Ten Years of Bliss

Submitted by Bill St. Clair on Fri, 2001-04-20 07:00.
You Say, I Say

You say,
"How can I find God?"

I say,
"The Friend is the lining in your pocket -
The curved pink wall in your belly -

Sober up,
Steady your aim,
Reach in,
Turn the Universe and
The Beautiful Rascal
Inside out."

You say,
"That sounds preposterous -
I really don't believe God is in there."

I say,
"Well then,
Why not try the Himalayas -

You could get naked
And pretend to be an exalted yogi
And eat bark and snow for forty years."

And you might think,

"Hey, Old Man,
Why don't you - go shovel
Snowflakes!"

(The Subject Tonight is Love; 60 Wild and Sweet Poems of Hafiz -- Versions by Daniel Ladinsky

Today is the tenth anniversary of my marriage to Karla. Al-hamdu lillah! We celebrated last week in Myrtle Beach.

I plan to fly back down to Myrtle Beach tonight, and drive back with the family over the weekend. Likely no updates until Monday.

Brian walked into my office and told me that the name of the fighter pilot who ran into the U.S. surveillance plane is Wang Wei (pronounced: Wong Way). I fell off my chair and knelt on the ground for a while. Sure enough, the name appears in this CNN story. See "Vowels & Dipthongs" on this page for pronunciation. Yep. Hehehe.

Angel Shamaya at KeepAndBearArms.com - Gun Kit Maker Challenges ATF's, Court's Jurisdiction - Bob Stewart was raided a while back by the b.a.t.f. He's in court now. He fired his attorneys and is challenging the jurisdiction of the b.a.t.f. and the i.r.s. I can't imagine the judge will let this through. Angel is hopeful. Guess he hasn't fully taken in how corrupt the courts have become. Maybe we'll get lucky and this Arizona judge is an honest one, but I'm not going to get my hopes up. [kaba]

Thomas J. DiLorenzo at LewRockwell.com - Libertarians and the Confederate Battle Flag - a good rebuttal to David Boaz'es Slavery should not be honored in a state flag, which appeared Monday in the Las Vegas Review-Journal. It's sad that Mr. Boaz got this one so wrong. I expect more from him. The war was fought over state's rights, not slavery. The Confederate battle flag is a symbol of liberty. Fly it proudly. [lew]

In his book What They Fought For, 1861-1865, historian James McPherson reported on his reading of more than 25,000 letters and more than 100 diaries of soldiers who fought on both sides of the War for Southern Independence and concluded that Confederate soldiers (very few of whom owned slaves) "fought for liberty and independence from what they regarded as a tyrannical government."

The letters and diaries of many Confederate soldiers "bristled with the rhetoric of liberty and self government," writes McPherson, and spoke of a fear of being "subjugated" and "enslaved" by a tyrannical federal government. Sound familiar?

...

When Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation in January of 1863, which freed no slaves because it exempted all territories under Union control, there was a massive desertion crisis in the Union army. Union soldiers "were willing to risk their lives for Union," McPherson writes, "but not for black freedom."

Michael E. Kreca at LewRockwell.com How the US Government Created the "Drug Problem" in the USA - an incredible piece outlining how the c.i.a. & f.b.i. were the instigators of many of America's drug cultures, especially LSD. [lew]

Eighteenth-century German philosopher Georg Friedrich Hegel long ago developed, among other things, what he called the principle of "thesis, antithesis, synthesis" to explain the process of deliberately enacted social disorder and change as a road to power. To achieve a desired result, one deliberately creates a situation ("thesis,") devises a "solution," to solve the "problems" created by that situation ("antithesis,") with the final result being the ultimate goal of more power and control ("synthesis.") It is unsurprising Karl Marx and his disciples like Lenin and Trotsky, as well as the US government in its so-called War On Drugs, made this process a keystone of their drive for total control of all individual actions that, in their views, were not, in Mussolini s terms, "inside the state" and thus controllable by the same.

Seth Shulman at Technology Review - Owning the Future: PB&J Patent Punch-up - Smuckers is trying to enforce its patent on a crustless peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Talk about prior art. How many people do you know who rip the crust off the outside of the sandwich before eating it? I don't do that; I eat the whole thing. But I've seen it done plenty of times. [xray]

Michael W. Lynch at Reason - Amtrak's Bad Trip - since they can't turn a profit on fares, Amtrak is getting 10% of the stolen assets, er... asset forfeiture, take. So if you buy your Amtrak ticket with cash or neglect to include your phone number, expect a visit from a drug-sniffing dog. I hate to hurt the dogs, but maybe it's time to start carrying cayenne pepper on the train. Maybe some pepper spray or mace for the jack-booted thugs as well. I'm sick of this. How long before we line up all these fascists and shoot them? They initiate force every day. Self-defense is not a crime. [zero]

NBIO " is a library which implements nonblocking I/O facilities for Java. Surprisingly, the standard JDK libraries (as of JDK 1.3) do not provide nonblocking I/O. This means that in order to implement applications (such as web servers and other Internet services) which support many concurrent I/O streams, a large number of threads must be used. However, the overhead of threading (in Java, as well as more generally) limits the performance of such an implementation." Contains native code that has been tested only on Solaris and Linux 2.2.x. Should be easy to port to other unices. NBIO is used by SwiftMQ, a free, commercial JMS implementation that we're using where I work. [wes]

Craig Burton - AOL at IM Games Again: AOL Will Go Down - Good commentary on the stupidity of AOL blocking "unauthorized" AIM clients.

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Michael Kreco , writer, dead.
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Sat, 2006-05-13 19:29.
Michael E. Kreca who wrote How the US Government Created the "Drug Problem" in the USA, an article you have spotlighted on your page, was shot and killed by a San Diego police officer on Feb. 11, 2006. Many of his friends and also his family think he was targetted by police. He was shot in the chest two times at point blank range. He was carrying an empty gun with a magazine in his pocket. He was no stranger to the handling of firearms and was a highly intelligent individual. He was also no stranger to San Diego police and had had run-ins with them. We who knew him and communicated with him on the web are very shocked and saddened at this news. A fellow correspondent had missed him on the forums he frequented and after a google of his name found news of his death. Lew Rockwell has a little posted about it on his blog. Here are the links: http://blog.lewrockwell.com/lewrw/archives/010550.html http://blog.lewrockwell.com/lewrw/archives/010552.html
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