When we attacked Iraq, just before we entered Afghanistan, I told my friends that we would have to fight Iran too. After all, we helped install Sadaam into power in Iraq, we drove him back out of Kuwait (Desert Shield and Desert Storm, under the first Bush) and we were finally going in to remove him from his totalitarian power trip. The whole mess was the result of the U.S. trying to covertly build a buffer between Iran and the rest of the anti-Israeli Arab nations. Certainly, we would replace Sadaam with a far more democratic system that would be deeply influenced by Washington and provide an even stronger buffer against Iran. So Iran now has theological reasons as well as ethnic and political reasons to oppose the U.S. presence in Iraq. From what angle could the Bush Administration NOT see this one coming?

The World is Becoming Disjointed

I have watched for some time now as the world has become more disjointed with the rise of the Net. Some people have practically abandonned the Net, while others have abandonned their families and friends, replacing them with remote ones. What is happening?

I read indexes of blogs and wonder, "Who cares?" So what if this person thinks something about nothing! Who is going to waste their time to read that blog? Certainly funny blogs can attrack many people. Serious blogs may attract people too, but only kooks who have an axe to grind. So all the kooks attack each other with their rubber axes, screaming crusading snarls, flailing their coffee cups at their monitors when their axes are shown for what they really are.

Where can we go from here? Where are the real friends? What can the use of this fathomless pit of blogging be? Someone throw me a rope!

Spoofing your citizenship to servers!

Here's a good trick if you get a message saying you cannot access some resource on the Net because all slots for your country are full or you just get some message saying you are denied access. This only works if the limitations are due to you not being inside the country of the server.

Find out what country the company who is offering the resource is in. Usually at the bottom or top of the page is an About Us button or link. Once you find that out it is rather straight forward. Google free 'country name' proxies (i.e. free russian proxies). You should be able to find a few pages with lists of free public proxies. You'll have to try them one at a time or randomly to get one that works, though most of them might work right off the bat.

Open the settings for the connection of your browser. Don't even ask about how to do this in MS Internet Explorer, though it is easy to do! Stay away from that piece of trash! It is the world's biggest security risk and whore in the world! It spreads VD (viruses) to your computer and allows anyone to have sex with your computer (namely, hackers, who'll have sex with ANY computer that lets them). I think you get the picture.


-->In the section of the connections settings you can mark that your computer is going through a proxy. That is where you also put in the address and port of the proxy in the country you wish to be seen as a bonafide citizen of. The address might look something like this: 134.89.2.22:80 or 219.93.178.162:3128 . There will be four sets of numbers from one to three digits long, separated by periods. On the end of this string of numbers will be the port number of any length, though usually only up to four digits long, set off by a colon.
Then you access your resource again and viola! The server thinks you are Russian or Danish or whatever nationality belongs to the country of the proxy you put in.

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My Favorite Tools - I

Is a great site to get new calendars or to share your own. Try it! You can get calendars of holidays for each country in the world or football schedules and much more. The calendar does not erase your current entries in the calendar on your computer, but merges with it.


This is a great, free Groupware program. A groupware program sits on a server somewhere allowing its members to collaborate on projects. It can be used to integrate any kind of community or group, not just for projects and work!

Evolution is a Linux version of Outlook. It is quite robust! If you use Linux, either through KDE or Gnome, you will want to take this for a spin. If you do not use Linux and have considered trying it out, this is one more reason to switch. Microsoft charges you the cost of MS Office to get Outlook, but Evolution comes included with Linux and we all know that Linux is free! :-)

The Catholic Encyclopedia

Here is a good place to go if you need to know something about the Catholic faith, whether or not you yourself are catholic. At the top right is a tiny menu to access the Suma Theolgica by Thomas Aquinas, The church fathers' writings, the Catholic Bible and a library of church documents.

Enjoy these tools!

Top 100 Tools for Learning Spring 2008

Top 100 Tools for Learning Spring 2008
Final ranking as at 31 March 2008

I agree with many of these. The top one is rather useless from my perspective. I have always faired better with refined and targeted Google searches than any so-called delicious bookmark list.

As for the Goolgle Reader, I have not tried it, but a news feeder is rather straight forward. Maybe it is on the list because no one has tried any other news feeders and they simply love the idea of being fed.

Firefox as a tool is a bit of a stretch. Actually, Firefox plugins should be listed there instead, since these are the real power of this browser. With plugins you can customize the tools available from within your browser until your browser almost becomes another operating system within your operating system (whether Linux, Windows or Mac).

Well, well! Powerpoint? Again, like with the feeder, perhaps the people meant the category of programs rather than the program in particular. Afterall, if people barely know how to turn on their computers they will probably only use what was pre-installed with their system, which if their os is Windows then they likely have MSOffice if any office software. They should try Open Office's presentation element. You can even export to PDF without additional software.

I am proud to see Audacity on the list of the top 10! I reccomend this program to all of my students for a recording project I assign them. It is a great little program that runs on both Linux and Windows.

I think someone from Google has been poisoning this list. Google Docs is terrible. I want to view the whole book! Most of the best books are only partials. The books that are whole are already freely available in the best repositories and can be downloaded directly to your computer so you can read them anytime you like.

Ah! Moodle, originally for Linux, is truly an excellent resource for building an educational site for your students and staff. I have yet seen one as complete or as easy to install and set up.

While YouTube is fun and useful for quick and dirty videos of certain themes you may be teaching on, it is a waste of time for serious work. But I still use it for fun.

This list is worth exploring, so I would reccomend setting aside a Saturday and trying these out. Don't forget to keep a list of what you like. Otherwise, you may really forget to use them even if they are installed on your system.

A Gift of Life Turns Deadly

This (A Gift of Life Turns Deadly) is quite a shocking story! Can you imagine how you would feel as the donor's parents, the donor recipients or the doctors? Unbelievable! Don't you think this would have been discovered in a routine scanning of the organs prior to the transplants? Of course, this all happened due to a misdiagnosis of the 15-year old boy's condition. Doctors are human and make mistakes as we all do, but when they make a mistake it can easily take the life of a bright and promising child.

From a site dedicated to the young man:

Alex Koehne, a ninth grader at Pierson High School in Sag Harbor NY suddenly passed on March 30, 2007 after a brief battle with Non Hodgkin’s Large T Cell Lymphoma. Alex, a much-loved son, brother, grandson, nephew, cousin and friend to many is greatly missed.

A vibrant and outgoing young man, Alex had a wide range of interests as demonstrated by his participation in acting on stage in school plays, as a member of the East Hampton football team and, as we fondly recall, a true passion for watersports.