Zero Politics, Seattle Earthquake, Libertarians Rule
Brent Simmons - 2001/02/28: a first-hand report on the earthquake that hit Seattle yesterday morning with links to other people's stories. [brent]
Thomas L. Knapp - Lies, Damn Lies and Republican Rhetoric: for years the republicans have been promising that if they were in a position to veto the democrats' big-government ideas, they would make the government smaller. They are now in that position, but GW promised Tuesday night to increase spending, all of it on unconstitutional programs. [market]
Not a single Democratic vote is required to pass the next budget. Therefore, it is reasonable to assume that the president's budget proposal -- specifics of which will be released tomorrow -- reflects what he wants. Given the glowing early reviews from the GOP's congressional leadership, it reflects what they want, too.So, what do the Republicans want? In two words, more government.
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Try as I might, I can't find the section of the Constitution that enumerates any federal power to provide for education. And unless I've missed something, the 10th Amendment -- you know, the one that says the federal government can't do anything that it isn't specifically tasked with doing in the Constitution -- doesn't seem to have been repealed.
The Republicans know this, of course. They've been bellyaching for two decades about it, and promising to eliminate the Department of Education and sow salt on the earth where it once stood. This hardly seems an auspicious beginning to that process. Perhaps Bush is hoping that all of the DoE bureaucrats will die of paper cuts incurred while riffling through the fresh stacks of Federal Reserve Notes he's having sent over.
J.D. Tuccille at CivilLiberty.About.Com - Cops who say 'no': why police should refuse to enforce morally repugnant laws, like drug prohibition. [market]
Recently, 60 Minutes II reported on marijuana control efforts in and around Mendocino County in northern California. Local restaurants refuse to serve police who work on the task force that seeks out and destroys illicit marijuana plantations. Radio station report police movements so that growers and distributors can stay one step ahead. And locals sometimes shoot at police helicopters involved in hunting down ganja fields.What's happening with those wacky Californians? Nothing too surprising, really. It's simply that the prevailing culture of the area considers the cultivation, distribution and sale of marijuana to be a perfectly legitimate activity. The law disagrees, of course, but many locals have made the decision -- hardly unprecedented -- that the law is wrong and immoral.
As a result, police enforcing the immoral laws are resisted with ostracism, sabotage and even force.
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A good starting point is just to remember that police officers are responsible for any immoral acts they commit, and immoral laws they enforce, even when they do so in accordance with orders and written statutes. Morality, quite simply, exists above the law. Likewise, individual rights pre-exist the law and can't be abolished by a majority of the legislature or the population.
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German cops had financial obligations too.
Andrew Sullivan at The New Republic - Fine Lines: good discussion of the craziness of the war on some drugs. Mr. Sullivan hasn't yet realized that the war on drugs has nothing to do with drugs. It is a war on freedom. It is a way to pour lots of money into the pockets of the criminals who run the world's governments. [zero]
Take the designer drug Ecstasy. "E" is now classed in the same group of illegal drugs as heroin. But as recently as the 1980s it was completely legal; Merck patented it in 1914. E works by flooding the brain for a few hours with serotonin, the "happy" chemical, a substance our body naturally produces but in much smaller and more consistent amounts. Now compare Prozac. Prozac and its sister and successor drugs help regulate the production of serotonin for people with suppressed or unstable serotonin levels. The effect of such drugs is far less intense than that of Ecstasy--and the method by which serotonin is released and moderated is far subtler. But the substance being manipulated is the same. Indeed, people who regularly take Prozac tend to find that E barely affects their mood at all. Their serotonin problem is already fixed.
Sean Hamill at the Chicago Daily Herald via Marijuana.com - Cancer Patient is Headed to Court: Jerry Peterson is dying of melanoma. He has been arrested at a traffic stop for the second time due to the marijuana that he uses to relieve the pain and provide an appetite. Apparently this happens a lot in Illinois, and most of the "criminals" are let off. A little bit of good news, I suppose, but why is smoking a vegetable anyone's business but the smoker's? [unknown]
"I'm on 400 milligrams of morphine patches all the time, but I get arrested for this," he said in a perpetually gravely voice.
Brad Edmonds at LewRockwell.com - Greenies Got it Bass-ackward: eco-terrorists spend their time attacking suppliers when the only thing that works is to stop the demand. Though Mr. Edmonds didn't say so, this applies to drug warriors, too. Stop the demand, and the supply will dry up all by itself. Funny how that works, eh? [lew]
The activists have cause and effect bass-ackward. The industries they oppose, as with every industry, are demand-driven. If today you remove every lumberjack from the planet, they'll be replaced tomorrow. If, however, everyone stops buying lumber today, the lumberjacks will stop lumbering. So here is how the ecofreaks should proceed from now on...
Paul Craig Roberts at townhall.com - Unarmed and unsafe: now that Great Britain has made their society safer by banning all guns but bird-shot loaded shotguns, why do their police, who used to go about armed with only nightsticks, now need guns? Simple, less guns means more crime. [lew]
The people most dangerous to the public are not on the FBI's "Most Wanted List." Far more dangerous to our safety than criminals are gun-control extremists like Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., and Sarah Brady of Handgun Control.These are the people who will leave us defenseless as they abrogate the Constitution and destroy respect for law, while promising an end to "gun violence."
alexander cockburn and jeffrey st. clair at counterpunch - W: First Blood: commentary on GW's inaugural crime against humanity. The U.S. dominated U.N. won't approve Iraqi imports of vaccines or water pumps. So when someone tries to help them, Amerika drops bombs. [lew]
Bombing the Iraqis should properly be listed as part of the Inaugural ceremonies, a man not being truly President of the United States till he drops high explosive on Baghdad or environs. The new team evidently felt that the Commander in Chief could not be allowed to leave the jurisdiction, even to Mexico, without unleashing planes and bombs against Saddam, for whom the bombardment produced the effect of widespread sympathy across the world for Iraq....
Bomb your way into favorable headlines has been the policy of every president since the Second World War.
David Boaz at the Cato Institute - One Bad and Eight Good Reasons to Cut Taxes: GW has said that his tax cut will improve the economy. There are many good reasons for a tax cut, but that isn't one of them. [market]
1. In a free country, money belongs to the people who earn it...2. Private individuals and businesses use money more efficiently than governments do...
3. High taxes discourage work and investment...
4. Income taxes should be cut because the overall tax burden is quite high right now...
5. If we don't cut taxes, Congress will spend the money...
6. Lower taxes are the only real check on the expanding size and scope of the federal government...
7. Elected officials should keep their promises...
8. ...Republicans win when they cut taxes...
Raja "(RAy tracer in JAva) is a complete, object oriented ray tracer written in Java. It fully supports transparency, intersection, union, complement, mirroring, basic anti-aliasing, and exact acne correction. We aim to do a complete, easy to use and distributed renderer to do images or movies over a network of heterogeneous computers." [meat]
