She-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named

Submitted by Bill St. Clair on Sat, 15 Nov 2003 13:00:00 GMT

From muth:

"Also, some folks suggest that it's better if we DON'T break the Democrat filibusters, so that WE can use the filibuster against liberal nominees if, God forbid, she-who-shall-not-be-named gets elected and Republicans lose the majority in the Senate." -- Chuck Muth

Mrs. du Toit - Children and Behavior - a lesson about dealing with the government schools. [kimdutoit]

GeekWithA.45 - FBI Report - only 56 LEOs were slain by criminals, nationwide, in all off 2002. This is a mighty good argument for being armed, always and everywhere. [geekwitha.45]

LEO's, who's duty calls for them to chase down and duke it out with the scum of the earth, and thus find themselves pretty consistently in proximity [to] danger, are slain by criminals at a rate of 60 or so a year.

Law enforcement officers are armed, and armored.

Civilians, who generally go about their business in "safe" places like banks, grocery stores, schools, public parks, and their own homes, are slain by criminals at a rate of (what's the accepted figure again?) 28,000 a year.

Civilians are on the whole NOT armed*, and rarely armored.

And yet, (again, with no disrespect to the folks in blue) it is "Officer Safety" that is appealed to for every single bleeping bit of gun bigotry legislation on the books.

It's pretty clear to me from these numbers that the officers are plenty safe, and that disarming honest folks for their sake results in a monstrous pile of dead honest folks.

Garry Reed, The Loose Cannon Libertarian - Insider Traitors - Mr. Reed counts the ways in which we all engage in insider trading every day, and makes it crystal clear that none of us are criminals.

I still haven't figured out what poor Martha Stewart did wrong. I know what she may have done illegally. She upchucked her ImClone stock a day before it flushed down her tastefully appointed commode. Based on insider info. Particulars the public wasn't privy to. But what did she do wrong? She didn't shoot anyone. Rob anyone. Defraud anyone. Those would be crimes to a libertarian. Insider trading is not.

That's because we're all insider traders. We're all guilty of doing what the Design Diva did. Over and over and over. Do you have a plumber in your family? An auto mechanic? A lawyer? (You don't have to admit that one.) A hairdresser? How many times have you swapped favors not available to the general public? How many times has a teenage babysitter been cheated out of work when you asked grandma to watch the kids? How many times have you found a bargain at a garage sale and sold it on eBay for triple what you paid?

Eric Raymond - The Art of Unix Programming is the reason Mr. Raymond's blog was inactive for quite a while. Available in HTML or dead trees. Mr. Raymond is pushing Unix as good design. The Lisp community considers it good enough design, or maybe not. See Richard Gabriel's Worse Is Better. Of course, most of us who don't work for NASA don't have time to do really good design. We have to settle for good enough. "Let them report it as a bug." So Unix is good practical training. And it beats Windoze hands down, IMHO (he said, typing on a Dell notebook running Windoze 2000). [eric]

The Art of Unix Programming attempts to capture the engineering wisdom and philosophy of the Unix community as it's applied today -- not merely as it has been written down in the past, but as a living "special transmission, outside the scriptures" passed from guru to guru. Accordingly, the book doesn't focus so much on "what" as on "why", showing the connection between Unix philosophy and practice through case studies in widely available open-source software.

from the preface:

There is a vast difference between knowledge and expertise. Knowledge lets you deduce the right thing to do; expertise makes the right thing a reflex, hardly requiring conscious thought at all.

This book has a lot of knowledge in it, but it is mainly about expertise. It is going to try to teach you the things about Unix development that Unix experts know, but aren't aware that they know. It is therefore less about technicalia and more about shared culture than most Unix books -- both explicit and implicit culture, both conscious and unconscious traditions. It is not a 'how-to' book, it is a 'why-to' book.

The why-to has great practical importance, because far too much software is poorly designed. Much of it suffers from bloat, is exceedingly hard to maintain, and is too difficult to port to new platforms or extend in ways the original programmers didn't anticipate. These problems are symptoms of bad design. We hope that readers of this book will learn something of what Unix has to teach about good design.

...

Other things this book is not is neither a C tutorial, nor a guide to the Unix commands and API. It is not a reference for sed or yacc or Perl or Python. It's not a network programming primer, nor an exhaustive guide to the mysteries of X. It's not a tour of Unix's internals and architecture, either. Other books cover these specifics better, and this book points you at them as appropriate.

Beyond all these technical specifics, the Unix culture has an unwritten engineering tradition that has developed over literally millions of man-years[1] of skilled effort. This book is written in the belief that understanding that tradition, and adding its design patterns to your toolkit, will help you become a better programmer and designer.

Cultures consist of people, and the traditional way to learn Unix culture is from other people and through the folklore, by osmosis. This book is not a substitute for person-to-person acculturation, but it can help accelerate the process by allowing you to tap the experience of others.

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Quotes

Government doesn't work. Never did. Never will. Can't. But there are lots of good people. Love them.

-- Bill St. Clair

The Atlanta Declaration

Every man, woman, and responsible child has an unalienable individual, civil, Constitutional, and human right to obtain, own, and carry, openly or concealed, any weapon -- rifle, shotgun, handgun, machinegun, anything -- any time, any place, without asking anyone's permission.

-- L. Neil Smith

Reread that pesky first clause of the Second Amendment. It doesn't say what any of us thought it said. What it says is that infringing the right of the people to keep and bear arms is treason. What else do you call an act that endangers "the security of a free state"? And if it's treason, then it's punishable by death. I suggest due process, speedy trials, and public hangings.

-- L. Neil Smith

A Penalty Clause for the Bill of Rights

Any official, appointed or elected, at any level of government, who attempts, through legislative act or other means, to nullify, evade, or avoid the provisions of the first ten amendments to this Constitution, or of the Thirteenth Amendment, shall be summarily removed from office, and, upon conviction, deprived of all pay and benefits including pension, and sentenced to imprisonment for life.

-- L. Neil Smith

Based on 253 journal articles, 99 books, 43 government publications, and some of its own empirical work, the panel couldn't identify a single gun control regulation that reduced violent crime, suicide or accidents.

-- John Lott, commenting on the National Academy of Sciences report on gun control laws.

Who is a libertarian?

Zero Aggression Principle ("Zap")

"A libertarian is a person who believes that no one has the right, under any circumstances, to initiate force against another human being, or to advocate or delegate its initiation. Those who act consistently with this principle are libertarians, whether they realize it or not. Those who fail to act consistently with it are not libertarians, regardless of what they may claim."

-- L. Neil Smith

(Formerly called the "Non-Aggression Principle", or "NAP")

Why Did It Have to be... Guns?

Make no mistake: all politicians -- even those ostensibly on the side of guns and gun ownership -- hate the issue and anyone, like me, who insists on bringing it up. They hate it because it's an X-ray machine. It's a Vulcan mind-meld. It's the ultimate test to which any politician -- or political philosophy -- can be put.

If a politician isn't perfectly comfortable with the idea of his average constituent, any man, woman, or responsible child, walking into a hardware store and paying cash -- for any rifle, shotgun, handgun, machinegun, anything -- without producing ID or signing one scrap of paper, he isn't your friend no matter what he tells you.

If he isn't genuinely enthusiastic about his average constituent stuffing that weapon into a purse or pocket or tucking it under a coat and walking home without asking anybody's permission, he's a four-flusher, no matter what he claims.

What his attitude -- toward your ownership and use of weapons -- conveys is his real attitude about you. And if he doesn't trust you, then why in the name of John Moses Browning should you trust him?

-- L. Neil Smith

Concise

"Tell me," I was once asked, "What do you think about gun control? Give me the short answer." To which I replied, "If you try to take our firearms we will kill you."

-- Mike Vanderboegh

Also from The Atlanta Declaration:

... like going to the bathroom, breathing, eating, sleeping, or making love, it turns out that self-defense is a bodily function one cannot safely or effectively delegate to a second party.

-- L. Neil Smith

This does not mean that "Marijuana should be available by prescription." It means that morphine sulfate should be available in five pound bags at the supermarket for a couple of bucks, like sugar... but probably in a different aisle, to avoid confusion.

-- Vin Suprynowicz

If you refuse to pay unjust taxes, your property will be confiscated. If you attempt to defend your property, you will be arrested. If you resist arrest, you will be clubbed. If you defend yourself against clubbing, you will be shot dead. These procedures are known as the Rule of Law.

-- Edward Abbey

The state can only survive as long as a majority is programmed to believe that theft isn't wrong if it's called taxation or asset forfeiture or eminent domain, that assault and kidnapping isn't wrong if it's called arrest, that mass murder isn't wrong if it's called war.

-- Bill St. Clair