The 1993 Bombing of the World Trade Center in New York City

Wednesday 26 February 12:18 PM EST is the 10th anniversary of the World Trade Center bombing.

The attack killed six people and injured over a thousand.

Killed were John DiGiovanni, Robert Kirkpatrick, Stephen Knapp, William Macko, Wilfredo Mercado, and Monica Rodriguez Smith and her unborn child.

Here is the [now destroyed] memorial to that bombing:

Its inscription read:

On February 26, 1993, a bomb set by terrorists exploded below this site. This horrible act of violence killed innocent people, injured thousands, and made victims of us all.

Thanks to the International Foundation for Art Research website.

A one-foot-square fragment of marble from the memorial was recovered from the WTC site and will be used in a temporary memorial [New York Times -- Registration required].

Most of the 1993 conspirators have been tried and are in prison. None received the death penalty because they were tried in the Southern District of New York whose juries are reluctant to impose that penalty.

From The Guardian: A new breed of terror

As an FBI helicopter took him to a cell on Manhattan, Bill Gavin, the head of the FBI in New York, leant forward and eased [Ramzi] Yousef's blindfold away from his eyes. "Look down there," he said to Yousef, gesturing towards the twin towers. "They're still standing." Yousef squinted and looked out of the window. "They wouldn't be if I had had enough money and explosives," he replied defiantly.

Bibliography of the 1993 Bombing of the World Trade Center

Best book is the out-of-print Two Seconds Under the World: Terror Comes to America - The Conspiracy Behind the World Trade Center Bombing by Jim Dwyer, Deidre Murphy, Peg Tyre, David Kocieniewski.
----

Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night; nor for the arrow that flieth by day; Nor for the pestilence that walketh in darkness; nor for the destruction that wasteth at noonday. A thousand shall fall at thy side, and ten thousand at thy right hand; but it shall not come nigh thee. -- The 91st Psalm

So I was watching Guilty by Suspicion the other day and noted that lefties oppose some coerced Congressional testimony (by the Hollywood 10 -- for example) but favor it when the targets are people like Imelda Marcos' lawyers (Congress decided that Attorney-Client Privilege doesn't apply to Congressional testimony), or Ken Lay, or Martha Stewart. Shouldn't one oppose all coerced testimony or support (at least the right of Congress to coerce) all?

I've got my biometric national ID -- do you?

I say national ID not national ID card because it's not a card. I spend a lot of time thinking about the concept of National ID and it occurred to me that anything that identifies you as a national (of a country) is a national ID.

Now, not to change the subject, my mother is a paper magnet. She was cleaning out her house recently and dumping whatever she could on her children. She sent me my file. Sort of a TIA Data Mining file; mother style. It included my original birth certificate, the hospital bill for my birth ($75.00), some kind of hospital record with my footprint, and my baptismal certificate. Every piece of paper indicates that all events occurred in California.

Now that file constitutes genuine, legal, biometric, proof of my nationality and my identity. I think I'll start carrying it around in case anyone asks me to prove that I exist.

New York Sun and Treason continues...
Prof Volokh at The Volokh Conspiracy commenting on the Sun controversy:

MORE ON THE NEW YORK SUN: Best of the Web recently came to the defense of The New York Sun's "antiwar speech as treason" editorial; Brendan Nyhan in SpinSanity has a quite persuasive response to that defense, as does Jesse Walker in Reason's Hit & Run. I generally very much like Best of the Web, but think that on this point its author erred.

I'm not sure I understand. Accusing the opposition of treason is a traditional part of robust American (and most other) political discourse. I gather that Best of the Web was arguing that if lefties can attack us with excessive rhetoric, we can attack them the same way. After all, many marchers are accusing the current US administration of war crimes and crimes against humanity ("Hitler" comparisons). Accusing the government of this sort of behavior is the exact equivalent of accusing individuals of treason. Note that both sorts of crimes can be punished by death.

The beauty of the Net is that it has restored vibrant disputation after a century of boring monopoly media. I have long predicted that this new culture would infiltrate backwards into traditional media and that seems to be happening. Seems like a good thing to me.

I'm sick and tired of having to treat those I think of as commie scum with kid gloves because it's not somehow "nice". They certainly don't treat me that way.

Complaints spur name change for school play

Technical High School students involved with the play "Ten Little Indians" will make some changes to tonight's opening after people complained to the school's administration about the title.

The administration asked the artistic director to explain before the play begins that the title isn't meant to offend American Indians. The program will be printed with "And Then There Were None," the name of the Agatha Christie book on which the play is based, in large print and the title in small print.

That was, of course, the American title of Agatha's novel. The British title was "Ten Little *******." [Fill in the plural of a dialect variation of the Spanish word for black.] If the students had used *that* title, they'd be hung.

What Would Jesus Shoot?

Rio De Janeiro, Brazil (CNSNews.com) - Religious leaders and politicians here are protesting a group that wants to portray Jesus Christ carrying a revolver and causing the death of a child. The portrayal is to take place during Rio's Carnival celebration, which starts later this month.

Collateral damage during a shootout with Satan.

I'm not sure Christ would carry a revolver, however. I think he'd be a large frame semi-auto man. Maybe even a Streetsweeper for his famous intervention in the foreign currency markets of Temple of Jerusalem.

Guns & Duct Tape on Curtis & Kuby WABC Radio

On WABC radio in NYC this morning, Curtis Sliwa (head of the Guardian Angels) and Ron Kuby (radical lawyer, communist, and partner of the late William Kunsler) were chatting about terrorist attack preparations. Ron repeated his point that guns and plenty of ammo were the most important part of any emergency survival kit.

Ron's classic quote: "Guns will get you through times of no duct tape better than duct tape will get you through times of no guns."

Man[Person]-eating lions dine on ecotourists

Ecotourists are helping nature in an unexpected way - by becoming "fast food of the bush" for man-eating lions, it was claimed today.

Reports of lions eating humans are increasing in Africa, and one reason may be more tourists camping on the big cats' doorstep.

Craig Packer, of Minnesota University, told New Scientist magazine: "There have been a fair number of attacks on humans in the last couple of years, including some in South African camps.

"The problem is, there is a growing number of camps putting people in the bush right next to lions."

Ah the glory of nature. Gaia detects an excess in certain populations and as "though by an invisible hand" acts to readjust the balance.

Instapundit Exclusive--Sauron Lives!

THE LOCAL CHAPTER OF EARTH FIRST! has partially covered a billboard for "Hooters" with this sign reading "Frodo Has Failed -- Bush Has The Ring." (A couple of them -- looking very chilly -- are "occupying" the sign, as you may be able to make out on the lower right. And yes, this is actual, firsthand photojournalism here on InstaPundit.)

So, let's unpack this. EF! is claiming that George Bush is Sauron. But Sauron, as all right thinking persons know, is a non-human, dark-hued practitioner of an alternative faith/lifestyle who is oppressed by humans and their Elven and Hobbit running dogs. They all appear in a series of novels written by a racist, misogynist, Christian for g*d's sake. Sauron was the good guy, wasn't he? Or at least misunderstood.

Does that make W our second Black (or at least Dark) President?

Surviving the Khmer Rouge

Francois Bizot is thought to be the only Westerner to survive Khmer Rouge imprisonment during their genocidal control of Cambodia in the 1970s.

The book he wrote in 2001 on his experience, 'The Gate', has been recently published in English.

He's teaching at the Sorbonne. By all means listen to this short actuality from the BBC.

He talked to the BBC's East Asia Today programme about his horrific ordeal, and his relationship with his interrogator, the notorious Khmer Rouge leader [actually their chief torturer] known as Duch.

The interview and the book are full of "banality of evil" sorts of quotes. "When I saw the killer's mask drop from him, what I saw behind the mask was not a monster...I saw someone looking like myself." Translation -- Duch was an idealistic, communist academic who naturally found himself torturing people. Just like "us" or like those of us who are idealistic communist academics.

"What I learnt from Duch and the torturers was that, altogether the good and the bad are in ourselves."

Truth Detector: Who's Mean-Spirited Now, Esquire?
So Eric Alterman has apologized for the following remark in an Esquire piece:

ESQ: "As a liberal who do you find more objectionable, Bill O'Reilly, Chris Matthews, or Rush Limbaugh?"

Alterman: "No question it's Limbaugh. He has an army. O'Reilly and Matthews are entertainers. I don't think anybody would follow the other two into a fire, but Limbaugh is different. The lack of civility that he demonstrates toward liberal politicians is really dangerous to our political public. I hate to say it, but I wish the guy would have gone deaf. I shouldn't say that, but on behalf of the country, it would be better without Rush Limbaugh and his 20 million listeners."

But lost in the reaction to the remark is that Rush is, in fact, profoundly deaf. He has regained hearing bionically but he's still deaf. An interesting case because he apparently got almost as good results as it's possible to get from his implant. Many people have problems with the devices. I would guess it's because he spent 35 years listening to people and sounds coming to him over headphones and he had to interpret them. We are what we do. Whatever we spend time doing our brains change to facilitate the doing. Action begets physical transformation of the circuitry.

I wonder what Alterman means by the phrase "danger to our political public". Does Rush encourage assassinations? What about his affect on our non-political public? Just wondering.

How to Invade Iraq Without Violating the Non-Aggression Principle (In case you felt the need to)

1) Fire the 82nd Airborne and abandon Fort Bragg.
2) The 82nd Airborne finds itself in the vicinity of a great deal of abandoned land, equipment, and ordinance and sees the entrepreneurial opportunities.
3) The 82nd Airborne begins to mix its labor with the soil and homesteads the former Fort Bragg. Sells naming rights on the open market. Fort Bragg becomes Fort Viacom.
4) Motivated by the need to meet payroll costs for 14,000 trained troops, the 82nd Airborne forms a joint stock company and issues shares (NASDAQ Ticker AIRB). Retains name "82nd Airborne" to preserve powerful brand identity.
5) Forms joint undertaking with ExxonMobile (XOM), Shell Oil (SC), and British Petroleum (BP) to prospect for under-exploited oil reserves in the Middle East.
6) Identifies oil development opportunity in land claimed by the so-called Government of Iraq (an outlaw entity that claims to rule territory by threat of force).
7) Cuts a deal with the recently privatized 25th Infantry Division
8) Lands forces in unoccupied territory.
9) Brings the oil fields of "Iraq" into a regime of private ownership by mixing their labor with the soil and converting them from unowned to owned property.
10) Are attacked by the armed forces of the self-styled "Government of Iraq".
11) Blows away the attackers thus preserving their property rights.
12) Note the absence of non-aggression axiom violations.

For those who doubt that a Libertarian Anarchist can legitimately violate the (nonexistent) national sovereignty of a nation without violating his principles, I can only point out that L. Neil Smith's The Probability Broach features an "invasion" of Germany by a 1000 airship fleet from the North American Confederacy and also an accepted claim by the Hamiltonian invaders from an alternate timeline that free societies can't object to armed groups entering their (non) territory. I would think that LNS qualifies as a moderately pure libertarian.

Economists' statement opposing the Bush tax cuts

But do these economists support tax increases? Some do presumably even though our tax burden (Federal + State) is more or less as high as it's ever been. But what about the rest? If they don't support Bush's tax cut then they are supporting a tax increase for most Americans. That's because the State governments are busy increasing their already record-setting tax burden.

So you've got a choice. Support offsetting Federal tax cuts or favor a tax increase at this point in the business cycle.

Sex, Drugs and Rock 'n' Roll
The latest in a series from the WSJ on the various flavors of "Conservatism." I guess that that pedagogical purpose justifies an Introduction to Libertarianism that would have been more suited to 1973 or 1983 than to 2003. Too bad Ms. Lee took a rather unnuanced approach to the subject.

Let's parse this puppy:

Sex, Drugs and Rock 'n' Roll
Libertarians have more fun--and make more sense.

BY SUSAN LEE
Wednesday, February 12, 2003 12:01 a.m.

...Libertarianism is simplicity itself. It proceeds from a single, quite beautiful, concept of the primacy of individual liberty that, in turn, infuses notions of free markets, limited government and the importance of property rights. In terms of public policy, these notions translate into free trade, free immigration, voluntary military service and user fees instead of taxes....

...To libertarians, on the other hand, the model of a free market functions as a template for all things. Not only does the market operate as a continuous process for sorting through competing ideas as well as goods, it also allows each individual to express himself or herself....

A number of comments in the essay like this one suggest that libertarians' support for liberty is utilitarian. That we are all Benthamites because freedom is the best way to (self-organize) society. That has been part of libertarian philosophy but most libertarians base their politics on natural rights/natural law not utilitarianism. Mill not Bentham. We support the free market not because of efficiency but because a free market is what happens when individuals' freedom of action is not politically constrained. Libertarians focus more on the morality of liberty than its efficiency.

...Libertarians are not comfortable with normative questions. They admit to one moral principle from which all preferences follow; that principle is self-ownership--individuals have the right to control their own bodies, in action and speech, as long as they do not infringe on the same rights for others....Libertarians do not concern themselves with questions of "best behavior" in social or cultural matters.

Here libertarianism is given too much and too little in the same paragraph. Too little because libertarianism is one of the most highly normative political philosophies. As political philosophers, libertarians can quickly and easily test various political proposals against the non-aggression axiom and downcheck everything from the Securities and Exchange Commission to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to the local Vector Control District (free those vectors!). On the other hand, the author gives libertarianism too much by stating that libertarians don't propose norms of best behavior in social matters. This assumes that libertarianism in a "complete" philosophy. It's not. Libertarianism qua libertarianism is only a political philosophy and lacks theories of esthetics, ethics, theology, epistemology, and personal behavior. Libertarians as individuals are perfectly free within their political philosophy to espouse white supremacy, pacifism, private ownership of nuclear weapons, Anglo-Catholicism, atheism, the worship of Shiva, vegetarianism, the Atkins' Diet, grammatical prescriptivism, progressive education, etc.

By contrast, conservatives are comfortable with normative issues....These values are not the result of the agnostic process of the free market; they are ontologically inherent. Because conservatives assume that there is a recognizable standard of excellence...For example, they argue that the state of marriage between a man and a woman possesses great virtue. And they can go on to distinguish lesser states of virtue in other types of relationships. This process of distinguishing isn't an entirely epistemological argument, however; it is based, in part, on tradition and, in part, on sociology taken from assumptions about "best behavior."

Libertarians believe that marriage between a man and a woman is just one among other equally permissible relationships; ...Conservative thought proceeds from absolutes, hierarchies and exclusivity. Libertarian thought promotes relativism and inclusiveness--although, admittedly, this tolerance comes from indifference to moral questions, not from a greater inborn talent to live and let live....

I can't tell here whether the author is accusing conservatism of the sin of epistemology or reliance on authority or what. Actually, both conservatism and libertarianism have a long tradition of committing both sins. Aristotle is beloved of libertarians and conservatives. Aquinas and C. S. Lewis both used logic and epistemology in their explorations of theology. Lewis' argument against priestesses in the [Roman or Anglican] Catholic Church and Robert P. George's contemporary argument against same-sex marriage are rigorously based on the proposition that such arrangements are not wrong but logically impossible. On the other hand, libertarians have also sometimes relied on tradition (The Enlightenment and the Founding Fathers) and sociology (utilitarianism) in butressing their arguments.

All this falls to the bottom line in obvious ways. Conservatives are against gay marriage, they are often ambivalent toward immigrants, and patronizing toward women; they view popular culture as mostly decadent and want to censor music, movies, video games and the Internet. They crusade against medical marijuana. For their part, libertarians argue for legalizing drugs; they are in favor of abortion and against the government prohibition of sex practices among consenting adults. They abhor censorship. In the conservative caricature, libertarians believe in sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll--but it is not far from the truth. Unfortunately, these debates are often animated by the fact that conservatives see libertarianism only as the face of what it defends: transgendered persons adopting children, video games of violent sadism and, yes, cloning. Simply put, the shocking and repellent decline of civilization. But for libertarians, these are merely some of the many aspects of a civilization that is advancing through vast and minute experiments. The exercise of freedom trumps the discomforts of novelty.

Libertarianism (as discussed here) is not a lifestyle choice. I know plenty of libertarians who have conservative or even reactionary social views. There are also conservatives (the Amish, for example) who eschew government authority and practice their traditionalism on the basis of voluntary organization. The real argument is between conservatives and "liberals" who favor a central, coercively organized social system and conservatives and liberals who favor voluntary arrangements.

...Now, few doubt that Hayek has won and that the economic argument has been settled in favor of free markets. What remains is the battle over politics and culture. One down, two to go.

I hope the battle of economics has been won. The remaining battle is purely over politics and that is not going well (since governments continue to grow in size and power). There can't be a battle over culture since absent political intervention, traditionalists will be able to live as they choose. No battle. A traditionalist PUD would be able to exclude gays and the godless at will and discriminate against decadence on any grounds it chose. If the more extreme libertarian anarchists were to win the political battle, a pro-life PUD could even punish abortion by death (among its population) if it was so organized. The "culture wars" are only a problem because governments can attempt to impose the ideas of one side or another on everybody. It's better to think of the conflict as being between monopoly and choice rather than as being between tradition and post modernism.

Official Taxpatriates Page

Every quarter since the end of 1996, the US Internal revenue Service has published a list of US citizens who have renounced their citizenship. As of the 4th quarter of 2002, 4159 names have appeared on this so-called taxpatriate list.

I just updated (more or less) my Official Taxpatriates page. In spite of its name, the Page itself is not official. Only the Lists are (and indeed are linked from the online version of The Daily Newspaper That Rules our Lives aka the Federal Register).

The .csv taxpats database has been updated but I have yet to update the JFILE and MobileDB versions. Is there anyone other than myself carrying the Taxpats list around?

CPO SPARKY is defending the Relocation of the Japanese from the US West Coast during WWII. Thanks to Instapundit for the link:

Some Facts (Not PC Shrill) on the Relocation of Japanese During WWII

The terms "internment" and "relocation" are often confused and used interchangeably. By law (an over 100-year-old Federal statute), no U.S. citizen could be "interned." That term applies only to detention of enemy aliens. When interned, enemy aliens were placed in Department of Justice camps under Army control. The people who were interned were considered threats to national security, subject to judicial review, and were allowed to have their families accompany them on a voluntary basis. Only some 11,229 Japanese (plus 5,620 Nisei who renounced their U.S. citizenship) were interned, along with 14,426 Germans, Italians, and other enemy aliens.

Evacuees were altogether different: those that were relocated were allowed, at least initially, to go anywhere they wanted in the interior. Note, also, that those of Japanese heritage who lived outside the Military exclusion area (California, the western half of Washington and Oregon, and southern Arizona) were not sent to relocation centers, although many of Japanese heritage living outside the exclusion area did request to be allowed to move into a center.

However, to suggest that 120,000 people were "locked up" as Mr. Floyd Mori suggests is, to use his own words, "outrageous and uneducated" and "patently incorrect."

Then perhaps CPO SPARKEY can explain why Mitsuye Endo had to file a Habeas Corpus petition to get out of her "Relocation Center" if she was in it voluntarily.

Mr. Justice DOUGLAS delivered the opinion of the Court.

This case comes here on a certificate of the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, certifying to us questions of law upon which it desires instructions for the decision of the case. Judicial Code 239, 28 U.S.C. 346, 28 U.S.C.A. 346. Acting under that section we ordered the entire record to be certified to this Court so that we might proceed to a decision, as if the case had been brought here by appeal.

Mitsuye Endo, hereinafter designated as the appellant, is an American citizen of Japanese ancestry. She was [323 U.S. 283, 285] evacuated from Sacramento, California, in 1942, pursuant to certain military orders which we will presently discuss, and was removed to the Tule Lake War Relocation Center located at Newell, Modoc County, California. In July, 1942, she filed a petition for a writ of habeas corpus in the District Court of the United States for the Northern District of California, asking that she be discharged and restored to liberty. That petition was denied by the District Court in July, 1943, and an appeal was prefected to the Circuit Court of Appeals in August, 1943. Shortly thereafter appellant was transferred from the Tule Lake Relocation Center to the Central Utah Relocation Center located at Topaz, Utah, where she is presently detained. The certificate of questions of law was filed here on April 22, 1944, and on May 8, 1944, we ordered the entire record to be certified to this Court. It does not appear that any respondent was ever served with process or appeared in the proceedings. But the United States Attorney for the Northern District of California argued before the District Court that the petition should not be granted. And the Solicitor General argued the case here.

This case was decided the same day as Korematsu (which upheld the exclusion zones). Here the court decided that once the Feds excluded the Japanese, they had to let them go. Obviously not a view shared by the Feds or the War Relocation Authority because they didn't let anyone go (except into the armed forces) prior to this decision.

More in my next post on MAGIC intercepts, etc.

NYC Group Give Away Toy Guns in Protest

Friday February 7, 2003 4:00 AM

NEW YORK (AP) - The Manhattan Libertarian Party conducted a ``Guns for Tots'' toy giveaway Thursday outside a public school in protest of a city bill that would ban the imitation weapons.

Mayor Mike Bloomberg interviewed, Friday, on WABC radio was upset as well. He claimed to be unable to understand why people would think or behave "like this". On the other hand, libertarians can easily understand why Mayor Mike would think and behave as he does. The advantage of outsider status I guess. Greater understanding.

I hope that the City Council toy gun ban has exemptions for museums, collectors, and New York's toy industry the way bans on real guns often do.

There are probably quite a few toy guns in museums and private collections in NYC. NYC is also the center of the American toy industry. I wonder how one can be expected to design and market toy guns without possessing them? But presumably that's the point.

Jacko Talks About His 'Disturbing' Life
Which reminds me of the old joke:

Young Man in Confessional: Father, is it really a sin to sleep with a girl?

Priest: No, my son. It's not a sin to sleep with a girl but the problem with you young people is that you don't just sleep.

Librarian's Dilemma

The editorial explains that some libraries have responded to the USA Patriot Act by deleting records so the government can't get them.

I do find the attitude it reflects pretty disturbing, especially given that (as I understand it) at least one of the Sept. 11 hijackers used a public library computer to make his flight reservations for 9/11/01. The thinking seems to be that national security investigations to stop terrorism are a greater threat to America than terrorism itself, such that it's better to have the FBI come up with nothing than to allow the FBI to collect evidence successfully.

This is not restricted to libraries. There has been a long debate about the use of encryption and other technologies to preserve privacy and anonymity online. Some ISPs offer various levels of anonymity and delete logs to facilitate the process.

Arguments in favor of this practice take several forms:

1) Government agents are more dangerous than the persons they seek. Governments killed many more people in the 20th century than did anyone else.

2) Since most federal government law enforcement actions do not involve defense of the realm against foreign enemies or prevention of Common Law (and hence serious) crimes one should not be expected to surrender various liberties in service of a lesser (or non-existant) value. Note that if something wasn't a crime at Common Law it can hardly be a serious breach of anything. They were bright people and would have noticed the problem. Immigaration, money laundering, drugs, taxes, administrative violations, etc. make up the bulk of Federal LE activities. Not crimes at Common Law so not serious. If the Feds restricted themselves to serious crimes maybe we'd care less about giving up privacy.

3) The Zone of Privacy arguement.

Overlooked Advantages of ID Requirements

ID requirements and the various proofs of this and that that our rulers expect us to present these days are not uniformly bad. What's forgotten is that some of these requirements are for things we may not want to do anyway and the lack of "appropriate documentation" provides us with a good defense to charges that we failed to do something that they desperately want us to do.

For example, the fine public schools or the Northeast have imposed all sorts of ID requirements on new students for fear that children from other districts will sneak into town and steal the fabulous educations they offer. Parents have to present utility bills and various forms of ID to establish local residency. Those who lack the required proofs, cannot register their children in school. This means that they can hardly be charged with truancy since they may lack proof of residence in any school district.

If the PO requires ID to mail packages (as some now do) then private alternatives start to look better. Encourages the use of UPS & Fedex.

If you lack picture ID (either permanently or temporarily) and are ordered to appear in court as a juror or a witness or in a civil matter, you can point out that you are unable to comply because you lack ID and thus cannot enter the courthouse.

Likewise for meetings in Federal buildings with employees of the Federal Government with whom you would rather not meet. Should get you through one round of excuses in any case.

Our rulers have not yet required us to have ID, period, but have only required us to have ID if we want to indulge in certain activities. So if we'd rather not play, they can hardly punish our lack of ID and the accompanying lack of ability to comply with their orders, can they?

I'm sure that in practice they will think that they can expect us to obtain ID and then present it to comply with their orders to do things but it would make for some interesting converstions.

Instapundit.com:

DANA BLANKENHORN EMAILS: "Two words -- Space Elevator." Sounds good to me. He didn't like my paper-ballots piece much, though. Oh, well.

Great idea! until you get to the punchline of the joke, "The bad news is that you get to write the Environmental Impact Statement."

Meme Watch: Return of the Lucky Duckies - The Journal re-enters the tax-the-poor fray. By Timothy Noah
From Slate

If poor people who don't pay income tax will never understand the misery endured by rich people who do, then it is not enough that "everybody should pay less in taxes," because lowering everybody's taxes would still leave taxpayers paying infinitely more in taxes than non-taxpayers. The only way to solve the mathematical puzzle is to either

1) lower the income-tax rate on everybody to zero and eliminate the federal government altogether;

2) disenfranchise poor people;

or

3) raise taxes on poor people.

Noah is showing a failure of imagination here. Another possibility would be to just eliminate the Federal Income Tax. It doesn't contribute that much to federal revenues these days. If we cut federal spending back to the 1990 level (just like Kyoto wants us to cut carbon fuel use back to that year) we could do without it. I could make the cuts myself with a few hours and a spreadsheet if our leadership lacks the courage. Easy.

Saw Analyze That and Two Weeks Notice last week. Both were filmed in post-attack NYC. The Manhattan scenes were all shot on the East side of lower Manhattan. Not the usual location used in the past. I sense they were trying to avoid certain locations. Too distracting!

Police Detainment of a Patient Following Treatment With Radioactive Iodine

We recently treated a 34-year-old man for Graves disease with 20 mCi of iodine 131. Twenty-four hours after treatment, his radioactive iodine uptake was 63%. Three weeks after treatment, he returned to our clinic complaining that he had been strip-searched twice at Manhattan subway stations. Police had identified him as emitting radiation and had detained him for further questioning.

Another reason to avoid public transportation!

Interesting search and seizure question presented. One can decline an airport search by choosing not to fly. Can one decline a subway search by choosing not to travel? Does the emission of radioactivity provide sufficient suspicion or probable cause for a so-called Terry Stop by police? Who knows?

Vanity Fair Magazine Cover - "The Fire and Passion of Salma Hayak"
How will you know when right wingers have come to dominate the media and pop culture?

Easy. When Vanity Fair runs a cover story like "The Fire and Passion of Salma Hayak" but instead of having just played a bisexual Stalinist of Color in the movies, the featured well-endowed actress has just played the lead in the Phyllis Schlafly biopic.

The Volokh Conspiracy

Interesting: When was the land of the free doing better than now? 1948, when blacks weren't free to use the same public schools or public restrooms as whites? 1948, when neither whites nor blacks were free to marry the other race? 1948, when one fundamental right of the post-feudalist order -- the right to vote -- was denied to millions of blacks? 1948, when the First Amendment that the column so praises was on balance considerably less protective than it is today? 1948, when state governments were routinely denying basic Bill of Rights protections to blacks (and, to a considerable extent, to whites)? Or, if you want to go before the income tax and the direct election of senators, 1900, when pretty much all the same was done? 1860 or before?

Seems to me that, race preferences, growing federal power, and the occasional excesses of the Left notwithstanding, we are in most important ways more free now than we ever have been in the past. But in any event, it's certainly wrong to say, as the column says, that we're on balance vastly less free now than we have been in some mythical imagined golden age.

One can argue that we're better off than in the past but you can't logically argue that we are freer. It's a simple mathematical calculation. Once one is no longer legally "the poorest chained serf in the field" one is free and if there are few other regulations one is very free. The legal status of the "median American" has to be less free today than 50 or 100 years ago simply because of the higher tax burden and the millions of regulations than exist now but that didn't exist then. In 1948 if you earned a a very solid middle class income of $100 a week, you kept $97 (97%) of that after taxes. In 1900 there were fewer laws and regulations by a factor of 10 or more.

This is not to argue that that was a golden age or that we were happier, healthier, or wealthier then. It is merely to argue that we were feer. [I speak, of course of freedom in the political sense.] And the right to attend government schools and vote is not part of the definition of freedom. Political freedom is the right to act without government restraints We are much more restrained these days than Americans were 50 or 100 years ago. Even "Victims of Color" and "Womyn" were freer in the sense of fewer legal restraints although they may have had a few more than other population groups.

Those who make this argument can only list a few examples of political liberation since 1900 while I can easily list thousands or hundreds of thousands restraints imposed on us since then. In fact, why don't I start a list on this blog and see how many invasions of freedom I can list together with how many increases in freedom I can think of. Political freedom only, of course. Perhaps I could interest someone from the "increased freedom" camp to take up their half of the burden.

I posted a longer version of this argument in response to a similar column by Jonah Goldberg of National Review Online:
Americans Enjoy More Freedom?

"I favor discrimination on the basis of race, creed, color sex, age, alienage, previous condition of servitude, recent interstate travel, health, handicap, sexual or affectional preference, marital status, Vietnam-era veteran status, economic status, political philosophy, appearance and anything else I can possibly think of."

Libertarian Gay Marriage
The whirl of Stanley Kurtz, Thomas Sowell, Arthur Silber, & Julian Sanchez in a big Conservative-Libertarian argument on Gay Marriage.

If we could have imagined it, we would have warned you that this would happen back in the 19th Century when Dom Rel Law was nationalized. But we could never have guessed. We should have left Dom Rel to the Church where it belonged. Particularly since this would now be "churches". Politicization is an ugly thing to behold.

Gays in the Military

I think there's a difficult and important empirical question here -- would allowing openly gay soldiers in fact materially interfere with the morale, cohesion, and thus effectiveness of the armed forces? I know that I know very little about the answer to this question, and thus can't have anything remotely approaching a truly informed opinion.

How's this for empirical evidence on the question:

Thought experiment only please!

Take all the armed forces that enlist gays and have them fight all the armed forces that exclude gays. See who wins. My best guess is that the "exclude" forces would win. Although, perhaps, the exclusion doesn't have anything to do with it. Hard to conduct experiments in the social sciences.

Here's one of my old essays that I found while doing disk cleanup:

WHY PRIVACY?

The last few years have been bad ones for privacy in America. As of June 1st, 1987 it became a crime to hire anyone, even your own child, who does not present identification cards. The "drug" laws passed in recent years require ever more detailed reporting of smaller and smaller cash transactions. Any children over the age of two who are to be claimed as dependents on their parent's tax returns now need Social Security numbers. I suppose that with all this new prying there will be less illegal drug use and everyone will pay
their fair share of taxes although past restrictions on privacy did not seem to reduce these problems.

We seem headed for a National Identity Card system. According to government officials promoting ID cards, the main argument in favor of this radical step is that the law-abiding would have nothing to fear from it. This seems a curious argument for the proponents of such a dramatic change in the relationship between the people of the U.S. and their government since it fails to state any benefit for the law-abiding either.

The fact is that the argument is false. The law-abiding have a great deal to fear from all invasions of their privacy by the minions of the state. If the history of this century has proved anything, it has proved that the innocent have far more to fear from government than the guilty.

Why guard the privacy of the innocent (the guilty can and will take care of themselves)? After all the enforcers say, "If you have nothing to hide, you don't need privacy." The answer should be obvious, "The innocent won't know what they have to hide until it's too late."

The reason to value privacy is simply that we know from the most casual reading of the history of Europe that every sort of person has at certain times and in certain places been killed because of what others knew about
them. Over the last 400 years, within the confines of Europe, peasants, workers, aristocrats, bourgeois shopkeepers, Jews, Protestants, Catholics, Communists, Nazis, anarchists, monarchists, and others have faced death simply because of what they were. These people may have gone about their business in seeming safety for years until a change in circumstance marked them for death. By then it was too late for them to hide their selves.

This is why privacy must be valued. It may be that every single one of the millions of current employees of the international, national, state, and local governments who will make use of the information collected about us is a noble human being without a tyrannical bone in his (or her) body but we cannot guarantee the future. The average American has some forty years of life left and forty years is a long time in the life of today's nations. There may come a time within those forty years when innocent information surrendered to the state will mean death. No nation is immune to domestic or foreign tyranny, given the fluid nature of modern politics.

To make the abstract concrete, how was it that the Nazi government of Germany identified Jews for extermination? It proved to be a simple matter of consulting local records. Did the Jewish mother and father in 1880 or 1900 or 1920 realize when they listed their child's religion on birth records in full compliance with the law that they were condemning that child to death? Or what about the passport. Promoted at the beginning of this century as a means of easing international travel and safeguarding the passage rights of
neutrals, it has become a major impediment to international travel and even a threat to life. If one is on board an airliner with armed Palestinian terrorists, would one rather be carrying an American, Israeli, British, Swiss,
or Syrian passport?

Kerry on the Death Penalty

SEN. KERRY: I'm opposed to the death penalty in the criminal justice system because I think it's applied unfairly…and because I'm for a worse punishment. I think it is worse to take somebody and put them in a small cell for the rest of their life, deprived of their freedom, never to be paroled. Now, I think that's tougher.

And here I thought Kerry was some kind of intellectual. Doesn't he know that prison is no punishment for the literate. Boy just give me the chance to finish Napier's History of the War in the Peninsula and France (1808-1815).

DOWNLOADING HAS BECOME ALMOST A WAY OF LIFE

"DOWNLOADING HAS BECOME ALMOST A WAY OF LIFE" on college campuses, the L.A. Times reports in Monday's paper. More specifically, downloading copyrighted works using the university's network has become part of the student culture. This isn't news to those of us who follow these issues, but the shift in attitudes in the last decade still strikes me as remarkable. Thanks to reader Phil Carter for the link.

Those of us who have been personally computing since the '70s do not find this phenomenon so remarkable. We remember a time when software was shipped on copy protected media, millions broke the copy protection, software was copied promiscuously, and eventually copy protection went away. This was a decade before Mr. Bill earned his (sometimes) $100 billion fortune. The software industry and users survived.

Most-ever U.S. moms breast-feed six months

A record share of new American mothers are following the advice that the "breast is best" for babies, a study released today shows.

Presumably the author of the piece meant most in recent decades not most ever since prior to the development of formula breast feeding was even more common than it is now.

This is a common error in contemporary reporting. On NPR this morning, a reporter described Virginia as "one of 7 states that have executed juveniles". Presumably more than 7 states have executed juveniles since the Colonial Era.

Americans enjoy more freedom today than ever -- by Jonah Goldberg

Basic argument:

1) Women and blacks are no longer the subject of legal discrimination
2) speech is less restricted
3) Technology makes it possible for Americans to do what they please, when they please, and how they please to (birth control pill, The Internet, cell phones, laptops, and cars)
4) internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II not being repeated. The United States hasn't rounded up whole communities of American citizens.

Then there's the note from The Corner on National Review Online:

Worst Column Ever!
I have to assume many Corner readers will also despise the column. If you want to tell me so, fine. But please give me concrete examples of how your grandparents were demonstrably more free.

One of my favorite topics. First, to dispose of a Strawman, we are speaking of political liberty here. While it's true that technology is very liberating and indeed can allow individuals to make choices in opposition to legal restrictions. Note the technical difficulty of the World's governments in restricting communications these days. But there are plenty of ways in which I'm less politically free than my grandparents.

1) Taxes. Federal taxes are still seizing the highest percentage of the economy in history. About the same as in 1945 when WWII expenditures peaked. And at that time, state and local taxes were very much lower so total tax burden was much lower. W's tax cuts have yet to have much impact on the Federal take and will have zero effect on the states. It's obvious that higher tax exactions restrict one's liberty to spend the dough directly, are directly coercive, and may involve a lot of loss of privacy. When my grandmother worked for Dun & Bradstreet (then Dunn & Co.) in the early '20s, the trolly came by her desk every Friday and the payroll clerk gave her a $20 gold piece with zero withholding. Income taxation involves forcing people to disclose a great deal of personal info to government. Most Americans paid no income tax until WWII.

2) The DMV. When my grandfather started to drive at the age of 12 or so in the San Francisco of 1914, he didn't need a license. When licenses were first issued they were a tax collecting measure. They didn't even test drivers. Then they tested them but did not require any proof of age or identity. Then they started to ask for proof of age and then identity. Since then they've gotten much more "user unfriendly". They are suspending licenses for many "failures" not related to driving. Child support arrears, for example. They have become a popular social control measure.

3) ID requirements in general. In the '20s, 30's, & 40's; SF author Robert Heinlein managed to attend school up through Annapolis; join the Navy; vote; run for public office; and work as a civilian contractor in the Pentagon in time of war; without ever having proved his identity to anyone. He was born before birth certificates. One just said who he was and went on from there. Government ID requirements have become more onerous and involve a loss of freedom.

4) The CFR -- not the Council on Foreign Relations -- the Code of Federal Regulations. People are more free the fewer regulations they have. We have a lot more regulations on us than our grandparents did. The CFR occupies a whole shelf. The Federal Register is a 300 page daily magazine that lists our orders from the Federal government (together with a lot of general bureaucratic nonsense). Then there are the similar books of statutes and administrative codes at the state and local levels. The more pages of these there are, the less free we are. And there are millions more pages than there were when my grandparents were young.

6) Financial privacy -- The Bank Secrecy Act of 1970 outlawed it. My grandparents could walk into any bank, give any name, and deposit any money they cared to. Legal restrictions make this more difficult today.

7) Even the much vaunted social freedoms of today do not represent a huge increase over the 1920s. When my grandparents were young, heroin, morphine, pot, alcohol, and tobacco were all legal and easily available (except pot). They could smoke in the theaters of San Francisco and legally drive with a blood alcohol level of .08. Prostitution, fornication, adultery were not unknown phenomenons and "feelthy pictures" were available -- if harder to find.

Now all of these thousands of laws and regulations may be utterly fabulous and necessary but they certainly reduce my freedom.

Medical Experiment

Over the last two months, I've had occasion to make and keep seven appointments with five physicians in Manhattan. The specialties represented were Internal Medicine, Radiology, Gastroenterology, Urology, and Dermatology. Manhattan physicians are usually very good but their office staffs often leave a little something to be desired. Four of the five offices worked about the same. There were the usual communications difficulties and waits that one becomes used to here. The paperwork and such. Once I was admitted to the presence of the physician, the appointments went well.

One of the five offices however worked much more efficiently than the others. I secured an appointment as a new patient without much phone delay. Staff was unusually articulate. I arrived 15 minutes late and finished my medical history, arranged payment, saw the PA and physician, received a prescription and was out the door a half hour after I arrived. Now it happened that my problem was a simple one but the ease of the transaction owed more to the office than to me. Some of my appointments with the other physicians involved as little MD interaction but the total process was much more involved.

Play a little game. Guess which of the specialists listed above had the most efficient office and why.

Answer -- the dermatologist. Why? Because most of his practice involves patients paying their own money for cosmetic procedures such as laser zapping for veins and wrinkles, botox, peels, liposuction, etc. Not covered by third party payors. Lots of competition on Manhattan's Upper East Side. Office efficiency. Amazing correlation.

Non-Citizens Voting
Professor Volokh on voting by aliens:

I would probably be somewhat more opposed than my friend to letting noncitizens vote in state and federal elections, especially since in many jurisdictions noncitizens are a huge group, and I do think that swearing allegiance to your new nation is an important step in making people feel like they have a long-term stake in the nation's health. But it is important to realize that the proposals to allow noncitizen voting are not some departures from an unbroken American tradition.

For obvious reasons, we are at a peak in anti-alien feelings.

In fact immigration itself was unrestricted throughout much of our history. Immigration controls were non existent for the first 100 years of the Republic, reflecting the pro immigration stance of the Founders. Note that immigration is not mentioned in the Constitution. There is only a reference to naturalization and the requirement that the President be native born. Arguably, Congress lacks the power to restrict immigration since they are not given that power in the Constitution. It could be argued that immigration control is part of the inherent "police power" that all governments possess but that then leads to the question of whether or not the Feds have "police power" (outside of the Federal District) or if that is the sole province of the States.

Both advocates and opponents of immigration should keep in mind that two of the leading documents in the history of liberty include immigration among the rights that governments should respect:

The Magna Carta

[30] All Merchants (if they were not openly prohibited before) shall have their safe and sure Conduct to depart out of England, to come into England, to tarry in, and go through England, as well by Land as by Water, to buy and sell without any manner of evil Tolts, by the old and rightful Customs, except in Time of War.

The Declaration of Independence

He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.

War & Liberty

Libertarians should know what libertarian theory actually has to say about War -- but they don't. Here are some "Believe it or Nots" from libertarian war theory.

1) War is permitted.
2) Military forces are permitted.
3) Government Armies in peacetime are less of a problem for libertarians than government teachers or social workers anytime.
4) Both the Income and Social Security tax systems under which Americans now suffer, were introduced in peacetime and collectively have caused far more loss of liberty for Americans than all our wars combined.
5) Libertarian principles permit one to "invade" another country and kill its government practically at will.
6) Almost all of the growth of the spending, taxation, and power of OECD governments over the last 50 years can be blamed on non-military spending and non-security-related regulation.

Mayor Bloomberg -- Second Hand Smoke Kills

New York City Department of Health & Mental Hygiene (DOHMH) - Testimony before the New York City Council Health Committee on Int. No. 256 -- In Relation to the Prohibition of Smoking in Public Places and Places of Employment (October 10, 2002)
On assuming office, at my direction, Dr. Frieden examined the conditions that were making New Yorkers sick. He found that tobacco use was the number one cause of preventable death in New York City, killing more people than TB, AIDS, homicide, suicide and alcohol combined. Today, we have the results; now we must act

How can we tell that NYC's mayor and Health Commissioner doesn't believe this. Easy. If they did, they would seize the children of all NYC smokers to protect them from death. But they don't. So second hand smoke must not be very dangerous.

Letter from Prof to AF Academy Cadet -- via Instapundit
Apparently genuine:

From: Peter Kirstein
Sent: Thursday, October 31, 2002 1:46 PM
To: Kurpiel Robert C4C CS26

Subject: Re: Academy Assembly

You are a disgrace to this country and I am furious you would even think I would support you and your aggressive baby killing tactics of collateral damage. Help you recruit. Who, top guns to reign death and destruction upon nonwhite peoples throughout the world? Are you serious sir? Resign your commission and serve your country with honour.

No war, no air force cowards who bomb countries with AAA, without possibility of retaliation. You are worse than the snipers. You are imperialists who are turning the whole damn world against us. September 11 can be blamed in part for what you and your cohorts have done to Palestinians, the VC, the Serbs, a retreating army at Basra.

You are unworthy of my support.

Peter N. Kirstein
Professor of History
Saint Xavier University.

Notes to the author... That would be "rain (not reign) death and destruction" and no aircraft deploy AAA, that is, Anti-Aircraft Artillery.

'Terror inspector' plan: 10 in each county

A confidential draft proposal to enlist municipal code inspectors in the fight against terrorism would train 10 volunteers from each county - a total of 210 statewide - to spot bomb-making materials and the components of chemical and biological weapons.

Fabulous idea! Provides just the legal basis residents require to resist warrantless regulatory searches of their private dwellings. Regulatory searches of dwellings without probable cause has been the wet dream of local governments for a while. They run into problems because of the remaining protections of private dwellings under the 4th Amendment. Private residences don't usually satisfy the exceptions to the 4th that the courts have used to allow other sorts of regulatory searches.

These factors are such things as limited discretion, lesser intrusion, implied consent, highly regulated industry, lessened expectation of privacy, etc. Things which don't usually apply to private homes.

When you convert a limited regulatory search into a more general law enforcement search, you make it even more likely that occupants can resist a search that is no longer purely regulatory. Good news.

Hawaii Election Results
So Hawaii has a lesbian (and hence female), libertarian, Republican governor. Shocking. Who'd have thought that a Republican could win. Where do you suppose Bill Quinn is these days?

Unmarked Spanish Graves Tell Tale of Franco Regime

Oct. 31, 2002
During the 36 years that Gen. Francisco Franco ruled Spain, tens of thousands of his political opponents went missing and are now believed to have been executed. Their descendants are still searching for the bodies in mass graves. Claire Marshall reports...

The story tells of a project to dig up the bodies of those executed by Franco. Unanswered is the question of what the diggers are going to do with the bodies of those executed by the anarchists, communists, and wishy-washy social democrats. Or didn't those worthies get around to executing anyone?

Postal Service Porn

Can it be true that the USPS is selling "adult" material on its website? At least Showtime-grade adult material. Has anyone told the Concerned Women of America?

How to be an illegal alien in the US without having violated the law to achieve that status.

There are at least two ways that I can think of to achieve official "Illegal Alien" status without having broken any law. [There may be more.]

1. You are three years old and your parents carry you into the US without having secured appropriate permissions to do so. You grow up in the US but you are an illegal alien. Since you performed no legally cognizable act to enter the US, you are guilty of no crime. See, for example...

2. You enter the US on a valid tourist visa with the firm intent of enjoying a two-week vacation here. After arriving in the US, you decide to make this country your home and you overstay your visa. You entered legally and only later (as soon as you changed your mind) did your stay become "illegal" -- but no law was broken.

In both cases, you would be subject to a civil action of deportation but no criminal charges would be sustained.

BTW, almost all Federal actions against illegal immigrants are Civil rather than Criminal.

Did you know that it may well be legitimate to discriminate against gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered persons -- no matter what your ethical beliefs?

Why?

Because this is a serial list and not a single item. And it's a serial list which has expanded over time. It started with gays and grew from there. Some users add additional items such as "questioning" or "sexual minorities" to the list. No authority has promised that the list is fixed and will not grow in the future.

What would happen if some deviate added celibates to the list at some future date. Anti-celibates who had promised not to discriminate against list members would be stuck.

So -- until the list stabilizes -- take care!

Money stream to 104 suspect child porn websites cut off.

Attorney General Jennifer M. Granholm today announced that as a result of a cease and desist order her office issued on August 26, 2002 to certain Internet billing companies, 104 suspected child pornography websites are no longer able to accept credit card charges through such companies to peddle their wares. As a result of this action, which is the first of its kind in the nation, the access to these websites is essentially cut off for residents of the United States.

What to say if you get one of these cease and desist orders.

Gee, I'd love to help but I have no way of knowing if those sites contain any kiddie porn. I can't even look at them because if they did contain any kiddie porn to look at them would be to commit a Federal felony. So I have no way of determining if your opinion of their contents is valid.

Even if I could look at the sites I wouldn't have any way of telling if the sites contained photos of real persons under the age of 18 rather than animated or morphed images. I lack that technical capability.

Additionally, when did an Attorney General become a judge. You have no more power to "order" anything than I do. You can order your employees but I'm not one of those. A "demand letter" is not a "cease-and-desist order". You lack that power.

Business as Usual

In which the famous Paul Krugman relates the horrors to follow the coming Republican election victory [Registration Required].

The mood among business lobbyists, according to a jubilant official at the Heritage Foundation, is one of "optimism, bordering on giddiness." They expect the elections on Nov. 5 to put Republicans in control of all three branches of government, and have their wish lists ready. "It's the domestic equivalent of planning for postwar Iraq," says the official.

The White House also apparently expects Christmas in November ...

...The first big step in undermining reform came when Harvey Pitt, chairman of the S.E.C., backtracked on plans to appoint a strong and independent figure to head a new accounting oversight board.

...The S.E.C. has been underfunded for years ... now the administration wants to cancel most of the "new funding" Mr. Bush boasted about....

...So what's going on? Here's a parallel. Since 1995 Congress has systematically forced the Internal Revenue Service to shrink its operations; the number of auditors has fallen by 28 percent....

...The Bush administration contains more former C.E.O.'s than any previous administration, but as James Surowiecki put it in The New Yorker, "Almost none of the C.E.O.'s on the Bush team headed competitive, entrepreneurial businesses." Instead they come out of a world of "crony capitalism, in which whom you know is more important than what you do and how you do it." Why would they turn their backs on that world?...

...Senator Phil Gramm, who pushed through legislation that exempted Enron's trading practices from regulation while his wife sat on the company's board, is retiring and taking a new job: he's going to UBS Warburg, the company that bought Enron's trading operation. Somehow, crusaders against business abuse don't get similar offers....

So, if the rascally Republicans win, they will cut government spending and reduce (or at least not increase) some of the burden of government regulation. Terrible! Would that it were so. I fear that the opposite would be true.

And does Krugman really think that if the admin was full of CEOs from entrepreneurial industries they would be more likely to support tighter regulation? Krugman hasn't met too many entrepreneurial types.

Pacifist-Aggressive Behavior

Pacifism is not my view of the world, but at least those who practice nonviolence in their own lives are just taking their own lives into their own hands. If they tell me (as some friends of mine have) that they don't think they could pull the trigger to kill someone who's trying to rape or even kill them, that's their choice. But the proposal on the list isn't just pacifism: This is an attempt to force nonviolence on others, by threatening to imprison them for exercising what I see as one of their most fundamental rights. Let's call it the pacifist-aggressive approach. I don't like it.

All too true -- and not just is the opposition to self defense. There are hoards of people who claim to be pacifists -- the Catholic Social Action types come to mind -- but who advocate loads of government action to raise taxes and control the minutia of human life. A true pacifist can't support the existence of any taxes or any government regulation since those practices work only via the application of loads of deadly force. They could support a "voluntary community" who's rules and dues were enforced only by the threat of disfellowship. But most go a lot farther than that. So they aren't actually pacifists at all.

MORE SPEECH RESTRICTIONS ON CAMPUS:

[From last Thursday's column:] [Maxim] magazine, which specializes in photos of scantily clad celebrities, touched off a controversy at UNLV's Boyd School of Law recently, when first-year student Clarke Walton was spotted reading it on his laptop computer during a class break. Two fellow students, both women, complained to their professor, Jean Whitney, that they were offended and distracted by the image. . . .

I'm surprised that no one has tried the defense I thought of a few years ago when the "Reading Playboy at a Berkeley Coffee Shop" case hit.

"I'm protected by the restrictions on discrimination on campus/in Berkeley on the basis of sexual or affectional preference. Looking at pictures of naked/scantily clad women happens to be my sexual preference. I have to put up with Sodomy on campus and you have to put up with visual depictions of erotica on campus. Too bad. They should have thought of that when they banned discrimination on that basis."

USATODAY.com - Economic woes just aren't giving Democrats an edge

But with less than three weeks to go before Election Day, Democrats haven't seen signs of the rebound they expected for their congressional candidates from voters anxious about their jobs or dismayed by their sinking 401(k) investments. Instead, Republican leaders are increasingly confident that the GOP will defy history, maintaining control of the House of Representatives and limiting any losses in the Senate.

One problem. The economy hasn't been in recession (defined as 2 consective quarters of declining economic activity) yet.

US official clashes with lawmakers on offshore tax havens

"The American people pay their taxes. People who work on Main Street, run businesses on Main Street, pay their taxes. And frankly, it disgusts me to see corporations decide in their board room that they'd like to renounce their US citizenship so they can avoid paying taxes. My feeling is that if they would like to be citizens of Bermuda, perhaps they ought to rely on the Bermuda navy to protect their assets."

Actually Bermuda and Bermudians whether Natural or Legal, are protected by two navies (US & Royal) so they are even better off than we are. [Though I guess NATO means we are all protected by the entire naval assets of the Alliance.] Osama's navy beware!

Yahoo! News - TAXES RULE UPCOMING ELECTIONS IN TENNESSEE

At the heart of the state's budget structure is one stubborn fact: Tennessee is one of nine states that doesn't have an income tax,

Though there's a legislative special session scheduled for November which may enact one.

Can you name the states without a "general tax on wage income"?

Alaska
Florida
Nevada
New Hampshire
South Dakota
Tennessee
Texas

Since Antonin Scalia has written such a strong defense of the right of revolution; does this mean that terrorists or those charged with sedition can quote his article to argue that since revolution is not as immoral as judicial activism (not yet even a crime!) they should get off?

...the choice for the judge who believes the death penalty to be immoral is resignation, ... Of course if he feels strongly enough he can go beyond mere resignation and lead a political campaign to abolish the death penalty—and if that fails, lead a revolution. But rewrite the laws he cannot do.

Search & Seizure

This sets the stage for what prompted this post: an otherwise interesting post by Am So A Pundit that describes how the police visited ASAP's apartment -- which is in the area of the recent sniper shootings -- to ask him if he was walking around with a gun. The post argues that "The Constitution doesn't say I only have my rights when everything's going swimmingly," and closes with "I don't think that, because I may fit [a] very vague profile [of a potential shooter], I should be subject to searches, seizures, stops, or other kinds of questioning."

Well, it turns out that the Constitution also doesn't constrain all "searches, seizures, stops, or other kinds of questioning." The Fourth Amendment itself bars only "unreasonable searches and seizures"; and while that has been interpreted as generally requiring at least articulable, individualized suspicion for most law enforcement searches and seizures, it has not been interpreted as covering questioning.

It is always important to point out however that one is not required to answer the door when cops knock on it or talk to them when they ask you questions in the street or on buses or trains. And the Supremes have held that they can't even stop you in the street without an articulable, individualized suspicion and if stopped, you don't have to say a word to them. In the interstate bus drug search cases, the Supremes have also constantly lectured the defendants that they were perfectly free to not answer questions and not submit to the pat downs and baggage searches that the cops sought. These facts have to be emphasized because most people don't know them.

In fact, the cops can arrest you and you can be tried, convicted, and executed without ever being required to open your mouth. They can kill you but can't make you talk! You can be required to testify in court (but not out of it) but only if you've been granted immunity for your testimony and you never have to talk to cops under any circumstances.

A Note for Your Oppressor

[All-purpose note to give to people who are currently oppressing you or helping the government oppress you. To be used to counter government oppression rather than private conflicts.]

CONGRATULATIONS!

Fate has handed you a rare opportunity to increase your understanding of human behavior.

Have you ever wondered why Americans oppressed other people in the past?

Have you wondered why Americans imprisoned 110,000 Japanese-Americans during WWII?

Have you wondered why Americans turned away the hundreds of Jews on the ocean liner Saint Louis sending them back to Europe to die?

Have you wondered why Americans forced the Cherokee off their land in Georgia and sent them first to Alabama, then to Oklahoma and finally onto a reservation killing 90% of them in the process?

Sometimes, it's hard to put ourselves in the place of those who did these things. We tell ourselves that we would never have done it. We can't comprehend why they did.

But it's actually quite easy to understand why people much like ourselves oppressed others.

People oppress other people because they think that the oppression is right. Their government and community tells them it's right. Even if they are unsure, they go along to avoid risking their livelihoods, the opinions of their neighbors, or even the punishment of the government.

It's only later when attitudes change that we can say that what was done in the past was wrong. Then we can go along with the crowd and condemn actions which we may have supported in the past.

The real trick is to figure out what we may be doing now that is oppressive.

The real trick is to stop our current oppressive actions even though we risk our livelihoods, the opinions of our neighbors, or even the punishment of the government.

If we don't stop our own oppressive acts, will we be no better than those oppressors of the past.

I would like you to consider the possibility that you may be oppressing me by...

[Fill in here a statement outlining the oppressive actions of the person you are giving the note to. Include three points. 1) What the specific
oppression is. 2) What the real motives of the government are. 3) What the person could do to both stop oppressing you and guard their own interests at the same time.]

Do you want to increase your net worth, improve your health, extend your life, and reduce the risk that you will commit (or become a victim of) a crime -- all without spending any time or money?

It's easy but there's only one downside -- the technique only works if you are a member of or a voter for the Democrat Party. (It may work if you are a Green or an affiliate of one of the other minor Parties of the Left -- but I can't guarantee anything.)

If you do qualify, you can magically change your statistical risk profile by the simple step of changing your affiliation to the Republican of the Libertarian Parties.

Those who vote Republican or Libertarian are richer, healthier, and longer lived (on average) than Democrats so you can be too simply by joining them. See how cheap and easy it can be.

Law Panel on Civil Liberties in Wartime

When it was his turn, Prof. Volokh spent part of his time addressing what I believe is a very strong and often overlooked point. Much of what was being complained about was not racial profiling, but citizenship status profiling, which is totally different.

Though the recent arrests in Buffalo and Oregon were of citizens and the perps came to the attention of the authorities because of their religious clothing and grooming (in the Oregon case) and because of their ethnicity (in the Buffalo case).

Later on, Prof. Armour raised the often used spectre of the Japanese internees during World War II, and used this as an example of the inherent racism and willingness to trade away due process rights for minorities in American society. This gave rise to my second question, which he also went unasked by the moderator, where I wanted him to address how the approximately 13,000 (46% of the slightly over 32,000 total internees) internees of Italian and German citizenship fit into his "racism" argument as opposed to Prof. Volokh's "citizenship profiling." I was also curious as to how he could legitimately claim that all were innocent when in fact about 5,000 people who held dual Japanese and American citizenships chose to willingly renounce their American citizenship, and only then were interred as citizens of an enemy state (without these voluntary internees, there would have been more Europeans interned than Asians). Somehow I doubt that Prof. Armour would have had a good answer as to why that was still racism as opposed to "citizenship profiling." (For more on these European internees, read Undue Process by Arnold Krammer.)

I miss your point on The Relocation of the Japanese vs. the Internment of Enemy Aliens. Of the 110K "relocated" persons of Japanese Ancestry, 70K were citizens. Even though they weren't interned as Enemy Aliens they were interned for 2-3 years while they waited for the Supremes to decide that they could be legally relocated but not interned once relocated. A subtle difference but just as much time in stir.

The US Army's new AmericasArmy.com website [which promotes its first person shooter recruitment game] features an Afghanistan weblog "Written by a member of the America's Army game development staff". I wonder what his MOS is. Unfortunately, the webmaster has neglected to hide the directories.

The Benefits of a 7 Day Waiting Period:

Live from Montomergy County

I'll be blogging here-n-there but with an occasional chopper overhead and such, I've got to keep one eye out for the bad guys. I know its overkill, but I've got the truck blocking the back door, and the Honda the front. The shooting locations making a perfect square about my house. Tomorrow I apply for a firearms permit and then wait the 7 days.

Fun With Genealogy

For a while, the State of Texas Department of Health had put its Birth Indices for 1926-1995 and its Death Indices for 1964-1999 on the nets. Because of fears that adoptees could use the indices to find their birth parents and that identity borrowers might use the indices to find names to borrow, they recently removed them.

But not to fear. The state had sold CDs of the indices for a while and my faith in the Market was vindicated when I went to Ebay and typed in the search term "Texas Birth Indexes". Soon I had my own copies and was ready to start selling them myself.

Look North to the future. Today US financial institutions are being told to block payments to gambling and "kiddie porn" sites. Tomorrow the churches?

Note to Royal Bank: Today's gay rights precede tomorrow's Enrons--count on it

The City of Montreal decided to make a bid for the so-called "Gay Games" in 2006, an event believed to be worth some $500 million in visitor dollars. Led by Reverend David Cormier, an evangelical pastor, several Christian and pro-family groups set up a "No Committee" to oppose this move, and routinely applied to the Royal Bank to open an account. They were refused because their purpose, so they were told, was in violation of human-rights law. As one bank official put it, "They're trying to prohibit gay people from coming into Montreal."

Gun Law Turning Law Abiding Citizens Into Felons; State Agency Failed to Inform Millions of Rights

When MassNews asked Wallace [Legislative Agent of the Gun Owners Action League] whether these people actually can be arrested even if they don't carry guns, he said, "There is no registration law in the state, but you cannot be in possession of a firearm or ammunition without a license. Even an empty shell casing in your house could get you two years in jail."

If true, that suggests a safe mechanism of attack. Hide or dump a bunch of .22 cartridges in the houses or offices or on the property of anyone you don't like in Massachusetts (perhaps anti-gun legislators) and drop a dime on them.

Note that if you are not a resident of Massachusetts and are passing through on an interstate trip the Firearm Owners Protection Act says you can carry guns and ammo so you can legally reach the targeted property and dump -- facing only an illegal dumping charge. Of course ammo is probably hazardous waste.

Seems stupid to pass a law that can be used so easily against someone else.

Professor Eugene Volokh on the ACLU and war censorship:
"CENSORSHIP IN TIMES OF CRISIS"

"CENSORSHIP IN TIMES OF CRISIS": I just got an ACLU e-newsletter titled "War on Words: Censorship in Times of Crisis". Now it says a lot about government searches, military tribunals, and various other things, but nearly nothing about actual censorship -- governmental restrictions on what people can say or write. (The only exception is a brief discussion of a Patriot Act provision that on its face seems to bar anyone, including people outside law enforcement, from revealing the existence of a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act wiretap.)

"The First Amendment violations now taking place are more subtle than in decades past and have not been widely reported in the press," the item warns. They are subtle indeed -- too subtle for me . . . .

Generally correct. The FISA wiretap gag rule is meaningless in any case given the ease of anonymous publishing in this era.

A better source than the ACLU though is the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) page (Chilling Effects of Anti-Terrorism) that tracks this sort of thing.

Going down their list, we see a few items --

FBI threats to websites to pull the Pearl Beheading Video under obscenity laws (even though it wasn't obscene since there was no sex or excretion). That failed and the video was restored but it was an official attempt.

Government pulling the plug on its own websites. I don't know if that's exactly censorship because I would like them to pull all their websites (and most other activities) as well. Doesn't bother me.

US shutdown of Somalia's only ISP. Presumably not done for content but because it was financially linked to terrorist organizations. Not as much censorship as was the US bombing of Serbian TV stations during that war (which was presumably content based in part).

There are two cases which suggest federal censorship at least in part - the cases of RaiseTheFist.com and StopAmerica.org.

Probably the most straightforward case of censorship is that of 19-year-old Sherman Austin of RaiseTheFist.com [connection irregular because of legal action and overload]. See a fair summary from the Carnegie Mellon student paper. Carnegie Mellon Computer Science Professor David Touretzky has a page of links on the case.

Raisethefist.com is a website urging various sorts of left-wing street action and included a guide to the manufacture and use of various weapons. Austin's house was raided in January and he was arrested a few months ago and charged with violating US Code title 18, section 842(p), which prohibits the demonstration of how to make or use explosives and weapons of mass destruction with the intention that the information will be used for violent crimes. He was also charged with possession of something explosive that violated the National Firearms Act (something that was arguably a Molotov Cocktail). We know his "crimes" weren't serious because the Feds offered him one month in stir and three years probation if he'd plead to one count of violating 842. A week ago he accepted the plea bargain. The explosive device he was accused of teaching how to make was a Molotov Cocktail. The Feds were clearly trying to obtain an 842 conviction because that statute is probably constitutionally limited to actual training in the manufacture and use of illegal devices in a context that would really constitute being an accessory to the underlying crime in any case. Arms length teaching of weapons and explosives is probably legal. Of course one who pleads guilty gives up the chance to challenge the application of the law. In any case, Austin's no doubt seminal contribution to the theory and practice of street combat is still available from several sources including the government's own proposed plea agreement!

Those of us with longer memories will recall when New York Magazine or Esquire or some such glossy mag published a cover illustration of how to make a Molotov Cocktail. It was the 60s/70s. You had to be there.

Another case not mentioned by the EFF is that of the webmaster of StopAmerica.org a Black Muslim who was originally held as a material witness and has now been charged with "providing material support to terrorists". Summary of case here. Note the significant part of the indictment: "It was further a part of the conspiracy that Ujaama established one or more World Wide Web sites (through which his co-conspirator) espoused his beliefs concerning the need to conduct global violent jihad against the United States of America and other Western nations."

Now whatever the merits of these two cases as criminal prosecutions, it is likely that the government developed an interest in the defendants in whole or in part because they operated websites which suggest the possibility of selective prosecution based on protected First Amendment activities.

While Selective Prosecution is a disfavored defense (because the defendant is not denying the underlying acts charged) in First Amendment cases it can work. See US v. Watamull (9th Circuit circa 1971) in which the owner of a talk radio station (KTRG)was acquitted of the charge of failure to respond to the 1970 Census. The US attorney in Honolulu, charged the owner, station manager, show host, and a guest of horrific crime of census resistance (maximum $100 fine) after one of the station's shows featured an interview with census resisters.

Not a vast number of censorship cases. Many fewer than WWII. But some interesting situations that bear watching.

The Superiority of Conventional Weapons to WMD
Eugene Volokh quotes e-mail from reader Stephen Marsh:

Saddam would have been much better served if he had spent the money buying portable disposable anti-tank missile launchers (of the same category as the LAW missile) and just provided them to the PLO. Suicide bombers with LAWs would have an impact far beyond anything currently seen.

For an interesting take on this point see A Weapon For All Seasons: The Old But Effective RPG-7 Promises to Haunt the Battlefields of Tomorrow. Fascinating stuff.

Exploiting online raunch at the polls - by Declan McCullagh

Granholm's efforts are also constitutionally suspect. In April, the Supreme Court ruled that only porn produced with real children could be censored. "Morphed" or fantasy porn produced using adult actors or bit-twiddled using computers was offensive but legal, the court ruled

Good article Declan but be careful about this language.

The Supremes didn't rule that morphed or animated kiddie porn was legal. They said that the added controls and penalties of the Child Pornography Prevention Act couldn't be applied to it. If found obscene under the Miller Test, morphed or animated kiddie porn would still be illegal.

RTF Webmaster Pleads Guilty

RTF Webmaster to be Convicted on Monday, Sept 23rd

Raisethefist.com, Sherman Austin will be convicted on Monday, Sept 23rd as he pleads guilty to felony count: 18 U.S.C. 842 (p)(2)(A): DISTRIBUTION OF INFORMATION RELATING TO EXPLOSIVES, DESTRUCTIVE DEVICES, AND WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION WITH THE INTENT THAT SUCH INFORMATION BE USED IN FURTHERANCE OF A FEDERAL CRIME OF VIOLENCE.

The plea bargain gives Austin a felony conviction with 1 month in jail, 5 months in a half-way home and 3 years supervised release. Austin does not start his sentencing on Monday, but will find out the exact date at his court appearance.

The arraignment is at the downtown federal building in Los Angeles on 255 east temple on the 3rd floor at 8:30am

Another one of those unfortunate chicken defendants we seem to get. He would have got a max of 4-5 at trial. So now he has a felony conviction anyway plus endless parole supervision which gives the Feds way too much control over you. And he gives up a chance to challenge the "Publish Bomb Plans" go to jail law.

If you go to trial and lose and do your time you are then free of supervision. Plus you never admitted any crime. A plea is an admission. When you are in custody, your cooperation is the only thing you can deny your captors.

See some of the actual links:
http://www.raisethefist.com/news.cgi?artical=wire/----9846413t4a.article
and
http://www.raisethefist.com/news.cgi?artical=wire/----9845643t4a.article

Being bombed can be fun.

Overlooked in discussions of the terror bombing of civilian populations by wartime combatants is the fact that being in a city undergoing such an attack can be a very enjoyable experience.

My friend Byrt was around 20 the first time he was bombed. A native of Berlin, Byrt was a skinny kid. His slenderness would later allow him to slip between the slats of the rail car that was taking him and his mother somewhere as guests of the German government [religious differences]. He was never to see his mother again.

He was first bombed on the evening of August 25th 1940. Byrt heard the noise as the city's defenses began to fire and ran up to the roof of the building where he was staying. He sat there and watched the first of many British night bombings of Berlin.

In later years, Byrt said that being bombed was great because it provided him with evidence that someone, somewhere was fighting his government and perhaps he had some small chance of survival.

In the end Byrt did survive and is, today, enjoying his retirement in the Northeastern US.

True Hallowed Ground

George Will on Chancellorsville and the WTC.

...But regarding commemorations, Americans today seem inclined to build where they ought not, and to not build where they should, as at the site of the World Trade Center.

In New York City, many people who are anti-growth commerce-despisers want to exploit Ground Zero for grinding their old ideological axes. They favor making all or most of the 16-acre parcel a cemetery without remains, a place of perpetual mourning -- what Richard Brookhiser disapprovingly calls a "deathopolis" in the midst of urban striving.

But most who died at Ground Zero were going about their private pursuits of happiness, murdered by people who detest that American striving. The murderers crashed planes into the twin towers, Brookhiser says, "in the same spirit in which a brat kicks a beehive. They will be stung, and the bees will repair the hive."

Let the site have new towers, teeming with renewed striving.