Opera 7.0 Goes Final
Opera Press Releases - Opera 7 Ready to Rock the Web - Opera 7.0 final for Windows is available for download. Yay! The U.S. sites were swamped when I tried. Netherlands was quick, however. I'm browsing with it as I write this.
Bill Walker at Laissez Faire Electronic Times - The Pianist, the Holocaust, and Gun Control - a review of Roman Polanski's film, The Pianist, a telling of the Warsaw ghetto uprising, "the Holocaust stripped down to its essentials." Jeff Shannon's review at Amazon calls this "the film that Roman Polanski was born to direct." [grabbe]
Bill Whittle - War - Not for the squeemish. Reality spoken here. Very long. Unfortunately, Mr. Whittle buys into the proposition that America's foreign wars are the reason for our domestic tranquility. I don't believe that. I agree with him that terrorists must be killed, but we do not need to hunt them down. If they come here, we kill them here. Suitcase nukes or not.
A finished nuke can fit in a suitcase, but to build one takes a factory, indeed, takes a nation: money, massive equipment, large work areas, armies of scientists. These things, unlike suitcases, can be found, targeted and destroyed.
There can be no question whatsoever that Saddam Hussein has been desperately seeking the means to build such a weapon. Let's make sure everyone heard that: There can be no question whatsoever that Saddam Hussein has been desperately seeking the means to build such a weapon. Really astonishing piles of independent records and sources confirm this without question. From Iraqi defectors who actually had hands-on experience with the programs, to intelligence reports of the import of the required equipment and raw materials, to the reams of evidence that prior inspectors discovered in their seven years of investigations, to the unabashed statements of Saddam Hussein himself... Saddam has brought his country to ruin for no other reason that his obsession with owning a nuclear bomb.
The Not in Our Name folks printed a two-page ad in the front section of the yesterday's New York Times. Impressive.
Bob Black at Spunk Library - FIJA: Monkeywrenching the Legal System - How fully informed juries could reduce the power of the state. [notreasonblog]
In just a few years a grass-roots movement has sprung up whose aim is to restore to the jury as a right the power it still has to nullify the law: FIJA. FIJA stands for three things. It is an organization, the Fully Informed Jury Association. It is a proposed (Federal and/or state) constitutional amendment, the Fully Informed Jury Amendment; and it is proposed legislation, the Fully Informed Jury Act, to implement the amendment. FIJA (the amendment) exists in short and long ("Maxi-FIJA") versions -- this is the short form: "Whenever government is one of the parties in a trial by jury, the court shall inform the jurors that each of them has an inherent right to vote on the verdict, in the direction of mercy, according to his own conscience and sense of justice. Exercise of this right may include jury consideration of the defendant's motives and circumstances, degree of harm done, and evaluation of the law itself. Failure to so inform the jury is grounds for mistrial and another trial by jury." So worded, FIJA would apply to some (not many) civil actions, but this analysis will be confined to FIJA's impact on criminal cases.
...
My best guess is that FIJA would break down the legal system unless the insiders adapted, as they surely would, by beating a strategic retreat from entire sectors of social life. Sex, drugs, guns -- the best things in life are free! Or soon would be. And where society is morally polarized it will be legally paralysed. There will be no point prosecuting pro-life or pro-choice "criminals": they will have to fight out their differences directly. The legislating of morality or ideology might not soon cease, but it might dwindle to a source of only symbolic satisfaction. That will be how anarchy returns, if it ever does. The state will not be overthrown -- just ignored. Perhaps the criminal justice system will persist, shorn of state power, as a game -- like chess, or Dungeons & Dragons. And the American Bar Association can merge with the Society for Creative Anachronism.
