End the War on Freedom

# I remember hearing on Wakin' Up With The Wolf, the morning drive program on PYX 106, that Clear Channel is censoring song lyrics, but I had never witnessed an example until yesterday. They were playing "Money" from Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon album. Instead of "Don't give me that do goody good bullshit", they cut the lyric to "Don't give me that do goody good bull." Assholes. Actually, Asscroft...

# I added Outdoor Marksman to my Mail-Order Ammunition Distributors page. Huge variety of ammo. Good prices. They also have accessories, optics, knives, and tools.

# Dennis Wilson's Artemus Zuna Trading Post - Radical Views - "Sic Semper Tyrannis" [thus always to tyrants] and "Vote from the Rooftops", on shirts, hats, bags, cups, etc. Explore the rest of Mr. Wilson's offerings via the menu on the left side of the page.

Radical views for radical times.

Lincoln was America's First Tyrant. He ignored and violated the Constitution and was responsible for more than 620,000 American deaths. It is disgusting that he is revered by any American. He got what he deserved. He had it coming.

No sympathy for tyrants!

When all else fails.... Vote from the Rooftops! That is what patriots did in the two American Wars of Secession in their efforts to gain liberty and freedom from tyrannical governments in 1776 and in 1861.

# There's a nice Flash ad at Michael Badnarik's campaign site, highlighting the primary difference between libertarians and the socialists in the other parties. The ad itself is here in case you'd like to download it (32K). Text:

I'm George W. Bush and you can trust ME to run your life.

I'm John Kerry and you can trust ME to run your life.

I'm Ralph Nader and you can trust ME to run your life.

I'm Michael Badnarik and I trust YOU to run your own life.

# Charley Hardman at saltypig.com - Schumer: Better Mall Security Needed - good commentary on Schmucky's latest plan to keep the slaves safe. Hehe.

# Boston Indymedia - "Baghdad to Boston" group brings it back to military recruiters' door - Report of a protest on June 5th of the May 27th arrest of Joe Previtera. Comments say that charges against Mr. Previtera have been dropped.

# Noam Chomsky - The Fate of an Honest Intellectual - not towing the party line in American academia is not good for your career. [pournelle]

I'll tell you another, last case--and there are many others like this. Here's a story which is really tragic. How many of you know about Joan Peters, the book by Joan Peters? There was this best-seller a few years ago [in 1984], it went through about ten printings, by a woman named Joan Peters--or at least, signed by Joan Peters--called From Time Immemorial. It was a big scholarly-looking book with lots of footnotes, which purported to show that the Palestinians were all recent immigrants [i.e. to the Jewish-settled areas of the former Palestine, during the British mandate years of 1920 to 1948]. And it was very popular--it got literally hundreds of rave reviews, and no negative reviews: the Washington Post, the New York Times, everybody was just raving about it. Here was this book which proved that there were really no Palestinians! Of course, the implicit message was, if Israel kicks them all out there's no moral issue, because they're just recent immigrants who came in because the Jews had built up the country. And there was all kinds of demographic analysis in it, and a big professor of demography at the University of Chicago [Philip M. Hauser] authenticated it. That was the big intellectual hit for that year: Saul Bellow, Barbara Tuchman, everybody was talking about it as the greatest thing since chocolate cake.Well, one graduate student at Princeton, a guy named Norman Finkelstein, started reading through the book. He was interested in the history of Zionism, and as he read the book he was kind of surprised by some of the things it said. He's a very careful student, and he started checking the references--and it turned out that the whole thing was a hoax, it was completely faked: probably it had been put together by some intelligence agency or something like that. Well, Finkelstein wrote up a short paper of just preliminary findings, it was about twenty-five pages or so, and he sent it around to I think thirty people who were interested in the topic, scholars in the field and so on, saying: "Here's what I've found in this book, do you think it's worth pursuing?"

Well, he got back one answer, from me. I told him, yeah, I think it's an interesting topic, but I warned him, if you follow this, you're going to get in trouble--because you're going to expose the American intellectual community as a gang of frauds, and they are not going to like it, and they're going to destroy you. So I said: if you want to do it, go ahead, but be aware of what you're getting into. It's an important issue, it makes a big difference whether you eliminate the moral basis for driving out a population--it's preparing the basis for some real horrors--so a lot of people's lives could be at stake. But your life is at stake too, I told him, because if you pursue this, your career is going to be ruined.

# Jay Lehr at The Heartland Institute via Liberty Forum - Stossel Takes on All Comers: Government, Press, Lawyers - A review of John Stossel's book, Give Me a Break: How I Exposed Hucksters, Cheats, and Scam Artists and Became the Scourge of the Liberal Media. [libertyforum]

Perhaps there was something in the drinking water of prominent journalists writing books last year. John Stossel's new book, Give Me a Break, is of equal weight and moment. If widely read, it could set the stage for dismantling the vast government bureaucracy that is increasingly holding U.S. citizens hostage.

...

Stossel tells more than 100 of the most shockingly disgraceful examples of government overkill with precision, brevity, and accuracy. Few stories worth telling from my 50-year career in environmental science, health, and technology are missing. Not only does he accurately recount each mis-representation of environmental overkill, government ineptitude, and nonprofit malfeasance, but in many cases he interviewed the actual participants and/or culprits.

Examples of Stossel's breathtaking expos&eaccute; include: airbags, ambulance service, asbestos, Aspen lead poisoning, Bic lighters, breast implants, milk price-fixing, crack babies, dioxin, domestic violence, Erin Brockovich, ergonomic evaluation of home offices, forest fires, global warming, organic food hoax, Love Canal, McDonald's coffee, private toilets, rent control, capitalism as poverty fighter, sport stadiums, Times Beach, tobacco lawsuits, and vaccines.

One of his first major efforts was aimed at the Food and Drug Administration, which he once revered following the agency's handling of Thalidomide, the drug that deformed many infants throughout Europe and Canada in the 1960s. Stossel came to realize that FDA's growing bureaucracy so dramatically slowed new drug development in the U.S., while increasing by more than 10-fold the cost of approving new drugs, that it ultimately was costing many more lives than it saved.

We Need Very Few Rules

This epiphany led Stossel to recognize that capitalism, with its three supporting pillars of private property, an open marketplace, and the rule of law, could police society through free choice and competition far better than government coercion. Having had socialism ingrained in him by a far-left faculty at Princeton University (his alma mater and mine), Stossel became a true libertarian, recognizing in his own words that most of the rules we need are learned in kindergarten:

"Don't hit other people, don't take their stuff, and keep your promises. To enforce these rules, we have contracts, police, and courts. Government, however, attempts to accomplish this thing through force alone."

Stossel recognized we don't need a million rules, because free markets regulate themselves. While the corporate malfeasance at Enron, World Com, Adelphia, and Tyco represented terrible scandals, we should keep in mind those scandals were exposed by markets--not by government.

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