Tiddly-Think [an Ode Against It]

[oops, blogging a blog is such bad form; CIAO,]
No society can exist unless the laws are respected to a certain degree. The safest way to make laws respected is to make them respectable. When law and morality contradict each other, the citizen has the cruel alternative of either losing his moral sense or losing his respect for the law. These two evils are of equal consequence, and it would be difficult for a person to choose between them. — Frederic Bastiat

If violence is wrong in America, violence is wrong abroad. If it is wrong to be violent defending black women and black children and black babies and black men, then it is wrong for America to draft us, and make us violent abroad in defense of her. -- Malcolm X
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Joan Chittister at The National Catholic Reporter - What the rest of the world watched on Inauguration Day - while Americans' were listening to Bushnev extol "freed'm", Europeans (and those of us who get our news on the web) were looking at the picture below (image from Warblogging). [smith2004]
Iraq Orphan

Dublin, on U.S. Inauguration Day, didn't seem to notice. Oh, they played a few clips that night of the American president saying, "The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands."

But that was not their lead story.

The picture on the front page of The Irish Times was a large four-color picture of a small Iraqi girl. Her little body was a coil of steel. She sat knees up, cowering, screaming madly into the dark night. Her white clothes and spread hands and small tight face were blood-spattered. The blood was the blood of her father and mother, shot through the car window in Tal Afar by American soldiers while she sat beside her parents in the car, her four brothers and sisters in the back seat.

A series of pictures of the incident played on the inside page, as well. A 12-year-old brother, wounded in the fray, falls face down out of the car when the car door opens, the pictures show. In another, a soldier decked out in battle gear, holds a large automatic weapon on the four children, all potential enemies, all possible suicide bombers, apparently, as they cling traumatized to one another in the back seat and the child on the ground goes on screaming in her parent's blood.

No promise of "freedom" rings in the cutline on this picture. No joy of liberty underlies the terror on these faces here.

...

There are about 25 million people in Iraq. Over half of them are under the age of 15. Of the over 100,000 civilians dead in this war, then, over half of them are children. We are killing children. The children are our enemy. And we are defeating them.

"I'll tell you why I voted for George Bush," a friend of mine said. "I voted for George Bush because he had the courage to do what Al Gore and John Kerry would never have done."

I've been thinking about that one.

Osama Bin Laden is still alive. Sadam Hussein is still alive. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is still alive. Baghdad, Mosul and Fallujah are burning. But my government has the courage to kill children or their parents. And I'm supposed to be impressed.
http://www.nationalcatholicreporter.org/fwis/
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It is important to remember that government interference always means either violent action or the threat of such action. The funds that a government spends for whatever purposes are levied by taxation. And taxes are paid because the taxpayers are afraid of offering resistance to the tax gatherers. They know that any disobedience or resistance is hopeless. As long as this is the state of affairs, the government is able to collect the money that it wants to spend. Government is in the last resort the employment of armed men, of policemen, gendarmes, soldiers, prison guards, and hangmen. The essential feature of government is the enforcement of its decrees by beating, killing, and imprisoning. Those who are asking for more government interference are asking ultimately for more compulsion and less freedom. -- Ludwig von Mises “Human Action”

Liberty [is]...simply being human to the hilt; being absolutely responsible for your own choices in life, questioning authority, being honest in all dealing with others, and never initiating force to get your way or condoning it for someone else to get their way. –Karl Hess


"An election is nothing more than an advance auction of stolen goods." -- Ambrose Bierce

A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine. ~ Thomas Jefferson

"For in a Republic, who is 'the country'? Is it the Government which is for the moment in the saddle? Why, the Government is merely a servant - merely a temporary servant; it cannot be its prerogative to determine what is right and what is wrong, and decide who is a patriot and who isn't. Its function is to obey orders, not originate them."-- Mark Twain


Government is not reason, it is not eloquence, it is force; like fire, a troublesome servant and a fearful master. Never for a moment should it be left to irresponsible action. -- George Washington

"...it [conscription] rests on the assumption that your kids belong to the state. If we buy that assumption then it is for the state -- not for parents, the community, the religious institutions or teachers -- to decide who shall have what values and who shall do what work, when, where and how in our society. That assumption isn't a new one. The Nazis thought it was a great idea." —Ronald Reagan, 1979

Fundamentalism
There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root, and it may be that he who bestows the largest amount of time and money on the needy is doing the most by his mode of life to produce that misery which he strives in vain to relieve. -- Henry David Thoreau

If ye love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquility of servitude greater than the animating contest for freedom, go home from us in peace. We seek not your counsel, nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you; and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen. ~Samuel Adams
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Rove & Boosh & DE'LAY's favorite fraud journalist:
$1200/weekend...Jeff Gannon...tool for hire
The StudFiles link on Jeff’s USMCPT site takes you to an escort Web site that is still live today. It’s for an escort named “Bulldog.” On the page there’s a picture of Bulldog’s torso, shirtless, wearing dog tags. He’s 32 years old, lives in Washington, DC, is “5’9”, 200 pounds, brown high and tight haircut, green eyes, 8+cut!” Under “position” it says “Top!” For an email – or “emale," as it says – contact it gives usmcpt@aol.com. There is also a link to visit “the Adult Photos” in Gallery 16. In order to access those photos, you need to buy an electronic Web ID that proves you are over the age of consent...posted by Zhuang at 2/17/2005 06:22:00 PM 0
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[ugh: omni-everywhere hoax warning: 'demon seed inside']
The Word of God

The release of a new Bible translation this month pushes to the forefront a hair-splitting debate among evangelical Christians. Depending on whom you ask, the Today's New International Version Bible is either a way to connect with a new generation or a paean to the feminist agenda.
It's an update of the New International Version, the best-selling Bible of all time. The NIV, published by Zondervan in 1978, has surpassed the King James Version in popularity. One in three Bibles bought is an NIV.
For evangelicals, it's the pew Bible of choice. And many don't want it changed.
Yet Zondervan insisted it was time for an update. The English language has undergone warp-speed changes in the last 30 years, they say, and the TNIV reflects a more "gender accurate" language than its predecessor. It took 45,000 changes to the text to do that.
That doesn't mean the Bible has been "neutered," Zondervan is careful to add. God is still referred to in the masculine. But where the original language was meant to include both men and women, translators have changed "man" and "brothers" to "human beings" and "brothers and sisters."
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2.14.2005
Waging a war...

Tape reveals terrifying campaign in war on drugs

In a war, the enemy is often dehumanized. It almost has to be that way since not many people can kill another person in cold-blood. At least not without practice. So perhaps it is no surprise that this would happen in the drug war too.

Of course, it is too bad when those dehumanized enemies turn out to be our friends, family, neighbors, coworkers, or members of our church. It is too bad that the lives of their children will be destroyed as their lives are destroyed by the state. I guess we have collateral damage here in the United States as well. And much like in Iraq, the government isn't particular interested in counting enemy dead. And as for the whole collateral damage thing, just forget it....

I wonder how the War on Poverty is going.

posted by Jade Cat
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What is Terror?

"Terror isn't just worrying about a plane hitting a skyscraper…terrorism is being caught in traffic and hearing the crack of an AK-47 a few meters away because the National Guard want to let an American humvee or Iraqi official through. Terror is watching your house being raided and knowing that the silliest thing might get you dragged away to Abu Ghraib where soldiers can torture, beat and kill. Terror is that first moment after a series of machine-gun shots, when you lift your head frantically to make sure your loved ones are still in one piece. Terror is trying to pick the shards of glass resulting from a nearby explosion out of the living-room couch and trying not to imagine what would have happened if a person had been sitting there. "

An excerpt from a post in the "Baghdad Burning" blog. Sometimes it's no fun being right, this war was a mistake.

posted by Zhuang
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2.04.2005
Dr Ecstasy

He might best be described not as a scientist in the modern sense but as a different type -- what Aldous Huxley, the novelist turned psychedelic philosopher, once described as a "naturalist of the mind," a "collector of psychological specimens" whose "primary concern was to make a census, to catch, kill, stuff and describe as many kinds of beasts as he could lay his hands on." Shulgin has on occasion run PET scans to see where in the brain some of his drugs go. He has offered theories as to mechanisms of action or, as with MDMA, even suggested an application for a drug. But his primary purpose, as he sees it, is not to worry about things like that -- much less about the political and social consequences of his creations. His job is to be first and then push on somewhere new. What to do with the widening wake of chemicals he leaves behind is for the rest of us to figure out.
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