End the War on Freedom

Government is good at only one thing: it breaks your legs, hands you a pair of crutches, and says, "See, without us you wouldn't be able to walk." -- Harry Browne

Cloaca - what'll they think of next? A mechanical digestive system. Food goes in one end and gets chewed up. Chemicals and bacteria process it in a series of clear glass chambers. And brown smelly stuff comes out of the other end. If you're not fond of reading the common name of that brown smelly stuff, I suggest that you don't follow the link. [nasm]

ar15.com - Neck Sizing only in Autoloaders - HawkTech asks if he dares to neck size instead of full-length resize his AR-15 ammo. Most of the responses warn strongly against doing it. I added a link to this discussion to my Neck Resizing for AR-15 Reloading article.

DPS-FTP: trademarks are supposed to be industry specific, so if you sell Corn Flakes as a cereal, I can sell it as a brass polishing medium and neither one of us has grounds to sue the other. Not anymore. [nasm]

DPS-FTP is a multi-threaded FTP client for GNOME. It was originally called Kevlar FTP, since its interface was inspired by Bulletproof FTP, and Kevlar is bullet-proof. But DuPont actually sent me a notice telling me that I can't use their trademarked product names in my product name. They were generous enough to allow me to say that my product contains Kevlar, however. After explaining to them that, being software, my "product" does not contain Kevlar, and that I'm not making any money from the "product", they still would not let me use it. So, I renamed the program to DuPont Sucks FTP, or DPS-FTP.

Ronald Bailey at Reason Magazine - Debunking Green Myths - A review of The Skeptical Environmentalist, by Bjorn Lomborg. I've seen pointers to this story before today, but never followed the link until now. A former member of Greenpeace attempted to debunk a Wired article by a right-wing anti-environmentalist (Julian Simon), and ended up discovering that the greenies have their facts all wrong. As a matter of fact, the environment is getting better, from just about every perspective. So he wrote this book. Mr. Bailey works a bit of free-market philosphy into his review, as I would expect from a libertarian rag. [reductio]

Lomborg and his students discovered that Simon was essentially right, and that the most famous environmental alarmists (Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich, Worldwatch Institute founder Lester Brown, former Vice President Al Gore, Silent Spring author Rachel Carson) and the leading environmentalist lobbying groups (Greenpeace, the World Wildlife Fund, Friends of the Earth) were wrong. It turns out that the natural environment is in good shape, and the prospects of humanity are actually quite good.

...

Where does Lomborg fall short? He clearly understands that increasing prosperity is the key to improving human and environmental health, but he often takes for granted the institutions of property and markets that make progress and prosperity possible. His analysis, as good as it is, fails to identify the chief cause of most environmental problems. In most cases, imperiled resources such as fisheries and airsheds are in open-access commons where the incentive is for people to take as much as possible of the resource before someone else beats them to it. Since they don't own the resource, they have no incentive to protect and conserve it.

...

Things are better now," writes Lomborg, "but they are still not good enough." He's right. Only continued economic growth will enable the 800 million people who are still malnourished to get the food they need; only continued economic growth will let the 1.2 billion who don't have access to clean water and sanitation obtain those amenities. It turns out that ideological environmentalism, with its hostility to economic growth and technological progress, is the biggest threat to the natural environment and to the hopes of the poorest people in the world for achieving better lives.

New York Tyranny Response Team - The 16th annual Martin Luther King Day Celebration - TRT, SCOPE, and the Second Amendment Sisters all had booths at this years MLK day event in Albany. Article and pictures.

The Second Amendment of the Bill of Rights ...the right of the people to keep and bear arms... is as much a Civil Right as Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Worship, The Right to Peaceably Assemble to Petition the government for Redress of Grievances. If one can not recognize these Amendments as Civil Rights one does not know what all of our Civil Rights are, where to find them enumerated, or in the case of at least the Second Amendment how to recognize one under attack, even as legislators argue whether this Civil Right is even an individual right.

John R. Lott, Jr. at THe New York Post - The Missing Gun - this is an old story now, but Mr. Lott reminds us that most of the reports of the subduing of a shooter at the Appalachian Law School negelected to mention that the students who stopped him did so with the guns they had in their cars. Without those guns, they would have been unable to stop him until he had to reload. This likely saved multiple lives. [geneice]

When the shots rang out, utter chaos erupted. Mikael said, "People were running everywhere. They were jumping behind cars, running out in front of traffic, trying to get away."

Mikael and Tracy did something quite different: Both immediately ran to their cars and got their guns. Mikael had to run about 100 yards to get to his car. Along with Ted Besen (who was unarmed), they approached Peter from different sides.

As Tracy explained it, "I aimed my gun at him, and Peter tossed his gun down. Ted approached Peter, and Peter hit Ted in the jaw. Ted pushed him back and we all jumped on."

What is so remarkable is that out of 280 separate news stories (from a computerized Nexis-Lexis search) in the week after the event, just four stories mentioned that the students who stopped the attack had guns.

Johnny Student at Samizdata - Libertarian goes to college: don't say the "g" word or you end up in jail! - a college student mentioned the second amendment in a philosophy class and was sent to the dean's office for an attitude adjustment. They nearly called the cops. Walter Uhlman posted a response, amazed at what our colleges have come to.

As John Stuart Mill, a real philosopher once said:

One person with a belief is equal to a force of ninety- nine who have only interests.

Maybe that's the trouble. Today's professors can't bear the thought of people with belief expressing themselves. It might make other people think, and then where would we be?

Maura Dolan at The LA Times - State Court Backs Police on Searches - if you fail to produce your license or registration at a traffic stop in Californication, the police may now search your car. Not much left of the fourth amendment, eh? The 3 dissenting judges said as much. Searches are supposedly limited to finding the missing documents. Yeah. Right. [kaba]

Charles Steele at KeepAndBearArms.com - A Kid's View of the 2nd Amendment - a letter to the principal of Mr. Steele's son's school commenting on a Bill or Rights wall at the school. [kaba]

I noticed that the student who was assigned the 2nd amendment, failed utterly to convey the intent of the founders, or to state even one word of what the amendment itself says. Regardless of yours, mine or the students' teachers' position on guns in America, the intent of the 2nd amendment is clear and deserved representation in that poster. It was unfair to that child that the teacher did not "help" him/her better understand the intent of the amendment. As a parent I assume, possibly incorrectly, that it's the goal of a teacher to teach fact and truth in history, not skew it with personal ideology. I may be making a wrong assumption here about intentional ideological sway, in which case I suppose it is just possible that the teacher him/herself has no clue as to why the 2nd amendment was written into the Bill of Rights.

Instead of speaking of the ability of the citizenry to prevent the rise of tyranny, I read excerpts of supreme court rulings on gun laws. Instead of reading timeless quotes from Madison, Jefferson or Franklin, on the utter importance of the people to posses the means to resist oppression and to defend their country from threat, I read of "licensing and permits." Instead of reading that the right to bear arms is just that, "A RIGHT", I read it is a privilege.

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