The WIZ

Submitted by Bill St. Clair on Wed, 18 Apr 2001 12:00:00 GMT

From The Federalist. I've posted this before, but it's worth reading again.

I have little interest in streamlining government or in making it more efficient, for I mean to reduce its size. I do not undertake to promote welfare, for I propose to extend freedom. My aim is not to pass laws, but to repeal them. It is not to inaugurate new programs, but to cancel old ones that do violence to the Constitution ... or have failed their purpose ... or that impose on the people an unwarranted financial burden. I will not attempt to discover whether legislation is 'needed' before I have first determined whether it is constitutionally permissible. And if I should be attacked for neglecting my constituents' 'interests,' I shall reply that I was informed that their main interest is liberty, and in that cause I am doing the very best I can. -- Barry Goldwater

Also from The Federalist:

On many campuses, students are encouraged to think of other people's ideas and criticism as assaults. A whole vocabulary has sprung up to convert free expression into punishable behavior: hate speech, verbal conduct, verbal assault, intellectual harassment and non-traditional violence, a fancy term for stinging criticism. Universities tell students they have a right not to be harassed by hostile speech. Well, sure. Nobody should be harassed. But the connection between harassment and speech is made so relentlessly on campuses that many students think they have a right not to be offended. Real debate fades as ordinary argument is depicted as a form of assault. The conversion of the campus into a culture of feelings makes it worse. The feel-your-pain rhetoric of administrators who reward hurt feelings has the obvious effect of encouraging more students to swoon when their ideas are contradicted. In the long run, it also makes many topics too dangerous to raise. But being exposed to discomforting ideas is the price of freedom. Someone should advise college administrators to share this insight with their students. -- John Leo

Declan McCullagh at politechbot - Brown U professors demand crackdown on anonymous "injurious" email - racism schmacism. I'm glad David Horowitz created his ad, and that at least a few universities printed it. Controversy is good. Bring it on. These folks would do well to read and understand the Federalist quote above. This discussion is happenning at the Brown Daily Herald. Interim President Sheila E. Blumstein's remarkably rational response on the matter is here. [grabbe]

bob lonsberry - Addictions Are Not Diseases - Spot on, Bob! My experience exactly. Thank you for saying it so well.

It's not a disease. Alcoholism, drugs, smoking, sex addiction, molesting kids, beating your wife, shoplifting, telling lies. None of it's a disease. It's not. It's all behaviors.

Behaviors over which people have control.

And I'm sick and tired of this non-stop hand-wringing about people being powerless to control their addictions. If I hear another addle-brained apologist call any of those things a disease I'm going to explode.

Charley Reese at the Orlando Sentinel - Drop political euphemisms -- call a spade a spade - "National interest", "stability in the region", "intervention for humanitarian reasons" are meaningless terms used to dupe the people into supporting tyranical policies. Everything the U.S. government does has a real reason. Many of those reasons suck bigtime.

All of this arrogance, cowardice and hypocrisy is caused in part by our departure from our republican roots. In a republic, elected officials from the president on down are just ordinary citizens hired on a temporary basis to do jobs the rest of us are too busy to fool with.
Sometime around the Kennedy administration, people began to look upon politicians as though they were gods, or at least emperors. Since the days of the Revolution, some Americans have hungered for a king. Some Americans are so psychologically debilitated that they long for a Daddy Figure to tell them what to think and what to do.

Lindsay Perigo's Politically Incorrect Show - 17 April 2001 - the revised apology the U.S. should give to China. [market]

We're sorry that you don't train your fighter pilots better. As a token of our apology, here's a copy of Microsoft Flight Simulator 2000.

We're sorry that your front-line fighter planes can't outmaneuver a 35-year-old prop-driven airliner. Perhaps you'd like to consider purchasing some surplus 1950s-era Lockheed Starfighters from Taiwan (who just replaced all theirs with shiny new F-16s).

...

We're especially sorry for treating you with such respect for the last 20 years. We'll definitely rethink this policy, and will probably go back to treating you like a common, untrustworthy street gang very soon.

WorldNetDaily - New documentary attacks Waco report; 'F.L.I.R Project' finds FBI fired on fleeing Davidians - Mike McNulty has created a third Waco documentary, this one a 35 minute film ($19.95) examining the infrared movies taken from government airplanes during the massacre. He calls it the "smoking gun" proving that the feds mowed down the escaping Branch Davidians. I have both of Mr. McNulty's other documentaries. The F.L.I.R. images in the first film sure looked like gunfire to me. Enough so that when I realized what had been done I wailed and wailed. Ian Goddard's The Waco FLIR Flashes disagrees with Mr. McNulty. Mr. Goddard now believes that the flashes were solar reflections from an object flapping in the wind, though he formerly believed the flashes were gunshots. Carlos Ghigliotti claimed that he could actually see the people holding the guns in his high-definition version of the videos. He died shortly thereafter, mysteriously. I think it was machine-gun fire, but I'm not paying $20 for another video. [market]

The Scientific Graphics Toolkit "(SGT) facilitates easy development of platform independent, Java applications to produce highly interactive, flexible, publication quality, object oriented graphics of scientific data. Features include user settable or automatically scaled axes, sophisticated, automatically self-scaling time axes, labels as movable, customizable objects, automatic generation of legends to explain the data being displayed, and many more." [cafe]

The WIZ looks incredibly neat, though I'm a little concerned about the L. Ron Hubbard references. It's an idea to enliven everyday objects with memory, processing power, and communication, to make them sentient, sort of. [script]

Add comment Edit post Add post

Previous Posts:
Jesus is coming to dinner
Bache'ing It
Cato on Waco
Thumb Prints for Rentals. Not!
Spring 2001 in South Carolina
010406.html
The Tyranny of Good Intentions
For the Children. Yeah, right.
Spring Forward, 2001
The Incumbent Re-election Act of 2001

Navigation

History

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