“We gonna pop [the drug dealers] in the head,” says Mayor Valley, who just instituted a 24-hour, non-stop curfew as part of an effort to reduce violence. This means that everyone in the area is essentially under house-arrest. The people who live there are not even allowed on their front lawns.

“Nobody can walk down the street and be safe, that is, be free from police interference,” says the mayor.

According to a local television station, not all locals are thrilled:

“I don’t think it’s right,” expresses Stevens. Some neighbors say they’re being unfairly punished for the crimes other people have committed. “They know exactly who’s doing the shooting, the robbery, but it seems like we’re never going to get any justice around here,” says Stevens. “We got kids down here. They should lock up these young folks that have been doing the shooting; don’t put us hostage or on lockdown,” complains Commons.

Fortunately, the good mayor’s staff has provided his cell phone number in case people have questions.

Click here if you can't see the video.

Here are my top five reasons why libertarians should support Bob Barr:

1. He voted for the PATRIOT Act.
2. He spent much of his life putting people in jail for possessing products that the state arbitrarily decided to outlaw.
3. He thinks guns should be forced on business owners.
4. He keeps an open (albeit misguided) mind when it comes to supporting war.
5. He endorsed a man for VP who doesn’t want to bring the troops home.

Well, okay, so maybe these aren’t the best reasons to support someone in his run for presidency. But never mind that the LP has gutted its platform, purged the radicals, and nominated two conservative Republicans. So they gave up on education and principles. What’s more important is that we rally behind the LP’s candidate in order to accomplish its new goal: hurting McCain.

You can bet McCain is shaking in his boots over that fraction of a percentage he’ll be losing to Barr.

I can’t wait to vote.

For more on Bob Barr, see this article.

If you haven’t seen this video, you must give it a watch. Well worth it.

Bob Dylan is surely one of the greatest songwriters who ever lived. This may be my new favorite song.

(Thanks to Leslie Webb for the email and link.)

Need a good laugh? Watch Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid, explain why taxation in the United States is voluntary.

So I’m on this uber-high-volume hardcore-libertarian mailing list and the subject to spam came up… Someone pointed out a story about a spammer being jailed, and a debate broke out about whether or not the state should be jailing people for sending unsolicited email.

But there’s something they seemed to be missing… with the occasional exception of replica watch spam or penis enlargement spam, almost all spam is an advertisement for controlled substances… without the state making it illegal to conduct such transactions out in the open, it wouldn’t be necessary to broadcast this crap to as many people as possible in order to make money. It would be more economical to setup shop just like any other business. Thus, without the state, such spam would not exist.

…just a random thought…

(Click here if you can’t see the video.)
Thanks to LRC for the link.

1) If you’re on Windows, download this and skip to Step 3. Mac, Linux, and Unix users download the source code for connect.c
2) Compile it. On most systems, the command would be: gcc connect.c -o connect
3) Add this to your ssh command: -o ProxyCommand=”connect -S localhost:9050 %h %p”
For example, I could use this command to connect to Silence is Defeat over Tor:
ssh -o ProxyCommand=”connect -S localhost:9050 %h %p” silenceisdefeat.org

And that’s it… Pretty easy. More info can be found here.

And you thought Facebook would attract stalkers. Imagine a service that shows people every move you make on Facebook, MySpace, Digg, YouTube, Amazon, Flickr, StumbleUpon, Friendster, Last.fm, and over a dozen other services at the same time but in one easy-to-stalk place. Spokeo, a recently launched Web 2.0 service that bills itself as a “hyper-aggregator”, does just that.

No need to log into thirty different websites to track your ex-boyfriend - Spokeo will do it for you! Start by giving it the username and password to your GMail account (not at all implying this is a good idea), and Spokeo will automatically show you all of your friends and all of your friends’ accounts on other services. Think your ex-boyfriend might have an account on sites that you don’t know about? Problem solved. Need more Stalk Data on your friends? Just give it more login credentials for the other websites you have accounts on… it’ll do the work.

Of course, when Spokeo’s servers are compromised, the attacker will have ALL of your login credentials for just about every account you have.
Spokeo says they don’t store your passwords, but since they don’t use SSL, they can’t stop others from sniffing the login credentials you give them.