End the War on Freedom

Thanks to Sean Hackbarth for his kudos (3.22.2001) on my recent letter to the editor. [mind]

Jerry Pournelle's Current View - Thursday, March 22, 2001 - a good jab at Kalifornia's newest energy policy. Will likely move here next week.

California continues to spend its budget "surplus" on buying power so that the ratepayers won't have to face any consequences. Those of us who've always had stable power at higher but not exorbitant prices get to subsidize everyone else. This is known as fairness.

Al Giordano at Narco News - Oh, Mexico! Fox Calls for Drug Legalization - Mexico's President Vicente Fox has called for a world-wide end to drug prohibition. Bravo! Bravo! [grabbe]

Richard Stenger at CNN - Mir destroyed in fiery descent - The Russian space station went down last night. Hugh Williams saw it and heard & felt the sonic boom from Fiji. They've got videos of Mir and Mr. Williams. It was cloudy, so Mir appears as lights moving rapidly through the clouds. grabbe titled his link to the Washington Post story on the fall, "Piece of Junk Burns Up". Hehe.

Gary Webb at Narco News - Solidarity Letter - Narco News needs $13K to pay a lawyer. Gary Webb encourages people to send donations. Banco National de Mexico, S.A. ("Banamex") is suing Narco News, in particular Mario Renato Menéndez Rogriguez and Al Giordano. Banamex claims that it has been libelled and slandered by accusations that it is run by drug trafickers. Mr Webb knows all about the kind of garbage that Banamex is throwing at Narco News from being silenced when he reported about the CIA's initiation of the crack epidemic. [cures-not-wars]

James Ostrowski at the Ludwig von Mises Institute - A $21 Trillion Tax Cut - Mr. Ostrowski agrees with me on this one. Cut federal taxes to zero. He even gives details on how to do it. Hard numbers. He cuts the budget to $100 billion, and then funds that from citizen donations. Yes! [lew]

President Bush has proposed a $1.6 trillion tax cut. I would like to suggest that the president modify his tax proposal. He should increase the size of his tax cut to $21 trillion.

Well, it's not really a $21 trillion tax cut. It's a $2.1 trillion tax cut. I got the $21 trillion figure by projecting it for ten years, just as Bush does with his. I don't know why Washington projects these tax cuts for ten years, since federal budgets are only good for one year and can be changed any time thereafter.

But, you say, isn't $2.1 trillion the entire federal budget for one year? Right you are. Let me explain my proposal, using fourth-grade math...

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The true nature of our national defense posture has been obfuscated for many years. As for nuclear attack, we have no defense whatsoever. We have no way to stop the bombs from falling, and no reasonable person who doesn't own stock in defense industries believes that we will have such a defense in the near future. Query: Which is easier, (1) figuring out how to shoot nuclear missiles out of the air, or (2) minding our own business so other countries don't want to fire missiles at us? Only a Ph.D. in political science would not be able to answer that question.

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Here's my idea. Scrap the million-man army-keeping a small number of technicians to care for the high-tech stuff-and replace it with a fifty million-man militia, as in Switzerland. If you take the number of able-bodied men in America between the ages of eighteen and fifty, and subtract the crazies and wimps, you could have about fifty million men ready to defend the United States from that imaginary, non-existent invasion from the Chinese that will never happen. With each militiaman armed with an assault rifle, pistol, and shotgun (for old times' sake), they should be able to handle that five million-man Chinese army (which would already have been blown out of the water by our streamlined Air Force and Navy somewhere around the Philippine Sea.)

NewsMax.com - You Have Less Than 30 Days to Protect Your Medical Records: NewsMax is collecting names for a pettition against Klinton's so-called "medical privacy" rules that would give the feds access to everyone's medical records and assign a "unique health identifier", another brand for the federal cattle.

Camille Paglia at Salon - Welcome to my world - Camille wants a real tax cut. Not as much of a cut as I want, she would still fund schools, roads, and medical clinics for the poor, but if that were ALL that the federal government spent money on, besides defense, and I mean defense of the U.S., not everybody else, I could live with it. It would be a hell of a lot better than the behemoth we've got now. Ms. Paglia gets in a good jab at the New York Times, calls for a complete overhaul of American education, lambasts PC garbage at colleges, and says farewell to John Phillips of the Mamas and Papas wondering why, in technical terms, "California Dreaming" is such a good song. Opera, movies, TV. [lew]

Meanwhile, I'm baffled by the demagogic rhetoric of my own Democratic Party about Bush's proposed tax cut, which is rather minimal. It may be my libertarianism talking, but surely the people who create the income should have the benefit of the doubt when it comes to disposition of their wealth. Government has become a fat, lazy behemoth, spawning parasitic bureaucracies resistant to reform. Democrats seem addicted to the dole.

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The trades need to be revalorized. Young men and women should be encouraged to consider careers outside the effete, word-obsessed, office-bound professions. Construction, plumbing, electrical wiring, forestry, landscaping, horticulture: Such pursuits allow free movement and require a training of the body as well as the mind.

Lowell Ponte at FrontPage Magazine - Dishonest Abe? Steven Spielberg is planning a movie on the real Abe Lincoln. [lew]

The cinematic genius behind "Jaws," "E.T.," and "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," Spielberg is reportedly developing his first bioflick, which will depict martyred saint Lincoln "as a manic depressive racist who nearly lost the American civil war."

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The surprising thing to me is that Spielberg and Goodwin worship Big Government. Lincoln is perhaps our greatest icon of Big Government, the ruler who destroyed a States' Rights nation that prior to his war spoke of itself by saying "The United States are...," not as today "The United States is..." So why do these modern Leftists want to deconstruct their fellow lover of huge centralized government? It was not by accident that American Marxists fighting on the Communist side in the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s called themselves the Abraham Lincoln Brigade

Don Mathews at LewRockwell.com - The Market Chooses Georgia's Old Flag - Georgia's government has mandated a new flag to downplay the confederate battle flag. It didn't work. Georgians are buying the old flag in droves. It's flying in many places that formerly flew no flag. Hehe. [lew]

There are two new articles in The Libertarian series by Vin Suprynowicz:

• Lone property rights case before the court this year - More on the supreme court case of Anthony Palazzolo.

  Many among the eco-extremists squawk that if the high court holds for Palazzolo -- a decision is expected this spring -- it could become prohibitively expensive for bureaucrats to wave their magic wands and declare vast swatches of the American landscape off limits for productive use, the better to "protect the habitat of the threatened yellow mealworm," or whatever.

• Sen. Reid fears we'd only 'squander' proposed Bush tax cut - Didn't we hear this same tired rhetoric from algore during the presidential campaign? Or was it Klinton?

  Sen. Reid believes that if the Nevadans -- all the Americans -- who work so hard to earn their pay are allowed to keep a little more of those earnings, we will "squander" them ... who knows, probably on such frivolities as groceries, children's clothing, housing, and utility bills.

  But let Sen. Reid keep his hands on that loot, and he'll put it to much better use -- on such projects as (here I cite the spending items for which Sen. Reid was "honored" in last week's annual pork report of the Citizens Against Government Waste) a $2 million UNLV study of remote airport check-in sites, and another $36 million in dubious and unsolicited "energy project" grants to both of Nevada's major state universities.

Thomas Sowell at TownHall.com - Storm troopers vs. free speech - A good article about student response to an ad by David Horowitz discussing why giving reparations for slavery is a really dumb idea. This story was on public radio yesterday as well, but with a slightly different slant. Sean Habarth has good commentary on this story at The America Mind for 3.23.2001. [mind]

Charges of "racism" have been flung hither and yon by those protesting the ad, but "racism" has become like ketchup -- something you can put on almost anything. Anyone who actually reads David Horowitz's carefully reasoned and factually-based ad will understand why his critics did not simply reply to him and try to prove him wrong. His logic is too air-tight and it demolishes the idiocy of those who are calling for reparations.

Laurie Asseo of AP via Yahoo!.news - Court Nixes Hospital Drug Tests - Good news! The supremes have declared that drug testing women about to give birth, without their consent, is unconstitutional. Seven to two. Rehnquist and Scalia dissenting. [unknown]

Reuters via siliconvalley.com - Sun's McNealy tells investors to get a grip - people are complaining about losing their shirts on failed dot coms. Guess what? They've nobody to blame but their own foolish investing. Reports on an interview on Wednesday that I think I saw part of while walking on the treadmill at the club. [script]

"People are feeling really wounded because they bought stocks at 100 times revenues, and they can't understand why their life's savings is gone," he told Reuters.

"People, get a grip! Look at what you did!" said McNealy, famed in Silicon Valley for being outspoken. "'Hey, that truck hit me!' Well, you play in the freeway, you are going to get hit by a truck."

Graham Glass at IBM developerWorks - When less is more: a compact toolkit for parsing and manipulating XML: because conventional XML parsers were too slow for SOAP, Mr. Glass wrote his own and got a factor of 5 performance increase. This article tells how he did it. [script]

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