Can't Cook a Frog, Slowly or Otherwise

Submitted by Bill St. Clair on Tue, 20 Feb 2001 13:00:00 GMT
There's a new issue of The Libertarian Enterprise, All the Presidents' Wars: This includes two articles by Vin Suprynowicz, and On Lincoln, by L. Neil Smith, none of which is new to me. But read L. Neil's piece if you didn't the other day, unless you're an "honest" Abe worshipper and determined to stay that way. There were also lots of good letters:
  • Letter from Henry E Blake: apparently a good dark pair of shades deters current face recognition software. Good to know.
  • Letter from E.J. Totty: a good explication of why we don't need no steenking licences.
    The Libertarian Ideal is to act only when there is a deed which adversely affects your life, liberty, or property. Lacking any of those, you are left to your suspicions only.
  • Letter from John Sebastian: This one is so good that I've included the whole thing below. Hahahahahahahahaha!!
    Dissertation on Cooking a Frog by Slowly increasing the Temperature

    Abstract:

    Testing the assumption that a frog will allow itself to be boiled should the temperature in the pot be slowly increased, showed that the frogs in the test sample would not allow themselves to be boiled under any circumstances.

    A representative sampling of 200 South Eastern Frogs were gathered. 100 Frogs were to serve as controls, and 100 as test subjects. Each group was sorted to provide a mix of juvenile and adult frogs of both sexes, tadpoles were excluded for obvious reasons.

    Frog behavior was found to be universally uncooperative in both the test group and the control group. Frogs avoided capture to the best of their ability, attempted to escape from their containers at the first opportunity, and refused to stay in any pot no matter what the temperature, unless a lid was firmly placed on the pot. The placement of the lid on the pot would seem to violate the "frog will allow itself" caveat of the test procedure.

    In fact frogs dispersed themselves about the laboratory facilities at any and all opportunities and are still being found in a generally dried and desiccated state by maintenance personnel.

    A lab assistant was however successfully boiled to death by being provided a combination of television and NPR, but he may have died of boredom and despair before being boiled.

    Frogs will not allow themselves to be boiled under any conditions. Lab assistants do however taste like chicken.

    Sebastian, RRPT, PG

  • Letter from James J. Odle: the best interpretation of the second amendment I have ever seen. I liked the rest of his letter, too.
    Now since the legal profession has demonstrated their complete inability to read, understand and apply the plain English language with which the Second Amendment is written, let us translate for their benefit:
    • A well regulated (In the parlance of the time, this meant 'well-trained'.)
    • Militia (James Madison, the author of the Constitution defined the word militia as 'The whole body of the people.' I think he would know.)
    • being necessary to the security of a free state (Guns in the hands of private citizens are necessary in order to secure our liberty.)
    • the right (It says 'Right' not 'privilege'!)
    • of the people (That's everybody, pal)
    • to keep (This means 'to own')
    • and bear (This means 'to carry')
    • Arms (This means 'personal weapons of all types, shapes and varieties including assault weapons')
    • shall not be infringed. (Shall not be interfered with in any way.)
    The Second Amendment is no more complicated than this.

Hemos at Slashdot - PRZ Announces Depature From NAI: Phil Zimmerman is leaving Network Associates. He will focus on other implementations of the OpenPGP standard, including Hush Communications, the maker of HushMail, and Veridis (pre-launch page, no hidden comments). He is also launching the OpenPGP Consortium "to facilitate interoperability of different vendors' implementations of the OpenPGP standard, as well as to help guide future directions of the OpenPGP standard." [/.]

I've been running PGP 6.5.8. I just downloaded PGP 7.0.3. This is the last Network Associates version that Phil Zimmerman will be able to vouch for. They may add backdoors after this, and since they no longer provide full source, it will be difficult to verify. It wouldn't install for me. It got an "access denied" error while "preparing the PGP install wizard". Maybe the international version refuses to install itself on an American machine.

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