Archive: July 08, 2003
Don't you hate it when searching for something on Google you come up with stuff from your own weblog? It certainly makes sense that that would happen, since if it's something you're interested in you've probably blogged about it before, but still... it's frustrating to want to come across new information, and wind up saying "Well I knew that!" upon seeing your own content.
Glenn Reynolds has (how does this man come up with so many good links?  ) links to a few articles with great pro-second amendment examples.
From an article about Professor Joe Olson:
"I discovered that there were people in bedsheets that wanted to kill me," Olson said. "There you are driving your car with Missouri license plates down lonely country roads in rural North Carolina. This would have been 1967. And remember, (Michael) Schwerner and (Andrew) Goodman and (James) Chaney were killed in Mississippi just three years before. All of us knew their names and what had happened to them."
Back at his office, he related his alarm at being followed by strangers, and his co-workers expressed surprise that he didn't have a gun.
"And that's how I got my first firearm," Olson said. A co-worker gave him a pistol, and Olson put it in his pocket and later replaced it with one of his own. He wound up using it.
"Twice," Olson recalled. "They'd pull up behind you, turn on their bright lights, get right up, 20, even 2 feet off your back bumper. I'd take it out, hold it up in front of the rearview mirror, and wave it back and forth. The lights would turn off, and the car would back off."
Along with a great quote:
"It's called democracy," Olson said of the effort. "It works for those who show up."
And more...
As it should be, according to Olson: He believes public access to firearms is a bulwark of civilized society -- a deterrent to everything from carjacking to genocide.
"If you don't have a gun, if you don't have power - it doesn't have to be guns, but it has to be real, personal power, individually and as citizens - if you don't have that, then whatever you have is only there at the sufferance of government," Olson said.
"The Founders all believed, and expressed in the Second Amendment - they all believed that there was a right of revolution at some point when government got too bad. Government had reached that point in their lives. They were unwilling, and did not define when that was. What they did in the Constitution, particularly in the Second Amendment, is that they left in place the infrastructure of citizen power."
And, Her Own Bodyguard, Gun-packing First Lady:
What a perfect example of how the Second Amendment is really the cornerstone of our Bill of Rights, the guarantor of all others. It was the exercise of her Second Amendment rights that empowered Eleanor Roosevelt to use her First Amendment rights to crusade for the Fourteenth Amendment rights of blacks.
Soybo looks neat, but I don't quite get how it works yet:
Soybo is a cross-platform and device independent technology that allows applications to publish their functionality as web services, accessible by any Internet-enabled device.
Soybo bridges the digital divide by drastically reducing the hardware requirements necessary for remote accessing of computing resources. Just as the Internet revolutionized access to information, Soybo frees applications from the confines of personal computers.
Here's their press release with a little more info. The software is cross-platform and available under the GPL except for a few cases such as if you want to include Soybo in a commercial product.
Check out Simon Cozens' recent two articles on regular expressions: Regexp Power and Power Regexps, Part II. If you're going to go through the examples, I'd recommend trying them with The Regex Coach.
Via Glenn Reynolds (again!) NAVY PLANS DISPOSABLE RAY GUNS.
I've been waiting for us to be able to employ lasers for defense purposes. Especially for missle defense. We've been planning "star wars" type missle defense systems for more than a decade, and in Iraq, for the first time, we successfully used them; very successfully in fact. But with those missle defense systems you're trying to hit a missle with a missle, which isn't easy. With a laser it'd be much easier for a computer to target and destroy a missle in the air.
Plus, as the article mentions, lasers can be used militarily for many things besides missle defense. I'm looking forward to all the great things our military figures out it can do with them.
Via Glenn Reynolds, James Morrow: Bush's actions speak louder than his words
But Bush is doing more than simply dispensing taxpayer dollars and touching down in African capitals to feel the locals' pain, as Clinton did in 1998. He is also considering sending American troops to stabilise war-torn Liberia - a move that, when taken with his other money-where-his-mouth-is enthusiasms for helping Africa and Africans, provides a revealing look at Bush's moral and political compass and where US foreign policy is heading.
In [Afghanistan and Iraq], Bush saw that the US had a clear, vital interest in regime change. Yet in Liberia, there are no terrorist cells nor petroleum reserves lurking beneath the surface. (This may be why Bush's potential violation of whatever sovereignty the rebel-infested Liberia has left has not stirred demonstrations around the globe. Somehow banners reading "No blood for palm oil" lack revolutionary panache.)
So why bother risking American lives in a potential replay of the 1993 Somalia disaster?
First, experts believe that, unlike in Somalia, US troops would have an easy time of it. In fact, demonstrators in the capital, Monrovia, regularly picket the US embassy waving the Stars and Stripes, begging for US intervention. And in the internecine battles between various rebel groups in the country, only the US is considered an honest, neutral broker; while other countries, such as France, have a long and continuing record of military intervention in Africa, their behaviour is widely regarded on the continent as heavy-handed, self-interested and bordering on the neo-colonial.
A successful action would fit into the Bush administration's evolving view of the global system in which the US (along with any other willing nations or organisations, including the UN) is permitted to insert itself into "failed states" whose governments, if they exist at all, fail to comply with existing norms.
The notion that if the US can save lives somewhere, it ought to do so, rather than surrender power to international talking shops that settle for easy, feel-good solutions that do nothing to help ordinary people, has clearly taken hold in the White House.
And it is this that upsets the elite Bush-hating class more than anything else: unlike 99 per cent of professional politicians, and certainly his predecessor, the man does what he says he will do, whether it is saving Iraqis from a genocidal maniac or ordinary Africans from disease and civil war.
Those on the Left who are driven mad by the man they derisively call "Dubya" and his use of US power should stop to consider their prejudices - and the alternatives. If they truly care about people, they might find that Bush isn't so scary after all.
I really feel bad about quoting so much of this article, but I just liked it so much
Whoa, Michael Savage was fired from MSNBC (via Glenn Reynolds).
I've been wondering what happened to him - not on MSNBC, since I wasn't a regular viewer of his show, but he hasn't been on the radio in his normal timeslot lately. I don't know whether WABC decided to no longer carry his show but he was still doing it, or whether he was fired from his radio program too.
I liked Savage - he was hard core. Then I read his book.
I figured his radio program was his "shoot from the hip" entertainment schtick, and that in a book he'd actually take his time and elaborate carefully on his conservative philosophy. Nope. His book read like a transcript of his radio program -- which is NOT the way to write a book. It was really really awful... embarrassing even. So Michael Savage isn't as cool as I thought he was.
Now he's gone and gotten himself fired.
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Tuesday, July 8, 2003
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