End the War on Freedom

"Alcohol, Tobacco & Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency." -- unattributed

From smith2004:

"This week the original Constitution of the United States will be on display to the public at the National Archives in Washington, DC. They figure this way maybe Attorney General John Ashcroft will get a chance to read it." -- Jay Leno

Made my second National Ammo Day purchase yesterday, a 140-round military surplus battle pack of .308. Happy Birthday (yesterday), Kim!

R. C. Baker at The Village Voice - American Gods - how apt. The drawing below describes Ashcroft's fascism perfectly. [trt-ny]

Asked to do a cover painting for this issue of the Voice--a riff on the finger-flipping patriot deemed too provocative for the hardcover edition of Uncle Sam--the chronically overscheduled Ross hesitates, then chuckles. "If you'd asked for anything else, I'd have had to say no. But I've wanted to get that one out there for a long time."

"Uncle Sam represents the government," Ross says, "and our current government is giving us the finger. But you can turn that around and see the true spirit of the nation giving it back to a government that is telling its citizens, 'We know what's best--don't question us.' That finger is definitely a fuck-you back at this government."

He elaborates: "Everyone's asking why are we in Iraq? We were sold a bill of goods. This is a show of strength to scare the rest of the world--go after the obvious bad guy. It's like Batman going after the Penguin because he can't find the real villain, the Joker. Batman would never do that just for show--that kind of thing only works for lone justice anyway, not with countries. [The administration] is feeding its ego by trying to send that kind of cowboy justice out into the world. You can't take vigilante philosophy onto that kind of scale."

Tina Terry at Sierra Times - Movie Review: Innocents Betrayed - great article with lots and lots of quotes and links. Long, but worth reading. [sierra]

I believe from the bottom of my heart and soul that one simply cannot be anti-Second Amendment and pro-citizen-disarmament without being in utter denial -- denial that is, as Innocents Betrayed reveals, mortally dangerous to oneself, one's family, one's community, one's country and one's planet.

I believe all this to be true because of personal experience.

For a couple of years during the 1970s I was actually a confused, deluded and misguided member of Sarah Brady's Handgun Control, Inc. (http://www.handguncontrol.org/) For that short time, I bought the hysterical, irrational, emotion-driven, lying propaganda propounded by people like Mrs. Brady and many politicians and Hollywood celebrities, that - if only we could rid the world of "evil" guns - all human violence would somehow vanish from the planet. Even though HCI would and could never provide a single shred of truthful evidence to support this contention, they promote it to this day.

What I discovered from my exposure to HCI and similar emotion-driven anti-Second Amendment organizations is this: Their members and supporters are self-anointed elitists, who lie so egregiously, consistently and chronically to themselves and others about facts, truth and basic human behavior that their propaganda rivals that of classic, master-manipulator elitists like Josef Goebbels, Adolph Hitler's Minister of Propaganda, Josef Stalin, Mao Tse Tung, Pol Pot and countless other murderous, megalomaniacal, power-hungry tyrants -- many of whose actions are examined in Innocents Betrayed.

Brady et al lie about statistics. They lie about facts. They lie about history. They lie about cause and effect. They lie about their intentions and agenda.

And their biggest lie of all: They tell us that all their efforts are "for the good of society" and, of course, "for the children." They claim they only want "to rid the world of gun-violence" -- using the sound-bite buzz-word "gun-violence" as if the tool itself is responsible for whoever who uses it for harm, and as if getting rid of all guns would somehow get rid of the innate violence in human nature.

...

Morally bankrupt, openly socialist film-maker Michael Moore made a slick, smarmy anti-Second Amendment pseudo-documentary called Bowling For Columbine -- and actually won an Academy Award for Best Documentary for this film - even though attorney David T. Hardy and others painstakingly revealed that Moore's film was more fiction than fact (see: Bowling for Columbine -- Documentary or Fiction? http://www.hardylaw.net/Truth_About_Bowling.html) and that it in no way met the Academy's criteria for a bona fide documentary. Despite this fact, the Academy has refused to consider revoking Moore's Academy Award.

Every time I go to the video store and see Moore's despicable movie being displayed for rental to the masses, I cringe at the damage to the truth and freedom that this film is causing. What I and other Bill-of-Rights-supporting truth-seekers have been wanting for a long time is a compelling and watchable movie that will use truth and facts to bust Moore and all the other victim-disarmament people of the lie, and show them up as the dangerous and manipulative prevaricators they are.

I truly believe Innocents Betrayed is that movie.

Harry Browne - The Civil Rights Laws & The Growth of Government - how a noble goal, ending government-mandated segregation, turned into a demon, forced integration.

In the first regard, the bureaucrats and courts set out to enforce the laws zealously, seeking to root out any kind of discrimination -- even though ending segregation, not discrimination, was the motive behind the original law. Companies were ordered not to consider race in any way when making hiring decisions.

But usually the reasons for a business decision are hard to prove. Unless a businessman is a noisy bigot, who can say whether racial discrimination has affected his decision to hire someone?

To avoid having to read minds, the enforcers examined results to determine whether discrimination had occurred. If you didn't have a suitable racial mix in your workforce (or even among your customers), you were assumed to be discriminating -- and the burden of proof was on you to prove otherwise.

So an employer could avoid charges of discrimination only by, in fact, discriminating -- by using quotas to assure that he hired the right number of people of the right races -- even though the original sponsors of the law had sworn that quotas were no part of it. The law against segregation had been transformed into a law requiring discrimination.

...

The civil rights laws are supposed to end discrimination and segregation, and to promote harmony.

But coercion never produces harmony. How harmonious are people who are being forced to act against their will? Most likely, those who are coerced will resent those who benefit from the coercion. This sets group against group; it doesn't bring them together.

And if we accept coercion for one purpose, we'll be asked to use it for others. Even if you can say "No" to the other uses, some people will say "Yes," and others will say "Yes, please, and make mine a double." The noble cause will be stretched further and further until it eventually becomes farce.

Walter E. Williams at TownHall.com - Harm's a two way street - a good short explanation of why anti-smoking laws destroy private property rights and why property should trump legislation. [trt-ny]

Lew Rockwell at LewRockwell.com - The US Will Leave Iraq Next Year - Mr. Rockwell recommends that the neocons read Washington's Farewell Address. Political reality will force them out of Iraq within the next year and they'd do well to stay out of other people's business after that. [lew]

Some predictions follow. The unworkability of the occupation and public pressure will force the US to leave Iraq at some point in the next year. The neocons will scream that the failure was due to doves in the Bush administration. Bush himself will go down in history as a dupe, or a tragic figure at best. Iraq will become decentralized politically, intolerant religiously, and continue to be violent, dangerous, and poor for many years. The ostensible head of the Iraqi state will receive the grudging backing of the US because there will be no choice. And the American people will forget about the place, just as they have forgotten about Panama, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Libya, and all the other lucky beneficiaries of US bombs.

In all the talk of the calamity of this war, never forget the broader picture: what an incredible opportunity was squandered after the end of the Cold War. The US had emerged as the universally acknowledged ideological victor in that forty-year struggle. That the Cold War was not actually an ideological struggle so much as a classic standoff between two evil empires is irrelevant for understanding the implications of this fact: totalitarian communism collapsed while the free economic system of the market economy remained standing in total triumph. The world was ready for a new period of genuine liberalism, and looking to the US. On the verge of an amazing period of technological advance, we were perfectly situated to lead the way.

There had never been a time in US history when George Washington's foreign policy made more sense. A beacon of liberty. Trade with all, belligerence toward none. Commercial engagement with everyone, political engagement with as few as possible. The hand of friendship. Good will. This was the prescription for peace and freedom. It was within our grasp. Our children might have grown up in a world without major political violence. A world of peace and plenty. It could have been.

But it was not to be, mainly because George W.'s father decided that he wanted to go down in the history books for doing something big and important. What else but war? The US was now the world's only superpower and itching for some fight somewhere. It's a bit like a playground filled with wimps and one boy with a black belt in karate who never absorbed the lesson in how and where to use his fighting skills. And then there was this oil-drilling dispute between Iraq and Kuwait, and Bush decided to intervene. Twelve years later, the US is still there, causing unrelenting havoc for those poor people.

Jon Dougherty at World Net Daily - Fewer guns, more death - good article from October about how disarming the victims causes more of them to be killed. A lesson that Great Britain and Australia will hopefully learn soon. But I won't hold my breath. [scopeny]

Nicki Fellenzer at KeepAndBearArms.com - KeepAndBearArms.com Writer Releases Latest Novel: Freehold - available for pre-order at Amazon for $6.99. Ships January 1. [kaba]

Imagine an ideal society.

Not a socialist utopia described by collectivist dreamers, where every person is bound to everyone else by political obligation, guilt or government force, but a paradise where every individual is bound by honor to live free, achieve and rise to the pinnacle of his or her ability.

Imagine a world with unfettered religious freedom, where no faith is outlawed and no belief is condemned.

It's a world where government's only purpose is to protect the populace from outside aggression and manage courts of law.

It's a society where one is free to be armed -- or not -- whenever one wants, without fear of government reprisal, without feeling feared, discriminated against and vilified by an uninformed general public and a government controlled media. It's a place where you carry your weapon in the open to assert your rights, and where those who rule do not fear an armed populace.

A world where human beings are free to live, love, achieve and succeed without state intervention, licensing or tracking.

If you believe the true potential of human beings can only emerge in a completely free society -- a society without government control of individual behavior, government sanctioned "morality" and government appropriation of earnings by force -- Freehold, by Michael Z. Williamson will have you yearning for change more than you ever did before.

Bruce Schneier's Cryptogram - Airplane Hackers - why Nathaniel Heatwole's sneaking of forbidden objects aboard planes is a crime, but not much of a crime. [cryptogram]

Point 1: This is extraordinarily silly. Every traveler I know has stories of knives being missed by airport security. No one who flies regularly thinks that the TSA is doing a good job of keeping sharp objects off airplanes. Even worse, no one who flies regularly thinks that keeping sharp objects off airplanes makes us all safer. Most of what the TSA does is security theater -- window dressing. It keeps up appearances, and maybe (hopefully) makes the terrorists a little less sure they can smuggle their weapons aboard airplanes. Probably not.

Bruce Schneier's Cryptogram - The 9/11 Terrorists' Real Weapon - I've been saying this for quite a while. Nice to see it here. Copied in its entirety. [cryptogram]

We all know that the new airline security procedures are silly. Baggage screeners taking away pocket knives and box cutters doesn't improve airline security, even after 9/11.

People who think otherwise don't understand what allowed the terrorists to take over four planes two years ago. It wasn't a small knife. It wasn't a box cutter. The critical weapon that the terrorists had was surprise. With surprise they could have taken the planes over with their bare hands. Without surprise they couldn't have taken the planes over, even if they had guns.

And surprise has been confiscated on all flights since 9/11. It doesn't matter what weapons any potential new hijackers have; the passengers will no longer allow them to take over airplanes. I don't believe that airplane hijacking is a thing of the past, but when the next plane gets taken over it will be because a group of hijackers figured out a clever new weapon that we haven't thought of, and not because they snuck some small pointy objects through security.

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