Jim Seaman – web log

I have to say I’ve thought about this one a bit and then went online to look up some figures – Without trying to put a price on the over 4000 US soldiers killed and 13,000 seriously wounded (or the over 500,000 Iraqis killed) we have spent over 500 Billion dollars in Iraq. That’s a lot of money and let’s face it, that is what the war is really about!

But what if we had invested that half a Trillion dollars in renewable energy sources (wind, solar, tidal, geothermal) and battery research? At the same time, creating jobs here at home. How much closer to true energy independence would we be? And it’s not too late – we can still start investing heavily. And I’m not very opposed to more nuclear plants – at least they don’t contribute to global warming like coal, fuel oil or natural gas plants.

The bane of the Internet – they make the lives of everyone miserable. I have several email accounts and I receive (on average) over 200 spam messages a day. And that isn’t even including the ones on my account at work that are handled by the spam filters there. It’s true, I don’t see most of these spam messages since they are caught by automatic spam filters, but am I am forced to review those that are caught on the off chance that some good mail may have been flagged mistakenly. A real waste of time.

Unfortunately, my spam problems don’t end there. This blog, while not read by that many, is the constant target of spammers. They have been leaving comments on every article I’ve ever written. Their comments are nothing but links to visit this or that website, sometimes dozens of websites. It is of the order of 20-30 a day but even that has finally been too much. I have to review them and let the valid comments post and then delete the junk. None of them ever get through to be viewed by the public but still they continue posting.

Well, NO MORE! I’ve turned off comments on this blog.

Spammers should be forced to pay for the time they cost all of us. Considering the number of messages they send out multiplied by the number of people affected – that would be life in prison.

Former Senator for North Carolina, Jessie Helms died today. For many years, this man was supposedly represented North Carolina in the US Senate. He was actually NC’s longest serving Senator. His stances against anything remotely liberal (or even moderate) earned him his nickname of Senator No.

He was another one of those who believed that AIDS was God’s punishment for gays. His beliefs and actions in the US Congress did immeasurable harm to hundreds of thousands of people. His backwards positions earned him the well deserved hatred of the gay community throughout the entire United States.

He made his home here in Raleigh and I happen to know that, after his retirement, his beliefs regarding AIDS moderated considerably. I don’t know if his beliefs actually changed or if he simply dropped a political front that he may have had surrounding himself. At any rate it was too little, too late.