Posted 11:04 PM by Floyd

This week a road construction crew is repaving the road (California Highway 84) in front of my house. The side effects of this project are relentless beeping noises, the smell of fresh tar, and a wait in line if I want to turn left out of my driveway. This is a normal experience for many people, but it's a bit unusual for me because I live in a rural area.

That last sentence was a lie. I do not live in a rural area. I have been to rural areas, in Indiana and elsewhere, and my town looks nothing like it. There are no agricultural animals, no long highways with acres of crops on either side. Woodside is what you get when you take highly desirable land in a large and wealthy area and partition it so that no one can build on less than one acre.

I did not invent the lie; it's spoken often enough here in Woodside, and probably in similar communities throughout the country. Its purpose is to justify the politics dominant in Bay Area suburbs. Local politics has nothing to do with the great and vexing issues of our age; war and peace, civil liberties, abortion are all irrelevant. What the typical Woodsider wishes to do is to prevent people from driving their cars on local streets; to prevent new houses and construction from being built; and to harass anyone who might wish to alter their existing property.

There is an acronym called NIMBY which stands for Not In My BackYard. I don't really consider the politics I am about to describe as NIMBY politics, because I think of NIMBYism as the avoidance of something unpleasant, a game of hot potato. You might think it is selfish for someone to object to a new prison, power plant, or halfway house in their neighborhood. But at the same time you would have to concede that you would not want one of those things close to you.

Let's invent a new acronym ANWIC: Anything New Will Instantly Cease. The ANWICer does not want to see a new house go up or a n+1th car drive by. To be fair, objecting to these nuisances is rational; an empty street is better than a busy one, an empty lot may appear nicer than the house replacing it -- and the process of constructing said house will be noisy and annoying.

But ANWIC is an attempt to undo the natural process of development and growth. Because people wish to build houses, to drive cars, and in general to live in the Bay Area, development can be prevented only by intransigence, and a fierce unwillingness to permit any growth anywhere.

ANWIC is mean-spirited and selfish. For instance, several major thoroughfares in the nearby town of Palo Alto have a speed limit of 25 MPH. It is impossible to drive at 25 MPH, and it is certainly ridiculous to do so on a four-lane street that connects the main drag with one of the major highways. But Palo Alto doesn't care -- they don't have to drive through the town, they just live in it. Even worse, the city makes continual threats to narrow one such road to one lane in each direction!

Because ANWIC is misanthropist, it needs a painted-on happy face. There are many ANWIC euphemisms, which I am sure are familiar to just about anyone who lives in a similar burg:

• "Preserving the rural character of our community"
  
• Protecting open space
  
• Traffic calming
  
• Planning commission
  
  What is there to plan in a town of 5000 with no industry
  and one block of businesses?
  
• "Appropriate for our neighborhood"
  
  Object to homosexuals or blacks, you're a bigot;
  object to two-story houses, you're a saint
  

Nothing is sacred to the strangling scum who would stop anything from being built anywhere. For example, the stereotype is that rich liberals adore education. Every time there is a ballot issue to allow some school to dig into your pockets, the placards urging yes votes are ubiquitous. A few months ago the Phillip Brooks School (a private institution) wanted to move to a 90-acre site in Woodside. Local residents strongly objected. (For instance, there were letters to the local paper complaining about all the grade changes that would take place. I suppose Phillip Brooks students should be happy to sit on a slanted floor, and after a few weeks the compensatory leaning would be automatic.) There was some negotiation
back and forth; ultimately the plan was rejected because it would not "protect open space".

This is a school. From Woodside's actions, you would think "Phillip Brooks" was the name of an especially rapacious strip mining corporation. An expensive private school campus is beautiful and complements the space around it; that's why on any weekend there are people wandering around Stanford.

Ultimately these tactics mar those who use them. When you mention the name of an expensive suburb like Palo Alto or Los Altos or Atherton, local middle-class people sneer at them as snobby. Now in the individual, I find the wealthy people who live in these communities friendly, outgoing, and democratic. It is their political actions which are selfish, exclusive, and hypocritical.

Posted 5:02 PM by Floyd

I was reading Nick Denton's blog today. Denton is a journalist who worked for First Tuesday and the Financial Times; he is now trying to make a career out of blogging. Denton has been tearing George W a new one every time the president enacts some new tariff to safeguard another chunk of electoral votes. He's well worth reading and has been added to my links.

But I diagree with one of his latest postings, DC and gun control:

Second Amendment advocates would find it much more convenient if the DC sniper was a terrorist. But they know perfectly well he's probably some gun nut. When that emerges, we'll hear a lot about the regulations that didn't stop him, and some disingenous statistics about crime rates in Europe and the US.

But the gun lobby is about as convincing as the tobacco companies which pretended cancer had nothing to do with cigarettes. Crud. Easy access to firearms *is* associated with higher murder rates. Dunblane -- the Scottish shooting spree -- was an exception rather than the rule. The Second Amendment obsessives, if they are ever going to speak to concerned Prince George's County soccer moms, need to acknowledge the facts.

And there is still an honest case to be made for the Second Amendment. It goes something like this. Guns do result in more fatal murders, but that is a small price to pay to guarantee freedom. The balance between the individual and government is ultimately determined by force. All the rights -- to privacy, a fair trial, of free speech, to property -- are underpinned by the power of individuals to organize against overmighty government, demonstrate, and ultimately take up arms. At a time when we are giving central government more powers, the counterweight of a people's militia is more important than ever. Even as a madman runs amok in the DC suburbs.

It's true that access to firearms makes murder easier than using an alternative. And I acknowledge that fact without reservation, even though I am a libertarian and staunch opponent of gun control. The reason that I don't have any problem admitting this is that firearms are here to stay. There are tens if not hundreds of millions of guns in America, and passing a gun control law won't change that. Even if the government managed to get a large proportion of those guns out of circulation, more could be smuggled into the country just like drugs are. Also, there are legitimate purposes for guns in the hands of police and military. If guns are banned, we can expect that those guns will be stolen from the unwary, and marketed by the unscrupulous.

So arguing over whether guns make murder easier strikes me as a pointless exercise, like arguing over whether the use of the printing press to create millions of copies of Das Kapital and Mein Kampf means that the world would be better off illiterate.

Let me qualify my earlier statement. Access to firearms makes murder easier -- for murderers. For those of us who do not wish to do murder, it makes no difference. There have been places and times in which guns were plentiful, but murderers were not. One was pre-gun-control (pre-1916) Britain, which had murder rates one-sixteenth that of the U.S. at the time. Another is present-day Switzerland.

I may be an "obsessive", but I'm not nuts enough to try to sell Prince George County's soccer moms on gun rights by telling them that sure, there may be a few more deaths in their neighborhood due to guns being legal, but it's worth it to keep the government in check. This reminds me of an argument that I came across secondhand in Albert Jay Nock's writings, where he said that when a centralized police force was proposed for London, libertarians said openly that a few throats cut in Whitechapel each year were a cheap price to pay to be free of the oppression those police could cause. This is an argument that could appeal only to people who are libertarians in the first place. It was a loser in 19th-century Britain, and won't fare much better today.

Posted 3:32 PM by Floyd

Yesterday I listened to, watched, listened to, and watched a baseball game. I don't think I have seen a complete game since I went to Candlestick to watch a game. So for the amusement of baseball fans, I will blog my impressions.

(First, a painful prologue: I watched the exciting last inning of the Twins-A's Game 5 on Sunday. Had the A's won, they would be playing the Angels in the ALCS. Had the A's taken a lead in the series, I could have taunted Angels fans with "I'm eeeeeating a rally monkey salad." Now that simple pleasure is denied to me. Fucking chokers.)

The last few days have been hot here in Silicon Valley. My friend Eric has just returned from Pittsburg. He and I are both unemployed so I suggested that we head down to Santa Cruz for some boogie-boarding. We spent the afternoon at the beach. Eric had mentioned that he wanted to watch the Giants-Braves game, which started around 5. I proposed that we find a pizza parlor or sports bar with a TV and eat while watching the game. After we returned our wetsuits and boogie boards, we got in the car and turned on the radio to hear the Giants' batters starting the game.

Unfortunately, we could not find a place to eat. Everything that looked good had no TV; we decided to blow off Little Caesar's and Round Table. I finally decided to go to the Village Host, which is very good but is several miles south, in Aptos. I got a little lost and by the time we got there it was the third inning. We heard San Francisco score two runs, a Lofton sacrifice fly and a Barry Bonds home run.

We ordered pizza and drinks and sat at some barstools, which were the only seats available for watching the game. (There was plenty of space but the main TV was turned onto the Bears-Packers Monday Night game.) There wasn't much action. The Braves scored a run to make it 2-1.

Eric wanted to go home and catch the last few innings on TV. So we got back in the car and headed home. Now there was more action. The Giants loaded the bases with no outs, but were quickly retired. Ortiz got into trouble, was pulled, and then the Braves were sent back with nothing to show for their hits.

A tight baseball game on the radio is more exciting in this way: You're on the edge of your seat a little longer waiting to hear what happened. For instance, there are men on base and the batter has a 3-2 count. On TV, you would see the pitcher swing, the batter whiff, and instantly know that there was an out. Listening to radio you hear: "The 3-2 pitch, Jones SWINGS ... and misses! Strikeout, inning over!"

We got back in the 8th inning with the score at 3-1 Giants. Eric's roommate Brian was there, and had the TV on to the game. Another TV/radio difference: Batters seem more passive on TV than on the radio. When I listened to Giants batting, I visualized them sweating and hacking. When I watched them in the top of the 9th, they just stood there. "Swing at something!" I yelled. "You fecking fecks!"

The Giants were retired. Atlanta came up to bat. Eric is a Pirates fan, and mentioned that ten years ago the Pirates were up by two runs in the bottom of the ninth in the playoffs. Then they lost the lead and Barry Bonds couldn't quite throw the winning run out at home. Eric said, "I'm not going to watch the Giants blow this one too." Then he said, "If the second baseman makes an error, I'm going upstairs."

Then the Braves batter hit a grounder to Kent, who threw it too short and the runner was safe. Error on the second baseman! Eric ran up the steps to the loft and put on headphones.

Then it got worse; the runner stole second, and the batter got a base hit. Men on first and third, no outs. Eric said, "Are there any outs yet?" I said "There have been 51 outs in this game." He told me to shut up.

Sheffield came up to bat. This guy wiggles his bat while waiting for the pitch. I don't mean when he does his little pre-throw ritual, I mean while the pitcher is winding up and throwing. How could you hit anything that way? Nen struck him out and we yelled to Eric that there was one out. "And it couldn't happen to a more deserving wiggling weirdo", I said.

Next came Jones. He spat on the ground. "Kill the spitter!" I cried. Then I said, "A lot of baseball players spit, don't they?"

Then Jones hit into a double play. End of game. Happy Floyd, happy Brian, relieved Eric. Unless you live in Boston, curses don't stick.

Posted 2:55 PM by Floyd

Now for something completely different:

Here is a fun Flash video. As a bonus, you will know the words to Led Zeppelin's Immigrant Song.

Do you find Stairway to Heaven less profound than when you were a teenager? If so, try substituting other lyrics -- say from a popular 60's comedy series.

Juan Gato pointed me to Albino Blacksheep's Flash video of a "Three Brains" song called Monkey Salad. For the last week I have had "I'm eeeeating a monkey salad" going through my head. I'm not worried and figure to be back to normal by the year 2007.

Posted 2:42 PM by Floyd

Happy birthday to my nephew, Scott Morton. He is six years old today. I remember the day in 1996 when my brother-in-law called to inform me of his birth. It doesn't seem like that long ago to me. But six years ago my nephew weighed seven pounds. He screamed and ate. Now he talks, swims, plays chess and Carcassonne, and has a little keyboard that he plays music on.

Posted 2:32 PM by Floyd

Administrativa III

When my hard disk crashed and I reinstalled Windows 2000, I got updated versions of lots of programs. I now have Netscape 7 and IE 5.0.

I used to have a bad impression of Netscape. Before the crash I had some version of Netscape 4, I think 4.4, and it was hopeless. And at work I found IE 5.5 better and more reliable than Netscape 6.1. But Netscape 7 is wonderful. One window can display multiple pages using tabs; you can open a link in a new tab, or create a tab and type a URL while another tab is loading. It's much easier than multiple windows. Also Netscape 7 is faster than previous versions at startup, loading, and rendering.

Netscape 7 has one drawback compared to IE 5. When I type an entry that names a blogger, I hyperlink that blogger's name to his blog (for instance, in the previous posting I created an <A HREF tag around Damian Penny's name). I have the blogger's site in my bookmarks, and would like to copy the bookmarked URL. In IE I can just go to the bookmarks page, navigate to his name, and right-click to get the properties. I can't do that in Netscape; I need to invoke the Manage Bookmarks window, which is much less convenient than getting the bookmark off my toolbar.

Posted 2:23 PM by Floyd

Administrativa II

One of the first things I did when I started blogging was to look for a site counter. I saw that Damian Penny was using SiteMeter. I set up an account and have been very pleased. You can see my SiteMeter button below the links on the left hand side.

According to SiteMeter I have had 947 visitors. Most of the visitors came when I was InstaSlashPunDotted a few weeks back. But I do have a trickle of regular visitors. SiteMeter gives me a report on my visits that shows the domain name of the reader and the time that he first accessed the page.

I know that my friend Paul reads this blog, not from SiteMeter but because he sent me email saying so. Hi Paul! I also have a reader from forbes.com. Hi guy from Forbes!

Posted 2:15 PM by Floyd

Administrativa

I forgot to mention last week that I reworked my links. Originally I had tried to put them in groups of two or three with a category header. Usually this was by geography (Australians), or by similar backgrounds (engineers from Southern California) or by oafish sexism (all the ladies). Trouble was there were too many bloggers who couldn't be neatly pigeonholed. Also the links were ugly I wrapped each blogger's name with descriptive text. This made the links a complete mess.

So I got rid of the sections and made one big list in alphabetical order. I yanked out the descriptions and reworked them as tool tips. Try putting your cursor over a link; you will see a colored rectangle pop up with a description. This is done using the TITLE attribute in A:

<a href="http://www.colbycosh.com/" title="Where he lives, it's already winter. Gave The Declarer its moniker.">Colby Cosh</a>

Posted 8:01 PM by Floyd

Several bloggers (Colby Cosh, Joanne Jacobs, Damian Penny, Instapundit, the Volokhs) have linked to this National Post story on Canadian Customs' seizure of newsletters from the Ayn Rand Institute, on grounds that they constitute hate speech. (The newsletters advocated Israel's right to exist and said various mean things about Palestinian terrorists.) All were quick to condemn this censorship, and I concur.

Even more problematic is the attitude of Europe toward "hate speech". The European Union may decide that it needs to search your computer in order to stamp out racism:

Development on 12 Nov 2001

New Treaty is Proposed to Unify Web Laws

The Council of Europe has adopted a cybercrime convention, elements of which look to define and criminalise hate-speech on the Internet. The 43-nation body, which aims to protect human rights, on Thursday adopted the treaty on criminal offences committed over the Internet. The treaty seeks to criminalise activities like fraud and child pornography as well as hate-speech committed on-line. It also sets up global policing procedures for conducting computer searches, intercepting e-mails, and extraditing criminal suspects. The news from the Council of Europe came on the same day that Yahoo Inc. won a victory over the French court that had moved to block users from Nazi memorabilia auctions on Yahoo. A US district court agreed with Yahoo that its Web site is outside French jurisdiction.

(From Enterprise Ireland.)

(I googled and searched ZDNet, but could not find more recent news on a decision having been reached. A similar article was posted on ZDNet a month or two ago.)

Restrictions on free speech that supposedly punish immoral or corrupt behavior should always be opposed. In America, we have campaign regulations that never inconvenience the major parties, but have been used to bankrupt individual citizens who recalled a powerful California legislator. Europe's proposed cybercrime laws could be used to harrass any non-mainstream political group. I don't know what the situation is in Europe, but in America if the police search your computer, they seize it and you have to sue to get it back.