End the War on Freedom

The Gift

Our
Union is like this:

You feel cold
So I reach for a blanket to cover
Our shivering feet.

A hunger comes into your body
So I run to my garden
And start digging potatoes.

You ask for a few words of comfort and guidance,
I quickly kneel at your side offering you
This whole book —
As a gift.

You ache with loneliness one night
So much you weep

And I say,

Here's a rope,
Tie it around me,

Hafiz
Will be your companion
For life.

(The Gift: Poems by Hafiz, translations by Daniel Ladinsky)

From /.:

There's nothing to writing. All you do is sit at a typewriter and open a vein. -- Red Smith

After A While is a nice poem by Veronica A. Shoffstall that I received via email. I think I've heard it before, but I don't remember where.

On Sunday afternoon, I visited the Nassau Sportsman Club. It sits on two hundred and some acres of mostly forest, has a large pond stocked with bass and trout, an outdoor rifle range with target stands at 25, 50, and 100 yards, two in-the-clear trap shooting ranges, and a bunch of in-the-woods skeet shooting stands, an indoor pistol, .22 rifle, and archery range, a lodge with kitchen and bar, a covered outdoor area that you can rent for $50 plus $1/head, and an American flag flying in a beautifully mowed front pasture. They just celebrated their fiftieth anniversary. Families are welcome if accompanied by the man of the family, though only men can attend the monthly meetings. All this for $100/year. And its just a 20 minute drive from my home. I learned all this from Joe, the guy who mows the lawn. He gave me a tour of the place on short notice. To get in you have to come to a first-Thursday-of-the-month board meeting, pay $100, and fill out an application. They vote you in at the second-Thursday-of-the-month general meeting the week after.

When I bought my rifles on Saturday, the sales guy and another customer told me about a shooting range near where I work. All I knew was an approximate location, and I couldn't find a likely candidate in the phone book, so looked at my map. "Rifle Range Road" was a likely location, so I drove there. Big sign, "Private Road. Forbes Rifle and Pistol Club. Watervliet Fish & Game. Entrance by permission only." I drove in anyway. Second sign: "Private road. No trespassing. All vehicles electronically monitored." I decided they were serious about their privacy, so I turned back. Found Watervliet Fish & Game in the phone book, but noone answered. My boss says he knows a lawyer who actually uses the place, so we'll get in soon. Lunch time shooting with the crew from work. Yes!

Received the new issue of Privacy Alert in the snail mail yesterday. Gobbled it up. L. Neil Smith on "The Psychology of 'Discreet Carry'", i.e. advice on carrying concealed without the king's permission. Holsters, RKBA, "Gee, I like police officers and all that, but my attorney advised me not to talk to cops", and L. Neil's current policy on using his piece in the light of the many recent cases of citizen defenders being jailed:

Oil people used to display a bumper sticker: "Let the bastards freeze in the dark." I say let their spiritual kin, the hoplophobes and victim disarmers, be crippled or killed by the class of criminals they're destroying our lives to give protected status to. I won't lift a hand to help them.

If I'm in that grocery store, service station, or liquor store and a holdup man's muzzle swings my way or toward anyone in my family, he'll die. "It's better to be tried by twelve," goes the old saying, "than carried by six." Otherwise, let the miscreant have his way. He's as much a representative of today's voters as any Democratic Senator or Republican Congressman.

A review of Boston T. Party's You & The Police and an interview with the author. An expanded version of Vin's "Getting the Drug War You Paid For", including the following gem:

Unless you're in favor of legalizing all drugs, right now, then watching Roni Bowers and her baby choke and scream and bleed and drown in some distant muddy jungle river is exactly what you asked for, what you pay your taxes for, and what you ought to have to watch on videotape every night before you go to sleep.

Order your own Privacy Alert subscription today at www.thespiritof76.com/privacyalert.html.

Rick Montgomery at the Kansas City Star - Ashcroft takes steps to make his stance on Second Amendment official policy - Refreshing to have an attorney general who actually believes what the second amendment clearly says. Of course we all know he's not completely in our camp, but at least his rhetoric is good. Now if we can just convince him of the couterproductivity of the war on freedom, er... some drugs.

Teoma is a new search engine. Slashdot discussion here. [/.]

Philip Jong & Stephen Granade at The Adventure Collective - Interview: Dave Lebling - Mr. Lebling was one of the authors of Zork, a text-based adventure game that was written on the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science back in 1977. It was written in MDL (pronounced: muddle), a Lisp-like language, on the PDP-10 running ITS (The Incompatible Time-sharing System). Zork was an after-hours project that actually helped with his day job, a DARPA Morse Code decoding project. I worked in the lab at the time collecting data for the MDL guys on a PDP-11/10. Core memory. Fortran and assembler. Custom wired-wrapped Phase-locked-loop circuitry for sampling the morse code. Mr. Lebling was known as PDL at the lab. Don't know what the "P" stands for. I remember him as much rounder than he looks in the picture in this article. Guess he lost weight. I also didn't know that he was one of the authors of the original maze game which used the Imlac graphic terminals. We used to go to the lab late at night and play for hours.