Quick Roundup 361

An Open Letter

Brian Phillips of Houston Property Rights has posted an open letter to Houston's real estate developers and builders.

Our abundant and affordable housing and our low cost of doing business are the economic benefits of that freedom. Our glorious skyline is the monument.

...

It is not easy to stand alone when the mob declares that your ideas are wrong. It is not easy to reject the consensus, to rock the boat, to question the status quo. But Christopher Columbus did it. Galileo did it. Henry Ford did it. Thomas Edison did it. Our Founding Fathers did it. The world is a much better place for their courage to see the truth.

These men and women have helped build a city poised to become one of the greatest in the world, but are purposely being made, by those who want to dictate terms to them, to feel isolated even as their right to do what they do to earn a living is openly attacked.

Houston's builders need to know that they have support, that other good men have had to stand up to massive injustice in the past, and that it is possible to win against irrational public opinion. If you know any builders and developers in Houston, or anyone who might have their ear and values freedom, let them know about this open letter.

Qwertz is back...

... in a manner of speaking. His work towards a J.D. has been taking the lion's share of his time and will continue to do so, but he hopes to begin posting somewhat regularly again. In the meantime, he's enjoying a newer version of the ultra-portable laptop I've found so useful over the past few months, although he agrees that the Eee PC is not for everyone.

In his review, he also notes a few potential additional matters that pertain to those who use Windows XP:

All that said, I cannot recommend the Eee line of netbooks to everyone. They have a funky hard drive situation, with a tiny (4GB) main drive that has fast write speeds and a larger (16GB) data drive with much slower write speeds. The write speeds on the slow drive make certain operations tricky. XP often writes back to the drive, so XP and its programs need to be on the faster drive in order to work smoothly. This limits what you can do with the Eee. If you really know XP and know how to do it, you can shrink your Windows installation and move installer caches off to the data drive so you have plenty of space, but it takes work. I have no idea whether the XP version of the 901 comes with these sorts of modifications to the operating system. The version I bought came with a dumbed-down Linux distro that was absolutely useless for what I wanted to do with the machine. I researched the machine's limitations and knew what I was getting into before buying. I recommend that anyone interested in getting an Eee (or any netbook for that matter) to do the same.

Of particular interest to me is the much-improved battery life of his newer Eee. That and the larger screen will have me upgrading as soon as I can afford to, although that might be awhile.

He also reviews a non-Kindle e-book reader.

A Few New Links

No time to go through each this morning, but I draw your attention to three new additions to the sidebar: Born to Identify, Fun with Gravity, and Principled Parent. I will note that Born to Identify features a post about a particularly encouraging example of cultural activism that has helped preserve freedom of speech on a college campus.

Also, there is a new group blog by the Inspector and Kriegsgefahrzustand (so far), who are contemplating moves from their current respective abodes. So if you notice a link to Dispatches from Area 32 crop up in the near future, you'll know they've finished their move.

A Visual Aid

Upon reading Craig Biddle's incisive analysis of this year's non-choice for President, C. August came up with a perfect visual aid.

That is why, barring some clear strategy to slow down the inevitable war on freedom that will follow the November elections, casting a vote is meaningless.

Indeed, to anyone who says that not casting a vote is somehow throwing away an opportunity to affect the course of our nation, or that it is somehow a "waste", I would counter that our current culture has wasted my vote already. Biddle outlines the proper course of action in his last paragraph.

Tree-Mourners

Q: How could one elicit an even more childish display of emotionalism from the savages in the following video?

A: By speaking up for the countless human lives lost to malaria due to environmentalism through the banning of DDT.

This video is hilarious on one level, and obscene on another. One of the great virtues of separating the economy from the state, which I advocate, is that people like this will be rendered much more harmless to myself and those I care about. (HT: Dismuke)

-- CAV