The poet Tom Digby asks (on his own list):
Didn’t bards of old live largely on tips and free meals and such, rather than from some giant corporation pushing packaged “product”? Might the Internet move us back toward that model?
How do these PayPal tip jars work, anyway?
There’s nothing new in this story — which is why such stories need to be published again and again and again. Harassment in the name of security, a subject on which I have touched before, is useless and dangerous (like the WoSD, come to think of it), and it’s not going away unless we protest it loudly, lucidly, and often.
(Link from that other law professor by way of Craig Schamp.)
Your browser is out-of-date.
You’re seeing this message because your browser won’t display my pages properly.
Rather than frustrate you with a pile of junk, I’d rather tell you how to update your browser so you can come back and see what my site has to offer. . . .
You could try the new version of Netscape 6.2. – it’s pretty nice and has some neat features.
I do use 6.21 sometimes, but prefer 4.76 – despite its limitations – because 6.21’s bookmark editor is less functional and I have utterly failed to configure 6.21 for mail (it seems to lack the notion that my POP and SMTP servers may not be the same). The one feature of 6.21 that I really appreciate is the ability to change the base font size with one keystroke.
I’ve yet to see anything that was clearly worth breaking backward compatibility. (It’s not only laziness that keeps the formatting primitive on my pages.) I’m particularly unimpressed by the current fad for confining the body text to the middle third of the window.
Oops, I have not publicly thanked Steve Neal for hosting Bayside Blogger Bash II this weekend.
It was smaller (and therefore more comfortable for this introvert) than the previous edition, ably hosted by Peter Přibík and Christina Tosti who very kindly listened to my blitherings about polyhedra.
I showed up too late to be in John Weidner’s photo gallery. Man of mystery, that’s me.
Am I the only one who remembers that in or about 1980 Robert Mugabe said frankly that his plan was for an orderly legal transition to a one-party state? Maybe it’s a false memory.
This ought to surprise nobody. (Another link from Kopel; search for “April 2”.) I’m pleased that Mr Harper had the good sense to shoot at the robbers even though they claimed to be police. If it happens more often, maybe some of the police will speak up about the foolishness of the War On Some Drugs.
Hey, I can dream, can’t I? But more likely they’ll ask for further police-statist legislation to make such violations of the Fourth Amendment safer for the violators.
Someone (forgot who) recounted a conversation with a cop during the siege of Waco: the cop agreed that BATF was in the wrong, but still wanted the Davidians to be smacked down hard, because resistance cannot be tolerated.
A few years ago, Massad Ayoob’s column in one of the gun magazines invited us to weep for the wife and small child of a policeman who was shot dead during a “dynamic entry”, police euphemism for breaking into a home at night to terrorize the occupants. Ayoob (himself a cop) hoped the killer would be sentenced to death. I was delighted to see that the next issue’s letters disagreed with Ayoob in the strongest terms, and later a jury rejected the murder charge: even a trader in contraband (I believe he was convicted on that count) has a right of self-defense.
Dave Kopel wrote on April 7:
The Boston Globe reports that gun sales in Israel are skyrocketing, “particularly since an Israeli shoe salesman used his own weapon to fatally shoot a 46-year-old Palestinian who had opened fire in a Tel Aviv restaurant March 5 and killed three Israelis. The Interior Ministry says applications for licenses have tripled during the past month, overwhelming its staff and forcing it to shift employees from other departments to handle the deluge. The Israeli government, meanwhile, has moved to ease once-tight restrictions on owning a gun . . .” More Guns, Less Terrorism.
This surprised me. I had the impression that a large fraction of Israëlis were already armed.