End the War on Freedom

From kaba -

The philosophy of gun control: Teenagers are roaring through town at 90 MPH, where the speed limit is 25. Your solution is to lower the speed limit to 20. -- Sam Cohen

Claire Wolfe at CCOPS - Know your Congressman's Ways!! 10 unconstitutional land-mine "laws" that were snuck through the 104th Congress. Happy to see another article by Ms. Wolfe. She's been mum from my seat since the last issue of Doing Freedom! in June.

The simple fact is that, regardless of what reasons legislators may claim, the U.S. Congress has passed more Big Brother legislation in the last two years--more laws to enable tracking, spying and controlling--than any Democratic congress ever passed. And they have done it, in large part, in secret. Redmon Barbry put it best: "We the people have the right to expect our elected representatives to read, comprehend and master the bills they vote on. If this means Congress passes only 50 bills per session instead of 5,000, so be it. As far as I am concerned, whoever subverts this process is committing treason." By whatever means the deed is done, there is no acceptable excuse for voting against the Constitution, voting for tyranny. And I would add to Redmon's comments: Those who do read the bills, then knowingly vote to ravage our liberties, are doubly guilty. But when do the treason trials begin?

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As Ayn Rand said in Atlas Shrugged, "There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws."

It's time to drop any pretense: We are no longer law-abiding citizens. We have lost our law-abiding status. There are simply too many laws to abide. And because of increasingly draconian penalties and electronic tracking mechanisms, our "lawbreaking" places us and our families in greater jeopardy every day.

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But this totalitarian runaway truck is never going to stop unless we stop it, in any way we can. Stopping it might include any number of things: tax resistance; public civil disobedience; wide-scale, silent non-cooperation; highly noisy non-cooperation; boycotts; secession efforts; monkey wrenching; computer hacking; dirty tricks against government agents; public shunning of employees of abusive government agencies; alternative, self-sufficient communities that provide their own medical care and utilities.

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It will not be stopped unless we are willing to risk our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honors to stop it. I think of the words of Winston Churchill: "If you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed, if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not so costly, you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance for survival. There may be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no chance of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves."

There's a new issue of The Libertarian Enterprise. This one is entitled "HBTM!" I did a quick Google search for HBTM. The most likely is "Happy Birthday to Me", but it could be "honey bee tracheal mite", "History by the Minute", or "Hybrid Bispectral Threshold Method". They've even got the whole birthday song here: "hbtm. hbtm. hbdm. hbtm."

• Letter from apple -

  Someone really ought to produce a brand of toilet paper with a little copy of the Constitution on every square so that we can be graphically reminded every time nature calls as to what the Statists are doing to our rights. It could even be 3-ply for our 3 branches of government! Hey now that's fun for the whole family! It would also make the point to our guests far more eloquently than we ever could. But I digress.....a lot......

  My point was that even now you don't have to register a car unless you take it off of private property. You can drive it around till doomsday without plates or taxes etc as long as you don't take it onto tax funded roads. Next time some gun-grabber says they want to treat guns like cars just tell them 'Fine, dump the FBI check and and lower the age restriction, teach kids how to shoot in high school (call it Shooter's Ed) and subsidize American gun manufacturers so they can sell guns more cheaply than foreign competitors". Then watch smoke come out their ears.

• Why Are You Throwing Your Vote Away? by Edward Dunnigan - Mr. Dunnigan tells us why he's voting for Harry Browne. He makes a similar point to the patriot Mass. state trooper I talked to a couple of weekends ago: elect Gore and let the revolution begin. My question to Mr. Dunnigan is, "Why are you voting at all?"

  To those that still don't get it, I'll make it simple. There is no difference between Al Gore and George W. Bush. Both of them want to accumulate and centralize power. Neither of them have any intention of rolling back government infringement on our Constitutional rights. Both will work towards ultimately disarming us.

  If the Libertarians divert votes away from 'W', and cause Gore to become president, I consider that a good thing. Once Gore begins his campaign to eliminate the internal combustion engine, electricity, and private ownership of firearms, perhaps then the citizenry will snap out of their collective stupor and start participating in their government again.

• Tipper's Family Values by Minority Mike - Mike goes after Tipper Gore in his inimitable style.

  Here's a tip for ya Tipper, of course you're depressed, you're married to Al Gore! Great balls of fire, ya nitwit, that'd make any sane woman want to fall on her sword! I get depressed just lookin' at that empty suit of clothes!

CmdrTaco at Slashdot - DeCSS Source Mass-Posted to Usenet: someone posted the DeCSS source to all of the comp* usenet news groups. Hehe. [/.]

J. Orlin Grabbe at Laissez Faire City Times - The Function of the Drug War: Mr. Grabbe follows the money in the war on freedom, er... drugs.

The function of the Drug War is to create the Drug Crisis. The Drug Crisis involves billions of dollars of hidden cash flow. Addicted to this flow of money are law enforcement agencies, drug producers and distributors, covert agencies who use it as a source of black funding, and politicians and bankers who are hired to protect the drug revenues. Addiction to drug revenues requires that the drug war be fought so as to be lost. Failure thus becomes the criterion of success.

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But whenever competition increases, the Drug War must be fought ever more vigilantly to ensure the continuing success of its failure. Only if competition is controlled can the market price of illicit drugs be kept well above their marginal cost of production, thus ensuring the massive profits upon which Drug Suppliers and Drug Warriors depend.

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Take George W. Bush and Al Gore, for example. Whichever man is elected, he will call for a new effort to sustain the Drug War's vigor, whether it be called "Reinventing the Drug War" or the "Drug War with Compassion", or something entirely different. Because, like other hired politicians, the new President will know the Drug War must be fought harder to keep the money and drugs flowing, and everyone happy. Only in failure will there be success.

David Pilling at Financial Times - Contaminated polio vaccine 'may have caused' Aids: I've heard this rumor before. It's probably not true. [grabbe]

There is a terrible irony in the polio vaccine theory. This year, polio is well on the way to becoming only the second disease to be eradicated as a result of a different vaccine against the crippling disease developed by Albert Sabin. It would be cruel if heroic efforts against one illness should turn out to have prompted the disastrous spread of another.

There's a new article in The Libertarian series by Vin Suprynowicz:

• Were the founders a pack of thieves? Not all of them, but Alexander Hamilton's group were at best liars.

  But absolutely, taxes are worse than theft; they are slavery. The thief does not expect you to show up at the same time next year to turn over another third of all you have produced. Ask anyone currently in government what is the maximum tax rate they would allow. Not a one of them will set a limit. They clearly believe all wealth belongs to the state; they allow us to keep only as much as required to keep us quiet.

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  In his fine novels of an alternative universe, starting with "The Probability Broach," science fiction author L. Neil Smith asks what America would have been like if the Declaration of Independence had contained just one additional word -- if Mr. Jefferson had thought to declare that governments derive their just powers from "the unanimous consent of the governed."

  In that alternative universe, George Washington leads his federal troops to put down the Pennsylvania rebellion against the whisky tax, and is promptly captured and hanged. Albert Gallatin becomes the next president of the young republic, promising no more of this "tax" stuff. Down to the present day, in Smith's novels, there continues a subculture of frustrated imperialists -- led by a thinly disguised William F. Buckley -- plotting to restore the central taxing authority necessary for their dreams of a majestic, powerful, imperial state. Smith dubs them the "Hamiltonians."

Lew Rockwell at WorldNetDaily - The decaying state: the government is finding it hard to fill bureaucratic positions. Yay! [wnd]

NRA-ILA Special FAX Alert via KeepAndBearArms.com - Clinton-Gore-Reno Justice Department Confirms Its Official Position: Individual Law-Abiding Citizens Have No Right to Keep and Bear Arms! And I thought you had to point a machine gun at someone to get them to dig their own grave. [kaba]

KeepAndBearArms.com - Quotes from Anti-self-defense people: the current rhetoric from the gun control camp is that they're only trying to cut down on crime. Not! 7 public figures who are already on record as intending to make it illegal to own guns. [kaba]

Patrick McCartney at the Auburn Journal via Cannabis News - There Was An Easier Way To Inspect Kubby's Garden: The trial of Steve and Michele Kubby finally began last Wednesday. So far, it looks like the prosecution has its work cut out for it. Good. Jail those cops. [cn]