Declare Your Independence from Washington D.C.
"Left and right are just two wings of the same bird of prey." -- Butler Shaffer
# I started reading Butler Schaffer's Calculated Chaos. Good stuff so far. Mr Shaffer's thesis is that institutions cause conflict. This doesn't give individuals an excuse, however. Institutions cannot do anything unless individuals do their bidding. And he's not saying that we should eschew organizations. People need to join together for practical and emotional reasons. Organizations serve their members. Institutions enslave them. More when I finish it.
# Kim du Toit - The Fourth Of July, 2005 - Mr. du Toit joyfully became a United States citizen twenty years ago. He lists the reasons that he's starting to feel like he's back in South Africa. He has announced that his "blog will be closed until further notice." I posted the following comment: [kimdutoit]
Closing your blog? Because a bunch of useless eaters have taken over the U.S. government? I've got a better idea. This Independence Day declare your independence from Washington D.C. Realize that though the Declaration of Independence and U.S. culture are all about individual liberty, the institutions that have grown up, supposedly to defend liberty, are in reality dedicated to enslaving us all, have no true purpose but to empower those useless eaters. Stop supporting them. Let them die (the eaters and the institutions). The tree of liberty doesn't need them. You don't need them.
And keep dancing at the stories of new shooters.
# GeekWithA.45 - An Open Letter... To The President, The Congress, and The Courts of the United States of America. The geek warns our servants in DC to choose carefully the new members of the Supreme Court. Two or three justices who understand that governments exist solely to defend individual liberty would certainly make a difference. Unfortunately, that is no longer, and probably never was, except in rhetoric, the real reason that the U.S. government exists. And I doubt a single candidate under consideration by the Busheviks will understand. Good letter, though. [geekwitha.45]
Ladies and Gentlemen, you may be loathe to publicly admit it, but we all sit atop a nearly filled powder keg.
As such, it can no longer be "business as usual in Washington". Considerations of petty partisan agenda, and even the pressing needs of our current war must all be held as subordinate to the central question as to whether this government shall entirely abide in the plain terms of its founding charter or not.
The current and coming vacancies in the Supreme Court provide us with both the means and the opportunity to remedy the situation, and to meaningfully demonstrate to the American people your commitment to upholding the plain meaning of the Constitution above any issue or party.
The damage already done indicates that natural consequences of failure would be devastating to the Republic's character as "free".
# Cindy Sheehan at LewRockwell.com - Still Not Worth It - Ms. Sheehan has balls. She used her short time on Larry King Live to refute the flag waving of every other participant, even another mom whose son died for the lies. Cindy Sheehan, I salute you. [lew]
I finally got on to speak for my 82 seconds (all the time Larry King Live could spare for the peace message) about how this war is a catastrophe and how we should bring the troops home and quit forcing the Iraqi people to pay for our government's hubris and quit forcing innocent children to suffer so we can allegedly fight terrorism somewhere besides America. How absolutely racist and immoral is it to take America's battles to another land and make an entire country pay for the crimes of others? To me, this is blatant genocide. How dare we export our brand of flag-waving death and devastation to a people who have been through so much already? It wasn't bad enough that our sanctions killed tens of thousands of Iraqis before we even started an active aggression against them. Now we have to create confusion, chaos, and disorder there. How dare our president and Congress, and we Americans, allow this to continue?
# Radley Balko For Independence Day, Supreme Court Slams Founders - commentary on Gonzales v. Raich and Kelo v. City of New London, in the light of Independence Day. Our nations Founders would have begun shooting long ago. [geekwitha.45]
Every right we have stems from government's recognizance that we, the people, are born with our rights intact. We own them. We have property in them. We voluntarily forfeit some of these rights to government, in exchange for protection from outside threats, the administration of justice and the rule of law.
The purpose of the U.S. Constitution, then, is not to tell us what rights we have. We're born with the right to do as we please, so long as we don't harm anyone else.
The Constitution's purpose is to outline what rights we give to the government, and to firmly define the limits of government power.
Unfortunately, this isn't widely understood.
Commonly, we hear people say things like, "Where in the Constitution does it say you have the right to smoke a cigarette?" Or, "Where in the Constitution does it say you're allowed to look at pornography?"
James Madison worried about questions like these. He feared that if we included a Bill of Rights in the Constitution, people would eventually come to assume the rights it listed would be the only rights we have. Others felt some rights -- speech, arms, etc. -- were so vital as to merit explicit mention.
# Chris Claypoole at The Libertarian Enterprise - EGO - how do you take down an egotist? Laughter, of course. Mr. Claypoole recommends ridicule as the best way to deal with the self-annointed fools who call themselves the government. [tle]
No ruler can continue once he becomes a laughingstock. If it was only hate and fear, they would be secure in their positions of power. If we can pull away the curtain, expose them for the pompous, real-world-incompetent parasites they are, we have a chance to regain our freedom. Make fun of them! The Supremes are not the Bastards in Black; they are superannuated Harry Potter wannabes in black robes. Congresscritters are merely the pigs that got to the trough first and crowded the rest of the barnyard out. The Administration? Easy--Pinky and the Brain.
# Robert R. Raymond - "Which Side is the Con On?" - the i.r.s. tried to convince a jury that Joe Bannister had defrauded the government. Mr. Raymond makes it crystal clear that the fraud was on the government's part. [tle]
Who is really the "mark" of the con? The all-powerful, lawyer-filled marbled halls of power in the D.C. beltway "tricked" by Joe Banister's "false" statements? Or the tax collecting politicians disclaiming their own written laws in the words they were written in, behind the lectern and leathered pulpits of sophists masquerading as judges, and harlots parading themselves as prosecutors? Which side is the con on?
# Thomas L. Knapp - That other war - in Afghanistan. We won that one, right? Wrong. [progressivenews]
The newspapers talk about a "resurgent rebellion," but that doesn't seem to be what's going on. The Taliban continues to take leisurely swats at those who've allied themselves with Washington's proxy government -- kidnapping an aid worker here, assassinating an official there, overrunning a district capital over yonder, what have you ... but it's not a rebellion. It's business as usual, with the Taliban a bit annoyed -- but not overly incovenienced -- by the fact that former US petroleum industry consultant Mohammed Karzai is sitting in what they consider their chair.
The Taliban knows better than to attempt large-scale assaults on the US troop presence -- it's a slaughter every time they sound the bugle. And the US military knows that digging the Taliban's troops out of their mountain redoubts would be a very, very bloody task.
So, it's a waiting game, with attendant effusion of blood. Three guesses which side can probably wait longer.
# Tom Handel with John Steinberg at The Fireworks Foundation - Information Regarding the CPSC Action against Firefox - the Consumer Products Safety Commission is working hard to shut down amateur manufacture of fireworks. [clairefiles]
'Spose I'm a whistle rocket fanatic and I am not federally licensed. Assuming I'm over the age of 21 and can prove it, right now I can go to my friendly neighborhood Firefox and legally buy as much Potassium Benzoate, Sodium Salicylate, red Iron Oxide, Potassium Perchlorate, (and anything else I need) as my pyro appetite requires and my pyro budget will allow. I can legally preprocess these materials - mill, screen, weigh, and to a limited extent mix (so long as oxidizers and fuels remain separate and no pyrotechnically live material is created) - in my garage or basement or back yard. I can legally transport these materials to the site of a federally licensed manufacturer (say, the PGI or a regional club). Given appropriate permission from the licensee, I can then, under his license, legally mix my pre-processed materials to create my whistle mix, a pyrotechnically live composition (an explosive, if you will). I can legally press my whistle rockets and fly them to my heart's content (given the licensee/WPA has the appropriate shooting permits).
Now lets look at this scenario (and it is only one) after the CPSC action: Most of it remains the same, but the critical first step, acquisition of the raw materials to pursue my hobby, has been rendered impossible. Firefox can only sell me one pound of Potassium Perchlorate, Potassium Benzoate and Sodium Salicylate per year. That isn't many four-pound whistle rockets. Fortunately, they can still sell me unlimited quantities of red Iron Oxide (rust) (that's a joke). Even with all the things I can still legally do - processing and transporting materials, creating whistle mix at a licensed manufacturer's facility, building and shooting rockets - it is all for nothing since I cannot legally acquire the necessary raw materials any more.
# Fred Reed at LewRockwell.com - ¡Viva Vicente Fox! - on the furor over a Mexican postage stamp.
Guadalajara, Mexico: Regarding the clownish performanceapparently ongoing in the US over Mexico's issuance of the now-famous stamps of Memin Penguin, a negrito hero of the comic books of decades back, a few thoughts.
Let's see. How many of those throwing fits had ever heard of Memin Penguin before this week? How many of them have seen a Memin Penguin comic book? How many read Spanish? How many read English? Have been to Mexico? Have the foggiest idea what they are talking about? How many are not spoiled, puerile, self-admiring twits?
...
This brings me to my belief that the intense racial discord that quietly underlies American life is largely the product of the policies of special privilege and lack of responsibility. As I've said before, when I was twenty I believed that policy should be determined without regard to race, creed, color, sex, or national origin. I was called the merest liberal and perhaps a dangerous communist. Now, forty years later, I believe that policy should be determined without regard to race, creed, color, sex, or national origin. This makes me a racist, a racist being one who does not believe that blacks should automatically get everything they want.
