Most Unusual
Painted on the back of a car trailer:
I got a new race car for my wife. Good trade, don't you think? -- Bubbs Tanner
Monde offers a new version of an old standard: [anodyne]
I pledge allegience to the people --
the entire race of humanity,
and to the planet on which we stand
one fragile web of life, indivisible,
and to liberty and justice for all.
Bill Sardi at LewRockwell.com - Oil Of Oregano Rivals Modern Antibiotic Drugs - May work against anthrax. Get some quick before they ban it. [lew]
Robert P. Murphy at the Ludwig von Mises Institute - Is Libertarianism Defunct? - Not even close, says Mr. Murphy. I agree. [lew]
For example, in her article, " The Fatal Weakness of Libertarian Thinking," Molly Ivins had castigated libertarians for their "eternal tendency to apply simple solutions to complex problems." She mocks them for their mantra, "Tax cuts good, regulation bad; tax cuts good, regulation bad."
In one sense, Ivins is perfectly correct. Libertarians do have a simple answer to political issues: You can't steal, and you can't kill to get your way. These two prohibitions alone disqualify virtually every proposal discussed by our media's talking heads, whether the no-spinning Bill O'Reilly, Rush Limbaugh with his talent on loan from God, or even that player of hardball, Chris Matthews.
Libertarians can't help it if the vast majority of people still acquiesce in the theft of taxation or the murder caused by our federal government through its wars on drugs, guns, and foreign peoples. Yes, we too would like to move on to deeper issues, but the government and its cheerleaders won't let us. Would Ivins object to the civil-rights hustlers for their mantra, "Equality good, racism bad; equality good, racism bad"?
Steven Yates at LewRockwell.com - Carryin' on With Ol' Isaiah - Mr. Yates has been accused of preaching to the choir. Albert Jay Nock reminded us in his 1962 essay Isaiah's Job that preaching to the choir is important. The masses will never grok the truth, but the Remnant will, even though you may never know who they are. [lew]
But be all this as it may, the Remnant is also out there. Nock tells us there are only two things we can really know for sure about the Remnant. That was the first, "that they exist." The second is that, if you do your best, "they will find you." We are speaking and writing to those who question -- perhaps almost instinctively -- "what everyone knows" and decide to snoop around on their own in search of truth. As such, they are naturally drawn to others who do the same. Beyond this, "working for the Remnant means working in impenetrable darkness ... [for] ... you do not know and will never know who the Remnant are, or where they are, or how many of them there are, or what they are doing or will do."
Seattle Times - FBI investigates shooting death of assistant U.S. attorney - Tom Wales, a Seattle attorney and former president of CeaseFire, an anti-gun organization, was killed in his home with a handgun in what appears to have been a hit. [kaba]
Vin Suprynowicz - Islamic Silence - part of The Libertarian series. A perspective on Palestine that I haven't seen before. Salman Rushdie and Dr. Imad-ad-Dean Ahmad have spoken out against bin Laden's "holy" war. Vin asks why so few other muslims have done so.
Palestine was the name of the British protectorate which was divided in half in 1948, to form a Jewish state of Israel and a Palestinian state of Jordan. Their properties largely seized without compensation, the Jews who had been living in what is now Jordan found themselves unmistakably unwelcome there and relocated into Israel -- no mass of Jewish squatters has camped around the borders of that country for the past 50 years, creating a "Jewishtinian problem" and leading to U.N. condemnation of "racist Jordan" for treating them unfairly.
If the Arabs who had been living in what is now Israel left their homes it was not because the Israelis drove them out. Rather, most left before they ever saw an Israeli uniform, believing Arab promises that Israel would soon be conquered and the Jews "driven into the sea." It is not America which has prevented any Palestinians from settling in Jordan or anywhere else in the Arab world, nor which prevents the Palestinian majority in Jordan -- formerly "Palestine" -- from living in "security."
Vin Suprynowicz - Security is important, but so is oversight - part of The Libertarian series. On Amerka's Reichstag fire. Heil Georgie. Well, not yet.
It's well to remember that the evening after the Reichstag fire, on Feb. 28, 1933, the aging German president Hindenburg was pressured by Chancellor Hitler into signing an emergency "Decree for the Protection of the People and the State," declaring: "Restrictions on personal liberty, on the right of free expression of opinion, including freedom of the press; on the rights of assembly and association; and violations of the privacy of postal, telegraphic and telephonic communications and warrants for house searches, orders for confiscations as well as restrictions on property, are ... permissible beyond the legal limits otherwise prescribed."
Vin Suprynowicz - They Could Hardly Wait - An advertisement for Vin's monthly newsletter, Privacy Alert, which I wholeheartedly recommend. The article is worth reading just for the commentary, however, even if it doesn't convince you to subscribe.
But, most predictably of all, now come calls for virtually unlimited federal power to snoop on our e-mail and voicemail messages and other electronic communications (the debate over whether FBI Carnivore devices should be allowed at every ISP being particularly disingenuous -- insiders tell us in most cases they're already there) ... not to mention a new presidential exercise of the already dangerous power to freeze the bank and brokerage accounts of anyone suspected of "suspicious or anti-government" activity, without right of appeal or benefit of due process.
(President Bush froze the accounts of 27 individuals and groups on Sept. 24. Was there any "due process" involved? Any right to appeal if someone felt they made the list without justification? Did our eagle-eyed national media -- so-called guardians of our freedoms -- even ask?)
Is more evidence needed that the statists are willing to dance on the corpses of the newly fallen in their rush to fulfill their pre-established anti-freedom wish lists? Then let's talk for a moment about Attorney General John Ashcroft and so-called "Libertarian" Larry Ellison of Oracle Computers, conspiring to gin up huge new "defense contracts" to wire us all up with "smart chip" national identity cards ... all in the name of "stopping terrorism," of course.
Vin Suprynowicz - No time for panic spending - part of The Libertarian series. Increased government spending will not help us now. Exactly the opposite.
This is not the kind of war that will be won through the mass productive of tanks and bombers and battleships. Rather, what is called for is a new look at de-centralizing responsibility for both our defense and our prosperity. President Bush's calls for the American people to remain vigilant here at home already echo the calls of our forefathers for the nation's defense to rest not on standing armies mired in entangling overseas alliances, but rather on a self-reliant people and its ever vigilant citizen militia.
Vin Suprynowicz - Yes, we're at war ... against sick Americans - part of The Libertarian series. The war on freedom, er... some drugs, marches on, even though the money and the manpower used to fight it would be much better used in protecting us from bad guys than from vegetables. Vin covers the recent armed robbery of the medical records of Dr. Mollie Fry, by Amerika's home-grown terrorist organization, the Drug Enforcement Administration. He also relates a conversation with Steve Kubby.
As "we watch a war unfold on the television -- a 'good' war to protect us from terrorists ... it raises some questions," writes L.J. Carden of Meadow Vista, Calif., in a Wednesday letter to the editor of California's daily Auburn Journal.
"Why then are precious resources -- specially trained, heavily armed and already on the federal payroll 'home security types' -- attacking a licensed medical physician and her attorney husband in rural El Dorado County?" asked Carden, whose letter was headlined: "Good war vs. pot raid."
"Shouldn't their goal be to protect us from really dangerous people?"
