We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
|
When he is Irish of course! Well according to Democratic Representatives in US Congress this seems to be the case.
Rep. Carolyn McCarthy of New York seems to have allied herself with the Provisional Irish Republican Army (P-IRA). She attempted, with some of her Democratic colleagues, to push through legislation in praise of dead P-IRA terrorists. In this amazing act of stupidity, these Democrats are trying to use the American House of Representatives to further their support for the P-IRA. This group of people obviously do not share most Americans new found distaste for terrorism of any kind. This disgusting legislative act should be widely reported to all who will listen.
Oh yes, and one more point, Ms. McCarthy is a staunch anti-gun zealot.
Surely this is not the best message to send to the US’s staunch ally, Britain. Reports on this in the British press will not make it easy for Blair to convince his reluctant back-benchers to stay quiet, when and if the US/UK coalition goes after Iraq.
Either the Democrats need to do some house cleaning/reprimanding or else anyone who loathes terrorism should campaign to make sure all those Democrats who supported this bill are defeated at the next opportunity.
Lagwolf
The name Hollings rang some bells, but I just couldn’t place it. I Googled him and nearly drew a blank… except I found his name is Ernest “Fritz” Hollings. That clicked. I dug back into my old email queues and notes from the days when I ran Pittsburgh L5 and found a cryptic lead. I had angrily called Hollings office on February 21st, 1986. All I could tell from the phone log was Hollings had done something I’d considered utterly despicable at the time and that it had to do with the Challenger disaster.
What else to do but call on friends like Glenn Reynolds to do a quick Lexus search? And now I’ve got it.
Senator Ernest “Fritz” Hollings (D, Times-Warner) tried to grandstand on the corpses of 7 dead astronauts. While submarines were still looking for key bits of debris on the ocean floor and the Rogers Commission was starting the long difficult job of sifting the evidence, Hollings was trying to grab headlines by calling for Senate Investigation. As reported in the MacNeil Lehrer Report transcript of that day:
LEHRER: Key members of the U.S. Senate went to war today over the shuttle Challenger investigation. Democrat Ernest Hollings fired the first round, holding a news conference to call for the resignation of NASA chief William Graham and for a Senate investigation of the Challenger accident. Hollings also had critical words for the presidential commission which is already investigating.
Within that context the log entry for my phone conversation with Gary Oleson (head of the Washington DC-L5 chapter) makes it clear why I was ticked off enough to call a Senator in another state:
Gary Oleson: looks like a setup. Jesse Moore is from S. Carolina, knows Hollings, and just moved to JSC [Johnson Space Center] post, puts him in line for running NASA if Graham gets the boot. Graham is evidently being fed incorrect info and the commission is being told that he’s going to give them incorrect info. Hollings, with GHR [Gramm-Hollings-Rudman] amendment under his belt is headline grabbing and has nothing to do with investigation. We have already notified chapters in SC. We’ll try to nail Hollings.
So this isn’t my first run in with this…. person.
And by the way… there’s a new Hollingsgate article over at Instapundit.
I was aware Donald Rumsfeld was in the Pentagon at the time the Al Qaeda kamikazi’s struck, but I did not realize he had experienced the full glories of middle eastern hospitality. He said the following in an interview with Sir John Keegan of the Telegraph, who had shared some of those same “glorious” times in Beirut:
DONALD RUMSFELD: The fellow who finally got me out of there was Brigadier General Carl Steiner, who was then head of our special forces and was travelling with me for a period.
He is quite well known today as a terrific person. But we ended up, we’d been trapped in there for three or four days where they were shelling the house we were in. And we got in the car and there was all this crazy driving. My wife took some Dramamine. She was in there with me that whole time.
We ended up in your Embassy on those wooden pews that are in the front, where all the people come in to get visas? And she had taken two or three Dramamine and fell completely asleep in a flak jacket. And I can still picture her, just out cold from the Dramamine, waiting for a helicopter to come in, and the only place we could go was your Embassy, before we got out of there.
Secretary Rumsfeld’s CV for his current job is even better than I had ever imagined. No wonder he understands there is no safety in any form of engagement with al Qaeda and their ilk that does not leave them laid in rows on the ground.
The interview is in the online Telegraph and well worth a read.
I’m still catching up on the backlog of email and work from my several days absence. Even so, this item from the Opinion Journal must be shared. These words from a woman who has just lost her husband and father of her unborn child should be an inspiration to us all.
Here is an excerpt from the statement issued by Pearl’s widow, Mariane a few days ago:
From this act of barbarism, terrorists expect all of us to bow our heads and retreat as victims forever threatened by their ruthlessness. What terrorists forget is that they may seize the life of an innocent man or the lives of many innocent people as they did on Sept. 11, but they cannot claim the spirit or faith of individual human beings.
The terrorists who say they killed my husband may have taken his life, but they did not take his spirit. Danny is my life. They may have taken my life, but they did not take my spirit.
I promise you that the terrorists did not defeat my husband no matter what they did to him, nor did they succeed in seizing his dignity or value as a human being. As his wife, I feel proud of Danny. I trust that our struggle will ultimately serve the greater purpose of resisting those evil people casting a shadow upon our world.
As I said “long ago” in the days after… we are all front line soldiers now.
I’m proud to serve with this woman.
The Demopublicans are at it again. A campaign ‘reform’ law we all thought was born dead has been revived. It’s a congressional effort to deflect attention from the fact virtually every member raked in the Enron largesse while it lasted.
The rhetoric is they are reforming. The truth is they are passing a law aimed at holding onto the Demopublican power monopoly. Jim Babka of Real Campaign Reform reports:
Shays-Meehan (the House version of the McCain-Feingold bill) and any alternative bills will be debated in the House of Representatives Tuesday and Wednesday, February 12 & 13.
Shays-Meehan is a terrible bill that restricts your 1st Amendment rights. There are several dreadful provisions included in it, but in this message I’ll just focus on one of them.
Shays-Meehan provides for 90 days in every election year when you and organizations you belong to will be prohibited from running any ads on radio or television that might influence a federal election campaign. In other words, there will be 90 days when you will be denied the right of free speech regarding election campaigns.
And the penalty for violating this law could be as much as $25,000 or five years in prison.
Of course Samizdata’s ruling elite are not in the USA, so we’ll back the Libertarian Party candidates all we want up to election night. Perhaps we’ll add a raised finger logo after our VOTE LIBERTARIAN posts to show our opinion on the collective intelligence of Washington.
Americans can send messages to their congresslime via the Real Campaign Reform web site.
Be watching for a full page ad in the New York Times tomorrow, Sunday, February 10, 2002. We The People Foundation has purchased one in the main news (first) section of the nationwide edition, titled “IRS and Department of Justice: Why Won’t You Answer Our Questions?“
You may remember the organization leader, Bob Schulz, who fasted last summer to force a congressional hearing on the legality of the US income tax. He and many, many others have long held this tax is unconstitutional and passed into law under very shady circumstances.
Mr Schulz was prepared to fast unto death but was reprieved near the end. The government agreed to a hearing under the requested terms. Then came September 11th… Mr Schulz quite reasonably agreed to a delay, as would any decent and honourable man. According to Schulz, the delay has turned into an unadmitted cancellation:
[January 28, 2002] Congressman Roscoe Bartlett (MD), Assistant Attorney General Dan Bryant, and IRS Commissioner Charles Rossotti have broken their written agreement with the American People and have betrayed the United States Constitution.
While I cannot speak to the correctness of Mr Schulz’s legal arguments, I can comment on the character of the people he is dealing with. They are liars, cheats and scoundrels whose word is of no worth.
To those brought up as I was, a man whose word is no good is not a man at all.
An article in the Sierra Times describes a Canada sharply at variance with what I had thought existed.
Gordon Campbell and the Liberal government swept to power last year (winning 77 of a possible 79 seats in the BC Legislature) on a mandate to set British Columbia back on the road to prosperity. Prosperity – as the Liberals promised – would be built on a platform dedicated to freeing the private sector from crushing taxes and burdensome regulation. Indeed, this last move by the Liberals to help cut 1.9 billion dollars from the budget by 2004 is just one thing in a list of many that has some wondering if the Liberals are actually Libertarians in disguise.
Well that certainly is one hell of a majority! But call me cynical if you like: talk is cheap… except for political talk, which is usually very expensive indeed. But then when I read what the BC Liberals have actually started doing, I almost fell off my chair! Way to go! Read the Scott Carpenter article and be amazed yourself. Methinks I shall be visiting the Sierra Times and the various Canadian blog sites more often to see what is in the air over there.
I have always felt second to none in my detestation of former NY mayor Ed Koch, who was for me the unalloyed stereotype of pragmatic municipal amorality. And yet, I found the following Ed Koch quote on the sublimely named Communist Vampires Newswire regarding the WTC twin towers:
I think we should rebuild them exactly the same way that they were. They are the symbol of New York. In a way, we crush the terrorists by rebuilding them. They thought they had destroyed us. I think this shows we are crushing them.
– Ed Koch, former New York mayor (1978 – 1989)
Absolutely true. Even better would be to build the largest building(s) in the world. To keep the site as some maudlin garden of remembrance would be a colossal mistake. We must indeed remember the fallen but let us also remember that they fell engaged in World Trade and in doing so made the world a better place more than any ten NGO’s you might care to mention.
I don’t often have time to respond in any depth to e-mail about articles I have posted. I’ve so many “irons in the fire” I barely have time to post, let alone debate. However reader and fellow blogger Swen Swenson of A Coyote at the Dog Show made some valid points:
FYI, there are still a lot of polygamists in the Rocky Mountain states and you rarely hear about one of them being prosecuted. Tom Green’s mistake – ‘marrying’ a 13-year-old and bragging about it. The first is statutory rape regardless of your religion, the second just plain asshole stupidity. With Green you could also make a case for chatel slavery. His ‘bride’ apparently had little choice in the matter.
I agree that the government has no business limiting the number or gender of those who would enter into a marriage contract. But in this situation you’d as well bemoan our attack on the religious freedom of the poor Taliban. They too were acting on their religious beliefs..
That is not the story Opinion Journal chose to emphasize. The titles weren’t of the form “Utah resident takes child bride in forced marriage“. They centered on the old Morman lifestyle. Had the former been the headline, I’d not have given the article a second glance. I’d have left it for someone like Karl “Defending The Indefensible” Hess.
Even the email replies Opinion Journal received and reported on focused on post-sellout (You vill sign ze papers old man!) Morman beliefs rather than the particulars of the case Swen pointed out.
…has collapsed during a speech. I received an e-mail pointing this out to me which asked if I cared? Yes I do care. I hope they bury her in Waco. Yes I realise she is not dead yet, which is why I wish someone would bury her in Waco.
The Opinion Journal’s newsletter is a good source of information, but they don’t always come down on the side of liberty. Recently they have been discussing the case of Tom Green of Utah, arrested for having a family with multiple wives. Today’s email newsletter states:
His “head wife,” Linda Kunz Green, implied that the Greens are Mormons. We heard from more than 100 readers, Mormon and non-Mormon alike, who pointed out that although some early Mormons practiced polygamy, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (as it is formally known) renounced polygamy in 1890, and anyone practicing “plural marriage” is subject to excommunication from the church. Although some breakaway groups in Utah and nearby states still practice polygamy, they are not, properly speaking, Mormons.
What the Opinion Journal neglects to mention is why the tenets of the Mormon religion were changed in 1890.
Many would know Brigham Young led his people to Utah after years of persecution in the east. Few are aware of the continous battle fought by he and his people to be left alone. The difficulty was that polygamy was a tenet of those beliefs and was anathema to the majority religion of the populous eastern states.
The first round in the running battle between freedom of religion and the Feds came with the 1858 Utah War sometimes known as ‘the Mormon War’. It was not exactly a shooting war as they were not a terribly violent people and had no particular desire to face off with the Federal troops that were sent in to put them in their place.
Because of this experience, the Mormons later fought the Blackhawk War on their own for nearly 8 years to avoid more unwanted ‘assistance’ from Washington. Nonetheless, Federal Troops intervened in 1872.
The final act came between 1887 and 1890:
The U. S. Supreme Court upholds the constitutionality of the 1887 Edmunds-Tucker Act, denying that its assault on Mormon institutions constitutes a violation of Mormon religious freedom. At the same time, Congress debates the even more punitive Cullom-Strubble Bill, designed to deny all Mormons the right to vote. In response, Wilford Woodruff, leader of the Mormon Church, issues the “Manifesto,” a revelation urging all members of the church to comply with the laws of the land regarding marriage..
So there we have it. The Green family is being persecuted for following the original tenets of their religion, tenets that their Church was forceably coerced into changing.
The Waco massacre was nothing new. Freedom of Religion in the US has always existed on the sufference of the majority religion. As the Buffalo Springfield song said: “You step outta line, the man come and take you away”
The Opinion Journal daily e-mail newsletter reported today that New York Times op-ed writer and former Enron adviser Paul Krugman has gone over the edge:
I predict that in the years ahead Enron, not Sept. 11, will come to be seen as the greater turning point in U.S. society.
Paul, I don’t know what it is you’re smoking, but would you tell me where I can get some too?
|
Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
|
