000721.html
I'm up in the middle of the night. Don't know why, I just woke up. Thinking a lot about the web output for my User Interface Manager. I need to write an article about it soon. It is a really neat piece of work. Mid-August, after we demo it at our users conference, is a likely time.
My friend Brad sent me a hilarious Letter from Camp. Fiction, I hope. LOL.
Keith R. Wood at Sierra Times - Retreat From Greatness: A tribute to Walt Wiesman, one of the lesser-known pioneers of space flight. I'm not a big space fan. I read this because I thought that Angus would like it. I'm glad I did. I remember the moon landings well. My junior high school had a TV set in the auditorium tuned to the broadcasts. Lots of people were there watching. Mr. Wood blames Senator William Proxmire "and his cohorts" for the demise of the U.S. space program. This story will likely move here next week. [sierra]
I'm mentioning Walt Wiesman because not enough people know about him, nor of the literally millions of others who helped us climb out of the mud and step onto the Moon. In fact, over half of the people alive today weren't even born when two Americans last dug into Lunar soil. Some people don't even believe that anyone ever really walked on Luna, they think that it was all some Ray Harryhausen special-effects show. Many of this last group also believe that the Earth is flat, though, so we can pretty much ignore them....
This "riptide" against the space program left America with the memory of greatness, and with an economic recession which led to drastic measures by the Federal government and an explosion of the Nanny State. That is, the same people who caused the problem then claimed to have the only solution, like underemployed firemen becoming arsonists!
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We can rebuild that link. This week, take the first step. Get your kids together and go check out http://www.apollosaturn.com before you go out into the back yard or onto the sidewalk, and look to the sky. If you remember those grainy, black-and-white TV signals from the Sea of Tranquility, remind your friends and tell your kids about the thrill of those words: "That's one small step for man . . . one giant leap for mankind!"
bob lonsberry - Leave Birth Control off the Insurance List: Planned Parenthood is backing a lawsuit claiming that the refusal of an insurance company to provide coverage for birth control pills is sex discrimination, a violation of federal civil rights. Not. Lots of people in America believe that birth control is a sin. The government has no business mandating anything about it. And congress declined to do so, but that wasn't good enough for Planned Parenthood. If the tyrants in congress won't give them what they want, they'll ask the tyrants in the courts to do it.
Planned Parenthood -- whose middle name should be "elimination of" -- is a group which makes much mischief in the name of women's health. It essentially is the nation's voice for abortion and contraception.Which is all well and good -- if you agree with such things.
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Failing to pay for birth control is not discrimination. It is a choice, something I thought Planned Parenthood was in favor of. An employer may choose to provide it, or not. And an employee may choose to work for such an employer, or not.
Richard Shim at ZDNet News - First look at Palm redesign: there's gonna be a new low-end Palm Pilot, the M100. $149, five removable front plates (silver, gold, black, royal and light blue), smaller dimensions similar to the Palm V. Picture in the article. There's also a new Palm VIIx, an upgrade for the Palm VII, 8MB instead of 2, slate gray case, more PQAs (web links). [/.]
Jon Katz at SlashDot - Privacy, Part Two: Unwanted Gaze: A review of Jeffrey Rosen's book, The Unwanted Gaze: The Destruction of Privacy in America. Highlights sexual harassment laws as a big part of the problem, legally. Says that there are technological fixes in the works, encryption, untraceable digital cash. Mr. Katz thinks that the exploration of the topic is good, but that the proposed fixes are simplistic. I didn't buy the book. [/.]
Mountain - Mississippi Queen. Nice to be reminded of this song. Thanks, Dave. [script]
John Young at Cryptome - FBI Requests PSIA Lists Removal: John recently published a list of the names and some of the addresses of members of Japan's Public Security Investigation Agency (PSIA). This article is an account of his phone conversation with a couple of dickheads (FBI agents) who asked him to remove the list, along with two emails he sent to them and their names. [grabbe]
David Hoffman at the Constitution Society - The Oklahoma City Bombing and the Politics of Terror: the complete book is online. They have an index to the chapters, but haven't yet built the HTML versions for anything but the Unpartitioned HTML version (1.87 MB). I downloaded it and have started skimming it. It starts off reminding us that it is impossible for a fertilizer bomb in a truck to have done as much structural damage as was done. For that you need "cutting charges set on the support pillars." I've read little bits of this over the years. Nice to have a whole book about it. [grabbe]
Richard S. Ehrlich at Laissez Faire City Times - A Final Solution to Hunger: a book review-interview of Jerry Hopkins' new coffee-table book, Strange Foods: Bush Meat, Bats, and Butterflies: An Epicurean Adventure around the World. Most unusual. Not for the meek-of-stomach.
Sunni Maravillosa at Laissez Faire City Times - The Thought Police Killed My Friend: remembrances of Peter McWilliams life, along with a pointer to a story by Don Lobo Tiggre suggesting letters of depreciation to the federal slime responsible for his death. Addresses included.
Peter McWilliams' death is a powerful reminder of why I value freedom, why I have no faith in the system to fix itself with some help from "our side", and why I speak out and take actions that are pro-freedom. This country, once the land of the free, is now the land of the free-for-all by the state. My voice isn't "represented" by sham elections that foist more shackles on the people. My views aren't what's fed to the sheeple on the 6:00 snews, pre-masticated and prettified to paint a politically correct picture of society. My life isn't tied to those who would make slaves of us all simply to satisfy their lust for power. A society that can look away while its government kills a man for simply trying to live his life and keep his health is seriously ill itself. As Peter did, we who recognize the ugly brutality of the tyranny in the United States must take whatever steps we can to help others see it, to resist it as much as we can, and to remember our fallen compatriots....
The Thought Police killed Peter McWilliams in hopes they would silence his voice. They've accomplished that, but only in a literal way. By killing my friend, our would-be rulers have strengthened my resolve, and will create new activists out of many of those who have previously been silent.
I think Peter would consider that a fitting tribute.
Charley Reese at the Orlando Sentinel - Sound principles and fearlessness make Rothbard a good read: a recommendation of a new collection of Murray Rothbard's essays: The Irrepressible Rothbard, published by The Center for Libertarian Studies. Barnes & Noble and Laissez Faire Books didn't have it. Amazon did, but there was a 1-2 week waiting time, and I'm still not linking to them. It's not even listed on the Center's Books to Buy page, though a few of Mr. Rothbard's other books are there. Guess I'll have to wait.
I love a number of people whom I've never met -- and, in some cases, never will, because they are dead. Murray Rothbard is one of these. But he still lives in his writings, and I'm happy to recommend a new collection of his essays....
Just to give you a flavor of his style, here is Rothbard's description of members of the Senate Judiciary Committee who were trying to keep Clarence Thomas off the Supreme Court: "The anti-Thomas Democrats were an odious lot. Most repellant was that gasbag Joseph Biden. Sen. [Patrick] Leahy reminded one of a Vermont village sneak, the snitch who reports his classmates to authorities; [Sen. Edward] Kennedy was . . . ugh, Kennedy. [Sen. Howard] Metzenbaum was an ugly ferret-faced embodiment of evil tempered by confusion."
As you can see Rothbard writes in the old-fashioned style of H.L. Mencken and Westbrook Pegler. Today's writing is so soaked in political correctness that it's usually mushy, ambiguous and vague, the one exception being when the left-liberals decide to unload their venom on white males, Christians or Southerners. Rothbard, to his credit, cuts no one slack and is definitely insensitive, a label all who value truth should cherish in these dreary times.
Bernard Cole of EE Times via TechWeb - IBM To Release Java Ports, Common Code Base: More embedded Java choices from IBM. I'm glad that IBM bet the farm on Java. I only wish that Microsoft would realize that it would be good for their business to embrace Java without extending or extinguishing it. [cafe]
To the current optimized versions of Java Virtual Machine (JVM) and VisualAge Java tool suite for the X86, MIPS, PowerPC, and Dragonball processors, IBM is adding versions for the SuperH, ARM, and StrongARM processor architectures. And to its QNX Neutrino optimization, it is adding the iTron industrial real-time operating system and Microsoft (stock: MSFT) Windows CE. [cafe]
Dan Horn at The Cincinnati Enquirer - Ruling suspends gun law: you could not legally carry a concealed gun in Cincinnati, until now. Judge Robert Ruehlman has issued a 3-week restraining order prohibiting arrests for concealed weapons. Good for him. [market]
Elisa Batista at Wired - The Congressman Who Loves Spam: Ron Paul was the only member of congress to vote against the most recent unconstitutional federal legislation. "Dr. No" voted against H.R.3113, the Unsolicited Commercial Electronic Mail Act of 2000. It authorizes a spam recipient or ISP to recover the greater of $500 or the amount of actual monetary loss from any spammer who won't stop after a government order to do so. No criminal penalties. The article mentions a few other bills on which Dr. Paul cast the only dissenting vote. Dr. Paul, I salute you. [market]
"I don't believe Congress has the authority to get involved in this," Paul said, explaining his no vote.
Nicholas Morehead at Wired - Democrats Halt Meth Bill: the House Judiciary Committee was planning to vote Wednesday on the Methamphetamine Anti-Proliferation Act of 1999. Some democrats delayed the vote until next Tuesday over the blatantly unconstitutional parts of it that everyone has been ranting about for the last long while. Now if they'd only realize that the entire war on drugs and the very existence of the FDA, DEA, etc. are unconstitutional and get rid of them... Dream on. [market]
Jerry Pournelle - Wednesday, July 20, 2000: will move here next week.
Long time readers of my stuff will recall I used to speculate on brain models and the like. Marvin Minsky took me aside one day. "They're wrong," he said. "We don't know enough to have a good theory yet. You don't have to follow that stuff because it will all be wrong." He was right of course and I saved myself 20 years of close study by taking his advice...
A.F. Branco at KeepAndBearArms.Com - GORE AS President: algore finally finds a use for the Bill of Rights. [wnd]
Bob Sullivan at MSNBC - Scam artist copies PayPal Web site: someone has copied PayPal's site at http://www.paypai.com/. They're sending email with links to their site, and then stealing your PayPal user ID and password. Watch out! [/.]
Declan McCullagh at Wired - Financial Privacy Under Attack? "Know Your Customer" is back! H.R.3886, the International Counter-Money Laundering Act, once again requires banks to spy on their customers. How do we teach Congress once and for all that this kind of thing is NOT OK? No matter what the reason. [technocrat]
