End the War on Freedom

To Build a Swing

You carry
All the ingredients
To turn your life into a nightmare —
Don't mix them!

You have all the genius
To build a swing in your backyard
For God.

That sounds
Like a hell of a lot more fun.
Let's start laughing, drawing blueprints,
Gathering our talented friends.

I will help you
With my divine lyre and drum.

Hafiz
Will sing a thousand words
You can take into your hands,
Like golden saws,
Silver hammers,

Polished teakwood,
Strong silk rope.

You carry all the ingredients
To turn your existence into joy,

Mix them, mix
Them!

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

According to Rabia, one of the Grande Dames of the Abode, where I live, this is a Buckeye Tree. It's at the base of Mount Lebanon on Shaker Road. Click on the picture for a larger version (362K).

I watched Traffic (site currently hacked) on video last night. Surreal. Two and a half hours of confusion and violence. The only half-way sane characters were the drug baron's wife, played by Catherine Zeta Jones, and the drug czar, played by Michael Douglas. I especially liked the economic explanation for the drug trade given by the czar's daughter's boyfriend and drug dealer.

I sent the following email:

Date: Thu, 28 Jun 2001 08:40:02 -0400
To: chris@DNASTUDIO.COM (Chris Gibbin)
From: "Bill St. Clair" <bill@billstclair.com>
Subject: www.trafficthemovie.com hacked?
Cc: bill@billstclair.com

Chris,

I'm writing to you because you're listed as the administrative contact for the domain trafficthemovie.com. I watched Traffic on video yesterday and wanted to link to the official site in my weblog today. I found the site on Google, and discovered when I went there that it has been hacked. The front page, http://www.trafficthemovie.com/" now says:

Hacked by Ghostwerm, artistic element added by Eàmonn O'Loughlin.
SHOUTZ TO: Proxykillah, EV|L1, NEILLER, B1NARY, ELITE158, HaXsw0rd, cmnoop and all the other lamerz @ Elitehackers.com
for more read http://elitehackers.com/uub/Forum2/HTML/004060.html
© 200x www.hax0rsportal.com

Thought you'd like to know about this.

I am in no way connected with this group of hackers. I just happened across the hack.

-Bill St. Clair
bill@billstclair.com

Declan McCullagh's Politechbot - Mastercard lawyers threaten Attrition.org over satire site - more satires of the "priceless" ads draw the ire of Mastercard's lawyers. When was it that trademarks stopped being industry specific? I don't remember any such law. Links to images in the story. Some of them are obscene, so don't go there if you're easily offended. X-Ray Net has links to all of them here. I especially liked this animated GIF (81K), archived here. "There are some things that money can't buy... For everything else... there's the Federal Government." [xray]

Harry Browne at WorldNetDaily - Top 10 misconceptions about government - Guess what? There is no budget surplus; social security is being raided to make it look like there is. HillaryCare has been largely enacted. The federal highway system robs from the poor states and gives to the rich and powerful. "Know your customer" is alive and well at your local bank. The war on some drugs has nothing to do with drugs. It is a war on freedom, a war on the bill of rights, a war on America's soul. And it doesn't work. Government is the worst polluter. The f.d.a. approval process prevents Americans from getting life-saving drugs. Government is a major cause of violence. The next government program will be at least as bad as the failed programs before it. So, what else is new?

The solution to today's problems isn't to pass more government programs -- or to reform government programs -- or to get better people to manage them. The answer is to end completely all these government programs that have caused so much misery, waste, corruption, and tyranny. Get government entirely out of health care, education, welfare, drugs, policing the world, and anything else not specifically authorized in the Constitution.

There's a new article in The Libertarian series by Vin Suprynowicz:

• Watch out for politicians promising us new 'rights' - Vin argues, nicely IMHO, that we should return to free-market medical care. He forgets to say that eliminating medicare would by itself markedly lower health care costs. Save us tax money, too.

  In fact, what we are seeing in this (really extremely limited) debate over a new form of government meddling in the health care industry is just another demonstration of von Mises' Law. The celebrated Austrian economist figured out decades ago that government interventions in the free market only trigger strings of unintended consequences, which inevitably lead for calls for new government interventions to fix the problems caused by the initial government meddling ... et cetera ad infinitum.

Dave Winer has created The Smart Tags Weblog: "Coordinating work to keep the Web safe from Microsoft". This site is for discussion of methods to disable Microsoft's new "smart tags" feature that is shipping in Internet Explorer 6. I have already added the meta tag to these pages. [script]

Scott Ard and Steven Musil at ZDNet - Smart Tags dropped from Windows XP - it appears that Microsoft has decided not to ship smart tags after all. I'm not removing the meta tag yet.

Nicholas Petreley at InfoWorld - Why the Linux desktop? Nick punches a couple of holes in the conventional wisdom. You should choose Linux just because you hate Microsoft, and Linux is not too complicated: KDE 2.1 is "amazingly simple and yet is powerful and flexible."

Let's start with how the company's lust for control over the market takes precedence over the well-being and security of its customers. For example, Microsoft is hard at work devising ways to lock you into a system where you pay on a continual basis to use a Microsoft application. Microsoft is not doing this because it is the best solution for its customers. Microsoft is simply running out of ways to entice you to pay for upgrades to its cash-cow applications. If that doesn't elicit a feeling of righteous indignation when you get your next blue screen of death or lose data to an e-mail Trojan horse, I don't know what will.

Kevin Cloud and Robert "Apache" Howarth at Voodoo Extreme - Returning To Castle Wolfenstein - ID Software is releasing a sequel to Wolfenstien 3D. I wasted many hours blasting away Nazis in the Mac version of this early first-person shoot-em-up. This is an interview with Kevin Cloud of ID. Slashdot discussion here. [/.]

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