Daily Archives: February 2, 2006

End The War Now!

This entry was posted in Anarchism Constitution Drug Laws Government Law Law Enforcement Libertarianism on by

As Ron says:

While the war in Iraq may outrageous there is another war that is equally outrageous and is truly bi-partisan, the war on drugs.

And Anthony Gregory frames this abomination as we all should:

The drug war is misdirected. It is foolish. It is stupid, unworkable, disastrous, tragic and sad. But beyond all that it is evil.
The drug war is grounded in an evil premise: that people do not own their bodies, that they have no right to control what they do with their own lives and their own property, that it is appropriate to lock them in cages if they produce, distribute or consume chemicals in defiance of the state.
This is a monstrosity. As long as America has the drug war, it is not a free country. Politicians who support it and expand it, knowing the evils it entails, have no business lecturing us on morality.
The ideology of the war on drugs is the ideology of totalitarianism, of communism, of fascism and of slavery. In practice, it has made an utter mockery of the rule of law and the often-spouted idea that America is the freest country on earth.

Read the rest and then consider just how you will start standing up to the jackboots of the drug war. How you will help lead them to their Nuremberg and there is no excuse for any of the drug thugs be they presidents, senators, governors, mayors, narcs, prosecutors, swat teams, etc. They should all know better.

They are all guilty of crimes against humanity.

The End of the ‘Best Of’ Discs?

This entry was posted in Economics Information Internet Music Technology on by

Ann Althouse asks the vital question:

Should we care if iTunes is killing the marking for “best of” music collections?

My immediate response I don’t care if best of collections fade into history. I don’t buy them.
Let’s, though, take this as a serious question and read the linked article. We need only read part way down the first page to see that Ann’s question distorts the article which posits a hypothetical question:

What if fans who might have paid for a full album of “the very best” of an established act instead choose to pay substantially less and simply buy the very, very best song?

And, after discussing various aspects of the question they get to this:

In many instances, however, record executives say online sales do not appear to be hurting their best sellers.

It appears that for, at least the folks with a substantive set of work, the best ofs will be successful for some time more. And, if a one/two hit wonder’s best of sales plummet to zero, well, great! This is as it should be and the saved money will be spent on something else.

Creative destruction in action.

alito’s First Action

This entry was posted in Law on by

I’ll admit to raising an eyebrow a bit when I saw this:

Alito, handling his first case, sided with inmate Michael Taylor, who had won a stay from an appeals court earlier in the evening. Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas supported lifting the stay, but Alito joined the remaining five members in turning down Missouri’s last-minute request to allow a midnight execution.

Granted that one vote does not a career or trend make but if you listened closely to a lot of the folks who opposed alito you’d almost think he was carrying a scythe himself.
I’ll be interested to read the reaction at Talkleft which had quite a few posts reporting on alito and the death penalty.
There’s more at Scotusblog.

Via Gary Farber.