Ten Years of Bliss

Submitted by Bill St. Clair on Fri, 20 Apr 2001 12:00:00 GMT

You Say, I Say

You say,
"How can I find God?"

I say,
"The Friend is the lining in your pocket -
The curved pink wall in your belly -

Sober up,
Steady your aim,
Reach in,
Turn the Universe and
The Beautiful Rascal
Inside out."

You say,
"That sounds preposterous -
I really don't believe God is in there."

I say,
"Well then,
Why not try the Himalayas -

You could get naked
And pretend to be an exalted yogi
And eat bark and snow for forty years."

And you might think,

"Hey, Old Man,
Why don't you - go shovel
Snowflakes!"

(The Subject Tonight is Love; 60 Wild and Sweet Poems of Hafiz -- Versions by Daniel Ladinsky

Today is the tenth anniversary of my marriage to Karla. Al-hamdu lillah! We celebrated last week in Myrtle Beach.

I plan to fly back down to Myrtle Beach tonight, and drive back with the family over the weekend. Likely no updates until Monday.

Brian walked into my office and told me that the name of the fighter pilot who ran into the U.S. surveillance plane is Wang Wei (pronounced: Wong Way). I fell off my chair and knelt on the ground for a while. Sure enough, the name appears in this CNN story. See "Vowels & Dipthongs" on this page for pronunciation. Yep. Hehehe.

Angel Shamaya at KeepAndBearArms.com - Gun Kit Maker Challenges ATF's, Court's Jurisdiction - Bob Stewart was raided a while back by the b.a.t.f. He's in court now. He fired his attorneys and is challenging the jurisdiction of the b.a.t.f. and the i.r.s. I can't imagine the judge will let this through. Angel is hopeful. Guess he hasn't fully taken in how corrupt the courts have become. Maybe we'll get lucky and this Arizona judge is an honest one, but I'm not going to get my hopes up. [kaba]

Thomas J. DiLorenzo at LewRockwell.com - Libertarians and the Confederate Battle Flag - a good rebuttal to David Boaz'es Slavery should not be honored in a state flag, which appeared Monday in the Las Vegas Review-Journal. It's sad that Mr. Boaz got this one so wrong. I expect more from him. The war was fought over state's rights, not slavery. The Confederate battle flag is a symbol of liberty. Fly it proudly. [lew]

In his book What They Fought For, 1861-1865, historian James McPherson reported on his reading of more than 25,000 letters and more than 100 diaries of soldiers who fought on both sides of the War for Southern Independence and concluded that Confederate soldiers (very few of whom owned slaves) "fought for liberty and independence from what they regarded as a tyrannical government."

The letters and diaries of many Confederate soldiers "bristled with the rhetoric of liberty and self government," writes McPherson, and spoke of a fear of being "subjugated" and "enslaved" by a tyrannical federal government. Sound familiar?

...

When Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation in January of 1863, which freed no slaves because it exempted all territories under Union control, there was a massive desertion crisis in the Union army. Union soldiers "were willing to risk their lives for Union," McPherson writes, "but not for black freedom."

Michael E. Kreca at LewRockwell.com How the US Government Created the "Drug Problem" in the USA - an incredible piece outlining how the c.i.a. & f.b.i. were the instigators of many of America's drug cultures, especially LSD. [lew]

Eighteenth-century German philosopher Georg Friedrich Hegel long ago developed, among other things, what he called the principle of "thesis, antithesis, synthesis" to explain the process of deliberately enacted social disorder and change as a road to power. To achieve a desired result, one deliberately creates a situation ("thesis,") devises a "solution," to solve the "problems" created by that situation ("antithesis,") with the final result being the ultimate goal of more power and control ("synthesis.") It is unsurprising Karl Marx and his disciples like Lenin and Trotsky, as well as the US government in its so-called War On Drugs, made this process a keystone of their drive for total control of all individual actions that, in their views, were not, in Mussolini s terms, "inside the state" and thus controllable by the same.

Seth Shulman at Technology Review - Owning the Future: PB&J Patent Punch-up - Smuckers is trying to enforce its patent on a crustless peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Talk about prior art. How many people do you know who rip the crust off the outside of the sandwich before eating it? I don't do that; I eat the whole thing. But I've seen it done plenty of times. [xray]

Michael W. Lynch at Reason - Amtrak's Bad Trip - since they can't turn a profit on fares, Amtrak is getting 10% of the stolen assets, er... asset forfeiture, take. So if you buy your Amtrak ticket with cash or neglect to include your phone number, expect a visit from a drug-sniffing dog. I hate to hurt the dogs, but maybe it's time to start carrying cayenne pepper on the train. Maybe some pepper spray or mace for the jack-booted thugs as well. I'm sick of this. How long before we line up all these fascists and shoot them? They initiate force every day. Self-defense is not a crime. [zero]

NBIO " is a library which implements nonblocking I/O facilities for Java. Surprisingly, the standard JDK libraries (as of JDK 1.3) do not provide nonblocking I/O. This means that in order to implement applications (such as web servers and other Internet services) which support many concurrent I/O streams, a large number of threads must be used. However, the overhead of threading (in Java, as well as more generally) limits the performance of such an implementation." Contains native code that has been tested only on Solaris and Linux 2.2.x. Should be easy to port to other unices. NBIO is used by SwiftMQ, a free, commercial JMS implementation that we're using where I work. [wes]

Craig Burton - AOL at IM Games Again: AOL Will Go Down - Good commentary on the stupidity of AOL blocking "unauthorized" AIM clients.

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Comments (1):

Michael Kreco , writer, dead.

Submitted by Anonymous on Sun, 14 May 2006 00:29:04 GMT

Michael E. Kreca who wrote How the US Government Created the "Drug Problem" in the USA, an article you have spotlighted on your page, was shot and killed by a San Diego police officer on Feb. 11, 2006. Many of his friends and also his family think he was targetted by police.

He was shot in the chest two times at point blank range. He was carrying an empty gun with a magazine in his pocket. He was no stranger to the handling of firearms and was a highly intelligent individual. He was also no stranger to San Diego police and had had run-ins with them. We who knew him and communicated with him on the web are very shocked and saddened at this news. A fellow correspondent had missed him on the forums he frequented and after a google of his name found news of his death.

Lew Rockwell has a little posted about it on his blog. Here are the links:

[url]http://blog.lewrockwell.com/lewrw/archives/010550.html[/url]

[url]http://blog.lewrockwell.com/lewrw/archives/010552.html[/url]

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Babuji's Urs 2001
The WIZ
Jesus is coming to dinner
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Thumb Prints for Rentals. Not!
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Quotes

Government doesn't work. Never did. Never will. Can't. But there are lots of good people. Love them.

-- Bill St. Clair

The Atlanta Declaration

Every man, woman, and responsible child has an unalienable individual, civil, Constitutional, and human right to obtain, own, and carry, openly or concealed, any weapon -- rifle, shotgun, handgun, machinegun, anything -- any time, any place, without asking anyone's permission.

-- L. Neil Smith

Reread that pesky first clause of the Second Amendment. It doesn't say what any of us thought it said. What it says is that infringing the right of the people to keep and bear arms is treason. What else do you call an act that endangers "the security of a free state"? And if it's treason, then it's punishable by death. I suggest due process, speedy trials, and public hangings.

-- L. Neil Smith

A Penalty Clause for the Bill of Rights

Any official, appointed or elected, at any level of government, who attempts, through legislative act or other means, to nullify, evade, or avoid the provisions of the first ten amendments to this Constitution, or of the Thirteenth Amendment, shall be summarily removed from office, and, upon conviction, deprived of all pay and benefits including pension, and sentenced to imprisonment for life.

-- L. Neil Smith

Based on 253 journal articles, 99 books, 43 government publications, and some of its own empirical work, the panel couldn't identify a single gun control regulation that reduced violent crime, suicide or accidents.

-- John Lott, commenting on the National Academy of Sciences report on gun control laws.

Who is a libertarian?

Zero Aggression Principle ("Zap")

"A libertarian is a person who believes that no one has the right, under any circumstances, to initiate force against another human being, or to advocate or delegate its initiation. Those who act consistently with this principle are libertarians, whether they realize it or not. Those who fail to act consistently with it are not libertarians, regardless of what they may claim."

-- L. Neil Smith

(Formerly called the "Non-Aggression Principle", or "NAP")

Why Did It Have to be... Guns?

Make no mistake: all politicians -- even those ostensibly on the side of guns and gun ownership -- hate the issue and anyone, like me, who insists on bringing it up. They hate it because it's an X-ray machine. It's a Vulcan mind-meld. It's the ultimate test to which any politician -- or political philosophy -- can be put.

If a politician isn't perfectly comfortable with the idea of his average constituent, any man, woman, or responsible child, walking into a hardware store and paying cash -- for any rifle, shotgun, handgun, machinegun, anything -- without producing ID or signing one scrap of paper, he isn't your friend no matter what he tells you.

If he isn't genuinely enthusiastic about his average constituent stuffing that weapon into a purse or pocket or tucking it under a coat and walking home without asking anybody's permission, he's a four-flusher, no matter what he claims.

What his attitude -- toward your ownership and use of weapons -- conveys is his real attitude about you. And if he doesn't trust you, then why in the name of John Moses Browning should you trust him?

-- L. Neil Smith

Concise

"Tell me," I was once asked, "What do you think about gun control? Give me the short answer." To which I replied, "If you try to take our firearms we will kill you."

-- Mike Vanderboegh

Also from The Atlanta Declaration:

... like going to the bathroom, breathing, eating, sleeping, or making love, it turns out that self-defense is a bodily function one cannot safely or effectively delegate to a second party.

-- L. Neil Smith

This does not mean that "Marijuana should be available by prescription." It means that morphine sulfate should be available in five pound bags at the supermarket for a couple of bucks, like sugar... but probably in a different aisle, to avoid confusion.

-- Vin Suprynowicz

If you refuse to pay unjust taxes, your property will be confiscated. If you attempt to defend your property, you will be arrested. If you resist arrest, you will be clubbed. If you defend yourself against clubbing, you will be shot dead. These procedures are known as the Rule of Law.

-- Edward Abbey

The state can only survive as long as a majority is programmed to believe that theft isn't wrong if it's called taxation or asset forfeiture or eminent domain, that assault and kidnapping isn't wrong if it's called arrest, that mass murder isn't wrong if it's called war.

-- Bill St. Clair