March 06, 2006

Who Owns Your Life?
Susan Callaway, Editor

We can get so tangled up in semantics and belief systems that we lose sight of the core issues. There are thousands of people writing articles, leading organizations, writing books and making movies, all trying to express their ideas about life and how best to order it. Most of them don't want to hurt anyone and all of them believe that their ideas for our lives are "for our own good" in some way. But I don't see or hear many of them asking the most crucial questions.

Who owns your life? Really?

Strictly speaking, ownership means control, so if you owned your entire life you would be the only one who controls it. The same would be true for everyone else, so you would have no right to attempt control of other's lives. Doing that is called aggression. So, if you really owned your own life, you would control everything your body did, what your mind thought, and you would be responsible for the consequences of those actions and thoughts yourself. You would also recognize the same ownership and responsibility in every other person. (Read the rest here)

The Second Amendment and the Preamble to the Bill of Rights
By Robert Greenslade and Claude Ellsworth © Nitwit Press

The modern debate over the wording of the Second Amendment could be quickly resolved if the Amendment was read through the preamble to the Bill of Rights. A preamble to the Bill of Rights? What are you talking about? You mean the preamble to the Constitution don't you? No Senators Kennedy, Feinstein, Schumer, Lautenberg and your fellow gun-grabbing buddies, we mean the preamble to the Bill of Rights. Next to Hillary Clinton's billing records from the Rose Law Firm, this little known text might be the most closely guarded secret in American History.

Following the Federal Convention of 1787 and the subsequent ratification of the Constitution, the several States began submitting amendments to Congress for consideration. By September of 1789, Congress had reduced 210 separate amendments to 12. The amendments were inserted into a congressional resolution and submitted to the several States for consideration. Of these, numbers 2-12 were adopted and became the so-called Bill of Rights. (Read the rest here)

When in Rome...
By Lady Liberty

On February 11, Vice President Dick Cheney was hunting quail with some friends. Sometime after lunch, Cheney mistakenly shot attorney Harry Whittington. Birdshot caught the victim in the cheek, chest, and shoulder. Since then, virtually everybody from the media to gun control activists to Democrats has taken aim at Cheney.

Now, I could talk about how hunting accidents sometimes happen, and who I think bears most of the blame. I could wax poetic about the Second Amendment and how people like Sarah Brady will try to use accidents like Cheney's to infringe an unalienable right. I could even jump up and down and join the fray criticizing Cheney's camp for not notifying the media immediately. But after looking at each of these things, I realized that the vast amount of attention being paid - still! - to the vice president's unfortunate hunting mishap is indicative of something much bigger and with far more dire consequences for all of us. (Read the rest here)

Sinning By Silence: How Churches Aid And Abet Tyranny
By Doug Newman

I did not go to church last Sunday. It is not that I have stopped going to church. It is not that my church has suddenly become a "synagogue of Satan." Nor have I turned my back on God. I am just so frustrated with what goes on in churches that I decided to take last Sunday off.

My decision not to attend church was prompted by an e-mail a friend sent me a few days before. The subject line read “How to handle the DaVinci Code movie.” The body of the e-mail urged Christians not to go see this film as it “wears its heresy and blasphemy as a badge of honor.” There was nothing wrong at all with the e-mail. (Read the rest here)

The Feminist Anti-Kid Crusade
By Carey Roberts

Call it one of those simple yet profound truths: only a father can help a boy become a man. And only a daddie can teach a girl about healthy male-female relationships.

Both dads and moms are unique and special. Maybe that's why dads love to mix it up with rough-and-tumble play. Perhaps it's why fathers teach kids a thing or two about risk-taking. And no doubt it has something to do with that tough love thing.

Countless studies point to the same conclusion: kids with hands-on dads do better in school, in the community, and in life. I could almost write a book about it - and fortunately, someone already has. (Read the rest here)

Monsters, Inc.
By Sam Bostaph

In 2001, an animated film from Pixar Animation Studios was released and became extremely popular with both adults and children. Monsters, Inc. is set in the city of Monstropolis, where all monsters live. A corporation that gives the title to the movie employs "scarers," monsters who venture out of the city every night to enter the human world through the closets of children. Their job is to scare children into screaming because the screams can be collected and used to generate the electricity that powers Monstropolis. The children themselves, and all their things, are believed to be toxic to monsters and must be kept out of the city.

One night a furry, blue monster named Sulley is followed by a child through her closet door into Monstropolis and panic ensues. In the midst of it, Sulley discovers that she isn't toxic at all. His frantic attempts to conceal the girl he nicknames "Boo" and to return her to the human world only make her laugh. When she laughs, power surges brighten the city lights. (Read the rest here)

Martyring Voltaire
By SARTRE

David Irving's persecution has been compared to the prosecution of Galileo. The Rev. Ted Pike offers up a list of other less celebrated fatalities of thought crimes. Pike's prediction is frightening: "The conviction of David Irving is a chilling wake-up call that hate crimes laws and international enforcement of them are not going to go away. They are vital to the ADL/B'nai B'rith master plan for eventual triumph over Christian civilization."

Austria may be getting the recent headlines but Germany has the final solution. It is called by law - Paragraph 130! (Read the rest here)

Mexico—The Fraud of the Century
By Alvaro Vargas Llosa

A secret report commissioned by the Mexican government on Mexico’s “dirty war” under the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) in the 1970s has caused a major scandal after being leaked to the press. It accuses the military of carrying out a genocidal policy against suspected subversives in the south between the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1980s.

Even taking into account a number of mitigating factors, especially the fact that President Vicente Fox, who commissioned the study, thinks the report does not give enough weight to the many abuses committed by the guerrillas during the 1970s, the information is potent enough to unmask (once again) the unmitigated fraud that was the PRI. (Read the rest here)

The People's Statement and Petition of Grievance
Against The Judiciary©
By Gary Treistman

The People hereby present a review of the State and condition of our Judiciary, its systemic inequities, constitutional drift and institutional malaise; a call for the betterment and return to the purity of due process, enforcement of caliber in our judicial administration, and official recognition of our demands.

FEMA = Failing Everyone Miserably Again
By Ed Henry

A congressional committee has investigated the reasons for the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s slow response to hurricane Katrina when everyone in the country should by now know the answer to that one.

What this committee should have been investigating is what’s happening now, six months after Katrina broke the levees that flooded New Orleans and two other hurricanes of equal strength struck the Gulf Coast just weeks later, one of them flooding New Orleans for a second time.

For example, after spending hundreds of millions to round up thousands of fully furnished trailers as temporary homes for people in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Texas, the vast majority of these trailers are still sitting in staging areas waiting to be delivered. (Read the rest here) (With editor's note.)

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