End the War on Freedom

russmo.com - Pals - cartoon commentary on the capture of the Butcher of Baghdad. Hehe.

Wasserman - There's something odd about the new electronic voting machines - cartoon commentary on the likely outcome of the 2004 elections. Hehe. [smith2004]

Michael Crichton - Remarks to the Commonwealth Club, San Francisco, September 15,2003 - Why we must change environmentalism from a religion to hard science. Wow! Great speech! [smith2004]

Today, one of the most powerful religions in the Western World is environmentalism. Environmentalism seems to be the religion of choice for urban atheists. Why do I say it's a religion? Well, just look at the beliefs. If you look carefully, you see that environmentalism is in fact a perfect 21st century remapping of traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths.

There's an initial Eden, a paradise, a state of grace and unity with nature, there's a fall from grace into a state of pollution as a result of eating from the tree of knowledge, and as a result of our actions there is a judgment day coming for us all. We are all energy sinners, doomed to die, unless we seek salvation, which is now called sustainability. Sustainability is salvation in the church of the environment. Just as organic food is its communion, that pesticide-free wafer that the right people with the right beliefs, imbibe.

Eden, the fall of man, the loss of grace, the coming doomsday---these are deeply held mythic structures. They are profoundly conservative beliefs. They may even be hard-wired in the brain, for all I know. I certainly don't want to talk anybody out of them, as I don't want to talk anybody out of a belief that Jesus Christ is the son of God who rose from the dead. But the reason I don't want to talk anybody out of these beliefs is that I know that I can't talk anybody out of them. These are not facts that can be argued. These are issues of faith.

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With so many past failures, you might think that environmental predictions would become more cautious. But not if it's a religion. Remember, the nut on the sidewalk carrying the placard that predicts the end of the world doesn't quit when the world doesn't end on the day he expects. He just changes his placard, sets a new doomsday date, and goes back to walking the streets. One of the defining features of religion is that your beliefs are not troubled by facts, because they have nothing to do with facts.

So I can tell you some facts. I know you haven't read any of what I am about to tell you in the newspaper, because newspapers literally don't report them. I can tell you that DDT is not a carcinogen and did not cause birds to die and should never have been banned. I can tell you that the people who banned it knew that it wasn't carcinogenic and banned it anyway. I can tell you that the DDT ban has caused the deaths of tens of millions of poor people, mostly children, whose deaths are directly attributable to a callous, technologically advanced western society that promoted the new cause of environmentalism by pushing a fantasy about a pesticide, and thus irrevocably harmed the third world. Banning DDT is one of the most disgraceful episodes in the twentieth century history of America. We knew better, and we did it anyway, and we let people around the world die and didn't give a damn.

I can tell you that second hand smoke is not a health hazard to anyone and never was, and the EPA has always known it. I can tell you that the evidence for global warming is far weaker than its proponents would ever admit. I can tell you the percentage the US land area that is taken by urbanization, including cities and roads, is 5%. I can tell you that the Sahara desert is shrinking, and the total ice of Antarctica is increasing. I can tell you that a blue-ribbon panel in Science magazine concluded that there is no known technology that will enable us to halt the rise of carbon dioxide in the 21st century. Not wind, not solar, not even nuclear. The panel concluded a totally new technology-like nuclear fusion-was necessary, otherwise nothing could be done and in the meantime all efforts would be a waste of time. They said that when the UN IPCC reports stated alternative technologies existed that could control greenhouse gases, the UN was wrong.

I can, with a lot of time, give you the factual basis for these views, and I can cite the appropriate journal articles not in whacko magazines, but in the most prestigeous science journals, such as Science and Nature. But such references probably won't impact more than a handful of you, because the beliefs of a religion are not dependant on facts, but rather are matters of faith. Unshakeable belief.

Geek with a .45 - Ring...Ring... - the Geek hears that the permit for his new .45 has been granted by the local gendarmes and has a conversation in his head with the spirits of the Founders. For a picture of a cousin of his new security tool and a description of his first day with it at the range, click here. I'm afraid I'm guilty of having done no festooning yet. Slap! Slap! Ouch!!! [geekwitha.45]

"You guys are in trouble, and it could be serious. The system's got self correcting mechanisms built into it. They aren't guaranteed to work, but they'll need some time to kick in, to see if they achieve their purpose or not. Much yet remains to be seen. As for the slitting of throats, we'll have to get back with you."

That works for me. I'd massively prefer to stay out of the slitting of throats business anyway.

So, I'm ditching work, and I'm gonna go do the Second Amendment.

I'm going to buy a great big, scary, politically incorrect semi-automatic handgun that holds a preposterous number of large bullets. Gun bigots are cordially invited to think of it as my very own personal "concealable hand cannon bullet hose".

Happy Bill of Rights day!

And speaking of Bill of Rights day, you have been printing out copies and festooning America with them, haven't you?

Google - Food Nazis - I often think that somebody at Google likes me. Today it's hard to deny. I put up my Center for Science in the Public Interest = Food Nazis page six days ago, and the Google search above lists my page first. Or maybe I'm just good at pleasing their algorithms. Whatever. Thanks, Google.

Elias Alias at Doing Freedom! - Low Profile, Slow Profile, No Profile - the webmaster of The Mental Militia tells the story of going from Viet Nam veteran to sovereign individual. Don't miss the rest of the new issue of Doing Freedom!, now edited by William Theron.

I ask myself daily whether I may be subconsciously seeking to be punished by the State. I'm convinced that I have no such latent wish. To my own knowledge of myself, I love life and freedom, creativity, beauty, Nature in all her manifestations, friendship and trust, honor, true pride in living honestly, intelligence and imagination, life's mysteries, the miracle of emotions, the miracle of form and function, the miracle of having been born of the bone gates of life into a world full of color and shape and movement and action. I think of myself as being perpetually distracted by the miraculous. I know a deep and abiding happiness, which I value. Having been incarcerated in the War on Drugs back in 1971, and having spent some months behind bars, I am quite sure that I never want to be in such a place again, ever.

Yet something inside me refuses to simply hide from this rogue government. Something inside me seriously fears the pattern developing within the national government over the past ninety years. Something I can sense, and perhaps have always sensed, suggests to me that my children may not be assured of a life of freedom such as I've known. I also feel that this pattern toward subjection of the individual to the powers of the State are being intentionally put in place, are being nurtured by those who own this nation's national debt, the people who secretly plan America's social disintegration, and this is the largest challenge to my happiness of which I'm aware. (I also think I know "who" these powers and principalities are. I call them: the "Globalizing Socialist Bankers of the Corporate Dynasty".)

Why? Because it causes me to know that I must stand as a man and try for all I'm worth to stop the social rape of America. It causes me to understand why we who are older owe it to coming generations to thwart this criminal destruction of America's Constitution and Bill of Rights. It brings to the fore in my mind and in my heart that treasured spirit of patriotism dedicated to freedom. It is not to be confused with modern notions of "patriotism", subject as they are to Statism and nationalism, but to a higher vision of the emotion, to the potential of the individual human being in a state of natural freedom.

Charley Reese at LewRockwell.com - Murder Inc. - the Busheviks plan to hire Israelis to murder Iraqis marked for execution by members of Saddam's old secret police. That'll win lots of hearts and minds. Not! It's Vietnam all over again, with sand instead of trees.

If you are one of those superpatriots who like to wrap themselves in the American flag while you watch Fox News, don't be shocked. We did exactly the same kind of things during the Vietnam War. I used to have, now and then, a bloody Mary or several with a CIA man who had run the infamous Phoenix Program in Vietnam.

There, the South Vietnamese would finger members of the Viet Cong, and we would snuff them. Of course, my friend said in his cynical way, if the quota for the month was 50, the South Vietnamese fingered 50; if it was 500, they found 500. How many of the thousands we murdered were actually Viet Cong and how many were innocent Vietnamese, nobody knows, except perhaps the South Vietnamese who were involved. The number of people we murdered ranges from 21,000 (an official figure) to 47,000.

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The truth is that war and occupation are a dirty business, and they contaminate everything and everybody involved. There are no good wars, and there are no good guys on either side. All you have are degrees of evil. We committed enough crimes against humanity in World War II that if we had lost, it would have been our politicians and generals in the dock for war crimes.

If we can't refrain from acting like Murder Inc. and from sleeping with the evildoers, let's at least drop the self-righteous bit. Hypocrisy so ill becomes us.

Cryptome - UnEyeballing the White House - some GlobeXplorer images of DC have been pixelated since 2002.