End the War on Freedom

Brian Fitzgerald - hope: nice poem. Good to remember. I had a good discussion with Brian. He may make a pacifist out of me yet.

From Sierra Times, advertising the 50 Million Round March:

Wanna Prevent this? Click on the Photo

James Bone at The Times of London - Gun fans say bite the bullet: The NRA is planning to open a gun-themed restaurant in Times Square. Local liberals are not happy. Hehe. [lew]

Patrick Poole at WorldNetDaily - Barr pleads the Fourth: Another story on the land mines in the Methamphetamine Anti-Proliferation Act of 1999. This article focuses on the section of the bill that guts the fourth amendment even more than it has already been gutted by the war on some drugs. If only Mr. Barr would realize that his opposition to this legislation is at odds with his drug war support. In general, I find Bob Barr to be a friend of liberty. I wish I knew how to heal his drug war blindness. Then we could be friends. [wnd]

Joe Farah at WorldNetDaily - The Billion Dad March: Joe proposes, tongue firmly planted in cheek, that we have a Billion Dad March on father's day on the mall in D.C. Subject, anger. Speakers, none. [wnd]

Lance Gay at Scripps Howard News Service - Panel hears testimony for, against secret-evidence law: This was on public radio last night (yes, I listen to it sometimes while driving). The answer is clear to me. The fascists are claiming they need secret evidence for national security reasons. If that is really the case, then it's time for the United States to follow Rome down the tube of history. I don't believe it's the case. What is really necessary is to imprison the fascists. Then again, it's only muslims who are being hurt here, and everyone knows they're all terrorists. Take me for example. [wnd]

Jude Wanniski at WorldNetDaily - Gen. Barry McCaffrey, war criminal? A letter to the Wall Street Journal commenting on General McCaffrey's op-ed in which he defended himself against Seymour Hersh's Overwhelming Force article in the New Yorker. Mr. Wanniski thinks that McCaffrey should lose his drug czar job and retire to private life. [wnd]

We've become the bullies of the world, bombing whoever gets in our way, and we kid ourselves into thinking these are the necessary costs of being the world leader. It's not right. What doth it profit a man if he gains the whole world, but loses his soul? The same is true of a nation.

Robert Scheer at latimes.com - Why Are We Still Funding 'Star Wars'?: We've already poured $120 billion down this rat hole with nothing to show for it. Time to cut our losses. Let's follow the Swiss and build a real nuclear defense system of hardened bunkers and fall-out shelters (my conclusion, not Mr. Scheer's, as is the rest of this commentary). Of course the real threat today is from a suitcase nuclear weapon carried in by a terrorist. The fallout shelters might help, but there will be no warning whatsoever of where or when it will happen. Our best defense against that threat is to end the charade that the U.S. is the world's policeman. We can do this by withdrawing American troops from everywhere and shutting down the standing army. Replace it with local militias. Then the terrorists will have little reason to bomb us. [lew]

The Pentagon's efforts to shoot down a missile in space are inevitably rigged because the damn things move so fast and it will always be just too difficult to detect decoy balloons, which disguise the target from the real thing. The latest debunking analysis, by Theodore A. Postol of MIT, confirms the story of decades of anti-missile system failures: The tests only work when the testers cheat.

A new article in The Libertarian series by Vin Suprynowicz:

• {@'Million Moms' distracted attention from de facto gun ban} - Many people were unable to purchase guns over the 40 Thousand Meddlers weekend because the national instant check system was down. The law that created this gun registration scheme states that if it's down, dealers are allowed to sell. Few will, however, since our national gestapo, the BATF, tends to discourage the practice.

  Firearm accidents kill fewer small children each year than drown in mop buckets. Accidental firearm death numbers are in the same ballpark as the number of kids now killed or maimed by automobile airbags mandated by the government.

  The more relevant statistic for most "moms" is that a woman who does nothing to resist a rapist is 2.5 times more likely to suffer serious injury than a woman who uses a handgun.

Pysol is a collection of (currently 293) solitaire games. It is written in Python. After 10 minutes of play, I class this as the best solitaire implementation I've ever encountered. The background music is real nice. The play is snappy where it ought to be, smart where it ought to be. I'm using the Windows version, but there are downloads packaged for Unix and Macintosh as well. [meat]

jta is the Java Telnet Application/Applet. It is a complete implementation of the Telnet protocol plus terminal emulator with plugins enabling different terminals and SSH (using Cryptix). It appears to work as long as you specify the host on the command line. I couldn't get a dialog to come up to specify the host and port. It's plenty fast enough on my machine with JDK 1.3. [meat]