And now, the 8th Annual Halloween Document from Microsoft!

Mark Steyn has has piece to say about gun control, and why it isn't working in Britain. You wanted my opinion? There's no way to make criminals give up their guns, so forcibly disarming the citizenry just ensures that the criminals have a steady stream of helpless victims. Furthermore, gun control laws demonstrate that, rather than doing something about the predators in the jungle, the lawmakers and police have decided to give up completely and try to pin blame on the population. It's just nasty, and both South Africa and Great Britain are demonstrating rather conclusively that is doesn't work.

A brief comparison note: gun owners in Texas are more law-abiding than the general population. So we are we disarming the people that have demonstrated they can most be trusted with our civil defense? Can we at least try trusting "we, the people"?

Argh. I hear various people saying that Islamic belief isn't the source of misogyny, but damn me if they don't disprove themselves. I realize it isn't our job to make the rest of the world stop acting like fuckwits, but I certainly have a few suggestions along those lines.

I read this essay by Steven Den Beste about the concept of "a fair fight" between combatants. Then, I read this response by Robin Goodfellow. My reaction turns, as did Mr. Goodfellow's, on SDB's comment "Would I rule out torture, rape, mutilation, mass murder? I won't rule out anything."

SDB claims that if we capture an enemy combatant who's planted a nuke in an American city with the timer ticking, then he's shoving pointy things under the guy's fingernails. Mr.Goodfellow says that some things are beyond the pale, and he's willing to die rather than do those things to live.

Good for Mr.Goodfellow, and I hope that we never have to depend on his punk ass. His claim that it's better to die than to live means that he's decided that my daughters would be better off dead all by his lonesome. Fuck him. With a stick. If a combatant is holding our population hostage and there isn't any other alternative, then the guys on the spot have to commit themselves to hell so that the rest of the nation can live. That's just the deal, and I'll further claim that that's always been the deal: the soldier's existence requires him to endanger his soul in order to save his people. If you're not willing to make that trade, then cover yourself in white paint and quit pretending you're not a pacifist free rider.

And yes, I'm willing to make that trade. The lives of my family, neighbors, state, and nation are worth more than my "soul". Damn, but I'm pissed now.

UPDATE: I hadn't yet read Kim du Toit's response. If I had, I'd have just pointed at that and said "You damned skippy". After my wife read my response we had a short-ish discussion, wherein the phrase "Marquis of Queensbury" came out of my mouth. I'm thrilled to pieces to find that I'm on the same wavelength.

And now, the very special condensed parody version of "Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers". Found by Mindles H. Dreck.

Apparently, some H&R Block employees were stealing customers' identities for plain ol' fraud and theft. The ugly part is the company wouldn't assist without subpoenas. Wouldn't you think they'd like to ensure their credibility with their customers enough to assist the Feds in an investigation?

John Scalzi gets a publishing deal from his website. No joke, jackson.

I'm also pleased to say that the book deal comes as a direct result of having the book up here on the Web site; the editor who made the offer (Patrick Nielsen Hayden, who in addition to being the Senior Editor of Tor is the author of the Electrolite blog) did so after reading chapters on the site and then downloading the complete book (and by doing so, Mr. Nielsen Hayden's ranking on my list of People Who Can Ask For a Kidney and Not Be Dismissed Out of Hand has shot up rather dramatically over the last few days. And I can assure you, it's a very short list).

A different legal structure for distributing your non-software works under a commons-friendly system: Creative Commons. Found via Lawrence Lessig, who copyrights his blog writings and licenses them under the "by" variant.

Strangely enough, I find it more difficult to blog when working from home than I do when in the office. It's probably a function of the density of distraction; at the office, there isn't anything except the other humans who are all full-grown and many of them are humor-impaired. At home, I have a 10 month old daughter who is a continual source of amusment, and I find I'd rather pick her up and tickle/hug/kiss her when I have a spare moment much more than I want to read CNN. Go figure.

A short(ish) whitepaper from Intel on securing your home network. Unfortunately, as they point out, these measures are "well-known security measures are both inadequate and burdensome", but you still have to deal with it.

"Hey check out my new wireless keyboard" says Norwegian local. "Yeah, I see" says his neighbor (also his employee). "I also see your keystrokes on my computer" he added. Yet another vulnerability to think about, in this day of wireless everything.

David Kahn, the author of one of the most important books about cryptography, spoke at the NSA about the death of cryptology. It's a short speech, but one that I found interesting anyway.

Yet another reason why Bill Frist is better than Trent Lott: he's willing to get out of the car.

shift.com posts their list of the key and stupid web moments of 2002. Good clean wholesome fun.

BWA-hahahahaha! Why not to direct link to other people's pictures. Ho ho ho.

Tim Blair makes his predictions for the new year. I wonder, though, how much of this will be funny to people who don't read blogs obsessively, because I was laughing out loud and interrupting my cow-orkers on several occasions.

This may be the first time I've read something written by David Mamet. Usually I just listen to actors reciting what he's written. Anyway ... he took a trip to Israel and had this to say about the experience.

A quick runthrough a pair of news stories from Reuters with commentary on framing bias by the incomparable Meryl Yourish. Great fun. Have some.

Max Boot lays out what he thinks defines a "neoconservative". Doesn't sound too far off of "South Park Republican" to me, by the way. I also see I'll need to go find an issue of Commentary to see what a "neocon bible" looks like.

I'll just quote Razib's lede and leave it at that: Wow-times have changed, but it's still whitey's fault!

BWA-hahahahaha! Scrappleface details the changes a-comin' to the church now that they're getting some of that Powerball money.

Corsair the Rational Pirate finds an interesting story about an American on the receiving end of a fatwa judgement, plus the cause of said death sentence (such as it is). In his own words:

Once again it is proved that Islamonazis have no sense of humor. If you can't laugh at youself, everyone else will do your laughing for you. You just look stupid and ignorant when you protest things like this

Tony Woodlief unloads a short stream of cluefulness on his own relatives. Well done, my good man. Well done indeed.

Nobody cares but me, I suppose, but because of Tim Blair I've been thinking about why I'm doing this. Way back when, I just trolled around the web and other people's blogs looking for things that I found interesting. As I found each one, I'd email them to my short list of victims (in fact, that's what I called the mailing list: "victims"). Eventually, Lee decided that I should stop emailing the links around and started this blog. The first two of three things I posted were pretty much just what I would have emailed out: a link with maybe one sentence worth of context. In an email to my wife, this is okay; on a publicly-available blog, not so much so.

My current theory ties in with the rather common "thinkers" v. "linkers" dichotomy, although I dispute the implication that I'm not thinking when I choose to spend my credibility (such as it is) in recommending someone else's writing. I posit instead that everybody is a newspaperman. Some people, Steven Den Beste, Eric S. Raymond, Bill Whittle, Jane Galt, et al, write their articles to suit themselves. They have some position on some topic, and write about it to whatever extent they find necessary. In short, they're journalists. Other people, like me, don't write the newspaper but we do select from the set of articles to accumulate a periodic digest of interesting bits of writing plus the occasional op-ed. In short, we're publishers.

You might imagine that being a gatekeeper is an easy job, and I'll certainly agree that it doesn't involve as much typing as authoring the content in the first place. The downside is that Jane Galt writes two or three posts a day; on an average day, I read every posting on every blog on my blogroll since the last time I read it (which was probably yesterday). I'll try to remember to count today how many things I'll read through to find the two/three/six/ten things that I think are important/relevant/amusing enough and in the right vein to make people like me go "Cool/Huh/#$@@#^", but I suspect it's over 200 articles a day. It's different work than writing the articles, but it isn't falling off a log either.

Anyway, I'll try to be worthy of Tim's praise going forward. Thanks for listening.

UPDATE: 205 articles before starting the commercial news outlets, and it's a slow news day in that lots of bloggers had no updates at all. That's me ... selflessly slaving away reading all this stuff so you don't have to. Unless you want to, in which case you can follow the links I've provided over there <--- on the left side of the screen.

Gary Farber was kind enough to write me a polite letter pointing out that I had inadvertently credited his blog to some guy named "Brian". He was gentlemanly enough not to call me "stupid", so he gets extra bonus points. Sorry 'bout that, sir.

Oh, my aching sides. Tim Blair reviews the execrable Bowling for Columbine for The Australian. What he said.

Why, just this morning a colleague asked me why Jimmy Carter is an Idiotarian. I replied that it was mostly his knee-jerk anti-America bent plus his willingness to fellate foreign dictators. And, in a stunning bit of synchronicity, I stumbled across Jay Nordlinger's anti-paen to Carter himself from earlier this year. (Found via Little Green Footballs)

Them's fightin' words!!! That ain't barbecue, it's smoked brisket and/or ribs. Barbecue is, by definition, chopped pork in yellow mustard sauce, although I'll allow that chopped pork in vinegar/pepper sauce is almost barbecue.

By the bye, anybody who uses "barbecue" as a verb is obviously beyond apostasy, and should be enlightened at gunpoint if need be.

I'm shocked, shocked!!, to find that Hans Blix and crew are bungling the interviews with Iraqi scientists. Who could have imagined such a thing?

BWA-hahahahahaha! Save the Earth! Drive an SUV!

I'm sure I'm behind the curve on this, but I just watched the "Lamp" commercial from IKEA at www.unböring.com and loved it. Consequently, I can only assume the general public will be either (1) offended or (2) completely indifferent. Sigh.

Professor Bunyip describes his journey from leftist to not-a-leftist (presumably a conservative, but he didn't label himself). Found via Tim Blair.