Happy Armistice Day
On November 11th, 1921, an unknown World War I American soldier was buried in Arlington National Cemetery, in recognition of WWI veterans and in conjunction with the timing of cessation of hostilities at 11 a.m., November 11, 1918 (the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month). The day became known as "Armistice Day." In 1954, Congress, wanting to recognize the sacrifice of veterans since WWI, proposed to change Armistice Day to Veterans Day in their honor. President Dwight D. Eisenhower, former Supreme Commander in WWII, signed the legislation.
Rense.com - Pretty Woman's Face Is Just Like Cocaine To Male Brain - A Harvard University study confirms what I already knew. Love is a drug. Just looking at beautiful women causes intense pleasure in healthy men. And Grabbe's page has engendered lots of pleasure in yours truly of late. [grabbe]
When men in the study were shown pictures of various faces, only the female faces deemed beautiful triggered activity in brain regions previously associated with food, drugs and money, according to findings published in the November 8th issue of Neuron.
Plop "is an experimental comic, and Scott Adams would like your feedback. There are 20 strips, and you can read them in order by clicking the "next" link below each strip." I got a couple of chuckles, but didn't write to Mr. Adams. [cowlix]
Concerned Citizens Opposed to Police States - What Will You Do About National I.D.? - CCOPS is doing a poll. There were 121 responses when I voted.
If the U.S. does adopt a national ID card, what would best describe your response:
- I would accept it as a necessary measure for national security and anti-terrorism.
- I would protest against it, but would personally accept a card, since everyday life would be too difficult for people who refuse to get one.
- I would absolutely refuse to get one, no matter what the personal consequences. [my choice]
- I would get a card so I would look like a compliant citizen, but would do everything I could to monkeywrench the system and bring down the police-state apparatus responsible for it.
- I would refuse to get one and would do everything I could to monkeywrench the system and bring down the police-state apparatus responsible for it. [the winner by a large margin]
Bob Murphy at anti-state.com - Why I (Sometimes) Vote - makes sense. Didn't convince me to vote, however. [anti-state]
The most serious (ostensible) problem with voting is that the procedure confers legitimacy on the State. But as I argued in an article from many moons ago: If I were in a Nazi concentration camp, about to be executed for my alleged Jewish ancestry, I wouldn't hesitate to announce that I was an Irish Catholic in order to save my life. Now, this wouldn't mean I agreed with the monstrous system whereby Jews were executed. My making use of the horrible rules in order to spare my life would not in any way confer legitimacy on the Nazi system. So in the same way, if I use my vote to possibly reduce the depravations of the State, I see nothing intrinsically wrong with my action.
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The reason is that people who don't vote are very easily dismissed as apathetic malcontents. I think that if you really want to express your disapproval with the system, you should go out and vote against the person you think is going to win, just to spite him. Now, the reason I choose the Libertarian candidate, rather than, say, the Communist one, is just so my "dissent" can be properly classified by outsiders. To repeat, if I stay home, people don't know if it's because I'm lazy, a communist, or an anarchocapitalist. But if I vote for Harry Browne, my political voice is much more clearly articulated.
Robert L. Kocher at Laissez Faire City Times - Armed Conflict in America, Part 10: From Ruby Ridge to Waco - concise, to-the-point, descriptions of the murders of Sammy and Vicky Weaver and "82 people at Waco--22 of them innocent helpless little children." (L. Neil Smith's description, not part of this article). Biting commentary. Introduces Timothy McVeigh.
Ruby Ridge was brazen premeditated murder built around purposely fabricated fraudulent justification. That's what the government agents came outfitted for and the opportunity they were hoping for. They seized whatever opportunity they could find to kill anything or anybody. What happened was that a group of severely mentally unbalanced federal officers had formed themselves into a rogue killer pack.
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Fellows and girls out there listening out in radio land, I have a message you can receive on your Captain Midnight magic decoder rings that you haven't heard before and which will probably seem quite radical. The wanton premeditated killing of people by federal agents is not a TV Survivor series where if they don't succeed in killing you then you receive a million dollars of somebody else's money collected by taxes while they go off to attempt to kill somebody else without personal consequences. It's more serious than that. Accountability in the adult world of responsibility means experiencing personal consequences levied in proportion to the act committed.
The situation had become way out of hand and had to be brought under control. The hammer should have fallen then.
If necessary, a crimes tribunal should have been convened on the Nuremburg precedent. Somewhere, in some court, the federal agents initiating the action at Ruby Ridge should have been brought to trial and been judged guilty of wanton premeditated murder with consequent sentence of death by hanging in the same camouflage costumes they wore during the commission of the crime. The judge who supported the action against the Weavers through judicial fraud while knowing full well that Randy Weaver had been instructed not to appear before the court for another six days should have been judged guilty of deliberately aiding murder and should have been sentenced to life imprisonment at hard labor, wearing the judicial robes he disgraced. Sniper Lon Horiuchi, first degree murder. Death by hanging. Keep it simple and understandable. A little rough? Maybe. But it sure as hell would have established an atmosphere of seriousness and such attacks damned well wouldn't happen again. That is the only thing that will establish seriousness.
Justice would have been served. And there never would have been a Waco. And there never would have been an Oklahoma City Bombing.
WACO
Waco was one of the most wanton and vicious acts in American History. I look for a legal or justifying reason for it on the manifest level, and I can't find it. The Branch Davidians were another group of seclusionists with no intention of interacting with the outside world. They were a threat to themselves in the sense of wasting their lives in an involuted cult, but there is no indication they were a danger to the outside world. If left alone, they probably would have died out through slow decline in membership. There is asserted speculation, but poor evidence, that they were breaking laws. For dangerous people supposedly armed with everything short of nuclear missiles, they showed little capability during the confrontation with the government. Attempts to demonize the Davidians fall flat. They were basically unattractive withdrawn kooks who, again, weren't reasonably worth 15 minutes of the government's or anybody else's time.
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The 60s generation radicalism was inhabited by brats who, in their self-centeredness, thought everybody else thought the same way they did, or should have thought the same way, or should have been made to think the same way. They have come to believe THEY ARE society. Hence, they have come to believe failure to conform to their visions or rejection of servitude to their ideas is a punishable crime against society. With ascendancy of this mentality into power and encoded into law, noncompliance is to be met with force, and if an excuse can be found, death.
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America had been under progressive siege for some period through legal and judicial means. (It still is.) There had been a leftist anticonstitutional and countercultural revolution occurring in America. This was part of the cultural war Pat Buchanan spoke of during the 92 Republican convention. By Ruby Ridge the revolution was becoming the initial steps of violent revolution of a peculiar sort. Usually, revolutions are described as people outside overthrowing the government. In this instance it was a case of an infiltrated government, with approval from the media and academia, overthrowing the people. The violent phase of this revolution was occurring through nonrestriction of useful idiots and sadists in government enforcement agencies and letting them have their way upon leftist-demonized and/or unpopular people or groups who were offensive to liberals.
Robert Bowman at Space & Security News - What Can We Do About Terrorism? - a reasonable article about why the terrorists hate Americans. And it ain't because we're rich and free. Dr. Bowman uses the word "we" a bit much for my taste, but he still makes some good points. I have said before that the U.S. government should not send American troops to protect the assets of U.S. corporations. If corporations need security, they can pay for it out of their own pockets, financed in higher prices for their products. This serves to offset the higher wages in countries that are already relatively secure. The invisible hand works better than government edict. Vote with your dollars every day. [mirabai]
We are not hated because we practice democracy, freedom, and human rights. We are hated because our government denies these things to people in third world countries whose resources are coveted by our multinational corporations. And that hatred we have sown has come back to haunt us in the form of terrorism -- and in the future, nuclear terrorism.
"Once the truth about why the threat exists is understood, the solution becomes obvious. We must change our government's ways.
Slashdot - Kent M. Pitman Answers On Lisp And Much More - Mr. Pitman is one of the bright stars in the Lisp universe. Here he answers some questions from Slashdot folks. Writing BlogMax reminded me of how much I like Lisp. Java doesn't suck, but it ain't Lisp. [cowlix]
I blue-screened Windows 2000 for the first time yesterday. I turned off the new printer and turned it back on again without stopping it first. This from software that pops up a selected Windows application when you push the "Scan" button on the printer. Friggin' driver bug. Reboot fixed it.
