End the War on Freedom

Someone from the Times Union called me yesterday afternoon to verify my authorship of the letter I posted yesterday morning. It appears that there's a good chance they'll run it sometime in the next 7 to 10 days.

From kaba:

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects. -- Robert Heinlein

Kieren McCarthy at The Register - Claire Field wins Harry Potter Web site case: Warner Brothers has backed down. Yay!

In a fax sent to Claire's lawyer, Matthew Rippon of Prettys Solicitors, Warner Brothers said that in view of the facts that Claire had registered the URL in good faith and was not using it for commercial means, there was no need for it to continue in its action.

David Borden at DRCNet - The Rule of Law: how come Patrick Dorismond's killers were not prosecuted for murder? How come police who pry open car trunks aren't prosecuted for theft or vandalism? Why are government agents above the law? Drug war exceptions to anything the fascists want, that's why.

As our predecessors who opposed Alcohol Prohibition proclaimed early last century: Save Our Constitution, Protect Our Youth, Repeal Prohibition.

Kevin Poulsen at The Register - Verio gags EFF founder over spam: John Gilmore's ISP, the providers of his T1 line, have disabled mail from his server because it was used by a spammer, and he refuses to limit access. I think Netherweb does a good job of this. They don't allow random email sends, but if you read your mail first, then you can send from that IP. This prevents people who are not Netherweb customers from sending mail via their server, but allows their customers to send mail from any internet connection. [register]

The Flow Magazine - Ten Things You Should Know About Marijuana: if we could convince the drug warriors of the truth of this page, the war on cannabis would end overnight. The Flow's purpose, from the home page, is:

to Create a Powerful Presence for Hemp in Cyberspace. To Gather in large numbers people of Like Mind, so that we may be able to Smoke, Grow, Wear or Use Hemp products in PEACE and HARMONY, together on The Flow.

Lindsay Perigo's Politically Incorrect Show - 12 March 2001: A Free Radical Award to Tim Wikiriwhi for burning his census form and giving a speech about why he's doing it and why doing so is not a crime.

Burning this document is the act of free men standing up and saying I'm not your property! My life is my own. So let us light us a fire tonight and raise our glasses for freedom!

CmdrTaco at Slashdot - Scientologists Force Comment Off Slashdot: somebody posted a copy of "OT III", part of the Fishman Affidavit, on Slashdot. Slashdot has removed it on advice of their lawyers. Lots of pointers to other places on the web containing stuff about Scientology. My only personal experience with them happenned in my freshman year at MIT. I met a scientologist in Central Square, and went to their $25 "Communication Course", where I said, "Do birds fly? I'll repeat the auditing question. Do fish swim?" over and over again. Pretty soon, I was asked for $300 for the next course in a hard-sell discussion. It seemed to me that the only thing likely to happen there would be me parting with my money, so I walked out and never went back. I did read Dianetics, but don't remember learning anything useful from it. Here's a summary of OT III from Karin Spaink's the fishman affidavit: OT III page:

The head of the Galactic Federation (76 planets around larger stars visible from here) (founded 5,000,000 years ago, very space opera) solved overpopulation (250 billion or so per planet, 178 billion on average) by mass implanting. He caused people to be brought to Teegeeack (Earth) and put an H-Bomb on the principal volcanos (Incident II) and then the Pacific area ones were taken in boxes to Hawaii and the Atlantic area ones to Las Palmas and there "packaged".

His name was Xenu. He used renegades. Various misleading data by means of circuits etc. was placed in the implants.

When through with his crime loyal officers (to the people) captured him after six years of battle and put him in an electronic mountain trap where he still is. "They" are gone. The place (Confederation) has since been a desert. The length and brutality of it all was such that this Confederation never recovered. The implant is calculated to kill (by pneumonia etc) anyone who attempts to solve it. This liability has been dispensed with by my tech development.

One can freewheel through the implant and die unless it is approached as precisely outlined. The "freewheel" (auto- running on and on) lasts too long, denies sleep etc and one dies. So be careful to do only Incidents I and II as given and not plow around and fail to complete one thetan at a time.

In December 1967 I knew someone had to take the plunge. I did and emerged very knocked out, but alive. Probably the only one ever to do so in 75,000,000 years. I have all the data now, but only that given here is needful. One's body is a mass of individual thetans stuck to oneself or to the body.

One has to clean them off by running incident II and Incident I. It is a long job, requiring care, patience and good auditing. You are running beings. They respond like any preclear. Some large, some small.

Thetans believed they were one. This is the primary error. Good luck.

Pretty crazy stuff, eh? We'll see if the Scientologists get on my case for this quote.

KeepAndBearArms.com Future Home of the Law-abiding Unregistered Firearms Association??? A Canadian judge has shut down www.LUFA.ca, so Angel Shamaya has offered them free space on KABA. [kaba]

Larry Rybka at KeepAndBearArms.com - Choose to Live: The Moral Decision to Bear Arms: Angel really likes this one. I found it sort of dry and long-winded. Decide for yourself. [kaba]

Marko Cunningham at KeepAndBearArms.com - An open letter to the gun banners; Gun ownership: Is it about Power and Violence? Except for the complete pacifists, who are few in number, the the Brady Bunch agrees with gun owners that force is sometimes necessary in defense. For some reason, they think that all such force can be left in the hands of the kings men. Mr. Cunningham explores why this is a really bad idea. There's a name for a country where only the police have guns. It's called a police state. [kaba]

Gun ownership is, indeed, about power, but not the kind of power you gun haters describe. It's not the power to force one's will on someone else by force of arms that makes gun ownership a priority to us. It's the power to control your own fate to some extent, and the power to back up a "No!" when someone else thinks they can take our possessions or our lives by force.

...

...The 60,000 dead fathers, brothers, sons and friends whose names are engraved on black marble slabs in Washington did not die because some crazy guy with a gun wasn't responsible with it; they died because a man in a suit threatened them with imprisonment or death if they didn't follow government orders...

David Peltz at KeepAndBearArms.com - Non Compliance; Why haven't Californians registered all their assault weapons? Only 27,000 of an estimated 500,000 to 1 million "assault weapons" have been registered in Kalifornia. Some of them were shipped out of state. Some were modified to no longer qualify as "assault weapons". But many Californians have simply refused to comply with the law, a massive case of civil disobedience. Good for them. For some strange reason, Mr. Peltz and his wife DID register their weapons. [kaba]

The Misanthropic Bitch - Don't Hurt Me: the bitch makes a point, in the light of the most recent school shooting, that some people deserve to be made fun of.

Chances are, if everyone you encounter mocks you and dislikes you - even those with whom you feel a connection - you are the problem.

Java Web Start Version 1.0 is available from Sun. I DL'd it but haven't tried it yet. [cafe]

Keith Dawson's Tasty Bits from the Technology Front - An illegal prime number: a 1401-digit prime number that when converted to hex is a gzipped version of the original DeCSS algorithm sans tables. Hehe. [tbtf]

Eckhard Roessel at The Java Boutique - The Mandelbrot Set: when I was at Thinking Machines in about 1984, I wrote a pretty nice Mandelbrot exploration program. This is a pretty good Java version. A modern $3k laptop is much faster than the $70K Lisp machines of 17 years ago. My program had a feature that would cache computations so you could get one without waiting the 2 or three minutes it took to calculate. This one takes about 2 seconds on my 350Mhz machine.

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