February 2009

february is over

Well...the trucking company is having a hiring freeze...so thats not happening. Not much is happening really. things are just moving on. I've been making a lot of pizzas lately, for myself, family and potlucks. I've been thinking about peddling my pizzas to strangers for small cash...for no other reason than i've got nothing better to do.

last fall i had hoped that by now i'd be in some sort of different situation or be in the process of being in a different situation. either i'd get a job in toledo or head to austria or at least change things up with what i'm doing in bg. Nothing really has kicked off though. After looking at my bank account recently i can see my money dwindling. I still have enough for a one-way ticket to austria...but i'd have an even tougher time finding work there than here...probably...though i might make some cash off of being an english speaker. If i couldn't find work, it wouldn't be worth it though, since i'd literally be living on the street/very poor squat and be at the mercy of whoever would give me food.

I'm not sad about my situation at all though anymore. I enjoy my family and i like the people i'm able to spend time with a lot. If i run out of money i'll just have to vamp up my aquiring of things for free.

I'm really happy about making pizza, and visiting toledo, and hanging out with anyone in bg. My dad has been laid off from work, which isn't all bad, since he's been around a lot. I like spending time with him, anytime i do it seems like i learn something about bowling green's past that blows my mind. I guess howards club H, was originally in a hotel building that was where the current public library is. the hotel was called howards hotel and the bar was howard's bar. Howards and the brathaus are the oldest bars in town...among the oldest businesses in bg in general.

Molly’sBlog 2009-03-01 06:03:00

CANADIAN POLITICS:SUPPORT PAY EQUITY:As long as we are talking about women’s rights here’s an example closer to home, from the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE). One of the things about Sneaky Stevie’s new budget down Ottawa way that has been m…

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The Role of State Monopoly Capitalism in the American Empire

“The Role of State Monopoly Capitalism in the American Empire”

by Joseph Stromberg

“With interventionism and restrictionism, the best businessman is he who best knows how to influence in his interest the decisions of the organs of the state (in regard to tariffs, government subsidies or orders, advantageous import quotas, etc.) . . . . What formerly was regarded as a special trait of the munitions industry becomes in interventionist capitalism the general rule. Some have argued that, under such centralized corporate statism, innovation and founding of new enterprises can be so discouraged that, as Jacobs puts it, “there is nowhere to export the embarrassing superfluity of capital except abroad.” The structure of the economy limits domestic investment, thereby promoting aggressive capital export. Simultaneously, monopoly prices foster artificial “surpluses” of specific goods. As the American economy became systematically corporatist, a sense of crisis and stagnation, as well as a desire to further rationalize and perfect the system, strengthened the hand of those who wished to universalize the new political economy through world empire.”

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Goebbels and Saul Bellow on Poles

Here's Saul Bellow from "Ravelstein":'To Wadja,[his servant] Ravelstein was just another loud Jew--her savage imagination had pictured the money he controlled, and he was rowdy, incomprehensible...It was Wadja who moved the furniture, cleaned the toilets, ran the vacuum, scoured the pots, washed the crystal. Easily overheated, she took off her dress and her slip. She worked in a giant bra and

Security Certificates and the case of Adil Charkaoui

On February 20, the Federal Court of Canada dropped most of the conditions it had placed on one of the prisoners of its “security certificate” regime, Adil Charkaoui. While much of his life is still lived in the rights-free zone widened under the “war on terror”, his struggles over the years have won him back some parts of his life. (For the decision see here)

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Huh?


In a recent speech by Obama concerning his administrations plans to pull out of Iraq, Obama made the following statement.

“We have also taken into account the simple reality that America can no longer afford to see Iraq in isolation from other priorities: we face the challenge of refocusing on Afghanistan and Pakistan; of relieving the burden on our military; and of rebuilding our struggling economy - and these are challenges that we will meet.”

Now, I’d just like to take a moment to ask when was America and the world, or in this case, America at war with Pakistan?  The last time I checked Pakistan was supposed to be an ally of the United States.  Although many politicians see it as perfectly legal bombs inside their allies borders — in the same way they ventured forth into Cambodia and Laos back in ‘Nam — I’m having a tough time getting around the idea that it’s legal to bomb your friends, especially when it seems to have some effect towards destabilising the country.

Following this, I’d also raise similar questions as were raised in this CounterPunch article that is also a must read regarding Iraq war propaganda.

Not to mention that the Afghani president may be getting ready to overstay his constitutional welcome, given that the country doesn’t have any other choice.

Gah, cracked again

Has anyone smeared honey all over my site while I wasn’t looking? Once again I find out the Division by Zer0 has been compromised and spam links are being inserted invisible into my content. And that’s only 10 days after the last time. Argh!

This time I didn’t discover it through a google search but rather when someone from NoState.com contacted me through IM to let me know. This time the spam links were not hidden from the normal source but rather simply invisible in the normal page. This at least makes them much easier to find out and know when you’ve removed them. Nevertheless, this always feels like a very nasty violation every time it happens.

However the exploit was better hidden this time. It wasn’t just a few files hidden in my subdirectories but rather code inserted in my actual wordpress and theme files. This seemed to have been done through some kind of xss exploit but I have no idea how it managed it as I’m running the lastest WP version. Fortunately Adrian was good enough to point out a wordpress support thread for my exact issue which helped me locate and rip out the source of the spam quickly. This is why it pays to microblog your aggravation I guess :)

Btw, I also noticed that the previous malicious cache.php file had reappeared in my wp-content folder. This time I saved a copy before deleting it and now you can all see what kind of crap they put in your server. Notice the quite humorous note telling you that “modified republishing is restricted”. Or what? Are they going to take you to court?

At least this later crack forced me to finally go ahead and lockdown my site even more. Now the site root, wp-content and my theme directory are read-only from my user as well. Let’s hope this doesn’t create any issues. Unfortunately I cannot make the plugin directory read only as very often they need to write in there as well but I don’t think this was done through a plugin so I think I’m good.I’ve also finally changed the prefix for all my database tables to avoid any zero-day exploits which I’ve been meaning to do for a while.

I also tried to install one logging plugin I saw mentioned in the wordpress forum but unfortunately it didn’t work for me. What would be really great however is a way to monitor all your site files for changes and whenever any file is modified or added, an email would be dispatched to the admin. Sure, you might get notifications for when you upload a new plugin or add new images through wordpress’ builtin function but you could easily ignore those. But when you see a change in your index.php that you didn’t initiate, then certainly something needs to be checked.

On a more positive note, I’ve gone ahead and integrated with Google’s Friend Connect. You can probably see it already on my sidebar where you can add yourself as a “member” of the site, whatever that is. I used to have Facebook but that requires you to add a FB application which not everyone cares to do. Everyone and their mother has a a google account by now however so hopefully this may give me a better idea of how many people like the site enough to register themselves.

But I swear, if I get compromised again, I’m going for a complete wipe and reinstall. It can only mean that I’ve got a trojan that won’t stop making my life difficult.

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Group Mind and the Stopping of Thoughts…

“John McMurtry writes that the first rule of the “Group-Mind” is that it cannot adopt itself as an object of critical reflection: “When the most self-evident line of thought has been blinkered out across a people, only an a priori thought system can account for it. As with other great problems of our era, [...]

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Digital Reading Encourages Risk-Taking

“While the testimonials of digital literacy enthusiasts are replete with abstract paeans to the possibilities presented by screen reading, the experience of those who do it for a living paints a very different picture. Just as Griswold and her colleagues suggested the impending rise of a “reading class,” British neuroscientist Susan Greenfield argues that the [...]

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Record Mirror 19th April 1986 – Flesh

As requested Darren.