[W]hen a judge goes beyond [his proper function] and reads entirely new values into the Constitution, values the framers and ratifiers did not put there, he deprives the people of their liberty. That liberty, which the Constitution clearly envisions, is the liberty of the people to set their own social agenda through the process of democracy.
Robert Bork
Speech
Congress 1987
Millions of sensible people are too high-minded to concede that politics is almost always the choice of the lesser evil. “Tweedledum and Tweedledee,” they say, “I will not vote.” Having abstained, they are presented with a President who appoints the people who are going to rummage around in their lives for the next four years. Consider all the people who sat home in a stew in 1968 rather than vote for Hubert Humphrey. They showed Humphrey. Those people who taught Hubert Humphrey a lesson will still be enjoying the Nixon Supreme Court when Tricia and Julie begin to find silver threads among the gold and the black.
Russel Baker
Ford without Flummery
The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern. Every class is unfit to govern.
Lord Acton
1881
Letter to Mary Gladston
[Lord Acton is probably better known for this quote, also known as Lord Acton’s dictum, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”–Joe]
Recently I had a discussion with someone that was resigned to us losing our freedom. I only weakly protested because I don’t think well on my feet. I need time, sometimes lots of time, to formulate my thoughts and to make my case. My strength is in my attention to detail and in my ability to focus on problems for long periods of time. I play a good game of chess but not a first person shooter computer game. Boomershoot for example is a particularly subtle, long term, and yet I believe effective blow against the freedom haters (see also Why Boomershoot).
He claimed Jefferson was right to say, “God forbid we should ever be 20. years without such a rebellion.” He said that it was too late to save our freedom. Our chance for freedom today was lost without a successful revolution 150 years ago. And he invoked this as an argument:
The average age of the worlds greatest civilizations from the beginning of history, has been about 200 years. During those 200 years, these nations always progressed through the following sequence:
From Bondage to spiritual faith;
From spiritual faith to great courage;
From courage to liberty;
From liberty to abundance;
From abundance to complacency;
From complacency to apathy;
From apathy to dependence;
From dependence back into bondage.
Never mind that it might actually be an urban myth that Alexander Fraser Tytler, Lord Woodhouselee wrote this (see also this). It could be true or false regardless of who wrote it. And even if were true when it was claimed to be written in the late 1700’s things have changed a bit since then. In the last 200 plus years the most amazing changes in human history have occurred. What is the effect of those changes? How does it affect our fight for freedom?
These questions affect us all. Do we resign ourselves, our children, and our grandchildren to a life of bondage? Is the best we can do just keep our head down so the “tiger eats us last”?
I don’t have definitive answers to those questions but I have some pretty good hints. Please consider these changes from the time when the above was supposedly written:
In the long range weapons category I don’t just mean extending the range of a rifle from a couple hundred yards to a thousand or more. And I don’t mean mortars that can extend that range out to well over a mile. With cell phones and/or the Internet people can now give commands to a weapon from anywhere on the planet to any other place on the planet. We can even deploy “smarts” into weapon systems that can take out a tyrant and/or his minions weeks, months, or even years after being put in place and the weapon owner is long gone or even dead.
There are many who would claim these items help the tyrant as much or more than the freedom advocate but I disagree. China, Russia, or even Canada with its oppressive gun control and socialist health care isn’t any bastion of freedom but each of those governments heavily censored communication to protect the oppressors. And in each case communication recently succeeded despite efforts to suppress them and brought about reforms. As a friend said, Computers and the Internet are a far bigger problem for the government than they are for the individual. Just look at the vigorousness of the response by the Islamic extremists to our “corruption” of their society by our communication. Or the impact talk radio has had on U.S. politics. They, the freedom haters, hate it so because it is so powerful. Open communication is the ultimate enabler of freedom in a war against tyrants and communication has never been so cheap or secure as it is right now.
The rapid and cheap transportation allows the freedom advocate to attend a pro-freedom march on Pennsylvania Avenue, or take action against jack booted thugs near Waco or Ruby Ridge on a Saturday afternoon and never miss an hour of work from his or her job in Seattle or Miami. And the communication makes it possible for them to know about the event and coordinate with others in real time rather than days or weeks after it was over and far too late to participate in a meaningful manner.
My conclusion, for all it’s lack of decisiveness, is that should we have the ambition and the courage to utilize the tools available to us we have it within our power to prevent the loss of more of our freedom and even regain many of the freedoms we have lost. I think the real question is, do you have the ambition and the courage to make a difference? Or are you going to give up?
The underlying problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism. It is Islam, a different civilization whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture and are obsessed with the inferiority of their power.
The problem for Islam is not the CIA or the US Department of Defense. It is the West, a different civilization whose people are convinced of the universality of their culture and believe that their superior, if declining, power imposes on them that obligation to extend that culture throughout the world.
Samuel P. Huntington
The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order
[Most people probably would find this book a bit dry but I find it, for the most part, fascinating. I’ve been listening to it (as an Audio Book) on my iPod as I travel back and forth to the Seattle area.–Joe]
The difference between death and taxes is death doesn’t get worse every time Congress meets.
Will Rogers
If you see a snake, just kill it – don’t appoint a committee on snakes.
Ross Perot
I knew from talking to the investigators that inspect the Boomershoot explosives magazine that things were rather “tight” but I had no idea how bad it was or why it was that way.
The full report includes such items as demands for remote controlled doors, and wood flooring in the directors office that alone cost over $62,000. The millwork alone for the other wood in the office would cost $243,000. That doesn’t include the executive bathroom which involved telephone, TV flat panel and radio speakers to listen/view news, quartzite tile floor to match the floor in the building atrium, a bench with a water resistant wood seat, tile wall “in horizontal straight stacked layout vs brick,” and sconces. The conference table cost $28,000. Don’t get me started on the bodyguards, motorcades, and the gym.
All this while agents in the field were using expired body armor and complaining of not having enough people, and other safety equipment.
Now, I’m all for the starving the ATF for money to spend on unconstitutional activities but the money should be left in the hands of the taxpayers rather than put into a quarter million dollar office for the chief villain.
See also: Homework help from the ATF.
I spoke with an NRA spokesman the other day. Among other things, he was bragging up the fact that the NRA had sued to get some of the guns seized in the Katrina aftermath returned to their owners.
OK, kudos, NRA. Great. Wonderful. Good job.
“Lets say I had broken into your home” I said, “ruffed you up, handcuffed you, and robbed you. I then get caught, taken in and put on trial. Would you consider it justice if the only thing that happened to me was that I were forced to return some of your belongings?” End of story? Hurrah, Hurrah? I think not.
I then asked him if he could name a single instance in which the NRA had attempted to get a violator of the Second Amendment punished for his crime. A long silence ensued, after which I had to ask, “Are you still there?” He could not think of a single instance, nor had he ever even considered such a question. I then asked him if he could name a single anti-gun law that, once passed, the NRA had managed to get repealed. Again, silence.
“If I stole all the fire extinguishers from your house, and later you started a minor kitchen fire while cooking dinner, and your house burnt down because you couldn’t find a fire extinguisher, would you not hold me at least partially responsible for the loss of your house?” After all, stealing your fire extinguishers is a violation of your rights and of the law, which limited your options in a response to an emergency.
Maybe you’d consider justice as having been served if, after you lost your house due to my violation of your property rights, I were merely forced by order of a judge to return half of your fire extinguishers a year later, all the while having continued my attempts at burglarizing other people’s houses for their fire extinguishers.”
Anyone would be a damned fool to think so. It would be a sick joke, wouldn’t it? Yet this is exactly the situation we face with regard to our Second Amendment rights and I dare say no one is doing anything about it. People are being disarmed and thereby exposed to an increased risk for injury and death, and we’re supposed to jump for joy, singing “Happy Days Are Here Again” at the news that a few of the weapons are returned a year after they were illegally confiscated? What about the perpetrators (I say, criminals– enemies of the Republic) who confiscated the weapons in the first place? What happens to them?
Dead Silence.
We have a certain body of law in this country. It is defined as the Supreme Law of the Land. It is the Constitution of the United States. All of our elected officials are sworn by Oath to uphold, defend and protect the Constitution, and many of them set out immediately to circumvent, compromise, dilute, and willfully violate that Constitution.
Yet when was the last time you can recall any individual ever being punished for that violation? It does not happen. These people are law breakers. They have been entrusted with, and then broken, the most important law in our society- the one that protects the very fabric of our Republic, and it seems to me that the very worst that has happened to any of them as a result is that they stand a small chance of being forced into early retirement (losing an election) and taking a life-long pension at the tax payers’ expense.
Until those who violate our constitutionally guaranteed rights are held personally liable for their crimes, they have no real incentive to stop.
Having said that, I have a friendly message for all you legislators, cops and judges out there– those of you who feel so comfortable attacking the rights of your fellow countrymen: Your words, and your actions, are a matter of public record. They will follow you for the rest of your life and in a time when intercommunication is increasing exponentially. How much are you willing to bet on the notion that We The People will never actually get serious about protecting our rights?
I wonder if the ATF would have helped my nephew’s with his high school homework had I asked really nicely:
The man who recently departed as director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives ordered his staff to help with his nephew’s high-school homework, wasting the agency’s time and violating ethics rules, an inquiry found Wednesday.
The nephew’s project — a documentary about the ATF that took 10 months to complete — was one of a half-dozen examples of lapses in judgment Carl Truscott committed before he resigned in August, says the report by Justice Department Inspector General Glenn Fine.
Probably not. But it would have been just as constitutionally justified as any other activity they are involved in.
We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.
John F. Kennedy
It stands to reason that self-righteous, inflexible, single-minded, authoritarian true believers are politically organized. Open-minded, flexible, complex, ambiguous, anti-authoritarian people would just as soon be left to mind their own fucking business.
R.U. Sirius
In How To Mutate and Take Over The World
[From a conversation and followup email from Kevin at The Smallest Minority.–Joe]
From my after dinner talk at the Gun Bloggers Rendezvous:
You all know what happens if you were convicted of an act of domestic violence years or even decades ago. Ex post facto your right to keep and bear arms was infringed by the Lautenberg Amendment. And yes, I think the Gun Control Act of 1968 had ex post facto elements as well. But this is just a symptom of a much larger problem. You don’t cure cancer by giving the patient an narcotic for the pain. We have a cancer infringing on our right to keep and bear arms and we need to find a cure.
There are lots of places you can’t exercise your right to keep and bear arms. Depending on the particular jurisdiction you can’t carry your defensive tools, even if you have permit for most public places:
In New Jersey a judge said, “When dealing with guns, the citizen acts at his peril.”
In Utah AOL employees were fired for transferring guns from one car to another in the parking lot before going to the range. They sued and lost their case.
In Oklahoma Weyerhaeuser brought “drug sniffing” dogs into the parking lot on the first day of hunting season. The dogs were also trained to alert on guns. Employees who refused to allow searches of their vehicles after a dog alerted on them were told they would be fired on the spot. The searches that resulted in guns also resulted in people getting fired. They sued and lost their case.
A friend of mine started having “weird things” happen to her at work. In essence she was demoted and previous work from home accommodations were terminated. Things were being made very difficult for her and she didn’t understand why. Independently I noticed that I was getting hits on my web sites from Google searches for her name. The visits were from people at her company. They spent a lot of time on my websites looking at her gun owner rights activities and I told her about my discovery. Ahhh haaa!!! So that is what is going on. She left the company on terms of her own choosing.
After taking a group of people to the range, where a good time was had by all, another friend was accused by some gun fearing woman of intimidating her in the hallway. My friends contract was terminated early without ever being asked his side of the story. The women later bragged about getting rid of the gun nut and was fired for dishonesty.
Chris at Anarchangel, at the next table over, has another egregious example of being fired from a job for exercising his right to keep and bear arms.
As many of you know I was fired from my job at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. I couldn’t understand why until I looked at my log files for my websites. Someone had a problem with my being a civil rights advocate.
If I know that many people personally affected then how widespread is the problem?
A former New York prosecutor told me if you shoot someone you must prove, and rightly so, that it was self-defense. Not that the prosecutor had to prove it wasn’t self defense. No part of the Bill of Rights applies if you are a gun owner.
What I want you to do now is replace “gun owner” in all those cases with ‘black’. What do you have?
We are gun n***ers.
They want us “in our place” and they want to exterminate us. Not our physical bodies but our culture–our “gun culture”.
And what do we do? Almost all of the time when we fight we only fight to maintain our position. We fight to keep from getting another restriction, another whipping. Sometimes we don’t lose those fights and don’t get whipped. And when we lose “The Master” tells us if we are good, we won’t have to get whipped again. We bow our heads and tell him how good we are going to be. The “The Master” won’t ever have to worry about us again. We are going to be good from now on. We don’t want to be whipped again.
We seldom win. We seldom make real progress. We occasionally defeat an anti-gun politician at the polls but his replacement isn’t able or willing to undo the damage done by his or her predecessor. We only slow the cancer some. We aren’t defeating it.
What we need to do is to turn the tables. But how do we do that? It’s in the state of mind.
We have been downtrodden for so long we are almost unable to think straight. These people are bigots. They may think they are the elite, the wise, the educated, and the deserving of power, but they are simple, ignorant bigots. The facts don’t matter to them. I’ve literally had people tell me, “Statistics don’t mean anything to me. You can prove anything with statistics.” And, “I don’t believe your facts.” They don’t have facts of their own. They only have their bigoted beliefs. When my Just One Question got put on the Democratic Underground the best they could some up with for a response was, “What color is orange? True or false?”
We must put these people in their proper place. The Brady Campaign, the Violence Policy Center, and all their associated organizations are the 21st Century equivalents of the KKK. And the majority of the public needs to know that. There were members of the KKK that were tried and sent to jail decades after their crimes because of the change in public opinion in the intervening years. Keep that as our final goal as you suffer through the “whippings” we take near every day. I know you cringe as you remove your gun and leave it behind when you go to work, or as you walk defenseless through the nearly empty parking garage to the hospital to visit a friend. We may be able to hold these people that impose these degradations and “whippings” upon us accountable years from now just as the KKK crimes were punished years after the crimes occurred.
I’ll bet the first question that comes to mind is, “Even if it were possible to make that much progress, wouldn’t that be Ex Post Facto that you complained about being applied to us?” No. The laws already exists. It just isn’t enforced because we are gun n***ers. 18 USC 241 and 18 USC 242 is what I want them doing time for violating. I want to see mayors Daley and Bloomberg, senators Schumer and Feinstein handcuffed and dragged off to jail. I want to see major newspapers and news networks detailing their crimes which resulted in the deaths of thousands and rapes of tens of thousands because of all the victims they disarmed. I want to see them pay restitution and spend the rest of their lives behinds bars for their crimes against humanity. I want to see company diversity training include a section on being sensitive to the rights of gun owners. I want to see making a disparaging remark about gun owners in the workplace be cause for disciplinary action.
You can help do this. It’s going to be much easier than some of the other battles we have fought because we don’t need new laws. We just need existing law enforced.
When you post on a gun rights issues, when you write your letter to the editor, your congressman, or your senator you have to have the proper state of mind. Never forget that the anti-gun bigots are the KKK of the 21st Century. Look for opportunities to make that point. Make belonging to the Brady Campaign the equivalent of a membership in the KKK because it’s true.
The large brain, like large government, may not be able to do simple things in a simple way.
Donald O. Hebb
[And to extend this even further and more emphatically, government cannot do things that businesses and individuals can. Health care, the food supply, housing, and personal security being just a few obvious cases in point.–Joe]
In our civilization, and under our republican form of government, intelligence is so highly honored that it is rewarded by exemption from the cares of office.
Ambrose Bierce
The Devil’s Dictionary
The Liberal party has no direction. The real challenge for the next leader will obviously be to unite the party and give them some direction other than just to run with whatever the issue of the week is that they think they can make a cheap point out of.
Stephen Harper
Prime Minister of Canada
September 16, 2006
$1-billion didn’t prevent tragedy
[As near as I can tell the same applies to the Democrats in our country.–Joe]
Via David and the Idaho Statesman:
Helen Chenoweth-Hage, an outspoken conservative who served three terms as Idaho’s 1st Congressional District representative, died Monday after being thrown from a vehicle that overturned on an isolated central Nevada highway.
She was traveling toward Tonopah, Nev., at 11:40 a.m. PDT on State Route 376 when the Jeep drifted off the right side of the road, swerved to the left and flipped after the driver overcorrected in steering to the right, Nevada Highway Patrol Trooper Rocky Gonzalez said.
State Route 376 is the main route between Tonopah and her ranch in Monitor Valley. The crash occurred about 40 miles from her ranch. Tonopah is halfway between Reno and Las Vegas.
The other occupants — daughter-in-law Yelena Hage, 24, and 5-month-old grandson, Bryan Hage — also were ejected but were not seriously injured. Nye County Sheriff Tony DeMeo said it’s still unclear who was driving.
Gonzalez said Chenoweth-Hage, 68, was holding the baby and wasn’t wearing a seatbelt.
…
A Republican, Chenoweth-Hage was elected to Congress from Idaho in 1994, serving three terms before stepping down.
She first ran for Congress against incumbent Democrat Larry LaRocco, gaining national attention during fundraisers when she held endangered-salmon bakes, serving canned salmon and ridiculing the listing of Idaho salmon as an endangered species.
During her congressional career, Chenoweth-Hage was a victim of a “salmon pie” attack while at a field hearing on forest health in Missoula, Mont. Randall Mark of Moscow hit her in the head with a “pie” made of rotten canned salmon, forcing the meeting to adjourn for an hour while she cleaned salmon flakes from her hair and jacket.
After the attack, the congresswoman joked, “I would like to say that I find it amusing that they used salmon. I guess salmon must not be endangered anymore.”
Chenoweth-Hage, a colorful lawmaker, said salmon aren’t endangered but that white males are. She also said the Endangered Species Act was unconstitutional, complained about black government helicopters harassing ranchers, said minorities didn’t like northern Idaho because it is too cold and called for disarming federal resource enforcement agents.
The outspoken advocate of smaller government self-imposed a three-term limit and chose not to run in 2000.
She lived in Orofino at the same time Barb and I were going to High School there. Barb’s sister Nancy used to babysit for her and her ex-husband Nick Chenoweth. There are stories I could tell, but won’t, about her private life.
She did a good job as our Representative in Congress. I’m sorry to hear she is gone.
For some reason this quote came to mind when I read the article:
Man, n.: An animal so lost in rapturous contemplation of what he thinks he is as to overlook what he indubitably ought to be. His chief occupation is extermination of other animals and his own species, which, however, multiplies with such insistent rapidity as to infest the whole habitable earth and Canada.
Ambrose Bierce
The Devil’s Dictionary
It’s politicians that infest the whole habitable earth, even Canada, but some of them ‘get it’–even in Canada:
For the past decade, the previous Liberal government has put all of its eggs in one basket when it comes to preventing gun crime. It invested over $1 billion into a gun registry that never functioned properly and was never proven to have prevented a single crime.
While federal gun registry officials were out chasing down farmers for not registering their .22s, relatively little was being done to attack criminal gun use. The Montreal tragedy, sadly, was the ultimate proof of the gun registry’s failure. The preliminary police investigation revealed Kimveer Gill appears to have properly registered all his guns and complied with every other firearm regulation.
The $1 billion wasted on the registry could have been put to much better use in putting more police on the streets, providing better equipment for forensics labs and helping schools and social workers to identify and deal with troubled youths before they become violent.
The Liberal opposition, blind as always to facts, continues to chant that we must keep the registry to prevent future crimes, even though it has failed so abysmally to prevent past ones. The new Conservative government will not repeat the Liberals’ mistakes.
…
Shamefully, the Liberals, NDP and the Bloc continue to exploit the grief of families by trying to twist the Montreal tragedy to their own political advantage. The Conservative government is not interested in such rhetoric. We are interested only in doing the right things by taking practical steps to clamp down on gun crime and violent criminals.
Tom Lukiwski
Lukiwski is Conservative MP for Regina Lumsden Lake Centre.
Ottawa
They have a long way to go to undo all the harm done by the restrictions on firearms. An entire nation needs to be educated on self-defense and how to use handguns. Had that $1 Billion (some say $2 Billion) been spent on teaching people to use and carry a handgun the Montreal tragedy would have been stopped much sooner. Think of it this way; when some criminal starts shooting innocent people what is the current response? It’s to call the police who, quite correctly, arrive as fast as is practical with their own guns to stop the shooter.
Got that? Good guys with guns stop bad guys with guns from hurting innocent people. Everyone knows that. When the good guys don’t have guns they are easily slaughtered by the bad guys with guns.
Therefore the way to reduce the number of innocent people from getting hurt or killed is to make sure there are good guys with guns close by. Therefore we need more good guys to carry guns with them and reduce the time from when a bad guy does something bad until he is stopped by a good guy with a gun. In this country we, by constitutional design, have the ultimate solution–The Right to Keep and Bear Arms. This solution also protects us from when the police, and the government in general, becomes infested with bad guys.
Unfortunately because of the infestation of politicians we have suffered with for the past 70+ years (I’m thinking of NFA ’34, but really it’s been longer than that) we have a lot of work to do before we restore things to their proper order. At least we are headed in the proper direction on this important issue.
I think the law is silly, but I am inclined to agree that the State of Texas probably is within it’s enumerated powers to pass and enforce such a silly law:
The Supreme Court refused Monday to consider whether a Texas law making it a crime to promote sex toys shaped like sexual organs is unconstitutional.
An adult bookstore employee in El Paso, Texas, sued the state after his arrest for showing two undercover officers a device shaped like a penis and telling the female officer the device would arouse and gratify her.
The employee, Ignacio Sergio Acosta, says a Texas law outlawing the manufacture, marketing or dissemination of an “obscene device” including those shaped like sex organs is unconstitutional because it prevents individuals from using such devices, violating their right to sexual privacy.
I would be inclined to ridicule every man involved in this from the legislators that voted for it, the police enforcing the law, to the prosecutors presenting the case. It would go something like this, “So, are you afraid your wife won’t be interested in you anymore once she gets one of these? Perhaps you should get some lessons on how to be a better lover rather than trying to prevent her from getting a little satisfaction.”
This is, word for word and in its entirety, the text on a poster that has been displayed in a public school in our area for years:
Violence is Any;
Word
Look
Sign
Act
that inflicts or threatens to inflict physical or emotional injury or discomfort upon another person’s body, feelings, or possessions.
Can anyone make sense of that statement? Adopting it as policy would be quite another matter: “Ms. Dimbulb, Johnny gave my pencil a dirty look…”
Send the kid in for anger management counseling. That’ll get him to respect you, I’m sure.
I would point out that approximately 100% of a public school’s budget comes as a result of threatening tax payers with acts of violence, but saying that might inflict emotional discomfort and thereby constitute an act of violence.