End the War on Freedom

Maso Digital Studio - Icon War - Flash animation. What the icons on your computer desktop do while you're not looking. Hehe. [landrith]

From my website log file. Looks like someone in the army in Kuwait is looking for some Lake City ammo.

cacheout.kuwait.army.mil - - [05/Jul/2003:05:23:56 -0400] "GET /ammo.html HTTP/1.0" 200 9442 "http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=Lake+City+Ammunition+Sales&btnG=Google+Search" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0)"

Ronald Reagan at GunBlast - What July Fourth Means to Me - written by Reagan himself for Independence Day 1981. He's of course wrong that "we're better off today with fireworks largely handled by professionals", but the rest of it is good. [gunblast]

In recent years, however, I've come to think of that day as more than just the birthday of a nation.

It also commemorates the only true philosophical revolution in all history.

Oh, there have been revolutions before and since ours. But those revolutions simply exchanged one set of rules for another. Ours was a revolution that changed the very concept of government.

Let the Fourth of July always be a reminder that here in this land, for the first time, it was decided that man is born with certain God-given rights; that government is only a convenience created and managed by the people, with no powers of its own except those voluntarily granted to it by the people.

We sometimes forget that great truth, and we never should.

Hiawatha Bray at The Boston Globe - Website turns tables on government officials - Chris Csikszentmihalyi and Ryan McKinley have created the Government Information Awareness system (GIA) at the MIT Media Lab. The GIA web site was very slow when I looked at it yesterday. [libertydogs]

The site also takes advantage of round-the-clock political coverage provided by cable TV's C-Span networks. McKinley and Csikszentmihalyi use video cameras to capture images of people appearing on C-Span, which generally includes the names of people shown on screen. A computer program "reads" each name, and links it to any information about that person stored in the database. By clicking on the picture, a GIA user instantly gets a complete rundown on all available data about that person.

The GIA site constantly displays snapshots of the people appearing on C-Span at that moment. If there's a dossier on a particular person, clicking on the picture brings it up. A C-Span viewer watching a live government hearing could learn which companies have contributed to a member of Congress's reelection campaign, before the politician had even finished speaking.

All of the information currently on the site is available from public sources. But GIA will go one step further. Starting today, the site will allow the public to submit information about government officials, and this information will be made available to anyone visiting the site. No effort will be made to verify the accuracy of the data.

From the GIA mission statement:

To empower citizens by providing a single, comprehensive, easy-to-use repository of information on individuals, organizations, and corporations related to the government of the United States of America.

To allow citizens to submit intelligence about government-related issues, while maintaining their anonymity. To allow members of the government a chance to participate in the process.

Chisun Lee at The Village Voice - Activists Push Back at NYPD - The New York City police have gotten pretty heavy handed with protestors of late. Some of the protestors are fighting back, in court. [whatreallyhappened]

Sharpshooters will man the rooftops. Counterterrorism agents will patrol in civilian guise. Bomb squads will case subway tunnels. At least this much will be certain when the Republican National Convention comes to Madison Square Garden next year, say two former NYPD officials who helped oversee previous conventions there.

And while he won't divulge specifics, police spokesperson Michael Collins says plans are forming more than a year in advance to ensure "the highest levels of security this city has ever seen" when President George W. Bush arrives to be renominated in September 2004.

For the NYPD, in concert with the Secret Service and a slew of federal agencies, maintaining order will be a daunting challenge, and not just because of the obvious terrorism concerns. The Bush administration's policies have roused hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers to some of the most heated agitation the city has seen in decades.

Angry protesters have claimed police are meeting these demonstrations with new heights of repressiveness, amounting to a pattern of unfounded arrests and abuses. Now, with an eye to the near future, they are pushing back. A look at the activist scene today reveals a number of challenges that together form a multipronged effort to free the streets. New Yorkers want their right to protest to be as firmly entrenched as the police presence will be come 2004.

Phoebe Schellenberg at Justince in July - July 4th Protest Drives President Bush Out of Philadelphia - a protest planned for Bushnev's visit to Philadelphia for the dedication of the National Constitution Center caused him to speak to uniformed troops at a military base instead. [whatreallyhappened]

ThornWalker - Roy A. Childs, Jr. - Includes Ronald N. Neff's "Roy Childs on anarchism" and Mr. Childs' "The Epistemological Basis of Anarchism: An Open Letter to Objectivists and Libertarians". Mr. Childs proved that Ayn Rand's Objectivism implied anarcho-capitalism. In 1982, he decided that his previous arguments supporting free-market anarchism were wrong, but in the final 10 years of his life, according to Mr. Neff, he never said why. Don't miss (from the notes page) Childs Open Letter to Rand. I have read the open letter, and Mr. Neff's piece, but haven't yet finished "The Epistemological Basis...". It's long. [notreasonblog]

From Mr. Neff's piece:

Perhaps most interesting, though, are his comments on elections -- "opinion mongering on a mass scale": "The choices allowed the people are artificial and superficial at best, and are always determined by the state itself." And the minority is "subordinated to the consensus reached." (p. 3) His explanation of why elections are the undoing of conservatives is worth quoting at length:

What is the primary tool used by conservatives in opposing the growth of the state? Political action.

Conservatives propose to oppose the growth of the state by supporting politicians. And what do politicians do? They support the growth of the state. Conservatives would have you believe that you can dehydrate a plant by watering it, or get rid of rats by feeding them.

Remember that one of the ways a state grows is by responding to increasing demands for state services. What do conservatives constitute? An increasing demand for politicians. The conservatives abandon their businesses, their voluntary institutions, and rush to bestow their attention on the state. And they expect the private sector to grow and the state sector to shrink.

And more: by rushing into politics, what principles are the conservatives abandoning, and which are they accepting? Voting and political action itself implies a sanctioning of the state, and hence of its basis -- the rule of man by man. The conservatives would fight the principle by adopting it. They oppose the state -- by sanctioning the entire governing process. What will be the result? The growth of the state. (pp. 13-14)

...

The nub of the argument of the Open Letter is contained in "Epistemological Basis," but there is much more. Roy hammers away relentlessly at the ends government is to serve, showing that all its claims are, in the end, vain promises to relieve ordinary men of the necessity of relying on their own judgment and acting on it. He shows that there is no reason to suppose that any given agency would ever obtain or hold a monopoly on the use of force in a given area unless it first resorted to force. And over and over, he argues that the resort to government is nothing more than the quintessential resort to initiated force, and that that resort to force simply cannot be justified, the conceptual acrobatics of critics of the Open Letter notwithstanding.

From Nicholas Strakon's Editor's Note:

Roy Childs's "Epistemological Basis of Anarchism" is the only article I've ever read that made me regret I was an anarchist. The reason for that is that I would have derived immense pleasure from being converted by Roy's argument. As it happened, before a copy of the article fell into our hands (in 1970, I believe) Ronn Neff and I had already worked our way from Ayn Rand's "night-watchman" state to free-market anarchism. Our intellectual expedition moved out along several paths, but one of them was similar to the one laid out by Roy. More than three decades later I vividly recall my own feeling of liberation when I understood and accepted, at last, two things: first, that a man's knowledge of what is True, or Right, or Just depends in no way on the endorsement of that knowledge by political authority; and, second, that the rightfulness of his acting on that knowledge depends in no way on such authority.

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