Month: April 2003

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.