The State Has Won
"Let's face it, in the great 20th-century struggle between the state and the individual, the state has won, game, set, and match." -- John Derbyshire
From kaba:
"The right of citizens to bear arms is just one more guarantee against arbitrary government, one more safeguard against tyranny, which though now appears remote in America, history has proven to be always possible." -- Senator Hubert H. Humphrey
Kevin Tuma - Hysteria - cartoon commentary on The Day After, Hollywood's latest global catastrophe fiction. Hehe.
# Connie du Toit - Finding Mark Twain - this is an old piece, but I had never read it before. Glorious! [kimdutoit]
By now it was beginning to drizzle. We crossed back through the flood gates and parked near the end of Main Street. We peeked into storefront windows. Main Street was mostly closed. It was a Wednesday, in May, midweek, not summer--not the usual time for family vacations. Most of the junk shops labeled, "Antiques" were closed, but I spotted a place that might be suitable for lunch. First, we decided to stop in at the Ice Cream Parlor and the kids went inside, while I had my long awaited (it had been 2 hours), finally out-of-the-car smoke.
There were treasures inside this store. I knew this because my kids didn't come out of the store immediately. I could see through the window that there were trinkets, candy, and ice cream--garbage that even nouveau-teenagers can't resist eyeing and fingering. Souvenirs!
My smoke finished, I opened the squeaky screen door to enter the shop, without the faintest notice of any alarms or warning signs that an epiphany lay ahead.
# Steven Yates at LewRockwell.com - Are Southern Baptists About To Abandon Government Schools? - "Let us pray," says Lew. Indeed. [lew]
# David DeBatto at Military.com - Follow the Evidence Wherever It Leads - an opinion on the atrocities at Abu Ghraib from "a former Army staff sergeant and Counterintelligent Special Agent who served in Operation Iraqi Freedom where he was injured in combat." [sierra]
Aside from the catastrophic damage this incident has done to U.S. foreign policy and prestige in general, and Operation Iraqi Freedom in particular, I think it also shows us that something much deeper and much more difficult to correct is going on here. That "something" is the culture, the "atmosphere" that allowed, if not outright condoned this behavior in the first place.
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This incident had its birth at or near the top, trust me. The fingerprints are all over it. This realization has been a long time coming for me and I do not come to it lightly or with any great satisfaction, but it appears to be true nonetheless. While some sadistic, low-life MPs played their roles as cast in this tragedy, the script was written at echelons way above them, or even above CENTCOM. It began with the decision to treat everyone scooped up after 9/11 as an "enemy combatant," thus depriving them of the rights accorded to prisoners of war under the Geneva Convention...
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Especially now that the Pentagon and the White House are in spin control overdrive, we must hold the investigators' feet to the fire, and that means the appropriate committees in congress, to investigate these allegations to their logical conclusion and trace the orders to their point of origin.
We have to find out who developed them, who approved them, who knew about them and who allowed them to be carried out. Everybody. I hate to say it, but they did not know what they were doing, and all Americans, in particular our military, are going to have to pay a steep price because of the misplaced trust we had in our leaders.
# George W. Bush at Cryptome - Proclamation 7791--Prayer for Peace, Memorial Day, 2004 - I didn't know this before, but since 1950, the minute beginning at 3:00pm on Memorial Day has been a National Moment of Remembrance. Mr. Bush extends that this year to an hour prayer for permanent peace at 11:00am and all flags at half mast until noon. [cryptome]
