You're Next
From my friend Brad in Wyoming:
You're Next...
When I was younger I hated going to weddings... it seemed that all of my aunts and the grandmotherly types used to come up to me, poke me in the ribs, cackle, and tell me, "You're next."... They stopped that crap after I started doing the same thing to them at funerals.
From the Wolf & Tobin Show newsletter:
A jury will soon render a verdict in the case of Tom Green, a man who lives with his five wives and 29 children in the remote Utah desert. If found guilty, Green will be sentenced to live the rest of his life. . . with 5 wives and 29 children in the remote Utah desert.
From DrugSense Weekly -
To say the drug war is a failure is like saying the Hindenburg was short a few fire extinguishers. -- Carl Hiassen, Miami Herald
From The Federalist:
Hell hath no fury like a bureaucrat scorned. -- Milton Friedman
and:
Good and evil both increase at compound interest. That is why the little decisions you and I make every day are of such infinite importance. -- C.S. Lewis
Jeff Elkins at LewRockwell.com - Thank You, William J. Bennett - a good response to Bennett's recent Wall Street Journal article, about which I wrote a letter yesterday. [lew]
We have Bill Bennett to thank for the epidemic of crack cocaine. Quoting Milton Friedman: "Had drugs been decriminalized 17 years ago, 'crack' would never have been invented (it was invented because the high cost of illegal drugs made it profitable to provide a cheaper version) and there would today be far fewer addicts."
The lives of hundreds of thousands of victims of drugs might have been saved. The inner cities would not be drug-and-crime-infested hellholes. Our prisons wouldn't be full of innocent drug offenders and we'd have far less prisons. If you're black, be sure to thank Bill Bennett for providing such a wonderful empowerment for your race.
Larry Dodge at Sierra Times - A Message from the Fully Informed Jury Association - FIJA's co-founder comments on the latest blow to trial by Jury in the People's Republik of Kalifornia. [sierra]
Declan McCullagh at politechbot - Kirkland police threaten Politech with lawsuit - Mr. McCullagh published here the SSN's of three Washington state police officers. The city of Kirkland is now threatening to sue him unless he removes them. ["ovimc"]
Declan McCullagh at politechbot - Hackers apparently nab justicefiles.org and repost police SSNs - they may be gone by the time you read this, but there are a bunch of social insecurity numbers of Kirkland, WA police here. Apparently, the owner of justicefiles.org took them down in response to a court order, but a group of hackers in Ontario have hijacked his domain and made it point to their servers. Hehe. Some Unintended Consequences in our future? ["politech"]
Garry Reed (The Loose Cannon Libertarian) at Newsguy - The Federal Bureau of Charity - commentary on gw's "Faith-based initiative". [market]
Virtually all controversy, it turns out, clusters around the Separation of God and Government issue. Only one writer that I'm aware of, a libertarian, has brought up the Tenth Amendment point. Hint: If the Constitution doesn't specifically say the Fed Gov can do something, then it can't do it. No governmentite has any Constitutional authority to ladle taxpayer dough into a charity's soup bowl. So why are Republicans and Democrats alike, along with their enabling media pundits, silent about the Tenth Amendment? Because they all want the equal opportunity to ignore it. Sorta like a secret handshake. Don't annoy me with the Tenth Amendment and I won't irritate you with it. And, horrors, don't remind the public of it. Prez Bush is just the latest in a very long line of politicians of both animal mascot species who take the oath to preserve and protect the Constitution only to violate it at earliest opportunity.
Garry Reed (The Loose Cannon Libertarian) at Newsguy - Libertarianism for Dummies - This is Mr. Reed's first article at Newsguy. It appears that he's writing them every other week. This one tells us what he means by "libertarian". It's missing any mention of non-initiation of force, so he isn't a real libertarian, but it sounds like he's leaning in the right direction.
Count two: calling libertarianism an amalgam of certain left handed and right handed principles just perpetuates the myth that all political philosophies exist on a one dimensional scale, like a DOA's flat line. All you left-liberal-Democrats on that end, all you right-conservative-Republicans on the other end, and we'll play keep-away with everyone in the middle.
Doesn't work that way. Take notes now. There are only two ideologically meaningful categories. There is libertarianism and there is authoritarianism. Today's left and right belong in the authoritarian camp, along with every other ism in history that places the power of the group above the sovereignty of the individual. The only difference between Pol Pot's killing fields and Bill Clinton's "I feel your pain" paternalism is a matter of degree. (Think that's too extreme? Don't forget that Clinton had his own killing fields in Waco and Sudan and Kosovo.)
Garry Reed (The Loose Cannon Libertarian) at Newsguy - On Being Aggressively Peaceful - Libertarian foreign policy can be summed up in one word: noninterventionist.
Another ingredient in the Aggressively Peaceful strategy is being aggressively diplomatic. Example One. Hutus and Tutsis are very bad neighbors. They periodically treat one another to genocide. Horrific? Absolutely. Does it threaten to spill over onto American soil? No. Conclusion: not our business. Example Two. India and Pakistan are very bad neighbors and they both have nukes. While a nuke-swapping party would be horrific it still isn't America's business. But what about the fallout? Could the jet stream pick up the resulting cloud of death and dump it on American picnickers? That makes it our business, and calls for a strong dose of diplomacy. Sound callus? Maybe. But our Constitutional mandate is to protect American lives. Attempting to protect everybody from everybody is unconstitutional. Funding the attempt turns every American citizen into a tax slave, also unconstitutional.
S. Fred Singer at the Independent Institute - A Stronger Case Against Kyoto - Why gw and all Americans should strongly oppose the Kyoto Protocol. It's bad science, very expensive, and: [market]
The Kyoto Protocol is the opening wedge. Unless the Bush White House takes a firm stance on climate policy, its energy policy is in peril; one cannot separate the two. Beyond this, foreign policy and national sovereignty are at stake.
Bill Steigerwald the Heartland Institute - Big Media's Lonely Libertarian: an interview with John Stossel - Mr. Steigerwald talks with the man the socialists love to hate. [market]
AP via Fox News - Calif. Sets Up Power Authority - Gov. Davis threatened this. Now he's doing it. If you live in the People's Republik of Kalifornia, this is your clue to move elsewhere. New York and Nebraska already have power authorities, and they seem to have survived it. Well, sort of. [market]
I tried the ManilaSiteConverter Tool last night. It mostly works. Link and picture URLs appear to still point to wws.editthispage.com, and I've got to plug in my new template. Still, it's progress. And I have some code I can modify that does most of what I need.
JDK 1.3.1 is available from Sun for Solaris (SPARC/x86), Linux (x86), and Windows. This release fixes bugs in 1.3. No API changes. Those'll come in 1.4. [cafe]
