End the War on Freedom

Jeru, one of Dave Winer's gurus (teachers), left his body recently. Dave thanks Jeru for being. Dave and Jeru, Assalamu Alaikum Wa Rahmatullah, Peace and the Blessings of God be with you.

How to Guard Against Missile Attacks [grabbe]

Warren Air Force Base in Cheyenne, Wyoming, recorded a message that one of its Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missiles was about to launch from its silo due to a computer malfunction. To prevent the possible launch, an armored car was parked on top of the silo. --Shaun Gregory, The Hidden Cost of Deterrence: Nuclear Weapons Accidents, Brassey's UK, London, 1990, pp. 181-182.

Charley Reese at the Orlando Sentinel - North or South, this book gives us all something to argue about: a review of Charles Adams' book, When in the Course of Human Events.

Here we are, still in the middle of tedious debate over the Confederate battle flag, and along comes a Yankee historian who knocks the wind out of those who say the war was about slavery.

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Adams amasses considerable evidence that the war was about the usual -- control of territory, resources and revenue.

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Adams states in his introduction, "We Northerners like to read about Lincoln the martyr and the dying god, but do we want to know about Lincoln the dictator who circumvented the Constitution to wage war on the South? His best generals would have a difficult time avoiding conviction by a war crimes tribunal according to the laws of war at that time for their plunder of Southern civilization."

NewsMakingNews looks interesting. Added to my links page. [grabbe]

Jon E. Dougherty at WorldNetDaily - Lawmaker prepares citizen-soldier act: Representative Helen Chenoweth-Hage of Idaho is preparing the Citizen Soldier Protection Act of 2000, legislation that trumps Klinton's PDD-255, a secret directive that places U.S. military personnel at the disposal of the U.N. Michael New was court-martialled for refusing to wear a U.N. uniform. His case is still on appeal. It's bad enough that the U.S. has any standing army whatsoever. Forcing them to wear U.N. uniforms is despicable. Applause to Rep. Chenoweth-Hage. [wnd]

Jon E. Dougherty at WorldNetDaily - Make a gun for the border: Drug runners take aim at officers guarding U.S. boundaries. Up to $200,000 is being offerred for the head of a DEA agent or anyone else who arrests drug couriers crossing the border from Mexico. Mr. Dougherty doesn't give an opinion in this article, only facts. He's revealed himself as a prohibitionist in the past, however. My take: this is an inevitable consequence of the war on drugs. The solution is simple. End the war and the violence will end. [wnd]

CBS News - License to Protest D.C. is about to change their license plate slogan from "Celebrate and discover" to "Taxation without representation". Hehe. [wnd]

Alan Keyes at WorldNetDaily - Drug war threatens U.S. Mr Keyes is rightfully indignant about the abuse of the constitution engendered by the war on some drugs. He still believes, however, that drugs should be illegal. He's showing his conventional conservative roots in this. He still believes that morality can be legislated. I don't. He also believes that morality is an objective truth. I don't.

bilboyablan at Slashdot - Thoughts On The Pike Programming Language? Lots of comments on Pike, an object-oriented scripting language with a C-like syntax. [/.]

Chris Rijk at Ace's Hardware - Binaries Vs Byte-Codes: Compares performance of two Java VMs and two C compilers in a small set of benchmarks. The results show Java doing surprisingly well. Lots of comments over at Slashdot. [/.]

This month's issue of Dr. Dobb's Journal has a nice article on REBOL. The article is not available on their web site, so you'll have to order a copy to read it.

Dave Winer's team has added some nice new macros to the set available to Userland hosted Manila sites. Full macro documentation is available at macros.userland.com. Thank you, Dave. I've been wanting some of these. [script]

I'm starting to work on serving my User Interface Manager via the web. It currently translates XML into Java Swing components. I now want to add the ability to convert the same XML into HTML. So today I looked at freshmeat for a 100% Java web server that supports servlets. I probably won't end up actually serving with this code, I'll likely use Apache, but I can use this to develop my servlets. The three likely candidates that I found via a quick search are Jetty, Jigsaw, and vqServer. I think I'm going to start with Jetty. If anyone has pointers to other 100% Java servers that do servlets, or a good reason why I should use vqServer or Jigsaw instead, please write or discuss.