All Hail the Fatherland! Heil Bushnev! Sieg Heil!
Patri Friedman - Quotes by Robert Heinlein - some good ones:
"There is no worse tyranny than to force a man to pay for what he does not want merely because you think it would be good for him."and:
"Before a revolution can take place, the population must loose faith in both the police and the courts."and:
"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects." -- Lazarus Long in Time Enough For Love
National Ammo Day - Buyers' Report: National Ammo Day Reported To Date - at 9am this morning, the tally was 804,014 rounds and/or bullets plus 168 pounds of powder purchased by 1170 individuals. I bought a pound of H4895 and one hundred .44 caliber 300 grain hollow points. Happy Birthday, Kim! If you bought ammo yesterday, and haven't done so already, please report your purchase.
Alan Fram of AP via Yahoo News - Senate Passes Homeland Security Bill - the senate passed last night an amended version of H.R. 5005, the "Homeland Security Act of 2002". There are a few bills with this name. I've been talking about H.R. 5710, which is what the House passed last week. I haven't compared this to the senate version, but Mr. Fram says, "Because of technical changes the Senate made, however, the House is expected to provide final congressional approval Friday with an anticlimactic voice vote." Hopefully, Dr. Paul will force a roll call vote, so we'll know exactly who the traitors are. To read what they passed, click on the link to "H.R.5005.EAS", which is an amendment that replaces the whole thing.
Albany (NY) Times Union Editorial - Liberties at peril, Part II: A Pentagon project could spy on all aspects of American life - The TU chimes in on the Fatherland, er... Homeland Security Act.
Americans who cherish their freedoms are rightly alarmed that Congress might soon curtail basic liberties in the name of protecting national security. As this page pointed out last week, an early casualty of the war on terrorism could well be the Freedom of Information Act if Congress approves the Homeland Security Act without including safeguards to ensure that neither government nor companies can keep information secret simply by claiming that it is related to national security.
That is troubling enough. But now there is a real possibility the government will soon collect dossiers on all citizens, right down to the videos they rent and the e-mails they receive. It's a chilling prospect made even more troubling by the fact that the program is the brainchild of retired Rear Adm. John Poindexter, who was convicted of lying to Congress during the Iran-Contra inquiry. The conviction was later reversed on an appeal related to immunity.
Ron Paul at LewRockwell.com - The Homeland Security Monstrosity - Dr. Paul expands a little on the speech he gave on the House floor last week.
Congress spent just a few short hours last week voting to create the biggest new federal bureaucracy since World War II, not that the media or even most members of Congress paid much attention to the process. Yet our most basic freedoms as Americans -- privacy in our homes, persons, and possessions; confidentiality in our financial and medical affairs; openness in our conversations, telephone, and Internet use; unfettered travel; indeed the basic freedom not to be monitored as we go through our daily lives -- have been dramatically changed.
Robert Vroman at anti-state.com - Jungle Law Rights Theory - interesting idea. Rights and morality are as much subject to market pressure as pencils and oranges. [anti-state]
So the point is: there are no objective Rights. The Right to life is not fundamentally different than the Right to be free of second hand smoke, the only thing that determines which Rights exist and which do not is market forces. You may have an epiphany and craft the ultimate moral theory, but unless it is both practical and attractive to follow that theory, you might as well not have bothered: your theory is irrelevant, except for how it affects your own behavior.
...
The battle should not be perceived as anarchism vs statism, with us romanticized rebels on one side and anthropomorphised Leviathan on the other. Politics do not exist, they are merely the management decisions of the dominant firm, which, as of 225 years ago, adopted the marketing tactic of superficially seeking its customers' opinions. The only relevant social force is economic. Our true role is that of unsatisfied consumers, and boxed out suppliers, of a specific black-listed good, and the state is the obnoxiously successful peddler of junk goods we are trying to grab market share from. That is the paradigm we must adopt if we want to stop playing by the competition's rules and supporting their "political" marketing.
Alan Stang at The Federal Observer - Why We Need Guns - Elementary. [kaba]
The Founding Fathers want us to carry guns in case we ever need them to overthrow the government.
Randall G. Holcombe at LewRockwell.com - America's Transformation from Liberty to Democracy - How did America's government change from a republic with the sole purpose of preserving individual liberty to a democracy? First a reminder of the original purpose: [kaba]
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed." -- Thomas Jefferson, The Declaration of Independencean excerpt from Mr. Holcombe's article:
If we were able to go back to the time of the Revolutionary War and ask the typical American to describe, in one word, the underlying principle of the new American government, that one word would have been liberty. If we were to ask the typical American citizen today to describe, in one word, the underlying principle of American government, that one word would be democracy. The Declaration of Independence is largely a list of grievances against the King of England, and the American Founders wanted to escape the oppression of the British government and establish a constitutionally limited government to protect the rights of its citizens -- to preserve their liberty. Today Americans view the role of their government as carrying out the will of the majority. My new book, From Liberty to Democracy: The Transformation of American Government (University of Michigan Press) describes how the fundamental principle of American government has been transformed from liberty to democracy.
