Belt­way Slugs. These slugs we like. A sim­i­lar infor­mal, spon­ta­neous jit­ney sys­tem oper­ates in the Bay Area, I’ve heard. Haven’t heard of one in L.A., except dur­ing the bus strike. [Hit & Run]

Police defend gun amnesty ‘suc­cess’. Police reject crit­i­cism that a gun amnesty has not had an impact on weapons held by real crim­i­nals. [BBC News | Front Page | UK Edi­tion]

That’s because gov­ern­ments don’t care about weapons used by criminals–those weapons help the gov­ern­ment, by scar­ing the sheeple into accept­ing even more gov­ern­ment con­trol over their lives. The only crim­i­nals who take advan­tage of a “gun amnesty” are those want­ing to get rid of incrim­i­nat­ing evi­dence against them.

Iraqis killed in protest. Thir­teen peo­ple were report­edly killed when US forces fired upon demon­stra­tors. [BBC News | Front Page | UK Edi­tion]

bq. Wit­nesses quoted by the French news agency, AFP, said the demon­stra­tors had been mark­ing Sad­dam Hussein’s birth­day when the Amer­i­cans opened fire.

The report said pro­test­ers were car­ry­ing por­traits of their ousted leader and Iraqi flags when they approached a school manned by US troops.

I guess the demon­straters didn’t get the word that they were sup­posed to be danc­ing in the streets cel­e­brat­ing his overthrow.

Non­smok­ing Par­adise. See how the ban on smok­ing in bars is improv­ing the qual­ity of life in New York. [Hit & Run]

bq. The night life for which this city is so famous is under­go­ing a meta­mor­pho­sis as bar patrons who smoke are spend­ing time on the side­walks rather than spend­ing money inside ever since a city­wide work­place smok­ing ban took effect on March 30.

”It’s cre­at­ing a social scene in the streets. The streets are becom­ing the new bar,” said David Rabin, co-owner of Lotus, a sup­per club in the Meat­pack­ing dis­trict. ”That’s not good for the neigh­bors try­ing to sleep, and it’s ter­ri­ble for business.”

Cal­i­for­nia has sim­i­larly dra­con­ian laws, and busi­nesses here have devel­oped a way to cope. In the past year I’ve seen a num­ber of cafes and restau­rants located in strip malls here in Kore­atown remod­eled so that their front “wall” is moved well back into the store, leav­ing most of the seat­ing area tech­ni­cally out­side but still pro­tected by the roof and two walls. The mild cli­mate in Los Ange­les makes this com­fort­able almost the entire year.

From grabbe:
bq.
“When your daugh­ter asks for a pony, don’t tell her that it’s too
expen­sive; after all, if you had your last twenty years of tax money
back, she could have ten ponies. Tell her the truth: that the IRS has
taken her pony and given it to an evil dic­ta­tor in North Korea who
will prob­a­bly eat it.” — unat­trib­uted
[End the War on Free­dom]

News.Com: “The soft­ware will be able to read music files encoded with ACC, a for­mat that Apple says ‘com­presses much more effi­ciently than older for­mats like MP3…while deliv­er­ing qual­ity rival­ing that of uncom­pressed CD audio.’” [Script­ing News]

And a for­mat which is pro­pri­etary to Apple and can’t be read by any other soft­ware, I presume.

President’s brother Jeb gives gun own­ers shot in the arm. The Gov­er­nor of Florida, Jeb Bush, has thanked the National Rifle Asso­ci­a­tion for help­ing elect his brother Pres­i­dent of the United States in 2000.

Mr Bush, the keynote speaker at the gun lobby’s annual con­ven­tion, said that, based on exit polls, 48 per cent of the vot­ers in the 2000 pres­i­den­tial elec­tion were gun owners.

NRA sup­port played a key role in sev­eral states, includ­ing Florida, where the vote was so close that the Supreme Court even­tu­ally had to set­tle the mat­ter of dis­puted bal­lots, and in Ten­nessee, home state of George Bush’s Demo­c­ra­tic oppo­nent, Al Gore.

‘Were it not for your active involve­ment, it’s safe to say my brother would not be Pres­i­dent of the United States,’ the younger Bush said on Sat­ur­day. [FirearmNews.com]

Pre­sum­ably he’s a clever enough politi­cian not to come right out and say, “Thanks, suckers.”

Embed­ded Reporters A Good Idea. In some respects, this has been a ghost war. We know that 125 Amer­i­cans were killed. We know that there are about 6,400 Iraqi pris­on­ers of war. How many Iraqi civil­ians were killed? How many Iraqi sol­diers were killed? This we don’t know. We were told there were fierce bat­tles here and there. Where are the corpses? Either there are thou­sands of Iraqi bod­ies lying around rot­ting, or 400,000 or so Iraqi sol­diers are not dead, wounded or in cus­tody. Where are they? Did they just go home? Did they take their per­sonal weapons with them? What are their plans? [Charley Reese]

This is some­thing I’ve been won­der­ing about too. Before the inva­sion started the Cru­saders were claim­ing that the Iraqi sol­diers would all sur­ren­der, but that didn’t hap­pen. So where are they?

When some Iraqis defied the Crusader’s script and fought back, the Cru­saders claimed that they were Repub­li­can Guard and Fed­day­een loy­al­ists who were only fight­ing because they would be killed by the Iraqi peo­ple if they lost. And yet, they stopped fight­ing abruptly and there have been no sto­ries of thou­sands of corpses mys­te­ri­ously appear­ing. So what hap­pened to them?

Lib­er­tar­ian Enter­prise -

Let­ter from Jay P Hai­ley — a good test to see if you’re a
lib­er­tar­ian. Hehe. [tle] [End the War on Free­dom]

bq. Take your favorite, shal­low, nar­row racial stereotype

[…]

Now, Pic­ture them well armed. Big, shiny new guns and rigs.

If any of this scares you, you’re prob­a­bly not a Lib­er­tar­ian by temperament.

Prod­uct announce­ment.  The slick Win­dows inter­face for Radio from Social DynamX (a part­ner of User­Land) is now avail­able for down­load.  It should be up in the store soon.  It offers the fol­low­ing:

1) Spell check.
2) A slick Win­dows edit­ing sur­face.
3) Tabbed brows­ing.
4) Out­look style news aggre­ga­tion.
5) Sim­ple image inser­tion.
Here is a screen­shot:

 
  [John Robb’s Radio Weblog]

This looks like a very inter­est­ing idea, but unfor­tu­nately it requires Radio to be run­ning on the same sys­tem. That doesn’t work for me, since I run Radio on my Mac lap­top so that I can use it both at home and at work. I do access it from my desk­top PC when at home, and it would be nice if this app could access the copy of Radio on my Mac from my PC.