Is LAPC Filtering PFW?

Content filtering is popular with the ruling powers in places like China, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and other geographies where the current regime has a reason to fear and subdue its adult citizens. Content filtering in the workplace is popular with employers who have actual, economic concerns about their workers’ abilities to simultaneously idle on MySpace, bid on Ebay, chat on AIM, play Warcraft, and still work at a productive pace. Content filtering in K-12 schools is popular with parents and administrators because it protects minors from sexually explicit material of a pornographic or obscene nature.

Content filtering at public, CA community colleges ain’t so popular, much less defensible, when the filtered content turns out to be neither obscene, pornographic, inflammatory with an intent to incite unlawful action, or libelous, but merely critical of a filtering institution’s policies, programs, curriculum, and publicly-employed personnel.

If you are unable to reach any Pierce Farm Watch content (all over there in the sidebar) from computers located on the Los Angeles Pierce College campus, or your browser is redirected to a page you did not request, let us know. And we’ll let EFF know.

We’d like you to test from libraries, computer labs, Wi-Fi spots if they exist, and any other networked computer on the Los Angeles Pierce College campus from which you have access to the Internet. Other LACCD campus locations and CSUers can test, too, because the wider you cast the net and the narrower the set of results … well, that says a whole lot about a little.

What you are looking for:
Instances of domain/subdomain failure or redirection:
Examples: You get redirected from www.piercefarmwatch.org to a page you did not request.
You can read other Blogspot or WordPress blogs, but not ours.
You can reach Eurekster, but our swicki is not available.
You can reach Flickr, but our photo sets are unavailable.
You can watch YouTube videos, but our playlists are unavailable.
Social networking sites (del.icio.us, ma.gnolia, and shadows) are available, but our bookmarks are not.

Search Engine cache filtering:
Example: You found us via a search engine, clicked on the Cached link for page results, but were redirected.

Legitimate URL redirection services fail:
Example: tinyurl

Mobile content translation fails:
Example: You are redirected to somewhere other than results you request through Google Mobile Search.

RSS-formatted requests fail:
Example: You can reach Feedburner, but clicking on our feed URL from Feedburner fails.

Language Translation fails:
Example: You know how to do the en-to-en thing to get Google Translate to serve as a proxy, but that fails.

That’s about it for the testbeds, other than the many mega-lists of anon proxies out there which you can find and play with for yourselves. Happy animal-safe-and-sane hunting!

AS 506

The only surface glitch in the reappearance of this Los Angeles Pierce College course offering seems a semantic one. Farm animals in our urban Los Angeles and Ventura areas are companion animals and our urban farm animal facilities are either private homes housing compassionate families or publicly-accessible sanctuaries staffed by least harm volunteers.

Companion goats, sheep, pigs, chickens and cows don’t feel the slice of the scalpel wide awake and screaming, the pain of constriction as their tails and testicles slowly necrotize and fall away, or the searing burn of infant flesh that would have become their horns. They don’t experience the newborn terror of being dragged from their frantic and bellowing mother’s side only to be locked away alone and fed from a bucket. They never succumb to the helplessness and futility of existence in a barren steel and concrete container only slightly larger than themselves. They aren’t lured, prodded and shoved toward the grinding gears of batch-mode disposal. That’s a whole other side of the coin.

Companion farm animals aren’t intentionally repopulated to be killed in the churn of back-yard animal agribusiness production. Back-yard breeding is something we thought the city of Los Angeles sought to curtail. Maybe we were wrong. Maybe you’ll let us know. Or maybe we just can’t read.

How do we know all this stuff? We actually see urban farm animals. All the time. We treat them and care for them year after year. And in the end we’re there as they peacefully drift away, cradled by those individuals and organizations that are demonstrative examples of what it truly means to cherish their existence.

Psst…hey, c’mere

I wanna show you something.

This way, let’s go. This is my home on the Los Angeles Pierce College farm. Nice, huh? Like my carpet?

We’re getting it cleaned next week.

Yeah, they canceled or something. Can I come over? Uh, could you help me come over, my head’s stuck.

We’re sorry we couldn’t help her. But from the broken sections of fencing, it looks like somebody already found a way to once or twice, if only for the moment. On second thought, better not come over just now. We weren’t really expecting company. Give us another year or so and a few more million to tidy up the place. Make it 10. Million and years. No, seriously.

Plywood ppm in swine rations?

With our inaugural report we’re asking all you budding animal scientists to weigh in on a little debate we’ve been having amongst–so far–just ourselves:

What are the min/max ppm for plywood in a balanced swine ration?
What is the optimal dry-matter % of plywood for gilts?

We believe the right answers are 0/0 and 0. Our friends over at the Leopold Center couldn’t help us out. Google helped us out a little, but for the most part there’s not a whole lot of “quality” research out there on this topic. And most of that seems to conclude that it’s just too darn expensive anyway.

The one thing we are certain of is that pigs are really smart. They’re smart enough to have moved the snacks closer to where they sleep, and it only took a week to figure out how to do it!

Of course, we’re not suggesting that Pierce College is feeding pigs plywood. What we are suggesting is that it took these two porcines less time to accomplish what they wanted to do than it’s taken your public employees to do one small thing they’re supposed to do: provide animals with a safe place to live. That’s all.

So weigh in and let us know: how heavy is a piece of plywood and how many man-hours would it take you to move it a few feet? From the shoebox we found a shot of how things might look after the result of such a great effort.