I'll Have to Check Your Bag, Comrade
"It may be necessary to kill a man, but to incarcerate him destroys both his dignity and yours." -- Robert Heinleinand:
"An instant explosive and violent counterattack is the very last thing most predators expect or plan for. Predators mostly dither and ultimately deal with it poorly as the Iraqis did. Fearless men with cold steel still frighten the low life of this world. God bless the British." -- unattributed
Chan Lowe at Marc Brands Liberty - Ronald Reagan vs. George W Bush - cartoon commentary. Hehe. [smith2004]
# Kurt Saxon - Fantasy & Weaponry - entertainingly presented account of the importance of aimed shots. Follow the "next" links at the bottom of each page to read the story of "Clarence The Mighty Martian Slayer". Part 3 contains a link to a PDF showing how to make a "Four Winds Shotgun" from two lengths of pipe, a nail, a wooden dowel, some cardboard, and some tape. Some parts of it are rather gruesome, so don't click past the "Fantasy & Weaponry" essay if you don't want to read that kind of thing. The stories are intended to show how easy it is for a determined and practically educated man to disrupt our society. It also illustrates the utter uselessness of everything the administration is doing for our "security". Well, not completely useless. They're getting Americans accustomed to showing their papers and being searched. While you're there, look at the rest of www.kurtsaxon.com. Quite interesting. [smith2004]
A pistol for the bedroom,
A shotgun over the door,
A 30-06 for reaching out;
You don't need any more.
If an intruder makes it to your bedroom, shoot him with the pistol. If he's trying to break in, use the shotgun. If he is fifty yards or more away and shooting at you, pick him off with the 30-06.
This is the real Survivalist's arsenal; basic, inexpensive, effective. So why all the promotion of rapid-fire weapons? If you aim at a man and don't hit him, he' going to move, and probably shoot you. Banging away in the same general direction is just a senseless waste of ammo. You need practice, not rapid-fire. You also need a realistic attitude, not a fantasy.
# Jeff Cooper's Commentaries - Summertime - summer in Arizona is hot and water is scarce; Marine sniper teams in Iraq are using Remington bolt rifles and .308 Match ammo, and some Chechans on the other side are good marksman; hunting from a stand in the dark; Andy Tillman's bullet construction for heavy rifle calibers, and the importance of shot placement with any bullet; the shot cock system for trigger cocking double-action pistols; historically renowned bastards, including the man on the ten dollar bill; "non-combatant" considered more proper than "civilian"; British use of the bayonet in Iraq; O.J. Simson, Lon Horiuchi, and Vince Foster; the "Mannlicher stock"; waiting 38 years for an Arizona desert sheep permit; kudos for the incription on the Jefferson Memorial; suggestion for improvement of the inscription on the Statue of Liberty; the point where nobody knows anything about anything; no progress on The Project; cougars; this digital business;
# Jesse Walker at Reason - The Search for the Historical Reagan - an objective look at Ronald Reagan's accomplishments, and there were a few, mixed in with a bunch of broken promises.
Nor am I a great fan of Reagan's foreign policy, far too much of which consisted of giving aid to thugs (some of whom repaid this generosity two decades later by turning their fire on Americans). He's widely credited with pushing the Soviet Union to collapse, but the jury's still out on that; and I'm inclined to think the Soviet state would have died soon anyway, even if he did hasten its end. What he did right--probably the most important decision Reagan made during his reign--was to recognize, after throwing down the gauntlet, that Gorbachev was serious about making peace, and then to push for missile reductions over the objections of the hard-core hawks in his party. Looking back on his presidency, it's clear that he didn't deserve the Ronnie Raygun caricature he was tarred with. When Reagan said he wanted to end both communist tyranny and the threat of nuclear holocaust, he was perfectly serious, a truth missed by those, on the left and the right, who thought you could target one or the other but never both.
# Murray N. Rothbard at The Ludwig von Mises Institute - The Myths of Reaganomics - written in late 1987, at the end of Reagan's reign. Ronald Reagan's economic policies were nice rhetoric, but in reality same old Keynesian deficit spending as before and afterwards. [lew]
On monetary and fiscal policy, the Democrats are the classic party of liberal Keynesianism, in contrast to the Republican policy of conservative Keynesianism. The problem is that, in the last decade or two, it has become increasingly difficult to tell the difference. Apart from supply-sider Kemp, we can expect the president of either party to be a middle-of-the-road liberal/conservative Keynesian. And so we can expect the next administration's economic policies to be roughly the same as they are now. Except that the rhetoric will be different. So we can, therefore, expect diverse perceptions and responses to a similar reality by the public and by the market. Thus, if Jack Kemp becomes president, the public will wrongly consider him a champion of hard money, budget cutting, and the free market. The public will therefore underestimate the wildly inflationist reality of a Kemp administration. On the other hand, the public probably perceives the Democrats to be wilder spenders relative to the Republicans than they really are. So should the Democrats win in 1988, we can expect the market to overestimate the inflationary measure of a Democratic administration.
All of this, along with the universal misperception of Reaganomics, illustrates once more the wisdom of those incisive political philosophers, Gilbert and Sullivan: "Things are not always what they seem; skim milk masquerades as cream."
# Just1pin at Boston Indymedia Center - Direct Action at Local Army Recruiting Center! - more on the arrest in Boston of Joe Privetera for dressing up in black hood and shawl in front of a recruiting center. Click here for Liberty Forum discussion. [libertyforum]
#
Raphael Lewis of The Boston Globe via Liberty Forum -
T to check packages, bags at random - more on the comming nazi
check stops in Boston. Starts next month, and accelerates for the
Communist Democrat convention. Guess I won't be
riding the T in Boston any more, nor will I visit there at all without
a darn good reason. [libertyforum]
# News with Views - Gun Decision Could Have Far Reaching Implications - in at least one Pennsylvania county, courthouses are no longer allowed to search for weapons at the entrance. State law forbids weapons in court rooms, district attorneys' offices, and judges chambers. Court of Common Pleas Senior Judge Robert Wolfe ruled that the right to keep and bear arms applies to the rest of the building. [scopeny]
# Imogen Foulkes at BBC News - A fix but no cure for addicts - Switzerland has a government program that gives heroin addicts their daily fix. It doesn't cure their addiction, but it keeps them off the streets and prevents them from overdosing or stealing to support their addiction. Heroin is, after all, pretty cheap in the absence of prohibition, and doesn't get much in the way of life (so I've read) if you get good stuff in the right dose. England used to do it this way too, and about ten percent of the addicts stopped using every year, but now they've followed the Amerikan example of throwing addicts in cages. Savages. [lew]
# Sheldon Richman of The Future of Freedom Foundation via The Price of Liberty - Kerry: An Echo, Not a Choice - Kerry is different than Bush only in rhetoric and style. At bottom, his policies, like Bush'es, will foment eternal war. [price]
In 1964 an incumbent president, Lyndon Johnson, was faced by a challenger, Barry Goldwater, who offered "a choice, not an echo."
In 2004 an incumbent president, George W. Bush, is faced by a challenger, John Kerry, who offers an echo, not a choice -- a mere variation on a theme.
That's too bad, because the theme is old and stale and entirely inappropriate for what is supposed to be a constitutional republic that honors individual liberty.
The theme is that the U.S. government should be the world's policeman. Bush and Kerry would no more call for American withdrawal from this role than they would advocate dismantling of the Education or Interior Department. Their only difference is in style and rhetoric.
...
Kerry of course has to make the electorate think that Bush would rather pursue foreign adventurism alone. The problem for Kerry is that Bush has every reason to involve allies and has tried mightily to do so. He was unable to because his case for war against Iraq was so weak. Now he is desperately trying to get the UN and NATO into Iraq. It's hard to see how Kerry would have been more successful at getting France, Germany, and Russia to go along with the war. His insistence that he would have succeeded is all he's got going for him. It's not much.
