Hang 'em Before They Outlaw Rope

Submitted by Bill St. Clair on Sat, 28 May 2005 12:00:00 GMT
From smith2004, commenting on the recent story about the Brits banning long kitchen knives:
"Quick! Hang 'em before they outlaw rope!" -- L. Neil Smith

# Don Wright at Marc Brands Liberty - Hit it with Your Bible - cartoon commentary on how religion treats science. Hehe. [smith2004]

# William Anderson at LewRockwell.com Blog - Why Janice Rogers Brown must be Stopped!! - a federal judge who actually understands the Constitution? "Horrors!" say the communists. "Far out!" say Mr. Anderson and I. [saltypig]

# We watched National Treasure on a rented DVD last night. Good action adventure flick. Nicolas Cage plays the last member of a family who have been searching for generations for the legendary Knights Templar treasure. He and his trusty nerd friend (Justin Bartha), funded by a criminal (Sean Bean), find a clue in a ship buried under Arctic ice that they interpret to mean that the next clue is invisibly written on the backside of the Declaration of Independence. Cage's character initially refuses to "borrow" the Declaration, thus losing the support of the villain, and nearly losing his life. They enlist, initially by force, the help of a beautiful blonde (Diane Kruger), to steal the Declaration, read the three clues on its back, and discover the treasure. Kept the kids and my attention for the full 2.5 hours.

# Jerry Pournelle - On Global Warming - yes, it's happening. No, humans aren't responsible. Should we do anything about it? Maybe. A pretty balanced view. [pournelle]

Why Do Nothing? Doing nothing seems wrong, but in fact might be proper: certainly we should Do Nothing until we know what it is we are Doing Something about. As to why "Nothing" may be the right answer, recall that the Vikings settled Greenland, and prior to about 1325 there was a long period of warm climates, long growing seasons, and generally mild weather: Good Weather. It may be that we are warming back up to that point. Those concerned about CO2 are right to point out that if we have a warming trend to an optimum the CO2 warming may take us well past that point to something we don't like. However, there's little evidence that will happen, and there's even less that it will happen suddenly: the Earth is big and the oceans are large, and warming up the whole mess takes lots of time because there are so many thermal sinks. We have no historical evidence of sudden onset warming.

We do have considerable evidence of sudden onset cooling: England went from deciduous trees to snow and ice in under 100 years in the last Ice Age, and the Little Ice Age came on very quickly. If we're warming up, preparations will be needed but there should be time -- and things will get better for quite a while before they get worse, so there will be more money to spend on Doing Something. If however it's ICE that's coming, things get worse before they get awful, there will be less money, and less time. Schneider's Genesis Strategy is a start on what we might do.

...

And many of the environmentalist protagonists use tactics that they would (and do) deplore if used by anyone else.

# Photobucket.com "is a free, simple, fast, reliable image hosting and and online photo album site that allows direct linking and photo sharing. With the increasing number of digital cameras, camera phones, auction sites, message boards, classifieds, live journals, blogs and photo albums, Image Hosting is becoming very popular. Most photo sites are banning direct linking, but not us! At photobucket.com, you can easily upload and store photos online, and then direct link them to any site on the internet." 25 megs of storage space, 1,500 megs of monthly bandwidth, 250K max image size. More if you upgrade to the pay service for $25/year. [clairefiles]

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