Remember Waco
At what age should you start to teach your kid to shoot?
It really depends on the kid. I could have started at age five, others only develop an interest in shooting at age eight or nine -- but every single kid, boy or girl, should have been exposed to the fine art of shooting by age ten.
-- Kim du Toit
P.J. Gladnick - The Hillary Waco Project - cartoon telling of the siege on the Branch-Davidians that began ten years ago yesterday. Stories below. I intend to run the 1/3-size image of the picture below in the left-hand column for the next 50 days, with a link to Carol Moore's Committee for Waco Justice page. [cwj]
Gunblast.com - SHOT Show 2003 - short intro linking to three pages of captioned pictures. Gunblast.com "is the most honest, most down-to-earth Webzine for firearm aficionados." Added to my links page [highroad]
Jeff Quinn at Gunblast.com - Savage Arms' New AccuTrigger - I think he likes it.
With the new AccuTrigger, Savage has just left other manufacturers in the dust. It will be interesting to see what the others will offer while trying to play catch-up. Hopefully, this will start a new trend toward better triggers for precision shooters. For now, Savage is way ahead of the game with their new AccuTrigger. It is simple, safe, precise, and user-friendly. When it comes to mechanical devices, I rarely use the word "perfect". Most things in the real world are compromises, with perfection rarely achieved...
The Savage AccuTrigger is perfect.
Yuval Dror at Haaretz.com - Big Brother is watching you - and documenting - eBay's "privacy policy" is a gross misnomer. Any cop who asks, gets everything they know about any eBay user. And they keep everything about every transaction. Hooey. [smith2004]
We don't make you show a subpoena, except in exceptional cases," Sullivan told his listeners. "When someone uses our site and clicks on the `I Agree' button, it is as if he agrees to let us submit all of his data to the legal authorities. Which means that if you are a law-enforcement officer, all you have to do is send us a fax with a request for information, and ask about the person behind the seller's identity number, and we will provide you with his name, address, sales history and other details - all without having to produce a court order. We want law enforcement people to spend time on our site," he adds. He says he receives about 200 such requests a month, most of them unofficial requests in the form of an email or fax.
The meaning is clear. One fax to eBay from a lawman - police investigator, NSA, FBI or CIA employee, National Park ranger - and eBay sends back the user's full name, email address, home address, mailing address, home telephone number, name of company where seller is employed and user nickname. What's more, eBay will send the history of items he has browsed, feedbacks received, bids he has made, prices he has paid, and even messages sent in the site's various discussion groups.
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Nevertheless, eBay does not make do with simply sharing its data with the legal authorities. Sullivan says the company employs six investigators, all of whom have experience in police investigations. Their job is "to track down suspicious people and suspicious behavior." To that end, they scan for patterns that are atypical - different from "normal patterns." For example, if a person sold baseball tickets for two months and suddenly switches to selling a car, the eBay system will "wave a red flag" and signal the seller as someone behaving unusually. Who asks eBay to do it? No one. eBay volunteers.
eBay goes even further. In his lecture, Sullivan spoke about how he helped investigators locate a user who had been suspected of selling stolen cars through the site. "We tried to buy the car from the thief and in that way incriminate him. But the bad guy was smart. He saw there wasn't a single feedback in the history of the person who was making the purchase. He told us he didn't want to make a deal with us."
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"By buying PayPal, eBay is merging the information about the goods trail with the money trail," explains Kozlovski. "Thus, in spite of the protective mechanisms of the law against disclosure of details on transactions, eBay is in a position to analyze the full set of data and `advise' investigators when it might be `worthwhile' for them to ask for a subpoena to disclose the details of a financial transaction. Essentially, this bypasses the rules on non-disclosure of details of financial transactions and the confidentiality of the banker-client relationship."
Alisa Solomon at The Village Voice - When Cops Play Soldier, Protesters Become the Enemy - some horror stories from the February 15 peace march/protest. [trt-ny]
Rutherford Institute Attorneys File Complaint on Behalf of Third-Grader Arrested, Suspended Under School's Zero Tolerance Policies - possible justice ahead in a two-year-old zero-intelligence case. [smith2004]
Leslie Miller of AP via Excite - Feds Testing Air Passengers Check System - your ID will soon be checked against government databases, and your ticket will be assigned a color, greed, yellow, or red. Green and you go through relatively unhassled. Yellow and you get searched. Red and you don't fly. The TSA must die. [trt-ny]
Jim Davidson at The Libertarian Enterprise - USA, RIP - a history lesson concerning the death of the USA in 1868 and its zombie existence since then. This essay is a year and a half old, but history is always relevant.
America Civil Liberties Union - Stop the New Patriot Act! - has a link to send a fax to your Congress Critters. Indymedia report here. I sent the following: [indymedia]
As your constituent, I urge you to oppose any efforts by Attorney General John Ashcroft to pass his proposed "Domestic Security Enhancement Act" in Congress. I am deeply concerned that rather than passing this new Act -- which would give new and even more controversial powers than the "USA PATRIOT Act" - Congress should instead investigate and oversee ways in which this Administration has already used or misused new powers.
--ACLU above. Me below--
Isn't the Homeland Security Department already enough of a gestapo for you guys? Are we going to have to start decorating the lamp posts in DC to get your attention? I hope not.
Seems to me that it's way past time to replace Herr Ashcroft with someone who can understand his oath to protect and defend the Constitution. My "Sieg Heil" arm is tired. Isn't yours?
Anita Ramasastry at FindLaw - Patriot II: The Sequel Why It's Even Scarier than the First Patriot Act - a good summary. [indymedia]
J.J. Johnson at Sierra Times - Hydrogen: A Challenge of American Ingenuity - I've known for a long time that hydrogen is a better way to run our cars than gasoline. I'm not sure that Mr. Johnson fully understands, however, that hydrogen is an energy storage medium, not an energy source. Electrolysis uses more energy than you get from the resulting hydrogen. That's OK, since you can centralize the production near a nuclear reactor. Hopefully, solar electrolysis will become commercially feasible, but we ain't there yet. [sierra]
L. Neil Smith at Rational Review - Bad Company - on how disgusting it is to share anti-war sentiment with Democrats. [smith2004]
Today, it isn't any better. They're holding antiwar protests again on the corner of College Avenue and Mulberry Street (carefully matched by what can only be called pro-war demonstrations on the other side of the street), and as I drive by on my way to the shooting range, I see many of the same old faces, more wrinkled, to be sure, drawn and much grayer, but without a sign that they've learned anything in the past 40 years.
If I were to join them, which I'm certainly entitled to do by virtue of conviction, seniority, or sheer literary output, I doubt I'd be welcomed. If I carried a sign that said, "Taxation is the Fuel of War" or "Arm the People -- Disarm the State", they'd scream, soil themselves, or faint in tidy bunches, like asparagus on sale at the market. These people have a use all their own for an all-powerful state; they'll never give up on it, even if it did mean an end to war forever.
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However I will not refrain from saying, whenever the occasion arises -- even if I have to make the occasion arise -- that the left is as much to blame for this war as the right. Had we followed the Founding Fathers' plan and stayed out of foreign entanglements of any kind, we wouldn't be where we are now. Every war of the 20th century was started by Democrats, even if it was eventually embraced by Republicans.
Chuck Baldwin at Toogood Reports - The Fires Of Waco Still Burn In The Heart Of The American Conscience - yesterday was the tenth anniversary of the beginning of the siege on the Branch-Davidians. Still no justice in sight. [sierra]
February 28th marked the tenth anniversary of the illegal assault by agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms on the home of the Branch Davidians living outside Waco, Texas. A shootout resulted with several deaths on both sides. Shortly afterward, the Federal Bureau of Investigation took over, and on April 19, 1993, agents from both departments (using military hardware and both U.S. and foreign military advisers) laid siege to the dwellings which resulted in the deaths of 87 American citizens. Many of the victims were old men, women, and small children.
The events at Waco have contributed to the distrust and disdain of federal abuse of power like nothing since 1775. Moved by grassroots pressure, the Congress of the United States convened special hearings into the conduct of those federal agencies responsible. The result was less than satisfactory to many Americans.
Federal agents lied under oath without any punitive repercussions. Evidence was conveniently lost. Videotapes of the events revealed deceit, duplicity, arrogance, and a thirst for blood on behalf of the federal agencies involved.
At the end of the hearings, the questions remained unanswered and no one within the government was held accountable. Those Davidians that survived the raid were tried for murder. A jury found them innocent, but no charges were ever brought against any of the agents.
William Norman Grigg at The John Birch Society - Waco: Never Forget - transcription, MP3, and Realaudio versions of a speech by Mr. Grigg. Good summary of the story. Washington DC, not Baghdad, remains the world's worst imminent threat to our liberty. [sierra]
When the Davidians repelled the initial BATF raid, they acted as free men confronting the determined lawlessness of a rogue government agency. And in keeping with the Christian principles governing the use of deadly force, the Davidians allowed the defeated raiders to retreat, rather than mowing them down once the tide of battle had turned and the Feds were at their mercy. Had the Davidians been bent upon slaughter rather than self-defense, they would have displayed no such restraint.
Within hours, the FBI took over the siege. For more than a month and a half, the FBI -- with the expert advice of Igor Smirnov of the Moscow Institute of Psycho-correction -- conducted a campaign of psychological torture designed to break the will of the Davidians. FBI tank operators roamed the environs of Mount Carmel, destroying private property and, more importantly, material evidence critical to determining what had happened on the morning of February 28th. On-site FBI commander Jeff Jamar refused to cooperate with efforts made by local police and Texas Rangers to investigate the crime scene.
On the morning of April 19th, FBI operatives and Delta Force commandos staged a combined armor and infantry raid after relentlessly pumping CS gas into the Mount Carmel church building. Around noon, a fire began that quickly enveloped the church. Heat-sensitive videotape of the siege's final moments indicates that federal agents directed automatic weapons fire into the burning building, cutting off avenues of retreat for fleeing Davidians. Nearly eighty people, including seventeen small children, were cremated in the fire. Shockingly, a recorded radio transmission between FBI commander Jamar and a subordinate documents that Jamar intended for the adult Davidians to perish in the flames.
In its April 19th assault on American citizens, the FBI deployed a chemical agent that is banned, by international treaty, from battlefield use. Kopel and Blackman point out that "CS is metabolized in the body to form cyanide and the toxicity of hydrogen cyanide is increased in the presence of carbon dioxide, used as a propellant of the CS at the Mount Carmel Center. Hydrogen cyanide is the active ingredient in Zyklon B, the gas used to exterminate Jews, gypsies, and others in the Nazi death camps. [Thus the] fate of the children at Mount Carmel was not dissimilar to that of the children at Auschwitz: gassing, followed by cremation."
