Gun Owner Day, 2003
Daily Rotten - Patriot Act II (draft) - an HTML version of the large (7 megs) PDF of Ashcroft's newest proposal for further empowering his gestapo. [grabbe]
The Libertarian Enterprise - Another Letter from Joe Burns - Spot on! [tle]
The "State of the Union" address is falsely advertised. This country has not been a union of several states since the War of Northern Aggression. Additionally, the address is not as much a statement of the current status of the "United" States, but, rather, a presidential wish list.
An honest statement of our current condition could be made in two sentences: "Our country is being strangled by a bloated, overbearing government. It is filled with people, like myself, who are more concerned with gaining and maintaining power than we are about maintaining the principles which made this country great in the first place."
Iloilo Marguerite Jones of FIJA at The Libertarian Enterprise - Many Things Were Missing From The Rosenthal Trial - a fully informed jury for one. A full statement of the facts for another. But somehow, Ms. Jones still thinks it can be fixed. She still believes that enough people can be educated so that the government will no longer be able to stack juries. I hope she's right. [tle]
Jim Davidson at The Libertarian Enterprise - The Shuttle Rescue That Wasn't - how NASA could quite easily have determined that Columbia could not safely reenter the atmosphere and how they could have taken the crew to the space station to await a resuce shuttle. [tle]
The results which were obtained on Saturday 1 February 2003 were not inevitable and they do not represent the best available thinking. Rather, they represent complacency, laziness, and an endemic lack of regard for human life.
The ingenuity which characterized the rescue and recovery of the Apollo 13 and its crew has gone out of the space program along with every vestige of management integrity. NASA today exists for the purpose of the continued existence of NASA. Its managers often seek to go out the revolving door to private sector jobs in the contractor community. Any notion that the 1988 amendment to the NASA charter to provide for the human settlement of the Solar System should be a guiding principle has long been forgotten by these time-clock punching misfits who dominate today's shuttle program.
Lowell Potter at The Libertarian Enterprise - Columbian Exposition And ... Turkey? - apparently the Kurds are doing just fine in defending themselves against Iraq with their own militias. They're afraid of the U.S. however. Our government has promised Turkey that the Turkish Kurds will not be allowed their own country. [tle]
William Stone, III at The Libertarian Enterprise - General Cowardice - why "we" shouldn't do anything about Saddam Hussein. And a cussing out for folks who say "we" should.
Then one day I picked up a copy of L. Neil Smith's novel Pallas. I found that I couldn't put the book down. The next day I grabbed a copy of The Probability Broach.
After that, my life was never the same. I realized that Limbaugh is simply a Republican whore with no real interest in limited government. Indeed, it became rapidly apparent that "limited government" was itself oxymoronic: "limited government" is about as feasible as a "limited pregnancy."
