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Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue. -- Senator Barry Goldwater, 1964
The Boston Phoenix printed a letter I wrote to them a few weeks ago.
The laws against marijuana are so nonsensical as to make you doubt the humanity of the people who make and enforce them (unless you follow the money and discover who profits from these laws). All this effort to lock up people who smoke a harmless weed that has never killed a single person is insane. So-called hard drugs do kill people, but why are even they any of the government's business? What adults put into their own bodies is their own responsibility. If they want to overdose on heroin, it's nobody's business but their own. The purpose of government is the preservation of individual liberty. Period.
Bill St. Clair
New Lebanon, New York
J. Neil Schulman - Silligisms: I think I've pointed at this before, but it's one of those essays that's worth re-reading from time to time. People have a right to protect their lives independent of the NRA, the second amendment, or guns.
In an America with common household objects including aerosol oven cleaners, laser pointers, microwave ovens, spread-spectrum cordless phones, and laptop computers, you seriously don't want to piss off millions of Americans who believe they own guns to keep the government under the people's control. We're peaceful and law-abiding now because our right to defend ourselves with guns is politically secure. Make those rights insecure and I, for one, promise those who use the force of the state to destroy our rights that I will find other ways to make their offices a living hell until we have once again secured our liberties.Here's a sillygism for them: They think gun owners are dangerous. But they also think it is safe for them to try taking away guns from millions of gun owners.
Maybe they should try thinking that one through again.
There are more good essays at J. Neil's scribblings page.
J. Neil Schulman at the Constitution Society - The Unabridged Second Amendment: J. Neil asked Roy Copperud, an expert in the style and usage of the English language, to do a linguistic analysis of the second amendment.
[Schulman:] "(2) Is 'the right of the people to keep and bear arms' granted by the words of the Second Amendment, or does the Second Amendment assume a preexisting right of the people to keep and bear arms, and merely state that such right 'shall not be infringed'?"[Copperud:] "(2) The right is not granted by the amendment; its existence is assumed. The thrust of the sentence is that the right shall be preserved inviolate for the sake of ensuring a militia."
L. Neil Smith via David Anderson - The Covenant of Unanimous Consent: from L. Neil's book, The Gallatin Divergence. Glorious!
FIFTH, that we shall maintain these Principles without Respect to any person's Race, Nationality, Gender, sexual Preference, Age, or System of Beliefs, and hold that any Entity or Association, however constituted, acting to contravene them by Initiation of Force -- or Threat of same -- shall have forfeited Its Right to exist;
Clive McFarlane at the Worcester (MA) Telegram and Gazette via Cannabis News - Rep. Frank Calls for Shift in Nations Drug Policy: Barney Frank has a clue about drugs. [cn]
"But there are people in prison today for doing what I believe Al Gore and George Bush did, when they were younger," he said."It is not that I mean Al Gore and George Bush should be in prison. It does mean that young, uneducated, poor and particularly minority youngsters should not be in prison either."
Phil Agre at X-Ray Net - The New Science of Character Assassination: an apparent Gore supporter gives his take on Republican political strategy. Sorry, Mr. Agre, Klinton and Gore really are evil. But then, GW is only marginally better. Sort of like the difference between hell and purgatory. [xray]
A kind of coup is in effect, continuing the pattern of the Whitewater hoax and impeachment. If the far right succeeds in its campaign, then the incoming government will be staffed by people who are trained in the new science of character assassination. It's all they know. And having destroyed Al Gore, they will come after the rest of us.
Joel Spolsky at Joel on Software - Painless Functional Specifications, Part 4: Tips: how to get people to read your functional specs: Be Funny, Writing a spec is like writing code for a brain to execute, Write as simply as possible, Review and reread several times, Templates considered harmful.
The mistake is that when you write a spec, in addition to being correct, it has to be understandable, which, in programming terms, means that it needs to be written so that the human brain can "compile" it. One of the big differences between computers and human brains is that computers are willing to sit there patiently while you define the terms that you want to use later. But humans won't understand what you're talking about unless you motivate it first.
Ray Thomas at Sierra Times - It Makes You Safer: Why support gun rights? Because it makes you safer. So said Harry Browne and so echoes Ray Thomas. [sierra]
Human Events - Want War? Vote Gore: What Human Events learned from the second debate between GW and algore. [lew]
Indeed, as commander in chief, Gore's approach to foreign policy would make the world a more dangerous place, where any humanitarian crisis anywhere could be converted into a U.S. war of intervention, and where the relentless, and, for now, blessedly isolated, civil wars that stand as perpetual testimony to the fallen nature of the human race are in danger at any moment of being transformed, by the action of the President of the United States, into regional or even international conflagrations.For starters, in the spirit of Clinton's four-day, dog-wagging, pre-impeachment war against Saddam Hussein, Gore declared, for all the world to hear, that as U.S. President, he would like to ignite a civil war in Iraq. "Now I want to go further," he says. "I want to give robust support to the groups that are trying to overthrow Saddam Hussein."
The Legion of the Bouncy Castle has a clean-room implementation of Sun's Java Cryptography Extension without the annoying requirement that all providers be signed by Sun or IBM. It is currently at version 1.0b4. [cafe]
Peter Clarke at the EE Times Microprocessor Forum - ARM adds Java extensions to ARM9 core: Arm Ltd. described Jazelle, an extension to its ARM processor instruction set to directly execute Java, apparently pretty quickly. [cafe]
Steven Feuerstein at O'Reilly - I Don't Like Your Examples! Mr. Feuerstein used some politically charged examples in his latest book on Oracle PL/SQL. Some folks didn't like this. The article makes it clear that the examples in other books are also making political statements, though most people don't notice because the politics that they describe, e.g. numbering human beings, is so much a part of life. [cafe]
Let's look at a simple example. Suppose you are responsible for building a database to keep track of war criminals for the International Court of Justice. You create a package called wcpkg to keep track of alleged war criminals. One of the programs in the package registers a new criminal. You want that register program to always save its changes, even if the calling program hasn't yet issued a COMMIT. These characters are, after all, fairly slippery and you don't want them to get away.
Ananda Gupta at National Review - The Al Gore Program: a C++ program showing the algorithm algore uses in his debates. "//" in front of a line means that the line is commented out. "eof" means End Of File. "==" means equals. "&&" means "and". "<<" commands the object named on the left to do the operation on the right. Other than that, just read the words in order and you should be able to make sense out of it (not that this hopeless geek really has a chance of telling how much sense a non-geek can make out of code...). Hehe. [mind]
