001119.html

Submitted by Bill St. Clair on Mon, 28 May 2001 12:21:12 GMT
I hereby officially certify that George W. Bush has won the presidential election in Florida. This means that when the electoral college meets in December, it is very likely that GW will become the president-elect, to be sworn in next January. Hail to King George (you know, the balls of ice that fall from the sky). There, that wasn't hard, was it? Who bloody cares, anyway? And why does anyone give a hoot about the Florida Supreme Court's opinion?

I took the kids to see How the Grinch Stole Christmas yesterday afternoon. Jim Carrey was perfect for the part. A few scenes were a little scary for my not-quite-4-year-old, but all-in-all she enjoyed it. I laughed hard many times, but I'm like that, in case you hadn't noticed.

William J. Beck III - "Too Late For a Political Solution?": Yes it's too late to change things from within the system, but will a violent revolution fix anything, even if successful? Not likely. A rational voice for massive passive civil disobedience. Written in 1996.

Billy Beck - A Free Mind: Includes a good essay on the war on freedom, er... some drugs. Why is it wrong for the current majority to prohibit the dopers from using dope? It's simple:

Essentially, this is because we would all resent it if the dopers were able to turn things around and make us all start smoking crack. Here is the difference: right now, the dopers are simply not strong enough (i.e. - they don't have enough votes) to turn the issue around on those who don't use drugs.

What if they were?

Would that make it right? If there was a law which forced you to take LSD twice a week, would it be right for them to do that? Would it be right for you to disobey the law? (Why?...why not?)

Simon Cole at Lingua Franca - The Myth of Fingerprints - According to the author, who wrote his doctoral thesis on the subject, fingerprint evidence is not, well, scientific. [/.]

The authority of fingerprint evidence rests on two contested assumptions. Although conventional wisdom since the nineteenth century has accepted the doctrine that no two fingerprints are alike, no one has really proven the proposition's validity. But if the question of the uniqueness of fingerprints seems pedantic, consider a more practical concern: How reliable is fingerprint evidence anyway? Can forensic technicians really match a fragmentary or smudged print taken from a crime scene to one and only one human fingertip, to the exclusion of all others in the world? At a pretrial hearing in the Mitchell case, this important question would receive its first airing in a U.S. courtroom.

Gypsy Smith at WorldNetDaily - Palm Beach Shuffle: a Flash animation with instructions for Palm Beach vote recounters on how to make sure their guy algorebachev wins. Hehe. [wnd]

CounterPunch - Bush and Cocaine: this was published a month ago, but I hadn't seen it before. Claims that GW dealt coke while attending Yale, but the witness refuses to go on record. I don't really care about this. Selling entertainment is a perfectly fine way for an enterprising student to make some pocket money. If only GW & algore would stop the rhetoric that other people should be jailed for the same things that they got away with. [cures-not-wars]

Peggy Noonan at Opinion Journal - The Donkey in the Living Room: Concerning algore's strategy to win by recounting votes. [mind]

They are attempting to do this through chicanery, and by interpreting various ballots any way they choose. As in, "This ballot seems to have a mild indentation next to the word Bush. Well, that's not a vote. Person might have changed his mind. This ballot seems to have a mild indentation for Gore; the person who cast this ballot was probably old, and too weak to puncture the paper card. But you can see right here there's a mark kind of thing. I think that's a vote, don't you Charley?" "Oh yeah, that's a vote all right."

J.J. Johnson at Sierra Times - The Call to Arms: J.J. has declared war. Not with guns, but with plowshares. It starts December 18th. He asks truckers to run with their lights on that day. If algore is declared the winner, he asks that they stop driving. He asks everyone else to call in sick with the "red flue". He's calling it Truck Stop 2000. I plan to go to work as usual that day, no matter which socialist is crowned king of the Union of Amerikan Socialist Republiks. Why should I or my employer suffer over some two-bit political wonk? Hmm... We already do. Them two-bit wonks is stealin' us blind. [sierra]

Radar provides a web interface for administering Tomcat. It allows you to add and edit contexts, servlets, and URL-to-servlet mappings. [meat]

"DUMB, the Diabolically Uncrashable MUD Builder, implements a lisp-like language interpreter in Java. This language is specialized to allow the most flexible MUD creation to date, and to allow 100% uptime, even during MUD development." I've never gotten into MUDs, but some folks have devoted large parts of their lives to them. [meat]

Add comment Edit post Add post