End the War on Freedom

From The Mastery of Love by Don Miguel Ruiz, pp. 129-131:

You find out that you are not what you believe you are, because you never chose your beliefs. These beliefs were there when you were born. You find out that you are also not the body, because you start to function without your body. You start to notice that you are not the dream, that you are not the mind. If you go deeper, you start noticing that you are not the soul either. Then what you find out is so incredible. You find out that what you are is a force—a force that makes it possible for your body to live, a force that makes it possible for your whole mind to dream.

Without you, without this force, your body would collapse on the floor. Without you, your whole dream just dissolves into nothing. What you really are is that force that is Life. If you look in to the eyes of someone near you, you will see the self-awareness, the manifestation of Life, shining in his eyes. Life is not the body, it is not the mind, it is not the soul. It is a force. Through this force, a newborn baby becomes a child, a teenager, an adult; it reproduces and grows old. When Life leaves the body, the body decomposes and turns to dust.

You are Life passing through your body, passing through your mind, passing through your soul. Once you find that out, not with logic, not with the intellect, but because you can feel that Life—you find out that you are the force that makes the flowers open and close, that makes the hummingbird fly from flower to flower. You find out that you are in every tree, you are in every animal, vegetable, and rock. You are that force that moves the wind and breathes through your body. The whole universe is a living being that is moved by that force, and that is what you are. You are Life.

This was said more succinctly but less poetically by Robert A. Heinlein in Stranger in a Strange Land, a classic that I must regrok sometime:

Thou art God.

From "Drying Out" by Al Neipris in the July 2001 issue of The Sun:

When asked, I tell people that I gave up drugs and alcohol on March 21, 1986, but this is misleading, because it implies a certain deliberate and premeditated act of will, as if giving up drugs called for some sort of sacrifice. The fact of the matter is I just couldn't do it any longer. I no more picked the date of my sobriety than a broken-down car, with a final choke and sputter, chooses the particular spot on the highway at which to coast to a stop. I accepted the praise of family a nd friends and basked in the applause of my AA group on my first anniversary because I have a need to believe, as we all do, that my life—and especially my suffering—has meaning. But I deserve no more credit for getting sober than you would give a drowning man for filling his lungs with air.

From "Sunbeams" in the July 2001 issue of The Sun:

It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it. -- Upton Sinclair

and:

In the next voyage of the Mayflower, after she carried the Pilgrims, she was employed in transporting a cargo of slaves from Africa. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne

and:

Work for the triumph of the good, knowing you will lose. -- Seneca

and:

We put our truths together in pieces, but you use nails, and I use glue. You mend with staples. I mend with screws. You stitch what I would bandage. Your truth may not look like mine, but that is not what matters. What matters is this: you can look at a scar and see hurt or you can look at a scar and see healing. Try to understand. -- Sheri Reynolds

From kaba:

Many people mistakenly see weapons as the source of crime rather than a reaction to it. This is rather like blaming your flat tire on the spare you carry in the trunk. -- Mickey Michels

Letter from Thomas L. McLaughlin is a missive from Massachusetts state police internal affairs received by Linda Hamilton in the beginning of June. No surprises here. The blue wall stands.

Damaged Justice at Music for Misanthropes - Saturday, July 07, 2001 - Ian's got a good response to my coffee ramblings of yesterday. He also quoted some great advice from No Treason. So I read the rest of that site. I recommend the same to you, unless you haven't yet read its namesake, Lysander Spooner's No Treason. In that case, drop everything and read it now. [MfM]

Dick Freely at No Treason - Do Something - This is the advice that Ian quoted. Good ideas for living "outside the cattle car-shaped box."

Michael J. Schneider at No Treason - Keys - Mr. Schneider locked himself out of his house the other day. He easily broke back in, of course, but the incident reminded him that the state is the reason we need keys.

Why are there so many thieves, and why are they so brazen? The answer is not complex: We are not allowed to do anything about them anymore ("do anything" being the euphemism for "provide them with a closed-casket funeral"). Only a thrice-damned fool would have thought of swiping John Elder's horse, knowing that a rope or a bullet were the likely consequences. My car is a different story; the contemporary crook knows that the state will protect him from me. Prisons do not solve crime, they incubate it. Lead solves crime. But I cannot make an example of more than one or two before the state makes an example of me. Because the state is the biggest crook of them all.

Lynette Warren at No Treason - When Anarchists Attack - on the futility of fighting against Spooner's logic. Hehe.

Billy Beck at No Treason - I, Criminal - Nice story. I'd love to see that car!

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

• Barring the people from the land - The environazis are at it again, this time in Utah. More of the same old unconstitutional "protection" racket.

  In fact, the only way the federal government is authorized by the Constitution to control any lands within the several states is to "purchase by the Consent of the Legislature of the State in which the Same shall be, (places) for the Erection of Forts, Magazines, Arsenals, dock-Yards and other needful Buildings."

Dan Gillmor at the San Jose Mercury News - Britain's sad decline of liberty a warning for U.S. - Mr. Gillmor was in England for Independence Day. The country that gave us the Magna Carta is becoming a surveillance state. [cafe]

There's some other dissent, largely from editorial writers and civil-liberties groups, but it doesn't seem to have made much of a dent. The British people seem to have accepted the idea that they will be pervasively spied upon. Sadly, they seem to have happily traded liberty for temporary safety.

David Rostcheck at KeepAndBearArms.com - Letter to the ACLU - I used to be a dues-paying member of the ACLU. The last time they sent me a renewal request, I sent back a short note saying that I couldn't support them anymore because they refuse to defend the lynchpin of the bill of rights and because they keep working to evict God from society. I didn't take the time to write a very good letter or to type it up. Mr. Rostcheck of the Pink Pistols took that time, though he didn't mention God in his letter. [kaba]

But honestly, Mr. Glasser, regardless of how you feel about the Second Amendment, I'm just not sure why you get up in the morning. Why do you bother to fight against the War on Drugs and defend against 4th Amendment violations? For every 4th Amendment case you win, my people lose two. It's the same Amendment, and it doesn't matter for what cause our rights are undermined - once they are legally dismantled, those decisions can (and will) be used against other persons claiming 4th Amendment protection. In short, Mr. Glasser, your job consists of going to work and filling in a trench with a shovel, while ignoring the backhoe digging out the other side of the trench.

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