Category: Uncategorized

Last night I stumbled onto a problem which provided a perfect illustration of how computers are challenging traditional notions of property — of what is and what is not yours. What happened was that I tried to pay a simple YouTube video in Slackware, and the Firefox web browser would not play it unless I…

I realize that this is not the forum for bragging about silly accomplishments, but after spending nearly two insanely difficult days of trying this and trying that, I was finally able to get my Broadcom 4318 wireless card (the BCM43xx chipset is notoriously difficult, and that’s in the “easy” Linux distros) to work in Slackware…

Glenn Reynolds spots something intriguing: “RASMUSSEN: 55% of Colorado Voters Favor Immigration Law Like Arizona’s. Once again, I think this is a sign of media-narrative weakness, given the overwhelmingly negative coverage given to Arizona’s law.” That’s a very good point. I can’t remember seeing an issue like this where media was so against and public…

It looks like the impotent, racist, violent, Tea Party folks have ousted Senator Bob Bennett in Utah. Republican Senator Bob Bennett was thrown out of office yesterday by delegates at the Utah GOP convention in what represents a stunning defeat for a once-popular three-term incumbent who fell victim to a growing conservative movement nationwide. Ah,…

From Scott Ott comes a good rhetorical question about a New York Times editorial: Does the New York Times really crave a society in which the federal government can restrict the constitutional rights of citizens who have committed no crimes? To which I would add another rhetorical question: “Is the Pope Catholic?” For some time,…

After some seemingly intractable hard drive partitioning problem (occasioned by the stubborn refusal of the GRUB-2 loader to accept partition changes), I finally managed to install and configure Slackware linux on this older Dell laptop. That’s in addition to Ubuntu — so now that I have straightened out the GRUB loader (with which Slackware has…

The Taxprof quotes from CNN: An all-but-overlooked provision of the health reform law is threatening to swamp U.S. businesses with a flood of new tax paperwork. Section 9006 of the health care bill — just a few lines buried in the 2,409-page document — mandates that beginning in 2012 all companies will have to issue…

I was reading a report on the market meltdown and came across this comment: it’ always about greed. The funny thing is that there don’t seem to be significant numbers of people asking their employers for lower pay. Nor does there seem to be a voluntary movement of any size of people willing to pay…

As I have pointed out in a number of posts, what I most like about the Tea Party movement is that it consists of largely of people who want the government to leave them alone. That’s a new phenomenon in American politics, because traditionally, political activists tend to be people who want to tell others…

Last night I attended a remarkable production of Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town”. Written at the peak of the 1930s (before World War II had started to seep in and draw that period to a close), it’s a classic portrayal of small town life which poses profound questions about life, death and eternity. The minimalist scenery…

From Reason Online which excerpted this quote from Radley Balko. SWAT team breaks into home, fires seven rounds at family’s pit bull and corgi (?!) as a seven-year-old looks on. They found a “small amount” of marijuana, enough for a misdemeanor charge. The parents were then charged with child endangerment. So smoking pot = “child…

Roger L. Simon looks at the “mystery” (yes, they’re actually calling it that) of the man (Faisal Shahzad) who traveled to Pakistan and “learned bomb making at a terrorist training camp.” Once there, according to investigators, he traveled to the lawless Waziristan region and learned bomb making at a terrorist training camp. In court papers,…

With shouts of “Give Us The Money” and “We Need The Cash”, public employees demonstrate in Springfield, Illinois. Nothing could make it more obvious after a demonstration like this that there is a war going on in America between government and the people over who is going to be the Master and who is going…

The Beau Brummels Cross Posted at Power and Control

Much as I love thoughtful comments (even by those who disagree with me), one of the problems that plagues me is when commenters jump on me by playing GOTCHA games, misreading what I said, putting words in my mouth, or even attributing to me positions I never took or beliefs I do not hold. This…

In an earlier post which I wrote after seeing Barack Obama’s commencement address (in which he advocated civility), I worried about the president’s failure to condemn the relentless campaign to falsely smear dissenters as racist, and concluded with a rhetorical question: …while I am glad the president said that “we can’t expect to solve our…

Politics 101: The politics of a coalition is dominated by the least committed member of the coalition. In response to the comments at Eric’s And if you’re against socialism but not a conservative, then what? Edited for clarity.

Eric at Classical Values repeats the old saw: “the Right is looking for converts and the Left is looking for heretics.” I always thought the left was looking for lunatics. Preferably well educated lunatics: George Orwell: “Some things are so stupid, only an intellectual could believe them” Looking for converts implies that Republicanism is faith…

Anyone remember when being against Bush was the litmus test for liberalism? These days, it often seems as if being against Bush has become a litmus test for conservatism. The old rule used to be that “the Right is looking for converts and the Left is looking for heretics.” Now it seems to be the…

What do you do if you hate socialism but don’t like conservatism? Unfortunately for me, I have found myself in that predicament ever since the election of Barack Obama. Oddly enough, no one seemed to care when Bush was president, because in those days people who disliked socialism more than they disliked conservatism were considered…