Happy Easter!
# Mad Ogre - HELL - (no permalinks, so scroll down to the April 10 entry). One of Ogre's kids got a bad cut on his face. A team of doctors fixed him up, but the bill is likely to be large. He didn't actually ask for donations, but I sent a little. If you are similarly moved, send what you can via PayPal to ogre at madogre dot com.
# Mercworx makes incredible knives. There's an article with yummy pictures in the May/June issue of American Handgunner. My favorite is the Sniper, shown below with Chili Pepper handle. 13" long with a 7.5" blade. $425. Click on the image for the product page.
# L. Neil Smith at The Libertarian Enterprise - Pure Poison - how denatured alcohol (poison by any other name) grew out of alcohol prohibition. Same as spraying paraquat on hemp. Or shooting down planes instead of allowing the passengers to carry firearms. And this madness is caused by democracy. There is no cure but to get rid of that insane concept. [tle]
Speaking of marijuana, it only seems natural -- better make that "denatural" -- that government would come up with a similarly slimy scheme to keep people from enjoying the vile weed. In this case, tons and tons of a poison with the lovely name "paraquat" were dumped out of airplanes (the same way Agent Orange was deployed in Vietnam) on marijuana crops in Central and South America, endangering the lives and health of farmers who had finally found a way to make a decent living.
Is there any wonder that the world hates us?
I can't recall whether any of this paraquat stuff made its way back to America to punish errant high school and college students, but I do remember one writer in particular (one hopes he'd be embarrassed at the suggestion today) who advocated intercepting shipments of other substances -- cocaine, heroine -- poisoning them thoroughly, and then reinserting them in the supply pipeline to "discourage" illegal drug use.
I also don't know whether paraquat is still being used. What I do know is that policies like these are not just homicidally insane, they tell us everything we need to know about those who would control our lives "for our own good". They tell us we're being ruled by people who make Jim Jones -- and the leaders of the cult who castrated themselves and then took poison to await the arrival of the Mother Ship -- look rational.
Now we can understand the officials who, faced with the threat of airline hijackings, would rather scramble military jet fighters and shoot the airliners down -- killing hundreds of innocent people in a particularly violent and frightening way -- than allow those same passengers to exercise their natural right to carry the means of self-defense.
That's a kind of poison, just like denaturing alcohol or dropping paraquat.
# The Libertarian Enterprise - Letter from Mimbreno Chiracahua - agrees with Bill Stone that in a pure market economy, intellectual property would be impossible to protect. Concludes that anarcho-capitalism is not a viable system. Nope, it just forces people who create information products to convince enough of the market to support them instead of buying copies. Not hard really. [tle]
# James Plummer at The Libertarian Enterprise - Privacy Villain of the Week: 'Registered Traveler' enablers - commentary on the Taking Scissors Away plan to test a voluntary "trusted traveler" ID. [tle]
With what little information that has been put out by TSA so far, the program seems to be little more than a backdoor to a national biometrically-enabled ID program.
# Lady Liberty at The Libertarian Enterprise - Slippery Frogs and the US Supreme Court - why the outcome is important in Dudley Hiibel's case against being compelled to identify yourself to a police officer. [tle]
