Hope Rocks!

Submitted by Bill St. Clair on Tue, 03 Jul 2001 12:00:00 GMT
So Many Gifts

There are so many gifts
Still unopened from your birthday,
There are so many hand-crafted presents
That have been sent to you by God.

The Beloved does not mind repeating,
"Everything I have is also yours."

Please forgive Hafiz and the Friend
If we break into a sweet laughter
When your heart complains of being thirsty
When ages ago
Every cell in your soul
Capsized forever
Into this infinite golden sea.

Indeed,
A lover's pain is like holding one's breath
Too long
In the middle of a vital performance,

In the middle of one of Creation's favorite
Songs.

Indeed, a lover's pain in this sleeping,
This sleeping,
When God just rolled over and gave you
Such a big good-morning kiss!

There are so many gifts, my dear,
Still unopened from your birthday.

O, there are so many hand-crafted presents
That have been sent to your life
From God.

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

I got my copy of Hope yesterday. Stayed up reading last night until the book fell out of my hands. Finished it at the bagel shop this morning. Wow!! Aaron Zelman and L. Neil Smith have written a libertarian blockbuster. The story of Alexander Hope, who wins the presidential election of 2008 running on a platform of Bill of Rights Enforcement, and then proceeds to turn America around. Buy it! Give it! Don't delay. Do it today. While you're at it, sign the petition asking L. Neil Smith to run for president in 2004. His platform? Bill of Rights Enforcement. I'll end by quoting the end of every one of Mr. Hope's speeches:

In closing, allow me to remind you of your 1000-year-old right and duty as a juror to judge the law, as well as the so-called facts of the case.

Because of my late night, I'm late for work. Go read the newest issue of The Libertarian Enterprise and Ron Paul's latest installation of Texas Straight Talk. I'll write some notes on them tomorrow, in sha' allah.

Charley Reese at the Orlando Sentinel - I believe in freedom but not libertarians - Mr. Reese reminds us of why he is not a libertarian. He believes that liberty requires government. The job of conservatives is to keep that government within its constitutional bounds. As I've said before, I could live with that.

The traditional American belief, both among our Revolutionary forefathers and Confederate forefathers, was this formula: Sovereignty rests with the people; people control the Constitution; and the Constitution controls the government.

Today, of course, the Constitution is generally disregarded and the government presumes to control the people. Nor do most Americans recognize that tyranny always wears a smiling face. Let me solve your problems, says the would-be tyrant. You don't have a job? I'll provide you with one. You didn't save for your old age? I'll give you a pension. What? You didn't take care of yourself or put aside a little something for the doctor? Not to worry; I'll provide you with medical care.

DeHans at Kuro5hin - Trial of Slobodan Milosevic live on the Internet - Milosevic's trial starts this morning at 14:00GMT with the reading of the indictment. It will be streamed at domovina.xs4all.nl/. XS4ALL press release here.

Elliotte Rusty Harold is writing a new book, Processing XML with Java. He's providing it free on-line as he creates it. Addison-Wesley will publish the dead trees edition next spring, in sha' allah. Chapter 1, XML for Data, is now available. [cafe]

This entire book is being written in XML from start to finish. The specific XML application used is Docbook 4.1.2. I use the UltraEtit text editor on Windows to write. XInclude is used to merge the individual chapters and exampls together. Michael Kay's SAXON XSLT processor and Norm Walsh's XSL stylesheets for Docbook produce the HTML and XSL-FO output. I haven't yet settled on an XSL-FO to PDF converter. FOP seems a little too buggy to handle the complicated needs of a book like this. I should look into PassiveTeX.

mnoGoSearch is a GPL'd web search engine consisting of an indexer that populates an SQL database, and a CGI web interface, available in C, PHP, and Perl. [newsforge]

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