Firefly
"The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that the English language is as pure as a crib-house whore. It not only borrows words from other languages; it has on occasion chased other languages down dark alley-ways, clubbed them unconscious and rifled their pockets for new vocabulary." -- James Nicoll
Scott Bieser at Rational Review - Portrait of an old homeless lady - from an idea of Rocky Frisco. Posted back in December, but still apropriate today. [smith2004]
Kim du Toit's Forum - Issue Stand - a question on where we stand on a number of important issues. Here are my answers:
Second Amendment/Class III Ownership/ The "AWB"
"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
Abortion
Until it comes out and starts breathing on its own, a fetus is part of its mother's body, hence her property. As such, she may do with it anything that she may do with any other property.
Public Education
We should raze every government (don't call them "public") school to the ground so that not one stone is left standing on another, and sow salt on the ruins (paraphrasing L. Neil Smith or Vin Suprynowicz, don't remember which).
Separation of Church & State
"Congress shall make no law..." If Texas wants to make its state religion tumble-weed worship, more power to 'em. But we don't need the ACLU or anyone else telling us we can't start a football game with a prayer.
Immigration (Legal and Illegal)
Get rid of welfare and medicare and social security and food stamps and all the other socialist pograms, and immigration will no longer be a problem. People will come here who want the liberty to make their own way, like the Europeans who made this country great.
War on Drugs
Drugs should be legalized. "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
Stem Cell Research
If potential mothers want to sell their cells to science, it ain't nobody's business.
# Claire Wolfe - Hardyville in Space - like many of the smith2004 participants, Claire loves Firefly. I still haven't seen it. The local video store doesn't have it, and I rarely watch even good video more than once, so I'll have to look at the further away video rental places, and look forward to Serenity in April. [claire]
# Timothy Bancroft-Hinchey at Pravda - Red Alert Bush - will the Busheviks raise the alert status to red before the election? Hard to tell, since their behavior isn't based in any external reality. Mr. Bancroft-Hinchey says that Bush must go. [grabbe]
The Bush regime has perpetrated an act of shocking butchery in Iraq, slaughtering around ten thousand civilians, including children, dropping cluster bombs into residential areas for kids to mistake for sweets only for the fragments to explode in their faces, targeting civilian infra-structures, handing out contracts to Bush s cronies even without tender.
This regime has gone too far. It is time for regime change. The people of the USA therefore have a monumental responsibility resting upon their shoulders when they make their decision.
...
We are supposed to be brothers living around a common lake and helping each other out. Bush has thrown all of that away and sold it downstream, just because he is surrounded by a clique of rich kids who have no more idea about the life of the common person than an Iraqi child has as to why his limbs were blasted off him and his family butchered by some GI who was screaming Burn you mother-fucker! Burn! as he listened to the radio blasting out from his tank.
# Robert Fisk at The Independent via ZMag - Iraq to Explode - things are not going well in Iraq, official reports to the contrary. [root]
# George Monbiot at Guardian Unlimited - A threat to democracy - civil liberties appear to be taking a hit in England even worse than here in Amerika. [root]
If we have learned anything over the past 18 months it is this: that the first rule of politics - power must never be trusted - still applies. The government will neither regulate itself nor be regulated by the institutions which surround it. Parliament chose to believe a string of obvious lies. The media repeated them, the civil service let them pass, the judiciary endorsed them. The answer to the age-old political question - who guards the guards? - remains unchanged. Only the people will hold the government to account.
They have two means of doing so. The first is to throw it out of office at the next election. This works only when we are permitted to choose an alternative set of policies. But in almost every nation, a new contract has now been struck between the main political parties: they have chosen to agree on almost all significant areas of policy. This leaves the people disenfranchised: they can vote out the monkeys but not the organ-grinder. So voting is now a less important democratic instrument than the second means: the ability to register our discontent during a government's term in office.
Applying the first rule of politics, we should expect those in power to seek to prevent the public from holding them to account. Whenever they can get away with it, they will restrict the right to protest. They got away with it last week.
# ID Software - Doom 3 is now available in the U.S. You need a modern machine, 1.5 GHz processor, 384 MB RAM, 1.7 gigs of free hard drive space, hardware video accellerator. My laptop does not qualify. I couldn't find a demo version anywhere.
