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The length of each of your footsteps on the spiritual journey is exactly your height, because the whole journey consists of falling flat on your face, then picking yourself up and falling flat on your face again. -- One Hasidic Rabbi
My usual hour drive home took 3 hours last night. The salt trucks didn't get out early enough, so the hill east of Nassau was a skating rink. A bunch of us waited on top of the hill for over an hour while the salt truck spread its load and the ice melted. Then it was 20MPH for the last 10 miles home.
Mike Shelton at the Orange County Register - Dimpled Cad: hehe.
Michael Gilson De Lemos at the Laissez Faire City Times - Jefferson's Slaves: why Thomas Jefferson's slaves were freer than we are.
...we have ignored Jefferson's warnings. In several letters he detailed that the American Revolution could be reversed by at first innocuous seeming structural changes. Demonetization and an uncontrolled taxation of even food and books, confiscation of weapons, a permanent military, the habit of a government promising to do what people normally should do on their own, while neither accomplishing the task or letting people seek their own alternatives, a policy of seizures and destruction of independent farms, of official government schools and media teaching everything but the Constitution, the confusion of democratic vote with popular control and personal freedom. They warned of exigent men using envy to rise on the backs of the uninformed.All these read like a checklist. All leading, in Jefferson's unsentimental words, to mass slavery under government: tyranny, with pretty words.
bob lonsberry - What Kind of Winner Will Bush Be? Implores GW to be a good winner. Recommends appointing blacks and at least one liberal democrat to his cabinet. Well said.
Al Gore is a bad loser, there's no doubt about that.The hope is that George W. Bush will be a good winner. And that he will have the leadership ability to make up for the embarrassment of the last month.
Gene Callahan at LewRockwell.com - A World Without You: Mr. Callahan explains why we must create a world without a state, why we must end government as we know it. [lew]
...Today, however, it is the Democratic Party that is attempting to drive the state forward on its next step toward becoming the total state. This is why I believe our short term goals must include eliminating the Democrats as a viable force in American politics....
My friend Bob Murphy demonstrated the shallowness of some of these arguments for the state last week on LewRockwell.com. In a mail about my previous column, a friend suggested another raison d'etre for the state. He asked me, "Without government, how can the weak be protected?"
...
I could go on, but it hardly seems necessary. A short catalog such as the above suggests that the more salient question would be, "Without the state, who would slaughter the weak in such vast numbers?" As Martin van Creveld would put it, "The modern state has murdered countless MEEELLLLions of innocent people."
Joseph Sobran at LewRockwell.com - The Silent Revolution: how the U.S. has been destroyed by the idea that the Constitution is a "living document". [lew]
Can the real Constitution be restored? Probably not. Too many Americans depend on government money under programs the Constitution doesn't authorize, and money talks with an eloquence Shakespeare could only envy. Ignorant people don't understand The Federalist Papers, but they understand government checks with their names on them.
George Anastasia at the Philadelphia Inquirer -
Scarfo case could test cyber-spying tactic 
: the FBI's habit of
installing keyboard monitoring devices on people's computers is in
court. In this case, they used it to obtain the PGP passphrase of
the son of a "jailed mob boss". There's lots of
Slashdot discussion on this one. Declan McCullagh also
has comments over at politechbot.com [unknown /. grabbe]
Said Alan Hart, a former IRS agent and private investigator who teaches criminal justice at Burlington County College: "This doesn't 'smack' of Big Brotherism, it hits you over the head like a baseball bat."...
Experts in electronic surveillance said there are at least three types of keystroke-logging devices.
There is software that can be loaded onto a computer. There is an attachment that can be linked to the port where the keyboard line enters the computer. And there is a "bug" that can be put inside the keyboard.
The bug is the most effective and least likely to be discovered, said James Atkinson, head of Granite Island Group, a private electronic security and surveillance firm in Gloucester, Mass. The device, Atkinson said, is about the size of a sugar cube.
Elliotte Rusty Harold has a good essay today about why he is avoiding buying stuff from Amazon.com, but how this is hard since almost noone else does e-commerce nearly as well. This essay is near the top of the page today. It will move down as December passes; look for "Wednesday, December 6, 2000". Come January it will likely move here. [cafe]
I've been trying to avoid buying from Amazon lately. Its recent anti-union activities are just one more in a long list of reasons why I don't like supporting them, and why I would really like to never buy from them again (or at least until they start treating customers and employees fairly). I just wish its competitors wouldn't make this so hard.
Wesley Felter reminded me of the wonder of multiple return values in Lisp. One of the many Lisp features I miss in Java. [wes]
Leander Kahney at Wired - Undoing the Mac OS Facelift: people are inventing ways to undo the UI changes that Apple has inserted into MacOS X. I haven't used MacOS X; don't have a machine on which it will run. [script]
"Spiral Synth is a physically modelled polyphonic analogue synthesizer for Linux or Free/Open/NetBSD." I haven't tried this, but it looks neat. [meat]
