End the War on Freedom

Today is National Firearm Purchase Day. In response to the commU.N.ist intention to disarm us, American patriots will buy guns en masse today.

From The Continuum Concept by Jean Leidloff, pp.74-75:

Illuminating research might be done on the influence of Queen Victoria's acceptance of the baby carriage (bringing it into common use) upon the character of the subsequent generation and the effect on Western family life. Would that the invention of the baby carriage had met the same fate as the playpen I saw invented one day in a Yequana village.

It was nearly finished when I noticed Tududu working on it. It had upright sticks lashed with vines to an upper and a lower square frame, like a comic-strip version of a prehistoric playpen. It had cost a good deal of labor and Tududu looked quite pleased with himself when he lopped off the last protuberant stick end. He cast about for Cananasinyuwana, his son, who had taken his first step about a week earlier. No sooner had Tududu sighted the tot than he snatched him up and put him trimuphantly in the new invention. Cananasinyuwana stood uncomprehending for a few seconds at the center, then made a move to one side, turned about, and realized that he was trapped. In an instant he was screaming a message of utter horror, a sound rarely heard from children of his society. It was unequivocal. The playpen was wrong, unsuitable for human babies. Tududu's continuum sense, as strong an any Yequana's, did not hesitate in interpreting the shrieks of his son. He pulled him out and let him run away to find his mother, who comforted him for the minutes he needed to counteract the shock before he was ready to go out again to play. Tududu accepted the failure of his experiment without question: after a moment's last look at his handiwork, he smashed the playpen to bits with an ax, and as the wood he had used was green, he did not gain so much as a pile of firewood from his morning's efforts. I have no doubt that it was neither the first nor the last such invention by a Yequana, but their continuum sense would never permit so patent an error to last long. If our continuum sense had not been so elemental a force unto human behavior for our two million years of stability, it would not have been able to contain the dangers inherent in our highly developed intellect. That it has lately been disempowered to the point where instability, or "progress," appears to us to be our ever more glorious destiny does not alter one jot the fact that the continuum sense is intrinsic to our very humanness. Tududu smashing the playpen is what we are evolved to be; what we would have continued to be had our sense remained unclouded, unbetrayed by whatever derailed it, leaving us so much in the dangerously ignorant hands of the intellect.

There's a new issue of The Libertarian Enterprise, "Shame, Shame, Shame!":

• Letter from Dave Kopp - discusses the importance of balance, as illustrated by the Yin-Yang symbol on the cover of Mary Ruwart's book, Healing Our World.
• Dollars Down the Web by Jeff Elkins - a reminder of a July 26, 2000 memorandum from rapist-thankfully-no-longer-in-chief Klinton causing huge amounts of our stolen tax dollars to be spent on making federal web sites accessible to people with disabilities. Yep. Another gummint solution to a non-existent problem.

Thomas L. Knapp - Mourn on the 4th of July - Mr. Knapp doesn't celebrate the fourth of July. "It would be disrespectful to those who made the holiday possible."

If Thomas Jefferson could be called back from the grave today to be told that an American could not walk down any street openly displaying a firearm, he would surely weep.

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In Thomas Jefferson's America, Lon Horiuchi would be on trial for his life.

In George Washington's America, the employees of the Internal Revenue Service would find new jobs -- or swing from lampposts by their necks.

In Francis Marion's America, the BATF would be cornered at Yorktown and given a chance to honorably surrender and leave.

Sam Boykin at Creative Loafing - Doctor Ecstasy - good article about Rick Doblin, the founder and president of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS). Dr. Doblin has been a regular LSD user for a long time, and thinks that MDMA is useful for therapy. Will likely move here next week. [unknown]

While Doblin knows he's fighting an uphill battle, he says he's convinced our country will one day come to its senses and call off the $18 billion a year war against drugs.

"These drugs are not inherently good or bad," he says. "The drug war says they're inherently bad. We're saying they're potentially good if used in the right way."

If indeed the day ever does come when doctors and therapists can freely use and prescribe psychedelics in their practice, Doblin has the way it will work all figured out. In fact, his Harvard doctoral dissertation includes a plan for how to regulate and bring to market a psychedelic drug.

First, he thinks drugs like MDMA will have to be stringently regulated, and available only by direct mail to specially certified clinics that will administer the drug on-site and carefully prescreen and monitor their patients. Doblin also envisions a licensing process, in which people who have used psychedelics under supervision without incident and who have no history of mental illness get a license to buy and take the drugs independent of any physician or clinic. The government would provide neutral information about the dangers of drugs, rather than what he says are hyperbolic claims that currently are issued from the federal and state agencies.

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And if one day your kids inform you that they want to try acid?

"I'll ask why, under what circumstances, and with whom?" Doblin responded. "The biggest concerns I have about my kids trying drugs is not the drugs themselves, but the drug war. They have to worry about the police, about going to jail, getting ripped off, and violence in the underground market. So I'm much more terrified of the drug war than drugs. Drugs have been tremendously useful to me in my life. So how can I look at my kids and not want them to find some value as well?"

BBC News - Cannabis 'not medical panacea' - finally, some real cannabis research, with cannabis extracts. Cannabanoids are "better than conventional drugs for treating sickness caused by chemotherapy". "But they were no more effective than codeine for controlling acute pain relief." And there were side-effects. They didn't bother to research smoking whole cannabis. No money in it, don't you know. [heart]

I Cringely - And Your Little Dog, Too - commentary on where the Microsoft case is likely to go. Advises Microsoft to buy Belize and move off-shore. [wes]

Please understand that I still think Microsoft has broken laws and should be punished, and I happen to think that my particular suggested punishment (selling-off Microsoft's programming language group and giving the proceeds to registered users) makes a lot of sense, but to blame everything in the industry on Microsoft is just a mistake. Times are lean and mean, and Microsoft is just meaner than its competitors. Microsoft is meaner than anyone.

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If you don't like Microsoft, stop buying their products. Go to Linux or Apple. There are alternatives, many of them cheaper and most of them better, so use them.