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Submitted by Bill St. Clair on Wed, 15 Mar 2000 13:00:00 GMT

Beware the ides of March.

J. Orlin Grabbe at Laissez Faire City Times - In Praise of Chaos: This is from a speech given to the Eris Society in Aspen, Colorado, in August 1993. I've seen it before, but it's well worth a re-read. "Well, is it really the case there is a hidden plan, or does the goddess Eris have a non-hidden non-plan? Will there be a Thousand-Year Reign of the Messiah, or the Thousand-Year Reich of Adolph Hitler, or are these one and the same?" And this wonderful excerpt from the Tao Teh King:

The more prohibitions you have,
the less virtuous people will be
The more weapons you have,
the less secure people will be.
The more subsidies you have,
the less self-reliant people will be.
Therefore the Master says:
I let go of the law,
and people become honest.
I let go of economics,
and people become prosperous.
I let go of religion,
and people become serene.
I let go of all desire for the common good,
and the good becomes common as grass.
(Chapter 57, Stephen Mitchell translation.)

He ends with a quote from the Roman goddess Eris:

I am chaos. I am the substance from which your artists and scientists build rhythms. I am the spirit with which your children and clowns laugh in happy anarchy. I am chaos. I am alive, and I tell you that you are free.

The Libertarian Enterprise has a new issue:

Wayne Howard - Project Exile, or Project Gulag?: this one's on the title page, so you have to scroll down a ways to find it. Russ Howard, NRA Director from 1995 to 1997 writes on how Wayne LaPierre has destroyed the NRA. "On Mar.6, Wayne LaPierre had a joint press conference with Handgun Control Inc.'s Jim Brady and other prominent victim disarmers to launch Colorado Project Exile. Of course, some of us aren't so easily taken. Reportedly, Mark Call of Rocky Mountain Gun Owners' 'Tyranny Response Team' asked LaPierre, 'I missed the phone number to turn in your neighbor. Is it 1-800-Gestapo, or 1-800-Police State?'"
Mark Call - Report on the Project Exile Kickoff: this is also on the title page, below the article by Wayne Howard. It is also here, at the Colorado Freedom Report's web page. "By the time I was called on there was only a single question which had been burning in my consciousness ever since seeing the eerily-unsettling TV propaganda pieces almost everyone there was so enamored of: 'I missed the phone number to "turn-in-your-neighbor;" was it 1-800-GESTAPO or 1-800-POLICE-STATE ?' What surprised me was the reaction: not so much as a stifled chuckle. In fact, there was a full five seconds of utter stunned silence, during which time the moderator turned his back on us, then simply pretended nothing had happened. It spoke volumes..."
L. Neil Smith - Stars And Bars: L. Neil comments on the Colorado government's economic boycott of South Carolina for flying the confederate flag. "Let's stop kidding one another, shall we? From their previous work, we know too well what sort of flag Wellywebb and his bunch would raise over the South Carolina capitol. It would feature a hammer and sickle. Or a swastika."
Bruce Elmore - Smashing The State: a beginners guide to encryption with pointers to Anonymizer.com, Zero Knowledge, Pretty Good Privacy, PGPi, MailVault, HushMail.
Robert Ellis - Violence is a Function of Behavior, Not a Function of Firearms: "If 'gun control' were the answer to the issues of violence, then cities such as Chicago, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, Philadelphia and New York, all of which have severely restrictive laws prohibiting citizens from owning or carrying firearms, would be among the safest cities in the world. Instead, these cities with severe gun control laws, are among the most dangerous cities in the world. Gun control laws do nothing to reduce violent behavior because firearms are NOT the cause of violent behavior. Unfortunately, many of our elected politicians don't seem to understand this reality."
Letter from Michael Coughlin: "Therefore, doctors are approximately 9,000 times more dangerous than guns when accidents are concerned."
Letter from Sean: "if ANY 'government' agent comes onto my property and orders me to do ANYTHING I am going to blow their m-----f---ing head off. Just thought I'd let you know, by the way, if everybody that read this, would blow a couple of 'government' agents heads off, well, I think there might be a few less of em."
Letter from State Senator Gloria T. Tanner & Scott Graves: Ms. Tanner is aparently the sponsor of Colorado Senate Bill 34, the Obesity Prevention Act. Her response to Scott's letter is standard newspeak, most uninteresting. That his letter drew such a tepid response is amazing: "Ms. Tanner, let me be the first, in I what I assure you will be along list of people, to heap derision and messages filled with hate upon your pointy head. Your bill, SB00-034 is quite possibly the most stupid and pointless bit of health nazi crap pilled upon an already overflowing dung heap of legislation that you and your cohorts have spewed forth from your ever full cesspool like minds..."

Laissez Faire City Times - Ron Paul on Politics and Freedom: an interview by Alberto Mingardi and Carlo Stagnaro. In case you haven't noticed, I like Dr. Ron Paul, the only libertarian member of the U.S. House of Representatives. "I think people who are anti-politics have to come to the realization that politics always has, and always will, exist. If you want to limit the things government can do, you must take political action—because failing to make your own political decisions means that you are allowing somebody else to make those choices for you."

Mark and Tina Terry at Sierra Times - A Tale of Two Cynics: Mark & Tina propose an independent citizens' grand jury system giving us a way to prosecute government criminals, like the murdering Lon Horiuchi.

JBuilder 3.5 is available from Borland. Their foundation product costs only download time and some personal information. It works on Windows, Linux (x86 only?), and Solaris. The download was easy, but the activation key server was very slow. Strange, I didn't see it on /. yet. They recommend 128 megs of RAM. I've got 64 megs, and it seems to work, though it DID crash my machine once, and some operations were pretty slow (can you say "thrash"). They fixed some bugs in the Emacs key bindings. It now does incremental search right, Alt is the meta key, and meta-% even brings up the search dialog. I managed to compile and run my current, fairly large, project, using the latest and greatest JDK 1.3 from Sun. If I get some more memory, I think I'll like this better than the JBuilder 3.0 Professional that I'm using now. Wow! [cafe]

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Quotes

Government doesn't work. Never did. Never will. Can't. But there are lots of good people. Love them.

-- Bill St. Clair

The Atlanta Declaration

Every man, woman, and responsible child has an unalienable individual, civil, Constitutional, and human right to obtain, own, and carry, openly or concealed, any weapon -- rifle, shotgun, handgun, machinegun, anything -- any time, any place, without asking anyone's permission.

-- L. Neil Smith

Reread that pesky first clause of the Second Amendment. It doesn't say what any of us thought it said. What it says is that infringing the right of the people to keep and bear arms is treason. What else do you call an act that endangers "the security of a free state"? And if it's treason, then it's punishable by death. I suggest due process, speedy trials, and public hangings.

-- L. Neil Smith

A Penalty Clause for the Bill of Rights

Any official, appointed or elected, at any level of government, who attempts, through legislative act or other means, to nullify, evade, or avoid the provisions of the first ten amendments to this Constitution, or of the Thirteenth Amendment, shall be summarily removed from office, and, upon conviction, deprived of all pay and benefits including pension, and sentenced to imprisonment for life.

-- L. Neil Smith

Based on 253 journal articles, 99 books, 43 government publications, and some of its own empirical work, the panel couldn't identify a single gun control regulation that reduced violent crime, suicide or accidents.

-- John Lott, commenting on the National Academy of Sciences report on gun control laws.

Who is a libertarian?

Zero Aggression Principle ("Zap")

"A libertarian is a person who believes that no one has the right, under any circumstances, to initiate force against another human being, or to advocate or delegate its initiation. Those who act consistently with this principle are libertarians, whether they realize it or not. Those who fail to act consistently with it are not libertarians, regardless of what they may claim."

-- L. Neil Smith

(Formerly called the "Non-Aggression Principle", or "NAP")

Why Did It Have to be... Guns?

Make no mistake: all politicians -- even those ostensibly on the side of guns and gun ownership -- hate the issue and anyone, like me, who insists on bringing it up. They hate it because it's an X-ray machine. It's a Vulcan mind-meld. It's the ultimate test to which any politician -- or political philosophy -- can be put.

If a politician isn't perfectly comfortable with the idea of his average constituent, any man, woman, or responsible child, walking into a hardware store and paying cash -- for any rifle, shotgun, handgun, machinegun, anything -- without producing ID or signing one scrap of paper, he isn't your friend no matter what he tells you.

If he isn't genuinely enthusiastic about his average constituent stuffing that weapon into a purse or pocket or tucking it under a coat and walking home without asking anybody's permission, he's a four-flusher, no matter what he claims.

What his attitude -- toward your ownership and use of weapons -- conveys is his real attitude about you. And if he doesn't trust you, then why in the name of John Moses Browning should you trust him?

-- L. Neil Smith

Concise

"Tell me," I was once asked, "What do you think about gun control? Give me the short answer." To which I replied, "If you try to take our firearms we will kill you."

-- Mike Vanderboegh

Also from The Atlanta Declaration:

... like going to the bathroom, breathing, eating, sleeping, or making love, it turns out that self-defense is a bodily function one cannot safely or effectively delegate to a second party.

-- L. Neil Smith

This does not mean that "Marijuana should be available by prescription." It means that morphine sulfate should be available in five pound bags at the supermarket for a couple of bucks, like sugar... but probably in a different aisle, to avoid confusion.

-- Vin Suprynowicz

If you refuse to pay unjust taxes, your property will be confiscated. If you attempt to defend your property, you will be arrested. If you resist arrest, you will be clubbed. If you defend yourself against clubbing, you will be shot dead. These procedures are known as the Rule of Law.

-- Edward Abbey

The state can only survive as long as a majority is programmed to believe that theft isn't wrong if it's called taxation or asset forfeiture or eminent domain, that assault and kidnapping isn't wrong if it's called arrest, that mass murder isn't wrong if it's called war.

-- Bill St. Clair