Police State USA
"It's really just 99% of lawyers who give all the others a bad name." -- old joke
From kaba:
"The difference between Congress as envisioned by the Founding Fathers and the Congress we have today is one of them inspires patriots to support it, and the other inspires patriots to buy extra ammo." -- Angel Shamayaand:
- Beagle's First Law of Governance: "Tyranny expands to fill the amount of passivity available for its implementation."
- Beagle's Second Law of Governance: "Tyranny is neither created nor destroyed, it just changes suits."
- Beagle's Third Law of Governance: "The result of an irresistible freedom force meeting an immovable tyrannical object is, well, revolution."
- Beagle's Fourth Law of Governance: "The desire for freedom varies inversely with the number of cable channels available."
# I put down a deposit on a CVA Optima break-action muzzleloader in .45 caliber. Remember, whoever dies with the most toys wins.
# Ron Paul at Antiwar.com - Police State USA - focus on liberty, and your security will be reasonably good. Focus on security, and your liberty is guaranteed to suffer. Turning America into a police state is letting the terrorists win. Stop it. LewRockwell.com also has a copy of this essay, and it's also on Dr. Paul's web site. [smith2004 lew whatreallyhappened]
Every generation must resist the temptation to believe that it lives in the most dangerous time in American history. The threat of Islamic terrorism is real, but it is not the greatest danger ever faced by our nation. This is not to dismiss the threat of terrorism, but rather to put it in perspective. Those who seek to whip the nation into a frenzy of fear do a disservice to a country that expelled the British, fought two world wars, and stared down the Soviet empire.
Liberty is lost through complacency and a subservient mindset. When we accept or even welcome automobile checkpoints, random searches, mandatory identification cards, and paramilitary police in our streets, we have lost a vital part of our American heritage. America was born of protest, revolution, and mistrust of government. Subservient societies neither maintain nor deserve freedom for long.
# Critter at The Claire Files - Check Point Nulification Project - a Simon Jester action that anybody can do. Put up signs warning people about highway checkpoints. Of course, this will become illegal if it spreads, but that shouldn't stop it. It will have a web site soon at www.cpnulification.org. [clairefiles]
# James Bovard at Strike the Root - Terrorism and Tyranny - tyranny is winning, by a landslide. [root]
A core fallacy at the heart of the war on terrorism is that terrorism is worse than almost anything else imaginable. Unfortunately, governments around the world have committed far worse abuses than Al Qaeda or any other terrorist cabal. By treating terrorism as the supreme evil, and insisting that governments can never be guilty of terrorism, the Bush administration makes the crimes of government morally negligible. From 1980 to 2000, international terrorists killed 7,745 people, according to the U.S. State Department. Yet, in the same decades, governments killed more than 10 million people in ethnic cleansing campaigns, mass executions, politically caused famines, wars, and other slaughters. During the 1990s, Americans were at far greater risk of being gunned down by local, state, and federal law enforcement agents than of being killed by international terrorists.
# BBC News - Work 'may ward off Alzheimer's' - there appears to be a correlation between thinking hard and avoiding Alzheimer's disease. I didn't see evidence in this article of a causal link, however, but it sure would be nice to believe it, since my father, his mother, and his sister were all afflicted with nervous system maladies late in life. [lew]