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Sean Hackbarth of The American Mind says that the Barnes and Noble where he works is out of the new Harry Potter book. There were out on Saturday evening at my local Barnes and Noble as well. Out of the book that is. We bought the tapes, which Christopher prefers anyway, though he'll read the book as well after it arrives today via FedEx.
Sean also said some nice words about End the War on Freedom. Thanx, Sean. Glad you like my blog. I like yours, too. Read it every day. [mind]
Sean likes WOIFM?, too. On his July 6 page, Michael Alex Wasylik said:
I'll be happy to trade - I'll vote to abolish the death penalty if you vote to abolish taxes. How much is life worth to you?Hehe.
Someone sent a band to my house,
And it started playing
At five in the morning.
I took this as a sign
God wanted me to sing!
Then the moon joined in
And a few of the tenor-voiced stars,
And the earth offered its lovely belly
As a drum.
Before I knew it,
I realized
All human beings could be happy
If they just had a few music lessons
From a Sweet Old Maestro
Like Hafiz.
I Heard God Laughing -- Daniel Ladinsky
Joe McDonald of AP via Yahoo News - Chinese Censors Create a Star: The Chinese banned a novel as pornographic, thus making it more popular. Hehe. Repeat after me, "Prohibition doesn't work. Prohibition doesn't work..." [unknown]
bob lonsberry - Black Man on 'Survivor' Is Bad Example: The "Survivor" writers picked Gervace, a lazy black man who lives off of the others, as the only cast member of his race, thus reinforcing that stereotype.
In the early days of movies, black characters were happy shuffling oafs, conjured up in the minstrel show imaginations of racist writers and producers.All these years later, it's hard to see how Gervace is any different.
David Gelernter at Edge - The Second Coming -- A Manifesto: A talk on the coming large changes in the way we use computers. This page is an introduction. The link to the talk itself is near the bottom of the page. LifeStreams is a first implementation of some of the ideas in this talk. There's a 2 meg Shockwave demo here. [cafe]
Computing will be transformed. It's not just that our problems are big, they are big and obvious. It's not just that the solutions are simple, they are simple and right under our noses. It's not just that hardware is more advanced than software; the last big operating-systems breakthrough was the Macintosh, sixteen years ago, and today's hottest item is Linux, which is a version of Unix, which was new in 1976. Users react to the hard truth that commerical software applications tend to be badly-designed, badly-made, incomprehensible and obsolete by blaming themselves ("Computers for Morons," "Operating Systems for Livestock"), and meanwhile, money surges through our communal imagination like beer from burst barrels. Billions. Naturally the atmosphere is a little strange; change is coming, soon....
9. The computing future is based on "cyberbodies" — self-contained, neatly-ordered, beautifully-laid-out collections of information, like immaculate giant gardens.
10. You will walk up to any "tuner" (a computer at home, work or the supermarket, or a TV, a telephone, any kind of electronic device) and slip in a "calling card," which identifes a cyberbody. The tuner tunes it in. The cyberbody arrives and settles in like a bluebird perching on a branch.
11. Your whole electronic life will be stored in a cyberbody. You can summon it to any tuner at any time.
...
14. The important challenge in computing today is to spend computing power, not horde it.
...
30. If you have three pet dogs, give them names. If you have 10,000 head of cattle, don't bother. Nowadays the idea of giving a name to every file on your computer is ridiculous.
...
58. If you have plenty of money, the best consequence (so they say) is that you no longer need to think about money. In the future we will have plenty of technology -- and the best consequence will be that we will no longer have to think about technology.
We will return with gratitude and relief to the topics that actually count.
Freeman Dyson at Edge - Progress in Religion: I haven't read this yet, but it looks very interesting.
I do not make any clear distinction between mind and God. God is what mind becomes when it has passed beyond the scale of our comprehension. God may be either a world-soul or a collection of world-souls. So I am thinking that atoms and humans and God may have minds that differ in degree but not in kind.
Edge looks like a really neat web site. Bears some long reading sessions.
James H. Jeffries, III at Sierra Times - An Open Letter to the BATF: The BATF has been hassling John Ross, author of Unintended Consequences, and attempting to supress distribution of the book. This is a letter from John's lawyer telling them to stop. [sierra]
Jim Hardin at Sierra Times - The Threat of Lost Sovereignty: Klinton is implementing the U.N. Biodiversity Treaty, which the senate refused to ratify, by executive fiat. The Forest Service has been shutting down forests, witness the recent Jarbidge Shovel Brigade. This is a report on a meeting in Birmingham, Alabama featuring a good speech by Margaret Brown, a Research Analyst for the Eagle Forum of Alabama. [sierra]
The ultimate goal of the United Nations is to control all the land, and globalists in our government share their misguided vision. The American delegation to the UN conference on Habitats and Settlements meeting in Vancouver signed a document that says, Land cannot be treated as an ordinary asset, controlled by individuals and subject to the pressures and inefficiencies of the market. Private land ownership is also a principal instrument of accumulation and concentration of wealth and therefore contributes to social injustice... Public control of land use is therefore indispensable...Wake up, Forest Service! You're helping to implement an agenda that will destroy our country. No doubt you are just trying to do your jobs, unaware of the larger agenda.
Wake up, Alabama! We must not take one more step toward global government, where private property doesn't exist and American soil is under UN control. We must say NO to this rule. What we need is a sound environmental policy enacted by elected legislators.
A.F. Branco at KeepAndBearArms.com - Agreement with Gore: well at least someone concurs with algore's opinion of the second amendment. heeheeheeheeheeheeheehee. [kaba]
Angel Shamaya at KeepAndBearArms.com - British Prime Minister's Apology: Angel apologizes to Tony Blair for the "anti British sentiments" in The Patriot. Probably not the apology he had in mind, but a good one from where I'm sitting. [kaba]
I'm also sorry you're having trouble coping with the few minor diversions from historical accuracy given the fact that those historical diversions bear significance to the current political climate in the country that rescued your country from not one, but two wars. No, your ancestors probably didn't burn a churchful of people as they sought to subjugate yet another in a long list of nations, but our government DID burn a churchful of people, just recently, and the American people needed to be reminded of that.
