End the War on Freedom

From muth:

"Thomas Jefferson once said, 'We should never judge a president by his age, only by his works.' And ever since he told me that, I stopped worrying." -- Ronald Reagan

From The Federalist:

"Several sections of the Constitution expressly grant Congress the authority to tax and spend money to establish military forces to defend the nation against its enemies. Not one says anything about buying drugs for retired people. ... The president and many Republicans in Congress strongly advocate naming to the federal courts only judges who will be 'strict constructionists,' meaning they will apply the Constitution as it was written and ratified. But do they practice 'strict construction' themselves when it comes to creating and funding government programs? You can search the Constitution looking for a clause that gives Congress the discretion to create a Education Department, and you will have no more luck finding it than you would finding the clause that mandates a federal prescription drug benefit." -- Terence Jeffrey

From root:

"Nations are possessed with an insane ambition to perpetuate the memory of themselves by the amount of hammered stone they leave. What if equal pains were taken to smooth and polish their manners? One piece of good sense would be more memorable than a monument as high as the moon." -- Henry David Thoreau

# I took a photo of my Winchester 1300 pistol grip 12 gauge, a gun you'll face if you break into my house. Yeah, I know, it needs a light. This is the 1/4 scale version (605x163, 24K). Click on it for the 1/2 scale version (1210x326, 70K). If you really want the full-resolution version (231K), send me email.

# Charley Reese - Basic Premises - why Mr. Reese won't come out and proclaim that he's an anarcho-capitalist, I don't know. He sure writes like one. [clairefiles]

What follows are a few of the basic premises on which I base my thinking. You might or might not agree with them, but may I suggest that you make a list of your own basic premises. It will help you clarify your thinking.

1. Government is inherently incompetent, and no matter what task it is assigned, it will do it in the most expensive and inefficient way possible.

2. The American government is corrupt from top to bottom.

3. If you rely on the mass media to inform you about your community, state and nation, you will, with rare exceptions, be woefully ignorant of what is really going on.

4. The universal franchise is a bad idea. The notion that the destiny of the nation should be put in the hands of ignoramuses, parasites, boobs, party hacks and idiots is absurd on its face.

5. Public education in America is a failure and is so flawed it cannot be reformed.

6. Not much has changed in the past 5,000 years of human history.

# drizzten - The Additonal Tyranny - The New Austin Smoking Ban Passes - the city of Austin Texas just banned smoking in restaurants and bars. A glorious rant from a libertarian anarchist who lives there. I especially like his Billy Beck quote: [saltypig]

An Experiment In Ethics

Let's say that you woke up one morning and, looking out your front window, you observed a crowd of people at the end of your driveway. Let's say that you went out there to say "hi" and find out what's going on. On your arrival, you discover that this crowd of individuals was getting ready to hold a referendum on whether they should enter your house and take your things, to be put to their use.

Would you cast a vote?

Remember folks. Smoking bans have nothing to do with health. They're all about private property rights. If any majority, no matter how large, can vote that you cannot allow (or ban) smoking or any other activity between consenting adults on your property, then it isn't really your property, is it?

# Jude Wanniski at LewRockwell.com - John Bolton, a Force of Darkness - why John Bolton should not be approved as U.S. ambassador to the commU.N.ists. I have no horse in this race. I think the U.S. should withdraw from the U.N. and kick them out of New York. Of course, the U.S. should also withdraw its military from the entire world, and eliminate the standing army, leaving only the Navy and the Air Force and enough of the Army and Marines to keep the equipment in working order and to train volunteers should they be necessary to defend our country from attack. [lew]

# Uri Avnery at Strike the Root - 'Aren't You Ashamed?' - why protesting the killing of two Palestinean boys by Israeli soldiers was a perfect way to celebrate Holocaust Day. The Israeli government has become the nazis they claim to hate. [root]

That morning, the newspaper Haaretz presented its readers with a nice gift: every copy of the paper came with a large national flag attached. One woman took this flag, painted a blood-red stain on it and held it aloft throughout the demonstration.

Should she be ashamed of herself? On the contrary. I think that she expressed the spirit of Holocaust Day better than any other person in Israel or at the Auschwitz ceremony.

# Douglas Herman at Strike the Root - Geronimo, Cochise and Osama bin Laden - if the neocon war-mongers would study U.S. history, they would know that they will never conquer Osama bin Laden's "terrorists" until they honestly offer true justice. [root]

Perhaps most remarkable is a collective American myopia to history. Only a century and a half ago, the charismatic Cochise held the American military to a bloody stalemate for a dozen years with fewer than 200 fighters, and Geronimo frustrated US captors for a quarter century with as little as 37 followers. Cochise finally negotiated a favorable truce from Washington DC , but not before he conducted a series of vengeful raids and depredations from his mountain sanctuary in southeastern Arizona.

Fift
een thousand casualties later, the roads leading to Tucson cut and that city besieged, a half dozen US generals and five thousand troops frustrated, President Grant realized the futility of fighting a conventional war against an unconventional warrior. Twelve years later Grant negotiated a peace settlement with Cochise.

# Bill Walker at Strike the Root - Arm the XX - hehe. [root]

"Guns don't kill people. Women don't kill people; men kill people." -- Penn Jillete

Violence is not randomly distributed. There are genetic markers that are highly correlated with violent tendencies. One set of genes is present in 96% of the incarcerated violent criminals in the US , yet is present in only 49% of the general population. These same genes are also present in the majority of Arab suicide bombers and 100% of NHL hockey players. There is a simple, low-cost, 99.9999% accurate genetic screen to find the carriers of these "violence genes," using a simple karyotype that can be performed in any hospital. There is even a technical name for this gene complex: in molecular biology, we call it the "Y Chromosome." I say that it is time that we use our knowledge of this genetic marker to reduce crime; any other course can only lead to more unnecessary deaths. Think of the children.

# John Taylor Gatto at The Odysseus Group - The Underground History of American Education - Why government-mandated education is such a totally absurd concept that it's a wonder people put up with it. The link is to the prologue to Mr. Gatto's book, which I have not yet read. Seems like time to do so. The entire book is available here, or you can order it on dead trees. [cafe]

You aren't compelled to loan your car to anyone who wants it, but you are compelled to surrender your school-age child to strangers who process children for a livelihood, even though one in every nine schoolchildren is terrified of physical harm happening to them in school, terrified with good cause; about thirty-three are murdered there every year. From 1992 through 1999, 262 children were murdered in school in the United States. Your great-great-grandmother didn't have to surrender her children. What happened?

If I demanded you give up your television to an anonymous, itinerant repairman who needed work you'd think I was crazy; if I came with a policeman who forced you to pay that repairman even after he broke your set, you would be outraged. Why are you so docile when you give up your child to a government agent called a schoolteacher?

...

The cost in New York State for building a well-schooled child in the year 2000 is $200,000 per body when lost interest is calculated. That capital sum invested in the child's name over the past twelve years would have delivered a million dollars to each kid as a nest egg to compensate for having no school. The original $200,000 is more than the average home in New York costs. You wouldn't build a home without some idea what it would look like when finished, but you are compelled to let a corps of perfect strangers tinker with your child's mind and personality without the foggiest idea what they want to do with it.