Claire's Bonfire of Horrors

Submitted by Bill St. Clair on Mon, 16 Jun 2003 12:00:00 GMT
Kevin Tuma - Hillary - cartoon commentary on the Living History book signing tour. Heaven help us.

Doing Freedom! for June 2003 is out!

Rocky and Bullwinkle at Doing Freedom! The Only Way to Go - if you can afford the training and the equipment, traveling by private plane is a good way to avoid the taking scissors away folks, and many of the hassles of driving. [Doing Freedom!]

Garry Reed, The Loose Cannon Libertarian - Our Logo Here - some government agencies are selling advertisements to help support themselves. Good, says Mr. Reed.

So Gary Ruskin of Commercial Watch gets it backwards when he decries the fact that San Diego has beach patrol trucks sporting giant Chevrolet emblems and the catchphrase "Official Vehicle of the San Diego Lifeguards." It's not that they've gone too far. They haven't gone far enough. Sell the whole damned beach to Chevy. Let them put their signs everywhere. Then sublease the snack shacks to McWendyKing and Taco Bender, franchise the beach umbrellas to Shady Deals International Trading Company and sell logo space on the canvass chairs and beach towels to the highest bidder. And then make the city cut taxes accordingly.

Bruce Schneier's Crypto-Gram Newsletter - The Risks of Cyberterrorism - are exceedingly low. Even calling it "terrorism" is a stretch. [grabbe]

Despite our predilection for calling anything "terrorism," these attacks are not. We know what terrorism is. It's someone blowing himself up in a crowded restaurant, or flying an airplane into a skyscraper. It's not infecting computers with viruses, forcing air traffic controllers to route planes manually, or shutting down a pager network for a day. That causes annoyance and irritation, not terror.

This is a difficult message for some, because these days anyone who causes widespread damage is being given the label "terrorist." But imagine for a minute the leadership of al Qaeda sitting in a cave somewhere, plotting the next move in their jihad against the United States. One of the leaders jumps up and exclaims: "I have an idea! We'll disable their e-mail...." Conventional terrorism -- driving a truckful of explosives into a nuclear power plant, for example -- is still easier and much more effective.

Claire Wolfe - I Just Made a Bonfire of Horrors - Claire has been the screen writer for JPFO's video documentary: Innocents Betrayed. Besides writing, she's collected the gruesome images illustrating what happens when the people are disarmed by their government. Her part of the project is done, so she burned her copied of the pictures. Thanx, Claire for exposing yourself to this so that we can remind the world of why all the people must always be armed. [claire]

And so, the bonfire -- consigning a two-foot-tall monument to human cruelty and misplaced trust to firece, cleansing flames. When I first carried the folders of photocopies out to the burn barrel, I thought I was merely doing something practical -- throwing the images away without taking up space in the trash can. But as the flames roared out and one after another the images curled up and withered away and out of my life, out of my house, out of my consciousness, into the pure blue spring sky, I felt my own spirit rising with the heat above the fire. My shoulders, which have been tight for months, suddenly didn't hurt any more. The horrors are still real and in the world and a genuine danger to us all. But in some absolutely primitive, visceral way, I felt as if they had also risen into the air and dissipated like the spirit of Sauron after the One Ring went tumbling into the fiery crack on Mt. Doom.

Boycott Delta - Victory - the Gestapo Department of Homeland Security has backed down on the CAPPS II system for tracking airline travelers. It appears that someone there finally read the Bill of Rights. [picks]

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