Water on Mars
Submitted by Bill St. Clair on Sun, 07 Mar 2004 13:00:00 GMT
From samizdata:
Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated, but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. -- C.S. Lewis
From survivalarts:
"Precision, like justice, flows from the mind. The precise mind does not imagine a vast, shadowy collectivity like "the Jews" as the architect of its sorrows. The precise mind does not contemplate the destruction of hundreds or thousands of innocents in the attempt to make justice, however conceived. Those are the paths traveled by the savage mind, the mind consumed by formless fear and undirected hatred. The precise mind uses courts, and laws, and clear, specific, carefully negotiated agreements, and only when those have been exhausted, rifles." -- Francis W. Porretto
Look Ma, there's water on Mars (click for full-size image):
# Author unknown - WD40 describes the history and uses of this cleaner, degreaser, and rust inhibitor. [tom]
# Elias Alias at The Claire Files Board - A little justice for the justice department - great screed in a thread wondering if Debra would get in trouble for talking against Herr Reichsführer Ashcroft. No, Debra would not get in trouble. Elias Alias would. Bravo! [clairefiles]
There is still a Constitution with its attached Bill of Rights. They know that they have to use the Constitution itself for any claim of legitimacy for their new oppressions. They can't write a USA PATRIOT ACT without the Constitution sitting right there authenticating their powers to make new laws. So they're in a quandry, but they're working their way through it. Little by little, one new convict by one new convict, they keep the lid on public dissent, which they hope will ensure that the truth of their criminality never is revealed until it is too late. We the people contracted with the government we created through that Constitution to ensure that our inalienable rights were never violated or destroyed. THAT is what Ashcroft is *supposed* to be doing with our office. But as the Butcher of Waco, Janet Reno, precedented, Ashcroft feels that he can trample on our Constitution any old way it takes to ensure that dissent in this country lays low and keeps quiet while the President and his cronies create massive criminal enterprises with which to conquer the world for their cherished dream of American Empire.
Well I say: Piss on that! Piss on Ashcroft! We ought to go up to DC and arrest the whole lot of 'em! The sooner the better. Treason against you and me is treason, and Ashcroft is a co-conspirator in the greatest treason ever brought upon the American people by seats of their governmental powers. It is the same treason which was fraudulently launched against the American people under President Wilson in 1913, when we were given the illegal Federal Reserve System, Inc., and the goddamned IRS. The history-thread which runs through all of this treason is chock full of names which date all the way back to the Tory Party during the American Revoution, those stupid people who preferred their business dealings with Rothschild and England over American independence. I'm talking about the Pierpont and Russell families, and their ilk, who under cover of wealth obtained through the smuggling of opium into China for Britain embedded themselves into the American educational system, the Ivy Leage. Wasn't it the Russell Trust out of Boston and Connecticut which created Skull and Bones? Didn't that "trust" come from opium smuggling operations with Britain? Of course it did; it's history. We got John Foster Dulles, Prescott Bush, Allen Dulles, Averell Harriman, George Herbert Walker, Clark Clifford.....on and on the list runs of men who came through that old system of British-supporting families in New England who opposed our Founding Fathers' untidy little Revolution, and those same bastards today have hooked the American public on a lifestyle of addiction to fossil fuel and fiat economies, using our own seats of governmental power to do this to us. Martha Stewart can rip off a few thousand bucks in savings by insider trading, and since she's not in the power-elite circles what happens, she gets busted. But watch what happens with Bush's friend and asshole buddy, Kenneth Lay.
Ashcroft, Bush, all of 'em, belong in prison, preferrably down at Guantanamo Bay.
# John Ross - Advice to Women About Men, or JR Uses Your Wristwatch to Tell You the Time - Mr. Ross has written advice to men about dealing effectively with women, and gaining some modicum of understanding of how they work. Now he puts the shoe on the other foot, telling women how men tick.
Women want men to show that they're thinking about them (bring them flowers, etc.) and may overlook large deficiencies (like his gambling addiction or not having a steady job) if he does these little things.
Men are just the opposite. Few men care much about all the little cards-and-flowers things that you find so important; we mainly want to avoid big negatives, like money problems and a lousy sex life.
Understand this: Any healthy, intelligent, single man can have his finances in order and have a good sex life. Those two things are EXTREMELY important to men. If you want to make us happy, just avoid taking away those two things, and we won't care if we never get another card, present, cake, or gourmet dinner from you for the rest of our lives. We won't care how much the dishes shine or how bright the colors are on our clothes.
Avoid being an economic sinkhole. When we pay for all household expenses, all vacations, insurance, tuition, etc., give you a monthly stipend to spend on anything you want, and never ask you to contribute a nickel of your earnings from your job, we absolutely DESPISE finding out that you have no savings, you've run up $20,000 worth of credit card debt in the last three months buying clothes, and we need to bail you out again. As one friend told me, "Being married to a woman who cannot control her spending is like being married to an arsonist. You never know when you're going to come home and find out she's burnt another place down that you now have to pay for."
# Jerry Pournelle - Friday, March 5, 2004 - commentary on Martha Stewart's conviction. Reinforces the idea that you should never tell a cop anything, especially a federal cop. Telling a little white lie to a federal cop is a felony. [pournelle]
For heaven's sake if you have some stock and your broker tells you that the owner of the company is selling in a panic, what would you do? Hang on to it? And if the owner is an old friend, you might well concoct some other reason for selling. It wasn't illegal to sell it anyway. But, clearly, the thing to do if the government asks you for cooperation now, is to have a total lapse of memory, and always assert your Fifth Amendment rights to boot. To heck with cooperation! You don't remember and if you did remember you might incriminate yourself. Go to blazes.
When I was a lad, it wasn't that way, and people thought they had a civic duty to help the government. After all, it was our government, not "the" government, and government people were us, not them. That's a myth increasingly hard to sustain, and I am not at all sure we are better for the change.
# I downloaded the demo of Return to Castle Wolfenstein, the second version of one of the original first-person shooters that I bought and played alot eight years ago. The installer is 114 megs, which took about 40 minutes on my DSL line (I was getting pretty close to 50K/second last night). I didn't play for long. It was fairly slow moving, though once I get a machine gun from one of the guards, it'll likely liven up a bit. You need to aim your shots a lot more accurately than in the first Wolfenstein or in the Doom or Quake versions I've played. The web site has an interesting warning, which is echoed in a startup dialog on the installer:
Important note for German users - Disclaimer: You are about to enter the Castle Wolfenstein website. The following pages may have content that is forbidden by law in Germany. Activision Germany GmbH is not responsible for the content of the following pages. By entering this site you approve having read this disclaimer.
Wichtiger Hinweis für deutsche User - Rechtshinweis: Sie betreten die Webseite von castlewolfenstein.com. Auf den folgenden Seiten können Inhalte vorhanden sein, die laut Gesetz in Deutschland verboten sind. Activision Deutschland GmbH ist für den Inhalt der folgenden Seiten nicht verantwortlich Mit dem Betreten der Seiten bestätigen Sie, diesen Hinweis gelesen zu haben.
