Google Talk
"Also, I can kill you with my brain." -- River to JayneFrom pournelle:
"Conservatism is the blind and fear-filled worship of dead radicals." -- Mark Twain
# Colin Bennett's Combat Diaries - 9/11: Seven Major Essays - conspiracy theories abound, but none are more ridiculous than the one about nineteen Arabs with box cutters flying airplanes into buildings. More diary chapters here. [grabbe]
# Mike Wasdin at Strike the Root - 'Next Day' Is Not Really 'Next Day' - Mr. Wasdin encounters newspeak at the post office. [root]
Only the government could get away with running a business like this. If I were to run mine this way, I would be out of business; but then I have to rely on customer service and market forces for my business to succeed.
# Chris Floyd at Friends of Liberty - It's Not A ''Conspiracy.'' It's Just Business -- The Bush Way - remember your grain of salt. [tcfrefugees]
At the center of this particular nexus is the unlikely figure of Neil Bush, the feckless, fraudulent brother of the current president. Neilsy, as he's known in the family, is most famous for costing American taxpayers $1 billion to bail out a savings-and-loan he had ruined with secret insider loans to his own business partners. For this massive fraud, he was fined -- by his father's administration -- the princely sum of $50,000, which was actually paid by one of his dad's political bagmen, of course.
You see, the Bushes are robber barons, not capitalists: They never risk any of their own money in the competition of the marketplace. Nor do they ever pay the price when their deals go belly-up. Just ask George W., whose first business was jump-started with secret cash from the bin Ladens, laundered through their U.S. frontman, James Bath -- who was also hired by W.'s dad, then-CIA director George Bush Sr., to set up offshore companies for shifting CIA money and aircraft between Texas and Saudi Arabia, the Texas Observer reported.
# Syze, anonymous, and knick evl ntnt at Friends of Liberty - Utah National Guard Cracks Down HARD on Local Music Event - three first person accounts of the nazi raid in Utah. I've seen the third one lots of places, but the other two are new. Syze's account is especially troubling.
# Brandon J. Snider at LewRockwell.com - Don't Support the Troops - why libertarians should shame the members of the armed forces into realizing that what they are doing in Iraq is wrong, evil, criminal. [warblogging]
"Support the troops -- Bring them home!" is a familiar refrain in current libertarian antiwar dogma. The slogan assumes they want to come home. It assumes they don't like what they're doing over there. It practically assumes they're libertarians. But are they? If so, why did they join the military? The fact is that American soldiers probably reflect the attitudes on war and interventionism of the US populace at large. Let's face an unpleasant truth: the voting majority in the US is pro-intervention. That same majority thinks that both World Wars were swell adventures, and that, if Vietnam was a failure, it was at least a noble effort. This is the pool from which the United States draws its military. Soldiers may think they're defending the country, or they may believe that action, whatever the consequences, is better than inaction. In other words, better to do something about an atrocity than stand by and allow it to happen. This kind of thinking needs to be debunked and it cannot be done successfully without reasoned criticism of the troops. Libertarians cannot say that war planners and the ideologues who drive them are evil, but that the instruments of those plans are peaceable innocents.
There's a tendency in libertarian circles to think that radical criticism of supposed sacred cows will prove to be disastrous to the future of the movement. I look at it differently. I think the other side should be ashamed of themselves, and we should encourage such shame with our rhetoric. We should not apologize for our views; we should make the statists apologize. We are libertarians, they are totalitarians; is this not correct? When I see libertarians Supporting the Troops! and reserving criticism for policy-makers, I see this view in practice. Yet Supporting the Troops! is a distinctly collectivist idea. Self-sacrifice for the state -- is there any principal more anathema to individualism? Why should anyone sacrifice himself for the state unless he is a mere worker bee?
# Nicki Felenzer - Shouldn't he be dead already? - John Allen Muhammed, one of the pair who sniped innocents in Virginia in the fall of 2002, is in prison, on death row. He is doing a hunger strike. Hopefully, they'll let him die. [nickiasylum]
Now, if it were up to me, both Muhammad and his boy pinata would be thrown in the darkest, dankest dungeon, kept in the dark, save for flashes of reporters' cameras, forced to wear nothing but leather thongs, force fed raw pork chops (ground raw sausage is also acceptable) and given sewer water to drink. They would also be regularly sodomized with live writhing reptiles (use rodents in a pinch) and subjected to daily humiliation and ultimate slow and painful death.
# Google Talk is a new instant messaging service from Google. Uses Jabber XMPP protocol. Google distributes only a Windoze client, but they are compatible for chat with other clients. Only Google's client provides voice calls, however. No encryption yet, but they plan to add it before they go final. You need a Gmail account to use Google Talk. According to Google's press release, they are giving a Gmail account to anyone who gives them a cell phone number. Or you can ask me, and I'll send you an invitation. I don't intend to install their client. I'll use GAIM if I want to get to their network, and Skype for voice conversations. [price]
