Ron Paul’s remarks on the war, to the House

useful spam-handling plugin for WordPress 1.5

a gag about clashing jargons

Sheldon Richman on the “Minuteman Project”:

. . . this “citizens’ neighborhood watch along our border” looks for foreigners who, by and large, are seeking better, more-productive lives for themselves and their children. The self-appointed American border guards inform the authorities when they find any. This strikes me as most out of keeping with the heritage of a country born in revolution, devoted to individual freedom, and skeptical of political power. The irony is that these Americans claim to be acting in the tradition of the original Minutemen, those brave early Americans who were always ready to engage the British forces during the struggle for independence.

After cataloguing the Brady Campaign’s calls for measures that (even if ideally implemented) would have done nothing to reduce the body count in Red Lake, “Lady Liberty” observes:

You see, there’s another fact we’re hearing very little about. Security guards, it seems, are politically correct, but armed security guards are not. And so an unarmed man bravely — and futilely — tried to stop someone who quite literally outgunned him. There are those who consider him heroic, but that’s likely scant comfort to his family. Even less comforting is the notion that if he had had a weapon of his own, he would very probably have been able to end the incident right there at the school door. It wouldn’t have been a happy day. The accused shooter, his grandfather, and his grandfather’s girlfriend would probably still be dead. But a teacher and five students would be alive and breathing today to thank that heroic security guard, who would in turn still be alive to brush off their thanks and say that shucks, he was only doing his job.

I like daylight savings time because it ensures that, no matter how busy I am, I remember to curse FDR at least twice a year. —Travis Corcoran

As I understand it, both Beijing and Taipei maintain the fiction (or perhaps some in both capitals even believe it) that China is a single state, with one or more province(s) temporarily out of communion with the capitol. A large faction in Taipei would prefer to drop the fiction and “declare independence”, a notion that makes Beijing see red.

What if the Taipei regime were instead to dissolve itself, as the USSR did, letting sovereignty revert to the provinces? Beijing could hardly take that as the same kind of insult.

What I’ve read about the case of José Padilla tends to come filtered by dangerous subversives like Hornberger; so I’m wondering who, other than employees of the Executive Branch, takes the opposite view. Anyone?

Selwyn Duke, a suspiciously white male, comments on the diversity police:

It’s a bit like insisting that every can of paint contain equal amounts of every color, so as to ensure that every color has a place in every can. This certainly would increase the constituent elements in every can, but the end result is that you would be left with only one color of paint in the world. Trying to make the constitution of every unit of society uniformly diverse does not yield true diversity, for it serves to make every unit the same.

Other links du jour — the jour in question being February 16-17, up to which I have caught in reading Rational Review News Digest:

Dave Kopel: The Klan’s Favorite Law

Glenn Harlan Reynolds: Real Social Security Reform

Tim Worstall: The Money Is In the Long Tail

Those who are committed to these leftish values of both a statist economy and a redistributive tax system need to make a choice, which of those do you actually want?

Sean Haugh relays a list of Federal capital crimes. The list is so long, it’s somehow disappointing to look closer and find that nearly all are varieties of murder.