 |
|
|
L. Neil Smith's THE LIBERTARIAN ENTERPRISE Number 221, April 28, 2003 "NEXT TIME ..."
Send Letters to [email protected]
THREAT MANAGEMENT 101 The threat will illegally strike when conditions are most favorable for him, and least favorable for you. You're not a "random disarmed victim." You've been carefully selected. Perhaps a more accurate term would be "a target of convenience." You were available, and didn't make it sufficiently difficult that the threat was dissuaded from pursuing you. Someday, you'll be at home, alone. You may be asleep or in the shower. You may just be relaxing with the tunes cranked. The threat knows this, and this is the moment he'll pick to illegally assault you and your precious family. Statistics demonstrate that trends show growing numbers of illegal assault by tumult rather than deception. That means the threat's already "cased" your residence, determined what's of value and how to best get it. You won't be able to just tell him to "go away," because your first inkling that this may not turn out to be one of your most stellar evenings is when the threat literally kicks in your door or window, and rushes in with at least half a dozen armed, screaming thugs. He'll bring three elements to the party: surprise, momentum, (sometimes incorrectly referred to as "speed") and violence, the identical elements taught to all SWAT and special forces as the basic elements of close-quarter combat. In his tome "On War," the brilliant early nineteenth century Prussian soldier, Carl von Clausewitz, advised: "Surprise lies at the foundation of all undertakings, without exception." A general who catches his enemy off-guard has control of the field, Clausewitz noticed. Not only does he cause confusion and discouragement in the opposing troops, he also determines the place and terms of battle, an immense advantage. What's the difference between excitement and surprise? Excitement's a surprise you know is coming. Unless you've previously thought about it, you don't have a plan to counter surprise. Having achieved surprise, his next course to defeat you as a threat is to cause you to be physically unable to offer any resistance to his ability to illegally do you harm. He'll accomplish this by aggressively assaulting you, typically first using momentum to propel you backwards, then to the ground, but occasionally, by immediate application of ferocious violence, usually employing an illegal weapon giving him disparity of force, such as an illegal firearm, knife or bludgeon. An alarm may give you some fleeting tactical advantage to counter his surprise, allowing you time to access a defensive weapon that'll defeat his momentum. By not having to rob you of precious split-seconds deciding whether to grab a defensive weapon first or call for backup first, you now have time to prepare a little surprise involving violence to him, knowing that it's only a matter of time until his position is untenable. If you're surprised and must meet his onslaught with only open-hand techniques, I recommend first to go for his eyes and/or chin, which tilts his head backwards, and failing that, use the clavicle notch to disable and drive the threat backwards, creating momentum. Your implemented plan brings to him exactly the same elements and is the only method outside of overwhelming superior force to reverse the assault. If you're being illegally assaulted so viciously that you have no chance to counter it, drive in, protecting your head by holding it under one of his arms, against his chest, holding yourself to him by wrapping one arm around him, using the other to fend off his illegal assault. A tenuous position? It only appears so. This position gives you time to relax, comparatively, and regroup. What can you do to reverse the course of the assault from here? You're in a perfect position to bite. That should get his attention. He won't be expecting it. Mike Straw [[email protected]] re: HOMELAND SECURITY: MY TAKE ON A GOOD HOMELAND SECURITY BILL Here's BIG clue sparky— Take your favorite, shallow, narrow racial stereotype • The Mexican farm worker Now, Picture them well armed. Big, shiny new guns and rigs. • The old Chinese shop keepers in Chinatown Now, Picture them well armed. Big, shiny new guns and rigs. • The Black Preacher in the Baptist church and the Ample Ladies who shout "AMEN!!" Now, Picture them well armed. Big, shiny new guns and rigs. • The Middle Eastern Convenience store clerk Now, Picture them well armed. Big, shiny new guns and rigs. • The Orthodox Jewish diamond merchants down on Wilshire Blvd Now, Picture them well armed. Big, shiny new guns and rigs. • The Korean Store owners Now, Picture them well armed. Big, shiny new guns and rigs. • The Russians and Ukrainians who rebuild ratty little houses into sprawling palaces (That one is from Spokane, really) Now, Picture them well armed. Big, shiny new guns and rigs. • The Tree Hugging Tie-Dye Berkeley Liberal Now, Picture them well armed. Big, shiny new guns and rigs. If any of this scares you, you're probably not a Libertarian by temperament. If these pictures make you grin and say "Yeeeeaaahhhh..." hey, maybe. Jay P Hailey [[email protected]] I think the time has come to face some facts. In the "liberty movement" we have fallen prey to some misconceptions, some intentional, others not. Let' s look at these misconceptions, where they come from, and why we need to get past them if we want to get anywhere in our desire to see "liberty in our lifetime". I think these misconceptions lead to our failures in elections and lead to a despair that leads to the desire to "gang up" on a state or small country and make it ours. I think we can win right where we are now; we just need to try something new. The biggest misconception is what I call the "zero sum election game" which is a misconception that started off as an accusation and has developed into a self-limiting delusion. The Republicans have accused Libertarians of "stealing votes from good Republicans". Well, first off where are their receipts for those votes? How can we steal what they don't own? Also what is a "good Republican"? The problem with this idea is it depends on the lie that the 15% of the population that votes Republican, the 15% that votes Democrat and the 2% that votes Minor Party are the sum total of all the people who will ever vote. The almost 70% that don't vote will never vote no matter what you do. Thus the only option we have is to take votes from the 30% pool, thus "stealing" from the Republicans, as no Democrat will ever break lockstep with their masters and vote for a Minor Party. What does this do to us when we fall for it? Well, primarily it keeps us from accessing the portion of non-voting population that thinks there is no difference between a Democrat and a Republican thus keeping us from forming a base that can win elections. Secondly it makes us the geek looking for a date for prom, "gee, um, if, like you don't want to go out with the football player, then, um maybe you might, er, go out with me." We accept in our minds a second choice status, and as such we don't try to win just not lose so badly. Another misconception is that the voters are just waiting for someone to deliver them a big old Liberty Pizza. This shows itself in the misconception "If we can just get X% of the vote then the republicans and democrats who are voting out of fear will come our way and BAM! We will start winning elections." The problem with this idea is we think that a large portion of the electorate is voting for the lesser of two evils instead of voting because they truly agree with the major party they are voting for. Sure you may have had a friend who votes Demopublican or Republicrat tell you some variant of "I'd vote for you, but that would just make the other guy win and I can't do that." Well, do you tell your friend his haircut is butt ugly? No, you make up some lie to keep the friendship. That's what the "I'd vote for you, but." line is all about. They are lying to you with something that sounds plausible instead of telling you "Gee, I think your ideas are crazy, letting people be actually free, we cant have that, it's too dangerous." The opposite of this one is the idea that all the people who want liberty are already in the Libertarian Party, thus making the total population of liberty seekers something like a half a million in a country of something like three hundred million. Sounds pretty depressing, don't it. This of course is not a real number. In the 2002 election, I got something like five hundred votes. There are about seven hundred registered Libertarians in the whole county, and I will assure you that five hundred of them don't live in my district. Our numbers are far greater than those who actually join the party, just not large enough to win yet. One of the other depressing factors is the entertainment industry. Some call it intentional brainwashing, but in fact it is simply a method to get you to stay put between commercials. The programming would be eliminated if they could get you to sit in front of all commercials all day. However there is some hope in this vast wasteland as well. Most of us would say that advertising does not work on us. Television is practically free for us as the commercials go past us with no effect. Now, we can extrapolate from this that liberty minded people are not worth advertising to, and thus the TV people don't waste time programming for us, thus the utter void of "Liberty TV". It's not that they want the world to be enslaved, it's simply that we don't buy what they want to sell, so why put stuff on we will watch? Finally we need to understand human nature. We figure that if given the opportunity people would love to have government taken off their backs. If a spell could be cast or Martians could be summoned to suck government off the planet, what would the reaction of the population be? Those who currently vote will vote the same class of tyrants into office, they will rejoice as the same types of bureaucrats find their way into positions of petty power and they will dance in the streets only when issued a permit to do so. We have the government we have not by evil conspiracy, but by the legitimate will of the majority of voters. If this is not obvious after a few years of the Bush Regime, then I worry about your attention span. Conservatives who we thought worshiped the Constitution when Clinton was in office discard it as "ink on a page" when their boy is in office. The conservatives and liberals both want tyrants; just they want them to be of their own party. If we don't learn this lesson now, while both the tyrants of the left and right are fresh in our minds we might as well give up. Don't start looking to the left as a place to mine voters from, they may sound on our side just like the right did a few years ago but they are not looking for liberty, they just want their own tyrant in the white house. What is the future of liberty in this country, and the world? I think election victories can be had; we just have to work for them. The roughly 70% of the population that does not vote is ripe for the picking. These people have been driven from the electoral process by mud slinging ads, by realizing the R's and D's are no different and because they think their vote will not change anything. If we can get a fraction of those non-voters we can put people in office and once in office we can interpret the Constitution in our way, just like the others have done in the past. Now, I know there will be those who say it can't be done. I would say how do we know until we try. Walking precincts to talk to the non-voters will be hard work, but in the end we can win if we put in the effort. Ignore the misconceptions that bedevil us, ignore the crap the major parties have tricked us into buying hook, line and sinker. This is the time to strike, 2004 will be the optimal time to get the non-voters off their butts and into the polling places if we are willing to try. I plan to run in 2004. I have the campaign team assembled and we have a plan. We will be walking precincts all summer long and into the fall. We will be asking the inactive voters to loan us their votes in November, we will be asking them to give us one hour of their year for a chance to change the way this state has been run. If we can get ten thousand of them to vote for me, we can either win or place a damn strong second place and shake the pillars of heaven. All we need to do is get off our butts and talk to them, these people have been ignored and insulted by the major parties for years and we can win them over. All we have to do is stop whining, and start winning. Scott Graves [[email protected]] WOULD I KID YOU? (MUCH LESS TROLL FOR YOU?) I just read the article "Homeland Security: My Take On A Good Homeland Security Bill" by Donald L. Meaker. All I can say is that the editor has got to be trolling again. How seriously can the readership be expected to take such a fool's cry for a bigger police state? You've got to be kidding. We're about three weeks too late for April Fools' Day. Maybe we (whoever in the hell that means) should just make all the foreigners living here wear a big yellow star on their clothes so they're easy to identify. Sounds cheaper than Mr. Meaker's solution. Robert Lallier [[email protected]]
As the World Coordinator of the World Church of Human Dignity, I have the privilege of being the spokesperson for the church and its beliefs. This is a good thing, because it gives me a platform from which to blast Senator "Sanctorum" and his sex police. The root of the Senator's error lies in his definition of the fundamental unit of society. The fundamental unit of society is not the family—it is the individual. Individual human beings have rights protected by the US Constitution. Families are not even mentioned in the Constitution. Families do not vote. Senator Santorum was elected by individuals, not by families. There is no more powerful force in a politician's mind than the urge to stick the government's nose into places where it does not belong. This is true of Republican politicians who claim a belief in limited government as well as Democratic politicians who claim a belief in civil liberties. Consenting adults should not have to be looking over their shoulder to see if the sex police are going to enter their bedroom. The role of government is to protect the life and liberty of the individual citizen. Anything more leads down a slippery slope to rule by Ayatollahs wishing to impose their personal views of proper behavior on the rest of their fellow human beings. Government can play a role vis-a-vis civil society, but that role needs to be limited to protecting the rights of individuals. And individual adult humans have the right to exercise their sexuality with other consenting adults without regard to the effect it may have on the Senator's "family values". Paul McKnight [[email protected]]
AN OPEN LETTER FROM A PATRIOTIC AMERICAN These are the last flickering days of liberty in what was once the united States. A piece at a time, the great system put in place by our magnificent Founders has been dismantled and replaced by a dictatorship. Don't believe me—believe Claire Wolfe and Aaron Zelman. They painstakingly document the transition from "democracy" to social fascism in their book, The State vs. the People: The Rise of the American Police State. [see below] Another convincing tool is the acclaimed Death by "Gun Control" by Aaron Zelman and Richard Stevens [also see below]that fixes America's place among the other totalitarian "governments" that systematically butchered their own citizens. Hard to swallow? Truth is a bitter pill. Once, America was a country where, according to Theodore Roosevelt, "No man is above the law and no man is below it; nor do we ask any man's permission when we ask him to obey it." Last week, in response to questioning by reporters, United States Supreme Court Justice Scalia announced that the Constitution was only a list of minimums. We can now expect, according to Scalia, that our liberties will be curtailed to be more consistent with those minimums. We are at a unique point in the history of the Republic: all three branches of the Federal Government are now in complete agreement that the Constitution is no longer relevant. We are now a nation of men, not of laws. What can we expect in this brave new world? Dead citizens. On any pretext. Among an extensive list, notable examples include Randy Weaver's unarmed wife, Vicky, by shooting her in the face from two hundred yards away while she was holding her ten-month-old baby in her hands inside their home; his fourteen-year-old son Sammy, by shooting him in the back as he was running away and even his dog. Read Ambush at Ruby Ridge, by Alan Bock, available at Laissez Faire Books. Emboldened by the total lack of resistance and public outcry when happily murdering harmless women and innocent children in Idaho, the feds, our erstwhile "defenders," pressed on to Waco Texas and intentionally, mercilessly, and indiscriminately, slaughtered another eighty-six innocent Constitutionally-protected U. S. citizens, men, women, and children. Talk show host Michael Reagan calmly pointed out that the Clinton Empire had used more tanks against American citizens at Waco than to support American troops slaughtered in Somalia. When Britain grimly paid fierce Hessian mercenaries to cheerfully slaughter brave colonial patriots, at least they didn't torture and murder harmless women and innocent children: it took the bloody ATF to do that, and we've let them get away with it. Who's heartless now? Incidents like Ruby Ridge and Waco, although highly publicized, are the standard, not exception of "government" behavior. Before Waco, the last time any "government" burned innocent people alive for their religious beliefs was the Spanish Inquisition—and they didn't do it on live disinformation media TV—are we progressing, or moving backwards? Watch The F. L. I. R. Project, by Mike McNulty, available from Laissez Faire Books, or just wait for the gore-covered ATF to appear ominously outside your windows. What happened in Lidice Czechoslovakia in 1942, and why is it chillingly similar to the events in Waco in 1993? Read Stolen Lives, available from Loompanics Unlimited, which documents over two thousand cases of citizen's lives summarily ended by "law enforcement." This behavior on the part of our beneficent "government" has been ongoing throughout our history. In 1932, over twenty thousand World War One "the great war for civilization" veterans, led by the legendary double Medal of Honor recipient Marine Corps General Smedley Butler, already sickened by years of the most horrible warfare imaginable, peacefully assembled in Washington D. C. to beg congress (which should be more properly spelled "incongruous") for their promised war bonus. General Douglas MacArthur, often described as an "American Caesar," soon to be promoted George Patton and future Supreme Allied Commander Dwight Eisenhower, whose most memorable quote is, "History does not long trust the care of freedom to the weak or timid," burned them out with tanks; fully offensively-armed troops shot and bayoneted unarmed disabled veterans, their harmless wives and innocent children, just like at Waco. Even resolute Israeli commandos refused to slay their bitter enemies, the murdering Palestinian terrorists holed up in the Church of the Nativity, and patiently waited them out, but here in the land of the free, we publicly incinerate eighty-six of our own innocent men, women and children with savage delight, even refusing permission for firefighters to douse their smoldering remains. The May thirteenth 1985 Philadelphia "government" MOVE bombing, or those in the 1974 California Symbionese Liberation Army shootout are other examples extending back as far as 1890, when they murdered one hundred eighty peaceful, unarmed Native Americans at what the "government" described as the "battle," one-sided as it was, of Wounded Knee. The common denominator is the same in our current undeclared "war." Either we're a nation of laws or we're not. The supreme law of the land is the Constitution—all of it—not just the bits and pieces "government" chooses to utilize for their own aggrandizement at a particular moment. If, as our erstwhile Holy Lawgivers assert, they'll "protect and defend the Constitution," then when they betray that public oath, any further orders are therefore illegal. The Constitution plainly states that Congress declares war—it doesn't provide the option to delegate that authority to a completely distinct and separate branch of "government," the executive. The Constitution is the Federal "government's" Employee Handbook. It explains how the Federal "government" operates. Adherence to its edicts isn't optional by those in "government." If they find that they can't abide by its rules, their only recourse is to resign their office or to amend the Constitution. Was this Constitutional requirement fulfilled for our current expensive round of flag-waving? A mere matter of semantics, you say. Or would you phrase it, "it depends on the meaning of the word `is.'" Emotion is insufficient to compel a nation to destructive and irrevocable deeds, or should be. At the beginning of the Civil War, the wealthy and politicians brought picnic lunches to casually observe what they believed to be the first—and final—battle, Bull Run. Murphy's Law was in effect then, too. At other times, and in other nations, proud families patriotically waved flags and cheered on their brave sons to do glorious battle against the evil vermin at places like Auschwitz, Dachau, Sobibor and Treblinka. After the war, at their trials, they asserted that they "were just following orders," a corrupt translation from the literal German, "it was legal for us to do so." Is Hussein a monster? Obviously. Should he be dealt with? Certainly. The vast majority of "anti-war" protesters don't dispute it, they're simply too politically na�ve or ignorant to point to the proper legal documentation—forgive them, they're products of our public schools—but like the supreme court's definition of pornography, "they know it when they see it," and they—and you—aside from your emotion, know that any "government" that refuses to follow the rules set down for it by the Founders is illegitimate, and its dictates shouldn't be followed, legally, morally and ethically. Sincerely, Mike Straw [[email protected]]
ADVERTISEMENT
Is America becoming a police state? Friends of liberty need to know. Some say the U.S. is already a police state. Others watch the news for signs that their country is about to cross an indefinable line. Since September 11, 2001, the question has become more urgent. When do roving wiretaps, random checkpoints, mysterious "detentions," and military tribunals cross over from being emergency measures to being the tools of a government permanently and irrevocably out of control? The State vs. the People examines these crucial issues. But first, it answers this fundamental question: "What is a police state?" Order from JPFO NOW!
ADVERTISEMENT Death by "Gun Control": The Human Cost of Victim Disarmament, by Aaron Zelman and Richard W. Stevens. The new book from JPFO. Why does JPFO exist? What motivates us year after year? You can find the answers in our brand new book. People have asked us to present the whole JPFO argument in one place. We have done it. Available now in an easy-reading format and a handy size, the new book is entitled Death by Gun Control: The Human Cost of Victim Disarmament. The message is simple: Disarmed people are neither free nor safe - they become the criminals' prey and the tyrants' playthings. When the civilians are defenseless and their government goes bad, however, thousands and millions of innocents die. Order from JPFO NOW!
|
|
|
|