] "I'm not willing to show my passport to travel in my own
] country," Gilmore said in an interview. "I am not willing
] to have my rights taken away by bureaucrats who issue
] secret laws in the dead of night."

[ John Gilmore on his fight against mandated ID checks for flights. -k]

Wired News: Flight ID Fight Revived

] Finally, instead of dissembling behind ambiguous notions
] of Gallic joie de vivre, someone in this leisurely land
] has declared outright that the French should eschew the
] Anglo-Saxon work ethic and openly embrace sloth.
]
] Corinne Maier, the author of "Bonjour Paresse," a sort of
] slacker manifesto whose title translates as "Hello
] Laziness," has become a countercultural heroine almost
] overnight by encouraging the country's workers to adopt
] her strategy of "active disengagement" -- calculated
] loafing -- to escape the horrors of disinterested
] endeavor.

[ My hero! ;) -k]

L.A. Daily News - News

] One of the dirtiest words in the economic lexicon is
] making the rounds again: stagflation.
]
] Defined as a noxious blend of stagnant growth and rising
] prices, stagflation last appeared in force in the 1970s,
] when it bedeviled U.S. policy makers and gradually
] degraded the standard of living of average Americans.
] Economists long thought a repeat to be extremely
] unlikely.
]
] But now, they are starting to worry again. The
] fundamental problem: Oil prices are kicking up inflation
] across the world, at precisely the same time that
] economic growth appears to be slowing. If oil prices keep
] climbing, and inflation rates exceed growth rates, some
] economists say the U.S., Asia and other regions could
] face a troubling scenario in which policy makers have to
] fight some of the same demons that plagued the U.S. back
] in the days of disco.
]
] "Oil at $45 a barrel is a stagflation problem," warned
] economists at UBS Ltd. in a recent research report. By
] their reckoning, sustained prices at that level would
] slow global growth rates by almost half a percentage
] point in 2005 and by about one percentage point in 2006.
] Perhaps more important, such prices would push inflation
] up by about the same amount -- giving the world its first
] taste in years of what stagflation can be like.

[ Awesome. Seriously su-par. -k]

WSJ.com - A Central Banker's Nightmare: Inflation and Slow Growth Together

] Since 2001, President Bush's tax cuts have shifted
] federal tax payments from the richest Americans to a wide
] swath of middle-class families, the Congressional Budget
] Office has found, a conclusion likely to roil the
] presidential election campaign.

[ BC'04 is dismissing it because the response is irreparably colored by the fact that the Democrats requested it and KE'04 is noting that the "CBO is nonpartisan, it's independent, and right now it works for a Republican Congress with a former Bush economist at its head." The shifting of the tax burden is a common meme these days, but not usually from anywhere as high up as the CBO.

Whatever, you'll note that the report is being released on a Friday afternoon, which pretty well guarantees that it's bad news for the administration. -k]

Tax Burden Shifts to the Middle (washingtonpost.com)

It seems clear to me that this case has almost nothing to do with "sending a message to worm writers" and almost everything to do with providing a spectacle for thousands of computer users like these... As we watch this guy get nailed all of these people feel vindicated and rejoice! They're right, and he is wrong, and he is going down! The system works! I love big brother!

[ Agreed. Most of these responses are absurd. Particularly the "try him as a cyber-terrorist and put him in jail forever". The fucktard who said that probably goes to church every week and thinks he's a good Christan, if I had to guess. You have to have pretty perfect (and always incorrect) view of your own impeccable morals to judge others as harshly as that.

People have so little perspective. This poor fucker's life is pretty much ruined as it is. If you need someone else's life to be utterly destroyed for your own satisfaction, you need preofessional help. -k]

vnunet.com - Blaster B plea angers onlookers

] Kerry isn't perfect, but the alternative is just
] completely....I hate to keep carping on this, but within
] the libertarian movement we're gonna have to
] actually sit down and talk about where we stand on the
] two variants, because one of them is actually part of the
] problem at this point. I used to think of myself as both
] kinds of libertarian, but I have pretty well parted
] company with [D.C.-based leader of libertarian-leaning
] conservatives] Grover Norquist at this point. I
] don't see anything particularly free about a
] plutocracy.

[ There's a shitload of good stuff in this article, and the bit i memed above here is just one that stuck me towards the end. Go read it now. -k]

Reason: John Perry Barlow 2.0: The Thomas Jefferson of cyberspace reinvents his body -- and his politics.

[ If your Sony-Ericsson phone just doesn't look enough like your favorite Linux/Mac OS, here are some themes to remedy your shameful situation. The debian one is perfect, as in, it looks like crap. I just wonder if you have to reinstall the phone's graphics subsystem and recompile the kernel 43 times to make it work. -k]

ZwahlenDesign Sony Ericsson Theme / Displayprofile

] What, the place where you go to eat ice cream
] doesn't have an ultraviolet cellphone sterilizer?

[ Wow. On reading the quote, I was about to say how Japan is a really strange place, but actually, i think this is Korea. Either way, UV cell sterilizer at an ice cream shop. Yep. -k]

So fresh and so clean - Engadget - www.engadget.com

] Jeffrey Lee Parson, 19, of Hopkins, Minnesota, admitted
] "intentionally causing damage to a protected computer"
] before a federal judge in Seattle yesterday as part of a
] plea bargaining arrangement. He faces between 18 to 37
] months in prison for his crime instead of a maximum
] sentence of ten years in jail. Parson may also be ordered
] to pay a fine, which could run into millions of dollars,
] according to Assistant US Attorney Annette Hayes.

He plead down to 37 months and millions in fines? The guy took an active worm, changed its tag (to his name!), and re-released it. This does NOT set an example for "worm writers." Parson didn't write a worm, and the people who did were never caught. Parson put his name in the worm. Any idiot could have caught him. The actual impact that adding his name had on the spread of this worm was zilch.

The only message the government is sending here is that our laws are unjust and our police are incompetent. Once again, the smart people get away scott free but the unlucky and dim get squashed like bugs for no good reason.

[ Yeah, it's pretty stupid. The kid certainly shouldn't get off scott free, but it seems overly harsh given the circumstances. -k]

Blaster teen pleads guilty

] Beards are out. So are jeans and athletic shoes. Suit
] coats are in, even on the steamiest summer days.
]
] That dress code, imposed by the Department of Homeland
] Security, makes federal air marshals uneasy -- and
] not just because casual clothes are more comfortable in
] cramped airline seats. The marshals fear that their
] appearance makes it easier for terrorists to identify
] them, according to a professional group representing more
] than 1,300 air marshals.

[ Fucking retarded. This better be a cover for the fact that there are a shitload other Air Marshals who *don't* have a dress code. Because if they're compromising everyone's safety because "the airline industry complained that air marshals' attire was too casual," a whole bunch of people need to be fired. Start with this guy :

"In order to gain respect in a situation, you must be attired to gain respect," Mr. Adams said in an interview. If air marshals were allowed to be too casual in their dress, he added, "they probably would not gain the respect of passengers if a situation were to occur."

-k]

Air Marshals Say Dress Code Makes Them Stand Out