Musings of a Libertarian Jew

2006-10-10T20:47:00.000-04:00

So, here I am, and it's been two months since I wrote my bitter prose regarding hilchos niddah, IUD's, and Rabbi Hillel David, and I look back at it and can't say I really am sorry for anything I wrote. I should be, perhaps, but I'm not.

Chainik Hocker is getting married a week from this Sunday, October 22nd. Were it not my grandmother's 80th birthday, with my mother traveling up from Beloved Hometown to surprise her (don't worry, my grandmother's heart is strong), I think I would put forth an effort to travel down from the Tri-State area to Baltimore to see that poor bastard put his foot down for the last time.

I moved to New Jersey at the beginning of last month. It's an amazing town in which I now dwell. In five or six weeks, no one, Jew or gentile, has done anything remotely hurtful or even unintentionally hurtful to me. In Brooklyn, eye contact is a threat. In my new town, not making eye contact is an insult.

Wishing all the best to the Chainik Hocker, and I hope I'll be inspired to write on this blog soon.

Love and Marriage

2006-08-09T06:38:00.000-04:00

Well, the Chainik Hocker is getting married. Poor bastard doesn't know what he's getting himself into! Just kidding. Marriage is a wonderful institution, to which I've been committed for more than four years.

His engagement inspires me to write about my gripes about being religious and married, and most specifically, hilchos niddah. This post is not for children.

My chosson teacher came highly recommended. In fact, he teaches boys from one of the most well-respected yeshivos in Brooklyn. However, when it came to the subject of sex, the man is obviously either an ignoramus or a nutjob.

"When you're about to have your orgasm, think of a pasuk (Biblical verse)."

Sure. And if I do that at just the right moment, I might get distracted from holding myself up and collapse onto my tiny wife. Yid's a big guy. Mrs. Yid isn't. Thinking of a pasuk would yield tragic results.

The second thing I recall that led me to question his sanity was when he said to me:

"Women don't even really enjoy sex. It just makes them messy."

Well, this one statement certainly did explain the utter lack of joy in his wife's eyes as she walked by the door. Some home life he must have. Ladies, is this true? You never enjoy sex? Just make you a wee bit messy, eh? Feh! If that's true, why is conjugal relations one of the three Biblical obligations a man has to his wife? Because women enjoy being messy?

Ah, but I digress.

or do I?

Yes, I suppose I do.

When my wife and I had been married around 15-18 months, Rabbi Hillel David (my level of pissed-off-ness leads me to an "I don't really care" attitude about the loshon hora here) was speaking to my wife on the phone about a niddah shailoh. My wife was curious about the reasoning to his p'sak, and David responded that he never explains niddah p'sak to women. That's fine by me. My wife was afraid she'd offended him, though, and apologized if she had. Rabbi David then told my wife to find another rav to talk to and promptly hung up on her.

Yes. Chew on that for a moment.

One of the most prominent rabbis in Flatbush actually was rude enough to hang up on my wife. She was so shaken by this she nearly cried.

So, now we take all of our niddah shailos to Rabbi Yosef Veiner, a man who always gives my wife the time she needs, and never hangs up on her.

Interesting way of classifying the quality of a rav, no? "He doesn't hang up on my wife! How about that!"

When my first child was born, before Hillel David revealed himself for the monster that he is (although I already had issues with him for the way he would scold and embarrass people in public) my wife and I consulted with him for choices in birth control. The pill is not an option for us due to health considerations. My wife's health is a complicated issue. The rav gave the option of using the IUD. He said nothing about what life would be like with it, however.

Life with an IUD is living hell.

Any rav who gives a heter for an IUD without warning of the ramifications deserves to be shot. IUD's make women bleed. A lot. From the point that a woman starts her period to when she goes to the mikveh is a minimum of twelve days. The IUD turned that 12 into.... let's just say longer than 12 days, and we were given no advance warning. We would have taken it anyway, but to endure that hardship when any rav would either have to know this in advance or be brain dead is absolutely appalling.

And what do you do when your wife is due to go to the mikveh, there's a niddah shailoh, and you can't get hold of a rav? You go to bed thinking of what might have been, angry at the Jewish world, like I am most of the time now, anyhow.

This was my rant. I hope it made sense.

To the Chainik Hocker, I wish you all the happiness in the world. Perhaps you'll be spared some of the insanity I've had to go through during my marriage, but don't think for a moment that I'd rather be single.

The quizzes keep on coming

2006-03-28T21:20:00.000-05:00

Which OS are You?

This is amusing. I use Ubuntu, which is based on Debian. Chainik Hocker was Win2K SP3, which is funny because SP3 is not the most current service pack for Windows 2000.

Be seeing you, Harry

2006-03-05T22:21:00.000-05:00

I was deeply saddened last night to learn of the passing of Harry Browne.

Mr. Browne truly changed the way I think about a lot of things, all due to his persistent wit, humor, and humility.

Back in 2002, Browne was on the Sean Hannity show in what can only be described as a shouting match with the host. On Browne's own show a day or two later, Browne publically lamented how he had lost his temper and was angry with himself for letting Hannity get the best of him. This quality of acknowledging one's own error is a rare one, and I admired him tremendously for it.

While I didn't email him many times, he responded to each and every one with great respect and politeness. When I made mention of my forthcoming parenthood in one of my emails, he warmly congratulated me on my fortune, and blessed me in my endeavors. Most wouldn't have taken the time.

I knew he'd been ill for some time, but he never (as far as I know) let the public know it was Lou Gehrig's disease, which his friend and associate Jim Babka disclosed to the press. I used to visit his website every day, hoping he'd written a new article. His last article was in December of 2005. His mailing list went out every Saturday to tell about his radio show, and that's how I found out he'd died.

Mr. Browne, we'll miss you. You created a wonderful legacy that I hope can live up to your example.

Ben Shapiro is out of his mind

2006-02-15T21:13:00.000-05:00

Well, it's been a while since I've posted here, and I know barely anyone will read this, but I feel compelled to fisk, which is a rare occurrance in my ever-increasingly busy life.

The only news and political scene I can handle right now is headlines and RSS feeds from Mises.org and Lew Rockwell. Tonight, I read a LRC blog post calling attention to this obscenity by Ben Shapiro.

What infects Shapiro is something that once infected me as well, so I feel qualified to identify this boy as a mentally unbalanced individual better than most.

In one single column, Shapiro summed up the totalitarian mentality that infects the Republican party going all the way back to Lincoln.

At some point, opposition must be considered disloyal. At some point, the American people must say "enough." At some point, Republicans in Congress must stop delicately tiptoeing with regard to sedition and must pass legislation to prosecute such sedition.

Wow. Way to protect freedom, Ben. Why don't we just bomb every country that doesn't like us, too? I don't agree with the administration and am willing to say things against it. Shall I go to prison, now?

In case you never read the first amendment, Ben (I grant the benefit of the doubt when I know I shouldn't) it reads "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." When it says "Congress shall make no law," Ben, I think, kinda sorta, that perhaps, maybe, it might mean that CONGRESS SHALL MAKE NO LAW restricting the freedom of speech. But what do I know? I'm an ignoramus compared to your wisdom, and you are obviously able to divine meanings from the text that are not immediately apparent to the plebian such as myself.

"Freedom of speech!" the American Civil Liberties Union will protest. Before we buy into the slogan, we must remember our history. President Abraham Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus and allowed governmental officials to arrest Rep. Clement Vallandigham after Vallandigham called the Civil War "cruel" and "wicked," shut down hundreds of opposition newspapers, and had members of the Maryland legislature placed in prison to prevent Maryland's secession. The Union won the Civil War.

Yes, and Lincoln was a villain for doing those things. Lincoln's actions towards his opponents in the North should prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that his fight was not for freedom. If the law compels you to behave a certain way, ie. not protesting against the government, is that not a form of slavery? Wasn't the Civil War about ending slavery? What Lincoln did was categorically illegal, regardless of the outcome, and had he not been assassinated, he should have been impeached and thrown in prison for his actions.

Under the Espionage Act of 1917, opponents of World War I were routinely prosecuted, and the Supreme Court routinely upheld their convictions. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes rightly wrote, "When a nation is at war, many things that might be said in time of peace are such a hindrance to its effort that their utterance will not be endured so long as men fight and that no Court could regard them as protected by any constitutional right." The Allies won World War I.

Regardless of the outcome, the Espionage Act of 1917 was an abomination, and Holmes disregarded the constitution in as much a cavalier manner as today's motley crew, who decide that any law can be ignored if there is a "compelling state interest."

During the Vietnam War, the Supreme Court repeatedly upheld the free speech rights of war opponents, whether those opponents distributed leaflets depicting the rape of the Statue of Liberty or wore jackets emblazoned with the slogan "F--- the Draft." America lost the Vietnam War.

So, we lost a war in which we never should have involved ourselves due to lack of popular support, and because of that, the protesters, in retrospect, should have been arrested for opposing Johnson and Nixon? How about arresting Republicans for opposing Clinton' military excapades?

This is not to argue that every measure taken by the government to prosecute opponents of American wars is just or right or Constitutional. Some restrictions, however, are just and right and Constitutional -- and necessary. No war can be won when members of a disloyal opposition are given free reign to undermine it.

No, Ben, you statist, totalitarian, fascist. No restriction by the government on speech is just, right, and especially not Constitutional.

In other words, you respect free speech, as long as the speaker says what you like. If that's free speech, what was the point of the Founders writing the first amendment? Were they seeking to protect something that didn't require protection?

I love these quizzes

2005-10-21T09:53:00.000-04:00

You are a
Social Liberal
(61% permissive)

and an...
Economic Conservative
(98% permissive)

You are best described as a:

Capitalist

Link: The Politics Test on Ok Cupid
Also: The OkCupid Dating Persona Test

This is a whole lot better than being told I'm un-American.

Recycle or we will kill you!

2005-09-15T22:07:00.000-04:00

I just got off the phone with one of the idiots who mans the phones for the city's 311 service. As usual, I was left completely unimpressed by her professionalism and courtesy, for if she had either, not to mention intelligence, she'd work in the private sector with the rest of civilization.

Around the corner from my apartment are numerous bodega type corner stores. All of them currently seem to be out of clear plastic recycling bags. Being the ever cautious person I am, and not wanting to piss off my landlord, I called ahead to make sure I don't fall from grace in the eyes of the Garbage Nazis. After all, if you throw out your garbage in a fashion which doesn't meet their approval, the city will steal money from you in the form of progressive fines.

Apparently, the offense of packing my recycling in blue plastic is a fine-worthy offense here in the People's Republic of New York.

I should look on the bright side. Anthony Weiner dropped out of the mayoral primary. Now there's hope we won't be the Weiner city.

In case anyone cares...

2005-09-12T23:06:00.000-04:00

I'm back. At least, I'm back for one little entry in my pathetic excuse for a blog.

For the past six months, I have worked for a company whose workforce is primarily chasidim, with some misnagdim such as myself, and a few gentiles sprinkled about the place. I work six days a week, and I'm totally exhausted most of the time.

To put it succinctly, I am drowning in a sea of neoconservatives, who are just like liberals -- they worship the state in all its glory, assuming it's their guys in power, and not those stoned, left-leaning gay lovers on the left.

These are the thoughts that have been floating in my noggin for the past few months:

1) How does the fact that the New Orleans detainees were held against their will in the Superdome contrast with us "bringing freedom" to Iraq?

2) Were the Jews who are outraged at the Jewish homes in the settlements similarly enraged when homes of Arabs who had little, if anything, to do with terrorism were destroyed by the same Israeli government? Like Goldwater said, the government powerful enough to give you everything you want is the same goverment powerful enough to take it away from you. Life's a bitch, ain't it, state-worshippers?

3) Are the idiots among the Jewish people who claim the tragedy in the bayou was retribution for America's lack of support for Israel aware of the idiots among the Muslims who claim the tragedy was retribution for America's support for Israel? I read a tripe over Shabbos written by Nachman Kahana. A supporter of his kind I am no longer. People like him would dare to assume how Hashem keeps the celestial scorecard. I'm not so arrogant as they.

4) When Jews hear of bad things the state of Israel does to religious Jews, it's believed without any hesitation. However, if any news comes out of bad things being done to Arabs by the Israeli government, all we hear are claims of media bias and anti-semitism. Why is this?

A co-worker of mine suggested yesterday that the Israelis should have mined all the schools and homes in Gaza before leaving. Another verbalized his desire to see all the Arabs killed. The latter (not a religious Jew, but a very nationalistic Jew) called a couple of guys "pussies" for thinking that Israel should just start bombing everyone in sight.

Sigh.

These people disgust me.

IF only Orwell were still here

2005-07-10T00:30:00.000-04:00

I haven't seen or spoken to my buddy, the Chainik Hocker, in quite a while. I saw his new blog site, and must say I like the new Wordpress template a whole lot better than the horrible orange he chose on Blogspot. He posted a Blogthing about how "American" you are, and here's my test results:

You Are 44% American

America: You don't love it or want to leave it.
But you wouldn't mind giving it an extreme make over.
On the 4th of July, you'll fly a freak flag instead...
And give Uncle Sam a sucker punch!

How American Are You?

So, I, the freedom loving, pseudo-Jeffersonian anarchy-leaning libertarian, am only 44% American. Jefferson and Payne and the rest are rolling over in their graves.

If you don't know the difference between the kitchen and the bathroom...

2005-04-20T20:55:00.000-04:00

There's a joke that goes as follows:

What's the difference between the kitchen and the bathroom?

If you don't know, stay the hell out of my house!

Walter Block once mentioned this joke, fine-tuning it to say if you don't know the difference between voluntary exchange and stealing, you have no business discussing political economy.

Along a similar vein, what is it called when someone uses a gun to force another person to go where he doesn't want to go? It's called kidnapping.

This came to mind because this week, I was "summoned" for jury duty.

I sympathize with those who need juries for their trials, but the method by which juries are gathered can only be truly described as kidnapping. I wasn't there to perform my so-called social responsibilities. I was there because of the invisible gun pointed at my head that, the holder of said gun telling me that I would be shot if I resisted the summons and continually resisted to the end.

I was empanelled twice in the day. During the first empanelling, one of the lawyers asked us how we were doing that day. What came to my mind but went unsaid was "Well, I lost all my overtime for the week by being here, but you're making plenty from attending this little shindig. I'm peachy."

Now, to these objections, most will say that we need juries to judge cases. I honestly don't disagree with that. People will say that if we don't force people to serve on juries, no one will serve. I don't believe that.

A huge problem with today's society is that if we can't come up with a solution to a problem, we assume that no one else is capable of coming up with a solution to that problem, so only the government, with its monopoly on force can resolve the problem, regardless of how many nukes get dropped on anthills.

Call me bitter, if you will.

The month flew right by

2005-04-03T08:28:00.000-04:00

I kept meaning to write a blog entry all month, but here it is, a month since my last entry. I must say I suck as a blogger.

I've become a victim of Henry Ford syndrome. Ford is known to have raised his wages to a point that his employees couldn't afford to leave, thus saving Ford from the hassle of constant training of new employees.

Last week, I took a job in Manhattan. During my interview, I was asked how much money I wanted. I told them my amount, which was six dollars more per hour than what they normally pay. They decided to pay me what I asked.

With 10-12 hours of overtime (the part of this deal that I dread) I'll be making quite a heftier sum per year than I was at my last job.

Not much to report, other than that the new job is effectively going to kill my consulting business due to lack of time to devote to it. I'll think of something. E-commerce is fun and easy money if I can get the contracts.

And, not to let anyone think I'm not keeping track of the latest news, here's one to think about regarding the Shiavo case by Gary North.

And, my younger daughter slept through the nights two nights in a row! Unfortunately, she didn't make to to three.

Doctor, my head hurts

2005-03-02T14:47:00.000-05:00

Boy, what a busy few weeks it's been since child number two was born. I have developed something of a working relationship between my company and the company of the Chainik Hocker, as I did some work on the same job wherein he tried to repudiate Marx's theory of labor and capital.

Thankfully, my wife and I won't be hurting for money, it seems, for a while.

Yesterday, I stayed home in a vain attempt to get work done and take care of the kids at the same time while my wife got some much needed rest. It was a valiant goal, but one doomed to failure, and I got no work done yesterday whatsoever. I was so stressed from my younger daughter's screaming that I had a splitting headache, and when I rubbed my forehead with my hand, I could feel the vein pulsing. Not a good sign.

I had a doctor's appointment today for a routine checkup. The lady who took my blood for testing handed me a pen, and said in a thick Russian accent, "here, a gift." I took it, thanking her, and then looked at the pen. Pharmaceutical reps give doctor's offices all manner of office supplies and related goods, and this pen was one of them. Under normal circumstances, I would have taken the pen. However, this pen had the word "Viagara" written along the side, and I didn't want to be a situation wherever I went with the pen that I would need my wife to vouch for me that I had no need for that product.

I have two children in less than three years of marriage. How did I do that? If someone came to me on the day I got married and told me that I'd have two kids before my third anniversary, I would have had a heart attack.

Somehow, we get by. And we love our kids.

Life was so much simpler when I was single and chronically depressed.

2005-02-17T00:01:00.000-05:00

So, I've been pretty busy lately, trying to rub my two pennies together and get them to multiply into enough cash to pay the exorbitant rent on my apartment that everyone I know thinks I got at a bargain price. Feh, I say. In my Beloved Hometown, my mother pays less than half my monthly rent payment as her mortgage payment on a three bedroom house. And she doesn't live in a backwards hellhole, either. It's a nice neighborhood.

Lessee, so much to say while I have the energy to type. My newborn daughter is now two weeks old, and she's a beauty, just like her sister. The resemblance between them (and to me) is quite remarkable.

Businesswise, I have a store I'm putting up as a side business that is just about ready to roll. My consultancy is startign to pick up (I hope). I've done a couple of jobs with my friend, the Chainik Hocker, this week, and I'm glad to have the pictures of Andrew Jackson to line my pocket. It gives me a warm, fuzzy feeling.

That's about it. I'm a daddy again, and I'm tired, again.

Ownership, Shmownership

2005-02-06T10:29:00.000-05:00

I have three RSS feeds as "Live Bookmarks" along the bookmark toolbar in Firefox: OSNews, Slashdot, and the Mises Economics Blog. Via the Mises Blog, I found this little gem on CBS Marketwatch:

The surprising thing about the private investment accounts proposed as a Social Security reform and considered a hallmark of an ownership society is that they'll likely leave account owners with little direct control.

BWAH-HA-HA-HA.

BWAH-HA-HA-HA.

BWAH-HA-HA-HA.

BWAH-HA-HA-HA.

BWAH-HA-HA-HA.

Ahem. Who in their right minds thought that Bush was doing anything productive with Social Security? Do you really think the Emperor is going to fix the problems when the government is the problem?

Wake up, people!

Life, death, and secrets

2005-02-06T01:10:00.000-05:00

This morning, I got my aliyah and named our newborn daughter, who, in the fine tradition of Lois Lane, Lana Lang, and Lori Lemaris (most of you plebians don't know who Lori Lemaris is -- google it) now qualifies to be a candidate to marry Superman, based on her initials.

We named the baby after my late stepmother, who was niftar this past Lag B'Omer. Of course, I didn't tell my mother's side of the family this, and I'm hoping to keep it a secret as long as possible. I figured it would make my father very happy, and I did love my stepmother. We discovered shortly after I returned to New York, following the funeral, that my wife was pregnant, and she and I agreed that we should name the child after my stepmother if it was a girl.

The thing of it is, we gave the first name simply because we liked it, and the middle name is for my stepmother. My mother and I were discussing the first name, and she asked if the name was after anyone, and, thinking she was referring only to the first name, I said no. Slight fib, but I'm hoping that didn't count as a lie.

On the instructions of a rav, I haven't told my wife that I received a call on Wednesday from Sammy the Kid's father, who told me that they lost their first born son, Sammy's older brother, in a car crash. I have been so tied up with family matters at home, I've not been able to visit their family yet, and I hope to make the shiva call tomorrow afternoon. Lord knows what I'll say to them, as I haven't a clue what to do.

I'm keeping this all a secret from my wife, as it's not good to tell a woman who just gave birth of such a traumatic event, but I'll have to tell her eventually.

We should all only know simchas like what my wife and I have known this week.

What's in a name, anyway?

2005-02-02T23:31:00.000-05:00

My newborn daughter was a little yellow, so they're keeping her in the hospital until tomorrow, circumventing our plans to bring her home one day early. Since I am alone with my older daughter (how weird to call her that!) I can't get to shul in the morning for lack of babysitting, and thus I can't name the baby, and it will have to wait until Shabbos.

So, the baby was born on Tuesday, and no one knows what her name is until Saturday. Yeah, that doesn't drive the grandparents nuts at all. Nah....

I'm so tired, and rest doesn't seem to be in the near future

2005-02-01T22:29:00.000-05:00

My morning started today at 3 am.

My beautiful, wonderful wife, whispered into my ears, "Honey, I think I'm in labor."

I sprung to my feet with a lucidity I rarely achieve that early in the morning.

We weren't sure of these things, despite already having one child, because last time, my wife was two weeks overdue, was induced, and it was a beautiful, almost completely painless experience. However, since my wife hadn't gone into labor naturally last time, this was the first time it was occurring for us. We called the OB, who said to wait it out a little. The wife and I decided to try to go back to bed, and the next hour was filled with nocturnal halucinations mired in my mind mixed with my wife's agony as the pains began to increase. By 4 am, it was clear that the time had come. Then came the complicated part.

We called my sister in law to ask her to come to the hospital with us. Then we called my mother in law to drive all of us to the hospital. My sister in law ended up watching my daugher in the waiting room while child number 2 made ready to enter this world.

Baruch Hashem, the epidural worked. We've heard horror stories from my wife's friends of women who had the epidural but received no pain relief whatsoever from them, so you can bet we were davening hard that it would work. It did, and then things started coming together very quickly.

Within an hour and a half of the epidural being put it, my wife's water broke in the labor and delivery room. Half an hour later, she started transition. Ten minutes later, our second child, another girl, was born.

My older daughter (I'm still trying to get used to referring to her like that) was wound up like a top and barely slept all day today, keeping us chasing after her all throughout the maternity ward at Maimonides Hospital, and in the ride home, she fell asleep, and I expect her to wake up some time just before the start of 2006. :)

I'm home with daughter #1, and my wife plans to come home tomorrow from the hospital with daughter #2, and now we'll see how well the wife and I can juggle two kids, my shaky employment status, and a whole slew of other interesting things in the months ahead.

I'm so tired. Happy, but tired.

Lord save me from IT recruiters

2005-01-31T11:24:00.000-05:00

Could someone explain to me what "Native Word" is? According to some IT recruiter who called me out of the blue, it's a completely different product from Microsoft Word which Microsoft produces that contains no macros. I tried to explain to the recruiter that Microsoft only has one "Word" program on the market, and that this "Native Word" was likely a euphemism. I was reminded how I knew someone in 1998 who worked for a man who put ads in the paper looking for candidates with at least 8 years experience in Windows 95. He pleaded with his boss, trying to explain the mathematical impossibility that someone would have so much experience with such a young product, but to no avail.

Now, I've likely missed a potential placing because of what is probably someone else's garbling of the English language.

Oy.

Old Gimp and Me

2005-01-30T19:47:00.000-05:00

I am finding, much to my surprise, that the free software program that I am opening with greater and greater frequency this past week isn't OpenOffice.org or Firefox or Kontact, but the GNU Image Manipulation Program, the GIMP.

My client in Boro Park, for whom I'm putting together a website, needed a logo to put in the setup, and they have no logo, even on their business cards and stationery, so I opened up the Gimp and designed one with a script for building logos that comes with the package. Now, they have a (somewhat) professional looking, albeit plain, logo, but they get what they pay for, and they didn't contract me for graphic design, nor would I allow them to do so.

I'm remaking my company's website, dumping the Flash site I made using Swish, and instead trying to cobble something attractive using Quanta Plus, before giving up and returning to Windows to shell out serious cash for something like Dreamweaver.

I've been using the Gimp mainly for editing my digital photos, as my daughter is quite red-eye prone. I never pictured myself using it for professional ends.

Also, important pregnancy update: my wife's due date was yesterday. My mother is wondering if child number two will be two weeks late like child number one was. :)

The Holocaust and the New Judaism it spawned.

2005-01-27T20:54:00.000-05:00

I was thinking about what I wrote earlier in response to the Chainik Hocker's comments on today being the anniversary of the liberation of Aushwitz, and I feel the need to confess something about the Holocaust.

I almost never think about it.

On both sides of my family, we saw the writing on the wall before 1920 and packed up to come to America. Therefore, I have a hard time counting lost family members (that I know of) on even one hand, not that I'm complaining. I therefore have a distant view of it, less emotional, and as such, perhaps clearer perspective on it.

In short, we dwell on the Holocaust too much. We dwell on it so much that you'd think Herod, Titus, Constantine and Chmielnicki had never been born and had never harmed anyone.

Among the Conservative, Reform, and Reconstructionist, the Holocaust has become a foundationstone for their mockery of religion that they call Judaism. When most non-religious Jewish teens are asked what are the top three things that mean the most to them about their religion, Hashem doesn't make the list, but the Holocaust does.

The Holocaust has literally become Judaism to so many Jews. When death and destruction become a religion, is it any wonder why these people have no interest in going to shul or in being Jewish? Need we even ask why the conversion and intermarriage rates are so high?

In Judaism, we keep it in perspective. It is a mitzvah to be happy. We have Tisha B'av for sorrow.

VNC, SSH, and security paranoia

2005-01-27T19:26:00.000-05:00

As a matter of routine since I set up my new office, I've been using ssh (secure shell) to log into my home machine from my office and vice versa. OpenSSH is a free implementation of the SSH protocol, which provides a variety of different methods to encrypt the network traffic between the client and the server to allow private transmission of data back and forth. SSH can piggyback other protocols through its tunnel, which is something I had never tried until this week. I installed TightVNC on the Windows boxes in the law firm, figuring that if they needed my help, and I was working from home, that I would be able to log into the office and perform remote admin of their systems. Two nights ago, I logged in, using X11 forwarding through SSH, I was able to get the vnc viewer window to be broadcast from my office machine onto the monitor of my home machine. It took at least a minute where the console just hung, leading me to think that I'd done something wrong, when the window shot open on my screen, totally encrypted to the outside world. I was surprised to see that the encryption did not damper the refresh rate of the screen, which isn't so great unless you're doing remote admin on a local area network.

So, fast forward to today, when I was working from home, and the attorney called me, telling me that his computer was slow. I told him I could look into it from my house. Opposite of how anyone else would react, he was none too pleased with this situation. He told me he expicitly stated he wanted to no network in the office, which I had taken to mean he didn't want a server for his files or printing. So, I abandoned the pursuit and told him I wouldn't log into his machine, and that whatever his problem was, it would have to wait until Monday, when I would be in the office.

See, now I'm stumped. I can't figure out how to alleviate his fears of my being able to do these things and the potential legal liability he would face if his files were compromised. How do I explain to him that the whole transmission would garbled and useless to anyone who wanted to spy in on us?

I decided it would be a lost cause. If he has a problem with me logging into my machine from home and vice versa, however, I'm going to have to call off the whole arrangement, as networking is a vital part of what I need to do. My sister in law volunteered to let me use her computer during the day if the need arises, and I might just have to take her up on that. I have the VOIP router for my office phone line. It wouldn't be that hard just to move it to her place if I needed it. T'would be a hassle though, since I just bought business cards with my office address on them.

sigh.

So well meaning, yet so wrong

2005-01-27T10:48:00.000-05:00

Today is the anniversary of the liberation of Aushwitz in 1945. My friend, the Chainik Hocker, called me on the phone a few minutes ago, to draw my attention to what he wrote on his blog, and to ask me what I thought. This inspired me to write something of my own about the whole affair, as a discussion with my good friend would likely result in an argument I'd prefer to avoid.

Let me first address what is perhaps the most prevalent myth of our time, that the United States government is some lone avatar of peace and justice in this world. It's not. No one has any business making such claims about the US government when it steals from its subjects fifty times the amount that instigated revolt against Britain in 1775. When the US government kills its own citizens, like how Peter McWilliams died, victim of the government's benevolence, we cannot stand up and say we are the ones who will fight evil in the world.

Let me first addrss the second myth that is prevalent on a day like today. The United States did absolutely nothing to help the Jews, nor was it the government's responsibility to do anything. However, the individuals who sat by and did nothing should be judged.

Another myth is that democratic nations do not war on each other. Excuse me? What do you think World War I was? Germany was democratic! The US and Britain were democratic! Read this for more information. Perhaps World War I wasn't really a war, or those countries involved weren't really democratic. Maybe those Christians who murdered Jews weren't "really" Christians.

Chainik Hocker's continued vilification of Saddam Hussein in light of the recent revelations that he had actually been telling the truth the whole time about his lack of WMD, and that it was the Emperor who had been lying, is indeed strange to me. Since the government is known to lie when it suits their purposes, and we have seen that the government has lied about the WMD, why should we believe anything else the government has said about him?

In all honesty, and with all due respect to my friend, I thought was he wrote was emotional, illogical, and foolhardy. However, that is exactly what typifies the Republican Party today. The saying used to go that there were the evil party and the stupid party, respectively.

Had the United States not gotten involved in World War I, the Allies in Europe would have been much more disposed towards simply stopping the fighting. Instead, they were bolstered by the US' presence into thinking they could win, so they continued to fight. They stomped Germany into the ground, laying the blame for the whole affair on them, something that was totally unjust and something I've never quite understood. Hitler only capitalized on the harsh conditions in Germany that were imposed by the unfair settlement in World War I.

In other words, the United States' involvement in foreign affairs is the cause, not the solution, to so many problems in the world today. Remember the farewell address of George Washington, who would have strongly criticized our Emperor.

Failing with Flying Colors

2005-01-25T11:01:00.000-05:00

I graded the midterms today. I was disappointed in my students' collective performance, more specifically their lack thereof.

In my English class, I gave them thirty questions. Five were multiple choice, and 25 were matching words with definitions. I divided the page down the center, with the word requiring definition on the left hand side, and the definitions with a letter next to them to answer the questions. This is where it gets funny. I wrote the 25 questions in OpenOffice.org Calc, the
spreadsheet component of OOo. I wrote the word in column a, a blank in column b, the letter to correspond with a definition in column c, and the actual definition in column d. Being lazy, I didn't want to keep track of each and every letter answer used, so I simply went down the sheet with definitions, a to z. I then highlighted columns c and d and sorted them alphabetically according to column d. Then, the test was ready. I didn't even think about what this meant at the time, until it came time to grade the test today -- a student would have gotten a perfect score had he simply written a-z alphabetically down the column as his answers.

Sadly, not a single student picked this up. Teacher mind games, perhaps?

My history class didn't have such a break handed to them. Instead, I told them that I was going to take the questions directly out of the book, and I did. After taking the test, one of the students came up to me and said, "Rabbi, I failed your test with flying colors." And, get this -- the highest grade on my history test belongs to a guy who forgot to write his name on the
test!

Oy. I hope the hanhala doesn't think this is a reflection on my teaching ability.

In other news, I did some googling, following Jen's questions about remote admin of her machine, and I found this site, which has links to free and not free implementations of ssh. I can only speak for one implementation of the ssh server, and that's the Cygwin product. However, as far as I have seen of Cygwin, this isn't recommendable for someone who wants to access their main filesystem, as Cygwin is a program layer that allows Unix/Linux programs to run on Windows by tricking the programs into thinking they're actually running in their native environment. It creates a Unix filesystem tree in a folder, and that's all you can touch with the Unix shell, as far as I can tell from my limited experience with Cygwin. I could be wrong.

Good for the curious to check out, just the same. SSH.com is mucho expensive, but some of the implementations of the server are rather reasonably priced for Windows software. They have some extra features that would be necessary for the software to be useful, because by itself, the Windows command line is completely brain dead compared to the Unix ones.

Of course, there's always the Unix/Linux world, where you can get OpenSSH for free. :)

T'was a feat of computer acrobatics

2005-01-20T22:40:00.000-05:00

For the past few months, I've been bringing in some extra cash by teaching some secular subjects at a local yeshiva. This week was..... MIDTERMS.

One of my students was not in school the day of my English midterm, which was last Monday. Today, when I arrived at the yeshiva, he was pleading with the rabbi to let him take the test that he'd missed. The rabbi allowed it, and the kid asked me if he could take it. I had no problem with it, except this: I didn't have the test with me.

I went downstairs to the admin office, and asked to use a computer connected to the internet and -- scandalous!!! -- there was one available, and on a high-speed connection, no less. I went to my yahoo email account to see if I had emailed this test to myself, and I hadn't. So much for Plan A.

Plan B -- I went to the website of what has got to be one of the most useful utilities for Windows that comes to mind -- PuTTY. PuTTY (maybe the author can explain why he chose such strange capitalization) is a free software ssh client for Windows, which allows console logins to remote machines. I downloaded PuTTY and PSCP (PuTTY's implementation of scp -- secure copy) to the yeshiva's computer. I then logged into my home machine and looked around my home directory to find the midterm. I saw that I only had the original document written in OpenOffice.org. The problem is that the yeshiva didn't have OpenOffice.org, so I had to get creative.

While still logged into my home machine, I opened up an irc client and went into a Linux chatroom on Freenode. I asked the room if anyone would mind me emailing an OpenOffice.org document to them, and that person then emailing me a PDF back. Someone immediately volunteered, and within minutes, I had something that I could print on the yeshiva's machine.

I then gave the student the midterm, and told him that he owed it to the kindness of a stranger he had never seen and would never meet.

Such is the free software community.

Now, some who read this may balk, saying I should have just used Microsoft Word, but OpenOffice.org exports to Word format, and the end results would have been the same, as I hadn't originally planned on sending the midterm document anywhere for another computer to read.

The big Israel post

2005-01-20T02:07:00.000-05:00

I've wanted to write about this topic for quite some time, and my last post reminded me of it, and I have a short break, at a quarter to one in the morning, before I need to call a friend and business associate out of state to complete some web work we're doing together.

The problem today between the religious and non-religious in Israel today is one that cannot be understated. It is the cause of continual strife, and it has a most obvious cause that everyone overlooks -- democracy. Yes, democracy, that god that failed, as Hoppe called it, is the root cause of much of the hatred that brews among brethren today in Israel, because the political process in the Israeli government is inherently designed to force people into a continual string of fighting to get what they want at the expense of the losers.

End the democracy and socialism in Israel, and replace it with a free market economy, and there will be peace among the Jews there. In case this seems like an oversimplification, read what follows.

Whenever a religious Jew walks by a secular school, he probably thinks to himself, "money that I could have spent on causes X, Y, and Z were stolen from me to pay for this? Likewise, the secular Jew sees a yeshiva and thinks to himself, "my money was stolen from me to pay for this? The system is inherently designed to create enemies out of men who would otherwise be brothers.

Now, there are other issues of contention between the religious and secular, and don't think I'm unaware of them. I did live there for a year. I was in a yeshiva, but I wasn't entirely living in a bottle.

Now, there are religious Jews who object to this idea, because they are, unfortunately, addicted to dole. "The families in kollel would have no money to support themselves!" That's right, sweetheart, because those families are led by husbands who don't work. I think that it's great if a family is able to sustain themselves and the husband can sit and learn all day. If those families support themselves through the coercion of government subsidies, then those families should rightfully have the carpet pulled out from under them.

If the government would stop taxing the people so much, I have every confidence that the increase of money in the bank accounts that would result from an end to subsidies and lower tax rates would be more than sufficient to maintain the numbers in yeshiva and kollel. The ones who couldn't be sustained in kollel would simply have to work, just like in America and the rest of the world.

Now, my fellow libertarian Jew supports Shinui to that end, and I respectfully think that's misguided, as Shinui doesn't want to end socialism in Israel. They just want their version of socialism as opposed to the religious version. The end result would be the same.

Brothers in Solidarity?

2005-01-19T13:14:00.000-05:00

I managed to create a small controversy for having the nerve to call Reverend King the man of violence that he was. I've been referred to speeches he made, but speeches are just talk if the actions don't follow, and that's the case with King. Had he fought only to correct racism in government, I would be able to say I support what he did. However, he used force to coerce private individuals to associate with people with whom they wouldn't have associated themselves otherwise. That is a form of slavery, and a libertarian cannot accept something like that as just.

In this, I met a fellow blogger, who is also a libertarian Jew. Funny, he would have had to pick a different name had I not gone with Yid instead of Jew.

Not knowing much about him, I think I can be pretty certain he is a brother in solidarity.

I read through his blog, and he posts a lot about something I rarely write about: Israel. The reason I rarely write about Israel is this:

I'm tired of nearly everything having to do with the Homeland. I cannot let myself get so wound up in the politics and the conniving and the violence over there or I'll work myself into an ulcer.

There is just one thing you have to know about the Israeli government and the situation with the Arab nations:

You need only think of the most sensible and speedy solution to the conflict, regardless of your political leanings, and the Israeli government will do the exact opposite.

After a while, I began to see little toeles in it all.

All Slifkin, all the time!

2005-01-18T09:44:00.000-05:00

For those of you who are wondering, it was requested that I delete certain portions of what I wrote over the weekend. I was lazy and decided to delete all of it.

Barely any of my readers comment on my blog, but once I decided to talk about Nosson, suddenly I'm getting emails, like from Dov Bear.

So, I went to Dov Bear's blog, milding entertained by what he wrote, until I got to this post, wherein he decided that no southern citizen is beyond insult.

Dov Bear probably learned everything he knows about the Civil War from northerners, and thus doesn't know squat about it.

Bigots here, bigots there, we see bigots everywhere. As Wonkette, from whom I lifted this piece suggests, this Mississippi compromise was probably just a way to get the fine, backwards, incest committing people of the South to acknowledge - however backhandedly - MLK and all the good he did to make our country a better, safer place to live.

Dov, I'm from the South. I was raised in the South. I love the South. In my nearly twenty years there, I never encountered these so-called "backwards, incest committing people of the South," but apparently you have far more expertise than I on these matters.

So, perhaps Dov Bear can answer the following sticky questions regarding the South and the Civil War, whose army was led by General Robert E. Lee:

1) If the Civil War was about freeing slaves, weren't the states who seceded from the union enslaved when they were forced to remain part of the Union?

2) Are you aware of the 3500 to 5000 Jews who fought for the Confederacy?

3) Are you aware of Grant's General Order that ordered the expulsion of the Jews from territories the North conquered from the South?

4) Are you aware that slavery had been abolished in the North, but had been replaced with many local laws forbidding the very presence of blacks, under penalty of whipping?

5) Can you point to the article in the Constitution that made secession illegal?
5a) If secession is illegal, why did some states only ratify the Constitution on the condition that they could secede?

Now, if you've answered those questions, let me ask you something about the civil rights movement of the 1960's led by Reverend King:

Which is worse -- not wanting to have anything to do with someone because he's black, or being forced at gunpoint to have to associate with that black person? If you think the former, isn't advocating the latter a form of slavery, and isn't the latter exactly what the Civil Rights Act did?

I would argue that what King did was worse than the evil he claimed to want to rectify.

I can just imagine what you might be thinking right now, that I hate blacks and I want to enslave them. This is rubbish. I want nothing of the sort. I want the blacks to be free. I want the whites to be free. I want all of us to be free.

That's why my moniker is "Libertarian Yid."

All other Western countries got rid of slavery in a civilized manner. There's no reason to believe that it couldn't have been accomplished in the United States had Lincoln not enslaved the South.

So, Dov Bear, stick it.

Impeach the Emperor. Now.

2005-01-13T09:57:00.000-05:00

We all knew unofficially. It's now official. The Emperor lied when he said that Iraq had WMD. So, tens of thousands of Iraqis were killed, numerous US military personnel were killed or maimed, and now there are countless Arabs who used to hate us, but now are willing to put forth the effort to act on that hatred.

But they hate us for our freedom.

Yeah. If you believe that, I have some beachfront property in Colorado for you.

"Boy. I sure do hate freedom. I think I'll go blow myself up on the other side of the planet."

Insults Wrapped in Compliments

2005-01-08T21:50:00.000-05:00

In case you might want to email me from the address listed on my profile, you should know that I rarely check the email address I created to put on my profile. Tonight I checked my blog email for the first time in at least a month and a half. In it, I found the following message from some bloke named Nathan:

Your postings are that of a true patriot. Atheism is an idea that flows very easily through libertarians if they want to be consistent. Objectivity leads
itself to atheism or at the very least agnosticism. Commen sense and every day realities lead us towards that conclusion. Faith can only be proven by science, hence making faith a fact which by definition contradicts itself. complacency and denial have let reps and dems steal the liberty of the american people. Look bush won because of religion and the blind followers. All the facts in the world don't mean anything to someone who's priority is set on religion. cognitive dissonance. individualism,freedom from all bureaucracy including religion peace out.

Umm... Thanks, bud. Keep smoking whatever you're using, as it's clearly working. :)

Atheism might flow through libertarians but it's hardly consistent to be an atheist, in any way. Claiming to be an atheist claims a knowledge of every aspect of the universe, by claiming that there is absolutely no diety whatsoever.

Agnostics lack consistency. for example, you'll have a Jew who says, "I'm not sure if there's a Higher power, so it's okay if I have this cheeseburger on Yom Kippur." Since you're not sure if the water is poisoned, it's okay to drink it. This is completely the opposite of reasonably behavior.

The Kuzari principle holds. It's the argument that won me over to Judaism years ago, and I've found it expounded upon on many outreach and countermissionary websites.

Now, if the people of this (formerly) great country would simply apply the Kuzari principle to politics, we'd be in better shape.

Unfortunately, people don't like the burden of thinking. That's why the Republicans and Democrats hold power.

The Yid's profound thoughts for the new year

2004-12-31T12:21:00.000-05:00

As 2004 comes to an end, I find myself thinking quite often about a movie I saw some 20 years ago, which suddenly seems strangely relevant.

That film is Transformers: The Movie.

Why?

I loved the Transformers when I was a kid. It was my favorite tv show and they were my favorite toys.

The movie, which came out twenty years ago, started with a voice-over, "it is the year 2005."

Hmmm. Tomorrow it will be 2005, and we still don't have them there flyin' cars, or robots that transform into tractor trailers or anythin'.

What up wit' dat?

Blogging was so much easier during the summer...

2004-12-31T09:30:00.000-05:00

Jesse Ogden and Robert are AWOL. They must not know the completely inocuous penalty for their actions, or they would still be writing today.

Jesse Ogden is a writer I've respected since I first read his writing on Lew Rockwell before he graduated high school. While I have total sympathy to any libertarian who is a philosophical anarchist, I can't comfortably place myself in that category at this time.

Robert, however, seems to be a genuine limited government type, like me. I know what we want is a pipe dream, but it did exist in this country, for the most part, until Uncle Abie came along and destroyed it.

Anyway, go read Lew Rockwell's column today. Mighty fine read, yessirree.

Would you care to visit my office?

2004-12-18T23:50:00.000-05:00

This calendar year, 2004, is going to end, shortly. It had been, from an employment standpoint, a rather interesting year for me.

Things keep happening to me that make it look like a private, independent consultancy might be the path that I should take now.

Tonight, my synagogue had an annual fundraiser/dinner, and I set next to a few friends of mine. One of them is someone with whom I've been working on a business possibility that might be coming together that will earn me some money to feed my womenfolk, and another is an attorney I've known in shul for quite some time, been friendly with him, but never knew him so well.

The attorney inquired about what I'm doing for a living now, and I brought him up to speed on the current situation. I told him about my current striving to do independent, freelance work. He told me he has office space, 400 square feet, that he'd let me use in return for me performing technical support in his office.

Imagine that. Yid's getting himself his own office!

Heh.

Tomorrow, I plan to head down there and see what his operation needs in the area of computers and see if I can fit the bill.

In other news, I went down to former employer, the grocery store owner, and saw that he basically wants me to do exactly the same work I was doing a year ago. I told him that he had mentioned on the phone that what I'd be doing would be different than before and more challenging, which were his own words. He denied that he had said these things. I didn't take the offer very seriously, considering that he had me fired by his brother, and that said termination occurred over the phone. I told him I'd work for him for 50% more than what he'd been paying me before. (Before you think I was being haughty, he wasn't paying me an incredible amount of money that 50% is such a huge increase.) I had another condition for employment that I won't mention here. He told me he'd get back to me, but I knew then that my conditions killed the offer. I didn't care, because like I said, I didn't take his offer seriously. I didn't think he really wanted me, considering how bad the experience was last time.

I'm moving on up to bigger and better things. I'm getting my own office.

Wouldn't you like to hire your friendly neighborhood computer consultant?

They were wrong, I was right.

2004-12-14T07:34:00.000-05:00

Starting January 1, 2004, I began working for a local grocery store in Brooklyn, working with their POS system and trying to maintain their inventory with it. POS stands for Point of Sale, but in this case, POS meant something far more colorful. I begged and pleaded with my boss to cut the computer loose because his system was garbage and that I could find a more suitable system that would actually work.

To make a long story short, my words went unheeded, and I got fired after working for him for two and a half months, unable to be productive with the lackluster tools I was given to do my work.

Seriously, this computer guy was full of it. He actually thought the old DOS text editor "Edit" was a great, revolutionary piece of software. Insert a statement about the greatness of Vi here.

Last night, I got a call from my former employer, who told me he finally let go the computer guy because I was right that the fellow didn't know what he was talking about. Now, he wants me to come back to the store and work for him again.

So, tomorrow morning, I'm going back to the store to hear what the guy has to say. If I can do the work, and the pay is right (my fee schedule has changed a tad in the last year :) I might actually go back to work for him.

What a world.

Being this good is quite a burden

2004-12-03T13:16:00.000-05:00

JOB UPDATE: I scored me my first consultancy job this past week, making a website for a family business (not THAT kind of family business) in Boro Park. If this works out, hopefully Hashem will put word of mouth on my side, and this could become a somewhat lucrative side business.

I went to a temp agency yesterday to submit a resume and put in an appearance. I was tested on Word, Excel, my spelling ability, and my typing skills. I was told that I scored high on Word and Excel. I scored the second highest test on the spelling test of all the scores my interviewer had ever seen, which I thought was dismaying, as I didn't think the test was particularly difficult. Lots of bozos out there, I guess. My typing speed, he said, was "insanely fast," and I was quite happy to see that I'd increased my typing speed up to 80WPM from my previous record of 70. I was told that if I ever wanted to change vocations, a career as a legal secretary would be waiting for me.

Anyhow, the interviewer thought he had a job for me that day, working inventory in an operation where I'd have the opportunity to learn AS/400, a server environment I've only read about. I was excited about the prospects, but I just got off the phone with the recruiter, who told me that Potential Employer felt, based on my resume, that I was over-qualified.

Gee, I'm flattered. I thought you had to be in your fifties to be overqualified for a job.

All the flattery in the world won't pay my bills, though. Back to the drawing board.

Being unemployed is so time consuming

2004-11-28T22:27:00.000-05:00

So... where do I begin? I've not been blogging lately because I've been so busy sending my resume to everyone in sight.

A family friend from my hometown (south of the Missouri Compromise line) who has thirty something years (and a resume that genuinely frightened me) in IT helped me retool my resume into a two page long thing of beauty that makes me look a lot more impressive than I feel. I think that's because when a person is able to do something repeatedly, it's not so much a big deal to that person anymore.

On Hotjobs, I look up the jobs that match the search for "technical support" and "help desk" and I see the list of open jobs with the line under them telling me that I've already sent my resume.

On Monster, they don't have such a nice feature. On Monster, you try to apply for a job and then it gives you an error message saying that you've already applied. Well, gee, Monster. Thanks for letting me know that I'm retarded. Couldn't you have spared me the trouble by warning me ahead of time?

The Chainik Hocker thought he'd snagged a data recovery job for me, after reading about my data rescuing escapades, but so far, nothing's come of it. CH has a client who lost all of his business records on a machine running Windows 98 (problem #1). CH referred the guy to me, but for a week I received no phone call. I called CH to harrass him about it (man's gotta eat! man's got womenfolk to feed!) and he gets back to me, saying that Potential Client has decided not to go with the Reliable Solution (me!) but with someone else, who supposedly has experience with the FBI opening up hard drives, taking out the disks, and (get this!) extracting the data with a syringe.

Well, shucks, I can hardly compete with data recovery skills like that!

CH tried to explain to this poor, hapless person that data is not stored in a liquid (this is only the 21st century, after all, not some half baked Star Trek like Voyager) but apparently to no avail.

Oh, well. There's a sucker born every minute. And poor me, I haven't the chutzpah to take advantage of them.

On another front, my friend, the person whose 13 GB I saved, referred me to his brother, who needs a website for his business, so maybe I can score some moolah on that end while I look for a new job.

I'm really giving a lot of thought towards starting a consultancy and advertising in our illustrious Jewish newspapers and the Torah Times, etc. to see if I can help my poor, misguided, technologically unsavvy Yiddishe brethren with their computer woes.

I better come up with something quick, though. My family is helping, but they're not made of money, either.

Various Musings

2004-11-16T10:40:00.000-05:00

Well, check out all the people jumping ship from the Emperor's cabal!

First Ashcroft, who decided that one term of urinating on the Constitution was enough for his ego, and now Powell, the man who completely destroyed his credibility by going before the UN with the so-called "evidence" that Iraq had WMD.

My good buddy, the Chainik Hocker, links to Michelle Malkin about the outgoing Imperial Legal Advisor. Unfortunately, CH seems to be unaware that Malkin is a blithering idiot who only talks but will shy away from any questions regarding the integrity of her work. As soon as I heard that she had the audacity to write a book claiming that the internment of Japanese Americans was a justified action, I thanked G-d that I no longer considered myself a conservative, because suddenly the term "conservative nutcase" seemed appropriate.

Turnabout!

2004-11-12T11:09:00.000-05:00

William Anderson wrote another great article about how the Democrats could win big if they did a turnabout in their strategy, letting the Republicans wear with honor the badge they have earned as the party of bigger government.

more!

2004-11-09T14:42:00.000-05:00

My daughter, who everyone knows is the cutest creature ever to walk on G-d's green earth, has learned to kiss. She'll stick her head out and touch her lips to my cheek and make a smacking sound.

It's absolutely heart-melting.

She's also acquired this strange yearning to see my wife wear her hat, which is silly since it obviously is only made for someone under the age of two. My daughter will say "more," which really comes out sounding like "mawww," until my wife puts it on, and once she does, my daughter kisses her.

Cute!

Credit where it's due!

2004-11-04T23:19:00.000-05:00

I received an email from my wife's great aunt today, with whom I've had a number of political discussions over the internet. My wife has always found this amusing, because she barely knows this woman, and I, the man who's met this woman once, talks to her more often than my wife does.

Below is the text she forwarded that had been sent to her:

My phone starting ringing a little before 9 AM yesterday. In each instance, it was a tearful friend or relative who wanted me to console them on the election results. But as I told them yesterday, I couldn’t comfort them until I could comfort myself.

The news was so unacceptable to me, that I simply ignored it. I didn’t believe it and I didn’t want to let reality in. So I busied myself as if nothing had happened. But that didn’t work too well, and eventually the truth struck my brain and all the fears came tumbling in.

I have nothing reassuring to say to anyone. The election shows one thing clearly. We are a white Christian nation. The rest of us are just tolerated, at least for now.

When I was in college, young people were liberals. I just assumed with all the new voters actually coming to the polls, we would see a mandate for change. We got one, but it’s to the right, not the left. The heavy turnout was not anti-war; it was evangelical. The elected president is not alone. He shares his mandate with Jesus. We’re back to the time when Atheists had better keep their mouths shut, Jews better behave, and Muslins might want to find a better place to live.

Separation of church and state, perhaps the most important principle our country’s founders passed on, is now on its way out. Prayer in the schoolroom is on its way back…. New Testament prayer, that is.

I’ve gotten over being upset that I am older than the president of the United States. But I can’t get over the fact that my president has a significantly lower IQ.

Most of the people who stole my country on November 2nd, have never lived through the McCarthy era, or the Eisenhower election, to say nothing of Adolph Hitler.

When I was barely out of my teens, I learned the hard way to be careful not to say aloud that I preferred Adlai Stevenson. Patriotic Americans were voting for Dwight Eisenhower. The small company I was with, wrote ”filler” articles for newspapers around the country and so we got weeklies and small dailies from almost every state. In the Bible belt, as we called it, you wouldn’t know the democrats had fielded a candidate. Adlai Stevenson’s name never appeared in print.

Joe McCarthy was so scary, no one spoke out until Edward R. Murrow got up enough courage and it put his career at CBS on hold. But I knew what was happening first hand because the company I was with, hired people McCarthy had caused to be fired because they failed the “loyalty” test. The group I worked with included a very well known Philadelphia reporter, a former financial advisor to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, two filmmakers from UNESCO, and a brother of liberal writer I.F. Stone. The only charge against these men was that they were left wing (and that meant Communist back then even though they weren’t.)

Are we back to a time when we dare not speak our mind or John Ashcroft and the Patriot Act will not only get us fired, but imprisoned. Dare we admit that we are not churchgoers? Will our companies demand a loyalty test as they did in the 50s? Will we be denied personal choice over our bodies?

The right of assembly has already been infringed. Freedom to believe, or not believe, is no longer an easy personal choice. Fear will increasingly infringe upon freedom of speech if by speaking out you could lose your job or be ostracized by your community.

Most importantly, will we ever hear the truth again? There’s something ironic about the “moral majority” selecting a pathological liar as their leader.

Richard Nixon said it best. Mediocrity is not a bad thing.

This president and his coterie introduce nothing new. Those of us over 50 have all been here before.

Comfort you? No, my dear friends. Come cry with me.

I'll take Melodrama for $1000, Alex!

Geez, beyond the appeal to my emotions (which I blocked immediately -- I can be very good at that when I want to be), I had to lend a little sympathy to these leftist quacks.

You see, I don't blame the Republicans for their victory this week.

I blame the Democrats.

I used to think the Democrats were real geniuses in how they'd figured out how to turn an election into an advance auction on stolen goods, but the Republicans tricked them into forfeiting the election.

How, might you ask?

The Democrats brought to the forefront issues of no real significance, like the gay marriage non-issue. Both parties have perfected to an artform the act of failing to foresee consequences of their actions. The Democrats pushed for gay marriage, yet didn't have any expectation whatsoever what kind of backlash it would create among traditionalist Christians who would have been too lazy to vote otherwise. So, the Democrats, not the Republicans, ended up mobilizing new votes into the Republican coffers.

Thanks a bunch. I reeeeally appreciate it. Now I can have the end of the income tax like I've always dreamed. Heh.

Today on Lew Rockwell there was an article by William Anderson that he wrote during Kerry's (really quite civil and gentlemanly) concession speech. He advised that the Democrats go back to their Grover Cleveland roots, who I've long thought was the last great American President, a sentiment with which Anderson agrees.

Of course, that won't happen, and the Republicans will continue to grow this government out of control, and continue ruining our economy.

So, let's get down to business

2004-11-03T15:14:00.000-05:00

Now that the Emperor has won reelection, let's ask a serious question.

How long must we wait after his coronation before we'll see the promised end of the federal income tax.

A Republican is in the White House.

The Republicans control the House and Senate.

Now, hold on for the ride as we watch for four more years of the Republicans betraying every spoken principle to which they've ever professed fealty.

The Republicans didn't beat the Democrats. They became the Democrats.

I'm waiting for this freedom the Emperor keeps telling us he's giving us.

Where is it?

Now, on to something important

2004-11-03T13:52:00.000-05:00

Okay, Bush won. I'm not surprised. His Emminence, Emperor George II, had primed up a healthy amount of fear that the sky would fall, brimstone would flow through our sinks, and that all the ten plagues would make a comeback if he wasn't reelected.

Riiiiight.

The idea that because there hasn't been a terrorist attack since 9/11 means that GWB is doing a good job is foolishness at its most sterling. It has been stated many times that al-Qaeda planned the 9/11 attacks for years before they occurred. If we haven't been attacked since 9/11, then it's because the plans haven't reached the end of their timetable yet.

There's not a thing on earth the government can do to protect us from the harm caused by a single man or small group of men other than stop provoking such attacks through our arrogant foreign policy.

Bring home the troops from Europe. Now.

Bring home the troops from Asia. Now.

Bring home the troops from the Middle East. Now.

See how fast the terrorism problem stops when the US doesn't stick its nose where it doesn't belong.

If our Christian "friends" think the US needs to protect Israel, why don't those Christians get off their duffs, pick up a rifle, and go over to the Holy Land to participate in its defense instead of sending off other people's sons and daughters to do it?

That was my political rant.

Now for my computer rant.

Adobe Systems is starting to look at its options in releasing products for Linux.

I am very happy to read about this, and I'm surprised that it took so long for them to come to this conclusion, considering how easy it is for them to release software for Linux.

Right now, if you download Acrobat Reader for Linux, it looks like this. Lame, I know. Functional, but it looks like something that was modern back in 1985.

However, Adobe bought licenses to use Qt, a software gui toolkit sold by Trolltech, a company out of Norway. Qt is multi-platform, and programs written in Qt need only be recompiled on Windows, Linux/Unix, or Mac OSX to create binaries that are native to those operating systems. Qt is the basis of my desktop environment of choice, KDE. Qt is free to use for free software development, but expensive to use for proprietary software developement. Adobe saw the value in Qt, and bought the licenses.

Now, if they port Acrobat to Qt, then they'll have one codebase to maintain, and they'll be able to distribute a version of the Reader for Linux that actually looks as good as it works.

I'm looking forward to it. I'm just wondering what took them this long, considering how long they've had the licenses.

At least I voted against Chuckie!

2004-11-02T23:31:00.000-05:00

Today, it was with great glee that I voted for Michael Badnarik and against Chuck "the Schmuck" Schumer.

Unfortunately, the LP only had three people on the board, but I gave my protest vote, and my bitchslap against Mister "I never thought of a government program too obscure, useless, senseless, or expensive to avoid advocating at my weekly press conferences" Schumer (can you tell I loathe him?).

Bush has to go. Kerry is no improvement. Whether the issue is the war, the economy, health care, or anything else, the answers that will be productive and conducive to a prosperous future lie with neither the Republicans or the Democrats.

Listening to Hannity this afternoon made me sick to my stomach, the way he completely dismisses the idea that 9/11 wasn't an unprovoked attack, when it obviously was provoked in the eyes of many in the Muslim world. The recent al-Qaeda tape was something so simple even a twelve year old could grasp it, and Hannity and the rest of the neoconservatives still need visual aids.

Sigh.

Oh, those haters of freedom!

2004-10-30T22:21:00.000-04:00

For those who get their news from Fox or CNN, here's the transcript of the latest al-Qaeda tape, where bin Laden says that those who say the Muslims are attacking the US out of their hatred of freedom are complete fools.

This whole war is completely pointless and can be stopped relatively quickly. The Bush doctrine will only exacerbate it, prolong it, and bring about our eventual defeat. The US empire, either way, will come to a fall.

PLJ sucks! And other news

2004-10-28T21:38:00.000-04:00

When I first moved to New York back in 2000, I was instantly taken to WPLJ, 95.5 on the FM dial for all of you who aren't in the know. They play the stereotypical "80's, 90's, and today!" mix, but they have sunken further and further into suckitude.

What's happened with modern music? I liked modern music so much more before that music started being called oldies.

My wife and I turn on PLJ now and we wait for a song that doesn't stink.

Anyone with me here?

Anyhoo, I'm writing this as I take a break from supercharging my resume so that employers will be begging me to let them pay me for my services.

Heh.

I just might be marketable

2004-10-27T09:57:00.000-04:00

Two nights ago, Sammy the Kid called me, informing me that his father, a programmer, had installed the new version of XP (XP: The Next Generation? XP Reloaded? XP: Windows with improved virus capability?) on their machine, and now Windows was denying access to the Administrator's My Documents folder. Administrator is supposed to have root access, meaning that nothing should stop administrator from touching anything on the system. "Access denied" shouldn't be happening.

Fear not, though, for Yid had a plan.

I came over to his house yesterday with a spare hard drive and PCLinuxOS, a very polished Linux live-cd.

I booted his machine to PCLOS, and, as I expected, I was able to access the documents folder which Windows had denied my friend. Under normal circumstances, I would have simply copied the contents of that folder into a different folder and all would have been done. There were two problems with this solution: 1) No room on the hard drive, since we were talking about 12.9 GIGABYTES of data, and 2) Linux doesn't support writing on an NTFS partition.

I formatted my spare 20 gb hard drive with a Windows FAT32 partition, and moved the My Documents folder from the computer's drive onto my drive.

Gawd, it took bloody forever! It took over an hour and a half to move the 13 gig.

But, it was worth it, because once we had achieved this, we simply booted back into Windows and moved the data safely back on the computer's hard drive in a different folder, and all data was saved.

Sammy the Kid's father said that this was definitely something marketable, and that I could make $500-$600 a pop doing something like that.

Doing five or six of those a month, I'd be made for the time being, and I could focus on the internet business I keep telling people I'm starting.

Yeah, this I really needed

2004-10-25T20:29:00.000-04:00

So, I showed up at work today to find that our office had experienced an unfortunate encounter with water -- the office had flooded overight, reportedly due to a clogged toilet.

So, none of us were able to do any work, because our computers all had to be unplugged.

Then, the spirit of fear and dismay filled the office, as rumors of a mass layoff haunted the building. Then, women in the office started crying as they packed their belongings. Just about everyone in the entire office was fired.

Around noon, I spoke with my boss, who informed me that their financial situation had taken a sudden turn downwards and that I was let go because they could no longer afford anything more than a skeleton crew.

So, tomorrow, I am back to pounding the pavement, and looking for a loan to pay my rent next week, because my boss doesn't know if he'll have the liquidity to deliver everyone's pay on time.

Sigh

Newsflash: Iran Endorses Bush for Reelection

2004-10-24T01:38:00.000-04:00

It seemed too funny to be true, but Iran has endorsed our beloved Emperor for reelection next month.

Insert joke that will irritate CH and IM here. :)

Sure he's my friend, but he doesn't get it!

2004-10-18T21:16:00.000-04:00

My friend, the Chainik Hocker, just did a review of the third party candidates on his blog. In true CH style, I found the whole thing quite humorous to read.

First off, we are going to have to call them something other than "third party candidates". "Third, fourth, fifth, and sixth candidates" would take too long to say, and besides, who gets to rank 'em? "Candidates with no chance of winning and only a tiny outside chance of getting the five percent of the vote required for matching federal funds" is too mean. "Alternative candidates" doesn't have any pizzazz, but will have to do for now.

Actually, it would be better to call them "candidates who have a nearly impossible task of getting onto the ballots in the first place because the Republicans and Democrats have protected their rear ends from true debate through the use of ballot access and campaign finance laws..

And Badnarik wouldn't take federal matching funds if he was offered them, considering that he'd end the practice as soon as he stepped foot in the White House.

Nader: Rumpled suit. Dresses like a flood victim. Mumbles to himself. Has "crazy eyes". He is the crazy guy who walks up to you in the subway and starts mumbling incoherently about Jesus, space aliens, or the CIA. No. Complained about NAFTA, called for it to be abolished. Apparently, it causes too much industrialization, and industrialization causes, like, pollution and that big capitalist rip-off, man. Didn't actually use those words but that was gist of NAFTA riff. Mumbled rest of answers. No.

Couldn't agree more. The problem with Nader is that there's no reason to vote for him. He's a kook. So are Bush and Kerry, but Nader's a big-time kook. He's against corporate welfare, as everyone should be, but he twists it into a rant against capitalism, and corporations making money off the government is not capitalism, despite the popular misconception thereof.

Peroutka: Seemed pleasant and almost reasonable. Whined about NAFTA, called for it to be abolished. Apparently it restricts industrialization and free trade. Also called for elimination of most taxes, including all income tax. Not bad. When asked how he would fund government, he called for import and export tariffs, which makes perfect sense for an economy that imports (large number) of manufactured goods (note to self: Google this large number before posting). No.

Peroutka would be a definite improvement over the two major candidates running for Emperor, but he's also a wacko. The Constitution Party's website makes it pretty clear that they believe in freedom for all Christians, and for the government to have a Christian influence over all us heathens who read the book of Numbers (23:19, I think -- I don't have a copy on hand) and said, "Gee, I guess G-d's not a man, after all." He wants to raise tariffs to pay for the costs of government. That's all well and good, but it should be remembered that there was an awfully bloody war fought in this country over this sort of thing.

Cobb: Most polished politician of the group. Not a compliment. used the word "justice" a lot, in one case three times in a single sentence. A left wing crackpot using the word "justice" too often in the same speech is like a right wing nutfudge using the word "freedom" too often in a single speech, a code word meaning you aren't going to get any. Bitched about NAFTA. Apparently it causes too much industrialization, and industrialization causes, like, pollution and that big capitalist rip-off, man. Nearly a verbatim quote. Got dinged by mod for nearly saying the name of his campaign website. Had a serial killer like smile. Wants to tax "the rich" and make them pay "their fair share". No.

I found the comment about using the word "freedom" very funny in light of how often our illustrious Emperor uses it. We can sum up Cobb by calling him a watermelon -- green on the outside, pink on the inside.

Badnarik: Personal favorite. Said many things I agreed with. When asked how he would fight war on terror, said he would do the whole domestic security thing, not bombing other countries. Whined about NAFTA, called for it to be abolished. Apparently it restricts industrialization and free trade. Looked up on website later, don't like isolationist foreign policies, (mildly) protectionist trade policies. Like his ideas on Social Security, but not War on Terror stance. No, with reluctance.

Now, I was waiting to get to Badnarik to comment about NAFTA, which is a huge fraud. The FT is supposed to stand for "free trade," which means that people can trade freely. Duh. Obviously, a free trade agreement needs no more than one page to declare this. Compare that idea to the reality of how long NAFTA is, and it becomes rather obvious to anyone with two eyes and half a brain that it isn't a free trade agreement.

Michael Badnarik is not an isolationist. Libertarians in general are not isolationists. We are non-interventionists (is that a word? If we were playing Scrabble, someone would challenge!). If we see a wrong-doing on the other side of the globe, we think we should be free to send our money or send our bodies to go fight that wrong. We don't see government action towards that end as anything other than slavery. We favor trade with all nations, which is the opposite of what an isolationist would favor. Peroutka is more of an isolationist in that regard.

I find the neocons' stance on the war to be quite frustrating. It is a recipe for perpetual war. As long as there are Arabs in the world who feel humiliated by the US, there will be Arabs who are willing to blow themselves up to get to us. And as long as Arabs are going to blow themselves up to get at us, the US the will continue to bomb them, perpetuating the process.

I don't have any easy answers, but anything would be better than this current situation. Bush is playing right into al-Qaeda's hands, because while beforehand, there were plenty of Muslims who hated America but were unmotivated to do anything with that hatred, now there are plenty of Muslims with the hatred of America and the motivation to act on it.

CH is almost there. He just needs to learn that there's more to life than killing Arabs, and that after the momentary feeling of triumph, there's a mess on the floor that he needs to clean up.

The Myth of Privacy Laws and their Efficacy

2004-10-17T01:02:00.000-04:00

I work in an establishment that is required by law by collect certain confidential information about our clients, not only their birthdates and social security numbers, but in many cases, their W2's and 1040's.

Now, what happens to these things after they're collected? They get stuck in a filing cabinet.

What stands in the way of someone pulling your file and doing something vicious and vindictive with this information? Absolutely nothing.

Sure, there are privacy laws, but there is nothing in practice that stands in the way of me collecting names and numbers while I'm at work and publishing this information on a Usenet group.

If this doesn't concern you, wake up and think again.

I see this time bomb every day from 9 to 5, and it worries the hell out of me.

She pushed my buttons!

2004-10-16T22:08:00.000-04:00

My wife and I had our second Shabbos in our new place. Last night, after we ate, we went into the living room, as Shabbos is now starting earlier, and we were in no rush to go to sleep. My wife let my daughter roam around outside the fence we normally keep her trapped in so she doesn't break anything while we're unpacking boxes.

My daughter roamed over to my computer and began making noise on the keyboard, obviously trying to emulate the noises she hears me make from it. Then she reached over to move the mouse around. My wife and I started laughing as we just let her have her way with the machine.

I said to my wife, "You know, she's really good at finding and pushing buttons. I hope she doesn't turn on the computer."

Then she turned on the computer. Oy vey, it's Shabbos! She's turning on my computer!

Then she turned it off.

Then she turned in on again.

And again she turned it off.

At that point, my wife scooped her up and brought her over to me.

I guess my daughter is trying to mimick what she sees when I'm in front of my machine. Who knows.

Anyhow, I switched to Slackware a couple of weeks ago, and I'm having a lot of fun with it. Who knew I'd have more fun with a distribution where I actually have to configure things by hand. I initially had a great deal of difficulty configuring X to work at my desired resolution. I started the switch based on advice from a friend, and after reading a series of articles over at Ofb.biz on the subject.

I have a few things left to work out, like getting my scanner working, and configuring a webcam I just bought but haven't yet opened.

Emperor's War Minister admits Administration is filled with liars from the ground up: Report

2004-10-06T01:13:00.000-04:00

The kevlar is really made of cotton candy. Going back on his statements that the administration has "bulletproof" evidence that Iraq had WMD, which was the major justification for last year's dance in the Middle East, Rumsfeld is now recanting on this position.

Well, gee. Imagine that. The French were right after all. I can't believe I just typed that, as I supported the war at the time.

Bush lied, and people died. Kerry also lied, and more people will die regardless of who's elected.

Now, there are those who said the Administration was "deceived." But, that doesn't hold water, as the CIA seemed to disagree with the President on quite a few things while leading up to the war, but of course we, the deceived, never heard about this on Limbaugh, Hannity, or Fox.

Feh. May Hashem forgive me for following them, and may He enlighten my brethren so that they may see that Bush is an evil, evil man, and is not a friend to Israel.

From the godfather's mouth to my ears

2004-10-04T18:34:00.000-04:00

I just read Irving Kristol's article in the Weekly Standard published on August 25th of last year, and I must admit it deeply disturbed me. I had first come across it from a DiLorenzo commentary, and then when I went over the Jesse's blog, there was a link to Karen DeCoster's comments on the Lew Rockwell blog, and that's how I found the link.

"...one can say that the historical task and political purpose of neoconservatism would seem to be this: to convert the Republican party, and American conservatism in general, against their respective wills, (emphasis added) into a new kind of conservative politics suitable to governing a modern democracy.

Can you say, "merry little totalitarian?"

"Its 20th-century heroes tend to be TR, FDR, and Ronald Reagan."

As Thomas Woods pointed out in his lecture at the Mises Institute, Teddy Roosevelt was an absolute head case, who violated his oath of office routinely.

Franklin Roosevelt almost singlehandedly made the Great Depression as painful and long lasting as possible.

And as for Ronald Reagan, Reagan did nothing of substance, which can be borne out by the fact that when he was eulogized, the only thing people really talked about was his warm personality.

"Such Republican and conservative worthies as Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, Dwight Eisenhower, and Barry Goldwater are politely overlooked."

To call Herbert Hoover a great "conservative" in the old style sense is like calling a prostitute chaste. When he left office, contrary to what we're taught in school, he bragged that he'd used every method of government possible to help end the depression. He was no laissez-faire capitalist.

No comment on Ike. Whatever.

Coolidge was a great president. He did what he could to get the government to leave people alone. Goldwater would have done the same had he been elected. He also might have nuked Vietnam, but no one's perfect.

Nevertheless, they cannot be blind to the fact that neoconservative policies, reaching out beyond the traditional political and financial base, have helped make the very idea of political conservatism more acceptable to a majority of American voters. Nor has it passed official notice that it is the neoconservative public policies, not the traditional Republican ones, that result in popular Republican presidencies.

Translated into English, the neoconservatives made the Republicans as close to Democrats as they possibly could in order to make them more palatable to the voting public. Sweet!

Kristol then went on about tax cuts to stimulate economic growth, conveniently leaving out how those tax cuts are meaningless if spending isn't cut back also.

The rest of it made me sick to my stomach, so there you go.

They're my friends, but I think they need to do a little more reading on the subject...

2004-10-04T07:30:00.000-04:00

Last Shabbos, we went to friends of our's, because we lack both sukkah and eruv, and thus would have been confined to our home and I would have been unable to fulfill the mitzvos of the week. A person walked up to my host and me while we were walking home once Shabbos was over, and he asked me who I was going to vote for. I told him Badnarik, and, unsurprisingly, the guy didn't know who Badnarik is. Oh, well.

My host went on to praise the Emperor, calling him "chasidei umos ha'olam," which, while I understand why he felt that way, is a completely and quite often misused term, as Rabbi Yosef Viener points out.

For some reason, many Jews don't seem to realize what a bad thing for Israel the invasion of Iraq was. It had made Israel further dependent on America of its security, instead of less dependent, and the less dependent Israel is on the kindness of others, the better off she is.

Adem Kupi quite correctly points out that America has a nasty habit of going to war with its allies. The idea that one day Israel could be declared the enemy of the US is entirely possible. Who knows? Perhaps the US is going to be one the major powers mentioned in the prophecy in Zechariah 12. I don't know. For 2,500 years, Judaism has been a non-prophet organization, and as Rabbi Wein says, "the Lord hasn't spoken to me in over two weeks!"

If the fate of Israel depends on the American election, then the Jews had better jump to attention and see what a horrible thing this is for us as a whole.

Many think that if John Kerry wins this election next month, it will be bad for Israel. They are correct. It will be bad for Israel because a foreign power will be interfering with her for political reasons. If George Bush wins reelection, it will be bad for Israel in the long term, because he'll only be in office temporarily, but the hatred which he's managed to accumulate for both Israel and America will last further than 2008.

Chainik Hocker Amazes Yid and Family With Feats of Strength and Valor: Astonishing First-hand Report

2004-10-02T21:24:00.000-04:00

So, I finished my move on Monday night. Finally. Due to circumstances beyond the control of myself or my beautiful spousal unit, we had to move piecemeal throughout the month of September. That means (you guessed it!) I had to pay rent on two different apartments this month. Therefore, my wallet is in a recession, but I'm sure FDR's ghost could push it into a huge depression if he was really feeling helpful.

On Sunday, with the help of the Chainik Hocker and a young 18 year old lad I'll call Sammy the Kid, the Yid and co. moved the vast majority of our worldly goods and items to the new apartment, inching us ever closer to Sheepshead Bay, but not quite.

In other news, Yom Kippur went extremely well. I didn't have any problems with the fasting until about 4-5 pm, by which time the fast is almost over anyway, so I told my stomach to shut the hell up and deal with it, and my stomach complied, since it knew I'd feed it bad stuff if it didn't. The chazzan really flew through Nei'lah (last service of Yom Kippur) which really made me respect him a lot, because it was like him saying to the congregation, "I understand, guys! I'm hungry, too!"

In all seriousness, it was a beautiful service all day long, and I even got to take a nap for about an hour between mussaf and minchah. At least then I could understand making a new bracha on my tallis. Why we're supposed to make a new one when we haven't slept escapes me.

Anyhoo, whatever the hurricane of the week is in Florida caused us New Yorkers who have nothing to do with the sins of the old people living down south to suffer horrible, terrible, and most importantly, wet, rains last for most of the day, which caused delays in our cable internet and VOIP lines being installed.

OK, Hurricane of the Week! Now it's personal!

I'm writing this blog post at 9 am on Wednesday, but I'm getting the feeling that I might not be able to post it until after Shabbos.

I still don't understand why I can't email my posts to the blog like the Blogger website says I can. Perhaps after the holiday and Shabbos I'll do something as revolutionary as actually emailing their support staff, assuming they have one.

Peace out.

PS. Read Anthony Gregory's piece on the Presidential Debates that was on LRC on Tuesday. It's a riot!

Maybe it's just me

2004-09-19T13:16:00.000-04:00

I'm moving my address book from my old cell phone to my new one, and I'm listening to Friday's edition of the Sean Hannity show. Maybe it's just me, but whenever Hannity talks about the voting habits of "the American people" he sounds like he's excluded himself from that mass. "The American people" do this. "The American people" do that.

And I thought conservatives were supposed to be individualists.

And for the first time in a while, I was inspired

2004-09-19T01:04:00.000-04:00

What a week! Rosh Hashanah, the two-day long observance of the new year, ran directly into Shabbos, so I was out of touch with the outside world for three days. The beginning and end of Sukkos will be the same way, so, if you happen to be an anonymous fan (yeah, whatever) be warned that I'll be out of touch in two weeks and the week after that.

There is a long standing tradition (I have no idea how old it actually is) that on the Shabbos between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur (that was yesterday, in this case) the rabbi of a shul gives a speech. If I remember correctly, this is mentioned in the Shulchan Aruch, which makes this tradition at least five hundred years old.

Anyhow, my wife and I were in the neighborhood where we're in the process of moving, and so I davened at the shul which I love most in Brooklyn. The rabbi there conducted my wedding, and I've always felt most comfortable there of all the synagogues I've seen in Brooklyn, and I've been to a lot.

The rabbi gave a wonderful drasha (speech) that the one thing we should really daven for is fear of Heaven. If we achieve this, then all will follow. He also spoke about how when he has grandchildren some day, he doesn't want to be remembered for how he played with his grandchildren and bought them matchbox cars, but he wants to be remembered for things that have meaning, like involvement in Torah and its institutions. This made a very big impact on me, and I dread the realization that I'm not an eighteen year old any more. My father even laughed when I told him that I cringed when I called an eighteen year old who's been helping us with our move "a kid."

I'm not doing the rav's drasha any justice in my comments here, mostly because I'm so tired, and it's one in the mornnig as I write this.

But, for the first time in a while, I was inspired to try to be a better Yid. The past year, being religious was really feeling like a burden that I didn't want to shoulder, but with this move my wife and I are making, I feel like this might be a fresh start for the both of us.

Maybe I'll finally find a seder for myself.

Two sides of the spectrum

2004-09-15T07:57:00.000-04:00

I haven't had the time to post, but I couldn't go without calling attention to two articles.

First, read this one by Rebecca Hagelin of WorldNetDaily.

Then, read this piece published the previous week on Lew Rockwell by Anthony Gregory.

The dichotomy is striking, I think.

Food Fight!

2004-09-12T14:34:00.000-04:00

Via the Associated Press, an interesting incident occurred in NYC over the weekend -- a man was arrested for the high crime of not leaving a high enough tip at a restaurant.

That's right, ladies and gentlemen. In a city which is, as my buddy the Chainik Hocker puts it, "home of the meanest cockroaches and most violentest criminals in the world," the people of the city put people in jail if they are unsatisfied with the tip you leave at your table.

My first job was working as a waiter. I have nothing but sympathy for these hard working people and the job they do... until they give me bad service. :) I remember quite well the anguish of working my butt off and being stiffed for a tip. However, I went into the job knowing that some customers can and would do such things. That was part of the job.

It seems to me that it would be far more equitable for restaurants simply to inflate the menu prices of everything they serve by 15%, and let the customers know that they need not tip their waiters. The waiters will get 15% of whatever they serve, and everyone will be somewhat happy.

Arresting a guy for stiffing you on a tip? If this is a legitimate matter of law, then the problems in this humble city are far worse than I thought.

Perl and Moving

2004-09-07T23:17:00.000-04:00

I've been taking a class in programming in Perl, and the homework is kicking my rear right now.

Also, my wife and I are... well, not exactly moving, but let's just say we're changing residences, and leave it at that. :)

Together with these two things, and the fact that I'm trying to find the time to get together with a friend who, G-d willing, is about to become a chosson (a California wedding if it works out -- I've never been to the left coast), I am absolutely swamped. Therefore, I'll likely not have much time for this blog until after Rosh Hashanah.

I made five trips yesterday from our old place to our new place. Today, I made one trip, and my wife made three with her mother. Tomorrow, her sister will take care of our daughter while my mother in law and my wife do some moving. No heavy lifting, of course -- she's incubating right now. :)

Anyhoo, I'll try to steal some time at work to put together a blog entry and keep my loyal readers up to speed on what's happening on my end. I have a whole thing on the Kuzari and politics that's been building in my head since I saw the Chainik Hocker on Shabbos.

Let's get real just for a second

2004-09-05T09:59:00.000-04:00

I know the Chainik Hocker might get mad at me for writing this, and thus refuse to help me out with my forthcoming change of residence, but I really can't resist. I shall now impress all with my feats of strength. Just kidding.

Anyhoo, CH has a quote from another Republican/neo-conservative website. I feel the need to deflate this haughtiness by just a few degrees:

If you believe that government should be accountable to the people, not the people to the government, then you are a Republican.

In a word, this is narishkeit. Republicans believe the government should be accountable to the people? That must be why Republicans around the country have been fighting for more government power, all the way back to their genesis in the mid 19th century.

If you believe a person should be treated as an individual, not as a member of an interest group, then you are a Republican.

This is the fundamental reason why Bush seeks out the votes of specific demographics, because he believe people are individuals, not groups.

If you believe your family knows how to spend your money better than the government does, then you are a Republican.

Ahh, yes. The family knows how to spend our money better than the government does. That's why the president will not refuse unconstitutional taxpayer-funded matching funds, and that's why the president allowed his Republican convention to be paid for with taxpayer money.

If you believe our educational system should be held accountable for the progress of our children, then you are a Republican.

Judging by the grumblings about the education system nationwide, I would venture a guess that Republicans around the country disagree, and would prefer to be released from the beast called government education.

If you believe this country, not the United Nations, is the best hope for democracy, then you are a Republican.

Ahh, just the founders of our country, who despised democracy, envisioned.

If you have faith in free enterprise, faith in the resourcefulness of the American people and faith in the U.S. economy, then you are a Republican.

In the world of the Republicans, raising tariffs and other forms of protectionism represent "free enterprise."

And, ladies and gentlemen, if you believe that we must be fierce and relentless and terminate terrorism, then you are a Republican.

A government campaign against terrorism? Could it be like every other government program, a witless failure?

Pardon by cynicism, but take this as food for thought.

I nearly split my gut laughing

2004-09-04T22:20:00.000-04:00

This Shabbos, I had the pleasure of seeing the Chainik Hocker both for last night's meal, as well as lunch today. CH and I are buds, but we don't get to see each other so often. Today, a couple with whom my wife and are friends came over, and I found that the wife was talking about the politics, and asked me what the Democrats stand for. I replied by asking if she had been paying attention to this past week's Republican convention. She said she had. I told her that if she just listened to what the Republicans were saying, then she would know exactly what the Democrats stand for. She instantly lit up and said, "Yes! It's so confusing! They both sound the same!"

I gave CH and look, and, briefly, I think we both knew what the other was thinking.

CH is a neocon. He vehemently disagrees with the notion that there's no difference between a neocon and a liberal. Here we had a person not involved in our conversations, a lay-person, if you will, who was agreeing with me instead of him.

The irony was thick enough to cut with a knife. I busted out laughing.

In other news, CH and I had a wonderful political discussion where I defeated him with my feats of strength.

Chainik Hocker Inspired by Socialists: Shocking Firsthand Report

2004-09-03T16:05:00.000-04:00

Sources reveal that the Chainik Hocker was inspired by the socialist drivel of the Emperor, George II. Last night, his Eminence took the stage in New York City, praising himself for the damage he has done to the economy through his expansions of government in areas of education, health care, and Social Security.

From his Highness' speech:

Another drag on our economy is the current tax code, which is a complicated mess — filled with special interest loopholes, saddling our people with more than six billion hours of paperwork and headache every year. The American people deserve — and our economic future demands — a simpler, fairer, pro-growth system. In a new term, I will lead a bipartisan effort to reform and simplify the federal tax code.

Libertarians and other people with two eyes and a brain questioned why it took the Republicans nearly one hundred years to decide that the tax code is eeeeeeevil. Libertarians were also thankful for the proposed additional 40% tax on all goods sold in the US.

Another priority in a new term will be to help workers take advantage of the expanding economy to find better, higher-paying jobs. In this time of change, many workers want to go back to school to learn different or higher-level skills. So we will double the number of people served by our principal job training program and increase funding for community colleges. I know that with the right skills, American workers can compete with anyone, anywhere in the world.

While fearing for his life, this correspondent would like to interject that if the emperor gives out money and helps more people go to school to get "marketable" skills, he will simply be raising the bar of necessary achievement to compete in the marketplace. Once, having a Bachelor's degree meant you could get a job with no problems. Then, the government got involved, and now so many people have Bachelor's degrees that they no longer have the meaning they once did, and now people must go further and get master's degrees. One must wonder how worthless a PhD will one day be because of government involvement in education.

Initial reports coming from the convention indicated that the Republicans' rhetoric, the Emperor's included, was becoming increasingly indistinguishable from the Democrats'. More on this as the reports are compiled.

Not a bad day at all

2004-08-31T23:58:00.000-04:00

Today, I was riding on the high of my wife's pregnancy, and the fact that she and I are no longer keeping it a secret. Despite the fact that in a few short months, my wife and I will be a couple of sleep deprived wrecks, my heart was buzzing from the thought of holding in my arms another child of my own. It turns out that my wife was a month further along than we thought. My wife had come to that conclusion a few days before the visit to the OB, since she was feeling the baby kick, and that doesn't happen until the fifth month. Why she hadn't been to the doctor before then is a long story that I don't have the energy to write.

In other news, Mises.org got Slashdotted! The Institute published a commentary that had all the answers to a great many questions that have plagued me for many years:

Gilligan's Island is now out on DVD, reawakening the unanswered questions of childhood: why does the Skipper let Gilligan help with anything when he knows he'll just screw it up? Why did the movie star take a day cruise in an evening gown? Why did two of the richest people in the world board a dinky boat with the hoi polloi instead of leasing a private yacht? And why do any of the other stranded castaways treat the millionaire's government money as valuable while stuck on an island where no such government can enforce its value?

The answer to this burning question?

Because it's just a dumb TV show.

Sleep well, I will, because of this answer. :)

PS. I refer to my wife as my spousal unit as a lame reference to the Coneheads, the classic 70's SNL skit. I apologize if the reference was too obscure.

Give them a reason, and they will come

2004-08-30T20:47:00.000-04:00

Last week, I mentioned that we're going to have a family occasion this February, where I'll be seeing my brother, who made aliyah in January 2003. The reason he'll be coming is he has never seen his niece.

The other reason he'll be coming is because around that time, my wife is due to deliver child #2.

That's right. You read it here first. She's pregnant.

Stay tuned.

Ode to VNC

2004-08-30T00:07:00.000-04:00

I finally figured out how to let my sister in law log into my machine via VNC -- I needed to open port 5900. Armed with this knowledge, I was able to walk my father through the steps of configuring his router to allow my vnc client connection to his machine, and with the help of RFBDrake, Mandrake's VNC server setup utility, I am currently logged into my father's machine in a separate window while I write this little note.

VNC rocks. It's the ideal tool for the lazy IT manager. Why should a guy waste his time walking over to a guy's desk to deal with the guy's machine when he can just emulate the machine with VNC?

I had no idea just how popular he is!

2004-08-29T13:26:00.000-04:00

I have enjoyed reading the blog of the venerable Frank J. for a long time (at least since the fall of 2002) and I had no idea just how popular this hilarious neocon really is!

I came upon a blog dedicated to his blog, if you can believe it. Beat that, Glenn Reynolds!

This is so funny that I just had to share it with you, my dear readers.

Maybe someday the Chainik Hocker's blog will be popular that he'll have fans who create a blog dedicated to him, also. Ambition, CH -- that's what it's all about, pal.

Chainik Hocker's Valiant Attempts to Prevent RNC-induced Media Suck-fest Unsuccessful: Report

2004-08-28T21:17:00.000-04:00

My buddy, the Chainik Hocker, has been unable to find his way inside the wretched hive of scum and evil, aka the Republican National Convention. I found the whole debacle to be a comedy of errors, based on what he blogged of the matter, and I'm a little disappointed because he has a way of telling a story that can make you split in the gut from laughter.

In other, related news, last night after my wife and finished eating our seudah, I went to my rabbi's house to say hello. He had just come back from the mountains (and interesting topic in itself), and I hadn't greeted him yet. They spent a great deal of time in Israel, and are quite fortunate to be unfamiliar with the political processes of this country. He and his wife asked me what the whole convention was about, and what purpose it served. I explained it as I described in the first paragraph, paraphrasing Obi-Wan Kenobi from the first Star Wars movie, that it is a wretched hive of scum and evil. The rabbi didn't know the reference, but he certainly thought what I said was humorous.

Indeed, a wretched hive of scum and evil. :)

You can never have everything you want

2004-08-27T13:15:00.000-04:00

As I'm writing this, I'm sitting at my desk, listening to the song "Until Now," by the band called Stir. One of the great things about my hometown is that it's one of the great music markets in the country, and that new bands get tested on radio there before most of the rest of the country has ever heard of them. For example, I was listening to Matchbox 20 (before they began to suck, mind you -- Long Day was a great song) and Tonic. Around the time that the aforementioned two bands were arriving on the scene, so was Stir, a rock band that I thought was far superior and, as these things go, much underappreciated. Their self-titled debut is one of the gems of my music collection, much better than their second release (although it's worth getting for the song "Velvet Elvis" all by itself).

Why am I getting nostalgic, you ask, dear reader? I'm getting to my point.

As crazy as it sounds, lately, I miss my old life immensely. This is ironic because that life was going nowhere at the speed of light. I had no ambition, no love life to speak of, and I lived with my mother. Sure, our schedules didn't allow us to spend that much time together, and she charged a very reasonable $200/month rent, but, come on, I was living with my mother.

Then I discovered my ancestral religion, and my life began to change rapidly. From the day I first went into the synagogue where I became religious, to the time I left my hometown to go study in yeshiva in Israel, a mere 9 months had barely passed. Don't think I don't regret leaving. Objectively, I had to leave. I had accomplished as much as I could in my own personal spiritual growth there.

It must have devastated my parents, as my brother had already left to go off to college in another town, and after graduating, moved to Israel, as he had also become religious around the same time. This January, it'll have been two years since I've seen my brother (my only sibling), but we hope to see him in February for an upcoming family occasion about which I'll doubtless blog later.

I have no regrets about becoming religious. Being Jewish is very important to me, and I'm not about to throw it in the shredder and going back to the secular life, which, for the most part, I view as predominantly self-destructive.

I think part of the problem is that I hate New York with a passion. My father hates New York with a passion, also. That's why we left New York in the first place. My father was none too happy when his first born son moved to New York City; in fact, he felt like I was rejecting everything he had ever taught me. I was excited to be in a thriving Jewish community, and I was going to be on the prowl searching in earnest for my future spousal unit. If I lived in a place where people
were a bit nicer to each other, maybe things would be different. Growing up, I could go months without hearing a car horn honk. It's just not something you'd do unless there was imminent physical danger. In New York, it's the same, only the imminent physical danger is that you're going to piss your pants unless the guy in front of you slams the gas on the exact, precise moment that the light turns green. And then, there's all these useless, socialist programs that we must endure here, like the Department of Environmental Protection (recycle or we'll bring guns to make sure you recycle!), the Department of Buildings (don't do anything with your property until you have our permission, boy!), and the Department of the Aging (is that where old people go to work?).

Post high school, I never really went to bars, stayed out to all hours of the night partying, or really did anything of much interest to most people who were my age, despite the fact that nothing at all was stopping me from doing those things.

Now, having become an "adult," married with kid(s), I find that I regret not living life to the fullest in that former life. I have nearly everything I want in life, yet I find that I'm dissatisfied, somehow.

Since the time I was fifteen, I wanted to be married. It took me ten years to make it happen, but I was only working at it, seriously, when I was 24, and I got married at 25. Now, I have the love of my life, the beautiful brunette I always dreamed about. I have a beautiful daughter who I love more than life itself.

I have everything I wanted when I was living the old life. I have a decent job that actually allows me to support other people (when you're able to do that for the first time, it's really quite an accomplishment). I got the girl. G-d has given me just about everything I prayed so hard for.

Yet, lately, I find myself dissatisfied.

Why?

Just to show you I CAN follow through...

2004-08-27T07:49:00.000-04:00

Here's the link to the aforementioned article by Professor DiLorenzo about the "Godfather" of the neocon movement.

Just a bunch of merry little totalitarians. Just like their Democrat counterparts, with whom they shared space in the womb.

Ode to my Spousal Unit

2004-08-26T18:24:00.000-04:00

When I was younger, I had a whole slew of food alergies, and the selection from which I could eat was small. The selection from which I was willing to eat was even smaller.

One thing I did enjoy, and that I could eat, was nachos. Put out some tortilla chips, drop some cheddar all over it, nuke it for a minute, and viola, instant meal.

I got kinda tired of it after a while, and then inspiration hit me with an idea that I never got tired of.

Pizza nachos.

Take some tortilla chips, spread a small amount of tomato sauce, sprinkle some mozzarella, nuke for a minute, and viola, even better instant meal. This was practically the staple of my diet when I was growing up, which surprises anyone who sees me, because it sure as hell didn't stunt my growth.

Fast forward to the present, to a time when your humble correspondent has the most wonderful spousal unit in the whole world, who humored me while I regaled her with tales of my pizza nachos and then, today, despite how fattening they are, made them for me.

I'm still on a high from them, and I ate them nearly an hour ago. I hadn't made them in nearly six years due to kashrus issues in one place or another where I lived. But my wife made them, despite how horribly bad they are for me.

That's true love, my friends. Yes, she'll do your laundry. Yes, she'll clean the bathroom. But will she make your favorite comfort foods?

The bestest President. Ever. I mean it. Really.

2004-08-26T18:11:00.000-04:00

So, the great liberator, our emperor, George II, is promising to take legal action to stop certain political ads.

Hey, free speech is overrated, anyway. If we don't limit free speech, who knows what might happen? Them Republicans and Democrats won't be able to keep office!

This is a direct violation of George Bush's oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States.

I listened to Hannity bitch and moan about this early this afternoon, but do you think this violation of our freedoms will affect his loyalty to the house of Bush? Not likely. After all, we have a man who violates his oath of office yet is "an honest man in the White House."

Feh. A pox on his house.

Funny, you don't look like a neocon...

2004-08-26T18:09:00.000-04:00

I went by the Iraq War Was Wrong Blog, because I wanted to read some funny comments by this person who can't seem to find his spell-check function, and is in desperate need of a grammar checking utility.

He put me on his blogroll. I'm flattered. Disturbed, but flattered.

He called me a Libertarian Neo-con.

Can you imagine that? He called me of all people a neo-con. Sure, my friends Chainik Hocker and Ipcha Mistabra are neo-cons to the bone, but I am most certainly not a neoconservative. Someone should send the Proprietor an email explaining the origins of the neocon movement and how it's the bed-buddy of the left. Thomas DiLorenzo wrote an article about this last year. I'll have to find it and link it.

Me? A neocon? Now, I'm pissed.

Email THIS, buddy!

2004-08-25T20:59:00.000-04:00

I added the capability to email my blog posts so that you can amaze and annoy your friends with my amazing insights.

This is my way of rewarding you for visiting my humble blog.

If only they understood the meaning of the word

2004-08-25T17:50:00.000-04:00

Sigh.

As I have written previously, I am a fan of free software, and a user of Linux in particular. There is a great deal of politics surrounding free software, and since it's in my face so often, I choose to subject my faithful readers to this madness.

In the early 1980's a man named Richard Stallman, a programmer at MIT, decided to embark on a life-long crusade to combat what he perceived as the evil of software licensing. He felt it was immoral to require people not to share software that vendors like Microsoft, Borland, IBM, et. al. sell on the open market.

So, Stallman made a call out to his fellow programmers to start a free (free as in freedom, you see) operating system, which he named GNU, which is a recursive acronym meaning "GNU's Not Unix." Every revolutionary project requires as dumb a name as possible, and Stallman is a stickler for tradition, apparently. He saw the technical advantages of the various flavors of the pre-existing Unix operating systems, and thus wanted the new system to be a free Unix-like system.

Stallman is, to the best of my knowledge, the author of the GNU General Public License. It is a software license that mandates that the user of software under the license have the freedom to do more or less anything they want with it, and must have access to the source code to said program. Any changes that the user then makes that are distributed publically must be accompanied with freely-accessible source code in the same fashion.

In the early 1990's Linus Torvalds began working on a Unix-like operating system kernel, which after quite wisely skipping his first choice for a name, Freex, he named Linux. The GNU system was pretty complete by then, but was missing a kernel. It took some doing, but the GNU system adapted the Linux kernel, and we had what was the first GNU/Linux system.

Unfortunately for Stallman, most people call his baby Linux, when Linux is just the kernel of the system, while the rest is GNU. But, them's the breaks, guy. Give your project a stupid name, and suddenly find out that no one wants to mention it by name.

So, that's my Reader's Digest version of how the Linux operating system came into being. It is quite, quite incomplete, and a reader who really wants more information can find it quite easily on the Internet, or email me personally. Choose Google first. :)

This is all well and good. Now to the problems I have with these people.

First of all, in case you never noticed, most techies are out of their friggin' minds. They tend to be academics, and that means they've been to college, which means they've been likely indoctrinated (be careful, Jesse!) in left-wing groupthink, and are thus mostly socialists. Not all, but most.

On a recent email list, I observed in silent horror how the members of the list extolled the virtues of unions and using the state to force employers to pay them their "fair wage." I was quickly shouted down when I made a statement of objection. Realizing I had better things to do, I withdrew from the discussion.

The free software movement's arch-enemy is Microsoft, because Microsoft makes their money off of closed-source software, is an evil corporate monopoly, and because Bill Gates put out a hit on Richard Stallman's firstborn. Just kidding. Stallman, thankfully, doesn't have children. They have a whole philosophy section on the GNU website.

Microsoft has done some dastardly things such as violating contracts, but is not a monopoly, and anyone who says otherwise either doesn't know what he's talking about, has a political agenda, or both.

I haven't even mentioned the sister movement to free software, called Open Source, which is based on practical advantages of using free software instead of the so-called "ethical" side of it.

I have nothing but appreciation for the free software movement's technical achievements, as I enjoy the fruits of their labors on a daily basis. I browse the web with Mozilla. I do my email with Kontact. I use OpenOffice.org. The list is quite extensive.

This whole "freedom" thing, however, is pure, unadulterated bunk to be sent to the body's standard output device.

Any movement comprised of hard-core left-wingers isn't going to be favor of freedom. They want only the freedom to do what they want with their software, and nothing more. They still want government mail (whatever would we do with government mail?) and the rest of the assortment of government programs.

These people believe on one hand that the government should punish Microsoft for anti-trust violations but at the same time criticize the same pack of drunken sailors over the DMCA.

At least Eric Raymond, the co-founder of the Open Source Initiative, is a libertarian. At least with him there's some consistency when he says that free software is about preserving freedom. But when a lefty like Stallman opines about freedom, it has a habit of coming off like a hooker lecturing about chastity.

If you look at Stallman's website, and spend time reading what he has to say on various political issues, and then see his picture, you'd be shocked to see that he actually doesn't have a picture of Karl Marx tattooed on his forehead.

And he has to audacity to say he loves freedom. Somehow, to him, people entering into a voluntary contract with Microsoft is antithetical to freedom.

Perhaps if Stallman had as good an understanding of the English language as he does of C, he'd be a little different.

Why Republicans don't live up to their rhetoric

2004-08-25T17:47:00.000-04:00

The Republicans speak a good game, but there's a reason they don't follow through and reduce government -- there is no profit from it.

They can, however, make big profit from telling people that they're going to reduce government. They can rouse the masses by telling the people that they'll kill the income tax, but they never will.

Why?

They won't do it because as soon as they do all the things they promise, they'll lose their funding.

For example, gun-rights groups pour millions into the Republicans every election cycle, hoping that the Republicans will fight to uphold the second amendment to the Constitution. But, if they do that, they'll lose all the money that the NRA, Gun Owners of America, etc. are giving them.

They really find themselves in the perfect position. On the one hand, they can vote in a liberal fashion because it will win Democrat voters, and they can speak in a so-called conservative fashion and win Republican/conservative voters. The Democrats are capable of many types of scams, but a scam like this is beyond their ability.

So, spread the word to your Republican friends, and emphasize that the reason the Republicans aren't going to help them is because they have every incentive not to do so.

Maybe the poor Iraqis are better off after all...

2004-08-24T17:50:00.000-04:00

I picked this up from the moron in charge of the Iraq War was Wrong blog, which is the ultimate testament to why the government school system must be abolished, becuz the ghai cont spel werth a damm.

Get this, the Iraqi War protestor semi-literate person has this complaint about the continuing occupation:

Saw this Iraq story on some fellow liberal websight (forget where) and he was incensed (IRRC) and well I am too: The US is forbidding Iraq from having a centrallly planned economy and protectionism and FORCING them to have a market economy with low taxes and freer trade!

The irony of this statement is so delicious I must savor it slowly. WWMD (What would Mises do?) The outrage! The Iraqis will be free? We can't have that, dammit!

This leftist....person... is complaining that the US is forcing freedom onto the Iraqi people, and won't allow the government to control the economy?

While some of the complaints in the Common Dreams article are somewhat valid (assuming they're true -- I never trust a leftist news source at its word), the following is of not-insignificant interest:

Order No. 49 drops the tax rate on corporations from a high of 40% to a flat 15%. The income tax rate is also capped at 15%.

If such an order were implemented in the US, these brain surgeons would likely have heart attacks from the dismay that the resulting prosperity would bring, because, as we all know, poverty is the statist's unspoken goal.

Finally, get this quote:

The Bremer orders are immoral and illegal and must be repealed to allow Iraqis to govern their own economic and political future.

The market economy is what would allow the Iraqis to govern their own economic future. Thus we see the twilight zone of the loony left, next door to the loony right.

Did anyone else see this?

2004-08-22T10:52:00.000-04:00

The Salma Hayek versus Friedrich Hayek Scorecard.

A man of truth

2004-08-22T10:37:00.000-04:00

As mentioned before, I have two neoconservative friends, the Chainik Hocker and Ipcha Mistabra. Other than my beautiful spousal unit, they are the only people who know my secret identity.

Anyhow, they daven in a yeshiva near my residence, where I once also was a regular, until I had a bad experience that left me with a bad taste in my mouth for the whole establishment. There was a gentleman at that particular yeshiva (no more than few years older than I am, I'd imagine) who would wear bowties instead of neckties. I'm very fond of such things, as the gentleman in my hometown who brought me to religious observance also wears bowties. This person at the yeshiva joked with me that only "anshei emes" (men of truth) wear bowties.

Hoping there's something true to that, and hoping my friends CH and IM will listen, I bring up another ish emes, Jeffrey Tucker. :)

The first time I read anything by Mr. Tucker, it was his commentary on LRC entitled, "How to Dress Like a Man," which my wife and I found quite humorous. In the weekend edition of LRC, he has a commentary entitled, "The Violence of Conservatism," which I wish my friends would read.

A choice quote:

Some protest that conservatism once meant resistance to the welfare-warfare state. That is a fascinating piece of historiography, as interesting as the fact that liberalism once meant freedom from the state. Glasses were once called spectacles too, but in our times, language has it own meaning.

One of these days, I'm going to get around to writing a treatment about how libertarianism would benefit the Jews and how the Jews on the right are really just part of the Jews on the left wearing different clothes. Reverence for the state is the same disease regardless of the donkey or elephant label.

What we find in these disgraceful tracts is plain and simple orthodox conservatism: violent, blood-thirsty, and anti-intellectual. All the years that the party of freedom warned about the dangers of the left and what do we find? We find that the real hammer blows to American liberty are being delivered by an unexpected source: the right you might once have thought represented a freedom-minded alternative to Clinton and Carter.

You were lied to.

Indeed, we were all lied to. Yet some are still "proud Republicans."

A rainy Shabbos, and other news

2004-08-22T00:18:00.000-04:00

Well, it's past midnight, and I felt like blogging.

Yesterday afternoon, my spousal unit and I took child version 1 to spend Shabbos at the spousal unit's mother's house because a friend of our family was making a bar mitzvah in the area. It was a very nice, catered affair. I don't have cholent that I think is fabulous very often, and this catered cholent was, I must say, pretty damn good. It had enough meat in it to satisfy the most voracious eater, such as your humble correspondent.

Soon, the spousal unit and I will be moving, and then we will have to make our own cholent, instead of mooching off our landlords, like we've done for the last two years, who have been extremely kind to us.

The only drawback to going to my mother in law's place for Shabbos is the old shul where we go to daven. The place is a hundred years old, it's enormous, the congregation is small, and they can't afford air conditioning, even in the heat of August. Needless to say, I soaked through my shirt.

The catering hall was nicely air-conditioned. As we were getting ready to leave, though, the heavens opened up a tremendous rainstorm (thanks, Charley, we appreciate it!) which lasted all of about 20 minutes, after which we walked back to the house, and sedative effect of the cholent hit me, and I fell fast asleep for three hours.

Anyhoo, I realized who Jesse Ogden is. I had first read a commentary he wrote some time ago about how he refuses to vote. I liked his writing, and thought he seemed unusually articulate for a drone churned out by a government school.

So, when Mr. Ogden placed a comment on my blog, I thought to myself, "self, where do you know this name from? It seems awfully familiar." Only a day later did I realize that this kid was a Lew Rockwell columnist.

Then the haughty part of me came into play. My friend, the Chainik Hocker, is striving to achieve dominance in the blogosphere, and is trying to get links on as many sites as possible. Here I am doing nothing of the sort, and Jesse links to me on his blog. Assuming I don't do anything to honk Jesse off, my link will still be there on his blog the next time he writes a piece for LRC, and the byline on his commentary will likely have a link to his blog, which has a link to my blog, and I have the potential for thousands of hits when that happens.

Chainik Hocker called me a bad name when I told him this, but that's okay, because he's my buddy. He should look on the bright side of things, and keep in mind that if I get thousands of hits, he'll likely get a portion because I link to his site.

Caf Z'chus, dude!

Flattery gets you nowhere! ...err....

2004-08-20T07:30:00.000-04:00

I'm a sucker for compliments, and after Jesse made such a nice compliment on my blog, I feel obligated to let him know how flattered I am, and link to this post on his (or is it her's -- Jesse is a unisex name) for the benefit perhaps of my friends, the Chainik Hocker and Ipcha Mistabra.

In other news, the email posting function still does not work properly, and I'm going to have to email Blogger about it.

Jesse, thanks for reading my blog. I have no idea how you found it, since I look on the list of blogs that include my interests, and I found everyone else's except for mine.

Jerry Falwell is going to have a field day with this one...

2004-08-17T12:36:00.000-04:00

I previously blogged about the whole shebang with Jersey's sorry excuse for a governor. Don't picture me a bigot -- I hated him before he came out of the closet. Believe me, he's got a lot more hidden in his closet than his sexuality.

Today, I found via Google News this commentary by a homosexual writer in California, which I think is, quite simply put, brilliant.

The writer, Steve Yuhas, has the same beef with McGreevey that I have: he was unfaithful to his wife.

As a side-note, this past week at the Shabbos table, there were people who thought that McGreevey was completely ruined. No, I said, he just saved his whole damn career. I explained to the family with whom my wife and I were eating that McGreevey was now going to become the darling of the left, and will go on to become a gay activist, and will likely makes lots of moolah on the speaking circuit. What do you know? I wasn't the only one who figured this: Yuhas thinks the same thing.

Choice quotes from the commentary:

From all that we've learned to this point, including the fact that according to Cipel's attorney negotiations were in the works up until minutes before McGreevey's news conference, it is safe to assume that McGreevey announced his sexuality because he knew Cipel would either go public or file a sexual harassment complaint against him. I'm baffled by gay organizations who describe coming out while staring down the barrel of a gun as a courageous act. There are closeted people serving in all walks of life, but to make heroes out of men and women who lie their way to the top and come out under pressure is akin to praising a thief who admits stealing after seeing that the deed has been caught on film.

Most interesting in all of this is that on the same day gay men and lesbians were glued to their televisions cheering McGreevey as he admitted his homosexuality and adultery, they were simultaneously preparing for an evening of vigils that were organized to protest the California Supreme Court's ruling that San Francisco did not have the right to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples and that the licenses already issued were void.

So, they fight for the right to get married, but cheer when someone commits adultery?

It is exactly this type of hypocrisy that fuels the wacky Falwell-types on the right in their crusade to discriminate against homosexuals.

For the record, I am a libertarian. I dislike homosexuality, but I'm not going to be up in arms against homosexuals. The only thing about the homosexual agenda that I find objectional is their drive to get special status under the law. If a person doesn't want to hire a homosexual on account of his sexuality, I have no problem with that.

And, before you ask the question, dear reader, the answer is NO: I do not support the laws that prevent employers from discriminating against me on account of me being openly Jewish. If an employer is an anti-semite, and doesn't want to hire Jews, no one should hold a gun to his head and tell him to do so. He who does not hire me will have to deal with a competitor who will hire me and benefit from my productivity, just the same as an employer who discriminates against homosexuals will have to deal with a competitor who will hire homosexuals and benefit from their productivity.

It will not take much time before McGreevey is on a speaking tour of college campuses or out signing copies of his autobiography. It is almost certain that he will be invited to be the grand marshal of a gay parade next year. But if gays and lesbians were truly concerned about marriage and truly desired the privilege of entering into the most important of unions, you would think they'd be less enamored by McGreevey. The pressure on McGreevey to leave office before Nov. 15 continues, and if gay activists were wise, they would join the chorus.

I couldn't agree more.

I tried arguing with him, but I got a headache, you see...

2004-08-17T07:17:00.000-04:00

Butler Shaffer has a most excellent article on Lew Rockwell today. Go. Read.

A few words about New Jersey's "governor"

2004-08-17T00:32:00.000-04:00

The one thing that bothered me the most about Jim McSkeevey's admission about his secret gay life is that he was essentially admitting adultery and then everyone applauded afterwards. It's like the fact that he broke his promise to his wife was completely irrelevant.

I'm just glad he's leaving, and I don't even live in the armpit of America.

I recall him talking to John Gambling a while back about how millionaires and corporations needed to be paying more of their fair share of taxes, blah blah blah, youknowthewholeliberalBSmentalitything.

Praise the Lord, McSkeevey is leaving. May the Lord save us from whoever replaces him.

Them gays is tearin' this country apart, boy!

2004-08-16T20:56:00.000-04:00

Robert recently blogged on a subject that I have been wanting to address, which is the "right" wing and their obsession with cultural issues.

The California Supreme Court invalidated a marriage between two homosexuals in some California town.

To this I say, who cares?

When I married my wife, I was tempted not to bother with the legal civil end of the marriage, as the religious aspect of it was all that mattered to me.

When I get a marriage license, what I allowed to do with my wife that I wasn't previously allowed to do?

There is no way to get homosexuals to stop acting on their urges, other than trying to convince them that it's wrong. Using the state to accomplish this end is completely misguided and destined for failure. After all, we can see what rousing successes the war on drugs and the war on poverty have been. A war on immorality would similarly be counterproductive.

I personally find homosexual behavior disgusting and reprehensible. However, I have other issues that require my attention, like making a living and raising a family. They are free to love whomever they want, as long as they don't get that love on me.

Issues like this are the means by which the Republicans rattle their masses to keep voting for them, much in the same way that the Democrats make calls that the opposition is going to take away Grandma's social security check unless you vote Democrat. If you vote Democrat, the gays are going to destroy marriage! Feh. As long as I can still be married to my beautiful spousal unit, let the fageles be fageles and let me be free to disassociate from them.

In summation, when you hear the words "cultural issues," you should usually be on the lookout for a scam.

Chainik Hocker to miss RNC: Shock, confusion, relief

2004-08-15T01:56:00.000-04:00

My friend, the Chainik Hocker, is sorry to report that he missed his opportunity to plague the RNC with his presence. I am shocked, shocked, I tell you.

In all honesty, I think a better gig came along and he doesn't want to admit it. I smell conspiracy. Stay tuned.

On the fritz....

2004-08-12T18:04:00.000-04:00

I've been trying to post to my blog using the email function and it ain't working. I'm forced to resort to this because Websense is now blocking the blogger.com domain, and I do my posting mostly from work.

Fear not, dear reader. I'll regale you with my opinions still. Stay tuned.

It makes me mighty uncomfortable

2004-08-10T23:31:00.000-04:00

I picked up a flyer for the guy running for our district judge, a fellow Yid named Charles Finkelstein.

It does not make me happy when Jews seek to attain political office. Not happy at all.

So, the flyer says that he was a narcotics prosecutor, and that got me steaming.

It's no secret that there's a drug problem among a segment of the Orthodox Jewish youth in NYC. But, I'll bet two to one odds that Finkelstein would go out of his way to cut slack to the Jewish drug users, because if a Jew uses drugs, he needs understanding, but if a goy uses drugs, it requires jail time.

Along a similar vein, isn't it interesting how both Al Gore and George W. Bush admitted to drug use in their youth, but neither one of them volunteered to turn themselves in and serve jail time? Obviously, their characters are so flawless that they wouldn't benefit from such treatment, hmm?

I never thought it would happen!

2004-08-09T23:13:00.000-04:00

I think I just discovered my complete opposite number.

It lives and breathes, you see...

2004-08-09T12:45:00.000-04:00

I laughed when I came across this last month, and was reminded of it by today's Mises.org daily article.

So, in a nutshell, the Republicans were up in arms back in 2001-2002 over the blatantly unconstitutional anti-free speech McCain-Feingold campaign finance law.

Now that Michael Moore (you know, the socialist blowhard) has a successful movie out that is making money, the Republicans are trying to abridge the free speech of that movie.

Like Harry Browne has pointed out in the past, we don't have a living, breathing Constitution, nor do we need to divine "original intent." The document is written in plain English, and the only thing you need to do to understand the Constitution is read it. "Congress shall make no law" means that Congress shall make no law! Imagine that. I'm a constitutional scholar. Wow.

Always Low Principles. Always.

2004-08-09T08:26:00.000-04:00

An issue of great interest to many libertarians today is the rampant abuse of emminent domain. Steven Greenhut wrote an excellent article on the subject that's linked on Lew Rockwell today.

There are many forces at work today that are attacking Wal-Mart and Costco and other big name stores for their "business practices." A prime example of this foolishness can be found at the Always Low Prices website. I once read an article linked there written by a botonist (a botonist??) that complained that a cashier working at Wal-Mart couldn't afford to take care of a family of four on what Wal-Mart pays.

Can you imagine? Which is more ridiculous -- that a cashier can't support a family or that a botonist actually thinks that a cashier should earn enough money manning a cashier to support a family?

Most cashiers are high school kids who don't need to support families, and the ones who do are usually in that situation because of their own irresponsible choices. That's not Wal-Mart's fault.

On the other hand, getting back to my original topic, Wal-Mart does have business practices that we libertarians find offensive, and that is their abuse of emminent domain.

Imagine, for a moment, that you have a plot of land on which you've had a family homestead for a hundred years. Wal-Mart or Costco covets that plot, and wants to build a store on it. You refuse to sell, so they send their representatives to whisper in the ears of the local government officials to force the person to sell his property and vamoose. This is called emminent domain, and the scenario I just described is outrageous, and it occurs all to often in today's world, and the media is, for the most part, silent about it.

So, if you want to boycott Wal-Mart, do it for a reason that makes sense.

Ociffer, I'm only slllliightly annibricated

2004-08-08T01:34:00.000-04:00

This was probably the nicest Shabbos that I've had in a really long time. The Spousal Unit and I packed our bags and went to friends of ours who live on the other side of the alphabet in Flatbush, and behold! -- it was good.

I've been suffering from a major urge to drink margaritas, and what do you know? Our hosts just happened to have the fixin's for margaritas!

So, while all you plebians were having cholent and some sugar filled carbonated beverage, I was having cholent with margaritas, baby!

I had three with Shabbos lunch, and our host makes a most righteous cholent, and the hostess is quite a cook in their own right, and they're just fabulous people to be around.

I hadn't had a margarita since my Sheva Brachos, which our Shabbos host happened to had made for us then also. I'm not a big drinker anymore (hell, who am I kidding? I never was a big drinker) and I can confidently say that the Cabo Wabo tequila had me pleasantly drunk.

Davening was nice. I hadn't enjoyed davening much lately, but today was pretty nice.

Shabbos margaritas. Life is good. Now if we could just get a soy cheese that tastes like real cheese, and we can have chicken quesadillas with margaritas and not go to hell as a result.

Alas, that Chainik Hocker guy thinks I'm going to hell anyway. Maybe I should spread vicious lies about him like Frank J used to do. More on this later.

An important constitutional dilemma?

2004-08-08T00:08:00.000-04:00

I have taken the liberty of sending this message and attachment to anyone with whom I have ever discussed politics, however briefly. Please read through all the mailings until you get to the medical information about 42. My concern is that there are no guidelines for the Congress or the Supreme Court to act in the event that the mental (or physical) condition of the President becomes questionable and there are no standards of mental competency for the President. Staunch dedicated right wingers will say all this is nonsense, lies, etc. so it not worthwhile trying to discuss this with them. I guess the decent thing to do is to inform people so that Bush can leave the White House with some dignity even though defeated.

This quote comes from an email that I received yesterday from a left-wing family member who sends anti-right wing nonsense to me on an almost daily basis. I find it irritating when she makes me want to defend the Republicans, who really are quite inept at the political game in most cases, making you feel sorry for them (unless that was their goal, in which case they're aces).

I emailed her back that I had no way of verifying the information contained in the email, and I find it hard to believe that the left-wing media would ignore yet another opportunity to bash the Emperor of the Holy American Empire.

So, according to this email, we have a constitutional crisis on our hands if the President of the United States becomes mentally unstable.

No, I emailed her back, we don't. I explained that we only have a Constitutional crisis if we have a "living, breathing Constitution." The real Constitution requires no special guidelines in the event of mental incapacitation like this because the President, according to the rules in the Constitution, really can't do that much damage if the Constitution is strictly enforced.

So, in other words, you reap what you sow. You didn't want the follow the rules? Gee, life sucks when it blows up in your face, eh?

Badnarik Nails It

2004-08-06T11:50:00.000-04:00

WND (Weapons of National Destruction) is running an article today about the firestorm the Republicans have created with the great unwashed by proposing the abolition of the IRS and the institution of a national sales tax.

Michael Badnarik is seeking the end to the 16th Amendment to the Constitution, which gives Congress the power to tax incomes in the first place, and is quoted as having said something that had already occurred to me:

"If we don't get rid of the authority for the income tax, it won't go away. We'll end up with Hastert's national sales tax or value added tax or whatever ... and the income tax, too," he said.

This is a con game. Okay, so we end up with a national sales tax. I can virtually guarantee you that the income tax will return within ten years' time, and then we'll have a 40% sales tax tacked onto everything we buy, and we'll still have to pay income taxes, and we'll be back to living in Hoovervilles. FDR sure made us feel warm and fuzzy with his fireside chats while his administration did everything in its power to make sure the Depression was as long and dreadful as possible, and we have no hope in 2004 of having an emperor who is as talented an orator as was FDR. And please, dear reader, as a side note, don't spew that nonsense to me how the war brought us out the Depression. It didn't.

This whole thing is nothing more than a Republican con game. Nothing to see here. Move along.

Britney, why do they hate you?

2004-08-05T12:53:00.000-04:00

I walked by the Britney Murphy movie poster, and it's been spray painted again.

Religious fanatics? In Brooklyn? Say it isn't so!

2004-08-04T23:50:00.000-04:00

There's some movie with that Britney Murphy (how I know her name is beyond me -- I don't think I've ever seen any of her movies) called "Little Black Book" or some such nonsense. There's a poster for this movie at the bus stop outside Cafe Napoli (awesome cafe, btw) and Avenue M. I noticed the poster walking by one day. The next time I saw that bus stop, someone had spray painted over Miss Murphy's face and torso.

Very soon thereafter, the spray paint was removed, and there was that anorexic blonde's face again.

Again, the poster was spray-painted.

Today, I noticed that yet again, the paint had been removed.

There is no point to this story, actually. I cannot assume that it was religious lunatics offended by the poster, as we've seen much worse in Flatbush. Hell, all the non-Jewish women walking through our streets are half-naked in the summer compared to that poster.

It could have been practical jokers.

Or Masons. It's probably the Masons.

Who is this Robert guy, anyway?

2004-08-04T23:38:00.000-04:00

I don't know him, but I like his style, and his wit.

He and I have traded comments on each other's blogs, and I'm really enjoying his comments on life and politics.

He brought to my attention the Iraq War Was Wrong Blog, where the world's most inept and illiterate fools try to explain why the war was, like, totally wrong, you know?

I feel I should say that it is partly because of the idiot liberal reaction to the Iraq war that I had a knee-jerk response in favor of it, and became quite uncomfortable agreeing with Lew Rockwell and Harry Browne because here were people who clearly were not liberals, yet were very articulate and made sense why the war was wrong. Yet, the fact that so many liberal bozos were against it that made me feel that surely the war must have been justified.

This blog that Robert brought to my attention on his blog today is a case in point. The people who created this blog need to be subjected to a new form of reality TV based on Monty Python's skit about the fish-slapping dance where all participants must stand on a bridge and be hit so hard by an especially large trout that they fall into the river.

The caption under the title reads verbatim as follows:

"A wrong war like during the Iraq war was cannot just be sitted idly by by." --The Proprietor

The grammar in this statement feels like fingernails on a blackboard amplified by a loudspeaker. Obviously, I am one of the few people who escaped government schools and is actually capable of forming a complete sentence relatively free of grammatical error. I'll bet you dinner at Essex on Coney that these dolts went to public school.

It's perfectly safe -- you can trust me

2004-08-04T22:51:00.000-04:00

I've been married over two years now (!!!!!) and I can tell you that it's an experience that I highly recommend, and having been to this side of the fence, the grass is definitely greener.

I thought I'd write a sappy ode to my Spousal Unit, celebrating her wonderfulness and such, but decided instead to write an erotic tale.

Just kidding. We frummies don't do such things.

My wife loves me more than anyone other than my parents, and does everything she can to make me a better person. Believe me, that's hard work. And I love her dearly.

And, last night, she made me chicken.

Fried chicken.

And behold, it was goooooood.

Need I say more?

I can only end this post with premarital advice for those looking for a future spouse:

When you're dating a girl, and you're serious about getting married, any issues that come up should *NOT* be put on the back burner. After marriage, tons of things come up, so if there's problems coming up beforehand, it'll only increase geometrically after the wedding. I had a broken engagement prior to meeting my wife, and I must say that if I had followed the advice I'm doling out now, I could have saved both me and my former fiance a world of heartache.

My second piece of advice is the following I heard from the great Rabbi Akiva Tatz of the fading British Empire: when you're born, you are missing your other half. When you get married, your spouse fills that other half. The longer you're single, the more you begin to compensate for that missing half, creating a situation whereby when you actually do get married, your spouse is trying to fill a space in your heart for which you've already compensated, and that adjustment becomes much more difficult.

Michael Badnarik != Ralph Nader

2004-08-04T21:12:00.000-04:00

Public Enemy #1 had the audacity to say that Michael Badnarik is copying Ralph Nader. This is ridiculous to the highest degree. Badnarik is copying a far more august group of people -- Harry Browne, David Nolan, and that bunch of bums called the Founding Fathers.

Public Enemy #1 is obviously trying to bait me. I'll wait until I read his reports from the RNC before I do anything about this.

Alas....

2004-08-04T12:22:00.000-04:00

This is too funny to miss.

Damn Websense!

2004-08-04T09:09:00.000-04:00

Websense caught on quickly and banned Michael Badnarik's website. Therefore, it blocks my shameless political plug from viewing properly at work.

Down with Websense! Websense == evil!