The Peace Amendment
# I've been renting HBO's OZ over the last few weeks. The local video store has seasons one and three. I've seen season three and two-out-of-three of the season one discs. Next weekend, I'll take the last of the ready supply of titts, unless I can find season two at another video store. And I don't get HBO, so I'll have to wait for more DVDs to be released to get my fix of seasons four to six.
# L. Neil Smith at The Libertarian Enterprise - You Go First: The Peace Amendment - note to old men who would send young men to die: "You go first!" The Peace Amendment would implement this nicely. [tle]
Beyond anything else it may be remembered for a thousand years from now, the 20th century was a century of war--unprecedentedly widespread and brutal--brought about by a century of the most swollen and powerful governments this battered world's six or eight thousand years of bloodsoaked history have ever witnessed. If we are determined to prevent another century of war, it's time to take more seriously this idea that for millennia has only been half-dream and half-joke.
It is time to ratify the Peace Amendment.
Here's how it would work: the first clause would repeal the War Powers Act and any other law, regulation, or directive that allows a president to send troops overseas (or do very much of anything else militarily) without a formal declaration of war passed by majority of congress.
Maybe even a super-majority.
The second clause would reinstate the 1878 Posse Comitatus in full, forbidding the government to use the military to enforce its will anywhere within the United States. Perhaps this idea belongs in another piece of legislation, but my belief is that politicians feel an irresistible urge every waking minute to use the military to beat somebody up and kill them. Prevent them from doing it overseas, and things could get worse here, unless we prevent that with the same stroke.
The third clause is the meat of the amendment. Having voted to declare war, every Congressman who voted "aye" will immediately get up from his seat and march right out the door, where he will be handed a uniform and a weapon and be conveyed directly to the front, defined as that area of military activity that is producing the highest number of casualties.
No excuses. Practicing politicians will be denied Conscientious Objectorhood. As long as they voted to subject yet another generation of Americans to war, their age, sex, prior service, or state of health won't keep our valiant congressional warriors from going with the "boys". If they can't march, they'll be given knobby tires for their wheelchairs.
In the case of another 20th century-style undeclared war, where all Congress does is contribute our money and our children to the conflagration and give the President the go-ahead, everybody goes, whether they voted affirmative or not. Voting "no" is not enough. They should have gotten up and walked out, in protest of the rape of the Constitution.
The fourth clause winds it up. Immediately upon notification that the Congress has declared war, the President will put on a uniform of his own, pick up his rifle, and march into the sunset as a common soldier. The Vice President replacing him will do the same thing in 30 days if the war isn't over. War is hell for everyone else, but heaven for politicians. If we desire to survive the 21st century, that has to change.
# Carl Bussjaeger at The Libertarian Enterprise - Thumbs Up (their arses) - Mr. Bussjaeger contacted a number of avowed RKBA groups, asking them to support the boycott of Verizon and Jeff "Hunter" Jordan's case. Only three of them did anything: Armed Females of America, JPFO, and KeepAndBearArms.com. [tle]
# Caleb Paul at The Libertarian Enterprise - May Day Madness - May Day is traditionally a time of protest for communists. For some reason, people who carry signs down the street bearing pictures of Stalin or Mao don't get the scorn they'd rightfully receive if they carried pictures of Hitler or Mussolini. Very few seem aware that the communist socialists murdered an order of magnitude more of their subjects than did the fascist breed. [tle]
# Russell D. Longcore at The Libertarian Enterprise - Dupes, Chumps, and Traitors - posits that service in a foreign war, any foreign war, by a sworn member of the U.S. armed forces, is unconstitutional, hence treasonous. [tle]
I've already read and heard what a patriot Tillman was. I submit that Tillman was an ignorant, uneducated chump who died for nothing. But, he wasn't alone. All of the rest of the soldiers deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan are chumps, too.
Notice that, above all, the oath swears to support and defend the Constitution of the United States. He swears true faith and allegiance to the Constitution, not the Commander in Chief. Only after that affirmation does the oath to obey orders of the president and superior officers appear in the body of the oath. A soldier who obeys an order that violates the Constitution commits treason against the Constitution. An officer who issues a direct order that violates the Constitution issues an unlawful order, and the order should be ignored.
I submit to you that a soldier that understands the depth of his oath cannot lawfully and constitutionally follow the orders to deploy to an undeclared war anywhere in the world. Soldiers who truly understood their oath would refuse to obey orders to do so, even if it meant prosecution under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Can you imagine what would have happened if tens of thousands of our military personnel would have refused to obey orders to deploy to Iraq or Afghanistan, using as their defense the oath they swore to support and defend the Constitution?
# Alan R. Weiss at The Libertarian Enterprise - Planes, Trains, and the Free State Project - the Libertarian Party is big enough to include minarchists and anarchists, even if one loud Vermonter disagrees. [tle]
When Amanda Phillips, President of the Free State Project, and I picked up George Phillies in Worcester in Amanda's Piper Warrior II, I had figured out that the secret to keeping my breakfast down while flying small planes was to remember to breathe, look around, and realize people had been flying little planes for a very long time. The technology, in other words, is pretty well-sorted out. Flying to speak with the Vermont Libertarian Party Convention, we had to fly over the very statist Massachusetts, into the much-less-statist New Hampshire, only to cross over the border into the moderately statist-but-taxed-to-death Vermont. From the air, after awhile, it all looked the same--green rolling hills, some occasional "mountains" of about 3000 feet or so, and lots of blue lakes.
It's the people that are different.
# Kapt Kanada, aka Manuel Miles at The Libertarian Enterprise - I Refused To Be Conscripted - Mr. Miles moved to Canada in 1968 to avoid the Viet Nam war draft. He urges today's young men to similarly refuse to serve as cannon fodder should the Busheviks reinstitute the draft for their war on Iraq. [tle]
It seems to me, however, that the greatest harm that I ever did to the war machine was to deprive it of the use of my life to destroy other lives. Approximately 250,000 other (former) Americans did likewise, and our collective acts caused the US military both a massive propaganda defeat and a logistical nightmare, just when it was most vulnerable. As Buffy Ste-Marie said, "He's the universal soldier, and he really is to blame," so we had to refuse to be soldiers of aggression.
# Kim Zetter at Wired - California Bans E-Vote Machines - and Secretary of State Kevin Shelley intends to pass evidence to his attorney general for bringing civil and criminal charges against Diebold for fraud. [picks]
# Bob Wallace at LewRockwell.com - A War on Everything - why we'd all be better off if the state would make peace with drugs, peace with poverty, and peace with terrorism (no, that doesn't mean you let the terrorists have their way, but it means that you deal with individual terrorists as the individual criminals they are instead of going around bombing cities where a few of them might live). War doesn't work. Ever. The free market ain't perfect, but it's a damn sight better than government-sponsored war. [lew]
Now imagine if we made "peace" on drugs, if they were legal. Organized crime involved with drug smuggling would disappear overnight, as would the smuggling itself. The concentrated drugs would still be around, thanks to the State. Once users have had a taste of crack, most aren't going to go back to chewing coca leaves. But at least they wouldn't be mugging people and burglarizing their houses to get the money for a fix. Crime would go down. The prisons would be half-empty. Those are some of the results of a "peace" on drugs.
Legalizing drugs wouldn't be perfect, because of imperfect human nature, but if they were legal, in just a few weeks the public would wonder why it hadn't been done decades before.
