End the War on Freedom

"A man should never be ashamed to own that he has been in the wrong, which is but saying...that he is wiser today than he was yesterday." -- Alexander Pope

"I'm going out on a limb and saying the winner [of the Iraqi election] will be a man named Muhammad something." -- Jay Leno

# CNN - Bush pushes his agenda: State of the Union speech focuses on Social Security, Iraq - Story, transcipt, and video (requires registration, but C-Span has it for free in Real video). I only listened to Bushnev last night for about five minutes, but I distinctly remember him pronouncing "nuclear" correctly. Listening to it again, however, I discover that I was wrong, he said "nuculer", as usual.

# Able Plus Systems - Buzzword Bingo - one way to make Bushnev's speech last night less boring. Play Bingo! Hehe. [unknown]

# Claire Wolfe at Backwoods Home Magazine - How we got the Statue of the Drunken Cowboy - on the result of Hardyville's experiment in [DRUMROLL] Democracy. Hehe. [claire]

Democracy, as the really big dampols always assure us, guarantees that everyplace that tries it will automatically become Glowing and Pure and 100 Percent Gloriously All-American Free without an injustice or an act of tyranny in sight.

Even if a country has national ID cards, Gestapo kicking down people's doors at night, two million citizens in prison, dossiers on everybody, spies everywhere, twisted tax laws arbitrarily enforced, and secret courts and detentions without trial, and plans for world domination by whatever means it can get away with -- even if all that is so, that country will be Free and Just and Secure as long as it's got [DRUMROLL] Democracy.

So we figured what the heck. If it can work for some third-world country with its capital in a mosquito swamp, it ought to work for us.

# Claire Wolfe and RL Crabb at Loompanics Unlimited - Big Brother on Board - a comic tale of the highways of the distopian future. [loompanics]

# Claire Wolfe at Loompanics Unlimited - Dark Satanic Cubicles: It's time to smash the job culture! - why measuring economic success by counting jobs is a bad idea and how to get away from the 9-5 job culture. Long. [loompanics]

In a healthy human community, jobs are neither necessary nor desirable. Productive work is necessary -- for economic, social, and even spiritual reasons. Free markets are also an amazing thing, almost magical in their ability to satisfy billions of diverse needs. Entrepreneurship? Great! But jobs -- going off on a fixed schedule to perform fixed functions for somebody else day after day at a wage -- aren't good for body, soul, family, or society.

Intuitively, wordlessly, people knew it in 1955. They knew it in 1946. They really knew it when Ned Ludd and friends were smashing the machines of the early Industrial Revolution (though the Luddites may not have understood exactly why they needed to do what they did).

Jobs suck. Corporate employment sucks. A life crammed into 9-to-5 boxes sucks. Gray cubicles are nothing but an update on William Blake's "dark satanic mills." Granted, the cubicles are more bright and airy; but they''re different in degree rather than in kind from the mills of the Industrial Revolution. Both cubicles and dark mills signify working on other people's terms, for other people's goals, at other people's sufferance. Neither type of work usually results in us owning the fruits of our labors or having the satisfaction of creating something from start to finish with our own hands. Neither allows us to work at our own pace, or the pace of the seasons. Neither allows us access to our families, friends, or communities when we need them or they need us. Both isolate work from every other part of our life.

# Jackie D at Samizdata.net - Happiness is a warm gun - Ms. D. visited an indoor gun range in Los Angeles on a recent visit. Time for Kim du Toit's little dance. Unfortunately, Ms. D. spends most of her time in largely disarmed Great Britain. [samizdata]

I have a lot more training to undergo before I am a confident shooter. Alas, it looks like I will not be taking that training in London - or anywhere else in Britain - anytime soon. And with the regulations that the legislature insists on piling upon American gunowners, I would advise US-based readers to exercise their freedom to bear arms while they still can.

# Ward Churchill at The Rocky Mountain News - Churchill's statement - Mr. Churchill has been wrongly characterized as have said that the people who were killed in the World Trade Center demolition deserved it. He clarifies what he meant here, and, in greater detail, in his book, On the Justice of Roosting Chickens. [root]

The bottom line of my argument is that the best and perhaps only way to prevent 9-1-1-style attacks on the U.S. is for American citizens to compel their government to comply with the rule of law. The lesson of Nuremberg is that this is not only our right, but our obligation. To the extent we shirk this responsibility, we, like the "Good Germans" of the 1930s and '40s, are complicit in its actions and have no legitimate basis for complaint when we suffer the consequences. This, of course, includes me, personally, as well as my family, no less than anyone else.

# LRB Arms of Long Island makes hammer forged M-14 and AR-15 receivers. The M-14 receivers are pricy, but likely very good. They also sell parts and complete semi-auto M-14 rifles. [clairefiles]