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Submitted by Bill St. Clair on Thu, 22 Jun 2000 12:00:00 GMT
New stuff at the end...

Here's a mailbox that I pass every day on my way to work. For a couple of pictures of the entire bear and a higher res version, go here or click on the picture.

Steve Kubby at Marijuana News - Kubby to Seek Libertarian Party VP Candidacy. Cowan to Nominate Medical Marijuana Activist at Anaheim Convention. Richard Cowan intends to nominate Steve Kubby for VP candidate of the libertarian party. Steve will be unable to campaign outside of California because that is the only state where he can smoke the medical marijuana that keeps his cancer in remission. [mjn]

The death of my good friend, Peter McWilliams, last week galvanized my wife, Michele, and me into political action. We are determined to force a debate about the failed police 'War on Drugs' onto center stage in the November election.

William Buckley at the Sacramento Bee via MAPInc - Peter McWilliams, R.I.P.: A good obit from Mr. Buckley, one of the few conservatives who realizes that the war on freedom (er... drugs) is a waste. MAPInc has a Peter McWilliams Page containing many stories about Peter.

Jacob Sullum at Reason Online - Fatal Condition: Another story about the death of Peter McWilliams, the latest martyr in the war on freedom (er... some drugs). [wnd]

A really cool Spirograph applet linked by kottke.org. ["desk"]

Lance Gay at Scripps Howard News Service - White House drug office tracks computer use of Web visitors: if you search for a drug-related term at lycos or altavista, the banner ad leads you to a government anti-drug ad, which stores a cookie on your machine. I tried it with "LSD". The ad appeared. I didn't notice any new cookies, however. [xray]

There were a few more back articles in Vin Suprynowicz The Libertarian series on my Linux machine. I gave up on the modem and called MacConnection for a replacement, which I should receive today. Meanwhile, sneaker net got the files to my Windoze notebook:

  • Mortgage discounts for the new aristocracy? - Clark County, Nevada, is considering mortgage discounts as an additional benefit to attract government school teachers. Better to privatize their schools.
    Before we go down this road, we might first ask whether there really is a teacher shortage -- not just an artificial shortfall caused by an insistence on arbitrary "pedagogy credentials" -- and whether any such shortage might not be caused in large part by the number of trained teachers who leave the field each year, due to the current absurd reluctance to flunk those who do not master their required skills, as well the effective ban on expelling morons and troublemakers -- turning this once rewarding profession into the equivalent of lion-taming without the whip and chair.
  • Time for a 'fat tax' on Wendy's, McDonald's? - The feds have dreamed up yet another scare tactic to steal more of our money.
  • A quick dip in the columnist's mail bag - Mostly about the 15%, yes 15%, that we lose from our paychecks for socialist insecurity and medisnare. We only see 7.5% of that on our paychecks, but the rest is paid by our employers, who would likely be happy to give it to us if it weren't for the government guns pointed in their general direction (fingers off the triggers, of course).
  • Do we really have to show a 'government-issued ID'? - How to avoid showing your internal passport at airports. Behave as below and you will get orange stickers on your luggage and ticket, may be rudely treated, but will likely get on the plane. They will also probably ask to search your luggage, but you can refuse, which may work. The real reason the airlines want to see your ID is to match it with the name on your ticket to prevent you from selling your frequent-flyer tickets. Papieren, bitte.
    The next time I refused to produce ID and an agent freaked, I told her, 'Just tap up Sec-Dec 96-5 on your computer, and go to Paragraph 1, Section C. Designate me as a "selectee," and proceed accordingly.'

Blogger has a Blog of the Week page. [kottke]

Elliotte Rusty Harold of Cafe au Lait has some news about Sun's plans for JDK 1.4. The piece will likely move to his june archive page in a couple of days. Or you can read all the details in Sun's merlin.pdf (I didn't). [cafe]

Wylie Wong and Mike Ricciuti at CNET - Microsoft brewing Java-like language: C# (pronounced see-sharp) is a new Java-like language from Microsoft. It combines features from C and C++ with automatic memory management (a garbage collector). It uses Microsoft's new Common Language Runtime, apparently a library of Windows software that will be available to all Windows programming languages (hmm... what's new about that?). [/.]

Dave Winer at Scripting News - .NET is Microsoft's new XML-based something-or-other. [script]

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