The Sagebrush Rebellion Lives!
County sheriffs in Wyoming are insisting that all federal law enforcement officers and personnel from federal regulatory agencies must clear all their activities in a Wyoming county with the Sheriff's Office.
Speaking at a press conference following the recent US District Court decision (case No 2:96-cv-099-J) Bighorn County Sheriff, Dave Mattis stated that all federal officials are forbidden to enter his county without his prior approval.
"If a sheriff doesn't want the Feds in his county he has the constitutional power and right to keep them out or ask them to leave or retain them in custody."
GeekWithA.45 - Smug Sanctimony - the geek visits a new doctor with his newly adopted kids and finds that the State is kept very healthy at the doctor's office. They didn't even have lollipops to comfort the kids after their shots. Not healthy, doncha know. Sheesh. [geekwitha.45]
Fatherhood changes many things, and one of them is that in the past, all of this collectivist, politically correct meddling had zero ability to impact me personally, and thus I could rage at liesure.
With kids, the stakes are high, as it brings you directly into the line of fire.
Things have changed, drastically, in the last 30 years.
It's becoming clear to me that the center of the battle is being waged over the Free Minds and Souls of our children.
We must not fail. We cannot fail.
By any and all means, these kids will be brought up so as to be Free, Thinking, Compassionate, Brave and Strong human beings, true Americans according to our highest aspirations, no matter the price, so help me, God.
GeekWithA.45 - Let's Register and TAX the Unarmed... - of course. Since these cretins refuse to defend themselves, they should pay for the rest of us to defend them. [geekwitha.45]
Smedley Darlington Butler - War Is A Racket - a longish essay by a World War I veteran, who retired in 1931 as a Major General in the United States Marine Corps. General Butler says, "To Hell With War!" He lists socialist ideas for ending it, though none of his ideas are any worse than forced conscription, the problem he's trying to solve. Archived in the Crimes Against Humanity section of ratical.org's ratville. [smith2004]
WAR is a racket. It always has been.
It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.
A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small "inside" group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.
In the World War [I] a mere handful garnered the profits of the conflict. At least 21,000 new millionaires and billionaires were made in the United States during the World War. That many admitted their huge blood gains in their income tax returns. How many other war millionaires falsified their tax returns no one knows.
Bruce Schneier's Cryptogram - September 15, 2003 - the difference between accidents and security incidents. My take: this is why our new Gestapo, er... Homeland Security Department, is doing a pretty good job of making us safer, but nothing whatsoever about making us more secure. Their policies make it less likely for us to be harmed accidentally, but do almost nothing to prevent intentional violence. It's not their fault, really. Centralized security just doesn't work. A distributed threat must be met with a distributed defense. Everyone must be watching all the time for terrorist threats and everyone must be prepared at all times to counter one. If the government has any roll in this, it would be to coordinate training, voluntary training of course. Schneier goes on to promote his new book, Beyond Fear. He is not in favor of licensing computer users. Forbidding hats in banks considered ridiculous as a security measure. Benevolent worms considered evil. California's Security Breach Disclosure law "is so badly written as to be a sham."
At a time when we're worried about attacks -- by terrorists, hackers, and ordinary criminals -- it's worth spending some time talking about accidents.
Some years ago computer-security researcher Ross Anderson described the difference as Murphy vs. Satan. Defending against accidents, he said, means designing and engineering in a world ruled by Murphy's Law. Things go wrong because, well, because things go wrong. When you're designing for safety, you're designing for a world where random faults occur. You're designing a bridge that will not collapse if there's an earthquake, bed sheets that won't burst into flames if there's a fire, computer systems that will still work -- or at least fail gracefully -- in a power blackout. Sometimes you're designing for large-scale events -- tornadoes, earthquakes, and other natural disasters -- and sometimes you're designing for individual events: someone slipping on the bathroom floor, a child sticking a fork into something (accidental from the parent's point of view, even though the child may have done it on purpose), a tree falling on a building's roof.
Security is different. In addition to worrying about accidents, you also have to think about nonrandom events. Defending against attacks means engineering in a world ruled by Satan's Law. Things go wrong because there is a malicious and intelligent adversary trying to force things to go wrong, at the very worst time, with the very worst results. The differences between attacks and accidents are intent, intelligence, and control.
...
"In Beyond Fear, Schneier has utterly demystified the idea of security with a text aimed squarely at nontechnical individuals. He takes his legendary skill at applying common sense and lucidity to information-security problems and applies it to all the bogeymen of the post-9/11 world, and asks the vital question: What are we getting in exchange for the liberties that the Ashcroftian authorities have taken away from us in the name of security?
"This is possibly the most important question of this decade, and that makes Schneier's book one of the most important texts of the decade. This should be required reading for every American, and the world would be a better place if anyone venturing an opinion on electronic voting, airline security, roving wiretaps, or any other modern horror absorbed this book's lessons first." --Cory Doctorow, BoingBoing
<http://boingboing.net/2003_08_01_archive.html#200444060>
Ron Paul at LewRockwell.com - The Costs of War - a speech Dr. Paul gave on the House floor on September 16 arguing to reject Bushnev's $87 billion funding request. [lew]
Those within the administration, prior to the war, who warned of the dangers and real costs were fired. Yet now it turns out that they were correct, that it would not be a cakewalk, that it would require a lot more troops, and costs would far exceed original expectations.
