End the War on Freedom

Would You Prefer Armed or Unarmed, Sir?

"It's been my position ever since Sept. 11 that if they were serious about reducing the possibility of plane hijackings, only one thing is needed. A big table with a pile of handguns on it at every boarding gate. Above the table would be a sign, 'If you don't have your own, please take one of ours. 'Armed pilots and air crews would help but a plane full of armed passengers would be the ultimate deterrent."

- Jack Joyner, Delta, OH

From kaba:

When a well-packaged web of lies has been sold gradually to the masses over generations, the truth will seem utterly preposterous and its speaker a raving lunatic. -- Dresden James

The terrible thing about the quest for truth is that you find it. -- Remy de Gourmont

russmo.com - Investing For Future - too true to be funny.

There's a new Libertarian Enterprise Issue: "High-Risk Cargo". Articles I liked:

• Letter from John Pate - re: killing U.N. soldiers.

  As an old-school bomb-chucking anarchist, I've come to the conclusion that the only way forward is that anyone in a uniform (except for when in protective clothing for hazardous work or for purely ceremonial or entertainment purposes) automatically has a "kill me" sign pinned on their back. If you need stewards to help the socially confused at your boondogle, they can wear flourescent armbands and be very polite. "Zero tolerance" is the fashion nowadays after all.

• Letter from Lionell Griffith - a response to Wendy McElroy's The Bill of Intellectual Rights.

  "Don't argue to display your own cleverness. This is as offensive to most people as an ostentatious display of wealth that usually causes resentment, not admiration."

  The author presumes offense and resentment taken by someone else is something that one must not engender. Well, she has greatly offended me by saying that I must modify my behavior simply because someone else is offended. I resent the implications. Unfortunatly, that is an argument from weakness. The offence and resentment resides within. It is an internal response to words. By making the speaker responsible for your reaction, you abandon responsibility for yourself. That is exactly what the so called politically correct feminists are doing. They attempt to make others responsible for their feelings and thereby deny self responsibility.

• Letter from Carl Bussjaeger - announces the winners of the Sixth Annual Liberty Round Table Essay Contest.
• Heartbreak Ridge by Jeff Elkins - on "the heartbreaking destruction of our freedom by those we entrust to preserve it."
• Owned by the Anti-Drug Cartels by Rick Gee - Who owns you? You do, of course. So stop letting jack-booted thugs behave as if they do.

  So why are marijuana and other drugs verboten? The cynical (but obvious) answer is that the ruling elite love to control the rest of us. In 2000, over 730,000 Americans were arrested for the heinous act of simply possessing or using marijuana. Our prisons are so full of drug users (most of them marijuana users) that the United States now houses 25% of the world's prison population.
  
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  All of the above arguments (definitely not a complete list) for ending The War on Some Drugs have merit. Some are practical, some are self- serving. But none of them carries the moral weight of the single most important reason for complete drug legalization: if I am the owner of my self and my body (and surely I am), nobody may tell me what I may ingest into it.
  
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  The War on Some Drugs is really The War on Some People.
  
  If you want to drink a fifth of Scotch a day and die from cirrhosis of the liver, that's OK as far as the government is concerned. But if you want to relax after a hard day at work with a few tokes on a joint, you are a criminal and may go to jail.
  
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  If Schmoke and Johnson have been the only prominent elected officials to have had the gonads to decry the war on drugs, that is still two more than have had the courage to criticize another victimless crime: "drunk driving." Oh, you say, but drunk drivers kill over 25,000 people in the US every year. What about those victims? True, but many people are also killed by drivers who are drowsy (or even asleep), tuning their radios, eating their Big Macs, talking to their passengers, or who are just plain BAD DRIVERS. Should we therefore outlaw eating and talking and listening to the radio if they are done within the confines of a moving automobile? Vehicular manslaughter is the crime and should be punished severely. But if you have a few beers at your local watering hole and then drive home safely, without incident, what exactly is the crime? Who is the victim?

• Stunningly Stupid by Carl Bussjaeger - why it is dumb as dirt to deny pilots effective tools of self-defense.

  Tell you what, Mr. Minetta, and especially you, Mr. President: If stun guns are all the defense that pilots require in order to protect thousands of lives, hundreds of times a day, how about you making your Secret Service security details, Sky Marshals, FBI, and the rest of your thugs turn in their firearms and protect you and your families - only a few people, after all - with nothing but stun guns.

Adriana Cronin at Libertarian Samizdata - Star Wars: the Libertarian subtext - Why the Star Wars films are good for libertarians. [samizdata]

An entire generation has grown up, especially in the United States, taking much of their basic morality from these films. That morality, despite being simple and unoriginal, has become part of that generation's meta-context. The new films are likely to be just as popular and influential with today's children. This is the good news because any child growing up on the new "Star Wars films will absorb the basic idea that the most dangerous enemy of them all is a slick politician, who promises to make the world better by taking more power for himself, whilst being publicly apologetic about the necessity to do so. Years from now, when little Jimmy comes to cast his first vote, in the back of his mind will be the memory from the most powerful fairytale of his childhood - you can't trust politicians, especially the ones who want more power. No matter what they say. And whilst that may not be enough to create a libertarian wonderland just yet, it certainly goes straight for the meta- contextual jugular.

AP via Sierra Times - Powell confirms United States to pull out of treaty creating international criminal court - Good news. [sierra]

The United States will tell the United Nations this week it is renouncing formal involvement in a treaty creating the first permanent war crimes tribunal, Secretary of State Colin Powell said Sunday.

Powell said the Bush administration will notify U.N. Secretary- General Kofi Annan that the United States has no intention of ratifying the treaty and now considers itself "no longer bound in any way to its purpose and objective," Powell said on ABC's "This Week."

Charley Reese - Mr. Bush's Albatross - About GW's "deal" with Ariel Sharon.

A stronger president, say a Harry Truman or a Dwight Eisenhower, would have gotten Sharon on the telephone and said: "Listen, if there is any doubt in your mind as to which of us is the big kahuna, it's me. Get those troops out of the West Bank now or see how you like living without $3 billion in American aid. If necessary, I'll freeze every asset the Israeli government has in the United States and suggest a U.N.-sponsored economic embargo.

Don Hamrick at KeepAndBearArms.com - Social Norming The Second Amendment: Reinstating a Constitutional Norm as a Social Norm Through Social Norms Marketing - a long article about how and why we should return America to nationwide unlicensed open carry, the norm before prohibition. Especially convincing is Mary Carpenter's letter: Grandmother of Slain Children Protests Trigger Locks and Mandatory Gun Storage. Her grand children, who knew how to use guns, were pitch-forked to death because they couldn't get to their father's handgun due to his obedience of California law.

May you stand before God and man as my two precious grandchildren's killer if you pass any more gun legislation that will make me a felon should I own a handgun or any other gun for that matter.

Charlie Brennan at The Rocky Mountain News - Libertarian candidate for Senate doesn't mince words - Rick Stanley hauls out the "T"-word. Good for him. I agree with him. 100%. But he (or the reporter or editor) needs to learn that the proper past tense of the verb "to hang" in this context is "hanged". [kaba]

"I believe he should be indicted for treason," Stanley wrote of the Republican incumbent. "Hung, when found guilty."

Isn't capital punishment a shade . . . severe?

"Actually, I do" mean that literally, Stanley said Friday. "All of these people (in Congress) are traitors."

Pressed for specifics, Stanley said:

"Wayne Allard voted for the Patriot Act. That violates the Constitution seven or eight different ways. You could take almost any legislation over the last 100 years and say the same thing."

Ron Paul's Texas Straight Talk - Pilots vs. Bureaucrats - Pilots are the last line of defense against terrorist hijackers. Arm them. Now.

Pilots already fought this fight last November. Congress passed an armed pilots provision as part of a larger airline safety bill, and the President signed the legislation. Transportation Secretary Mineta, however, has a long history of opposition to gun rights as a Congressman- and his anti-gun bias is interfering with his ability to do his job. He is no longer a lawmaker. His job now is to implement the laws passed by Congress. Yet like the IRS, the Transportation department simply won't follow laws it doesn't like. This illustrates perfectly how we have come to be governed by unaccountable, unelected bureaucrats who constantly undermine the legislative process.

Bob Wallace at LewRockwell.com - The Hammer and the Thumb - violating natural law is not a good idea, for individuals or for governments. [lew]

Every war the US was involved in was caused by violations of "Do not steal" and "Do not murder." All could have been avoided. World War I appears to have been the cause of all the rest. Something that happened almost 100 years ago still affects us today, illustrating the truth of the Biblical saying, "The sins of the fathers are visited on the sons."

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If people are forbidden to steal and murder, then so are governments. When governments ignore these laws, we end up with catastrophes, sometimes world-wide. It is the height of hubris for governments to think they can ignore laws of the universe. Obviously, my thumb has more brains than everyone in the US government combined; it allowed itself to be hit only once before it learned its lesson.

Jeff Elkins at LewRockwell.com - You Can Own a Machine Gun - all you need to do is pay a $200 tax and convince the local sheriff to sign the form. The latter is the rub, but the 1934 Group is working on removing this part of the 1934 National Firarms Act. [lew]

Brad Edmonds at LewRockwell.com - We're Like Ants - and if we had the freedom of the individuals in an ant colony, we would accomplish miracles while very well defending ourselves. [lew]

This has implications for national security. Stick your finger into an ant hill, and you'll learn that the ants do an admirable job of defending themselves. Again, they don't really have free will, and they aren't acting as a result of superior intelligence. Regardless how it happens, beings with superior capacities, such as cattle and people, avoid stepping in antbeds (never mind beehives). Nations are in a sense the equivalent of antbeds, but of a special kind: Most of us big ants must apply for permits to defend themselves and their colonies, and are never allowed to stray beyond their borders to defend their homes against invaders. Only the Government Ants can do this. After long enough, most of these ants lose the capacity to defend the colony.

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