End the War on Freedom

# Michael Bradshaw at The Libertarian Enterprise - Space ShipTWO, GovernmentZero! - an account of last Wednesday's flight. Try two, to win the X Prize, is planned for this morning. [tle]

# XPrize.org - 2nd SpaceShipOne Launch is GO FOR OCTOBER 4th - show starts this morning at 7am pacific time. Ignition at 8am, landing at 8:30, press conference to announce official altitude at 10:30 (1:30 eastern). More at Scaled Composites Tier One page.

# Cat Farmer and Bob Wallace at The Price of Liberty - Politics Causes Brain Damage, Scientists Claim - a little good-natured satire. [price]

"We have done brains scans on many registered Republicans and Democrats and have almost invariably found that the more passionately a person engages in politics, the less activity there is in the more advanced parts of the brain, and the more there is in the largely primitive parts," said Dr. William "Boris" Pratt, professor at the Karloff Neuropsychopolitical Evolutionary Socio-Emotional-Intelligence Development at the institute. However, he adds, "People who partake of politics strictly as a form of amusement appear to sustain minimal loss of brain function, so it appears that laughter, irony and satire all mitigate many harmful effects of prolonged exposure. Otherwise, we found politics shrivels brains like apples left in the sun in the backyard for about a week."

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Surprisingly, he said that of all the habits that affect the brain, overindulging in politics appears the most troublesome addiction. "Alcoholism, cocaine, heroin, tobacco, caffeine, sucking your thumb...none of these things come close to damaging the brain as severely as dependence on politics," he said. "Considering what it does to the brain, perhaps political behavior should be prohibited from public places. 'It's for the children,' you can say. Perhaps there should be commercials that say, 'This is your brain. This is your brain on politics.' Schools should teach what a catastrophic thing believing in politics is, possibly even have after school info-education programs like those anti-drug ones. How about 'DOPE - Dare to Oust Politics from Education'? I think that's oddly apropos for a public school program."

# Posted to scopeny:

If the demlicans or republicrats field a candidate I can actually vote FOR, I'll be happy to do it. I will not support evil by voting for the lesser of two.

When I hear a candidate for federal office consistently propound that the Constitution says nothing about schools or drugs or welfare or retirement funds or medical care, hence the federal government may not make a single law mentioning any of those things, when I hear a candidate for federal or state office consistently propound that "shall not be infringed" means that there can be NO federal or state firearms laws, especially including the NFA and the GCA and the Brady Bill and any requirement for any permit of any kind to carry any firearm in any manner in any place, I'll happily vote for him or her. The only candidates I know of saying that in this election are Michael Badnarik and his fellow Libertarians.

The only vote I would be willing to cast for Bush or Kerry would be a strong vote against made from the rooftops. Both are evil tyrants who do not deserve to draw breath.

--Bill St. Clair

# Chris Floyd at The Moscow Times - Global Eye: The Barbarians - "Vote for the president -- or we'll burn your house down." That's what supporters of Bushevik installee Hamid Karzai are saying in Afghanistan, and they mean it. I'm sure Georgie would do that here in Amerika too, if he thought he could get away with it. [grabbe]

The paper detailed the delightful antics of a Special Forces squad -- led by a berserker known only as "Crazy Mike" -- who subjected captives to near-drowning and electric shocks, ripped out their toenails, and beat them so savagely that some were left crippled while others joined Bush's favorite philosopher way up in the sky. Crazy Mike also threatened to kill any local official who interfered with his good clean fun. Army investigators, prodded into action by the Times story, say they have no idea who was actually in command of Mike's secret unit -- nor could they say how many other pocket gulags were squirreled away across the Bushist satrapy.

This stinking fish of unaccountability rots from the head, of course: Bush has given his personal blessing to a worldwide system of torture and murder, pointedly telling his shock troops "I don't want to know" where their secret prisons are and what's being done there, investigator Seymour Hersh reports. The official Bushist line on torture, top intelligence officers told Hersh, is short and sweet: "Grab whom you must. Do what you want."

And why not? There will be no consequences, except for the usual small fry offered up in the ritual sacrifice of "a few bad apples": show trials to divert attention from the systematic perversion of law and morality ordered from on high -- as The New York Review of Books makes clear in a devastating excavation of the "official" prison abuse reports. Despite buckets of Pentagon whitewash and Bushist weasel-wording, even these severely constricted Potemkin probes lay bare a nightmare network extending far beyond the goon show at Abu Ghraib. Here too, buried beneath layers of butt-covering lard, we find the most damning fact of all: the professional judgment, by professional soldiers, that Bush's lawless regimen has actually produced "less actionable intelligence" than interrogators were gathering with legal, ethical methods. Not only is Bush's torture policy deeply immoral; it's stupid and ineffective as well.

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Terrorists, torturers, house-burners, oath-breakers, vote-riggers, goons: That's the Bush Tribe for you -- a violent, greedy, barbarous clan, befouling the name of democracy all over the world.

# James J Odle at The Libertarian Enterprise - I Refuse - Mr. Odle will never again vote for the lesser of two evils. [tle]

I refuse to vote for liars. It is now known that the administration created a Lie Factory1 otherwise known as the Office of Special Plans who's entire mission was to cherry-pick intelligence data and present it in such a way as to justify the Neocons' and perhaps the president's obsession and desire for war with Iraq. There are over a thousand American soldiers dead and many more wounded as a result of this unconstitutional and unnecessary war. Saddam Hussein was never a threat to us.

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I refuse to vote for people who foolishly believe that they have the authority to pick and choose which of our rights they are going to respect, which of our rights they are going to ignore, when of our rights 'are available' to us and when of our rights 'are not available' to us, all the while deliberately forgetting that they were hired to make our rights secure. 'We' seem to have forgotten this also.

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I refuse to vote for people who believe that the DEA should have the power to pull a doctor's medical license should such an individual become 'overly enthusiastic' with the pain medication. This is a barbaric and unconscionable practice. Why should law enforcement officers have authority over a better educated and more highly trained doctor's medical decisions? Sound like practicing medicine without a license, to me. Hell, I refuse to vote for people who believe that the DEA should be in existence.

# Charley Reese at LewRockwell.com - A Bad Joke - commentary on the Cat Stevens incident. [lew]

More importantly to Americans, this incident shows you the danger of government lists. To this day, the singer does not know why he was put on the list, and the only thing the U.S. bureaucrats will say is, "Yusuf Islam has been placed on the watch lists because of activities that could potentially be related to terrorism."

Now, let's decode this bureaucratese. What activities? If you are going to publicly embarrass a person, you should say frankly what activities you are talking about. And who says he's engaged in them? And what in the heck does it mean that they could "potentially be related to terrorism"? Notice they do not say these mysterious activities are related to terrorism. They say they "could potentially be" related. Our government so loves guilt by association that these activities could be nothing more than donating to a legal charity that uses a bank somebody thinks is owned by a terrorist organization. That's guilt by association twice removed.

I make charitable donations, small ones, and I have no idea which banks the Boy Scouts and the Salvation Army use, much less who owns the banks. I kid you not that in this present state of hysteria and semi-police-state tactics administered by morons, good people's reputations have been smeared by just such a ridiculous claim.

The government should not be allowed to put anybody's name on a terrorist watch list without notifying that person, presenting its evidence before a judicial officer and giving the person a chance to rebut it. As it is now, anybody can end up being called a terrorist and never know why. As Sen. Ted Kennedy has pointed out, he's been stopped numerous times for additional searches because apparently some name is similar to his on one of these dumb watch lists.

# Mary Starrett at News with Views - Oh No! Not Another "Pandemic" - why you should eschew the flu vaccine, this year and every year. [sierra]

Did those who were conned into getting the vaccine understand the inherent dangers? Did those elderly and immune-compromised bother to research the side effects and very real risks associated with the potentially toxic cocktail they lined up to receive? Did their doctors sit down and do some homework on these witch's brews they poked their patients with? Immunogeneticists like D. Hugh Fudenburgh report that if someone has five consecutive flu shots his or her chances of winding up with Alzheimer's disease increases tenfold.[3] Each year between 20,000 and 40,000 people die from "flu-related" illness. In other words, they're already sick. It's deceptive to blame their deaths on the "flu".

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"Pandemics"? Sure, and they're being CAUSED by the very agencies and companies which purport to "protect" our health and well-being.

# What Really Happened - The 9/11 WTC Collapses: An Audio-Video Analysis - arguments that the World Trade Center towers were demolished by internal explosion, not by fire from airplanes.

# Massad Ayoob at Backwoods Home Magazine - Common sense about burglary prevention - locks, alarms, dogs, guns, safes, and putting them all together to increase your security. [backwoodshome]

# Pelle Braendgaard - Using Knoppix for Java development - if your hard drive ever dies, and you can't afford another one, use a Knoppix 3.6 CD and use Mr. Braendgaard's JDK1.4.2.05, Jikes, Ant, Maven, Tomcat 5.0.27 installer to put those on a USB keychain or similar. This also allows you to do your work on a large percentage of the machines on the planet. Just plug in the CD and the USB keychain, wait a couple of minutes for it to boot, and you're back in your custom environment. Mr. Braendgaard has left Panama for his native Denmark and gotten a regular job.

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