End the War on Freedom

Ron Paul's Texas Straight Talk - U.S. Armed Forces Should Protect American Soil - Dr. Paul says that we should bring most of our foreign troops home and use them to protect our own borders.

Ron Paul in the House of Representatives - A Sad State of Affairs - Wonderful speech by Dr. Paul giving expression to many of the politically incorrect truths about 911. I archived the page at billstclair.com/ronpaul-011025.html.

America's heart and soul is more embedded in our love of liberty, self-reliance, and tolerance than by our foreign policy, driven by powerful special interests with little regard for the Constitution.

Throughout our early history, a policy of minding our own business and avoiding entangling alliances, as George Washington admonished, was more representative of American ideals than those we have pursued for the past 50 years. Some sincere Americans have suggested that our modern interventionist policy set the stage for the attacks of 9-11, and for this, they are condemned as being unpatriotic.

This compounds the sadness and heartbreak that some Americans are feeling. Threats, loss of jobs, censorship and public mockery have been heaped upon those who have made this suggestion. Freedom of expression and thought, the bedrock of the American Republic, is now too often condemned as something viciously evil. This should cause freedom-loving Americans to weep from broken hearts.

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We are not even considering restoring the rights of pilots to carry weapons for self-defense as one of the solutions. Even though pilots once carried guns to protect the mail and armored truck drivers can still carry guns to protect money, protecting passengers with guns is prohibited on commercial flights. The U.S. Air Force can shoot down a wayward aircraft, but a pilot cannot shoot down an armed terrorist.

It will be difficult to solve our problems with this attitude toward airport security.

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But there is one business that we need not fear will go into a slump: The Washington lobbying industry. Last year, it spent $1.6 billion lobbying Congress. This year, it will spend much more. The bigger the disaster, the greater the number of vultures who descend on Washington. When I see this happening, it breaks my heart, because liberty and America suffers, and it is all done in the name of justice, equality and security.

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We already hear of plans to install and guarantee the next government of Afghanistan. Getting bin Laden and his gang is one thing, nation-building is quite another. Some of our trouble in the Middle East started years ago when our CIA put the Shah in charge of Iran.

It was 25 years before he was overthrown, and the hatred toward America continues to this day. Those who suffer from our intervention have long memories.

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It is both annoying and sad that there is so little interest by anyone in Washington in free market solutions to the world's economic problems. True private ownership of property without regulation and abusive taxation is a thing of the past. Few understand how the Federal Reserve monetary policy causes the booms and the busts that, when severe, as now, only serve to enhance the prestige of the money managers while most politicians and Wall Streeters demand that the Fed inflate the currency at an even more rapid rate. Today's conditions give license to the politicians to spend our way out of recession, they hope.

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I would like to draw analogy between the drug war and the war against terrorism. In the last 30 years, we have spent hundreds of billions of dollars on a failed war on drugs. This war has been used as an excuse to attack our liberties and privacy. It has been an excuse to undermine our financial privacy while promoting illegal searches and seizures with many innocent people losing their lives and property. Seizure and forfeiture have harmed a great number of innocent American citizens.

Another result of this unwise war has been the corruption of many law enforcement officials. It is well known that with the profit incentives so high, we are not even able to keep drugs out of our armed prisons. Making our whole society a prison would not bring success to this floundering war on drugs. Sinister motives of the profiteers and gangsters, along with prevailing public ignorance, keeps this futile war going.

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Although this unwise war on drugs generates criminal violence, the violence can never be tolerated. Even if repeal of drug laws would decrease the motivation for drug dealer violence, this can never be an excuse to condone the violence. On the short term, those who kill must be punished, imprisoned, or killed. Long term though, a better understanding of how drug laws have unintended consequences is required if we want to significantly improve the situation and actually reduce the great harms drugs are doing to our society.

The same is true in dealing with those who so passionately hate us that suicide becomes a just and noble cause in their effort to kill and terrorize us. Without some understanding of what has brought us to the brink of a worldwide conflict in reconsidering our policies around the globe, we will be no more successful in making our land secure and free than the drug war has been in removing drug violence from our cities and towns.

Without some understanding why terrorism is directed towards the United States, we may well build a prison for ourselves with something called homeland security while doing nothing to combat the root causes of terrorism. Let us hope we figure this out soon.

We have promoted a foolish and very expensive domestic war on drugs for more than 30 years. It has done no good whatsoever. I doubt our Republic can survive a 30-year period of trying to figure out how to win this guerilla war against terrorism. Hopefully, we will all seek the answers in these trying times with an open mind and understanding.

Jacob Sullum at Reason - Second Sight - a short essay on how U.S. v. Emerson may have achieved for the second amendment "the status of normal constitutional law." [sierra]

UK House of Commons - Legalisation of Cannabis Bill - the text of the new British law. I didn't read it. [Cures not Wars]

John Zukowski at Sun Microsystems - New I/0 Functionality for Java™ 2 Standard Edition 1.4 - Beta 2 of the Java 1.4 SDK has been available from Sun for over a month now. It includes a new I/O system that supports non-blocking I/O. It used to be that all I/O blocked, so you needed multiple threads to perform simlutaneous I/O. No more. These changes are in the java.nio package. Buffers, channels, regular expressions, event-driven I/O. Sun plans to ship beta 3 of JDK 1.4 by the end of the year, a release candidate early in 2002, and the final version in Q1.

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