Stop the War
When you go into court you are putting your fate into the hands of twelve people who weren't smart enough to get out of jury duty. -- Norm Crosby
Mike Shelton at the Orange County Register - Davis' California Adventure: cartoon commentary on Kalifornia's self-induced power problems.
StopTheWar.com has a nice Flash video allowing you to choose from three strategies to end the drug problem. For all three, "Been There. Done that. Doesn't work." They've got a contest to win a DVD or video of Traffic when it is released.
Ray Thomas at Sierra Times - Don't You Believe It! some of the ways that collectivists lie to convince you to give away your freedom. As I occasionally remind my son (Christopher, 9 years old), you are free. Absolutely, completely free. Noone can take away your freedom unless you give it to them. They can limit your liberty, but they cannot take away your freedom. If you remember that, it's easier to keep up the fight for liberty. [sierra]
Another basic lie you've been told is that the struggle today is between liberals and conservatives. Between left and right. The inference is that there is a dictatorship on the right. What they don't say is that, under their theory, there is a dictatorship at both ends. The struggle is really collectivism vs. individualism. Under collectivism, they can rule you. Under individualism, they can not. It's as simple as that, and to rule you is their goal. Not money per se: you don't need to own the money if you totally control how it is spent, and on what. The actual battle is over whether they, or you, will control what you may do or say in the future and how your money will be spent, and on whom. Nothing else.
B. J. Sigesmund at MSNBC - We're Getting Clinton Now as He Really Is: Mr Sigesmund interviews Camille Paglia about some lesbian jokes told to Klinton by Bob Kerrey.
Clinton is a boor. And he's a hypocrite and a misogynist. It's not that it's an offense to lesbians here. I think it's an offense to civilization.
William Blum - Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower: an introduction with lots of excerpts to Mr. Blum's book. [lew]
If you believed that the NATO (read U.S.) bombing of Yugoslavia for 78 days and nights in 1999 was a "humanitarian" act, Rogue State hopefully can serve as a wake-up call to both your intellect and your conscience. It is a mini-encyclopedia of the numerous un-humanitarian acts perpetrated by the United States since the end of the Second World War.
There's a new issue of The Libertarian Enterprise, "Plenty of Abuse to Go Around".
- Letter from Jack Jerome - Reviews an episode of "The Business of Government Hour", more aptly named, "The Big Brother Technology Hour".
- So Mel, You're Back! by John Taylor - concerning the return of "the execrable Mel Reynolds of Daleyville" following his pardon by the rapist-in-chief.
- Harry Redux by Jim Babka - another installment in the continuing feud between Jacob Hornberger and Harry Browne. I'm sick of this feud. I didn't bother to read it.
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Incrementalism For Liberty: What Works and What Doesn't by Kent
Van Cleave - The Libertarian Party is attempting to reverse the
advance of tyranny by incremental means. This doesn't work. We must
convince people that liberty is more important that comfort. Moral
arguments are the best way to do this.
For some reason, many experienced libertarian activists treat it as a revelation when I mention that the LP is naturally the party of circumscribed means, not of ends. After all, the non-aggression principle simply limits the pursuit of any goal whatsoever to means that are honest and peaceful. The choice of goals is strictly a matter for individual or cooperative choice. Government should be silent on the question of ends. The job of the law, for libertarians, is to eliminate the means of fraud and aggression--period.
For us, the role of politics is just a matter of hiring, democratically, those who will be responsible for protecting our rights by prosecuting use of the prohibited means of aggression and fraud. For most Americans today, politics is a very different thing. It's either the way you get what you can't earn and don't deserve, or the way you do "good" things for people by holding a gun to somebody's head. Politics itself has become the preferred vehicle for committing aggression and fraud.
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For ordinary humans--and politicians will often respond to this, too--ostracism may be the harshest tool. No more invitations, preferably with a note instead explaining how they aren't considered polite company any more--"You'll understand the bind I'm in!" "Sorry, I can't come fix your whatsit--people will think I condone violence, too." Ask your pastor to talk with the bureaucrats in your church, and suggest ways they can do good in a voluntary framework.
Carlo Stagnaro at Laissez Faire City Times - Women Against Gun Control: an interview with Nancy Herrington & Janalee Tobias of Women Against Gun Control. Lots of good quotes and links.
The Second Amendment is our Equal Rights Amendment!Guns really do make us equal. Guns really do make women equal to men. Not all women believe the way they do. Women need to be taught that.
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Guns are tools and in the hands of law abiding citizens they have been used to save lives and deter crime over 2 million times a year.
WAGC abhors all violence, including baseball bats, knives, automobiles, shovels, pitchforks, and even hands and feet. WAGC blames the individual who commits these acts of violence regardless of the tool used in commission of the act.
Marshall Burns and James Howison at Ennex Corp - Napster Fabbing; Internet Delivery of Physical Products: You think the record companies got hot under the collar over internet distribution of their bits? Wait until digital fabricators (fabbers, 3-d printers) become common. This page describes a presentation to be given at the O'Reilly Peer-to-Peer Conference on Friday, 2/16, in San Francisco. [/.]
Joel on Software - Human Task Switches Considered Harmful: Joel uses an example of computer task switching to motivate his conclusion that you should only ask a progammer to work on one task at a time. [joel]
Following Dave Winer's example, I turned on syndication and added the little {rssLink ()} link in the top right-hand corner of each page. [script]
Fiona Harvey and Marcus Gibson at Financial Times - Scientists in memory advance: 10.8 terabytes in an area the size of a credit card with no "conventional moving parts". Commercially available in two years for $50. A new eight-fold text compression algorithm. Lempel-Ziv, the algorithm used in zip files, gets two-fold compression on average (the link has a nice animimation of how it works). [/.]
Jon Van of Knight Ridder via The Salt Lake Tribune - Electric Industry Abuzz About Breakthrough Superconducting Technology: They're going to replace nine large cables in downtown Detroit with three smaller superconducting cables; 25,000 pounds of copper replaced by 900 pounds of ceramics. Great news! I hope it works. [/.]
