Carry on, gun-control. I briefly toyed with the idea of post­ing this under the ‘Humour’ cat­e­gory but, the trou­ble is, I am not… [Samizdata.net]

There’s a par­tic­u­larly good com­ment on this post:

bq. The mod­ern Left­ist reli­gion has sev­eral dog­mas, such as gun con­trol works, or higher taxes stim­u­late the econ­omy, or Alger Hiss was framed.

Pro­po­nents of gun con­trol con­tinue to sup­port gun con­trol for the same rea­son devout Catholics believe in the Immac­u­late Con­cep­tion, or evan­gel­i­cal Chris­tians believe the Bib­li­cal account of the Cre­ation. Such things are mat­ters of faith, not fact, and as such are immune to ratio­nal examination.

For a Left­ist, deny­ing Gun Con­trol is heresy. Guns are Evil Tal­is­mans, with super­nat­ural pow­ers of mind con­trol. No mat­ter how few guns are legally held in soci­ety, no mat­ter how inef­fec­tive gun laws are, they will always seek to “con­trol” them further.

Kevin

Kenya probe focuses on Somali mil­i­tants. United States offi­cials say a Somali-based Islamic group may have car­ried out Thursday’s twin attacks on Israeli tar­gets in Mom­basa. [BBC News | Front Page | UK Edi­tion]

I’m sure the US would love to find (or invent) a con­nec­tion to Soma­lia. That would give them an excuse to resume Clinton’s failed attempt to con­quer Soma­lia for the UN.

I ran across an arti­cle titled “The Uncom­fort­able Truth” in the Lib­erty Impact newslet­ter. Since their archives are out of date, I repro­duced the arti­cle here.

Record the Lens That Records You. A poly sci pro­fes­sor wants shop­pers to pho­to­graph mall sur­veil­lance cam­eras that pho­to­graph them. The point is to dra­ma­tize how vul­ner­a­ble we’ve become to pry­ing eyes. By Patrick Di Justo. [Wired News]

A friend of mine did that at an indoor mall in South­ern Cal­i­for­nia a while back. Sure enough, mall secu­rity threw him out–they didn’t believe that “turn­about is fair play.”

Arafat Aide: Upris­ing Fails Pales­tini­ans [AP World News]

bq. Yasser Arafat’s top deputy said the armed upris­ing against Israel has been a mis­take for the Pales­tini­ans and must be stopped, declar­ing it had held up Pales­tin­ian inde­pen­dence and led to a reoc­cu­pa­tion of West Bank cities by Israeli troops.

Although this is obvi­ous to any out­side observer, it’s unusual for some­one in the PLO to be say­ing it. I won­der how much longer he’ll be Arafat’s top deputy?

My new “Micron” arrived yes­ter­day, and I spent some time set­ting it up at home. The hard­est part was find­ing room on my desk–I already have my Pow­er­Mac G4 with two mon­i­tors there. So far it’s work­ing out nicely.

I’ve noticed a sig­nif­i­cant dif­fer­ence between the Mac and Win­dows ver­sions of “Mozilla”. In the PC ver­sion the Down­load Man­ager works cor­rectly, but in the Mac ver­sion the progress bar and “xx of xx KB” dis­plays don’t update until the down­load is com­plete (which makes them use­less). Hope­fully the Mac ver­sion will be fixed soon.

Is Microsoft Truly ‘Trust­wor­thy’?. Microsoft seems to have got­ten secu­rity reli­gion, but its ini­tia­tives to con­vince users to blindly install every patch could cre­ate even more prob­lems. Com­men­tary by Lau­ren Wein­stein. [Wired News]

This may be true, but I don’t expect any­thing to change. After all, the best way to ensure the secu­rity of your per­sonal com­puter is to buy a Mac, and Microsoft is hardly going to encour­age that.

Do Peo­ple Really Use Their PDAs? [Slash­dot]

bq. I work in a high-tech indus­try and I see more peo­ple car­ry­ing their PDAs than actu­ally using them.

The peo­ple I know with PDAs don’t even bother car­ry­ing them, let alone using them. Until recently I was in the Wire­less prod­ucts divi­sion at Syman­tec, and even in this group of peo­ple who cre­ated PDA prod­ucts, I was the only one who actu­ally used a PDA. It’s a com­mon thing to see a meet­ing room full of peo­ple with yel­low pads in front of them–and if they have a PDA at all, it will remain off through­out the meet­ing. Per­haps this is because my PDA is a New­ton, which is actu­ally use­ful, whereas oth­ers have Palms and Pock­et­PCs, which are not.

Man dies from rabies after bat bite. A con­ser­va­tion worker has died after con­tract­ing Britain’s first case of rabies for 100 years.. [BBC News | Front Page]

Per­haps this is why the British gov­ern­ment finally ended their pol­icy of quar­an­ti­ning pets for six months–they finally real­ized that a rabid bat could just fly across the Eng­lish Channel.