My login worked fine, and it even remembered my last login date correctly.

HatTip to Snowflakes In Hell

Anyone need a Linux geek/sysadmin/software developer who is fluent in C, Python, PHP and a bit rusty in Perl? I’m a reliable telecommuter as well, no need to pay for me to relocate.

Email me at editor here at libertynews.

Hat Tip to The Smallest Minority for posting about this.

esr is also well known in the open source world for his books, “The Cathedral & the Bazaar“, “The Art of UNIX Programming and “The New Hacker’s Dictionary“. You can read more about his background on his Wikipedia page.

Needless to say, he has now been added to the GunBloggers list. Welcome back Eric!

According to this article from The Hill -

Furious senior House aides are demanding committee action against a website that has posted their bank account numbers, signatures, home addresses and children’s names that are included in financial disclosure documents.

Some are demanding legal action against the website LegiStorm, which since February has been posting congressional documents online as a way to increase transparency in government. Aides have brought their complaints to the House Administration Committee and the clerk of the House.

But things don’t appear to be so dire when you read the response from Legistorm -

- The U.S. Congress wrote the law that requires disclosure of personal finances to aid in the fight against public corruption.

- Congressional staffers were the ones who voluntarily filed what they did in their personal financial disclosures. In a handful of disclosures, a tiny fraction of the total, staffers included unnecessary personal details like investment account numbers and children names. Their signature is the only detail that they now most complain about that is required.

- The Congress made these documents public. It did so after a one-month review process that concluded, apparently, that nothing was wrong with their disclosure.

- Neither the House nor the Senate require any form of identification to access this information. Anybody can access it without talking to a single person and by simply entering a fake name into a computer.

- We have voluntarily gone to significant lengths and costs already to scrub the most sensitive of information released due to staffer slipups and ethics committee oversight. This includes investment account numbers and Social Security numbers. We did so without delay.

- We have voluntarily provided various security measures such as user registration and authentication, a legal warning (one that is not present on two other heavily trafficked web sites that have for years provided member of Congress disclosures), and a human response system to make sure that automated bots cannot access the data.

So, instead of simply exposing the government documents to the world (which I would have no problems with) they have gone above and beyond what is required and attempted to clean up some of the mess which the Hill is complaining about.

Every time the government proposes new intrusions into its citizens private lives we hear the supporters repeat the mantra – “If you are innocent then you don’t have anything to hide”. It is high time that we turned the tables on the people who are behind the laws and regulations that infest our daily lives. They certainly seem to be doing alot of squirming and spreading alot of FUD about LegiStorm — I wonder what they are trying to hide from us?

Next up is The Firearm Blog, who focuses on firearm technology instead of politics. The articles range from gun reviews like this one on a black powder AR-15 to this video of a MG shooting down a RC airplane.

The most recent addition is New Jovian Thunderbolt, I came across this one when this article on using headspace gauges was link to by another GunBlogger member. This is another site with many gun review articles like this one on survival guns.

In Houston we have the cops testing out the use of UAVs for spying on its citizens. Then along comes the article about judges issuing warrants without probable cause for tracking cell phone locations.

We also have the government in Maryland forcing parents to have their kids immunized against their will and with the threat of jail (at the point of a gun). In Omaha a baby was ripped from its mother’s arms in order for the state to give it a blood test. It took them a week to get their child returned to them from the State mandated foster care.

To top this off I am finally convinced that our Democracy experiment in Iraq is doomed to eventual failure. Look at Pakistan, they can’t even hold their government together. Jerry Pournelle is right when he says we could have spent a fraction of the trillions that this war is costing us and had energy independence (Nuclear Reactors don’t need oil from unstable nations, nor does space based solar satellites.)

I feel like we’ve tipped over the edge and are sliding into the abyss. And I don’t see ANY presidential candidates who realize this.

There just seems to be something right about watching The Patriot and cleaning your guns, especially less than a week after Independence Day. I finished off with a salmon dinner while watching Black Hawk Down.

These are the kinds of movies that the movie industry should be making, not this continuous stream of remakes of old films targeted towards baby boomers suffering a mid-life crisis. They remind us of the sacrifices that are needed in order for us to maintian our Liberty. We have a duty to those who have fallen not to forget their sacrifices and to continue to resist efforts to enslave the free.