End the War on Freedom

This Talking Rag

It
Was all
So clear this morning,

My mind and heart had never felt
More convinced:

There is only God,
A Great Wild
God.

But somehow I got yanked from
That annihilating
Realization

And can now appear again
As this wine-stained
Talking

Rag.

(The Gift: Poems by Hafiz, translations by Daniel Ladinsky)

From Quotes of the Day:

"Education's purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one." -- Malcolm Forbes

"Never judge a book by its movie." -- J. W. Eagen

Took the whole family yesterday to see Disney's latest animated movie, Atlantis. Christopher and I liked it. Karla thought it was too pointless and violent. She's no adventure film buff. Victoria was interested, but some of it was too scary for her. Movies aren't cheap entertainment any more. Nearly forty smackers to buy tickets, drinks, and popcorn. Cmdr Taco has a review over at Slashdot. He liked it, and hated "Suck Raider".

Amber Kronberg at Following Eden - heroes and revolutionaries - good stuff from Amber. Y'all go right on over and read it, hear?

Peter Robinson and Milton Friedman at the Hoover Digest - Friedman on the Surplus - From a January 17, 2001 interview on the TV show Uncommon Knowledge. Mr Friedman says that the budget surplus should be returned to its owners as a tax cut and why. Hint: it has nothing to do with the economy. [market]

ROBINSON: In that case, let me ask you a historical question. Our form of government was set up over 200 years ago, and yet right up through the middle of the last century, the share of federal government spending remained small relative to the overall economy. What happened to change it? That is to say, the fundamental institutional structures and incentives were always there. What happened?

FRIEDMAN: What happened was the Great Depression, which changed people's views. Before the Great Depression, the general public vision was that the government was a necessary evil and that you should rely on the private market. The Great Depression was wrongly attributed--in my opinion, it was produced by government mismanagement--to a failure of the capitalist system, and public attitudes changed drastically as a result. From regarding the government as a necessary evil the public came to regard the government as the answer to all problems, which set in motion, beginning with FDR's New Deal, a process under which government has been growing incrementally from then on.

...

ROBINSON: Only if Congress doesn’t have the money can it be prevented from spending it?

FRIEDMAN: Right. That's why for a long time now I have been in favor of any tax cut, under any circumstances, in any way, in any form whatsoever.

Garry Reed at NewsGuy - Book Review Review: Libertarian Bashing? - Mr. Reed reviews a publisher's blurb, a press release, and a Mises Institute review of the book Love & Economics: Why the Laissez-Faire Family Doesn't Work By Jennifer Roback Morse. From the sounds of it, I don't blame him for looking for shortcuts to actually reading the book. I wouldn't pay $27.95 for it either.

Halfway into the blurb I found the hook on which to hang my review: "Most Americans, whatever their politics, share the libertarian view of personal liberty as the right to do as one pleases." That's a direct, complete, unadulterated quote.

As reviewers everywhere are wont to sputter, Pshaw! Libertarians do not believe in the right to do as one pleases. We don't believe in the right to steal, the right to murder or the right to dump our old papaya skins in our neighbor's yard just because it might please us to do so.

Vin Suprynowicz at the Las Vegas Review-Journal - Who would raise kids to 'fear' government? - Commentary on the case of JoAnn McGuckin and her five children. At least the nazis haven't killed any of them yet. My take: whoever is responsible for keeping Ms. McGuckin from her children should be shot.

"So they trick this woman into being arrested, and they go and slap $100,000 bail on her head? And (Bonner County prosecutor Phil Robinson's) comment to the press was, 'I recommended $100,000 bail to keep her from getting out of jail and going to see her children.' I don't know about you, I thought bond was to prevent flight or perhaps because there's a threat of violence to someone in the community, not to keep a woman from seeing her children."

NORML News Bulletin - DEA Restates Proposed Ban on Hemp Products - Having discovered that the courts are going to disallow urine testing as a means of proving marijuana use, since they can't distinguish use of the illegal psychoactive form and the legal hemp-based foodstuffs, the d.e.a. is still working on making it illegal to import any form of cannabis intended for human consumption containing any detectable amount of THC. Bastards! [market]

There are two new articles in The Libertarian series by Vin Suprynowicz:

• High court OKs after-hours religious club - Vin gives us a lesson in the establishment clause. Wish the courts would listen to this. They did it right in this case, but have it dead wrong in most others.

  America's founders favored religious pluralism and sectarian tolerance, but gave no indication they wanted the country's youth cut off from religious teachings. (Whether or not to allow religious teachings in the government schools was a question which never arose, of course, since there were no Prussian-style government-funded schools on these shores before the 1850s.)
  
  The court is thus well in line with the founders' thinking when it rules there is no state mandate to shield schoolchildren from the possibility of hearing a religious message on their own time, so long as it does not intervene to favor or promote the teachings of one church or religion over any other.

• The saga of The Moose's Tooth - The commerce department released a report on June 4 showing that the less socialist states had more economic growth during the 1990s, though they didn't make that connection. The one exception appeared to be Alaska. Nope. Alaska's gone socialist, too. Too bad.

  The real correlation with economic growth or slowdown would appear to have far less to do with defense contracts -- or any Asian currency crisis -- than it does with whether a state's lawmakers strive to keep taxes low and stay the employment-strangling hand of the "regulatory" racketeers. Once a laissez-faire paradise for the self-sufficient, Alaska now seems to have instead fallen into the hands of the protection rackets and their professional legislative wheel-greasers.

Russell Madden at Laissez Faire City Times - The Right to Discriminate - a good screed on the right of individuals and businesses to discriminate in any way they please. Good commentary on the destruction of property rights in the light of the Supreme's Casey Martin decision.

There's a word for this economic arrangement. It's called "fascism."

This warped view of what dealing with the "public" subjects a business-owner to has long been in vogue. This Martin travesty is merely one more extension of the fantasy that property rights are to be determined by majority vote . . . and the owner always loses. The anti-smoking fascists utilize the same tactics in clamping down on smokers in "public" places such as restaurants and stores. The owner himself is powerless to resist. His wishes and decisions are as meaningful to these sanctimonious despots as are those of a lamb to a wolf.

John Markoff at the New York Times - Longtime Computer Designer Leaving Disney Research Unit - Alan Kay is leaving Disney along with the rest of his group that have been working on Squeak, a highly portable Smalltalk implementation designed with kids in mind. I tried Squeak a year or so ago. Very neat.

John Borland at CNET - MP3 rival to release full version - Version 1.0 of Ogg Vorbis, an open source MP3 rival, is scheduled for release today. I DL'd the beta 4 encoder, WinAmp plug-in, and FreeAmp player. vorbis.com also has some free music samples, but I'm at home on my modem right now, so I didn't wait for them. I couldn't get FreeAmp to install. It unpackaged a bunch of files, went into "preparing the InstallShield wizard..." mode, then got: "Error extracting support files: Access is denied". The oggdrop application complained about an unknown format when I dropped a wav from the Sound Recorder, and did nothing to a CD file and an MP3. [newsforge]

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