Off to Ukraine till 7/20
It has been my experience that folks who have no vices have very few virtues. -- Abraham Lincolnand:
Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule - and both commonly succeed, and are right. -- H. L. Mencken
I'm headed for the Ukraine this afternoon, returning next Friday, July 20, in sha' allah. I probably won't do many updates from there. I'll have internet connectivity, and I'm taking Emacs on a CD, but I only have a computer in the office, and my office time is controlled by when my ride leaves, so I usually get very little free time while there. Plenty of real free time outside of office hours, however, especially this weekend. Should be fun.
Brent Simmons at inessential.com Wednesday, July 11, 2001 - Brent has switched to Pine on OS/X for reading his email. He gives a list of reasons why. I used to use Emacs mailers. They worked fine.
Mark Twain - The Curious Republic of Gondour - a short story about a place where education and wealth get a man more votes. And those votes bring respect. [lew]
anansi at kuro5hin - Final Fantasy: the phantom menace within - A review of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, which opened yesterday. Anansi didn't like it much. I plan to see it after I return from the Ukraine. [kuro5hin]
Final Fantasy is not a very successful film. But it fails in some interesting ways. I'd strongly discourage anyone from paying more than $5US to see this one, unless you are a Japanese anime fan, or obsessed with computer graphic storytelling. Under no circumstances should anyone bring a date to this film.
Hemos at Slashdot - The Tech behind Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within - links to a couple of articles about the hardware and software used to create the movie, and lots of Slashdot comments. I didn't read the articles. [/.]
Vince Beiser at Mother Jones - How We Got to Two Million: How did the Land of the Free become the world's leading jailer? - This is the overview article in a Mother Jones special report on prisons: Debt to Society. [wood s lot]
How did this happen? How did a nation dedicated to the principle of freedom become the world's leading jailer? The answer has little to do with crime, but much to do with the perception of crime, and how that perception has been manipulated for political gain and financial profit. From state legislatures to the White House, politicians have increasingly turned to tough-on-crime policies as guaranteed vote-getters. That trend has been encouraged by the media, which use the public's fearful fascination with crime to boost ratings, and by private-prison companies, guards' unions, and other interests whose business depends on mass-scale incarceration.
Prisons certainly aren't expanding because more crimes are being committed. Since 1980, the national crime rate has meandered down, then up, then down again -- but the incarceration rate has marched relentlessly upward every single year. Nationwide, crime rates today are comparable to those of the 1970s, but the incarceration rate is four times higher than it was then. It's not crime that has increased; it's punishment. More people are now arrested for minor offenses, more arrestees are prosecuted, and more of those convicted are given lengthy sentences. Huge numbers of current prisoners are locked up for drug offenses and other transgressions that would not have met with such harsh punishment 20 years ago.
There are two new articles in The Libertarian series by Vin Suprynowicz:
-
The hidden war on academic achievement - more unintended
consequences. The 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver ruled
that students grading each other's tests violated the Education Rights
and Privacy act. Now it will be heard by the Supremes.
The premise underlying such suits is that it's somehow abusive to the sensibilities of the lower achievers to award grades ... at all. All across the nation, we see steps to eliminate any acknowledgement in the schools of the achievements of superior students, lest those who fail to make the mark suffer psychic harm.
...
Until we can get to that point, let's at least hope the high court makes short work of the "embarrassment" of Ms. Falvo's children.
Because the correct remedy, Ms. Falvo -- other than getting your kids out of the government welfare camps entirely, which I highly advise -- is to help your kids with their homework, until their grades are no longer anything to be "embarrassed" .... about. -
The transparent sham of the 'public meeting' - Las Vegas is going
to put a baseball stadium and medical center on its last remaining
vacant downtown parcel. Vin discusses how the decision was made about
which builder to choose.
An apparent example of cognitive dissonance that brings us to the main issue here, which is not so much which proposal was chosen -- that choice is well within the council's discretion -- as the nature of the public debate which preceded the vote.
And the nature of that public debate was -- there wasn't any public debate.
Matthew Eisley at The Washington Times - 2-year-old's naked lark triggers lawsuit - the North Carolina couple whose daughter's naked cat chase back in March led to an investigation by Cleveland County's Department of Social Services, is headed to the NC Supreme Court. Jim and Mary Ann Stumbo refused to allow the investigator to enter their home or interview their children without a search warrant. Good for them. d.s.s. is unmitigated evil. Anything we can do to stop those people is good news. If one of them ever tried to force entry into my house without a warrant, the floor would be stained red. [unknown]
Charley Reese at the Orlando Sentinel - Public schools are beyond reform and redemption - Why government schools should be abolished.
The system today is a political system and, like everything else in our society, has been strangled by laws, rules and court orders. If you look at the areas left where a school-board member could actually make a decision, you find there practically are none. Hence, elected school boards have become, in effect, a cover for a bureaucracy that runs itself without any democratic input whatsoever.
Contributing to the unlikelihood of serious reform is the disunity in a country that is being destroyed by immigration and by a moronic native population conditioned to despise its own heritage.
Consequently, there is no consensus even on what education should accomplish. Business wants it to produce docile workers and mindless consumers. Various fanatics want it to produce cannon fodder for their respective ideological wars. Many parents just want public schools to baby-sit their brats so they can enjoy their soap operas in peace. In the meantime, colleges of education, better called institutions of no learning, are spreading the poison that education should be effortless and under no circumstances should any child have to earn self-esteem.
Charley Reese at the Orlando Sentinel - Federal Reserve is all about stupidity - If you understood how the federal reserve works, you would never put up with it. You'd abolish the legal tender laws and return to gold and silver, minted by private organizations, lots of different private organizations. Unless you were a banker or a politician.
In the late 1960s, you could buy four or five heavy bags of groceries at a supermarket for about $17. Today, you can carry $17 worth groceries in a plastic sack hooked around your little finger. Ever wondered why the change?
...
So here is how your money is devalued. When Congress wants to spend $50 billion more than it collects in taxes, it goes to the Federal Reserve. The government gives the Federal Reserve $50 billion in government bonds, and the Federal Reserve adds $50 billion to the government's checking account.
Seems reasonable. But there is a catch. Where does the Federal Reserve get the $50 billion to put into the government's checking account?
It creates it out of nothing, with a keystroke. The bonds and the interest due on them are paid for with taxes, which is to say the sweat and labor of the American people.
Stan Gibson at ZDNet - Torvalds tome is more than just fun - a review of the book Just for Fun, the story of Linus Torvalds by David Diamond. He likes it. [newsforge]
Where the book did it for me was in explaining how the unique outlook of Linus Torvalds came to be. First, many of Linus' immediate family members, including his father, are journalists. Journalists by nature tend to be against the control of information and expression. For Linus and others in the open-source/free software community (I know the two are different, but they are spiritually kindred, so spare me the flame mail), writing software is in the realm of information and self-expression.
More, Linus' father was -- and presumably still is -- a committed Communist who looked to Moscow for inspiration and frequently traveled there.
Linus is no Communist. In fact, he's apathetic politically, but his father's background as a non-conformist and social critic in a Western country made it easier for Linus to look at things in an iconoclastic way. He even admits as much.
Bill Gates' father, by contrast, is a highly successful lawyer. Hmmm.
Nicholas Petreley at InfoWorld - Stop the desktop insanity - people are crowing that Linux is not ready for the corporate desktop, meaning that it doesn't run Microsoft Office. There are at least three good free Linux solutions that will do all that most people need: KOffice, StarOffice, and OpenOffice. So start using your money to expand your business, not Microsoft's.
NewsForge - dLoo releases peer-to-peer programming language - A new peer-to-peer programming language, BlueBox, is available from dLoo. Looks interesting, but I didn't try it. [newsforge]
BlueBox is a browser that makes scalable language creation a reality. With BlueBox, programmers write language structures known as words and post them on the Internet. As more and more words are posted in domains like mathematics, art, and finance, the language grows in richness and power. BlueBox compiles documents written in these words into the technology of a user's choice -- be it Perl, Python, C++, a COM component, etc.
Benny Evangelista at Computer News Daily - A Possible Successor to Napster - KaZaA, aka Morpheus, is a new peer-to-peer file sharing service. No central server. Lots of music, a few movies, and Microsoft Office available for free download. [newsforge]
