Archive for March, 2007

8
Mar

For all the little Capitalists out there

   Posted by: Doc   in Uncategorized

Ever wish you had like a hundred thousand dollars to open a stock portfolio, but realize, “Well, not this month, I gotta figure out how to both pay the rent AND buy drugs!”?

Well, guess what: Now you can buy drugs AND play the Market. Always in the search of new online time wasters, I have stumbled across Investopedia’s free stockmarket game. The game gives you 100,000 dollars of fake money, and then sets you to investing in their stock market (which is, of course tied to the real stock market). You can compete against others for the top ranking, and demonstrate your Warren Buffet-like skills in picking when to buy and when to sell to make yourself very rich. Or you can ignore all of that and just mess around, trying different investment strategies: Suppose you want to build a green portfolio to see if it would really work in a capitalist country (it probably won’t). You can do it here without actually investing a dime. Suppose you wanted to invest heavily in the military industrial complex, because you know you’ll make money but can’t stand the idea of actually helping them wipe out Iraq. You can do it on this sim.

The one reason I recommend this game to you all is not because I have turned capitalist, but for no other reason than you aren’t really investing, but it does teach you a lot about the system. Since it updates with the real market, you can see that you have to understand the system a LOT better than simply saying “capitalism is bad, socialism is good.” There are a number of reasons why capitalism is bad, and you can tease these reasons out by looking at this game. If you are a total idiot when it comes to market capitalism (as most socialists are, because they rely too heavily on normative Marxism and do not even participate in the real world), this will help you learn what you are critiquing.

And did I say best of all, it is totally FREE?! Well, there is it.

Click on this link to begin building your fake portfolio today

6
Mar

sCooter is Quilty

   Posted by: Doc   in News, Politics

Who knows, who cares what it means? All I know is that the people who made the decisions to have 3200 plus Americans murdered in the sands of Mesopotamia will never be tried for their complicity with “tourists”.

Do you feel cryptified? Join the club and read the story for yourself: Click this link, from Yahoo News.

Take it easy Mr. Libby. You’ll get pardoned anyway.

Who Loves Ya, Baby?
The Reverend

6
Mar

Radio Havana and the Wonders of SW radio

   Posted by: Doc   in News

Friends, I just would like to point out two things:

1) If you are getting this post via an aggregator and don’t otherwise visit the site (probably because there’s really nothing new there, and hasn’t been for some time,) there is something new worth checking out. I have listed a number of internet radio sites on my sidebar directly to the right of this post. Some of them are political, most are news, talk and good music. You can just click the link and it opens in your windows media player, and you can listen to it all damned day if you like (including Air America, NPR, and that whack KPFA from Berkeley! If you have never been to the North Bay but want to find out what sort of whackjobs live out there, just listen to KPFA for a little bit, and you will get a small sampling. But you still have to go for the full experience. This is like getting a whiff of something that you can’t quite put your finger on. The real deal is rather more surreal.)

On that note, Radio Havana now plays English Language broadcasts at 10pm local (Mountain Time) that’s Midnight on the East Coast, 9pm on the West Coast. You can click their button, displayed prominently by the animated icon, and listen to all the best news you won’t hear in the United States. If you ever wanted to take a trip back to the cold war, this is how you do it. The broadcast is not too professional sounding: in fact it sounds like a propaganda bureau in a communist country. But it is great to listen to and supplement the normal garbage you get from this country. It presents “the other side”, if you will, the stuff we’re too scared to say. RHC also breaks the hour in two places with Cuban music, and political commercials informing the world that the Cuban 5 will return. I love it, and would listen to it every night, if I could get the computer time to do so. The English broadcast lasts 2 hours, and then abruptly switches back to Spanish language at midnight, sometimes mid sentence.

2) Which brings me to my second point: If you can’t get the computer time, or don’t have one (you probably wouldn’t be reading this if you didn’t), get yourself a cheap shortwave radio. I got one for 10 bucks online, tuned it to 6000 kHz, and listened to a crackly, ghostlike broadcast straight out of Havana tonight, in my son’s nursery. At the midnight cut off, I switched through some channels and got a relatively clear broadcast of Radio Australia! Yes, that’s right, radio from half way around the world, literally, over the air. While the static is sometimes very difficult to deal with, nonetheless, you can listen to broadcasts without wasting your time on a computer. I have begun writing my times and freqs down (as shortwave hobbyists do), and when I get a significant number of them I’ll post them.

For now, know that Radio Havana is on from 10 PM Mountain on channel 6.00, and Radio Australia is on channel 9.70 at midnight. The weather has a lot to do with reception, and things throwing off huge amounts of EM waves (like your computer, for instance, or your microwave) will destroy any hope you have of getting any reception on a SW radio, so use it where there is the fewest plugs, EM generators, and other things like this, and maybe try an external antenna for clearer sound (apparently, getting the antenna out of the house will do wonders, especially in steel frame houses. It’s like listening to AM radio and driving under a bridge: it doesn’t work, but you all know what I am talking about, and if not, try it.)

Enjoy internet radio at Supernova Earth, and Dan, I’ll look for an AlJazerra link online for you too.

Who Loves Ya, Baby?

Sincerely,
The Reverend