Drug War = Assault & Kidnapping
# Eric S. Raymond - Ethics from the Barrel of a Gun: What Bearing Weapons Teaches About the Good Life - great essay on the importance, to our souls, of bearing arms. [geekwitha.45]
# Kim du Toit - Hideaway Pistols - handguns that you can carry under a T-shirt or in a pocket. Many of them are posed with a six-inch ruler, so you can get a good feel for how big they are. [kimdutoit]
# Fran Tully - Planning Your Move - Mr. Tully's first blog entry since April. He's been neglecting his blog since it was getting "too political". This is a more practical piece about how you could go about simplifying your life, thus gaining more time for being with your family and other important things that are supposed to be the reason we slave away at our jobs, but that usually get lost in the mad rush.
By the end of two years, he is producing 75% of his own food - which is tasty and organic, has finished his home - with no mortgage, has reduced his utility bills to $30 per month, and has started his own business - which is a small "service business". He has become part of the underground economy. Now, in addition to his $30,000 salary, he is making an additional $15,000 a year, tax free. His monthly expenses have dropped from $1900 per month down to $750 per month. The result is that he can pay off his land in 3 years instead of 10 and has more time with his family. He works 4 days a week instead of 5 - and has no commute, he spends more time hunting, shooting, skiing and fishing. He is much happier, healthier and is living better. He has never had more money in the bank and has never required less money for living. His wife has started home schooling his children, so they eat breakfast, lunch and dinner as a family. He reloads his own ammunition and trades a pig to his neighbor for his homemade beer and cider. Life is good.p
Now I realize that the story is over-simplified, but I am meeting more and more folks who are actually making moves very similar to the example I just gave, and are finding it far easier than they ever imagined.
# Yours Truly at The High Road - Should drugs be legalized? - I made a gentler post in this thread early in its life, but I was sick of the prohibitionists last night. Here's my entire post:
On Hallowe'en night in 1982, I was offerred some "free base" by a chemist at the college from which I graduated in 1978. This was before the word "crack" was in common use. I loved it. He taught me how to turn cocaine hydrocholoride (the salt that people snort) into free base and how to ingest it using a spoon, vice grips, a propane torch, and a modified turkey baster. In November and December of 1982, I spent somewhere around $7,000 on cocaine hydrochloride, which I based and smoked. Before this, I had smoked cannabis (aka marijuana) fairly regularly and drank regular beer and gin & tonic. The coke made the cannabis and alcohol uninteresting. By the end of December, I noticed that the thing I liked about the coke was there all the time. The coke just helped me to see it. I stopped cold turkey come the New Year, and have abstained from cocaine and cannabis ever since. I had my last alcohol in the summer of 1983.
I can't call my experience typical, but I can say uncategorically that imprisoning me for what I did would not have improved anyone's life, and may well have destroyed mine. If you believe that people who ingest vegetable derivatives should be imprisoned, you are absolutely wrong, dangerously so. You are the one who should be imprisoned, to protect the rest of us from your tyranical beliefs.
Arresting someone for ingesting vegetable derivatives is assault and kidnapping. Narcs should be tried for assault and kidnapping, and, if convicted, executed. Congress critters who vote for bills that would imprison people for medicating themselves should be tried for conspiracy to commit mass assault and kidnapping, and, if convicted, executed.
# BBC News - Freak waves spotted from space - a satellite monitoring system has finally found what has been believed for a long time by many, huge waves that appear out of nowhere on the open sea. [lew]
Over the last two decades more than 200 super-carriers - cargo ships over 200m long - have been lost at sea. Eyewitness reports suggest many were sunk by high and violent walls of water that rose up out of calm seas.
But for years these tales of towering beasts were written off as fantasy; and many marine scientists clung to statistical models stating monstrous deviations from the normal sea state occur once every 1,000 years.
The waves exist in higher numbers than anyone expected Wolfgang Rosenthal, GKSS Research Centre, Germany "Two large ships sink every week on average," said Wolfgang Rosenthal, of the GKSS Research Centre in Geesthacht, Germany. "But the cause is never studied to the same detail as an air crash. It simply gets put down to 'bad weather'."
...
Around 30,000 separate imagettes were produced by the two satellites during a three-week period in 2001 - and the data was mathematically analysed.
Esa says the survey revealed 10 massive waves - some nearly 30m (100 ft) high.
"The waves exist in higher numbers than anyone expected," said Dr Rosenthal.
...
In the next phase of the research, a project called WaveAtlas will use two years' worth of imagettes to create a worldwide atlas of freak wave events.
The goal is to find out how these strange cataclysmic phenomena may be generated, and which regions of the seas are most at risk.
