Month: March 2002

Newsweek: The Customer Is Always Wrong. Steven Levy. The Disney Corp. was once celebrated for its crowd-pleasing recipe: underpromise and overdeliver. But Eisner and his copyright-holding counterparts, drinking deep from the fountain of fear, seem to have adopted a new motto: overcharge and disable. [Tomalak’s Realm]

It’s good to see a story like this in a (usually clueless) mainstream publication. Hopefully this will help convince all those people who aren’t all that technical that the MPAA and RIAA are out of control.

In the interest of fairness I contacted Patrick Gomez, the other candidate running against LA Sherrif Baca, and asked if he supported CCW. Here is his reply:

bq. Yes, If you complete the background and the shooting course, I will issue you a CCW permit.

I strongly believe in the 2nd amendment….and will issue permits to “regular people,” not just celebrities as Baca’s done.

This is encouraging. If you are a Los Angeles County resident, please vote for either Stites or Gomez on Tuesday!

New Lineage RPG episode brings Mac, PC gamers together [MacCentral]

This looks like it might be interesting, but unfortunately there’s only Windows and OS X versions available. No Mac version, though.

Get Us Out of the IMF. Ron Paul at LewRockwell.com –

Get Us Out of the IMF – Why the United States should withdraw support
of the International Monetary Fund. [End the War on Freedom]

bq. In addition, the IMF violates basic constitutional and moral principles. The federal government has no constitutional authority to fund international institutions such as the IMF. Furthermore, it is simply immoral to take money from hard-working Americans to support the economic schemes of politically-powerful special interests and third-world dictators.

As part of my ongoing e-gold experiment, I tried buying something–a copy of The State vs. The People, by Claire Wolfe and Aaron Zelman. It’s published by a civil rights organization called Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership. The cost was a fraction over two grams of gold, and the order process was about as complicated as a credit card order.

Angry Argentines Withhold Tax Payments In Protest Against Government [Tax-News.com]

Argentines are clearly much smarter than their government, which intends to make up for lost tax revenue by printing more money.

Enron and Greenspan’s Bubble. Opponents of the market say we have to stop another Enron from happening again. Yet all the government’s watchdog agencies completely missed Enron. The system of cronyism in Washington, D.C., made the debacle possible and made it harder for the public to find out what was going on. Existing laws will put Enron executives behind bars, but they won’t touch any of Enron’s accomplices in Washington. They are too busy devising additional laws that pretend to protect us from fraud, while obscuring the biggest fraud of all. [Ludwig von Mises Institute]

Although he doesn’t say it in so many words, the author clearly recognizes something which has eluded the mainstream media–Enron was a “dot com.”

Israeli Troops Advance Into Camps. Moving deeper into two Palestinian refugee camps, Israeli troops killed five Palestinians in gun battles Friday, while commanders defended the assault on the crowded shantytowns

Content Spat Split on Party Lines. The Senate debate on copy protection for digital content is falling out predictably, with Democrats calling for regulations and Republicans hedging. Declan McCullagh and Robert Zarate report from Washington. [Wired News]

This is worth pointing out because it shows how the Democrats are lying when they claim to care about the people. In fact, they’re just as beholden to special interests as the Republicans. Incidentally, the Repulicans’ favorite lie is that they favor smaller government.