The Slippery Slope

Submitted by Bill St. Clair on Mon, 12 Aug 2002 12:00:00 GMT
From a StandAndFight.com T-Shirt page:
"Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote." -- Benjamin Franklin
and:
"Firearms are second only to the Constitution in importance; they are the people's liberty teeth." -- George Washington

From Objectional Content:

"An atheist is a person who feels about Yahweh the way any decent Christian feels about Thor, Baal, or the Golden Calf. We are all atheists about most of the gods humanity has ever believed in -- some of us just go one god further." -- Richard Dawkins

From Quotes of the Day:

"If you want to know what god thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to." -- Dorothy Parker
and:
"After an access cover has been secured by 16 hold-down screws, it will be discovered that the gasket has been omitted." -- De la Lastra's Corollary
and:
"The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity." -- Ellen Parr

There's a new issue of The Libertarian Enterprise, "Doing the Right Thing?" I'll comment on some of the articles tomorrow, in sha' allah.

Eugene Volokh at The Volokh Conspiracy - Why Gun Owners Worry about the Slippery Slope - first it was handguns, then "assault weapons", now the Brady Bunch is calling for the outlaw of pump-action weapons. Know well that these folks aren't going to stop until the sheeple are completely disarmed. [firearmnews]

What are the chances that the pro-control advocates will then say "Oh, OK; it's true that there are as many gun-related deaths as before, since people are using other guns besides the pump-action ones, but our proposal was simply related to pump- action guns, and since we've won on that, we're just going to disband"? Pretty low -- the likely response will be "close the loophole by banning all these other guns that are functionally equivalent to pump-action guns." And, as it happens, all shotguns and rifles are functionally not that different from pump-action shotguns and rifles.

Harry Browne at World Net Daily - Why the income tax must go - of course. We all know why, now we just need someone to figure out how.

Perhaps the fastest way to make America a free country again would be to repeal all income taxes -- the personal income, corporate, gift, estate and Social Security taxes.

This would create at least five very important benefits...

...

Having an IRS Gestapo may be typical of most nations, but no country is truly "free" so long as there's such an agency.

...

The benefits of liberty are boundless. The tyrannies of government can be limitless as well.

Which do you choose?

Jeff Lewis at MacOpinion - Rethinking Jaguar - a self-professed Mac Skeptic likes Jaguar, the new Mac OS X version 1.2. He thinks it's well worth the $130 upgrade cost.

First off, there's a difference in the UI behaviour. I can't nail it down precisely - I don't think it's any one thing, but for the first time, MacOS X feels more like working with MacOS 9. It's not an issue of familiarity - I've not used MacOS X much at all in the past three years. It's also not any one thing. It's sort of an overall change, but it's definitely noticable. Long time MacOS X users may not notice it, but I did - the moment I started using 10.2.

On the other hand, I have been using WinXP a lot and in some ways, MacOS X is becoming more like XP (or XP more like X - whatever) so perhaps it's not that's why it feels more familiar now. Either way, Jaguar is definitely nicer to use than previous versions. To me, this single improvement would be worth the price of upgrade because until now, using MacOS X just hasn't been an enjoyable experience for me.

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