End the War on Freedom

You see those dictators on their pedestal, surrounded by the bayonets of their soldiers and the truncheons of their police, they are afraid of words and thoughts -- W.S. Churchill, referring to 'book burnings'

From Quotes of the Day:

You cannot make a man by standing a sheep on its hind legs. But by standing a flock of sheep in that position you can make a crowd of men. -- Max Beerbohm

When I was born I was so surprised I didn't talk for a year and a half. -- Gracie Allen

Tom Tomorrow at Salon - Junior Homeland Security Fun Kit - Cartoon commentary on the youth arm of the Amerikan Stasi. Hehe. [smith2004]

I had a little fun over at this ar15.com thread. Not very well received, so far, though not many have said anything. A few of the typical "love it or leave it" responses. Anarchy is hard to sell in a country where everyone is brain-washed by the government schools from the age of 5. I'll probably make one more post in the thread saying that though I think anarchy would work best, I'd settle for Bill of Rights enforcement. Course I'll have to define anarchy and Bill of Rights enforcement.

I think we should shut down every "publicly" funded (i.e. funded with stolen tax money) police force. Get rid of all the city cops, county sheriffs, state police, federal marshalls, every variety of armed federal goon, all of 'em.

As a free person, one of your responsibilities is security for yourself and your family. In such a world there will be plenty of private security firms that you can contract with if you need better security than you're willing to provide for yourself with the help of Mr. Colt. Insurance companies will pay for lots of it. Good security will improve their bottom line.

No, I don't know how well it will work relative to the status quo, but it beats the growing Amerikan police state hands down.

Of course, with no way to enforce political edicts, all the laws against victimless crimes (prostitution, gambling, drugs, gun possession) will go to the well-deserved trash heap. And true criminals will meet their well-deserved ends at the hands of their intended victims at the scene of their intended crimes.

A pipe dream? I don't think so.

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We used to have peace officers. Guys with badges whose job it was to help preserve the peace. They responded to citizen complaints about crimes.

Now we have Law Enforcement Officers. Military guys whose job it is to enforce a multitude of political laws with no right to be. Yes, many of today's men in blue are still peace officers. But a lot of them aren't. And the good ones support the bad ones. 42 bullets for a cell phone. Broom up your ass for God knows what. Bullet in the head while holding your baby. Women and children fried. And noone held responsible. Sorry, this is NOT OK. If the good cops would crucify the bad ones when they do bad, you could keep your good name. As it is, it's too late. You've lost me and a lot more like me.

Used to be I felt safer walking down the street if I saw a cop. Now I worry that he'll come after me, arrest me for breaking some crazy law I never even heard of.

America will never be Somalia. We didn't grow from a country full of warring tribes. The American west worked fine with very little organized law enforcement. It could work fine again.

And Glock31 heard me right. I don't want schools, libraries, public utilities, highways or anything else paid for with extorted money. Fee for service from private enterprises everywhere. Private schools, private libraries, private highways, private utilities, private security. Service contracts for things that you use every day, like roads.

Government doesn't work. Never did. Never will.

Sybase Solves Financial Services Industry USA PATRIOT Act Compliance Challenge - This is incredibly scary. GW's "know your customer" is way above what we fought against in Klinton's time. [pournelle]

"More than 6,000 financial institutions are facing the October 2002 deadline," said Billy Ho, senior vice president and general manager for Sybase's e-Business Division. "The Sybase PATRIOTcompliance Solution offers this significant market an end-to-end solution for Act compliance, from review of existing customers and account opening, through real-time analysis of transaction data, to filing Suspicious Activity Reports and maintaining scrupulous records for auditing. All transaction types can be handled, supported by a flexible architecture that builds upon existing applications and provides the features needed to address upcoming requirements like electronic filing and notification."

Vin Suprynowicz at The Libertarian Enterprise - I Sentence You To Death By Four Thousand Rules - one of the economy's real problems is the constant increase in government Regulations. It's expensive to stay in compliance. [tle]

"Agencies face overwhelming incentives to expand their turf by regulating even in the absence of demonstrated need, since the only measure of agency productivity -- other than growth in its budget and number of employees -- is the number of regulations," the Cato scholar continues. "Congress passed and the president signed into law 108 bills in 2001. But ... unaccountable regulatory agencies issued 4,132 rules. The unelected are doing the bulk of the lawmaking. ...

"By regulating instead of spending, government can expand almost indefinitely without explicitly taxing anyone a single penny," the Cato scholars conclude. "Making Congress accountable for regulation in the same manner it is accountable for ordinary government spending is the only way to head off this sort of manipulation."

Kent Van Cleave - Join the Bush Brigades - a TIPS poster fashioned after an old Nazi poster. Apt, eh? [tle]

Operation TIPS (Tattletales, Informants, Provocateurs, and Stool-Pigeons) isn't just for adults anymore! Learn the meaning of true citizenship in the Bush Brigades. Does your dad quote the Constitution? Does you teacher talk about the Bill of Rights? They need help, and you can make a big difference. Join the fight against privacy and individual autonomy today, and help to make political diversity a thing of the past.

L. Neil Smith at The Libertarian Enterprise - The Future According To Bush - Neil imagines the future that GW and friends are creating, something they don't share enough brain cells between them to see, even if they wanted to, which is unlikely. [tle]

We are all too well acquainted with the various futures envisioned for us by left wing socialists from H.G. Wells and Edward Bellamy to Gene Roddenberry, Ursula LeGuin, Steven Spielberg, and all those other good Samaritans who plan to take care of you to death. It sometimes seems as if that's all the future that we have left, a claustrophobic nightmare of altruism and collectivism in which the individual counts only in terms of his usefulness to others or some cause "greater than himself".

For 25 years, I've tried to present another vision of the future, one in which only the individual counts (because, in point of fact, only individuals exist) and there's plenty of elbow room for robust, freewheeling characters who can "spit on the mat and call the cat a bastard". That's the world I want to pass on to my daughter and her children.

As far as right wing socialists are concerned, it is admittedly a colossal assumption that George Bush or any of his closest accomplices are capable of imagining much of anything. They do not strike me as imaginative folk, or even very capable of abstract reasoning, for that matter. Every last brain cell they possess seems to be in use already, thinking up new, improved ways of enriching themselves at everybody else's involuntary expense, depriving the individuals who pay their salaries of rights it took a thousand years to win, or locking their most recent victims up somewhere so that nobody can see or hear their protests.

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