June 09, 2005

Southern Oregon Sheriff Tramples Civil Rights Again
By Carl F. Worden

Do you remember the great Chicken Caper, pulled off by deputies of Oregon's Josephine County Sheriff, Dave Daniels? That's where a guy named Nick Gombos found a stray chicken huddled in a box outside a closed market in Williams, Oregon, took it home and cared for it. Nick even got a couple more chickens to keep it company in a pen he built specially for them.

Sheriff Daniel's boys raided Gombos' home late at night and stole the chicken, returned it to the market where sometime afterward some juvenile monstrosity stomped it to death. They also arrested Nick Gombos in his bright red briefs, and hauled him off to jail for the night. So much for "Speckles", but the Josephine County DA pressed charges against Gombos, and put his family through Hell for months before a new DA dropped the charges. (Read the rest here)

The Sun Of Feminism Shines Brightly In Socialist Europe
By Carey Roberts

Despite the resounding rejection of the European Constitution by French and Dutch voters, the fact is, old Europe still genuflects at the altar of socialism and collectivism. So it comes as no surprise that feminism has taken root there as readily as mushrooms sprouting on a pile of barnyard manure.

Karl Marx taught that if women desired to free themselves from the shackles of patriarchy, they first had to wrest control over the means of reproduction. Now birth rates in Europe have plummeted, choking off the inflow of young workers and imperiling the financial viability of the social welfare state. (Read the rest here)

A Straight Line Between Two Dots
If Bush Can Do It, So Can We!
By Ted Lang © 2004

There is no connection between the terrorist acts we term "9-11" and Saddam Hussein and his Iraq. The absurdity of the Bush regime's backpedaling is to be accepted, yet the absurdity of it being an "inside job" is not even to be considered by any reasonably intelligent observer. Why and how is this logical?

Think of the Pentagon's Private Jessica Lynch Hollywood-style filmography; that production would make Frank [Why-we-fight] Capra proud! How about the Pat Tillman tear-jerker - he died for his country? How about the Donald Rumsfeld series? He was totally confounded and caught off-guard by private photos proving his Abu Ghraib torture policies, but remained silent for a couple of months till the story was finally broken by CBS. How about that famous quote of the century: "You go to war [read invade] with the Army you have." (Read the rest here)

Parents Are Right to Protect Their Children from the Military
by Jacob G. Hornberger

A recent front-page story in the New York Times reported growing opposition among parents to the U.S. military’s efforts to contact and recruit their children to join the U.S. armed forces. In the process, parents are also discovering some uncomfortable things about the federal government.

One thing parents are learning is that federal funds to local school districts have less to do with federal concern that children aren’t learning in public (i.e., government) schools and more to do with opportunities to extend federal control over American families. Do you remember the much-vaunted No Child Left Behind Act? That Act requires school districts to give the military access to the names, addresses, and telephone numbers of high-school students as a condition of receiving federal funds. So, if a school district says “No, we won’t give the military the information it seeks to recruit our students,” it loses its federal welfare even if all those children are supposedly “left behind” as a consequence. (Read the rest here)

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Libertarian Commentary on The News
By Nathan A. Barton © 2005

Self-defense issues are hot in the news today, for some reason. Not just individuals and families have a right to defend themselves; so do communities, even those very large communities we call nations. The problem is, the larger we let a community get, the more likely it is that the community will misuse, abuse, the power it has to defend itself. Well, as history has shown (the Clantons, Earps, James, and other families and “clans” come to mind, here in the west) even small communities and families can have that problem, and need to be defended AGAINST. But sometimes, the threats are clearer and less ambiguous. At least, that is what I think - if you don’t agree, then tell me!

General news

Armed Pirates Seize Oil Tanker, Demand Ransom
SpaceWar.com
Washington, (UPI) June 6, 2005 - Armed pirates stormed a Thai-owned tanker in the world's busiest shipping lanes and abducted two crew in the first such attack in nearly two months. Pirates went undetected late Wednesday by naval patrols in Indonesian and Malaysian waters, said Noel Choong, chief of the International Maritime Bureau's piracy reporting center in Kuala Lumpur.

Piracy was the primary reason the Founding Fathers did not put (now-ignored) limits on appropriations for military (land) forces as they did for naval forces, and we tend to think of piracy as something found only in the history books with Long John Silver a place to eat and not a threat to life, limb, and property. But piracy is still a major problem, particularly in the Indian Ocean and the Southwest Pacific, in and around Indonesia, the Philippines, and Southeast Asia. Sadly, the local nationals are more concerned about tyrannizing their own people (and keeping Western relief agencies out) than controlling the pirates that navies should have as their primary enemy. So this kind of thing happens a lot. Interesting, isn’t it? The majority of modern pirates appear to be either Hindu or Muslim - I wonder why that is? (Read the rest here)

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