Beware the Ides 2001

Submitted by Bill St. Clair on Thu, 15 Mar 2001 13:00:00 GMT
Music for Misanthropes is the new radio blog of Damaged Justice, whose Frog Farm site I mirrored last Saturday. Added to my links page in the "Weblogs" section.

I sent the following letter to Popular Science magazine, in response to an article in their latest issue:

Drug Boosters

In "Drug Busters" (April), you waxed eloquent about new technology for intercepting airborne drug smugglers. Every year, the state spends more of our tax dollars on the war on some drugs, and every year drugs become more plentiful, cheaper, and more potent. There's a name for continuing to do something that doesn't work, and expecting the outcome to change. It's called insanity. The real results of this war are lots of rich criminals and lots of peaceful Americans in jail for possession of vegetables. Not only that, but our legislators routinely shred the bill of rights in the name of this crazy war. Most of the so-called "drug problem" is cannabis hemp, aka marijuana. Industrial hemp, which cannot get anyone "high", has a host of uses, from paper to clothing to food. Psychoactive hemp is a medical miracle. Even recreational use is far less dangerous than alcohol, cigarettes, or aspirin. Noone has ever died from a marijuana overdose. It's time to legalize cannabis hemp. Sell it in bulk in the herb section of the local health food store. The war on some drugs has nothing to do with drugs. It is a war on freedom. End it.

Bill St. Clair
New Lebanon, NY

Jonathan Hamilton and David Burch at the Marietta Daily Journal - It's the law in Kennesaw: a 1982 Kennesaw law requiring heads of households to own at least one gun with ammo is working. The crime rate has plunged. More guns = less crime. [unknown]

ZeroPolitics.org - Response to Jonah Goldberg RE: Drug Legalization: a good response to a recent National Review column. Why drug prohibition is a really bad idea. [zero]

Towards one more point of Mr. Goldberg's, in a moment of pure lucidity, he states that "consistency [is] the chief advantage libertarians have over all other ideologies." Later, he makes a scatterbrained attempt to bring up the problem of raising children in a society without drug prohibitions. He says, "Children have never fit easily in the libertarian paradigm." But they do. Children are the responsibility of their parents. And this is part of the wonderful consistency that is libertarianism. Children, like freedom, are a risky proposition. But despite all the risks, any libertarian would tell you he would rather guarantee his children's freedom than yoke them to the state.

Lew Rockwell at LewRockwell.com - Legalize Drunk Driving: a good article from last November about the absurdity of blood alcohol laws. [zero]

But there's a more fundamental point. What precisely is being criminalized? Not bad driving. Not destruction of property. Not the taking of human life or reckless endangerment. The crime is having the wrong substance in your blood. Yet it is possible, in fact, to have this substance in your blood, even while driving, and not commit anything like what has been traditionally called a crime.

Dave Winer at Radio Userland - Sources in initial blog post: Mr. Winer has institutionalized my method for crediting sources, a link between square brackets. Thanx Dave! [radio]

Dave Winer's DaveNet - Which Way Internet? Dave asks whether we should all jump on SOAP, or stick with XML-RPC. My opinion is to stick with XML-RPC, if only because I can grok that spec, but the SOAP spec is greek to me.

I opened the Manila database for wws.editthispage.com with Radio last night. Most interesting to see my last 15 months of blogging reduced to 841 "messages" in the "#discussionGroup" and 1120 "#glossary" items. Shouldn't be too hard to convert these to "posts" in one of the "myUserLandData" "blogs" (famous last words). I had an idea that every Frontier database should have a "#documentation" node, whose contents is a mirror of the rest of the database with "#comment" nodes added containing descriptive text. How come noone has done this yet?

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