Recently in Quote of the Day Category

I think the hidden benefit of Islamic extremism is that it freed the atheists from their closets. The old mindset in the United States was that almost any religion was good, and atheism was bad. But since 9/11, atheism has moved above Islam in the rankings, at least in the minds of Christians and Jews in the United States.

Ask a deeply religious Christian if he’d rather live next to a bearded Muslim that may or may not be plotting a terror attack, or an atheist that may or may not show him how to set up a wireless network in his house. On the scale of prejudice, atheists don’t seem so bad lately.

Scott Adams, Dilbert.Blog, "Atheists: The New Gays"

The world and the universe is an extremely beautiful place, and the more we understand about it the more beautiful does it appear. It is an immensely exciting experience to be born in the world, born in the universe, and look around you and realize that before you die you have the opportunity of understanding an immense amount about that world and about that universe and about life and about why we're here. We have the opportunity of understanding far, far more than any of our predecessors ever. That is such an exciting possibility, it would be such a shame to blow it and end your life not having understood what there is to understand.

Richard Dawkins, from an interview with Sheena McDonald

I code in Python, I don't gotta declare
drop vars left and right, interpreter don't care
and you'll notice my keyboard ain't got much wear

That's cuz py code is short like your schlong, with typing loose like your mom,
and curly braces missing like geeks at the prom,
all in this lovely little language by guido van rossum.

Patri Friedman
"...some python nerdcore lyrics I came up w/ yesterday while biking home..."
(with express permission)

….This custom is so thoroughly ingrained that, when the Pink Nazis loot the Vatican. the survivors refugee out to former Catholic girls’ school in Brownsville, and a new Pope (the former Cardinal Fulton J. Sheen) takes over from the assassinated Pius XII, he orders that everyone working for the Church (including priests and nuns) comply with the letter and spirit of the law of the nation of which they are presently guests. That’s why you see a .22 Colt Woodsman — ” … only a Popegun, sir … ” — on the poker table at Pius XIII’s elbow.

….The only standing groups resembling a military are the Texas Rangers (of which there are damned few — “One riot, one Ranger”), and the Texas Air Militia, which only has half a dozen planes.

….With a thoroughly armed society (of course you can get out of gun-toting if you apply for a license _not_ to carry a gun and go through fingerprinting and psychiatric evaluation) who needs an army or the cops?

L. Neil Smith
"Taxes in the Federated State of Texas"

"I'm not a conservative complaining about liberals," Rodgers says. "To me the 'greater good' is a catch phrase for people trying to force you to do what they want. And it's both sides of the political spectrum; it's not a liberal thing only. You look at our current administration. They have all kinds of greater good things. For example, they have decided what can and can't be done with embryo research. They're forcing people to follow their dictates. If you look the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, it's freedom from, not freedom to. The Bill of Rights doesn't give you a right to something, it gives you the right not to have the government do something to you."

T. J. Rogers, in a Metro interview

Libertarians should not be denying scientific fact. We should instead spend our time combatting the religious impulse of people to think the modern world is evil and that we must repent for our sins by living cruddy lives and waiting for (in their minds) our inevitable and justified doom at the hands of a wronged Gaia.

Perry E. Metzger

Want hot sex from a woman? Keep the relationship psycho. It worked for me when I was single. I had many long-term non-monogamous relationships that remained erotic right up until the moment she tried to claw my eyes out. It costs a lot in therapy, but boy is it sexy.

Want love and contentment? Dump the psycho and build a nest. You get to have steady sex with somebody who is not trying to claw your eyes out. Plus you get to have breakfast without any coffee cups aimed at your head.

And there's nothing like reading a book, in bed, next to somebody you love.

Joe Quirk
"Scientists Have Discovered the Food That Makes Women Lose Interest in Sex"

Mac OS X has always had problems with name resolution... both DNS, id->uid, etc. It's all centralized to one service and that service is buggy.

I joined XXXXXXX this year, but before that I spent 1.5 years running a medium-sized (but international) Mac OS X network. Half the problems we had all were traced down to name service.

The situation gets better with each release, but there are some fundamental problems still. Mostly they crop up with you have LDAP enabled.

Whenever I see the spinning rainbow ball, and no network traffic and little CPU use, I just steam and sit there imaginging a little gnome inside my computer holding the ends of two cables marked, "Don't disconnect: name service conduit! important!" laughing as he disconnects them, counts to 300, then reconnects them.

We must find, and kill, this gnome.

Thank you for listening.

Tom Limoncelli, with express permission

Part of the human condition is that we make an emotional investment in our hardware. We allow a caliber, cartridge, or specific firearm to define us rather than the other way around. It is understandable, as many of us are happy to say we are a "Bud-man," a "Harley-man," a "Swaro kind of guy," or a variety of other tenuous ways of describing nothing in particular. Though we talk of "inherent accuracy" (a dubious concept, indeed), few would attempt defining it, only parroting that it exists.

We take the same path in using unsophisticated terms to describe sophisticated events. "Knock-down" is one, a physically impossible concept that is never the less widely used. The same strained, tortured approach is used to define "kinetic energy" and "energy transfer." Autopsies are not fun reads; nor are obituaries. We will search long and hard to find a medical report that lists "kinetic energy" as the cause of death.

Surely, after all these years, there must be one recorded instance where a human being lost his life to a sudden gust of kinetic energy? Yet, medical journals are generally void of energy and velocity as causes of death. Perhaps it is because neither ever is. Those waiting for the Surgeon General to alert us to avoid kinetic energy exposure are in for a very long wait, indeed.

The Gut-Wrenching Nightmare of Caliber Worship
by Randy Wakeman

We are born, so to speak, provisionally, it doesn't matter where; it is only gradually that we compose, within ourselves, our true place of origin, so that we may be born there retrospectively.

Rilke, as quoted by Coetzee, as quoted by Donald Ritchie, as collected in "The Japan Journals", as editted by Leza Lowitz
p441

Once again:

"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects."

Robert A. Heinlein
The Notebooks of Lazarus Long

Very well, where do I begin? My father was a relentlessly self-improving boulangerie owner from Belgium with low grade narcolepsy and a penchant for buggery. My mother was a fifteen year old French prostitute named Chloe with webbed feet. My father would womanize, he would drink, he would make outrageous claims like he invented the question mark. Some times he would accuse chestnuts of being lazy, the sort of general malaise that only the genius possess and the insane lament. My childhood was typical, summers in Rangoon, luge lessons. In the spring we'd make meat helmets. When I was insolent I was placed in a burlap bag and beaten with reeds, pretty standard really. At the age of 12 I received my first scribe. At the age of fourteen, a Zoroastrian named Vilma ritualistically shaved my testicles. There really is nothing like a shorn scrotum, it's breathtaking, I suggest you try it.

Dr. Evil

I'd suggest to you that instead of taking the ACS head on, that we ought to insist on a "mandatory" statement on the ACS form and in all conversations started by Census workers such as,

"Although the ACS is 'mandatory':

1.) This has never been tested in any court. And we aren't interested in having it tested before any court because we very well might lose.

2.) The Census Bureau has no enforcement powers and the Department of Justice has its hands full doing lots of other more important things. They'd probably laugh in our faces if we referred cases to them asking them to try and collect $100 fines.

3.) No one in the history of the US has ever been fined or prosecuted for refusing to complete the Census. So the probability of your being eaten by a man eating tiger that escapes from the zoo is greater than your being fined for not competing this survey."

suinmd

There is no such thing as a nature/nurture debate. It’s something that caught on in the media because it rhymes. You can’t have one without the other. A gene can only work in an environment that triggers it to turn on. An environment can only express its influence through an animal by turning genes on and off. You can’t impose a culture on a rock. You can only impose culture on an animal designed by genes to learn from culture.

Joe Quirk

I wish to have no connection with any ship that does not sail fast; for I intend to go in harm's way.

John Paul Jones

William Faulkner, in his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize for Literature, called upon writers of the future to not write merely "for the glands." Of course, at that moment, Faulkner was being rewarded for being the best writer for the glands this country has ever known. Incest, serial killing, insanity, race war, castration, burial of the dead, biblical flood, hunting bear, rape with a corn cob - Faulkner did it all. The guy played our genome like a xylophone. Faulkner, in a suddenly noble moment, called upon writers... to transcend the endocrinological. He didn't set the best example.

Joe Quirk
Sperm Are from Men, Eggs Are from Women, p118

All of the liability problems of general aviation manufacturers were brought on by their own lawyers. They maintained that they couldn't afford to fight these cases, when in truth they couldn't afford not to. Ford fought their Pinto case to the Supreme Court and had a $125 million judgment against them thrown out of court. Nobody sues Ford capriciously anymore.

Scott Crossfield, aviation legend, who died yesterday at the age of 84 while piloting his Cessna 210
Courtesy of AVweb

"I wish the eagle had not been chosen as the representative of this country. He is a bird of bad moral character; he does not get his living honestly. You may have seen him perched in some dead tree where, too lazy to fish for himself, he watches the labor of the fishing hawk and, when that diligent bird has at length taken a fish and is bearing it to his nest for his young ones, the bald eagle pursues him and takes the fish. With all this injustice, he is never in good case."

Benjamin Franklin

Property "rights" are basically an epiphenomenon arising from respect for voluntary agreements. As such, if a society doesn't respect voluntary agreements, private property doesn't last long. You can't even decide who owns something unless voluntary agreements are respected.

Perry Metzger, by permission, from a private mailing list

Canada is a great place to live... it is cool that we can smoke weed and marry people who have similiar genitals.

Jade Palamarek

Frank Bieser writes:
> Perry E. Metzger wrote:
>> Without enough people working on the problem, we won't finish in
>> time. Right now, I'd say smart people are the biggest missing resource.
>
> And why might that be? Where did all the smart people go?

They didn't "go" anywhere. They've never been in the field.

How many smart people were working on orbital rocketry in 1920? A half
dozen, perhaps. Lots of people claimed the whole idea was bunk, too,
including the New York Times. Later on, lots of people joined up.

Today, not many people are working on Drexler's vision. That doesn't
mean it isn't worthwhile -- it just means that the field is young and
lots of people are still skeptical about it. I suspect that the number
of people actively working on it numbers less than 20, and possibly
less than 10.

There is enough work for thousands of people to push on this for many
years to come. At some point, we'll get IA or AI and the pace will be
able to pick up, but that point still seems pretty distant. Meanwhile,
direct molecular manipulation and molecular manufacturing pose a very
hard set of problems -- possibly the hardest engineering problem yet
faced by mankind -- and we need more minds to make progress. On the
flip side, MNT will also bring the biggest revolution in civilization
yet experienced, dwarfing everything that came before, so I see it as
a worthwhile problem to attack.

Still, we lack enough smart people working on it. As any good VC can
tell you, money is something of a commodity, but smart people are
rare. More smart people are needed.

Perry

People who work under demanding taskmasters usually learn to respect them. People who are coddled with unearned A-grades despise the system they are exploiting. Living on a diet of junk grades is like living on a diet of junk food. You swell up out of all decent proportions without ever getting any real nourishment. And you end up in later life regretting your disgusting habits.

"All Shall Have Prizes"

April 12th 2001

The Economist

Come to the Dark Side, we have cookies.

Patrick McKee

The wise man can pick up a grain of sand and envision a whole universe. But the stupid man will just lay down on some seaweed and roll around in it until he's completely draped in it. Then he'll stand up and go, "Hey, I'm Vine Man."

Jack Handey

As long as the government doesn't mandate "one-size-fits-all," I don't care what the private companies do. There will always be one or two renegades who will see the obvious market opportunities and offer various levels of security. Personally, I want to fly with the clothes-optional-guns-mandatory-girls-fly-free airlines.

Sandy Sandfort

FEMA, in fact, is an illegal organization. It's mentioned nowhere in the Constitution (which lists the lawful powers of the government in Article I, Section 8), nor did anybody ever vote about it, neither you nor I, nor even the Congress. It was created out of thin air by Presidential fiat, and given unprecedented power to override, at gunpoint, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the rule of law in general.

L. Neil Smith

The idea of a constitution, we’re told, is to limit government power. It’s supposed to bind the government to certain operational procedures that restrict its ability to violate rights. So a constitution cannot grant human rights; it can only spell out what are seen as the proper functions of government, and try to limit its ability to invade rights.

The US constitution came perhaps as close to this ideal as possible, until its meaning was perverted into a complete reversal, from restricting power to enabling it, from binding government to giving government a mandate for a thousand things to do to us.

But here is the problem. Constitutions by necessity leave the government as the primary enforcement agency. It’s like a memo: "Government to Self: don’t become tyrannical." It only works so long as the enforcement agent operates in good faith. If we remember that the worst rise to the top in government, as Hayek noted, we can have no realistic expectation that this good faith will last. Government gains not by adhering to its own restrictions, but by re-rendering them as positive mandates.

Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.
"A Constitution for Iraq"

Can you Breathe in Freefall?
At 120mph, inhaling is real easy. If you find it difficult to exhale, panic and scream, which is just another way to exhale. Then inhale which, as mentioned, is very easy at that speed.

In short, yes, you can breathe in freefall.

Adventure Center Skydiving FAQ

In my opinion, ninjutsu is not a spiritual system (outside the confines of martial training) or a religion. Some may disagree.

Asking for ninjutsu without the martial aspects would be akin to asking some Navy SEAL "I want the spiritual strength and tenacity of a Navy SEAL but I don't want to do any hard physical training."

Jeff Sherwin

If you can, within principle, take over and adopt whatever name your enemy calls you, do so. It shuts them up very handily.

L. Neil Smith

I would much rather see transhumanists delve into real research or produce real results rather than just recruiting "believers". I [would] rather have fewer people working on the right things than a much larger number who believe in mistaken ideas.

...sadly, the transhumanists themselves will be a large part of the faulty advertising that lead humanity astray with outrageous claims, false beliefs, and preferring quantity over quality. I see nothing in most of our PR efforts that will actually help us attain our goals. Having a couple of hundred people join a science fan club worldwide will have little to no effect on progress.

Harvey Newstrom

Year by year, a third of the [American] labor pool emerges with a college degree. Most of these degrees are in the humanities and social sciences.

Meanwhile, China produces over 450,000 college graduates a year in science and engineering – as many scientists and engineers as the United States has, total. Then, next year, China will do it again.

Gary North

...reading for pleasure is pretty much the single most important determinant (and correlant) of later success in any fields involving thinking, planning, writing, and intellectual effort. Those who don't read as children are mostly lost forever...they'll simply never catch up with those of us who read books every night.

Timothy C. May

I think it was one of the Jeffersons who said history was a nightmare from which mankind was trying to wake. We're moving deeper, it seems, into REM.

Dr. Sean Gabb

If you stir, as opposed to shaking, your martini will simply not be cold enough. There are many ways to destroy a martini, but none surer than by not serving it just short of frozen. Anyone who tells you that shaking a martini "bruises the gin" is probably also capable of talking about "bending air." It's true that shaking the mixture will make it slightly cloudy, but in my opinion it looks better that way.

Joseph Dobrian

Cops are armed when civilians can't be, often with weapons civilians can't have. I can't tell you how sick I get of seeing notations in catalogs like Brigade Quartermaster that certain items are for cops only.

Cops live and operate within a strict hierarchy, usually with titles like "sergeant", "lieutenant", "captain", and so forth. Most of them wear military-style uniforms, and an argument can be made that so-called "plainclothes" operations ought to be outlawed. Increasingly, they wear military battledress and carry military weapons.

Cops form a culture all to themselves, like professional soldiers, and usually have little to do with those who are not cops. They do call us "civilians". I never heard this term "little people" before. They also call us "assholes" and say that the public just consists of criminals who haven't been caught yet. I know because I was there at one time.

Yeah, I understand the theory that they're civilians, too. I repeat that it's bullshit. What they are, in fact, is an occupying military force, with strategic bases in every hamlet in the nation -- which is why they and their hangers-on lie to us and possibly to themselves about being civilians, too.

They are the very standing army that the Founding Fathers were afraid of.

And for good reason.

L. Neil Smith
In response last night to a post I made on a mailing list about how cops refer to non-cops as "civilians" when they, too, are in fact "civilians."

Indeed, I am opposed even to free market supplied "police" in the conventional sense. The potential - indeed, universal reality - of armed agencies abusing their power is such that I believe that it is foolish for individuals to delegate their use of just force and to rely on third parties. We need an armed citizenry, the "hue and cry", and the use of specialist/expert "martials" for arrest only in restricted cases.

Dr. Chris R. Tame
Excerpted with permission from a recent private correspondance

If a cat scan of my brain or my EEG looks like Terry Schiavo's, do NOT put me on machines, do NOT insert a feeding tube(unless you're feeding me margaritas), do not take extraordinary measures to prolong my life. And especially do NOT call Jesse Jackson. If you call Jesse Jackson to stand over my bedside and pray, I will come back and HAUNT your ass. Correction. I will come back and haunt your ass and then BEAT it.

Bill Hartwell

If you want government to intervene domestically, you're a liberal. If you want government to intervene overseas, you're a conservative. If you want government to intervene everywhere, you're a moderate. If you don't want government to intervene anywhere, you're an extremist.

Joseph Sobran

How much time have you spent in the Western US?

Have you ever tried to buy a semi-automatic rifle in Canada?

Have you ever tried to order an "unapproved" video from Loompanics in Canada?

Have you ever tried to tell a Mountie to "Get a Warrant"?

None of these things work very well in Canada.

When Canada is as free as, say Montana, where a man stopped by a state traffic cop for driving 80 mph, with a beer in one hand, and pistol on his hip, can ask the cop "What the hell do you want?", and have the cop eventually just give up and walk off, then you can discuss with us how "free" Canada is.

As for the "we're doomed" crowd here ... The US is the healthiest patient in the World's tyranny cancer ward. If we don't win here, things are going to get very ugly.

Kristopher Barrett

They keep talking about drafting a Constitution for Iraq. Why don't we just give 'em ours? It was written by a lot of really smart guys, it's worked for over 200 years and, what the hell, we're not using it anymore.

Tom Skinner

I tend toward the variation "If you can't say something nice about someone... I'm all ears."

Ward Griffiths

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself -- and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that. After you've not fooled yourself, it's easy not to fool other scientists. You just have to be honest in a conventional way after that.

I would like to add something that's not essential to the science, but something I kind of believe, which is that you should not fool the layman when you're talking as a scientist. I am not trying to tell you what to do about cheating on your wife, or fooling your girlfriend, or something like that, when you're not trying to be a scientist, but just trying to be an ordinary human being. We'll leave those problems up to you and your rabbi. I'm talking about a specific, extra type of integrity that is not lying, but bending over backwards to show how you're maybe wrong, that you ought to have when acting as a scientist. And this is our responsibility as scientists, certainly to other scientists, and I think to laymen.

For example, I was a little surprised when I was talking to a friend who was going to go on the radio. He does work on cosmology and astronomy, and he wondered how he would explain what the applications of his work were. "Well", I said, "there aren't any". He said, "Yes, but then we won't get support for more research of this kind". I think that's kind of dishonest. If you're representing yourself as a scientist, then you should explain to the layman what you're doing -- and if they don't support you under those circumstances, then that's their decision.

One example of the principle is this: If you've made up your mind to test a theory, or you want to explain some idea, you should always decide to publish it whichever way it comes out. If we only publish results of a certain kind, we can make the argument look good. We must publish BOTH kinds of results.

Richard Feynman
"Cargo Cult Science"

Capitalism is the only moral social system because it allows each man to work for his own profit and because under a capitalistic system men only have to work with each other through voluntary action for mutual benefit. Capitalism maximizes wealth, prosperity and happiness.

Valara Forsythe

Mother Nature is a royalist bitch. She tries to kill you even if you try to embrace her, and its only mankind's mystical musings that assumes a warm embrace of this coldhearted killer is appreciated.

Alan Weiss

I get the occasional numb-nut. They say, "I can see how you can shoot ugly wild boars, but not a beautiful deer." Oh, a little more Hitlerism is just what we need. This can live and this can die according to my whims. Eat me, you fuck! Here's the truth so you can print it in bold, capital red letters: The cuter the critter, the sweeter the meat.

Ted Nugent
Interview in April 2004 Maxim magazine, p104

For a martial art to be a martial art, rather than some other form of physical expression (some other "art" entirely), its focus must remain on fighting. A truly accomplished warrior may renounce violence -- but only his or her mastery of violence makes this possible. If the style or system you study leaves you unable to defend yourself in a realistic self-defense scenario, it may indeed be an art -- but it is not martial at all. Its practitioners delude themselves if they believe that it is.

In the same vein, a martial art or martial artist whose attitude towards weapons is one of contempt, mistrust, fear, or condescension tells you volumes about its, his, or her "martialism." Weapons are force multipliers -- tools that perform the same function as hammers, levers, and pliers in that they make it easier to accomplish a specific task. As the purpose of a martial art is to deliver force against another human or group of humans, only the most ignorant of martial artists would dismiss or reject tools that make performing this task more efficient and less risky. There is no such thing as an immoral tool. There are only immoral tool users.

Phil Elmore

People who will not take the trouble to raise children should not have them.

Robert A. Heinlein
Podkayne of Mars

A man may fight for many things. His country, his friends, his principles, the glistening tear on the cheek of a golden child. But personally, I'd mud-wrestle my own mother for a ton of cash, an amusing clock and a sack of French porn.

Rowan Atkinson

I'm an 'ivory tower' liberal. That means when I see a hungry person half-way round the world I send money, but when I see one at my door I call the police.

Tom Lehrer

If you really believe you can compensate for a lack of skill or talent by doubling your efforts, there is no end to what you cannot do.

Stephen Carville

If you can't annoy someone, there's little point in writing.

Kingsley Amis

Walking past a newsstand near my office yesterday, I saw the banner headline "Tube Bosses Buy Parts on eBay". The accompanying story told us, in faintly mocking tones, how engineers working on the London Underground system have resorted to using the online auction firm because the parts they need are so old that they cannot get the pieces they need from regular stock.

Now it may at first appear a terrible thing that our metro systems are so old that the folk running them have to resort to an online auction set up by those vulgar American geeks from their Silicon Valley offices to get the stuff they need. But (drums roll!) I have a certain admiration for the Tube staff who had the entrepreneurial savvy to make use of the amazingly successful eBay platform. If the power of the internet can make my journey to work a bit smoother, I ain't complaining.

Johnathan Pearce

All greatness of character is dependent on individuality. The man who has no other existence than that which he partakes in common with all around him, will never have any other than an existence of mediocrity

James Fenimore Cooper

Homo sum; homini nihil a me alienum puto.

Terentius

The enemy was repelled. But victory was not won. The war dragged on for a year and there was no decision. Gold grew scarce, and again the Government was in despair.

"I easily relieved them. 'Write,' I said, 'promises on paper to be repaid in gold.' They did as I advised, paying me (at my request) a trifle of half a million for the advice. I handled the affair on a merely nominal profit. I punctually met for another year every note that was paid in. But too many were presented, for the war seemed unending and entered a third year."

"Then did I conceive yet another stupendous thing. 'Bid them,' said I to the Sultan, 'take the notes as money. Cease to repay. Write, not 'I will on delivery of this paper pay a piece of gold,' but, 'this is a piece of gold.'"

"He did as I told him. The next day the Vizier came to me with the story of an insolent fellow to whom fifty such notes had been offered as payment for a camel for the war and who had sent back, not a camel, but another piece of paper on which was written 'This is a camel.'"

"'Cut off his head!' said I."

"It was done, and the warning sufficed. The paper was taken and the war proceeded."

Hilaire Belloc
The Mercy of Allah, 1922

A college student challenged a senior citizen, saying it was impossible for their generation to understand his. "You grew up in a different world," the student said. "Today we have television, jet planes, space travel, nuclear energy, computers..." Taking advantage of a pause in the student's litany, the geezer said, "You're right. We didn't have those things when we were young. So we invented them."

Unattributed, sent to me by email from Terry Egan

Here richly, with ridiculous display,
The Politician's corpse was laid away.
While all of his acquaintance sneered and slanged
I wept: for I had longed to see him hanged.

Hilaire Belloc
"Epitaph on the Politician"

These things escalate because everyone always tends to focus on the differences in ideology rather than working on the more abundant commonalities. My homeland has of course taken this to the extreme. Only in Northern Ireland can two people have been brought up in the same street, go to the same school, have the same colour skin, and the same religion (christianity) and still have their marriage considered 'mixed' (i.e. protestant & catholic).

Stephen Ewart

In science, 'fact' can only mean 'confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.' I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms.

Stephen Jay Gould

Computer, compute to the last digit the value of pi.

Spock
TOS, Wolf in the Fold

A scientist can discover a new star, but he cannot make one. He would have to ask an engineer to do that.

Gordon L. Glegg
American Engineer, 1969.

A discovery is like falling in love and reaching the top of a mountain after a hard climb all in one, an ecstasy induced not by drugs but by the revelation of a face of nature that no one has seen before.

Max F. Perutz

> I thought many on this list would take exception to the part where he
> says, "The rights of the people come from God."

Why should I care if you want to believe your rights are a form of celestial welfare?

e0ts

The other way makers learn is from examples. For a painter, a museum is a reference library of techniques. For hundreds of years it has been part of the traditional education of painters to copy the works of the great masters, because copying forces you to look closely at the way a painting is made.

Writers do this too. Benjamin Franklin learned to write by summarizing the points in the essays of Addison and Steele and then trying to reproduce them. Raymond Chandler did the same thing with detective stories.

Hackers, likewise, can learn to program by looking at good programs-- not just at what they do, but the source code too. One of the less publicized benefits of the open-source movement is that it has made it easier to learn to program. When I learned to program, we had to rely mostly on examples in books. The one big chunk of code available then was Unix, but even this was not open source. Most of the people who read the source read it in illicit photocopies of John Lions' book, which though written in 1977 was not allowed to be published until 1996.

Paul Graham, in "Hackers and Painters"

As [Charles] Adams writes, the Lincoln Cult is terrified that this truth will become public knowledge, for it if does, it means that Lincoln "destroyed the separation of powers; destroyed the place of the Supreme Court in the Constitutional scheme of government. It would have made the executive power supreme, over all others, and put the president, the military, and the executive branch of government, in total control of American society. The Constitution would have been at an end."

Exactly right.

Thomas J. DiLorenzo
"Lincoln’s 'Great Crime': The Arrest Warrant for the Chief Justice"

If you only encrypt important things, even without decrypting the message the simple fact it's encrypted means its important. This is information that you have given freely to whomever it is that is watching: "Pay Attention, This One Is Important."

I cannot stop the buggers from knowing everything about me if they decide I'm a target. But I can throw chaff. Encrypt everything.

As PGP's developer Phil Zimmerman said, "PGP is for small secrets."

Curt Howland

Q. How can you, an anarchist, be a lawyer?

A. My father was a physician. That doesn't mean he believed in disease.

Duncan Frissell

Voicing an opinion is costless - anyone can argue that socialism is great, or that the government won’t really inflate a fiat currency. Having a false opinion may be costless if it doesn’t affect your life much, and it can produce a benefit of feeling good. So people may choose an opinion based on how it appeals to their hopes, rather on on what they believe is true.

An example of a more incentive compatible system is gambling. While people often gamble irrationally, gambling still tends to draw out more beliefs and less hope than mere discussion. By placing a wager, you tie your opinion to a personal gain or loss, so you care whether you are correct. Hence “Wanna bet?” really means “Do you actually think that, or are you just saying it?", and its a great way to call the windbag’s bluff. People offer absurd opinions much more often than they make idiotic wagers.

Patri Friedman

You might want to take note of the interconnection between purpose and action in the minimal State. The minimal State does not, for instance, build art museums, because it does not exist to promote art but to enforce agreements and provide mutual defense. In order to build an art museum, the State would need to acquire the resources with which to build it. If people are willing to donate those resources freely, there is no need for the State to build the museum — it could be built privately. If people are not willing to donate the resources freely, then the act of forcibly taking the needed resources turns the purpose of the minimal State on its head — instead of enforcing the decision by the participants to respect each other's lives and property so that their own lives and property will be respected, the State then becomes an agent for some to abscond with the property of others. I may think it is a good idea to build a home for orphans, but if I take your resources against your will to do it, whether I'm an official of the State or a private citizen, I have violated the truce. To obey the truce, I must convince you to voluntarily provide resources for my goals, whether by trading with you or appealing to your charitable instincts.

In short, if the justification of the minimal State is that it exists, at the behest of a collection of sovereign individuals, to enforce a mutually beneficial truce among those who choose to participate in it, and to organize mutual defense against those who choose not to participate by violating the truce, then that justification does not reasonably permit the expropriation of resources for the purpose of projects that are merely laudable.

Note that this view of the minimal State cannot provide a justification for initiating warfare in distant lands which are not a threat its citizens' safety, regardless of how laudable it might be to re-arrange the social structures of those foreign places to suit enlightened tastes. However, by the same token, neither position prevents individuals from engaging in such activities on their own, at their own risk and with their own resources.

Perry Metzger, in "What is the Role of the State?" today

There's something for everyone on a Dr. Bronner's [Magic] soap [bottle].

Even for officers and employees of the National Libertarian Party:

"Dilute! Dilute! Ok!"

Curt Howland

I'll tell you what I'd prefer our government's foreign policy to be, assuming we need to have a State at all. My proposal is pretty simple: Swiss-style armed neutrality. That means no invasions, no military threats, no foreign aid, no "covert operations", no military bases outside the country, no attempts to influence the internal affairs of foreign countries whatsoever.

No one blows up bombs in the streets of Geneva. No one from Switzerland gets kidnaped in third world countries to protest the evils of Swiss foreign policy. Wherever they go, at worst, people think of the Swiss as boring — it is rare that anyone feels the need to buttonhole someone from Zurich or Lugano and tell them off for what their government does.

The Swiss are not pacifists, though. They have a very strong militia for defense, and in times past when Europe was less peaceful, it would have been extremely costly for an attacker to invade them. Even if (in the case of particularly strong enemies) an invasion might have ultimately succeeded, it would have yielded very little of value at an astonishing expense.

Perry Metzger

God isn't interested in technology. He knows nothing of the potential of the microchip or the silicon revolution. Look how he spends his time! Forty three species of parrot! Nipples for men! Slugs! He created slugs! They can't hear! They can't speak! They can't operate machinery! I mean, are we not in the hands of a lunatic? If I were creating a world, I wouldn't mess about with butterflies and daffodils. I would have started with lasers, eight o'clock, Day One!

from Time Bandits, via Samizdata

If forced to shoot someone in self defence, you should claim that you were robbing him at gunpoint after discovering him in your home.

That way you get out on probation immediately, can buy a replacement firearm off "the street", and serve no jail time.

Kristopher Barrett

Capitalistic competition is also why "child labor" has all but disappeared, despite unionist claims to the contrary. Young people originally left the farms to work in harsh factory conditions because it was a matter of survival for them and their families. But as workers became better paid—thanks to capital investment and subsequent productivity improvements—more and more people could afford to keep their children at home and in school. Union-backed legislation prohibiting child labor came after the decline in child labor had already begun. Moreover, child labor laws have always been protectionist and aimed at depriving young people of the opportunity to work. Since child labor sometimes competes with unionized labor, unions have long sought to use the power of the state to deprive young people of the right to work. In the Third World today, the alternative to "child labor" is all too often begging, prostitution, crime, or starvation. Unions absurdly proclaim to be taking the moral high road by advocating protectionist policies that inevitably lead to these consequences.

Thomas J. DiLorenzo

In Colorado, the state where I live, the constitution provides that no new law may be passed unless it is immediately necessary to protect the health and safety of the people of the state. The idea—which went along with discouraging professional politicos (especially lawyers) in the legislature and strictly limiting the number of days that it could be in session—was to keep state laws to an absolute minimum.

The result? The infamous "safety clause" rubber-stamped at the top of every item of new legislation, a standard "boilerplate" asserting—whether a proposed law subsidizes unicorn ranchers or designates an official state intestinal parasite—that the law is immediately necessary (natch) to protect the health and safety of the people of Colorado.

L. Neil Smith

The same piece of software can be both an application and infrastructure. Apache is an excellent example of this. Apache is really Linux’s “killer app.” It runs on Windows and BSD, but the main point is that it doesn’t require Windows, and many machines are built for the sole purpose of running Apache. Apache is an application when I am setting up a web server, but it’s infrastructure for you when you’re looking at my blog.

Sean Lynch

Almost wish I could be a Christian: the idea of an angry Jesus dealing with these filthy motherfuckers just delights the hell out of me.

Rocky Frisco

I always opposed the National Libertarian Party's adoption of the Statue of Liberty as its logo. The idea was typical of the LPUS at the time, and oddly appropriate, both the statue and the LPUS being hollow and devoid of meaningful content. The statue was co-opted by statists so long ago that our using it offered nothing but negative publicity, very nearly as negative, for instance, as having an office in the Watergate.

There were some who greatly preferred the porcupine as a national LP symbol because it's all about defense, although those of us in the west who know it personally, know that the little animal is stupid and destructive.

I, myself, prefer the skunk. It's quick and clever. Predators are even more anxious to avoid its defense system than the porcupine's quills. Some species will simply crouch and spray, but what I wanted was the type that stands on its front paws, throws its back feet into the air, and joyously lets you have it with style and grace. It would have made a hell of a logo, but the Nerfies were too fastidious for that.

L. Neil Smith

[The tailend of a dialogue with an idiot I witnessed last night. - REW]

> Windows accomplishes most of what *I* need.

I'm sure it does...

> Why isn't that enough?

It obviously isn't enough for you. Everytime the subject comes up you re-route your anus to your keyboard via your forebrain and go off into I Hate Linux mode. You remind me of one of those women who was betrayed by one man and spends the rest of her life taking it out on everyone around her.

e0ts, on a list I frequent

The real difference the media doesn't get is the difference between an anarchist and a "nihilist." Most modern reporters can't even define the word - but it is what they mean when they say "anarchist."

I regret the loss of my language almost as much as the loss of my freedom.

Kathryn A. Graham

There have been posters for the movie up around LA for a few weeks now, saying "Alien vs. Predator: Whoever wins, we lose." Remarkably appropriate for an election year..

Ken Hagler

Most of America's health care is private, so many assume it operates as a free market. In truth, it is dominated by the government, resulting in high costs and stifling bureaucracy.

The federal government effectively socializes 86% of all health spending, a greater share than in 17 other industrialized countries, including Canada (though other features make these systems less free).

By discouraging individual responsibility, the government guarantees irresponsibility. We pay less attention to our health and demand more care — with little regard to the costs we impose on others or the rising prices that result. (Should it surprise us that health insurance is unaffordable for millions?) Those footing the bill — employers, insurers and the government — try to impose responsibility in ways both offensive and harmful (read: managed care).

Michael F. Cannon

Programming is like sex: one mistake and you have to support for a lifetime.

Unknown

This jackass needs to have the first amendment tattooed on his scrotum. Then he needs to be beaten like a red-headed stepchild and put in stocks on the ferry ramp for about 3 weekdays.

Then we need to get rid of all these brownshirt "security screeners" before we find ourselves living in Nazi Germany.

Frank Ney, referring to an incident involving a Port Authority thug (Hoboken Ferry) 2 days ago

Like every partnership, marriage should fit the individuals it unites, rather than be a "one-size-fits all" proposition defined by those outside the relationship. Each marriage should be what the partners want it to be—no more, no less. Ideally, the terms of marriage should be defined ahead of time with procedures to modify them as necessary.

Just as anyone can engage in a business relationship, any individuals should be able to enter into a marriage. Government's role in a business partnership is to simply enforce, not dictate, its terms. Government's role in marriage should be the same.

Michael Badnarik

As Congressman Ron Paul has said, "To many politicians the American government is America and patriotism means working for the benefit of the state." Thus, on a crude level, the draft appeals to patriotic fervor. This, according to Congressman Paul, is why the idea of compulsory national service, whether in the form of military conscription or make-work programs like AmeriCorps, still sells on Capitol Hill. Conscription is wrongly associated with patriotism, when it really represents collectivism and involuntary servitude.

Ronald Reagan said it best: "The most fundamental objection to draft registration is moral." He understood that conscription assumes our nation's young people belong to the state. Yet America was founded on the opposite principle; that the state exists to serve the individual. The notion of involuntary servitude, in whatever form, is simply incompatible with a free society.

Michael Badnarik

I have to admit that I don't understand luddites well. Human welfare has been radically improved by technology. The progress we've made towards reducing poverty and human misery has been nothing short of breathtaking. Even Marx seemed to understand this pretty well. I get the feeling that the people who used to embrace communism now have switched to technophobia.

As a postscript, let me note that even the most radical anti-technology activists out there like the Unibomber, Ted Kaczynski, seem to make use of at least some technology in their lives. I doubt Kaczynski could have survived through the winter in his cabin without steel implements and an iron stove for heat. No one would know of Kaczynski's ideas but for his willingness to use of technology to write them down (even paper and pencils require pretty significant ingenuity and effort to produce). Even written down, high technology, including computers, has been the primary means by which his ideas have been disseminated. Some such people argue that they are merely using technology temporarily to try to fight technology, or that they do not oppose "appropriate" technologies like wood stoves. (Kaczynski doesn't seem to make any such arguments, though, or at least, none that I can see.) Even so, there is tremendous irony in anti-technologists making use of even primitive technologies, and further irony in their communicating by any method other than speech. I suspect, however, that the irony is lost on them.

Perry Metzger

Roxanne,

How are things in Seattle? Quieter, I hope. I had a close call today, I tracked a goblin in on my shoe. Actually, to be precise, my boot, since I was luckily wearing my black leather western-style riding boots. At first, I thought it was a chunk of mud and hay from the pasture out back. Its arms and legs looked like twigs and were covered up by the real pieces of hay and grass and dead vegetation that had been captured by its evil stickiness. I didn't realize what it was until I had pried it off my boot with my Buck Knife. Something about the way it hit the carpet just wasn't right for a mud-clod. That attracted my scrutiny and allowed me to see past the camouflage, that and the smell. The goblins here don't smell very strong, unless they're in rut and mark at you, but even during the dry season they have a putrid wrenching metallic stench that isn't any more pleasant for being subtle.

It had obviously been a typically ugly little abomination, even before I accidentally smashed it with my boot: all head and spindly appendages, like a cross between Humpty-Dumpty and a daddy-longlegs, but with a gross parody of a human face with a gaping slash of a snaggle-toothed mouth across its belly and rank greasy black hair everywhere but the face. The head-body was about two inches in diameter and the arms and legs were around six to eight inches long. I don't doubt that the thing that had saved me from its toxic bite was the sterling silver decorations you sent me for my boots, the toe-tips and faux spurs, one of which still held a nasty little gobbet of goblin-stuff on its point. The eyes had burst under the pressure and still leaked rancid jelly onto my carpet. I was pretty sure it was really dead, since I'd never seen one reanimate with its eyes busted. Still, you can't be too careful, so I got out the tongs and brought it over to the fireplace receptacle and flash-burned it into grey ash and a puff of grey-green smoke that vanished up the vent. Then I popped a beer from the fridge and congratulated myself on a job well done. Thanks again for the silver
boot decorations.

Harley, down the road, has a suggestion for the Troll in your culvert out at the country place. He says the red-orangey ones with big green teeth, like you have, are resistant to the Black Flag Troll-Away and the Raid Trollacide, too, which would explain why those didn't work for you. He says the only way to get rid of this kind is to immobilize them with liquid nitrogen and throw them into a volcano, which would be very expensive. He also says you could wait until a really cold night, fifteen below or colder, and very carefully toss a loop of rope onto it while it's sluggish and just drag it twenty or thirty miles away and leave it by the culvert or bridge of some rich S. O. B. who could afford to have it frozen and transported to Hawaii. I assume you know this is illegal as well as dangerous. Until you figure out what to do about this, I guess you'll just have to keep using the back road into your place.

Your suggestion about the deal with the cookies has solved my brownie problem; I haven't seen a single one for over a month and the cows have been undisturbed. Now, if I could just figure out an easy way to clean the fairies off the windshield of my pickup...

Sincerely Yours,

Rocky Frisco
"Varmints"

If we have learned anything over the past 18 months it is this: that the first rule of politics - power must never be trusted - still applies. The government will neither regulate itself nor be regulated by the institutions which surround it. Parliament chose to believe a string of obvious lies. The media repeated them, the civil service let them pass, the judiciary endorsed them. The answer to the age-old political question - who guards the guards? - remains unchanged. Only the people will hold the government to account.

They have two means of doing so. The first is to throw it out of office at the next election. This works only when we are permitted to choose an alternative set of policies. But in almost every nation, a new contract has now been struck between the main political parties: they have chosen to agree on almost all significant areas of policy. This leaves the people disenfranchised: they can vote out the monkeys but not the organ-grinder.

George Monbiot

Among the most gruesome consequences of fiat money, and of paper money in particular, is its ability to extend the length of wars. The destructions of war have the healthy effect of cooling down initial war frenzies. The more protracted and destructive a war becomes, therefore, the less is the population inclined to support it financially through taxes and the purchase of public bonds. Fiat inflation allows the government to ignore the fiscal resistance of its citizens and to maintain the war effort on its present level, or even to increase that level. The government just prints the notes it needs to buy cannons and boots.

J.G. Hülsmann

I do not believe that fighting is the primary goal of martial arts in contemporary times. I believe that it has far greater potential. Hatsumi Sensei [says] that it is to produce higher human beings and create peace. Although these may sound like lofty ideals, we have all witnessed the personal evolution of practitioners and seen the spirit of friendship flourish between countries. In many cases, the Bujinkan has created friendships between students even when their home countries were still hostile.

Martial arts provide a model of life. They teach us to be positive and resolved in the face of adversity. They teach us to seek truth (albeit at first through technique), they teach us to seek harmony rather than accord, they teach us cooperation (which is necessary during practice) and they teach us the humility to know that we must act as part of nature not contrary to it. If we must fight, then we should do so with a pure heart. To harm an opponent more than is necessary is savagery and is unbecoming of an artist. It is better that we are judged on our dignity and humanity, rather than by how fearsome we are.

In Japanese martial arts, there is a saying, ‘The sword that kills and the sword that spares’. This is usually taken to mean that the swordsman would have such skill that he could choose whether to kill or spare an opponent. Hatsumi Sensei said that there is another meaning, that one action may have included both. An example of this may have been when faced with no other choice, a samurai would have killed an attacker to prevent him from taking innocent lives. Although regretting the taking of life, his one sword cut would have killed and spared life at the same time. To make such a judgement for the correct reasons, the swordsman needed to have had a highly developed sense of humanity and justice. Taking life cannot be compared with giving life. Hurting cannot be compared to healing and destruction cannot be compared to creativity. We are not just martial practitioners, we are martial artists and we should create beauty through the movements of our bodies and hearts.

Peter King, on "Fighting"

A second fallacy is the idea of war as an engine of prosperity. Students are taught that World War II ended the Depression; many Americans seem to believe that tax revenues spent on defense contractors (creating jobs) are no loss to the productive economy; and our political leaders continue to believe that expanded government spending is an effective way of bringing an end to a recession and reviving the economy.

The truth is that war, and the preparation for it, is economically wasteful and destructive. Apart from the spoils gained by winning (if it is won) war and defense spending squander labor, resources, and wealth, leaving the country poorer in the end than if these things had been devoted to peaceful endeavors.

H.A. Scott Trask

The government doesn't produce any wealth. Factories, software companies, farmers, and others are the ones producing wealth. All the government can do is make it harder for people to produce wealth or take wealth from one person and hand it to another. It can't actually make the pie larger on its own, but it can manage to drastically reduce the size of the pie by interfering. Only the people actually doing productive work can increase the size of the pie.

We see extreme cases of this in the third world. The reason people in Africa live in shacks and have to wear our cast-off clothing is not because we're mean and keep them from having all the wealth we've stolen from them. They have little wealth to steal in the first place. They are poor because their governments are run in a way that makes the creation and retention of wealth impossible. Unlike the booming Asian economies, where foreign factories are welcomed, few foreign companies "exploit" the poor of Africa, because the African governments have made running factories and businesses nearly impossible. Even indigenous entrepreneurs are regulated, shaken down and taxed into oblivion. If you want to make the poor wealthier, you have to stay out of the way of people who want to produce wealth. The more you get in the way, the poorer people will be.

Perry Metzger

This is not to say that I believe all religious people are readily capable of murder. Rather, I claim that once you structure your life around ideas that you are not permitted to test, but which you accept as beyond testing (that is, on "faith"), you've abandoned your most important survival tool, namely reason.

Introduce a bad axiom into a mathematical formal system, you can prove anything. Similarly, if you abandon reason for "faith", you lose your only tool with which to distinguish the truth. This could leave you helpless to escape the idea that "God" demands that you kill, and from there it is a short step to shooting abortion doctors or flying planes into skyscrapers.

Perry Metzger

The concept of luck is also an insult to those who have truly earned what they have. It's an easy way for others to write off hard work and perseverance as merely a kiss on the forehead from the fates.

You see, I find it invariably true that 'luck' strikes those that are well prepared to receive its bounty. By preparedness I mean that they have educated themselves, unerringly pointed themselves in the direction of choice and put themselves forward again and again as a person who desires the chosen end result. I'm as unsurprised by these kinds of people being struck by ‘luck’ as I am by the tallest grounded antenna being struck by lightning.

Monica White

Robert LeFevre taught us that capitalism is simply the postponment of consumption today, so that resources may accumulate, allowing us to much greater things in the future.

I think he quoted von Mises, who pointed out that taking the time and making the effort to prepare a stick so that you can knock down fruit that's higher up on the tree, instead of simply plucking and eating the fruit you can reach by hand, is the fundamental act of capitalism.

That being the case, in any conflict that ever existed between capitalism and anything else, capitalism won several hundred years ago. The real struggle is whether we will practice private capitalism, or some other form that will seize your stick for the community, or "merely" license it, and either claim your future fruit production for "all mankind" or limit how much you can take at any given moment, idiotically "saving" it for future generations (by which time it shall have rotted or be eaten by birds).

Me, I'm a private capitalist, as much as I can be in this nation of fourflushers and cheeseheads.

L. Neil Smith

...to fix the "market failure", the government must somehow actually act to supply the missing good, either directly or via government contracts. Because there is no market discipline enforcing the efficient delivery of government services, these services are often supplied in a stunningly bad manner. You can't go to the competing DMV — there is none — so you wait on line for hours to get your drivers license. Why should we expect that the efficiency with which, say, national defense or other purported "public goods" will be supplied would be any greater?

So, here is the crux of the problem with the "let the government supply the public goods" argument: there is no evidence the government can supply putative "public goods" with any greater efficiency than the market that has "failed". Indeed, one might even get less efficiency than one started with. Why, then, is government intervention any better than the "market failure" we started with?

Perry Metzger

Mr. O'Dowd also misses one of the most important aspects of security -- he fails to discuss the economic tradeoffs (if any) being made in a given security decision. He mentions only the possible problems of using an open source operating system, but he ignores the price associated with not using one. Against the weak claim of decreased security, we have to balance the loss of functionality and increased cost that using a proprietary operating system might cause. Developers do not select open source software at random. They adopt it because it gives them better functionality and has a lower cost.

Indeed, the cost savings and productivity benefits of open source systems might easily make it possible to devote more effort to security in a design, and the improved tools available can make security far easier to implement. Open source operating system users take features like packet filters, MMU based memory protection for multiple processes, logging facilities, etc., for granted, but these features not available in many conventional embedded operating systems. Even the ones that do have any particular feature rarely provide the breadth of functionality of the open source systems.

Perry Metzger

To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always been premature, and it remains premature today.

Isaac Asimov

So, there are folks in Washington who must go in to the office every day and think they are involved with keeping our networks secure, when in fact nothing they do has any impact on the problem at all. This kind of thing appears to be a common feature of large bureaucracies. I've been struggling to come up with a pithy word or metaphor for it without much success. The only thing that pops into mind for me today is the Aztec priesthood. Those where the folks who thought that if they didn't cut out someone's heart every day, the sun would stop rising.

It is sort of the inverse of a "Cargo Cult." Instead of your actions bringing about no results even though you think you're doing everything right, the results you want keep happening even though your actions have nothing to do with it at all, and you are convinced you are the cause.

Perry Metzger

First of all, the Founding Fathers loathed a democracy, calling it a tyranny of the majority. The United States is not a democracy. The United States is a constitutional Republic based on private party and individual rights. In the 1860s we passed the 13th amendment, which presumably eliminated slavery and it took well over 100 years to erase the racial hatred between the whites and the blacks. How does the American government think that they can go into another country and
override thousands of years of culture? It is not our job to export anything except products and services.

Michael Badnarik

Security is an important aspect of a good life, but if you live in a society where a government potentate can nullify your citizenship and completely strip you of your rights just because he doesn't like your looks, with no real accountability for his actions, then you are not secure at all.

Self-defense is as basic a bodily function as eating and defecating, and cannot truly be delegated -- unless you want to live life as an effective cripple, or as someone else's property.

Scott Bieser

Personally, while I like [L.] Neil [Smith]'s idea in Hope of a "Bill of Rights Party", I think a better idea would be a "Mind your own damned business party":

Don't like guns? Don't own one, and mind your own damned business!
Don't like homosexuals? Don't associate with them, and mind your own damned business!
Don't like pagans? Don't associate with them, and mind your own damned business!
Don't like nuclear power? Don't use it, and mind your own damned business!
Don't like hunting? Don't hunt, and mind your own damned business!

See how easy it is? All the individual has to do is live and let live, follow the basic precepts of ALL major religions, as far as love, tolerance and respect, and mind their own damned business!

Ron Beatty

There is, however, one advantage to government: it keeps society's worst criminals out in the open where we know where they are and what they're doing. That they manage to fool some people into thinking they're saints instead of devils is simply a learning experience for those fools.

Bill St. Clair

One of the then new private co-location facilities I had in mind when I mentioned them yesterday was PAIX in Palo Alto, California. This was one of the .com boom beautiful creations. By Cromm, what a facility! I've never seen expensive track lighting in a raised-floor facility before, or since. The Cisco campus in San Jose, or @Home in Redwood City, those were beautiful and fun because people worked there. Beauty in a co-location facility is a pointless expense better spent on infrastructure, in my not so humble opinion, but I may be the only person who cares. Isn't beauty for its own sake, even if no one sees it, important too?

A well designed network isn't fancy, it doesn't embody the latest and greatest. That's for marketing droids. A beautiful network is embodied in its simplicity of design, in as minimal a number of different protocols as possible, in its invisibility. Much like traditional Japanese architecture, I think. Like air, it should just be there as needed. If the users know it's there, it's because it has affected them in some way they didn't expect, and that is bad.

Curt Howland

Walking through the city in a skirt so short that it’s possible to see what you’ve had for breakfast may be asking for a couple of raised eyebrows, but certainly doesn’t sanction assault or rape. If another human decides to harm you in some way, it was still an independent decision, irrespective of the triggering events.

Another I’ve heard is that women choose to wear the hijab in order to prevent objectification in a sexist world. This implies to me that the male form is the norm - the standard to which women must aspire - and the only way to do that is to completely hide any physical differentiation with the aid of several yards of material. I completely reject the idea that one gender should hide its attributes from another in the attempt to receive equal rights.

Monica White

First, we see that "public goods" are rare things. There's a great collection of essays by economists called "The Theory of Market Failure" edited by Tyler Cowan, which includes descriptions of the way private organizations historically built lighthouses, and the market for honeybee pollination (lighthouses and pollination are both classic examples of public goods in econ texts which are in the real world not public goods.)

Second, even if we are confronted with a public good, given the general incompetence of a non-market signaled monopoly organization with an unchecked budget at accomplishing anything, why would we imagine the organization would be able to figure out the "true" demand for the public good and supply it at the economically efficient level? Also, why do we imagine that the extraction of funds from all sorts of weird tax sources in any way properly reflects the "true" consumption of the good by the populace? "Solving" the public goods problem with government is like searching for your car keys under a street light 500m away from where you dropped them because the light is better there. Sure, it makes you feel as though you are doing something, but does it actually get you any nearer to your goal?

Perry Metzger

...the first highways were in fact privately funded, and, it can be argued that Xerox's networking protocols were better than TCP/IP at the time, but that's all another story. The general point is, sure the government does some good sometimes, just as even that crazy neighbor who no one suspected would go off and kill 50 peoples always seemed so quiet and did great things for the community playground project. Even a broken clock is right twice a day. I can
point at dozens of things the government has done reasonably well, but there is no feedback mechanism that rewards the bureaucrats who did the good things and punishes the idiots who run the DMV for doing bad things, so there is no likelihood those seeds will sprout into oaks.

Meanwhile, though, dumb companies that piss off customers go under all the time, and good ones make people rich. It isn't that the same sort of idiots who run government agencies can't get their hands on companies for a while -- it is that they can't keep running things that way for long before the well runs dry.

Perry Metzger

We find that the sexual instinct, when disappointed and unappeased, frequently seeks and finds a substitute in religion.

Baron Richard von Kraft-Ebing

A biophysicist talks physics to the biologists and biology to the physicists, but when he meets another biophysicist, they just discuss women.

Unknown

This is very much like the arguments I've been having with those who believe only government is capable of "real" science, of "pure" research. Yes, indeed it did take 43 years for private efforts to repeat the sub-orbital flight of [Alan] Shepherd.

But Rutan['s ship] returned to earth with everything he left with except his fuel, a feat that Government has never achieved.

Curt Howland

Now, I am no climate scientist, but I harbor a suspicion that maybe, just maybe, one factor impacting on the Earth's climate just might be - now, I'm just throwing this out - the sun. I find discussion of the sun's impact on global weather to be oddly absent from the reams of paper speculating on how minute variations in various gases here on earth may affect climate, rather like speculating on how adjusting the air pressure in your tires a few ounces might affect fuel efficiency without ever considering the, well, fuel you are putting in the tank.

Robert Clayton Dean

The young always have the same problem- how to rebel and conform at the same time. They have now solved this by defying their parents and copying one another.

George Chapman

High-fiving people who share your beliefs is easy. What's hard is allowing others to have a different opinion without attempting to silence them.

Duane Alan Hahn

The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.

Friedrich Nietzsche
The Dawn, 1881

The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.

Friedrich Nietzsche

You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life.

Winston Churchill

If a politician isn't comfortable with any individual being able to walk into a hardware store, pay cash for any firearm without producing identification or signing a single scrap of paper (and that individual being able to carry that protection concealed or open), then that politician does not support freedom.

Gun-control laws only disarm potential victims, thus creating a safe work environment for criminals - kind of like an OSHA for felons. And criminals won't be deterred from getting a weapon because of a law. Criminals don't follow laws. Any attempt to rid the world of a tool that would give my 130-pound wife a fighting chance against a 230-pound man would be immoral.

Ernest Hancock

I suffer whenever I see that common sight of a parent or senior imposing his opinion and way of thinking and being on a young soul to which he is totally unfit. Cannot we let people be themselves and enjoy life in their own way? You are trying to make another you. One's enough.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Who so would be a man must be a nonconformist.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

There's this great passage in "How to win friends and influence people" by Dale Carnegie when he mentions telling some people about how he'd made the day of some person working a menial job by smiling at them and giving them a compliment about their work. "What did you want to get out of him", someone in the audience asks. Carnegie got upset at this. "What's wrong with just wanting to make another human being happy?"

When I mention things like getting to know the people you're dealing with, it isn't so you can exploit them. It is because you and they will be more genuinely happy with an environment where you understand each other better. When I say it is a mistake not to listen to your neighbors, it isn't just so that they'll feel "included" -- you aren't perfect and might actually learn something you didn't know. Besides, it is rude to assume that everyone around you is an idiot, and you wouldn't want to be treated that way, so why treat others that way?

Even if you don't agree with a person, you have valuable things to learn from hearing what they have to say. Maybe their proposed solution to a social problem isn't what you would propose, but perhaps you weren't aware of the problem. Maybe it is valuable just to know that some people are concerned about the issue. Who knows. In any case, it is always better to listen, and listen well.

Perry Metzger

If money becomes more important than making good art for you, you will become a hack. But money attaches you on the audience or the reader. It forces deadlines out of you. It makes you focus. It forces you to edit, to rewrite, to start over. And above all, to make choices. When there's no money, then there's the deadly freedom that kills all artists. You should fear it, because it will make you indulgent and self-obsessed, and above all, boring. It will drive you to write that 1,200-page novel entirely from the point of view of an ant just about to get eaten. It will make you a performance artist. Who wants that?

Paul Bibeau

The success of SpaceShipOne feels like a reward for my faith. I can’t say I’m terribly surprised – relief is more the word. If I were anywhere near the Mojave desert instead of freezing through a London summer, I would have travelled myself to witness it.

It’s a shining example of what like-minded people would say is the ultimate freedom – the freedom to create, to produce, to take risk, to try and also to fail. The freedom that can only fully be realized where our money (our very lives) isn’t taxed away for a variety of hare-brained political schemes and our lives aren’t regulated to the point of absurdity.

Most Americans reading this would have paid for NASA through their taxes – where’s your return on investment? I’m willing to bet that the VCs who stumped up for SpaceShipOne are looking forward to some long term return on their money.

I hope that those who advocate the big-government nanny state for various reasons sit up and take notice this week. This is what we humans are capable of – without the interference, guidance or regulation of beaurocracy.

Monica White

Bill of Rights Nullification by the US Supreme Court:

They have nullified the first: you have to be a politician to criticise a politician on TV or radio before an election.

They have nullified the second, repeatedly, since 1934.

They have nullified the third: we are now serfs, via taxation. We don't directly quarter the troops... they wouldn't lower themselves to live in our hovels.

They have nullified the fourth: there is no such thing as an illegal search anymore.

They have nullified the fifth: remaining silent is now unlawful.

They have nullified the sixth: you only get a speedy trial if the Supreme Court decides you deserve one, jurors are subordinated to the judges, and you can be tried secretly or get no trial at all if you are declared a "terrorist."

They have nullified the seventh: unless your civil case involves the exchange of 21 antique silver dollars, you have no right to a jury trial.

They have nullified the eighth: if you are declared a terrorist, it's torture and Gitmo time for you.

They have nullified the ninth: apparently the commerce clause and vague language about the common good cannot be contradicted by a later AMENDMENT.

They have nullified the tenth: no Supreme Court judge since the 1803 Marbury decision has obeyed that one.

The United States Supreme Court has finally nullified every one of the Bill of Rights amendments through judicial fiat. The destruction of rule of law in the U.S. is now complete.

Kristopher Barrett

...religious morality is like a stopped clock; right twice a day, but always better off ignored. This is because religion bases its morality on what God wants (whether through scripture or tradition or religious authority or divine revelation) rather than what is empirically demonstrated to be good for people and the world we live in. In brief, religious morality, while good for god, only occasionally meets the needs of real people in the real world.

...why do you refrain from stealing what you want and murdering your rivals? Is it really because God threatens you in some mysterious afterlife? or is it because you know you must get along in a world of others and acting in this way would surely turn them all against you? Most people are nice because they've been raised to be so and because it helps them get along in a community of others. God needn't have anything to do with it.

In fact, I would be generally frightened of anyone who said that they would steal, rape and murder if it weren't for the threat of hell. Yet that's exactly what many religious moralists would have us believe; that we would all be reduced to snarling animals without the threat of hell hanging over us. It's nonsense when you think about it. Would you behave this way if God were proven to be imaginary?

Scott Feldstein, on Orkut

Organic chemistry is the chemistry of carbon compounds. Biochemistry is the study of carbon compounds that crawl.

Mike Adams

When the war finally came to an end, I was at a loss as to what to do... I took stock of my qualifications. A not-very-good degree, redeemed somewhat by my achievements at the Admiralty. A knowledge of certain restricted parts of magnetism and hydrodynamics, neither of them subjects for which I felt the least bit of enthusiasm. No published papers at all... Only gradually did I realize that this lack of qualification could be an advantage. By the time most scientists have reached age thirty they are trapped by their own expertise. They have invested so much effort in one particular field that it is often extremely difficult, at that time in their careers, to make a radical change. I, on the other hand, knew nothing, except for a basic training in somewhat old-fashioned physics and mathematics and an ability to turn my hand to new things... Since I essentially knew nothing, I had an almost completely free choice...

Francis Crick
What Mad Pursuit, Basic Books, New York, 1988, pp 15-16.

The success of a party can be determined by the number of gatecrashers. And we do have friends who've been knocking away on the virtual doors of the cartel. MadMan is devising a logical test of libertarianism. Get ready to jump through the hoop and clear the hurdles!

Any more wanting to join us in the battle against the evil forces of socialism, illogic, and unfreedom? Drop me a line.

Yazad Jal

Hello, my name is none of your business. I am suffering from seven rare and deadly diseases, poor scores on final exams, fear of being mauled by squirrels, and the guilt for not forwarding out 50 billion chain letters sent to me by people who actually believe that if you send them on, then that poor 6 year old girl in Arkansas with a potato growing out of her forehead will be able to raise enough money to have it removed before her redneck parents sell her off to the travelling freak show. Do you honestly believe that Bill Gates is going to pay you and everyone you send "his" email to $1000? How stupid are you? Ooh, looky here! If I scroll down this page and make a wish, I'll meet the girl (or guy) of my dreams tomorrow! What a bunch of junk! So basically, this message is directed to all the people out there who have nothing better to do than to send me stupid chain mail forwards. Maybe the evil letter leprechauns will come into my house and write "I'm a moron" on my forehead in permanent marker in my sleep for not continuing the chain which was started by a knight of the round table and was brought to this country by midget pilgrim on the Mayflower and if it makes it to the year 2000, it'll be in the Guinness Book of World Records for the longest continuous streak of blatant stupidity. If you're going to forward something, at least send me something mildly amusing. I've seen all the "send this to 50 of your closest friends, and this poor, wretched excuse for a human being will somehow recieve a nickel from some omniscient being" forwarded about 90 times. It's getting old. Show a little intelligence and think about what you're actually contributing by sending your forwards.

Tiina Urm, from Estonia, complaining about Orkut "friend of a friend" spam

I have come to the conclusion that the reason people don't just "throw the bums out" and vote for freedom, is that they genuinely are afraid of their neighbors. They fear freedom for other people, thinking that regulation is the only thing that stands between themselves and violent death.

Handguns are an excellent example. Someone who wouldn't think twice about balancing their own checkbook, and "looking both ways" before crossing the street, dreads a handgun because it represents no longer relying on those regulations for personal safety.

They cannot admit that regulations do not provide "safety", so anything that reflects badly on those regulations is itself anathema. They fear what firearms in private hands truly represents.

This adds yet another layer to hoplophobia. It makes it still harder for someone with the condition to admit they are irrational, because they might honestly say they do not "fear" guns.

They fear their neighbors. What an awful fear that must be.

Curt Howland

Abolishing the FCC does not mean airwave anarchy. What it means is returning to bottom-up law rather than the top-down process that has characterized telecommunications for the last 80 years...

...If the FCC had been in charge of overseeing the Internet, we'd likely be waiting for the Mosaic Web browser to receive preliminary approval from the Wireline Competition Bureau.

Declan McCullagh (cited by Anton)

If we assume that the individual has an indisputable right to life, we must concede that he has a similar right to the enjoyment of the products of his labor. This we call a property right. The absolute right to property follows from the original right to life because one without the other is meaningless; the means to life must be identified with life itself. If the State has a prior right to the products of one's labor, his right to existence is qualified. Aside from the fact that no such prior right can be established, except by declaring the State the author of all rights, our inclination (as shown in the effort to avoid paying taxes) is to reject this concept of priority. Our instinct is against it. We object to the taking of our property by organized society just as we do when a single unit of society commits the act. In the latter case we unhesitatingly call the act robbery, a malum in se. It is not the law which in the first instance defines robbery, it is an ethical principle, and this the law may violate but not supersede. If by the necessity of living we acquiesce to the force of law, if by long custom we lose sight of the immorality, has the principle been obliterated? Robbery is robbery, and no amount of words can make it anything else.

Frank Chodorov
Out of Step: The Autobiography of an Individualist (1962)

"Mysticism" often just starts out as temporal lobe epilepsy. It enriches your life no more than the bright lights you see if you hit your head with a hammer. It may well be that the brain damaged have had more effect on human civilization than any other single group of people in history. It sure would explain a lot.

Steve Van Sickle

Don't become a novelist; be a statistician, much more scope for the imagination.

via Samizdata

Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.

Ronald Reagan

"Feelings" of a supreme being prove nothing since feelings are biochemical states. Feelings no more prove god's existence than seeing pink elephants when withdrawing from alcohol prove theirs. Science demands external evidence that is reproducible. This is how the West has risen from the swamp of mysticism and ignorance to antibiotics, computers, space travel, the internal combustion engine, etc.

Mysticism starts out as an apparently harmless, individual subjective experience. It ends up with a whip in its hand and an explosives belt around its waist, tyrannizing everyone who doesn't share that private experience.

Jim Mark

You did hear that the Boston transit system now has the authority to stop you and demand ID, your itinerary, and your reason for travel, didn't you? Failure to produce all three will result in your expulsion from the transit system and probable arrest on suspicion.

Folks that can't see the similarities between this nation now and the Germany of the 1930's are both blind and stupid.

Frank Ney

I refuse to allow anyone or anything to bring me to my knees. If there is a god I will find a way to free myself of him.

The best mythology I have ever heard on gods is from the Klingons of Star Trek. The Klingons had gods, but they killed them when they realized that they were more trouble than they were worth.

Philip Welch (on Orkut)

Do not be afraid of enemies; the worst they can do is to kill you. Do not be afraid of friends; the worst they can do is betray you. Be afraid of the indifferent; they do not kill or betray. But only because of their silent agreement, betrayal and murder exist on earth.

Bruno Yasienski
"The Plot of the Indifferent" (1937)

It is a shame that the precautionary principle is not applied to government regulation: in the absence of any overwhelming proof that it will work, such regulation ought to be prohibited.

Antoine Clarke

This is my favorite Atheist quote:

"I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours."

That sums it up as good as anything, really. Atheism is merely a position regarding the existence of gods-there is no context outside of that. The beliefs we do generally share, we share with every other sane person on earth. And we are less rare than you think - most Atheists don't make their presence known, because there is no reason to. We don't advertise.

Dwayne Stephenson

All of us must begin telling everyone we know—especially if they're not libertarians—that if they're fed up with this mess the Republicans have made in Iraq and Afghanistan, if they want to see the USA Patriot Act go down in flames, along with all the unconstitutional intrusions and limitations that it has inflicted on us, if they want to see drug laws, the income tax, and federal gun laws repealed, and if they don't believe life under a Kerry Administration would be any better than it has been under Bush, their only option is to see both "major" parties shocked and embarrassed by a high turnout for Michael Badnarik.

L. Neil Smith

Cargo Cult Libertarians observe that successful Republican and Democrat politicans wear suits and power ties, that successful Republican and Democrat politicians exude confidence, that successful Republican and Democrat politicians shy from the radical, and that successful Republican and Democrat politicians take a smooth, milquetoast, middle of the road, "well, Bob" approach in media interviews.

From this, they hypothesize that if they, as Libertarians, wear suits and power ties, exude confidence, shy from the radical, and take a smooth, milquetoast, middle of the road, "well, Bob" approach in media interviews and public appearances, that they will magically become successful Libertarian politicians.

Needless to say, it doesn't work that way. Voters who want cuddly, well-dressed, moderate, confidence-exuding, "well Bob" politicians already have them. We call them Republicans and Democrats. The LP's future, if it has one, lies precisely with those Americans who sense a need for a radical, in your face, "well, Bob, fuck the conventional wisdom" alternative.

Thomas Knapp

landlord, cowboy, brotherhood, yacht, cult, primitive, addict, alumni, American, elderly, illiterate, mankind, penmanship, teenager, third world, uncivilized, underprivileged, unmarried, widow or widower, masterpiece or mastery.

Just some of the words you won't find in an American textbook because an anti-bias committee has airbrushed the literature.

It's funny when a line Bob Dylan's "Blowing in the Wind" changes from "How many roads must a man walk down before you call him a man?" to "How many roads must an individual walk down before you can call them an adult."

Yazad Jal

Is it moral to carry arms? You bet it is! When I enter your home or your business with a firearm, concealed or otherwise, I am tacitly agreeing to share with you the responsibility for defending your property and your family. When I eat in the same restaurant, I am prepared to shed my blood in your defense. There are survivors of the horror at Luby’s in Killeen, Texas, who would appreciate what I am saying here.

I will never, never need to ask some poor cop to die for me. I value my own life enough to defend it myself. I carry arms proudly, as a free American.

Do you?

Kathryn A. Graham
"Handguns - A Moral Imperative"

What he said: Have you ever thought about what Jesus could do for you?

What I said: Not much, really. Religion isn't my thing.

What I was thinking: If your god really is omnipotent and omniscient as your people claim, then he's directly responsible for my mother's stroke and the fact that my sister has been deaf since she was about three. If the Lord, or Jesus, or one of their henchmen ever happens to appeareth before me, I just hope that I remember, among the pyrotechnic light show that should accompany any such apparition, to kick God square in the nuts as a "thank you" for services rendered. [Note: If anybody is offended by this, then remember that God in his omnipotence is entirely responsible for my having said what I've just said - this was all God's will.]

Rory Blyth

...that's why I advocate no pants at all for men. If you're wearing a nice shirt and tie and a sports jacket, you can think of it as the Porky Pig look.

Of course your "tail" is in the wrong place...

L. Neil Smith

I believe it was Dr. Johnson who said famously that "Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel." It is also the first refuge of an idiot. My loyalty is to the ideas on which this country was founded, not to the two-century-long string of governments that have done their best to destroy them.

L. Neil Smith

[A bit of context: this quote refers to an amusing incident where a religious cultist in a forum I frequent blew up when he was called out on an issue of "quantum mysticism" he couldn't support. - Russell]

I think [a particular theist twit] actually did good job of defining by example an important concept in quantum mechanics: the uncertainty principle.

He obviously has some beliefs, and we could either know the position or the energy of his beliefs, but not both.

He chose to show us the energy.

Dan McCoy

...choose your friends more carefully, be ruthless with your time and seek out the best people you can find. As you improve yourself, you'll find that better and better people will naturally gravitate towards you. I think you'll be surprised at just how much excellence is out there.

Monica White

The reason why worry kills more people than work is that more people worry than work.

Robert Frost

A man flattened by an opponent can get up again. A man flattened by conformity stays down for good.

Thomas J. Watson, Jr

I won't be in today for work because I have the potential of making history. So I think that's a little more important, and I just wouldn't be focused. So lets call this a mental health day or something.

Voicemail left on Amanda Phillips' answering machine

[Re: the recent "Jesus Is My Homeboy" fashion fad - Russell]:

Jesus was just one of a handful of guys wandering around ranting whatever the hell happened to pop into their coupla-crayons-short-of-a-box skulls. Nothing cool about him, unless begging is suddenly the 'new black'.

Monica White

To believe in gun control, you have to believe that it's wrong to make snide, sexist comments about women, unless the comments are about women who own guns.

Bill Hartwell

Be happy while you're living, for no matter how long you live, you're a longer time dead.

Scottish proverb (courtesy of Robert Bradbury)

I imagine respirocytes as minuscule objects consisting of roughly 18 billion atoms arranged in small balls about a thousandth of a millimeter in diameter. Each respirocyte is a tiny pressurized gas tank equipped with small pumps. Respirocytes are nanobots that move with the blood. In the body's periphery, they release oxygen and absorb carbon dioxide. In the lungs, they do the opposite, recharging themselves with oxygen. The exchange of gases is regulated by minute sensors. Though the respirocytes are modeled on red blood corpuscles, they transport oxygen two hundred times more efficiently than the natural item. A small syringe-full of respirocytes could carry as much oxygen as your entire bloodstream.

Robert A. Freitas Jr
28 July 2000

Space travel becomes easier when the sky has fallen.

Brad Templeton
16 May 2004

Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.

William Pitt (1759-1806)

I regret to say that we of the F.B.I. are powerless to act in cases of oral-genital intimacy, unless it has in some way obstructed interstate commerce.

J. Edgar Hoover

I was lead to believe that fidelity was about genital exclusivity. It took a long time to realize that infidelity is about lying and not abiding by (or re-negotiating) interpersonal contracts.

It's been a long journey. Now I know that I can never again promise exclusivity (even if I in fact have only one partner). I cannot trust myself to live up to that promise and therefore cannot expect any future partner to trust such a promise.

What I can promise is total honesty. I want a partner with whom I can share my feelings, my attractions, my crushes. Most of these never get acted out anyway.

If a woman wants genital exclusivity, all she has to do is keep me sexually exhausted. :-)

Richard Birney-Smith

If one were to walk into the beginning of my biology class, one might conclude that one was in the wrong place. Art history or human biology? Hard to say. Every day, he (my instructor) opens up with a slide of an artwork (nevermind the definition of art).

Today, it was a painting by Theodore Something-or-another (a Frenchie) named Medusa (or something like that). Anyway, the painting is an illustration of a raft full of survivors of the Medusa, the flagship of some French flotilla en route to their colonies in Africa. Because of typical French incompetence and blundering, their ship ran aground and some 150 crewers had to abandon ship on to a hastily built raft. After thirteen days (when they were finally rescued), only fifteen of the survivors were left, and five of those died four days later. My instructor was telling this story fairly well, then jumped back to the matter at hand - the urinary system. Wow, that was abrupt.

Andy Chen

...when I saw Vlad in Carlsbad he patted my stomach and said big (fat) men make great fighters, then smiled and said they can't run away like everyone else so they have to be...

Clayton

The objectives of bullies are Power, Control, Domination, Subjugation. They get a kick out of seeing you react. It doesn't matter how you react, the fact they've successful provoked a reaction is, to the bully, a sign that their attempt at control have been successful. After that, it's a question of wearing you down. The more your try to explain, negotiate, conciliate, etc the more gratification they obtain from your increasingly desperate attempts to communicate with them. Understand that it is not possible to communicate in a mature adult manner with a disordered individual who's emotionally retarded.

The Number One rule for dealing with this type of behaviour is: don't respond and don't engage. This is not as easy to do as it sounds. It's a natural response to want to defend yourself, and to put the person right. However, never argue with a serial bully; it's not a mature adult discussion, but like dealing with a child or immature teenager; whilst the serial bully may be an adult on the outside, on the inside they are like a child who's never grown up - and probably never will.

Unattributed

Well, it didn't take long for this to happen. We've been "adopted" by a stray dog. This is Pesky.

I found him at our gate, shivering and obviously starving, a couple of days ago. At first, it was a toss-up: have him put to sleep, or try to nurse him back to health. In the end, his sweet disposition won me over. If he's this nice of a dog when he's near death, he must be a genuinely nice dog. I'm keeping a watchful eye on him, however, just in case he starts to show menace. One of the side benefits of being always armed is that I can be comfortable taking controlled risks with something like an unknown dog. In an unarmed society, there would be only one route for dogs like Pesky - some gov-goon would show up and either shoot him on the spot, or lock him up for a few days until he was gassed.

Bob Tipton

Competitive systems can operate to check each other's excesses. Consider the codes governing the relations between U.S. corporations and their shareholders. The fifty states compete to offer standard corporation codes; companies can either use these default terms or tailor specific provisions in their corporate charters. (A company does not have to be physically headquartered in a state to claim it as the corporation's legal domicile.) Agreeable state rules, backed by well-established case law, can significantly cut the cost of doing business. The competition among states for incorporations and the taxes they bring makes legislatures responsive to new ideas and changing business conditions.

Equally important, company managers can't get away with adopting just any code that makes their lives easy. These rules govern a two-way agreement—between the business (essentially, its managers) and the shareholders. Opportunistic managers who try to use state laws to help themselves at the stockholders' expense are checked by another source of competition: the financial markets. So, for instance, when Pennsylvania passed a law designed to make hostile takeovers difficult, protecting managers but making stock less valuable, pressures from falling stock prices pushed most of the state's publicly traded companies to opt out of the law's provisions. Few other states adopted the same law, lest they lose incorporations.

The legal scholar Roberta Romano, who calls this federalist system of competing rules "the genius of American corporate law," writes: "As the Pennsylvania experience illustrates, the federal system provides a safety net against the consequences of harmful state laws. Some jurisdictions will have no or only mild takeover regulation, and this constrains how much other jurisdictions can act in this area and how much firms can take advantage of value-decreasing laws, especially when major commercial states such as Delaware and California have less onerous laws." Having many sources of competing rules, rather than a single, national standard, makes finding good rules—and eliminating or limiting bad ones—more likely.

Virginia Postrel
The Future and Its Enemies: The Growing Conflict Over Creativity, Enterprise, and Progress, p145 (from Chapter 5, "The Bonds of Life")

BTW, do you know what you say to a person that walks into a gun store where you work, asks to see a "9mm Automatic" and then, when it is handed to him/her, slide back, promptly lets the slide slam jarringly shut on an empty chamber and then ejects the magazine onto the floor?

"How are you today, officer?"

Forrest Halford

Fuck euphemisms. Dammit. Some would have us believe that a woman raped and strangled with her underwear is somehow morally superior to one that put two rounds into the chest of that motherfucker, saving future women from his predation.

Though I suppose the recent photos of abuse in Iraq point out again that people can be abusive, not just men.

God fucking dammit.

Rapists should meet a wall, and at least one .30 bullet. Fuck. My girlfriend was reading a study to me last night on at least one American college campus that had over 60% of the male respondents answer that they might, when "rape" was substituted with "force intercourse", or similar verbiage.

Stop rape. Go armed, and love yourself enough to know that you are fucking WORTH DEFENDING.

John Shirley

Do you really think that innovation will come to a grinding halt without the FBI confiscating computers and spying on P2P networks? Please.

This whole DMCA bs isn't about protecting intellectual property. It's about the recording, movie, and software industries believing that for the time being it's more cost effective to manipulate legislation than to cut prices enough that consumers will opt for paid distribution channels.

Here's a hint-- how many people do you know who pirate books via photocopy? That's right, not many. Why? Because most books (certain textbooks and tech manuals being the exception) are priced such that it is simply not worth the effort to stand there and photocopy them. Technologies change. Media corporations that can't/won't keep up will go out of business and good riddance.

Alex Bokov

As far as anarcho-socialists getting jobs, it's not really a problem. When's the last time you went to a record store or a $tarbuck$ and got waited on by a kid in a button down shirt and khakis?

Socialists buy health insurance all the time. They just want us to chip in.

John 8=$

Happiness comes when we test our skills towards some meaningful purpose.

John Stossel

When Monica and I spent some time in Malaysia it was an interesting experience.

We were in the capital, KL. Something to know about Malaysia is that it is the most Westernised Muslim country. As an example, people from the fully fundamental places that want to experience 'Western Decadance' will be allowed to go there by their government because it is not a secular country under the surface.

Most of my recollections about it were negative. I was there with a Chinese friend. Something to note is that Malaysia has three predominant cultures - Malay, Indian and Chinese - in that order of population. Wealth and power, however, goes in the opposite direction with the 3-5% of Chinese owning most of the country.

There's a major reason for this. The Chinese people (on the whole of course) work damn hard, and the Malays don't - they don't need to. There are laws saying that there must be X% of Bumis (the local name for Muslim Malays) working in every business and other such crap.

I also tried to put an ad in the local paper but couldn't because it needed to go to a government office to be "checked" before being printed - they had true government censorship.

As to the people, I'd never seen so many women covered up before. In Australia there are many Muslim women around so you can get used to it even if you don't like it. Seeing this many in a place that for all other appearances was Western (ie: in the malls with Nike stores or in the KFCs) was weird. (Incidentally the fashion was to wear a dark dress with a white head scarf... when you look down the mall over their heads at them (I'm tall and they are generally short), and when they cluster, they look like lots of little bowling pins ready for a big bowling ball :)

We grilled (nicely of course, just in case) a taxi driver as to why they don't eat pork, even though there were good historical reasons for desert dwellers not to eat pork due to trichinosis, but no longer. And also why women have to be wrapped up.

His answer was that pork has things in it that are like cancer. If you eat it even once you will die, not right away, but you will have long term problems.

As to the women, historically it's just to protect their beautiful faces from harsh winds and sand storms, and now it's just a fashion - nothing more.

Yeah... right. that's why I saw many beautiful Chinese women in short skirts and business jackets, or thousands of beautiful Indian women in saris or other dresses but NEVER in three weeks saw a single Malay woman uncovered.

Matthew White

...the same mindless bimbettes who ask:

"Do I look fat in these jeans?"

Won't ask:

"Do you think that my opinion is justified in this instance?"

Or:

"Do you think I've read enough to proffer an educated guess on the topic?"

I guess their ass means more to them than their assumptions.

Monica White

IMHO firefighters are the only true heroes in this country. They sustain a far higher risk of injury and death than any cop or military person, they frequently do it as volunteers, and they don't get nice fancy medals like purple hearts or congressional medals of honor for the lives and property they save.

That being said, private fire fighting is how the practice started, and non-profit private organizations is how I think it should be run. The ONLY advantage that public fire departments have is that their very expensive equipment can be purchased with borrowing at much lower rates of interest because the government has the power to tax.

Mike Lorrey

Confusing monogamy with morality has done more to destroy the conscience of the human race than any other error.

George Bernard Shaw

They'll [Christians] start a moral debate, and just as you begin to win it, they'll start to sputter, and then get creepily calm. Then they'll give you a patronizing smile and say “Well, you can't understand how I'm right because you don't believe in anything higher than yourself.” They'll bring it in as their final trump card into any issue, and you can't argue with it because they'll put their fingers in their ears and hum. If you bring up contradictions, then they'll say: “Well that's not my faith!” and you try to get them to explain their faith and they start to, but when you point out a single contradiction, they'll pretend they never said it. Or, they'll pretend they have “Powers” that you cannot possibly understand. And that you are not morally worthy of learning them, as you are a *snort* atheist.

Diane Duncan

My Dad used to tell stories about air-baggers back in the 1920's; these were people who strapped bags full of hydrogen to harnesses they wore, setting the contents to near-neutral buoyancy. He described their activities as jumps that could take them 50 feet in the air or higher, with the main danger being getting caught in trees and electrical wires.

Rocky Frisco

There is a central myth about British science and economic growth, and it goes like this: science breeds wealth, Britain is in economic decline, therefore Britain has not done enough science. Actually, it is easy to show that a key cause of Britain's economic decline has been that the government has funded too much science...

Post-war British science policy illustrates the folly of wasting money on research. The government decided, as it surveyed the ruins of war-torn Europe in 1945, that the future lay in computers, nuclear power and jet aircraft, so successive administrations poured money into these projects--to vast technical success. The world's first commercial mainframe computer was British, sold by Ferrranti in 1951; the world's first commercial jet aircraft was British, the Comet, in service in 1952; the first nuclear power station was British, Calder Hall, commissioned in 1956; and the world's first and only supersonic commercial jet aircraft was Anglo-French, Concorde, in service in 1976.

Yet these technical advances crippled us economically, because they were so uncommercial. The nuclear generation of electricity, for example, had lost 2.1 billion pounds by 1975 (2.1 billion pounds was a lot then); Concord had lost us, alone, 2.3 billion pounds by 1976; the Comet crashed and America now dominates computers. Had these vast sums of money not been wasted on research, we would now be a significantly richer country.

Terence Kealey
Wasting Billions, the Scientific Way
The Sunday Times, October 13, 1996

I do not know what you mean when you say you do not agree with me on the VN war. Are you referring to opinions expressed by Oscar of GLORY ROAD? If so, be assured that my fictional characters speak for themselves, not for me--and, in any case, that book was written six years ago. My private opinion of the situation in 1968 I have never expressed publicly.

Robert A. Heinlein in a personal communication (letter)

Hain't we got all the fools in town on our side? And hain't that a big enough majority in any town?

Mark Twain (1835-1910) in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

There are in fact two things, science and opinion; the former begets knowledge, the latter ignorance.

Hippocrates, in "Law"

The mind likes a strange idea as little as the body likes a strange protein and resists it with similar energy. It would not perhaps be too fanciful to say that a new idea is the most quickly acting antigen known to science. If we watch ourselves honestly we shall often find that we have begun to argue against a new idea even before it has been completely stated.

Wilfred Batten Lewis Trotter, English surgeon (1872-1939)

Wiley Clapp has an article on the BAR [Browning Automatic Rifle] in the current Shooting Illustrated. He sums it up thus:

"The BAR is like a blind date that is a little overweight and not very pretty, but redeems herself with enthusiasm and skill in the activities of the late evening."

Steve Pegram

Current feminism is the idea that men are the evil to be dealt with through the medium of a lawsuit or a mallet. I guess that's the kneejerk reaction of undateable women when they hear guff about not being the 'logical' sex.

...considering the fact that women have comparatively (to human history) recently come into the workforce, you can't expect half of all boards & CEOs to suddenly be wearing skirts. The lead time for someone to study the right subjects in school to get into the right university course to get into a good company to work their way up the career ladder can be over 30 years. It'll take time.

Monica White

The concept of porn invading our homes all by itself is simply the right-wing equivalent of the left-wing nonsense of guns (ahem) pulling their own triggers.

Dave Aronson

Though we have many words with Latin roots, English is Germanic in origin. Romance-language speaking peoples conquered England from time to time, and injected our language with a few of those words. As a result the less common “Latin” words spoken by our conquerors were treated as superior to our native language because they were often used by the upper class. The big problem was that these words and sometimes even entire systems of grammar were not used by the majority of people and muddied communication exceedingly when they were used. In my experience, the use of Latin words in the place of simple Anglo-Saxon mono-syllables that mean precisely the same thing usually goes hand in hand with intellectual pretension. Language is a way of bridging the gap between people, so you can probably understand why it bothers me when people do this.

Diane Duncan

pacifist monotheistic zealots
My taxi driver yesterday was a zealous muslim. Upon finding out I'm jewish, he spent the entire drive to the airport ranting about religion, citing the Bible, Torah, and Koran. On the plus side, his angle was all about how the christians/jews/muslims are brothers following slightly different interpretations of the word of the one true god. While he was clear about how his way is the right way, he was also clear on the importance of peace and brotherhood and how any terrorist (whether bin Laden, Bush, or Sharon) is acting contrary to god's will.

It was still creepy and weird, but at least he was creepily condemning violence instead of creepily advocating hate.

Patri Friedman

To illustrate the vain conceit that the universe must be somehow pre-ordained for us, because we are so well-suited to live in it, he [Douglas Adams] mimed a wonderfully funny imitation of a puddle of water, fitting itself snugly into a depression in the ground, the depression uncannily being exactly the same shape as the puddle.

Richard Dawkins, in "Lament for Douglas" (17 September 2001)

I'm a software developer by trade, and one of my pet peeves is clients who expect me to be on-call in case they have a bug, or (more likely) forget how to use their software. I stand by the rule taught to me by a long-time developer: "There are NO software emergencies." His point being, trying to slap a bug fix onto an application under pressure is almost certainly going to cause more problems than the bug you originally introduced when you were developing at a measured pace. The cure for this type of issue is testing and training, not 24/7 availability.

Bob Tipton

The thinking physician identifies AOIs [areas of ignorance] daily.

Professor Elliot Wolfe, MD
Stanford University Medical Center, 5 April 2004

Certainly it is a great unhappiness to be poor, but it is an even greater unhappiness to be surrounded by people as poor as oneself. Lacking wealth oneself, one must wish wealth for others: an indigent has infinitely greater possibilities for earning his living and becoming well-off if he lives among a rich population, than if he is surrounded by poor people lilke himself. And note here that the hope of the poor is not founded upon the charity of the rich, but upon the interest of the rich. It is in his own interest that the rich man supplies the poor man with land to cultivate, tools, fertilizer, and seeds, and with food on which to live until the harvest.

Jean-Baptiste Say

Stephen Turnbull writes... on the Free Software Business mailing list, "If you have a job because somebody else is prohibited from offering the product at a lower cost, you're not on salary, you're on welfare."

Further, I would say that if your job depends on subsidies or tariffs, you're not working for a living, you're begging for one.

Russell Nelson

The textures of life that so fascinate dynamists are full of such historical surprises. Consider a strange fact about doughnut shops in California: More than 80 percent are owned by Cambodian immigrants. Doughnuts are not a Cambodian food; indeed, Cambodians don't even like them that much. But when Ted Ngoy fled to southern California in the 1970s and got a job in a doughnut store, he realized the possibilities. Here was a niche that matched his skills (or lack thereof) and had potential to grow. The business required hard work but little start-up capital and little English. Ngoy soon owned several doughnut shops. He hired and trained many other refugees, who then started their own stores, hiring and training still more immigrants. Over time, the community developed special expertise and suppliers, making it much easier for a Cambodian immigrant to California to get started in the doughnut business than in other ventures. By 1995, Cambodians ran almost 2,500 of the doughnut stores in California. They also expanded the market, giving Los Angeles one doughnut shop for every 7,000 residents—ten times the concentration in Phoenix.

The doughnut story is surprising, but not a random accident. It represents a complex order of selection and feedback: A perceptive entrepreneur discovers an opportunity. His knowledge spreads through communal networks, which develop specialized product, labor, and capital sources. More and more Cambodians learn how to make doughnuts, and how to make them well. Competition among shops improves doughnut quality, and the mere presence of so many stores reminds potential buyers of their product, leading to more sales. This legacy, an example of what economists call "path dependence," does not keep non-Cambodians from owning doughnut stores or block Cambodian immigrants from other businesses. It was not predetermined, nor does it guarantee any particular future. But it makes some choices more likely than others.

Virginia Postrel
The Future and Its Enemies: The Growing Conflict Over Creativity, Enterprise, and Progress, pp49-50

The world is a dangerous place to live, not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who do nothing about them.

Albert Einstein

When the Governor-General requested that the Miao be prevented from having weapons, and that Chinese merchants be forbidden to trade with them in such items as lead, saltpeter, and sulfur, I did not grant his request. It was not only that the Miao depend for their livelihood on the game they could kill by hunting with crossbow and fouling piece -- it was also that effective control of them had to depend on the sensitivity of the local officials. Besides which, of course, there was the question of how you can get the common people to hand over their weapons to the government officials at all -- as I pointed out to the Board of Works vice-president Muhelun when he presented his crazy scheme of disarming the people of Shantung province.

K'ang-hsi, Emperor of China from 1661 to 1722, quoted from page 35 of
"Emperor of China: Self-portrait of K'ang-hsi", compiled by Johnathan D. Spence, 1974

When we ask advice, we are usually looking for an accomplice.

Joseph-Louis LaGrange

Re: "Oh my god!"

It's a colloquialism, a phrase, common in English - when I've said it aloud, I've yet to have anyone turn to me and say "Hey, you said you were an atheist!"

I might also say "holy shit" - but I certainly don't give reverence to poop.

Shrug.

Andy O'Reilly

The most detestable wickedness, and the most horrid cruelties, and the greatest miseries that have afflicted the human race have had their origin in this thing called revelation, or revealed religion.

Thomas Paine

Robert Anton Wilson, in the Historical Illuminatus Chronicles, had this to say about the French and the English: the French are utterly mad pretending they are sane, and the English are cooly sane pretending they are mad.

Chris Claypoole

This country has come to feel the same when Congress is in session as when a baby gets hold of a hammer.

Will Rogers

To hate is sometimes necessary as is to love or to be indifferent.

No, I haven't turned into a psychobabbling Counsellor Troi, I'm simply stating that a psychologically healthy human constantly judges things according to his value system.

From choosing one ice-cream flavour over another to choosing one job or lover or mode of dress from an array of options - we are constantly making choices.

So far, my examples have been of choices where the person strives to choose the item of highest value, the thing that will aid their life the most. These things we say are 'better' or 'excellent' and our reactions are to 'like', to 'prefer' and to 'love' them.

Conversely, there are things that harm us as humans. Things like dictatorial governments, religions with tenets stating that infidels should be killed or laws in democratic governments that encroach on civil liberties. Any intelligent human being with a valid moral system will avoid these as much as possible, will choose not to live in a society with these kinds of negatives or will fight them if they see them springing up in their own society. These things are 'worse', 'harmful' and 'evil' - these are the things that we 'hate'.

So, I do hate Christianity - when it infiltrates government, when it is thrust at me, when I am forced in some way to use its false tenets to interact with reality. When it's simply a false belief system held by certain members of society, I really couldn't care less - although it's rather an enjoyable target for humor.

Monica White

Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.

Oscar Wilde

For religious friends, I have a basic rule. You don’t mention your religion around me, I leave it alone. You bring God(s) into our friendship, and I will not hesitate to shred a hole in your beliefs. If you try to feed my some hippy bull-shit about “respecting everyone’s beliefs,” you have five minutes to get as far away from me as humanly possible. I will make no promises regarding your safety after those five minutes have passed. I’ll stay friends with the religious, but not with the patronizing religious. Hell, if it’s simply an informative conversation, I’ll often sit and quietly listen for entertainment value.

Diane Duncan