End the War on Freedom

Two Puddles Chatting

It rained during the night
And two puddles formed in the dark
And began chatting.
One said,

"It is so nice to at last be upon this earth
And to meet you as well,

But what will happen when
The brilliant Sun comes
And turns us back into spirit again?"

Dear ones,
Enjoy the night as much as you can.

Why ever trouble your heart with flight,
When you have just arrived
And your body is so full of warm desires.
And look:

So many meadows of soft hair are
Planted upon you.

Why ever trouble yourself with God
When He is so unjudging
And kind

Unless you are blessed and live
Near the circle of a
Perfect One?

(The Gift: Poems by Hafiz, translations by Daniel Ladinsky)

Stuart Carlson - Homeland Security - my title. Cartoon commentary on the fact that laws are both unnecessary and ineffective in motivating people to action. [sierra]

Mike Shelton at The Orange County Registger - California Deficit - cartoon commentary contrasting the recent mine rescue with the California government. Hehe.

russmo.com - Prudence - cartoon commentary on protecting your home from forest fires.

Scott Bieser at Rational Review - The Voice of Experience - what GW could learn from WC. Hehe.

From The Federalist:

Progress is born of cooperation in the community -- not from government restraints. -- Herbert Hoover

To insist on strength ... is not war-mongering. It is peace-mongering. -- Barry Goldwater

When character is lost, rules and punishments cannot take its place. -- Paul Craig Roberts

"Armed Pilots? Many Travelers Are Gun-Shy" -- New York Times top-of-the-fold headline **Memo to the Times: Let's put armed pilots on red planes (Bush country) and unarmed pilots on blue planes (Gore country) -- and let's see which ones terrorists choose!

By a vote of 401 to 1, James Traficant was expelled from Congress for bribery, extortion and racketeering -- or, as they call it in Congress, the Triple Crown! -- Jay Leno

From Quotes of the Day:

I never vote for anyone; I always vote against. -- W.C. Fields

All science is either physics or stamp collecting. -- E. Rutherford

Garry Reed, the Loose Cannon Libertarian - Separation of Church and Statists - comments on a city trying to take a church'es property to increase their tax roll. Property rights? What property rights?

Used to be that eminent domain was all about using land for public works projects, like building a nice sewage treatment plant in your backyard or erecting a water tower so people can sprinkle their petunias and brush their teeth in the morning and flush their federally mandated low flow toilets. No more. Now it's all about money. Cypress community development director David Belmer explains why this land grab is in the best interest of the community (churches, apparently, aren't "community"): "They have a fiduciary responsibility to manage the city such that it has sufficient revenues to provide the services our residents have come to expect." Translation: shopping malls pay taxes, boring old churches don't. Kick the deadbeats out.

But don't those upstanding citizens of Cypress have rights, too? You bet they do, and this quote from an article in the Orange County Register makes that abundantly clear: "But Cypress residents say their quality of life is at stake. And they mirror the views of some city officials: What about residents' rights to new jobs, quality services and convenient shopping?"

Got that, all you rights-obsessed libertarians out there? People have a right to jobs, a right to services, a right to convenient shopping, but not a right to keep their own property. Kick the deadbeats out.

Thomas L. Knapp at Rational Review - Looking Forward -- and Back - a report on the Libertarian Party's recent convention and a thank you to Jim Lark, the outgoing party chair.

The most important result of the convention is that the particular schism that has torn the Party for the last eight years should be effectively ended. The election results for chair and LNC amount to a repudiation of the "spend and spend, don't elect and don't elect" cabal that maintained a white-knuckle grip on the Party's checkbook for nearly a decade.

...

Buckle your seatbelts and return your trays to the upright position. The LP is about to enter into a period of unprecedented success.

L. Neil Smith at Rational Review - Scattered Thoughts on the Life of a Writer - Neil is between book contracts, so he uses the time to ruminate on what writing means to him. Keep doing it Neil. Your books and essays matter. Even if the New York publishers won't pay you for them.

On top of that, if writers aren't crazy to begin with, they soon get that way, simply from sitting still indoors making tiny, precisely controlled, savagely restrained movements with their fingers and wrists, when what they so badly want and need to do, if they have any convictions at all, is to go outside, strangle everyone around them within reach of their hands, and bludgeon everyone else to death who isn't.

Instead, they have their characters do it in a book.

...

Robert Heinlein pointed out somewhere that most writers are broken in some way. He himself suffered tuberculosis, but many are just nasty little kids scrawling dirty words on the walls of somebody else's property. For the most part, in the western world today and possibly for the entire run of its history, writers and intellectuals have been traitors to their own species, delivering to humanity the worst advice they can possibly think of, because it pleases whatever demon within them that drove them to become writers and intellectuals in the first place.

I can't do that. My self-respect won't permit it, and I can't afford it in other ways, even if it means living in a tiny shoebox of a house and driving an 18-year-old car. Unlike other writers who claim that they enjoy writing for its own sake, I started writing with an ulterior motive. Several, actually. I don't like living in a police state. I want more freedom, not less. I want less government, not more.

I'm unwilling to sacrifice the minutest fraction of that freedom for the "safety" -- even if it were real, which it is not -- that the government wants to trade me for it. I understand, despite saturation level propaganda to the contrary, that it is government, not freedom, that poses the greatest threat to the life, health, and well-being of every single individual on this planet. I also understand, in the final analysis, that all taxation is theft and that all government is evil.

Steve Trinward at Rational Review - The day the LP stood up -- and honored its fallen heroes - the story of Mr. Trinward's work at ensuring that The Liberty Awards were decided upon at the Libertarian Party convention.

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