captaincool.net: what if making sense was cool?

Facets of Ayn Rand — Ayn Rand changed my life. She reached down through the decades, via her books, and handed me a refreshing philosophy of reason. When I was in college, and my professors were writing comments in the margins of my papers such as "What is reality?", and when in my American History class, we were deconstructing the Declaration of Independence in a way that conveyed that the most important feature of the historic document seemed to be that it was written by White Men, not that it was revolutionary political thinking, and when in my literary criticism classes, we were doing kindergarten exercises like imagining all the different ways a seemingly straight-forward "Wet Paint" sign might be misinterpreted because words don't mean things and language is just a infinite chain of signifiers with no grounds in reality -- when my mind was being assaulted from every direction, Ayn Rand helped me to laugh at the silliness and reminded me that those who want to abandon their human faculty of reason aren't betraying me or Ayn Rand, but their own souls.

And still, at 31, I find her philosophy makes a practical difference in my daily life. It helpes me to do business and be a good husband and father and face adversity and maintain sanity in this world. I often wonder about the woman who was so brilliant and who persevered to do the things she did in her life while the political climate was decidedly not in line with her view of life. I wonder about the real person behind the books. Facets of Ayn Rand is a great resource that answers many of those questions.

Drudge Report — The news that's usually first* and many times accurate. The site boasts 5 billion visits a year. It's a starting point for all kinds of web journeys. I get interested in something I find here and two hours later I'm on the furthest reaches of some unupdated site with broken links that nonetheless has that picture I've been looking for of Randy James' Prize Texas Longhorn.

*When I say first, I really mean second, because Drudge is usually linking directly to a report on another site. But when so many people find out their news from the same place, even though they went through Drudge to get to the actual report, you begin to think of Drudge as first.

Internet Haganah — This site by A. Aaron Weisburd is an intriguing project that combats terrorism on the Internet. It includes shocking information about how terrorists operate and how they use the web to communicate. Weisburd updates the site regularly with new information, along with tallies of terrorist sites that have been shut down by after being outed by Weisburd or others.

Discover The Networks Found this one @ National Review Online's trial edition. Discover The Networks had run a big ad. That's when I went there and found this great resource that only the Internet could have made possible.

Chaos Ink — A damn good screen printer.