Lone Cloud
Claire Wolfe at Backwoods Home Magazine - Living the outlaw life: Freeing your inner outlaw - first in a regular series. Yay! Claire is back, sort of. Or so it says at Wolfe's Lodge. She's continuing the Hardyville columns that she started at WorldNetDaily in the members only section of Sierra Times A good reason to send some coin of the realm their way. Claire also links to The Claire Files, a compendium of links to every known Claire Wolfe article on the web. In this article, Claire gives us a few pointers on how to live free regardless of how many lawmakers attempt to enslave you. There are so many laws that you are already a criminal, whether you know it or not. Claire suggests that you embrace that fact and become an outlaw, someone who lives outside the law.
In The Tyranny of Good Intentions, Paul Craig Roberts and Lawrence M. Stratton write:"The U.S. Code, which contains all federal statutes, occupies 56,009 single-spaced pages. Its 47 volumes take up nine feet of shelf space. An annotated version, which attempts to bring order out of chaos, is three feet long and has 230 hardcover volumes and 36 paperback supplements. Administrative lawmaking under statutes fill up the 207-volume Code of Federal Regulations, which spans 21 feet of shelf space and contains more than 134,488 pages of regulatory law. ... Federal law is further augmented by more than 2,756 volumes of judicial precedent, taking up 160 yards of law library shelving."And you're certain you're not breaking one of those laws?
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In the science fiction novel Pallas, one of L. Neil Smith's characters says, "People—pardon me, journalists and politicians—have often accused me of believing that I'm above the law. And yet, who isn't? ... The law is created by demonstrable criminals, enforced by demonstrable criminals, interpreted by demonstrable criminals, all for demonstrably criminal purposes. Of course I'm above the law. And so are you."
Amen, bruthah Neil.
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Government ruthlessness is a giant purple rhinoceros standing in the path between you and the free enjoyment of Outlawry. It's a rabid rhino. With a cyanide-tipped horn. It's rutting season and it thinks you're competition. It's got a thorn in its little hoofie. In general, it's having a really, really, really bad day. Yes, resistance to arbitrary power is dangerous. Let's nobody kid herself about that. But resistance is not futile.
Senator Larry Craig - The Second Amendment - I first copied this a long time ago. It is the text of a speech given on the floor of the U.S. Senate on June 6, 2000. During these two weeks when the United Nations is discussing worldwide disarmament of its citizen slaves, it is a good reminder of why we must always remember, and fight for when necessary, the individual human right to keep and bear arms.
The framers of our Constitution wrote the Second Amendment with a greater purpose.
They made the Second Amendment the law of the land because it has something very particular to say about the rights of every man and every woman, and about the relationship of every man and every woman to his or her Government.
That is: The first right of every human being, the right of self-defense.
Let me repeat that: The first right of every human being is the right of self-defense. Without that right, all other rights are meaningless. The right of self-defense is not something the government bestows upon its citizens. It is an inalienable right, older than the Constitution itself. It existed prior to government and prior to the social contract of our Constitution. It is the right that government did not create and therefore it is a right that under our Constitution the government simply cannot take away. The framers of our Constitution understood this clearly. Therefore, they did not merely acknowledge that the right exists. They denied Congress the power to infringe upon that right.
Under the social contract that is the Constitution of the United States, the American people have told Congress explicitly that we do not have the authority to abolish the American people's right to defend themselves. Further, the framers said not only does the Congress not have the power to abolish that right, but Congress may not even infringe upon that right. That is what our Constitution says. That is what the Second Amendment clearly lays out. Our Founding Fathers wrote the Second Amendment to tell us that a free state cannot exist if the people are denied the right or the means to defend themselves.
Let me repeat that because it is so fundamental to our freedom. A free state cannot exist, our free state of the United States collectively, cannot exist without the right of the people to defend themselves. This is the meaning of the Second Amendment. Over the years a lot of our citizens and many politicians have tried to nudge that definition around. But contrary to what the media and the President say, the right to keep and bear arms is as important today as it was 200 years ago.
GOA Senate Ratings For The 107th Congress gives Senator Craig a "B" rating: "Pro-Gun Compromiser: generally leans our way". It seems that his actions are not entirely in line with his words. I can't find any detailed voting records on GOA's site any more, but there's a clue at the end of Mr. Craig's otherwise stellar speech:
Having said all of this, let there be no mistake. Guns are not for everyone. We restrict children's access to guns and we restrict criminals' access to guns, but we must not tolerate politicians who tell us that the Second Amendment only protects the right to hunt. We must not tolerate politicians who infringe upon our right to defend ourselves from thieves and stalkers and rapists and murderers. And we must not tolerate the politician who simply says: `Pass another gun control law and call 9-1-1.'
Leonard Reed at Foundation for Economic Freedom - I, Pencil - another good one to read if you haven't or re-read if you have. The Invisible Hand, explained, elucidated, made crystal clear.
I, Pencil, am a complex combination of miracles: a tree, zinc, copper, graphite, and so on. But to these miracles which manifest themselves in Nature an even more extraordinary miracle has been added: the configuration of creative human energies -- millions of tiny know-hows configurating naturally and spontaneously in response to human necessity and desire and in the absence of any human master-minding! Since only God can make a tree, I insist that only God could make me. Man can no more direct these millions of know-hows to bring me into being than he can put molecules together to create a tree.
The above is what I meant when writing, "If you can become aware of the miraculousness which I symbolize, you can help save the freedom mankind is so unhappily losing." For, if one is aware that these know-hows will naturally, yes, automatically, arrange themselves into creative and productive patterns in response to human necessity and demand -- that is, in the absence of governmental or any other coercive master-minding -- then one will possess an absolutely essential ingredient for freedom: a faith in free people. Freedom is impossible without this faith.
Harry Browne at the Orlando Sentinel - 2000 Libertarian candidate: Freedom is responsibility - Mr. Browne reponds to Charley Reese's July 1 essay.
But freedom is responsibility. When you're free, you're automatically responsible for your own future. The Freedom book shows why you must recognize the consequences of your own acts -- why you must take responsibility for whatever situation you're in today -- why you shouldn't blame others for what you don't like about your life -- why you must make your own decisions so you can be responsible for your own future -- and how to do that without the bad consequences you might be afraid of.
I installed Red Hat Linux 7.1 in a VMWare virtual machine. KDE 2 is very nice, though it takes a long time to start up. Good thing I won't have to do that very often, thanks to VMWare's nice suspend feature. Konqueror, KDE's new file manager, web browser, etc. is almost as nice as Opera, which works fine for me in Red Hat 7.1. I didn't play much with the KOffice apps, but they are rapidly making Microsoft Office look like the bloated pig it is. BlogMax appears to work. And our Java-based User Interface Manager application works modulo repaint failure of the JTree component.
