A Reformed Libertarian Party

Greetings to one and all. The latest item in the news that I find disturbing is that it will now be illegal for private citizens to encrypt their calls. In England they passed a law that hasn't been enforced yet but will be that states that if you don't turn over your encryption key to the cops upon being asked for whatever reason they choose, then you can go to jail. They are also going to do this with financial corporations such as banks and such. It's a blatent invasion of our privacy and our civil rights. We're getting just a little too Orwwellian in our government view. The government does not have the right to monitor private computer correspondance, incrypted or not. In terms of phone conversations I am told the government is already monitering all our calls via micro-wave sattalite. They scan for certain words with as Jihad and them fixate in on those calls. Demanding the turning over of encryptian keys is just such a blatent invasion of our rights to privacy that it isn't funny.

I am not happy about the "proctology exam" that tobacco companies are forced to submit to. Even the most minute office memo is up for scruteny. Everybody knows cigarettes are harmful and to sue a corporation because you're a smoker in this day and age is absurd. People should have to face the consequences of their own actions and decisions. I'd hate to think that Larry Elder is right. I don't want our society to be turned into a bunch of "Victocrats". People need to be left to their own comon sense. If I had my way tobacco would be advertized on television. After all, nobody ever smoked a cigarette and then went out and crashed their car like might happen with alcohol. Yet alcohol flows freely on soap operas and other TV programs. We are fast getting to the point where nobody who smokes will feel confortable anywhere. People say this whole "second hand smoke" thing is a myth. It's just a lie to say that it takes years off everyone's life who is exposed to it.

I've thought about it and I think it's about time that we experiment with legalizing drugs now illegal and let the chips fall where they may. I'm still uneasy about doing this but I think lots of good could come from it and cut down on gang and mafia violence. I think the way to solve the problem is to get the addict to a drug rehabilitation center. Perhaps we should give it a trial period of five years and if it doesn't work out then we could go back to the system we have now. The thing is a hundred years ago all the hard drugs that are illegal now were legal then, and yet somehow society managed to function just fine a hundred years ago. It just seems we could free up government agencies for things like terrorists if we decided we were going to give the drugs thing a "pass" for a while. Apparently in England they handle the problems of hard drugs there differently. Drugs are obviously destructive and they ruin lives. Public servace messages are good. But look how overcrowded our prisons have become. How many more prisons do we need to build?

It appears that Los Angeles has taken tenative steps for getting a National Football League team in LA by making a new team pay for renovatring the Coloseum.

Leo Le Port was talking about the print screen command with DOS screens. I have found you can't paste from a DOS command because I was going to use sayings from "Behind the eight ball" in this blog, but it didn't work. I've found you can use print screen on "screen zero" in BASIC. Perhaps you can't use it in graphics screen 1. There was an 84 year old man still using Turbo-Pascal. That was around in 1989 when I was going to the computer lab at Cypress.

Now they are proposing a two tiered system of internet quality. If you don't pay extra you'll get inferior service. The corporations will slip in charges any way they can. I think these letters may come out too dark to look good on black. We'll see.