E.T. Meets Clockwork Orange

Submitted by Bill St. Clair on Wed, 01 Aug 2001 14:28:34 GMT
From Quotes of the Day:
If I had to live my life again, I'd make the same mistakes, only sooner. - Tallulah Bankhead

FreeFind is the search engine used by The Libertarian Enterprise. I set it to work indexing billstclair.com. Besides searching, it provides a site map, what's new listing, and page change monitoring. They allow 32MB of content for free, nominally 3,000 pages. I decided I like PicoSearch better. More control of the search and it always shows some of the matching context. The one advantage of FreeFind is that it allows you to schedule indexing, as often as once a day if you like.

Over the weekend, I read America's Man on Horseback: A Fable? by Guy R. Odom. Definitely not my idea of a good future for the U.S. They guy is moby anti-drug, and wants to kill off huge numbers of people. Though killing off lots of people is a good idea, having the government do it is not the right way. Simply encourage people to off criminals when they invade their houses, and we'll get rid of lots of the ruffians. Politicians are another matter of course. Hanging is the proper way to get rid of that class of organized criminals. I can't go along with Mr Odom's bills of attainder (kill the relations up to 4 generations) or his conquest of Mexico. Still, there's lots of good information in the book, especially about the fact that civilizations last about ten generations. America ends its tenth generation in about 2012.

JPFO - A print-it-yourself 4th of July poster - The fine folks at SaveOurGuns.com have a free Fourth of July Poster (186K). It has pictures of nazis and their prisoners captioned, "Not everyone can celebrate a 4th of July", and the following text: [jpfo]

Celebrate July 4th!
Remember those Armed Citizens
who fought government tyranny
and oppression. They were
like you; they were armed.
It was the American Revolution.
Your Bill of Rights wasn't free.
As a free American, it is YOUR RIGHT and DUTY
to be Armed in order to Stand Guard against
Government Tyranny and Oppression.

Declan McCullagh at Wired - A.I.: Lacks a Human Touch - A review of the new Spielberg/Kubrick collaboration that premiered in theaters last Friday. I'll probably still go see it, but I definitely won't take my kids. It seems the moral of the story is: Gotta find somebody to love, me droogies. [wired]

But E.T. or Indiana Jones this isn't. Kubrick's darkling vision of the future weighs heavily on the first hour or so of A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, resulting in brutish, horrific scenes reminiscent of A Clockwork Orange or The Shining -- definitely not suitable for children.

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

RealCampaignReform.org is Harry Browne's new website containing articles about why current campaign financing laws are really just unconstitutional incumbent protection laws, and gathering contributions for his lawsuit against the f.e.c. You can subscribe to a newsletter.

Casper (WY) Star-Tribune via MAPInc - 366 Cars Stopped, 80 Charged During Rave - A little more news on the concert at Terry Bison Ranch that I mentioned on Saturday. The drug warriors were busy. [unknown]

Those patrolling the event included 25 Laramie County Sheriff's officers, 22 Wyoming Highway Patrol troopers, 12 Cheyenne police officers, six Division of Criminal Investigation agents, four U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agents and two Platte County Sheriff's officers.

There were also 12 military police and, just over the state line, 19 Colorado State Patrol troopers. Numerous firefighters and paramedics were on the scene as well.

I Cringely - Reach Out and Touch Someone - Robert X. Cringely created a DSL connection for himself, even though he's way too far from the phone company central office to get it directly. He bought a telescope, used it to find a house close enough to get the service, convinced the owner to let him pay for it, and used two 802.11b radio links connected to two Yagi directional antennas to connect his house with the other guy's. Brilliant! [kuro5hin]

Remember, I am a professional. Don't try this at home.

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