I haven’t been posting much as of late, but I have added a bunch of quotes to my quotes database that I’ve posted around the web. Here’s some recent things I’ve said that I thought were worth saving:

“It is better to be truthful and wise than to be naive, believing lies.”

“America has lost it’s right to be called the land of the free. As a citizen cannot claim to be free if they have a debt to pay, the American government cannot claim to be free if it is swimming in IOUs. America’s freedom is currently on loan.”

“Debt and freedom are opposites.”

“No person is free until they can tell the truth without retaliation, live without debt, and change their mind without disaffection. This is freedom from religion, freedom from inequity, and freedom from dogma.”

“There is a big difference between believing in something without evidence and believing in something in spite of evidence. The first is blind faith which is unwise but not necessarily harmful. The second is illness and should be treated as such.”

“I refuse to believe in creationism because when you blame a supreme being for creationists you’re giving up on human evolution.”

“If your business’s only purpose is to increase profits, your business is unnecessary and will eventually be expelled from the bowels of the economy like the excrement that it is. Businesses exist to serve the people, not the other way around.”

-Me

Here’s a letter I just sent to my representatives and the President:

I oppose President Bush’s energy plan to reduce gasoline usage by 20% in 10 years.

A) It doesn’t do enough to cut greenhouse gas emissions.
B) It allows the Transportation Secretary to actually REDUCE fuel economy standards
C) It allows manufacturers to pay their way out of increasing fuel economy—without setting a price or even a reasonable economic model.
D) Widening roads allows for even more gas-guzzing cars to clog them—it never, EVER reduces traffic. In fact, Bush’s plan to reduce traffic congestion only widens roads for the sake of allowing more cars on to them!
E) It actually calls for pumping MORE fossil fuels out of the ground (to become pollution later)
F) It doesn’t create one single incentive for tax payers to actually invest in alternative fuels or technologies.
G) It actually provides tax incentives and encourages investment in COAL! Repeat it with me: CLEAN COAL IS NOT.

What we need is a CO2 cap & trade program that reduces the cap every year. We also need to ban construction of non-renewable power plants ASAP because the plants that are built now could very well continue to run for another 50 years. Do you think that 50 years from now ANYONE will appreciate the fact that they’ll be getting their electricity from a toxic pollution dinosaur?

Interesting fact: Coal-fired power plants emit ten times more radioactive materials into the atmosphere than nuclear power plants do—even if you include the mining and eventual storage of the materials! Why is this? Because coal contains small amounts of various radioactive materials. When you burn billions of tons of it, that amounts to tons of radioactive material!

I was discussing the infamous teapot analogy a few days ago and decided I’d post the original:

“If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time.”
– Bertrand Russell

For ages I haven’t been able to get the Fingerworks Multitouch utility to work in Linux. At some point about a year and a half ago it stopped working. Since I only ever opened it once in a blue moon (having already programmed my keyboard to my liking) I’ve been blowing off trying to fix it.

Today I decided that it was worth my time to fix this problem so I started to google for a solution. But first, let me list the output I was getting in case someone googles for the same error messages…

(click the title to read more)
(more…)