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Thanks for picking up an idea from Mad magazine. That cover photo of W. lacks only the "What, me worry?" line. -- Earl M. Wester
bob lonsberry - All Drug Crime Is Violent: I agree with many of Mr. Lonsberry's essays. On this one, I couldn't disagree more. Most drug users are not violent, and in no way contribute to violence. It is the legislators and police who create and enforce the drug laws who are responsible for creating the black market in drugs, the gang wars, the drive-by shootings, the "overdoses" from badly manufactured drugs (yes, there are real overdoses, too). If drugs were legal, with the result that they would be cheap, the only deaths due to drugs would be self-inflicted by fools not fit to survive. Drug sales and use, among adults, is consensual behavior. There is no victim here until the police drag one of them off to prison. Then they, the police, are responsible for the real crimes of assault and kidnapping. If you attempt to help drug users by setting up treatment clinics with voluntary admission, I salute you. If you criminalize drug use and sales, the only salute you will get from me will be the one you deserve, "Sieg heil!". Prohibition doesn't work. Didn't we learn this in the nineteen-twenties?
Drug use is inescapably destructive, and it tears at society by crushing the individual. It weakens natural family ties, causes people to fail in their private and public responsibilities and -- in the aggregate -- sickens and chokes society. The tearing down of a nation and its people is patently violent.There's also the issue of the money.
If you use illegal drugs, you had to buy them somewhere -- and that puts money into the illegal economy. And that buys the guns and the bullets that put thousands of Americans in their graves every year. It also foots the bills for drug lords who routinely kill and terrorize people up and down the hemisphere.
Dave Polaschek - The state of the Bill of Rights: a pretty good overview of the health of our rights in police state America. Thanks to Dave for including some of my comments, and for toning them down a bit. I get worked up sometimes, in case you hadn't noticed. [picks]
Timothy at SlashDot - What Privacy? UK DNA Database Could Grow Fast: the police state in the U.K. gets bigger. Police are now authorized to add your DNA to the database on mere suspicion of a crime. [/.]
Chad Reichle at LewRockwell.com - Politics Out of Power Now: agrees with the solution I stated yesterday for Kalifornia's energy problems. Political control caused the problem. Return to the free market will solve it. [lew]
The best analogy I can think of for California's "deregulation experiment" is a group of legislators coming across a man bound hand and foot, hogtied, blindfolded, with plugs in his ears and duct tape over his mouth. After several hours of discussion, they come up with a plan. They remove the earplugs and then dance around shouting "we have freed this man!"Some time later, they realize that the man is not moving or saying anything, so they begin to debate anew. "Perhaps we should put the earplugs back in?" suggests one. "Well," another pipes up, "if we cut off his legs at the ankles, the hogties is no longer an issue."
Obviously, no one in the state government or news media bothered to attend Economics classes when they went to college. It's too bad, really, because the solution is so blasted obvious that anyone in the State government who took an economics class and isn't talking about it is criminally irresponsible.
If we had deregulated consumer prices, this would not have happened. We have plenty of power, but since it's artificially cheap, we use more of it. So the obvious alternative to the State shutting down people's power randomly is allowing people to buy the power they want or need. There is no need for rolling blackouts except as a political tool to convince the unaware that more State authority is the solution.
Ron Paul's Texas Straight Talk - Turn Out the Lights, Government Takeover of the Electricity Industry Threatened in California: I missed this last week, but it's still relevant. The week before last, Kalifornia's governor Davis was in Washington asking the feds to force out-of-state utility companies to sell them power at below market prices. As I remember, the feds turned him down. Thank God!
California's woes are due in part to its tremendous population growth over the past decade. The influx of residents and businesses, particularly energy-intensive tech businesses, has greatly increased demand for electricity. The problem is that the California government has not allowed the construction of new power plants, in large part because of "environmentalists," citizens groups, and regulators hostile to property rights. The blatantly obvious result of high demand coupled with artificially low supply must be: high prices. Had the free market been allowed to operate, profit-seeking utility companies would have built new power plants to meet the demand and the situation would be very different today.
Thomas J. DiLorenzo at the Ludwig von Mises Institute - California's Enemy: The State: How the state has caused or worsened electric and water shortages in Kalifornia.
Ballooning demand, restricted supply, and price controls are a perfect recipe for shortages. Complete deregulation of the electric power industry is the only way to resolve this problem, although California's governor is currently proposing the worst of all worlds: a Soviet-style government takeover of the state's electric power industry.California's periodic water "crisis" is another unnatural disaster caused by government regulation. The big problem is that most of the water in the state has been regulated for decades by the Federal Bureau of Reclamation, which heavily subsidizes the irrigation which delivers water from the northern part of the state to the bone-dry southern part. (Seventy-five percent of the water comes from the north, whereas 75 percent of the population is in the southern half of the state).
Some 85 percent of the water is used for agriculture and is sold at government-imposed, below-market prices. Some farmers pay as little as $3.50 per acre foot for water that costs $100 per acre foot just to pump through the government-run irrigation system. At these prices it is "economical" to grow cotton and rice in the desert, even though the Mississippi Delta and the rice paddies of Vietnam are more natural habitats for these crops. California grows prodigious amounts of both.
...
Even California earthquakes would not be as devastating were it not for government regulation. Federal disaster insurance allows residents to purchase homeowners' insurance at subsidized rates, sometimes at one-tenth the free-market price. Federal disaster insurance is sold where no private insurer would even consider it, such as insuring houses built on top of earthquake faults or on the edges of muddy cliffs overlooking the ocean. The government is subsidizing the building of houses that are sure to be destroyed by earthquakes and winter storms.
The Economist - When the lights go out: Grabbe titled this "California's phony deregulation". Apt. [grabbe]
JSynthLib "is an Open Source Universal Synthesizer Patch Editor / Librarian written in the Java Language." [meat]
GutenPalm "is document reader for the Palm Pilot organizers. GutenPalm is Free Software released under the GNU General Public License v2. Unlike other doc viewers for the Palm, GutenPalm uses zTXT files. These are similar in many ways to the de facto standard format, DOC, but they feature much better compression." I downloaded this, but haven't installed it on my Palm yet. [meat]
SISC, Second Interpreter of Scheme Code, is a new Scheme
implementation by Scott G. Miller. GPL v2. I downloaded it, but didn't
try it yet. From the description, it looks neat. The
implementation paper, implies that he did tail call correctly. My
testing confirms this. After (define (f x) (f x)), it ran
(f 1) for as long as I was willing to wait. What was also
nice is that (define (f x) (f x) x) got an out of memory
error, NOT a stack overflow error. Yes! The paper is in postscript. I
hate it when people do this. Can you say HTML? But I DL'd GSview and
Ghostscript from http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/, and could then easily
read the paper. [meat]
SISC is an extensible Java based interpreter of the algorithmic language Scheme. SISC uses modern interpretation techniques, and handily outperforms all existing Java interpreters (often by more than an order of magnitude).In addition, SISC is a complete implementation of the language. The entire R5RS Scheme standard is supported, no exceptions. This includes a full number tower including complex number support and arbitrary precision integers and floating point numbers, as well as full support for first-class continuations (not just escaping continuations as in many other interpreters).
Work is underway to complete a clean interface to Java, allowing efficient scripting in a mathematically elegant language.
