End the War on Freedom - Links and Commentary from my Crypto-Anarcho-Libertarian Perspective

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Sat, 21 Nov 2009 14:47:14 +0000

From Twitter:

"If there's anything a public servant hates to do it's something for the public." -- Anonymous

Climategate: the final nail in the coffin of 'Anthropogenic Global Warming'?

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 11:28:23 +0000

James Delingpole at Telegraph Blogs - "hacker broke into the computers at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (aka Hadley CRU) and released 61 megabites of confidential files onto the internet." If this stuff is for real, the whole human-induced global warming house of cards is about to collapse.

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The world is currently cooling; electorates are increasingly reluctant to support eco-policies leading to more oppressive regulation, higher taxes and higher utility bills; the tide is turning against Al Gore’s Anthropogenic Global Warming theory. The so-called “sceptical” view is now also the majority view.

Unfortunately, we’ve a long, long way to go before the public mood (and scientific truth) is reflected by our policy makers. There are too many vested interests in AGW, with far too much to lose either in terms of reputation or money, for this to end without a bitter fight.

A modest proposal

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 14:45:05 +0000

Al Horne at The Washington Post - if the government can require everyone to buy health insurance, why not require everyone to buy a gun? Great satire. Surprised to see it in the Washington Post.

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Surveys indicate that gun ownership is not spread evenly across U.S. households. In fact, chances are that a substantial proportion of U.S. gun owners have more than one weapon, so it's quite possible that fewer than 200 million Americans own those 260 million guns. That means there may be more than 100 million citizens left unprotected against their gun-owning fellow citizens.

Surely everyone can agree that this is an outrage. Moreover, it is an outrage that Congress can easily fix, without months of committee meetings, town halls or tea parties. All that is required is a bipartisan, pro-constitutional bill to extend the Second Amendment's protection of gun ownership to all Americans, whether they like it or not.

Absolved, Chapter 28. Nemesis: The Six Apostles.

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 12:36:39 +0000

Mike Vanderboegh - another chapter in the soon-to-be-published novel. Mike has stopped posting on his blog, so he's getting it finished. In this chapter, the American patriots do like the Armenians and Irish and start sending the congress critters, news editors, and celebrities who fueled gun confiscations to meet their maker.

Snow Leopard Font Problem - Bitstream Vera Sans

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 02:12:30 +0000

I recently had a problem with a web site when viewed in Safari 4.0.3 in Mac OS X 10.6.2. All the body text appeared as a sequence of capital "A" characters, surrounded by square boxes, as pictured below.

I discovered that it was due to "Bitstream Vera Sans" being mentioned as a font-family in the CSS file. I fixed it by downloading the font via the "Download" button at www.dafont.com/bitstream_vera_sans.font, decompressing the downloaded zip file, selecting the four ".ttf" files in the Finder, right-clicking and choosing "Open With.../Font Book.app", clicking "Install Font" on the resulting window. Then, in order to clear the font cache, I did the following in a Terminal window:

sudo atsutil databases -remove
sudo atsutil databases -removeUser
sudo atsutil server -shutdown
sudo atsutil server -ping

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Sun, 15 Nov 2009 15:38:01 +0000

From Classical Liberalism: Fail:

"People create orderly markets through cooperation, and are eager to do so. Where there is no free market, people will risk a great deal to create a black market - called black by those scum in government who aren't getting their cut. But really a golden market, a market of free and equal sovereigns cooperating in finding market clearing prices." -- Jim Davidson

Beyond Security Theater

Sun, 15 Nov 2009 11:06:19 +0000

Bruce Schneier's Crypto-Gram - excellent analysis of the difference between real security and the security theater at airports and office buildings. But he doesn't mention one of the best security mechanisms, armed and trained civilians.

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Security theater refers to security measures that make people feel more secure without doing anything to actually improve their security. An example: the photo ID checks that have sprung up in office buildings. No-one has ever explained why verifying that someone has a photo ID provides any actual security, but it looks like security to have a uniformed guard-for-hire looking at ID cards. Airport-security examples include the National Guard troops stationed at US airports in the months after 9/11 -- their guns had no bullets. The US colour-coded system of threat levels, the pervasive harassment of photographers, and the metal detectors that are increasingly common in hotels and office buildings since the Mumbai terrorist attacks, are additional examples.

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Unfortunately for politicians, the security measures that work are largely invisible. Such measures include enhancing the intelligence-gathering abilities of the secret services, hiring cultural experts and Arabic translators, building bridges with Islamic communities both nationally and internationally, funding police capabilities -- both investigative arms to prevent terrorist attacks, and emergency communications systems for after attacks occur -- and arresting terrorist plotters without media fanfare. They do not include expansive new police or spying laws. Our police don't need any new laws to deal with terrorism; rather, they need apolitical funding. These security measures don't make good television, and they don't help, come re-election time. But they work, addressing the reality of security instead of the feeling.

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Despite fearful rhetoric to the contrary, terrorism is not a transcendent threat. A terrorist attack cannot possibly destroy a country's way of life; it's only our reaction to that attack that can do that kind of damage. The more we undermine our own laws, the more we convert our buildings into fortresses, the more we reduce the freedoms and liberties at the foundation of our societies, the more we're doing the terrorists' job for them.

There is a scene...

Sat, 14 Nov 2009 17:00:20 +0000

GeekWithA.45 - good commentary on the productive use of anger.

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So, I repeat, what should we do with this energy?

First, we must become firm in ourselves, and clear about what is ours.

Our time, our minds, our bodies, our labor, the fruits of our labor, our freedoms, and our prerogatives are all inalienably OURS. The opposition will try to soften this belief and seduce us away, using well prepared, sophisticated means. They will lay many invalid claims against us, claims which we must reject. We must reject these claims, and we must do so without even seeking our opponents acceptance of this rejection, because it will never be acknowledged or granted. We must get used to the fact that our opponents will never agree with us, we will never be justified in their eyes. Our opponents will seek our passive and active sanction of their perpetrations, we must scrutinize our actions to detect the many ways we give them the greelight, and we must not give it to them. They would have us believe, through any means that they could arrange, that we have some duty of conscience to obey them. They are wrong, and it is up to us to recognize where that rubber meets the road, and to reject it when it happens. We must examine all the ways in which we grant them power over us, and withdraw that power, each and every time we find it. Asking our opponents for sanction, agreement, permission or justification grants them power they didn't earn or deserve.

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Fri, 13 Nov 2009 15:52:29 +0000

From lew:

"The state is a coercive monopoly managed by a huge committee (of parasites) and populated by those who consume looted wealth and produce bads (e.g. murder, disorder, war, victimless criminal statutes) instead of goods." --David Calderwood

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Thu, 12 Nov 2009 22:22:24 +0000

"The whole gospel of Karl Marx can be summed up in a single sentence: Hate the man who is better off than you are. Never under any circumstances admit that his success may be due to his own efforts, to the productive contribution he has made to the whole community. Always attribute his success to the exploitation, the cheating, the more or less open robbery of others. Never under any circumstances admit that your own failure may be owing to your own weakness, or that the failure of anyone else may be due to his own defects -- his laziness, incompetence, improvidence, or stupidity." -- Henry Hazlitt

“Why Don’t Students Like School?” Well, Duhhhh…

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 10:34:11 +0000

Peter Gray at Psychology Today - School is prison. Even worse than prison in many ways. [lew]

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But I think it is time that we say it out loud. School is prison.

If you think school is not prison, please explain the difference.

The only difference I can think of is that to get into prison you have to commit a crime, but they put you in school just because of your age. In other respects school and prison are the same. In both places you are stripped of your freedom and dignity. You are told exactly what you must do, and you are punished for failing to comply. Actually, in school you must spend more time doing exactly what you are told to do than is true in adult prisons, so in that sense school is worse than prison.

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As a society we could, perhaps, rationalize forcing children to go to school if we could prove that they need this particular kind of prison in order to gain the skills and knowledge necesary to become good citizens, to be happy in adulthood, and to get good jobs. Many people, perhaps most people, think this has been proven, because the educational establishment talks about it as if it has. But, in truth, it has not been proven at all.

In fact, for decades, families who have chosen to "unschool" their children, or to send them to the Sudbury Valley School (which is, essentially, an "unschool" school) have been proving the opposite (see, for example, my August 13, 2008, post). Children who are provided the tools for learning, including access to a wide range of other people from whom to learn, learn what they need to know--and much more--through their own self-directed play and exploration. There is no evidence at all that children who are sent to prison come out better than those who are provided the tools and allowed to use them freely. How, then, can we continue to rationalize sending children to prison?

Imogen Heap: Hide and Seek

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 22:21:56 +0000

Imogen Heap at YouTube - Tweeted by John Perry Barlow, who saw her at the Filmore. Electronic, ambient, strong female voice. Magic. I bought the "Speak for Yourself" album, which includes this song, from iTunes. Her latest album, "Ellipse", also sounds good, from the 30-second iTunes clips.

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Tue, 10 Nov 2009 02:07:30 +0000

From tmm:

"... it is poor civic hygiene to install technologies that could someday facilitate a police state." -- Bruce Schneier

"A.I.N.O.'s."

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 15:01:53 +0000

Mike Vanderboegh - Brilliant! I'll use it.

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Sipsey Street reader Daniel J. Almond has created a new term in reaction to "Pelosi's Intolerable Act Passes the House.":

Americans In Name Only (AINO's) passed this unconstitutional, illegitimate, un-American, socialist bill.

New Firearms & Stuff from the 2009 NASGW Show

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 14:03:06 +0000

Jeff Quinn at Gunblast - photos of new products from the National Association of Sporting Goods Wholesalers Show in Reno, Nevada. The most interesting new product to me was the Chiappa Rhino Revolver, a snubby .357 magnum with the barrel aligned with the bottom most chamber, for less (or no?) muzzle flip. I couldn't find any prices.