Apparently, since Cherios has been running commercials saying that a study has shown that eating Cherios as part of a healthy diet can help lower your cholesterol, the FDA has decided that Cherios is a drug. According to this WSJ article, the FDA claims that only drugs can make those claims, and if they want to continue making these claims backed by a peer reviewed clinical study, they must file a new drug application. This is the same new drug application that has destroyed and slowed so many potentially helpful drugs, that has left so many dead because it takes so long to go through the bureaucratic morass required to get a license necessary from the FDA to sell a new drug to the public.

Now, I’m not too religious, but my god, what is wrong with this country. Oh, I know, the government wants to control how everything is done everywhere. In the name of the public safety, the government regulates almost every aspect of our lives. It tells us how we have to build a house, how we build a car, how we make a new drug. Do you ever wonder why we are still driving cars with basically the same technology as Henry Ford was pumping out 100 years ago. It is not merely because of the greed of the oil companies. It is not because the combustion engine is the best engine out there. It isn’t even that humans just can’t figure anything better out. For progress to happen there must be diversity in the industry. Not only that, but people must be allowed to take risks on new technologies, even with their own lives. If somebody wants to buy a new unproven technology, they must be allowed to do that, otherwise industry will continue to run at the snail’s pace that it is currently traveling at.

But I digress. What is wrong with a food company extolling the healthy benefits that it has, especially when it has a strong peer reviewed clinical study backing its claim? It isn’t fraud. There really was a study. And it isn’t a drug, so why would the FDA try and claim it is. Let me let you in on a secret that it appears the FDA might not know. There are things other than drugs that can make a person healthy, and yes that can even cure certain diseases. You think they would have put at least one person in charge of this idiotic (not to mention unconstitutional) government agency that knows that. Only idiots must gravitate to the government regulatory business.

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According to this article in the Wall Street Journal, the EU is screwing IBM. Apparently the EU is fining IBM 1.6 Billion Euros because they have allegedly used rebates and direct payments to retailers so that they wouldn’t sell AMD – the biggest competitor to Intel.

I have yet to see the evidence for this, more than likely there is little if any, but that is not the point. What right does the EU have to tell a company how to run itself? Especially when government can’t even run itself. This is completely ridiculous.

The EU is a bunch of thugs and thieves and looters, that can’t do anything productive themselves so must steal from those that are productive. It is ironic how governments regulate and tax all the competition out of the water and then they fine the people who do manage to survive the harsh regulations and taxes just for being the only ones to survive. Even if the government didn’t destroy competition and even if companies didn’t use “underhanded” methods to run other companies out of business, if simply nobody else decides they want to compete with a company, that company would be in violation of Anti-trust laws simply for doing nothing. Anti-trust laws were put in place so that governments can steal money from companies whenever they wanted.

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In the mail today I got about three public notices to various people that have lived here (including myself) about a nearby business requesting a liquor license. According to the notice:

“Pursuant to section 4-60-050 of the Chicago Municipal code, the City is required to send public notice of a new package goods, tavern, or incidental license application to all legal voters within 250 feet of the proposed location. All objections must be received by the Department of Business Affairs and Consumer Protection/Local Liquor Control Commission within 40 days of the date of application shown above. If received by the 40th day, your comments will be taken into consideration by the Mayor’s License Commission before any decision is rendered on the issuance of the license. In the event a hearing is commenced in this matter you may be required to provide testimony in person to support your complain or comment. ”

Let us forget that city licensees are for nobody’s good except the city’s treasury, that city licenses are simply a large money making protection scheme run by the city any using the Chicago Police as enforcers. Let us forget that in addition to the whims of government arbitrarily approving or denying licenses, the whims of the people can also influence this arbitrary process. Let us forget all of this.

What right does anybody have to deny you the ability to sell liquor on your own property? What right does anybody have to tell you what you can do on your own property as long as you don’t infringe the rights of other people? The only possibly way for this to be morally right is if the government owns the land. A license to sell liquor is the government asserting the idea that the government owns everybody’s land. It’s good to be the king.

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Beware, the last bastion of freedom in this world, the Internet may soon be free no longer. According to an EFF e-mail I received today, government released documents imply that treaty negotiators are zeroing in on Internet regulation. According to the e-mail they sent me:

“A discussion of the challenges for the pact includes ‘the speed and ease of digital reproductions” and “the growing importance of the Internet as a means of distribution.’

Other publicly available information shows that the treaty could establish far-reaching customs regulations over Internet traffic in the guise of anti-counterfeiting measures. Additionally, multi-national IP industry companies have publicly requested that ISPs be required to engage in filtering of their customers’ Internet communications for potentially copyright-infringing material, force mandatory disclosure of personal information about alleged copyright infringers, and adopt “Three Strikes” policies requiring ISPs to automatically terminate customers’ Internet access upon a repeat allegation of copyright infringement.

The great invention, that disseminates information better than any of the old ways of commication, might soon be just as bad as the old media. Under the guise of anti-counterfeiting and intellectual property protection the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement would give world governments far reaching control over the Internet. This will even force developing countries to adopt strict intellectual property rules that will only serve to stifle the free flow of information throughout the Internet.

Those who would control us have always hated the Internet, since there is so very little regulation of it. It shows the lie that government regulation improves civilization. Every second that the Internet exists free and open is another bit of proof that government regulation is not needed and actually harmful to the freedom and happiness of a people.

Call your representatives now and demand that they pressure the Obama administration to release the thousands of pages they have so far refused to release about this trade agreement. Once again, Obama shows he is no different than Bush by continuing to use and abuse the state secrets privilege. Keep the Internet free and open by keeping the government out.

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Well, it seems that this whole swine flu thing completely overblown by the mass media and the government. With schools closing because of just one possible case of swing flu, you would think this was the Spanish Influenza that killed at least 20 million people worldwide in 1918. Well, it isn’t. It doesn’t have the killer genes of that flu. The Mexican government claims 200 people have died of the virus in Mexico, which the World Health Organization disputes. One person has died in the US. It doesn’t even seem to have the strength of “normal” flu which kills thousands each season.

This just seems to be more of the fear mongering that both major parties love, since fear mongering makes it easier to enact their agendas. They will use every crisis real and imagined to their personal political benefit. “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste,” says Rahm Emanuel, Chief of Staff to the President of the United States. What a sick human being. Even the idiots over at the Libertarian Party are advocating that the US government stop people from coming into this country. I thought that they were the party of principle?

There is only one answer. Stop believing anything you hear on news (especially from TV and newspaper) by anybody that has a journalism degree. H.L. Menchen – the great skeptic most famous for his satirical reporting of the Scope Monkey trial – once said

“The more reflective reader reads next to nothing [in newspapers] and believes the same amount precisely.  Why should he read or believe more?  Every time he alights on anything that impinges upon his own field of knowledge he discovers at once that it is inaccurate and puerile.  The essential difficulty here is that journalism, to be intellectually respectable, requires a kind of equipment in its practitioner that is necessarily rare in the world […].  He should have the widest conceivable range of knowledge, and he should be the sort of man who is not easily deluded by the specious and the fraudulent.  Obviously, there are not enough such men to go round.  The best newspaper, if it is lucky, may be able to muster half a dozen at a given moment, but the average newspaper seldom has even one.  Thus American journalism (like the journalism of any other country) is predominantly paltry and worthless.  Its pretensions are enormous, but its achievements are insignificant.”

It is as true today as it was then.

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Chrysler is going to file for bankruptcy since they failed to come up with a plan that is acceptable to their creditors to restructure by the date the Obama administration set. On the other hand, GMC has found a path to restructuring which involves the government and the UAW being the major owners, with the previous owners only retaining about 10% ownership. It is ironic that the government and the UAW, the two groups (with management coming behind at a close third) that are most responsible for the utter failure of GMC to make a good product that people actually want to buy – which absolutely no one would buy if not for an irrational need for some people to buy only substandard American made cars form the “big three” despite the fact that there are 11 companies besides the big three that manufacture cars in this country, and unlike the big three have never downsized their plants – for a price cheap enough that GMC could actually afford to continue making it will now be financially liable when GMC finally liquidates (and it will eventually liquidate). Unlike with the profit sharing scheme that the UAW forced on GMC that lets them profit when the company is profitable but accepts no risk when the company looses money like a stockholder would.

Anyway, back to Chrysler. They are apparently fighting to be able to use loans from US and Canadian governments. Why can’t they get a loan from a bank or some other organization? The answer is because every private company knows that Chrysler is already dead and it just doesn’t know it. I suppose I can understand why people want Chrysler to stay afloat. It employs 4800 people. If they went under and had to liquidate then all of those people would lose their cushy overpaid jobs. What people need to realize is that Chrysler is a drain on the economy, and is helping to keep the rest of us in this recession. It is keeping valuable resources, machinery, raw material, skilled laborers and managers in a company that can’t create wealth. It is simply drawing all money towards it and basically making it disappear. You cannot simply spend yourself into prosperity because spending money is not the same thing as creating wealth. We are in this recession because there is not enough wealth. Just printing money and spending it does not create wealth, it is simply redistributing wealth. It is like trying to raise the level of water in a pool by taking water out of one end and pouring it into the other. This company needs to go under to free up its resources to go to other areas that will be able to help create the wealth needed to pull us out of this recession and bring us back into prosperity.

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I was reading Lever Action by L Neil Smith (also find it free here). I found this New Covenant. What a world it would be if everybody agreed to this. You can find a better formatted one at Smith’s website, and you can find some interesting some nice wall hanger versions here.

A New Covenant*

by L. Neil Smith

WE, THE UNDERSIGNED Witnesses to the Lesson of
History — that no Form of political Governance may be relied upon to secure
the individual Rights of Life, Liberty, or Property — now therefore establish
and provide certain fundamental Precepts measuring our Conduct toward one
another, and toward others:

Individual Sovereignty

FIRST, that we shall henceforward recognize each individual to be
the exclusive Proprietor of his or her own Existence and of all products
of that Existence, holding no Obligation binding among Individuals excepting
those to which they voluntarily and explicitly consent;

Freedom from Coercion

SECOND, that under no Circumstances shall we acknowledge any Liberty
to initiate Force against another Person, and shall instead defend the
inalienable Right of Individuals to resist Coercion employing whatever
Means prove necessary in their Judgement;

Association and Secession

THIRD, that we shall hold inviolable those Relationships among
Individuals which are totally voluntary, but conversely, any Relationship
not thus mutually agreeable shall be considered empty and invalid;

Individuality of Rights

FOURTH, that we shall regard Rights to be neither collective nor
additive in Character — two individuals
shall have no more Rights than one, nor shall two million nor two thousand
million — nor shall any Group possess
Rights in Excess of those belonging to its individual members;

Equality of Liberty

FIFTH, that we shall maintain these Principles without Respect to
any person’s Race, Nationality, Gender, sexual Preference, Age, or System
of Beliefs, and hold that any Entity or Association, however constituted,
acting to contravene them by initiation of Force — or
Threat of same — shall have forfeited its Right to exist;

Supersedure

UPON UNANIMOUS CONSENT of the Members or Inhabitants of any
Association or Territory, we further stipulate that this Agreement
shall supercede all existing governmental Documents or Usages then
pertinent, that such Constitutions, Charters, Acts, Laws, Statutes,
Regulations, or Ordinances contradictory or destructive to the Ends
which it expresses shall be null and void, and that this Covenant,
being the Property of its Author and Signatories, shall not be Subject
to Interpretation excepting insofar as it shall please them.

SIGNATORY:				WITNESS:

_________________________________	_______________________________

signature		date		signature		date

_________________________________	_______________________________

name (please print)			name (please print)

SEND TO:

736 Eastdale Drive

Fort Collins, CO 80524

PLEASE ENCLOSE TWO DOLLARS to cover processing and archiving. Add SASE for
confirmation of receipt.

*Excerpted from Chapter XVII of The Gallatin Divergence by
L. Neil Smith, Del Rey Books (a division of Random House), New York, 1985,
as amended by unanimous consent, October, 1986.

e-mail L. Neil Smith: lneil@lneilsmith.org

You are here: Webley Page >  Lever Action >  New Covenant

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by Robert Hawes

“The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite.”

~ James Madison, Federalist 45

Recent debates over sweeping new federal laws have re-ignited old quarrels concerning the proper constitutional role of the federal government and the rights and reserved powers of the states. As a case-in-point, on February 1, 2007, the Montana State House of Representatives unanimously passed two bills condemning the federal REAL ID Act as an improper use of federal legislative power. Both bills were designed to exempt Montana from the Act; however, the bill introduced by Representative Diane Rice of Harrison, Montana, went a step further, stipulating that, “the legislature of the state of Montana hereby nullifies the REAL ID Act of 2005, as it would apply in this state”.

Read that again: “The legislature of the state of Montana hereby nullifies the REAL ID Act”. Nullifies. Hmmm, there’s a word we haven’t seen in awhile, and with good reason. You see, the word “nullify” like its conceptual kissing cousins “secession,” “states rights,” “delegated powers,” and sometimes even “Constitution” belongs to a special class of political four-letter words, so called for the reason that they are verboten in polite conversation amongst the political mainstream. In that parlance, they are akin to the type of words that self-conscious adults tend to spell-out in front of small children so as to avoid embarrassment, and are allowed to be spoken only in a historical context, and only when accompanied by an obviously derisive tone of voice.

For this reason it’s understandable that the use of this little three-syllable word “nullify” will make some people skittish. Like a hand-grenade, the word is small but loaded with explosive potential, enough even to cow some otherwise hardy and ruggedly individualistic Montanans. According to Missoulanews.com, Hal Harper, an advisor to Montana governor Brian Schweitzer, downplayed the significance of the word ‘nullify’ when commenting on Diane Rice’s bill, stating that it “is simply a synonym for ‘repeal’ and carries little significance beyond demanding that the federal government reverse its law.” Technically, what Harper says is true; the word “nullify” can be used as a synonym for “repeal,” although that is not its primary meaning, and its use in this context is rather dubious. To see what I mean, try using ‘repeals’ in place of ‘nullifies’ in the sentence that I quoted from Ms. Rice’s bill. When you do this, you get: “the legislature of the state of Montana hereby repeals the REAL ID Act of 2005.” Nope, I’m sorry, Hal, but this doesn’t work. Montana didn’t pass the REAL ID Act, so it can’t very well repeal it; and nowhere in Ms. Rice’s bill do I see any call for the federal government to “reverse its law”. The bill simply states that the REAL ID Act “is inimical to the security and well-being of the people of Montana, will cause unneeded expense and inconvenience to those people, and was adopted by the U.S. congress in violation of the principles of federalism contained in the 10th amendment to the U.S. constitution,” and that the state “nullifies” it “as it would apply in this state.”

Read the rest of the article

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When I was in an elevator today, the little screen said a survey found that people think that the top NASA achievement is the Global Positioning System or GPS. I find that interesting since it was the Navy that developed GPS and not NASA, although I suppose it was NASA that probably shot the satellites into space. Anyway, this got me thinking about the uselessness of NASA. It seems that every 10 years or so NASA declares that will be be on Mars in another 30 years. Yet where are we? The problem with NASA of course is that it is run by the government, and is therefore run like any government agency, inefficient. It spends too much time whining to congress about how is doesn’t have enough money, instead of developing space technologies that people would actually want to pay for.

It’s endeavors are generally incredibly expensive, have a drastic safety record, and really show no discernible value. I must agree wit Mr. L Niel Smith, that it seems NASAs sole purpose is to prevent the private space industry from ever developing. All NASA probably wants is a monopoly on space travel. As with all monopolies, they fail to innovate and we are stuck here on earth with no moon colonies or anything.

I don’t know why everybody is so afraid of a non-government agency traveling into space. Are people afraid there will be KFC on the moon or something? What’s wrong with that? Maybe they think it will be too expensive. That is utterly ridiculous. There are vast resources in space that any number of people would want to tap into. Whether it is mining an asteroid or space tours, this is how people innovate. They develop a product or service that people want, and the money flows in. Then development doesn’t stagnate like it does over at NASA. How old are those shuttles anyway? They seem to be help together with duct tape and super glue. How about we get rid of NASA and finally travel to mars.

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I want to point you to a website I found with an interesting concept. The website is called Going Galt. The basic premise of this site is that they want you to buy the book Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand and then send it to a politician. If you can’t change the politicians, change how the politicians think. Will they read it? I don’t know. Maybe they will get enough copies that they will actually read the thing and realize how they are destroying this country. This won’t change the world by itself, but eventually all of the small things do add up to a big thing.

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