Monsters, Inc.
The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum. -- Noam Chomskyand:
Decency, security and liberty alike demand that government officials shall be subject to the rules of conduct that are commands to the citizen. In a government of laws, existence of government will be imperiled if it fails to observe the law scrupulously. Our government is the potent, omnipresent teacher. For good or ill, it teaches the whole people by example. Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a law-breaker, it breeds contempt for the law. It invites every man to become a law unto himself. It invites anarchy. -- U.S. v. Olmstead, 277 U.S. 438 (1928), Justice Brandeis, dissenting
The kids and I went to see Monsters, Inc. yesterday. And a good time was had by all. Highly recommended for kids of all ages. My nearly five-year-old daughter liked it, but a friend's younger kid had to leave at one point because he was afraid.
Howie Carr at The Boston Herald - Liberals give new attitude their best shot - After 9/11, even former big-time gun grabbers want to be armed. As they should. As they always should have. But Howie's got it wrong on the revolver/semi-auto choice. The pros are mostly using semi-autos these days. [kaba]
There's an old saying that a conservative is a liberal who's been mugged.
Now I guess we can add, a gun-owner is a liberal who's worried about terrorists.
It's a silver lining to a dark cloud, isn't it, this sudden collapse of the anti-gun movement? But by God, it's happened. In the halls of Congress and the State House, they used to debate: Should we ban assault weapons? Now the more pressing question is: Do I buy a revolver or an automatic? Do you want to give up the larger magazine on an automatic for the greater reliability of the .38 caliber revolver? Ask any liberal - the choice is clear. The pros take the revolver, and so should any card-carrying member of the ACLU.
Alwin Hawkins - Facing Evil - scroll down a bit to find this bit. Evil exists. Those who have succombed to it must be eradicated. [heart]
Angel Shamaya at KeepAndBearArms.com - A Round of Hearty Applause for the FBI: Corrupt Mayor Who Sued Gun Industry Meeting His Just Rewards - Occassionally the feds get it right. Joseph P. Ganim, the mayor of Bridgeport CT, gun grabber extraordinaire, will soon make a very long visit to Camp Fed. [kaba]
Vin Suprynowicz - Meet the new boss ... same as the old boss - part of The Libertarian series. Thirty years ago, Amerika's socialists' speech was repressed when they spoke out against the Vietnam war. Now they are the ones doing the repression, of patriotic spirit by college students. The only way out is free speech. Open debate.
The point here is not just how out of touch left-wing academia seems to be with heartland American opinion -- though it does remain to be seen how long rank-and-file citizens will continue to pay vast sums to have their children "educated" by an intellectual class now revealed to have more sympathy with the purported grievances of Osama bin Laden than with the right of 5,300 innocent Americans to go to work in the morning without being murdered.
For it hardly solves the problem if those on "the right" grow outraged to have their flags taken down ... while asserting that suppressing the opinions of Communists and Wahhabi Muslims is merely common sense.
I find the views of both the latter mentioned parties to be by turns laughable and repulsive. But the solution is to hear them out and then ridicule them mercilessly, rubbing their rhetorical faces in their own failures. Is the Muslim peoples are the chosen of God, how come so many of them live in flyblown hellholes with no flush toilets while their corrupt poohbahs bask in all the oil wealth? Killing Americans will not solve this home-grown problem.
James Redford at anti-state.com - Government Causes the Crime - a summary of how governments cause wars and terrorist attacks. [anti-state]
So what really has happened during the 1990s which would incite Islamic foreigners to lash out against the U.S. establishment? In a phrase: the Gulf War. Since the 1991 war and the United Nations economic sanctions and intermittent bombing by the U.S. and Britain that followed, as many as two million Iraqis--about half of them young children--have died from starvation and easily preventable disease. When Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was asked in 1996 whether the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children was an acceptable price for maintaining sanctions on Iraq, Albright's response was "we think the price is worth it." To Arab Islamists, this is their equivalent to the Holocaust--and from their viewpoint they would certainly be remiss not to take action against the country largely responsible for it. As well, it was during this war that the U.S. Government placed its military forces into many Islamic countries such as Jordan and Saudi Arabia, and continues to maintain them there -- this can only be considered for most Arabic Islamists as a continuing aggression by U.S. foreigners upon their holy lands. This combined with the U.S. Government's continuing support of the Israeli Government in light of that Government's ethnic cleansing and racist policies against, and brutal treatment of, the Palestinians, is bound to pique more than a few Islamic Arabs. Indeed, the above three items are what Osama bin Laden apparently cited as his main reasons for his jihad against the U.S. establishment (although it should be noted that he also denied involvement in the September 11th terrorist attacks, for whatever that might be worth).
