Brady Nonsense
damaged justice at Music for Misanthropes - Wednesday, March 21, 2001: good rant today. I especially liked his comments on immigration: [MfM]
What's so goddamn hard to understand? People come to America not only because of the opportunities freedom offers, but because of the gravy train already being taken advantage of by Americans themselves. Get rid of "welfare" and you won't need a damn immigration "policy", because people will stop coming to America for the wrong reasons. They will come for the freedom.
Dave Polaschek, the creator of Dave's Picks, has been looking for an LED headlight for his bicycle. He didn't find one, but found a bunch of LED flashlights that are likely adaptable to a bike. He posted a list of links. Look for "21. March 2001". This page will likely move here in April. [picks]
Amber Kronberg is taking a break from blogging for a while. A glorious repast to you, Amber. May your recent troubles evaporate like the water from a thunderstorm. [eden]
Victor Davis Hanson at Opinion Journal - Paradise Lost; California parasites kill the goose that produced the Golden State - Wow! A wonderful exposition of California's state-induced troubles. Not only do they have no power, but they're close to running out of fresh water, their highways are in really bad shape, and 30-40% of their university course offerings are remedial in nature. Mr. Hanson farms grapes and professes classics. [Mrs. K]
Not since the robed philosophers of Rome and Greece bickered and harangued each other by lamplight has history seen such a sophisticated preindustrial society as our own.
Mrs. K., who sent me the link to Mr. Hanson's story and a former California resident, said about California's woes:
Watching the self-destruction is akin to watching a bright, beautiful woman destroy herself with heroin; such a waste of natural wealth.
Jerry Pournelle got a link to Mr. Hanson's story in yesterday's email. His response is worth reading. Below are my favorite two paragraphs. Will likely move here next week. [pournelle]
Nationalizing all problems means the states are shielded from the consequences of bad decisions. Inheritance taxes: leave it to the states. And power policies including Environmental Protection. Yes, some of that can be interstate matters, but federal law now requires us to use stack scrubbers on western coal -- and our stack gasses go INTO the scrubbers cleaner than they COME OUT of the eastern scrubbers burning eastern coal. If power generation were not subject to imbecile federal laws, California, Utah, Nevada, Arizona, and New Mexico would be generating power all over the place with less pollution than Pennsylvania.Same with nuclear power. Sure there are some Federal matters. No positive void reactors, for example. But Europe manages nicely on nuclear power. Japan has more than we do. What man has done California can aspire to. The reason nuclear power is expensive is legal not economic, and everyone who has spent an hour examining the subject knows it, leaving me to wonder if the "journalists" who routinely dismiss nuclear power as "too expensive" are truly that ignorant. (As to nuclear waste: build the equivalent of the SuperDome in the Mojave Desert. Put a chain link fence topped with razor wire around it. Let the garrison at Ford Irwin protect it from any idiot who actually tries to break in. No one will ever see it, and the SuperDome can hold all the nuclear waste California will generate for hundreds of years.)
From Liberator Online, the email rag of Advocates for Self-Governmenet, the expounders of the World's Smallest Political Quiz:
New and Improved World's Greatest Political Quiz
Fed up with small, slanted political quizzes? I present a new unbiased political quiz which will enlighten you to your actual political views. Answer either "True" or "False" to each statement below. Give yourself 1 point for each "True" and 0 points for each "False." The category in which you have the most points describes your political position.
I. Your Conservative Rating
- People should be forced to conform to my moral views.
- My prosperity is my divine right.
- Rush Limbaugh is the greatest hope for our nation.
- A woman's place is in the home.
II. Your Liberal Rating
- All economic problems can be solved by taxing the rich.
- Criminals are not responsible for crime, society is.
- Values are a dangerous and evil concept, abolish them.
- All white males are racist and sexist.
III. Your Libertarian Rating
- People without money deserve to starve and die.
- All trespassers should be shot on sight.
- Nothing bad can possibly happen in a free market.
- The law of gravity is coercive, repeal it.
And now that you have learned of your own political leanings, it is time to test your knowledge of the other philosophies. Just match the phrase with the political group it represents.
Our country would be so much better if we could just eliminate:
* atheists.
* the rich.
* the government.
All I want is for other people to:
* live like I do.
* let me spend their money.
* @#!% off.
If I had $1 million, I would
* give it to Pat Robertson.
* create a new bureaucracy.
* buy more land and fence it in.
All my opponents are just like:
* Adolph Hitler
* Adolph Hitler
* Adolph Hitler
Cryptome - Cryptologists Discover Flaw in PGP E-Mail Security Program - Some Czech guys claim they've discovered how to recover your PGP private key if they get the encrypted key file and a single message encrypted with it. The only comment that John Young has collected so far on the story is that it's likely a hoax. I'm sure we'll see a lot on it in the next little while. The Cryptome entry includes the NYTimes article to which Lawrence Lee (Mr. Tomalak) links. [tomalak]
Libertarian Party Press Release - U.S. House planning "sneakiest pay raise in history," Libertarians warn Americans - The house is planning to give themselves a $165/day tax-free per diem. This amounts to a $25,000/year raise.
"This episode demonstrates that the one word that should strike fear into the hearts of every American is 'bipartisan.' After all, there's nothing more dangerous, or expensive, than Democrats and Republicans working in harmony to funnel your money into their pockets," [Steve] Dasbach said.As for the amount -- $165 per working day -- he quipped: "How much would we have to pay them just to stay home?"
Carter M. Yang at ABC News via Yahoo!.News - Fake IDs Foil Gun Background Checks: undercover agents had a 100% success rate at passing the Brady background check with fake identification. The Brady Bunch are probably going to use this as an excuse to require fingerprints to purchase a weapon. The proper solution of course is to trash the background check entirely. Laws only make it harder for honest people, the ones you want to be armed, to get guns. Criminals will always have access to weapons, no matter what the laws. [unknown]
Dave Winer at TheTwoWayWeb.Com - The XML Files: it appears that Dave has renamed Jake's tool and changed the XML a little. If you jumped on the ExportManilaSite tool yesterday, it's probably a good idea to replace it with TheXMLFiles tool. Dave also documents the XML output. [script]
