The State vs. The People
Forget every idea of right and wrong
Any classroom ever taught you
Because
An empty heart, a tormented mind,
Unkindness, jealousy and fear
Are always the testimony
You have been completely fooled!
Turn your back on those
Who would imprison your wondrous spirit
With deceit and lies.
Come, join the honest company
Of the King's beggars --
Those gamblers, scoundrels and divine clowns
And those astonishing fair courtesans
Who need Divine Love every night.
Come, join the courageous
Who have no choice
But to bet their entire world
That indeed,
Indeed, God is Real.
I will lead you into the Circle
Of the Beloved's cunning thieves,
Those playful royal rogues --
The ones you can trust for true guidance --
Who can aid you
In this Blessed Calamity of life.
Hafiz,
Look at the Perfect One
At the Circle's Center:
He Spins and Whirls like a Golden Compass,
Beyond all that is Rational,
To show this dear world
That Everything,
Everything in Existence
Does point to God.
(I Heard God Laughing: Renderings of Hafiz by Daniel Ladinsky)
From kaba:
I do believe that where there is a choice only between cowardice and violence I would advise violence. -- Mohandas Gandhi
From samizdata:
Whenever you're tempted to believe that those who are responsible for all of the world's problems are involved in some vast conspiracy, consider the far likelier possibility that they're just stupid. -- from Hope by Aaron Zelman and L. Neil Smith
Concerned Citizens Opposed to Police States - Pentagon Asks for Homeland Command: Americans Sleep Through Tyranny - Commentary on the new "Homeland Command". Also, the new book by Claire Wolfe and Aaron Zelman, The State vs. The People, is available to order from JPFO. $19.95 per copy including 3 Gran'pa Jack booklets. I ordered a copy. [geneice]
Since 1878, the Posse Comitatus Act has prohibited the military from searching, seizing, and arresting anyone within the United States. Exceptions have been made for suppression of insurrections and "domestic disturbances." In the late 1990s, the Pentagon was also given authority over nuclear, biological, or chemical threats within U.S. borders.
What will happen when there's a permanent, full-time command dedicated solely to domestic uses -- and with nothing else on its mind? Have you ever heard the term "mission creep"? Expect the "emergency" presence of soldiers in U.S. airports to become permanent. Expect military roadblocks in border states. And above all, expect the already vague definition of "domestic disturbance" to broaden ... and broaden ... and broaden.
...
People, this is tyranny, pure and simple. And it's arriving, as tyranny nearly always does, packaged in the pretty pink ribbons of "safety" and "security." It's to protect the American "homeland" (a feel-good propaganda word -- like the German "fatherland" and Russian "motherland" -- that never needed to be used when America was truly the land of the free).
NO, IT ISN'T "FOR OUR OWN PROTECTION." Soldiers, permanently on law-enforcement duty in the U.S., seeing each and every one of us as a potential enemy, is NOT good.
Vicki Ross Havens - The Bill of Rights: Hostage in the War on Drugs - This is four-and-a-half years old, but, unfortunately, still relevant. The war on freedom, er... some drugs, has been wildly successful in its true goal: eliminating individual liberty. [picks]
It is never a simple thing to turn present public policy around-even when the various interests select a mutually accepted new direction. However, change we must. We must stop accepting the erosion of our civil liberties because this is "what it takes to get the drug dealers." The war on drugs is failing. More and more social scientists, judges, and law enforcement officers are indicting our current narcotic policies as ineffective, counterproductive, and harmful--a position directly contrary to the positions of Congress and of the President.
Eric Sevaried observed that "The chief cause of problems is solutions." More of our civil rights will be quietly sabotaged, and more repression will occur until we are willing to attribute the suffering to the War on Drugs and the narcotics laws (and their consequences) themselves, rather than the actual drugs (and their use/abuse).
Cheryl Seal at Unknown News - State of the Union speech (Cheryl's fantasy version) - GW stands up to his dad and tells the truth about lots of things. Hehe. I agree with Cheryl that Jimmy Carter was the last American president who was not a crook. [unknown]
So, for you Americans out there watching this, I hope you will forgive me for nearly selling you all out -- I was confused and scared and didn't know what I believed about anything when I came to this town. But if you'll give me another chance, I will start acting like a real President -- something we ain't had in here since Jimmy Carter got chewed up and spit out.
The Union Leader (New Hampshire) - Beyond gun control: Do you have a permit for that baseball bat, son? - a good characterization of why its ludicrous to attempt to ban weapons instead going after those who abuse them. [kaba]
The New Hampshire Sunday News and The Union Leader had stories this week about the surprising number of registered sex offenders in the state. Sex offenders are interesting in that they are both the criminal and the weapon. New Hampshire, along with most other states, wisely sought to reduce sexual assault by registering criminals known to do that. Can you imagine the scenario if the state had instead opted to register the "weapon" instead of the criminal?
Reed Irvine at WorldNetDaily - Someone has finally talked! - Mr. Irvine interviewed a person who was on the deck of a navy submarine when Flight 800 was shot down by a missile. Apparently it wasn't his sub that fired the missile, but it was likely one of the others out that day. [wnd]
Harry Browne at WorldNetDaily - How did we lose America? We let the government into the schools, that's how. Harry says we should get them out, completely out. I agree. Separation of school and state. Now.
Liz Michael - The Revolution Has Started: Here Are Your First Orders - Buy Guns.
The sheer numbers of firearms in the hands of the American public would have made the American commanders in Vietnam quake in their boots. Most of it is pretty sophisticated stuff. The average hunter could give a platoon of regular troops more grief than they want.
The potential recruitment population for a modern American revolutionary army would be 150 million, compared to a maximum of 2 million government troops. Millions of these are people with military or law enforcement training. And it's not just the arms: it's the vehicles and the technology. A modern revolutionary army would be one of the most numerous, best trained, best armed, most mobile, and most high tech, probably in the history of the world.
And the government forces would use their high tech stuff on whom? Who do they drop bombs on? Which recruits will be counted on to obey the orders that bomb their home cities, or the homes of their fellow platoon members. How many of those troops will be willing to die for a government run amok? And possibly kill their friends and families for it?
Charlie McMillion at KeepAndBearArms.com - If Golf Were Like Shooting - Mr. McMillon highlights the absurdity of all the gun laws by replacing "gun" with "golf club" and "ammo" with "golf ball" in a description of a number of the infringements on our inalienable individual human and civil right to purchase, own, and carry any weapon anywhere any time. [kaba]
Nitwitted anti-club politicians would carelessly swing clubs over the heads of reporters during press conferences while espousing the dangers of club ownership. When questioned about their handling of the clubs, they would respond "I knew the club was empty. The State Police would never hand me a loaded club".
James W. Cooper at Java Pro - Is Java Fast Enough? - Using an object-oriented style, instead of FORTRAN-like code slowed matrix manipulation algorithms by a factor of 10-20. Still, Mr. Cooper concludes that compiler technology will eventually overcome these problems. The OO style is much easier to read and maintain. Hand optimization of the OO style, using techniques that could be taught to a compiler, got back to almost the FORTRAN-style performance. So there is hope. And there's really no choice: [cafe]
A few years ago, I tried to persuade my academic friends that Java was a far more elegant teaching language than Pascal or C, and it ought to be taught to students in introductory programming courses. We won that one big time. Java is now the most widely taught computer language because it is object-oriented, elegant, and harder to screw up—but as Budimli noted, more students are now gaining a computer science education where the only language they want to use is Java. So it isn't just that we thought we'd try to optimize Java: We have no choice. Our new programmers won't (or can't) program in any other language. We're victims of Java's success!
One final note: I don't ever find that Java is the real bottleneck in any of my work. The bottleneck is far more likely caused by disk I/O, database access, or network delays. The number of places where Java performance needs to be tuned is small. In addition, as a general rule, you write the program in the best OO style you can and then look for tuning opportunities if you find that something is slow, rather than writing code in peculiar and unreadable ways to start with.
