Luna Moth
J. Orlin Grabbe has a photograph of the lovely Nikki Visser almost wearing a bikini.
From office email. Author unknown.
I've never understood why women love cats. Cats are independent, they don't listen, they don't come in when you call, they like to stay out all night, come home and expect to be fed and stroked, then want to be left alone and sleep. In other words, every quality that women hate in a man, they love in a cat.
Amber Kronberg - Thursday, May 24, 2001 - Amber's sister had what sounds like an involved operation. My prayers go out to her for a speedy recovery. God bless you Amber. And God bless your sister. There is nothing for you to verify. Your word is plenty good enough for me. [eden]
L. Neil Smith at CCOPS - One-Term George, Take Two! - L. Neil advises gw that if he wants another term as president he should enforce the bill of rights by eliminating the Brady bill, the semi-automatic weapon ban and magazine limit, and the 1968 Freedom, er... Gun Control Act. Bravo! [jpfo]
I don't know why this should come as a surprise to anybody. When Bush visited my home state, Colorado, during the recent campaign, he stood beside Socialist ... er, Republican Bill Owens, a particularly odious specimen dubbed "Governor Gungrabber" by anyone who cares about the Second Amendment in this state, declaring that he supports Owens' antigun legislative agenda, which includes shutting down gun shows, registering (maybe even banning) private sales between individuals, and forcing gun owners to lock their weapons up where they won't pose a threat to his moral and spiritual kin, the muggers, rapists, and burglars.
...
The National Rifle Association no longer speaks for me. Nor did it ever have my leave to bargain away my 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 -- now, not even in exchange for the benevolent government providing us with glorious utopian Xanadulike shooting ranges or other socialist sops.
Enforce the Bill of Rights.
The same goes for the state rifle and pistol association and all the rest of the NRA's various tentacles out across Flyover Country. In my experience, you could exchange Wayne LaPierre for Sarah Brady in the middle of the night and nobody would ever notice the difference. I support Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership -- and to give you an idea of who you're dealing with here, Gun Owners of America is on probation with me just now, until they prove to me that they're not planning to bend over and grab their ankles in the time-honored NRA tradition.
Jerry Pournelle - Thursday, May 24, 2001 - characterizes our congress critters as "tax eaters". Will move here next week. [pournelle]
Fiscal restraint, the Vermont tax eater says. Fiscal restraint: no tax cut. If money goes to Washington, it belongs to the tax eaters, and they WILL spend it. They will not give it back. They know better than you do how money ought to be spent. You are too darned dumb to spend your money properly. So we continue with tax levels sufficient to win World War II. And it is not likely to get better that way. Fortunately we are rich and can afford parasites, like a healthy dog can afford to succor fleas.
Ron Paul's Texas Straight Talk - Don't Blame the Free Market for Energy Shortages - price controls cause shortages. Don't do it.
Never mind that California caused its own problems by restricting supply and freezing energy prices while the population skyrocketed. The real danger is that the federal government may repeat California's mistakes on a national level, subjecting the rest of the nation to similar shortages. The true crisis facing us is not a physical shortage of energy, but rather the looming threat that socialist economic planning will replace market mechanisms and cause unnecessary shortages.
...
Free markets work. Government, not markets or deregulation, causes the economic woes we face today. Free markets insure that supply and demand are evenly matched, preventing shortages. Contrary to the claims of environmentalists, free markets always promote conservation by increasing the price of precious resources as they become scarcer.
Cincinnati Ya Basta! Collective at Louisville IMC - Cincinnati Ya Basta! Collective Calls for a Yellow Overalls Formation for June 2nd - Looks like there will be some news from Cincinnati at the end of next week. These folks plan a peaceful rally. Somehow I doubt the cops are going to help them to achieve it.
Tibor R. Machan at Laissez Faire City Times - Drug War Blues - Mr. Machan is tired of fighting the drug war, and can't figure out why there's no public uproar over killing and imprisoning people for hurting noone but themselves. I concur. [grabbe]
Who on earth are these folks who take it upon themselves to bully their way into other people's lives to rescue them from themselves in the most uncivilized way that people can interact, by means of a gun! Yes, they are czars -- and doesn't that clue folks in just how evil they are? For at the end of every legal edict there have to be guns, and when the edict is unjust, these guns will have to be used unjustly whenever compliance isn't forthcoming.
Sean N. Gruber at Laissez Faire City Times - Exploiting Children by "Saving" Them - explores two cases of children "saved" by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. One was a sixteen year-old runaway. The other was a mentally disabled kid. In the first case, the runaway was returned to her parents against her will. Kidnapping by any other name... In the second, they performed a useful service. [grabbe]
Camille Paglia at Salon - The energy mess and fascist gays - McVeigh, Pennsylvania coal and oil, pro-capitalism, alternative energy, educational reform, reparative therapy, "Government has no business intervening in any consensual private behavior", "The Sopranos" is vulgar and boring, Pam Grier. Camille will be on summer hiatus until September. Her tribute to Bob Dylan will be in the June 7 issue of Rolling Stone.
The first public beta of JDK 1.4 is available from Sun for Solaris, Windows, and Linux. It has a host of new features. XML parsing, non-blocking I/O, assertions, preferences API, regular expressions, modern FTP protocol handler, JDBC 3.0, a mostly-concurrent garbage collector,... The windows download is 48,317,852 bytes. The jre distributable directory has grown from 28.3 megs in 1.3.1 to 39.9 megs in 1.4.0. The rt.jar run-time library has grown from 13 megs in 1.3.1 to 21 megs in 1.4.0. I tried the SwingSet and Java2D demos. They seem a little faster than in 1.3, though I didn't do a real comparison. Our medium-sized (1.2 megs of Jar files) application just works. No changes or recompilation necessary. Good work Sun! Elliotte Rusty Harold outlines the new features and says: [cafe]
Finally, what is possibly the sleeper feature of this release, but has the potential to change the way Web sites are implemented, is giving the Java Plug-in "access to the DOM via standard, w3c-defined interfaces". If this means what I think it means, you'll now be able to write applets that can control and interact with the HTML markup on a page. I can't believe it's taken six years to get to this. Something like it should have been available in Java 1.0 alpha 1. If it had been, the whole JavaScript mess could have been avoided.
