End the War on Freedom

Zapato Productions intradimensional, "Serving the Paranoid Since 1997". Includes Aluminum Foil Deflector Beanie: "An Effective, Low-Cost Solution To Combating Mind-Control", and MindGuard: "Personal Anti-Psychotronic Software For Amiga and Linux". Hehe.

Aaron Zelman & L. Neil Smith - Hope: How would you feel if you no longer feared your government... ? - this is a prepublication notice of a new book by Mr. Smith and Mr. Zelman. A lot could happen with one simple change in our government: Bill of Rights enforcement. I ordered a copy for $14.95. They expect to begin shipping in 3 to 4 weeks. [jpfo]

Hope is the story of Alexander Hope, a young American who comes back from Vietnam, falls in love with a bright, beautiful girl, and with her starts a pioneering computer business. Thirty years later he's a billionaire, and alone in life. He decides to leave everything he created behind to write books and teach history at a private college.

Almost as a joke, Alex allows a handful of admiring students to enlist him as a candidate for a third party Presidential nomination. His brief campaign rests on a single promise: to enforce the first ten amendments to the U.S. Constitution -- commonly known as the Bill of Rights -- exactly like the highest law of the land they happen to be. And in a series of astonishing but perfectly plausible political events, he's amazed to discover that he's headed for 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

There's a new issue of The Libertarian Enterprise, Ride the Lightning:

Common Sense Legislation Could Have Saved Teen Lives by Chris Goodwin - how to save our kids from a deadly weapon, the automobile. Very good pattern matching of the Brady Bunch'es gun rhetoric.

We would like to take this opportunity to state for the record that we are not anti-car, as our opponents in the American Automobile Association have painted us, nor do we want to take away all cars. We just want to see some common sense in how automobiles are sold and used. Neither the Constitution of the United States nor the state constitutions of the 50 states provide for any kind of right to own and drive automobiles; all 50 states specify that driving is not a right but a privilege.

TRT in the Crosshairs by Jeff Elkins - The anti-defamation league is going after the Colorado Tyranny Response Team. Good outline of the TRT's goals and methods.

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

• State to squeak by on 'less money than we started with.' Heh, heh - Nevada lawmakers suffer through a budget "shortfall", they can only spend 20 percent more than last year, including an 8 percent pay hike over two years for the state's nearly 16,000 employees.
• Pay more for better work? Sounds suspicious - The Clark County Commission in Las Vegas unanimously eliminated its employee merit pay system. The unions finally convinced them to stop "playing favorites" by rewarding better workers with better pay. Or maybe they just noticed that they could save money.

  There's an old saying in Russia that a socialist is a person who -- if he can't have a pig of his own -- would rather see his neighbor's pig killed, since that would be more "fair." Anyone who thought that was merely a joke might want to review the current situation among Clark County workers: the union would rather see total compensation for those workers drop by $1 million, if in return it can end a system where some workers were rewarded for outstanding performance.
  
  ...
  
  Ever watched four county employees change a street sign, or the light bulb in a stoplight? Notice one young fellow working with particular zeal in hopes of drawing the attention of his supervisor and thus earning a merit raise? No, I didn't think so.

Libertarian Party News & Features - Dr. Mary Ruwart wages campaign to be appointed FDA commissioner - It's official. Mary Ruwart is running for commissioner of the f.d.a.

Having worked as a research scientist for the Upjohn pharmaceutical company and taught in the Department of Surgery at St. Louis University, Ruwart said she has the expertise to "seriously reform" the agency.

"My goal will be to facilitate the conversion of the FDA from a bureaucratic regulatory regime into a market-oriented support system that maximizes our access to life-saving medications," she said. "I believe that I have the experience and the skills to create such an environment."

...

To support Dr. Mary Ruwart for FDA commissioner, write to: President George W. Bush, The White House, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW, Washington DC 20500.

Libertarian Party Press Release - What now? Five suggestions to prevent the next Timothy McVeigh - good advice on how to reduce the liklihood of another Oklahoma City bombing.

(1) Prosecute government officials who commit crimes.

"McVeigh said he blew up the building in Oklahoma City to protest the federal government's actions in Waco -- and he was quickly apprehended, tried, and punished for his crime," noted Dasbach. "That was proper, even if you might disagree with the morality of the death sentence.

"However, not a single FBI or BATF agent was arrested for their role in the fiery deaths of 86 people at the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas. There should not be one standard of justice for ordinary Americans, and another for government officials. Until that injustice is eliminated, many Americans will continue to view their government with suspicion, fear, and bitterness."

(2) Embrace an open, vibrant political system...

(3) Reject violence on principle...

(4) Repeal the Omnibus Anti-Terrorism Act of 1996...

(5) Reduce the size and power of the federal government...

Freedom Summit "is an annual seminar dedicated to promoting and advancing human freedom. To that end, the Freedom Summit offers speakers who have demonstrated their ability to effectively present the intellectual case for freedom." This year's meeting is October 6 & 7 in Phoenix. It costs $175 plus hotel. Speakers will include Jacob G. Hornberger, Don Boudreaux, Robert A. Levy, Butler D. Shaffer, Aaron Zelman, Vin Suprynowicz, Clint Bolick, Jim and Melissa Sharpe. [jpfo]

Richard S. Lindzen at Opinion Journal - The Press Gets It Wrong: Our report doesn't support the Kyoto treaty - Last week's report on climate change from the National Academy of Sciences was misinterpreted by the mainstream press. Jerry Pournelle says about this, "Regulatory science is to science as bear traps are to bears." [pournelle]

Our primary conclusion was that despite some knowledge and agreement, the science is by no means settled. We are quite confident (1) that global mean temperature is about 0.5 degrees Celsius higher than it was a century ago; (2) that atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide have risen over the past two centuries; and (3) that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas whose increase is likely to warm the earth (one of many, the most important being water vapor and clouds).

But--and I cannot stress this enough--we are not in a position to confidently attribute past climate change to carbon dioxide or to forecast what the climate will be in the future. That is to say, contrary to media impressions, agreement with the three basic statements tells us almost nothing relevant to policy discussions.

One reason for this uncertainty is that, as the report states, the climate is always changing; change is the norm. Two centuries ago, much of the Northern Hemisphere was emerging from a little ice age. A millennium ago, during the Middle Ages, the same region was in a warm period. Thirty years ago, we were concerned with global cooling.

...

Mr. Lindzen, a professor of meteorology at MIT, was a member of the National Academy of Sciences panel on climate change.

GOA's most recent postcards for representatives, Tom Delay, and g.w. encourage the defeat of S.27, the "Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2001", and it's sister bill in the house, H.R.380. S.27 passed the senate back in April by a vote of 59 to 41. These are not campaign reform bills. They are incumbent protection bills. They will forbid GOA and other groups from reporting the voting records of candidates within 60 days of an election. If such a group even mentions a candidate's name on radio or TV within 60 days of the election, they will lose their tax exempt status. The bill text is not for the squeemish. It would have taken me significant time to figure out what the text means. And I'm a lot smarter than most U.S. senators...

OFFXP: About Office Activation and Reduced Functionality - All about Office XP's activation feature. If you don't activate it with a license code, it works in viewer-only mode. My take: Microsoft seems hell bent on convincing people to ditch their software. [pournelle]

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