Archives for January 2007

Quite fortunately for Kim du Toit, he happens to be more disposed to conduct his voluntary and consensual affairs in ways that happen to be legal in Texas, and more generally, the U.S. Although, with all the traveling around he does for his gun shows, I just wonder if he edges across the legal line in any of the states he must traverse to get from one place to the other.

Not that I mind, of course. But there are sure plenty of "concerned citizens" who’d be perfectly happy to see him locked up for a good long time in order to "protect" the rest of us.

Equally, of course, others who conduct their own voluntary and consensual affairs are not so fortunate. All the while, the irony and hypocrisy seems to completely allude good ol’ Kim:

The U.S.A. leads the way with 2.2 million prisoners out of a
population of 300 million (0.73%, or over 4.5 times the world average).

Excellent. So we stick our lawbreakers in jail, rama lama ding dong.

He goes on to question the idea that prison is not efficacious in dealing with crime, asking: "Efficacy by what standard?" By which he means: a standard of rehabilitating criminals, or a standard of protecting the innocent from them?

Ok, fair enough. But he sure doesn’t continue the logic, does he? By what standard are people convicted as criminals? It’s certainly not clear harm perpetrated on others, is it? How is getting high necessarily harming others (or materially different from getting drunk)? How is producing, buying, or selling some substance necessarily harming others (or materially different from producing, fermenting, and distilling grain)? How is exchanging money for sex necessarily harming others? How about "illegal" gamblers? How about in Washington State, where you can go to jail for years for engaging in online gambling? And how about the numerous British public-company executives arrested, charged, and awaiting possible prison time for operating legal online gambling enterprises in their own countries? And what about the states where you can be locked up for the manner in which you conduct your peaceful affairs surrounding your interest in firearms…? What about that? Kim? Should I go on?

And I’m not even getting started on all the failed social programs that have literally created home-grown war zones where innocent kids are born and bred to be predators.

I recall reading a quote somewhere recently that went something like, "where there are laws, there you will have criminals." I couldn’t find a reference, but here’s one from the 6th century, B.C.

The greater the number of laws and enactments, the more thieves and robbers there will be. ~ Lao Tzu

Get it? Two-thousand, six-hundred year-old wisdom, and it’s still not enough for most people. Well, Kim du Toit is probably a generally nice guy, someone to whose care you could entrust your daughter; often gregarious, kind, and honorable. But he’s not wise, and I think that’s what this world needs. Far more than anything, this world needs wisdom — true, deep, humble, thoughtful, honest, non-politicized, non-advantage-seeking: wisdom.

I’ve actually addressed this whole issue before, but let’s refresh.

• Over 9 million people are held in penal institutions throughout the
  world, mostly as pre-trial detainees (remand prisoners) or having been
  convicted and sentenced. About half of these are in the United States
  (2.03m), Russia (0.86m) or China (1.51m plus pre-trial detainees and
  prisoners in ‘administrative detention’).
• The United States has the highest prison population rate in the
  world, some 701 per 100,000 of the national population, followed by
  Russia (606), Belarus (554), Kazakhstan and the U.S. Virgin Islands
  (both 522), the Cayman Islands (501), Turkmenistan (489), Belize (459),
  Bermuda (447), Suriname (437), Dominica (420) and Ukraine (415).
• However, more than three fifths of countries (60.5%) have rates
  below 150 per 100,000. (The United Kingdom’s rate of 141 per 100,000 of
  the national population places it above the midpoint in the World List;
  it is the highest among countries of the European Union.)

Did you get that? The U.S. has 4% of the entire world’s population,
yet 22% of its prisoners. It has more people locked up than any other
country, including communist China, and it locks up more as a
percentage of the population than any other country. 701 out of every
100,000, which means you have a far greater chance of being a victim of
American enthusiasm for creating and prosecuting "crimes" than you’ll
ever, ever have for getting whacked by a terrorist. 701 out of 100k in
America. Western Europe? Less than 100, on average. If you’re a Swiss
citizen and you immigrate to the U.S., you’ve just made it 10 times
more likely that you’ll spend time in prison during your lifetime.

The awful French, right? Well, if you move there from here,
especially if you’re an inner-city black man, you’ll cut your chances
of ever going to prison by a factor of eight.

But at least we have some close company, eh? Russia. Belarus. Kazakhstan. Feel honored, Kim? Seeing as how we’re locking up about 15 times more "criminals" than Japan, and about seven times more than most of western Europe, we ought to see immense crime waves passing through those countries any day now.

I’ll expect you to gloat about it, too. Serves ’em right for not being man enough to lock more people up.

These people have no earthly idea what they’re seeing when they look at
her. This is like being able to see through to the drooling alien
mesmerizing children from inside the Santa-suit.

I’d have to chalk that up as one of the most apt descriptions of what I perceive about her.

I’m still pretty skeptical about her being able to win; but then again, it’s difficult to predict anything in this upside-down, politicized world — a world where second-hand smoke, for instance, is widely believed to be more dangerous and risky than actually smoking. …A world where, for instance, organized groups of whiny people are seen to have a greater moral claim on a company’s affairs than that company’s own customers, employees, officers, directors, and shareholders put together.

I’ve long said that when the day comes that America elects a woman to be president, it will be a Margaret Thatcher type — someone clearly conservative and uncompromising, and not just for politics’ sake, but because that’s what she is in her bones. Then again, worlds change.

Of course, as a fall back, her opponents can just make sure that there’s lots of sound clips of Hillary being indignant in that loud, shrill, monotone voice she does — kinda like your worst nightmare of a nagging, domineering wife. I don’t know about you, but that always just sends shivers of fear and loathing down my spine.

I have been on record here, many times, in support of killing terrorists (those who vow to kill us and are to be taken seriously), and by that, I mean them and their material support network. I also allow that because of the nature of this reality in which we live, it is wholly impractical to hold as a prerequisite for such self-defense that innocents can’t be caught in the crossfire. Indeed, it is primarily because of the left’s political exploitation of the fact of innocent casualties that the real villains ensure that there are civilian casualties in abundance.

The proper moral position is to morally condemn them even further for purposefully involving civilians, and not abdicating our moral duty to defend ourselves against cunning aggression that seeks to hamstring us through political manipulations.

So, this is categorized as a Kim du Toit post, and longer-term readers will recall my mini campaign which has really sort of fizzled. In truth, I can’t keep up with the guy; I have a life that’s substantially lived apart from this blog. It was only last night that I decided to scan through the 178 posts of his, sitting in my RSS reader, having been neglected since early December. I could have chosen any of a dozen posts to highlight, but in the end, I just let it all go.

Of note, there was this, and then this. But shooting a sailor for stealing a laptop and trying to sell it to a spy, and then desertion, is not materially different from shooting people who refuse to submit to a draft, if it should ever come to pass again, and I already dealt with that. In the second case, dropping a Daisycutter on a bunch of Hezbollah supporters in Beiruit, a country not party to the war, was characterized an "unworthy thought;" so I gave it a pass. I understand thoughts, though with visitors well into the six figures monthly, Kim really ought to stop and think which of his thoughts are really appropriate to put on his blog.

And then there was this. What the JDAMs and Daisycutters don’t get, in an attack on Capitol Hill he doubts "could ever be classified as ‘friendly fire,’" he has a mop up plan.

Is it too early to start the hangings?

And so I ask you: what are these brave troops fighting and dying for? To protect that kind of jingoistic rhetoric spewing out to 200,000 Republican choirboys per month who visit his site? You’re welcome to explain it to me, but I fail to see a helluva lot of difference between that, and the mobs of 7th century primitives dancing in the streets and singing "Death to America" while effigies burn.

Can you think of anything nobler than this? I sure can’t.

Every weekday, a truck pulls up to the Cecil H. Green Library, on the
campus of Stanford University, and collects at least a thousand books,
which are taken to an undisclosed location and scanned, page by page,
into an enormous database being created by Google. The company is also
retrieving books from libraries at several other leading universities,
including Harvard and Oxford, as well as the New York Public Library.
At the University of Michigan, Google’s original partner in Google Book
Search, tens of thousands of books are processed each week on the
company’s custom-made scanning equipment.

Google intends to scan every book ever published, and to make the full
texts searchable, in the same way that Web sites can be searched on the
company’s engine at google.com.

[…]

No one really knows how many books there are. The most volumes listed
in any catalogue is thirty-two million, the number in WorldCat, a
database of titles from more than twenty-five thousand libraries around
the world. Google aims to scan at least that many. “We think that we
can do it all inside of ten years,” Marissa Mayer, a vice-president at
Google who is in charge of the books project, said recently, at the
company’s headquarters, in Mountain View, California. “It’s
mind-boggling to me, how close it is. I think of Google Books as our
moon shot.”

Well, they better hurry up. With a market capitalization of one-hundred and fifty billion dollars, along with two co-founders worth fifteen billion each, it’s a substantial booty, and likely only a matter of time before those who care to think of themselves as "nobleman," but who are everything but, stoke up the public-relations envy and ego machine, wherein one of the greatest, most benevolent companies ever to have existed will suddenly, almost overnight, be seen as one of society’s greatest parasites.

Just ask Bill Gates, though I think he still hasn’t got that part of the equation figured out yet, or else he’s doing a great job of just keeping his mount shut. Who knows how many billions that saved him.

Oh, and in case you’re wondering? I haven’t addressed the copyright issue because it’ll be a red herring. Oh, sure, there will be endless posturing, but in the end, this will happen. And it will benefit authors and publishers. Trust me.

(Kurzweil)

Update: I find I just have to add this other quote.

Such messianism cannot obscure the central truth about Google Book
Search: it is a business. Google has pledged not to show advertising
next to the pages of library books, but the company does sell
advertising alongside search results that lead to books obtained from
publishers. Google’s prospects for producing revenue from the books
project appear rather modest, but the company has often made a profit
on ventures that initially seemed unlikely to be lucrative. “We’ve had
this fortunate streak that when we’ve done things that have impacted
our users and society as a whole—positively, in a significant way—we’ve
been rewarded by that downstream in some way, even though we may not
have envisioned exactly what it was right offhand,” Sergey Brin told
me. “We didn’t have ads when we first put up Web search. It wasn’t
clear it was great business when we started search. In fact, the
companies that were doing search were moving away from it. But we just
thought it was important, and we thought that where there was a will
there would be a way.

Yep. That’s keeping the horse before the cart. And it’s elegant and noble.

Hard to resist not just posting this in its entirely. I agree with George Reisman: a bucket of pearls. In addition to his complaint that the author wishes you to cast them before swine, I do have to say that the need to write another Declaration of Independence ought to to at least imply some reason to check a premise or two. I’m referring to the "Constitutional" nonsense, as well as the "Governments are instituted among men" balderdash. Nonetheless, it’s a rather comprehensive look at the band of thieves you call your representatives and governors.

Read on.

With a new Congress convening,
it’s time to recall the ideals of America as expressed by Thomas
Jefferson in our Declaration of Independence. The following is a new
version of the Declaration, updated to reflect the current usurpations
and threats we face. It is an urgent call for our newly elected
representatives to fulfill the promise of America envisioned by our
Founders and for We, The People, to insist that they do.

When
in the course of human events, a people find it necessary to rid
themselves of a government that has abandoned the sound principles upon
which it was founded and that increasingly threatens their lives and
liberties, reason requires them to declare the causes of their
discontent.

We hold these truths to be certain and immutable,
that all men by their nature possess unalienable rights; that among
these are life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness; that
to protect these rights governments are instituted among men, deriving
their just and limited powers from the consent of the governed; that
individuals show respect for each other’s rights by associating with
one another through voluntary consent; that an act of force against a
person violates his rights; and that it is the sole, legitimate purpose
of government to ban the initiation of force in society by retaliating
with force against it—through the police and courts to apprehend and
punish domestic criminals, the military to defend against foreign
invaders, and the civil courts to settle disputes among men—thereby
insuring the peace and safety of a free and civilized people.

That
whenever a government becomes destructive of these ends, when it
becomes the very instrument of coercion it is supposed to protect
against, it is the right and duty of the people to alter it and
institute new government that will protect their safety and freedom.
The history of the present government of the United States—with state
and local governments following suit—is one of a dangerous, unchecked
growth of powers leading to the ultimate perversion in which it is the
government that holds the reins and the citizens that are saddled,
bridled, and spurred to do its bidding. To prove this, let facts be
submitted to reasonable minds.

The government has violated our
right to property and seized our wealth through onerous taxation that
totals over 40 percent of the national income, taxing our salaries,
investments, homes, businesses, purchases, etc., so that we cannot even
buy a toothbrush without paying a tribute.

It has transformed a
nation of self-reliant, self-supporting individuals into a swarm of
special interest groups—workers, farmers, seniors, unions,
corporations, etc.—each clamoring for favors and handouts at the
expense of others, so that the young are taxed to support the old, the
rich to support the poor, the people in the mountains to support flood
victims at the shores; and the louder the demands, the more a group
receives.

It has made us dependent on its largess for our vital
needs, such as our retirement income and medical care, which no longer
depend on our individual choices and actions but on the promises of
politicians whose costly, ill-conceived programs are fast approaching
bankruptcy.

It has appointed itself as the supreme master who
decides for all what foods, medicines, products are safe to use—even
mandating how our televisions must be made, our cereal boxes labeled,
our toilets flushed—bombarding us with countless agencies that misuse
our money, harass us, fine us, and violate our freedom to control our
own lives.

It has, in order to gain votes and power bases,
usurped the role of private charity, giving food, housing, and other
provisions to special groups, removing incentives for them to improve
their own lives, and creating an uncharitable, unchosen, and unjust
financial burden on others to support them.

It has vilified our
industries, seized their profits, hampered free trade, prevented
mergers, dictated every detail of employment and operation—controlling
pay, hours, benefits, prices, hiring, firing, production, profits—even
setting safety standards for swivel chairs in the workplace—thereby
violating the rights of employers, employees, and customers to deal
with each other on their own terms.

It has created endless ways
to cripple businesses, so that if a company is deemed too large,
anti-trust laws force it to divide; if it is deemed to pay wages that
are too low, labor laws force it to offer more; all at the whim of
public officials who create no wealth and live off money extorted from
taxpayers, yet issue televised tongue-lashings and punishments to
businesspeople for not running their enterprises to better suit the
politicians’ favored groups.

It has, for political advantage,
doled out subsidies, invoked protective tariffs, created monopolies,
bestowed grants and privileges—including paying farmers not to produce
any crops—giving unfair advantage to some businesses at the expense of
others and creating chaos in the marketplace.

It has failed to
protect the people’s rights, but instead protects snail darters,
caribou, and the wilderness, in order to pander to aberrant
environmentalists who use energy in every aspect of their lives—in
their cars, planes, computers, lawn mowers, toasters, microphones—while
instigating laws to severely hamper energy production.

It has
stifled domestic exploration for oil with onerous regulation, which has
made oil scarcer and more expensive and thus enriched foreign
oil-producing countries such as Iran, whose revenues support the
brainwashing schools, training camps, and militias of ruthless savages
who plot to annihilate us.

It has imposed oppressive taxes, yet
the huge sums it extracts still cannot quench its thirst for more
reckless spending, plunging the country deeper into debt and, if
unchecked, into bankruptcy.

It has seized so much power that
kickbacks from contractors, bribes from lobbyists, favors exchanged for
votes, and other scandals in its ranks are rampant.

It has
corrupted the morals of the people, who see that they can vote
themselves the taxpayers’ money, so they abandon personal
responsibility and self-reliance to clamor for more handouts,
perpetuating their own dependence and their representatives’ corruption.

It
has created a welfare state not only within our borders, but throughout
the world, squandering huge sums on foreign aid that bails out the
failing regimes of despotic rulers, feeds the very enemies who arm to
destroy us—such as North Korea and many others over the years—and
creates a global entitlement mentality that demands a bite of the
already ravaged carcass of the American taxpayer.

It has
financed and supported the corrupt United Nations, an organization
allegedly dedicated to world peace that grants the worst tyrannies
equal moral standing with free countries and provides a forum for the
bloodiest dictatorships to condemn us.

It has shamefully failed
in its constitutional duty to protect us from deadly threats abroad,
allowing repeated attacks on us to go unpunished and emboldening our
enemies to wreak unprecedented death and destruction on our own soil.

It
has left us vulnerable to a ruthless enemy because of its endless
appeasement, its perverse desire not to offend anyone, its need for
approval from hostile countries, its concern for our decorum over our
victory—in short, its moral cowardice in defending America.

These and other usurpations and failings now weigh heavily on us.

By
the laws of nature and our Constitution, we declare ourselves a free
people with sovereignty over ourselves. We demand an end to the
creeping tyranny that strangles us. We demand the dismantling of
government in all areas of usurped powers never granted it by the
Constitution. We demand that our elected representatives act on the
ideals of liberty to reverse our self-destructive course.

We
will never forget that we are Americans. We forged a continent not with
public aid but with the shining vision of a better life and the
self-reliance to attain it. We created wealth, progress, and
achievement on an unprecedented scale. No government fed our pioneers,
inspected their wagons for safety, certified their chickens, subjected
their homes to endless building permits, meddled in their businesses,
looted their wealth. No government built the breathtaking skylines of
our majestic cities, the proud monuments to free minds and free
commerce. The government’s fingerprints are found only on the shattered
shells of public housing that wound our cities, a grim reminder of the
failed welfare state. The time has come to reclaim our country from the
meddlers, do-gooders, and would-be dictators seeking to nourish their
craving for power with our lifeblood. We will restore America as the
proud haven of liberty. To this we pledge our sacred honor.

If
you agree with this declaration, send it to your representatives. Tell
them that you intend to support people who offer a return to limited
government and the freedoms guaranteed us by the Constitution.

Genevieve (Gen) LaGreca is the author of “Noble Vision” a novel about liberty and a ForeWord magazine Book of the Year Award winner. She may be contacted at [email protected]ypress.com.

Copyright © 2007 by Genevieve LaGreca