Blog-IT-o ergo sum

	4/15/2005

FEMA Flash

Comic relief from the polished 4-color FEMA Flood Warning trifold I recieved in today's mail:

"In the last decade alone, North Carolina has had 12 federally-declared flood-related natural diasters. State residents have recieved over $620 million in flood insurance payments since 1994. What's amazing is that in a state where flooding is such a problem, nearly two-thirds of people in high-risk areas remain uninsured."

I hope I am not the only one who sees the humor in this.

9:55:10 PM

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Illegal Perks

Nope, not an opinion on the majority leader in the US House.

Should illegal aliens living in North Carolina be awarded taxpayer subsidized in-state tuition rates? Assuming of course they are made elligible for public colleges in the first place.

I am told by sources that the discussion on this has lit up the airwaves on talk radio in Raleigh over the last few days. Even the Grand Poobah weighed in.

The N&R ran its own humanitarian piece a few weeks ago in advance of the current debate.

Here's my take: First apply for legal standing; then apply for college. That seem's fair in a society based on the rule of law. Alternatively, anyone who wants to contract with a willing private college not subsidized by taxpayer funds should get more sympathy.

Sidebar: Rather than enticing illegal immigrants to attend our public universities at a discounted rate, why not entice higher paying out of state students to attend our highly regarded learning institutions? This seems prudent for a State staring at a billion dollar budget shortfall.

12:50:50 PM

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Radio Userland Conspiracy

Over the course of the day yesterday I spent over an hour on two different computers in two different cities on two different ISP hookups trying to make a post to ed cone's post dinging our local chapter of the Libertarian Party. Every which way I posted: with and without HTML tags, with and without punctuation, etc. my attempts kept returning the "error 403 access forbidden" message.

As I was able to make posts elsewhere on Ed's blog as well on other blogs this was a vexing problem. Resorting to the old engineering brute force method of trial and error this morning I was able to determine cause of the problem: Radio Userland will not accept comments containing the word "socialist".

To verify, I typed the single word "socialist" into the comments on Ed's, Hogg's and my own Radio Userland blog: all returned the same 403 error.

What message is a programer at Radioland trying to send us here?

8:18:39 AM

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