America's Dumbest Congressmen

Via Radar Online, America's Dumbest Congressmen.  I find it incredibly absurd when people attempt to blame Jon Stewart for making young people cynical about politics.  When these dipshits we elected (and even worse, re-elected) are the best people their party could find, we should be cynical.  My favorite entry has to be the one about Donald Young:

The scene: Fairbanks, Alaska, 1994. Congressman Don Young, already in office for 20 years, is on the stump preaching the virtues of Newt Gingrich's Republican revolution to a group of high school students. Just look at all the wasteful things the federal government does with taxpayers' money, he tells them. The National Endowment for the Arts, for example, funds art involving "people doing offensive things ... things that are absolutely ridiculous." One student asks, "Like what?"

"Buttfucking," replies the great scourge of obscenity and instructor of youth.

A Dying Population - Los Angeles Times

Link to A Dying Population - Los Angeles Times

The L.A. Times has an article about the declining population in Russia, and one of the reasons cited is the poor health of many Russians.  Indeed, that was one of the impressions that I had walking around Moscow and St. Petersburg when I was there.  Health conditions that would be routinely treated here are left untreated there, the majority of the population smokes, and pollution was rampant.

The scary thing is, here, we tend to think of most of those health problems as being long-term, and here they largely don't affect people of child-bearing age.  If conditions have become so bad across Russia that even the younger generation is having its fertility significantly reduced, then they are in serious trouble.

While we in the U.S. celebrated the fall of Communism, all has not gone well in Russia.  The "New Russians" (those who made fortunes in the unstable period following the collapse) are fabulously wealthy, the streets of Moscow and St. Petersburg are full of luxury import cars.  But the "average" Russian makes $38 a month.  Think about that, I spent twice that much on my last pair of shoes.

I think the real danger in this is that Russia will turn away from Democracy, toward a more authoritarian state.  Putin has already assumed quite a bit of power, and moved to squelch dissenters, and the sense I got is that the Russians admire, and need, what they perceive to be a "strong" leader, more than one with strong democratic values.

Get out of your SprintPCS contract for free

Sprint just raised the price of their text messaging to 15 cents/message. The good news is that this represents a "material change" in their contracts, and allows you to terminate the contract for free, as long as you do it right away. So, if you've wanted to switch cell phone providers, now is the time.

Student Life at UNI

If you're wondering what student life is like here at UNI, we have a few students now blogging on the weblog service I help run here at work.  While we haven't opened it up to our student body (yet), these three are giving a pretty unfiltered look at what life is like as a new or international student here.

University of Iowa computer containing 14,500 social security numbers compromised

Looks like the University of Iowa had another compromise, potentially exposing 14,500 social security numbers to a hacker.  It's not likely that the numbers actually were stolen though, most of these hacks are because someone wants to use the fast university servers/bandwidth to share pirated movies, music, and porn.