010119.html

Submitted by Bill St. Clair on Fri, 19 Jan 2001 13:00:00 GMT

You Were Brave
In That Holy War

You have done well
In the contest of madness.

You were brave in that holy war.

You have all the honorable wounds
Of one who has tried to find love

Where the Beautiful Bird
Does not drink.

May I speak to you
Like we are close
And locked away together?

Once I found a stray kitten
And I used to soak my fingers
In warm milk;

It came to think I was five mothers
On one hand.

Wayfarer,
Why not rest your tired body?
Lean back and close your eyes.

Come morning
I will kneel by your side and feed you.
I will so gently
Spread open your mouth
And let you taste something of my
Sacred mind and life.

Surely
There is something wrong
With your ideas of
God

O, surely there is something wrong
With your ideas of
God

If you think
Our Beloved would not be so
Tender.

(The Gift: Poems by Hafiz the great Sufi Master translated by Daniel Ladinsky)

Patricia Neill at LewRockwell.com - Exactly How Extreme IS John Ashcroft? Patty's back! Patty's back! Yay! Patty and Camille one after the other. If Claire chimes in, I'll be a very happy camper. Patty comments on John Ashcroft, who she considers a pretty regular republican, much less extreme than she is.

Nearly every sentence uttered included the word "extremist" or other variations of the word. Never mind that Ashcroft is probably closer to how most sane Americans think and feel -- to these biddies, he's a "white male" and that alone is extreme enough. Honestly, that was one of the complaints against him. I don't think white males are extremists -- occasionally loud, obnoxious, and arrogant, maybe, but males are rarely extreme. It takes a female to get that way, and we do so every month -- you can count the days.
...
Ashcroft supports regular folks carrying concealed guns. So do I. He wants the regular folks to get permits from the atate. I think they should just make damn sure they're good shots and skip the permit business altogether. Criminals use guns, the loony left shrieks. Well, yes, my feeble-minded dears, they do, and that's why I do, too. Police are historians, they show up after a crime, say, rape or murder. I, however, live in the present, and I'd be there at that rape or murder as perchance victim -- so I'll be there armed, thanks very much. And the crime won't happen -- except a criminal, one of those people the left considers "oppressed," might get hurt. So put me in the "extremist" category of people who'd rather shoot the creep than get raped.

Angus Glashier authored the quote below, and I agree with him, but try fighting that battle on this side of the pond. Actually, I usually write dates as yymmdd, so that they will sort alphabetically in date order. For instance, the file I'm editing right now (with Emacs, of course) is named 010119.txt. [latte]

Bloody Americans, why can't you write dates properly?! Everyone knows that the day is written like so: dd/mm/yy. It makes sense, you see, because it becomes increasingly precise from left to right.
You can switch over to metric while you're at it!

demitria monde thraam is worried, because of something she read, that there's something bad about having the word "random" in the name of her weblog, randomonium. I think "randomonium" is a wonderful name, and I told her so. I read her weblog because I like the content. Text is king. [randomonium]

Lew Rockwell at LewRockwell.com - Business-Cycle Primer: Mr. Rockwell reminds us of what really causes recessions, as advanced in 1912 by Ludwig von Mises in The Theory of Money and Credit. [lew]

The theory begins by observing the profound effect that interest rates have on investment decisions. Left to the market, interest rates are determined by the supply of credit (a mirror of the savings rate) and the willingness to take risks in the market (a mirror of the return on capital). What throws this out of whack is manipulation by the central bank.
When the Fed feeds artificial credit into the economy by lowering interest rates, it spurs investments in projects that eventually don't pan out. For example, the high-tech and dot-com manias resulted from a decade of sustained money growth via lower interest rates. When the Fed stepped on the brakes to prevent prices from rising, it prompted a sell-off, and hence a downturn.

Laissez Faire Books has redesigned their web site. Much nicer looking. Much more useable. Search is in the upper-left-hand corner where it belongs (used to be a click away on another page), with title search as the default.

Simon Jenkins at The Times of London - Bombs that turn our leaders into butchers: commentary on the author's visit to the Plain of Jars in Laos, "the greatest bomb-site in history". [lew]

America is still "in denial" over Laos, where its chief concern is to search for the bodies of missing American pilots. It cares less for the Laotian bodies still to come. There are estimated to be some nine million unexploded bombs and bomblets (or "bombies" the size of tennis balls) littering the country. They constitute a gigantic, unmapped minefield. The BLU and CBU canister weapons contained hundreds of delayed action bomblets, each with timers and 250 ball bearings. They were and are wholly unreliable, a quarter to a third not exploding as intended. Today's mutilated victims fill the hospitals and beg in the streets. A quarter of the casualties are small boys.
No remotely civilised state should use such weapons. Britain uses them. The RAF dropped them on Iraq in 1991 and on Yugoslavia in 1999. I have no doubt they are being dropped on Iraq this very day. They are no more accurate or sophisticated than those used in Laos 30 years ago, more than a quarter reportedly failing to explode in Yugoslavia.

Charles Riggs at The Kentucky Coalition for Carry Concealed - The Parable of the Sheep: a parable for our times. I found it via Ken Holder's Preparedness site's Guns & Ammo page.

Thomas Sowell at TownHall.com - The Clinton 'legacy': Klinton's legacy is almost all bad. He was just lucky to be elected during an economic upswing. Now we seem to be entering the downswing caused by his administration. How come people always forget that there's a delay between cause and effect? [mind]

This is not to say that Clinton will leave no legacy. He will. He will leave a legacy of unprecedented corruption of all the fundamental institutions of government.
For a President of the United States to commit felonies and get away with them is a deadly legacy that may embolden future presidents to disregard the law -- and on things far more serious than cheap sex. Once you have demonstrated how brazen lying and character assassination against those who prosecute you, or who serve as witnesses, can get you through the worst scandals, you have left behind a blueprint for the further corruption of government.

Joel Spolsky - Big Macs vs. The Naked Chef: Joel compares McDonalds to the Naked Chef in order to explain why large IT shops are consistently mediocre to bad. The moral of the story is "Beware of Methodologies". Everyone's pointing at this today. Why? Because it's good. [joel]

Simson Garfinkel at Salon - Java fans fight back: Mr. Garfinkel got lots and lots of mail about his Java: Slow, ugly and irrelevant article last week. He responds here.

Michael C. Daconta at JavaWorld - When Runtime.exec() won't: some good advice for avoiding common pitfalls in the use of Runtime.exec().

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Quotes

Government doesn't work. Never did. Never will. Can't. But there are lots of good people. Love them.

-- Bill St. Clair

The Atlanta Declaration

Every man, woman, and responsible child has an unalienable individual, civil, Constitutional, and human right to obtain, own, and carry, openly or concealed, any weapon -- rifle, shotgun, handgun, machinegun, anything -- any time, any place, without asking anyone's permission.

-- L. Neil Smith

Reread that pesky first clause of the Second Amendment. It doesn't say what any of us thought it said. What it says is that infringing the right of the people to keep and bear arms is treason. What else do you call an act that endangers "the security of a free state"? And if it's treason, then it's punishable by death. I suggest due process, speedy trials, and public hangings.

-- L. Neil Smith

A Penalty Clause for the Bill of Rights

Any official, appointed or elected, at any level of government, who attempts, through legislative act or other means, to nullify, evade, or avoid the provisions of the first ten amendments to this Constitution, or of the Thirteenth Amendment, shall be summarily removed from office, and, upon conviction, deprived of all pay and benefits including pension, and sentenced to imprisonment for life.

-- L. Neil Smith

Based on 253 journal articles, 99 books, 43 government publications, and some of its own empirical work, the panel couldn't identify a single gun control regulation that reduced violent crime, suicide or accidents.

-- John Lott, commenting on the National Academy of Sciences report on gun control laws.

Who is a libertarian?

Zero Aggression Principle ("Zap")

"A libertarian is a person who believes that no one has the right, under any circumstances, to initiate force against another human being, or to advocate or delegate its initiation. Those who act consistently with this principle are libertarians, whether they realize it or not. Those who fail to act consistently with it are not libertarians, regardless of what they may claim."

-- L. Neil Smith

(Formerly called the "Non-Aggression Principle", or "NAP")

Why Did It Have to be... Guns?

Make no mistake: all politicians -- even those ostensibly on the side of guns and gun ownership -- hate the issue and anyone, like me, who insists on bringing it up. They hate it because it's an X-ray machine. It's a Vulcan mind-meld. It's the ultimate test to which any politician -- or political philosophy -- can be put.

If a politician isn't perfectly comfortable with the idea of his average constituent, any man, woman, or responsible child, walking into a hardware store and paying cash -- for any rifle, shotgun, handgun, machinegun, anything -- without producing ID or signing one scrap of paper, he isn't your friend no matter what he tells you.

If he isn't genuinely enthusiastic about his average constituent stuffing that weapon into a purse or pocket or tucking it under a coat and walking home without asking anybody's permission, he's a four-flusher, no matter what he claims.

What his attitude -- toward your ownership and use of weapons -- conveys is his real attitude about you. And if he doesn't trust you, then why in the name of John Moses Browning should you trust him?

-- L. Neil Smith

Concise

"Tell me," I was once asked, "What do you think about gun control? Give me the short answer." To which I replied, "If you try to take our firearms we will kill you."

-- Mike Vanderboegh

Also from The Atlanta Declaration:

... like going to the bathroom, breathing, eating, sleeping, or making love, it turns out that self-defense is a bodily function one cannot safely or effectively delegate to a second party.

-- L. Neil Smith

This does not mean that "Marijuana should be available by prescription." It means that morphine sulfate should be available in five pound bags at the supermarket for a couple of bucks, like sugar... but probably in a different aisle, to avoid confusion.

-- Vin Suprynowicz

If you refuse to pay unjust taxes, your property will be confiscated. If you attempt to defend your property, you will be arrested. If you resist arrest, you will be clubbed. If you defend yourself against clubbing, you will be shot dead. These procedures are known as the Rule of Law.

-- Edward Abbey

The state can only survive as long as a majority is programmed to believe that theft isn't wrong if it's called taxation or asset forfeiture or eminent domain, that assault and kidnapping isn't wrong if it's called arrest, that mass murder isn't wrong if it's called war.

-- Bill St. Clair