As we move PRODOS websites to the new hosting system it’s going to cause them to briefly go offline or show only a “parked domain” page.
For each site, this could last from a couple of hours to a couple of days.
Apologies for the inconvenience.
Happy New Year.
The iLOVEprodos.COM merchandise site is broken.
I broke it yesterday when I clicked a wrong button whilst working on the server. That’s what happens when one gets too tired and loses focus for a moment.
What a nuisance.
It’s now going to have to stay that way for about a week until the server migration is completed.
Oh well.
I’m currently looking at migrating all PRODOS web sites and services to a new server over the next week.
On October 03 2006, I had the pleasure of attending the launch of John Pasquarelli‘s “On the Road Again” exhibition, presenting his latest paintings from his travels about Australia.
Here are some photos from that event.
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The man himself: John Pasquarelli!
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John Pasquarelli and Gallery owner, Lynne Wilton
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Suzanne Carbone, columnist from The Age and Prodos
It was a delight to finally meet Suzanne Carbone! She’s considered a “leftie” – whatever that means. I suppose she is. Personally, I’ve found her to be highly intelligent and honest and very good fun to talk with.
She exudes a spunky sort of cynicism (not to mention plenty of feminine charm – hence the nickname “Sultry Suzanne”) and you can sense the BS detector always scanning the horizon for hypocricy and an opportunity to expose a farce. You can read some of her highly entertaining articles here.
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Andrew Bolt from the Herald Sun presents the opening speech
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John Pasquarelli and Prodos
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Hey! Here’s some cute yankee girl!
So, what about the paintings themselves? Simple, direct, strong. But I’ll say more about them some other time.
Project update:
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This morning I formally started working with Davide Villani on building the new Snewpi system. This will create TinyURL type links to “NON-endorsed” websites.
But rather than linking directly to the destination website, the user will need to jump over 3 linkbuffers to get there.
It’s main use will be on PRODOS campaigns such as Celebrate Capitalism ™ where a wide variety of individuals and groups might cooperate towards a goal, but also have important areas of difference and disagreement.
Today in the Herald Sun, Andrew Bolt has a very good article about Pastors Danny Nalliah and Daniel Scot of Catch The Fire Christian Ministries.
Pastors’ Toil and Trouble (article and blog site).
An excerpt from the article which talks about how the Two Danny’s were done over by Justice Higgins of VCAT:
Most of the case over the weeks that followed dealt with the lecture given by Scot, and some curious things soon became clear.
First, even one of the converts had to admit that Scot, who’d been born in Pakistan and got degrees there in theology and applied mathematics, actually understood the Koran far better than did the people complaining he’d misquoted it.
Second, as I wrote at the time, many of the complaints accused Scot of no more than quoting the Koran accurately.
Yes, the Koran did tell men they could beat their wives.
Yes, it did have verses calling on Muslims to fight infidels until they submitted.
The verdict was also odd.
The pastors were found guilty of vilifying Muslims even though the judge identified only one thing Scot had said that was factually wrong: he’d given the wrong birthrate for Muslims here. And, the judge, added, he’d failed to quote a verse that showed Allah was merciful.
Higgins [the original judge who convicted the Danny's and Catch The Fire] said the real problem with the seminar was that it was not “balanced”, and neither Scot nor Nalliah had said clearly enough that the hard-line Islam they were talking about was, in the judge’s opinion, not followed by most Muslims here.
Here’s another strange thing: Scot and Nalliah were convicted of stirring up hatred – of being “hostile, demeaning and derogatory of all Muslim people” – even though they’d again and again told their congregation to love Muslims, however wrong their faith.
“We have to love them”, Scot had insisted.
“Love should be not only in theory, in word, but should be shown in practice. You invite them for (a) cup of tea. You invite them for dinner, for lunch.”
On he went: “Of course do not criticise their culture . . . We should not criticise their dress . . . Don’t be afraid of (the) Koran . . . there are a lot of things in (the) Koran, which are very similar from (the) Bible.”
What’s more, there was no evidence that those listening to him were a danger to a single Muslim.
The worst the judge could say of them was they’d responded “at various times in the form of laughter”. Dear God – save us from the laughing Christian.
So, this is the kind of dangerous hate-preaching that had the pastors convicted under our new laws, and sentenced to apologise in expensive advertisements in the Herald Sun and Age.
And that was odd, too. Why did the pastors have to apologise to 2.5 million Victorians for comments they made to just 250? Why did the judge also ban them from repeating any of their claims from the lecture, no matter how truthful, in any state?
Mad, you say? Welcome to witch-hunting in Victoria.
The complete text of the Appeal is available HERE in html form or HERE as a 90 page rtf (rich text file).
The 3 judges who ruled on the appeal didn’t agree on all points. Andrew Bolt recommends the findings of Justice Geoffrey Nettle.
I’ve spent a large part of the last two days activating and configuring a WordPress anti-spam plug-in on each of the 140 THINKER TO THINKER™ blogs. This had to be done individually for each blog. There’s no facility to do it en masse.
I also manually corrected some formatting problems that I came across. There were instances of the right hand column (the “sidebar”) of some blogs having flipped from the right hand side to the bottom.
The cause seemed to be that the blog owner had copied and pasted into his blog, articles or parts of articles from something like Word.
The problem is that text editors such as Word introduce coding that the blogs don’t recognise and can’t process and this throws the formatting out of kilter.
The other thing it can do is disable the RSS feed of the blog.
If any THINKER TO THINKER™ blog owners want to use a text editor, try using the one I sometimes use: NoteTab Light. You can download it for free from NoteTab.com
Reporting that there’s a bug in the prodosphere.com news feed site which is replacing all article titles with one title.
I’m looking into what can be done to fix this.
In the latest issue of Australian online free market journal, BrookesNews, Gerard Jackson reveals that Victorian Liberal Party “power broker” (whatever that means) Michael Kroger, is working on using the Liberal Party‘s recent election defeat as a way of purging the Victoria section of the Party of those who don’t support his agenda for more power-for-the-sake-of-power.
About Michael Kroger, Gerard Jackson asks:
How is it that a man who holds no official position in the party can dictate to its members who they can elect?
Good question. Especially since the Kroger/Costello faction have been controlling the Victorian Liberal Party for some years now.
IF … Michael Kroger really IS a “power broker” … AND … it’s his people who have been pulling the strings and running things … AND … the Party has been getting thrashed … THEN … shouldn’t the “power broker” and his people cop some of the flack for this? This doesn’t sound like a difficult line of reasoning to me.
But even more troubling for fans (such as me) of Herald Sun columnist Andrew Bolt is Jackson’s questioning of why Bolt seems to be so soft on Michael Kroger.
Gerard Jackson writes:
Considering the deliberate damage that Kroger has done to the Liberal Party it is indeed strange that Bolt should ignore his activities. This has led some Liberals to conclude that Bolt is now in Kroger’s pocket. How can they be blamed for this conclusion when Bolt turns a blind eye to Kroger’s destructive scheming.
Read the article at BrookesNews.com – which includes a bit about my run for Preselection earlier this year. CLICK HERE
Also, read my comments about Michael Kroger on Andrew Bolt’s blog – reply #12
The MYprodos membership management system is finally completed.
It’s located at MYprodos.com and will allow members of all PRODOS projects to join or leave projects, and to update any of the details (such as email address, city, etc.) which affect their project subscriptions.
I’ve been working on getting this system built for about two years and have worked with 3 different coders/programmers on it.
The chap who finally succeeded in building it with me was a brilliant young Italian coder, Davide Villani. And what a marvellous job he’s done!
Now I’ve got the massive task of adding several thousand subscribers to the new system.
One of the biggest reasons for building this system was to be able to coordinate the expansion of the Celebrate Capitalism™ campaign.
Since 2001, International Capitalism Day™ has been celebrated in over 200 cities in 43 countries.
But my goal is “1,000 festivals in a 1,000 cities”.
Managing a project of such magnitude would be impossible without a system such as MYprodos.com. In fact trying to keep up with “just” the current 200+ cities has proved a nightmare over the last few years.
Background: I created the first, informal Capitalism Day™ in 1984. By 1999 it had crystalized to include the world’s first ever Ayn Rand Film Festival held here in Melbourne, Australia, where I screened We The Living, The Fountainhead, and Ayn Rand: A Sense of Life.
By 2001 Capitalism Day™ was formalised as a worldwide campaign which has been growing steadily year by year, with wonderful, positive Project Leaders working to promote free thinking and free markets across the globe.
Now available at the website of US Senate Committe on Environment and Public Works HERE
Some excerpts:
… One of the ways alarmists have pounded this mantra of “consensus” on global warming into our pop culture is through the use of computer models which project future calamity.
But the science is simply not there to place so much faith in scary computer model scenarios which extrapolate the current and projected buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and conclude that the planet faces certain
doom.… The alarmists freely concede that the Kyoto Protocol, even if fully ratified and complied with, would not have any meaningful impact on global temperatures.
… The Kyoto Protocol is a lot of economic pain for no climate gain.
Regarding Al Gore‘s movie, An Inconvenient Truth:
… I am almost at a loss as to how to begin to address the series of errors, misleading science and unfounded speculation that appear in the former Vice President’s film.
Here is what Richard Lindzen, a meteorologist from MIT has written about An Inconvenient Truth.
“A general characteristic of Mr. Gore’s approach is to assiduously ignore the fact that the earth and its climate are dynamic; they are always changing even without any external forcing. To treat all change as something to fear is bad enough; to do so in order to exploit that fear is much worse.”
And here the Senator James Inhofe quotes an Aussie scientist:
Bob Carter, a Paleoclimate geologist from James Cook University in Australia has described how the media promotes climate fear:
“Each such alarmist article is larded with words such as ‘might’, ‘could’, ‘probably’, ‘perhaps’, ‘expected’, ‘projected’ or ‘modeled’ – and many involve such deep dreaming, or ignorance of scientific facts and principles, that they are akin to nonsense, professor Carter concluded in an op-ed in April of this year.
This booklet is very well presented with plenty of supporting evidence and intellectual amunition for global warming skeptics and anyone interested in sussing out the facts.