End the War on Freedom

Ed Oliver at The Massachusetts News - Linda Hamilton Is Guilty of 'Assault With A Dangerous Weapon': On Wednesday, after her attorney agreed to a bench trial, Judge Alfred A. Barbalunga gound her guilty in a Pittsfield court. She will lose her gun permit and be fined about $400. Her attorney "barely began his closing argument before the judge cut him off and announced his decision." I talked with Linda on the phone. She said that they're filing for a mistrial. Her current attorney agreed to a bench trial on the advice of her former attorney, who Linda said is in bed with the DA. Linda said that Fox News in Albany has picked up her story, and it will be part of the new book that Claire Wolfe and Aaron Zelman are writing about Police State America. I added a link to this story to my Linda Hamilton page over at billstclair.com. [picks]

To make a donation for Linda's legal expenses, send a check to:

Linda Hamilton Legal Defense Fund
P.O. Box 484
Charlemont, MA 01339

Kevin Tuma - Painted into a Corner: cartoon commentary about the current position of the eco-extremists in Kalifornia. Ho. Hohoho.

S. Fred Singer at The Washington Times - Global warming rewarmed: Global warming is a fraud, but there's a good living in it on the government dole for algore and friends. Mr. Singer "is professor emeritus of environmental sciences at the University Virginia and former director of the U.S. Weather Satellite Service." [lew]

Laymen are understandably confused when scientists disagree. The explanation is simple. The U.N. group gets a warming trend by averaging data from all surface thermometers, including poorly characterized measurements of the sea surface. The so-called "skeptics" point to the absence of a temperature rise from well-controlled weather stations in the United States and Europe, where the local heating from urban effects can be eliminated. More important, the truly global data from weather satellites show no appreciable warming trend since 1979, and these results are independently confirmed by instruments carried in weather balloons.

...

Hence our conclusion: The balance of evidence suggests climate has not warmed appreciably in the past 60 years. We expect future climate effects from human activities to be barely detectable and certainly inconsequential. Let's see if Al Gore and the School of Journalism picks up on this. I am taking bets.

There's a new article in The Libertarian series by Vin Suprynowicz:

• Drug war very effective - The war on freedom, er... some drugs, has been very effective at bloating the police and prison "industries". That was likely one of the things that Harry Anslinger and friends had in mind when he invented "marihuana" at the end of alcohol prohibition.

  It's tempting to say the War on Drugs isn't working. In fact, it's working very well as a justification for allocating billions of additional tax dollars for police equipment and staffing and tracking systems -- in what would otherwise be a shrinking industry, as the aging of the American population has caused the rate of virtually every non-drug crime to actually plummet in recent years.

  Oh, the "War on Drugs" is working very well if your goal is to track where even law-abiding Americans go and who they call on the telephone and what they do with their money. It's only "not working" if we naively suppose the purpose is to stop people from voluntarily ingesting drugs -- which was actually given up as a lost cause in this country when they legalized "demon rum" in 1933.

Lew Rockwell at LewRockwell.com - Lights Out For Civilization? Kalifornia's problem? Government regulation. The solution: the free market. [market]

Bush should demand the full loaf: a complete repeal of the 1990 Clean Air Amendments (even if his dad was the one who approved them). These regulations have caused prices to rise along with the costs of doing business and saddled every local government and power producer with intolerable levels of federal supervision. If, at the same time, restrictions were lifted on nuclear power, the result would be cleaner air in the long run, and, far more importantly, lower prices and plentiful supplies of electricity.

...

If you know an environmentalist, tell him that if he likes barbarism so much, to turn off the electricity in his home and recycle his own waste. But leave the rest of us alone to enjoy the fruits of a capitalist society.

Rob Moody at LewRockwell.com - With Liberty and Justice For All? Virginia state senator Warren Barry "recently introduced a bill that would require students to recite the Pledge of Allegiance or face suspension." Mr. Moody tells us why we should NOT say the pledge. [lew]

It never occurred to me until I heard Marshall Fritz of The Alliance for the Separation of School and State say the following, which hit me like a shot to my solar plexus: Government schools churn out men who march obediently off to war, and women who cheer them. The welfare-warfare state always needs an ample supply of willing cannon fodder, and boy was I ever willing.

Tim O'Reilly's Weblog - The Rise of the Anti-Commons: an interesting viewpoint on how patents are being misused to cause gridlock. [mumble]

I was speaking with Charles Cella, the CEO of BountyQuest. Charles pointed out that patents don't actually give you the right to do anything. They simply give you the right to stop others from doing it.

A few days later, at a meeting of the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board, Berkeley Law Professor Pam Samuelson raised this same issue. She spoke of the rise of the "anti-commons". If enough people have the right to stop each other, no one can do anything.

Henry Kingman at LinuxDevices.com - Details emerge on Transmeta's "Mobile Linux": Linus has squeezed Linux into 8 megabytes using the compressing cramfs. [/.]

Add comment Edit post Add post