Steven Den Beste Weighs In On Europe’s Proposed “Right of Reply”

In which he states again that the EU is being set up as a benevolent dictatorship. For now.

Rachel Lucas weighs in on the topic, too.

I predict this is going to get ugly in a few years or less.

This always reminds me of the (apocryphal) 18th Century quotation from Sir Alexander Frasier Tytler:

A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largess from the public treasury. From that time on the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury, with the results that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship.

The average age of the world’s great civilizations has been 200 years. These nations have progressed through this sequence:

from bondage to spiritual faith;
from spiritual faith to great courage;
from courage to liberty;
from liberty to abundance;
from abundance to selfishness;
from selfishness to complacency;
from complacency to apathy;
from apathy to dependency;
from dependency back again to bondage.

I think the Europeans are just a bit ahead of us on the curve. They’ve hit “dependency” and are about to descend – voluntarily – back into bondage.

On a More Serious Note

In relation to the Doctors for the Reduction of Handgun Injury piece below, comes this link from Prof. Volokh concerning a 52 year-old woman who used instructions she found on the internet to take her own life. Now St. Louis Circuit Attorney Jennifer Joyce wants to prosecute the provider of that information for voluntary manslaughter.

Where do these people get law degrees?

Ms. Joyce believes that the suicide victim would not have killed herself if she hadn’t found that information. What planet is she from? She’d have found some way to end her life, if that’s what she’d decided to do. As I noted, 29,350 people offed themselves in the U.S. in 1999. Women don’t use a firearm as much as men do. The tend to use asphyxiation or poisoning, generally by drug overdose. This woman could have just as easily used the Japanese method of throwing herself in front of a train.

Question to Ms. Joyce: What if this information had been printed in a novel?

I’m quite tired of the government trying to protect us from ourselves.

Department of “What the Hell Were They THINKING?”

Thanks to some sharp-eyes over at AR15.com, I found this extremely humorous link.

It would appear that someone at Mattel wasn’t thinking when they created the Harry Potter Nimbus 2000 Broomstick toy. Then again, maybe they were…and they should be investigated.

It appears that the toy is extremely popular with the young ladies.Bzzzzz……

Oh, and Amazon no longer carries the item for some reason….

(I predict a comment from the Reverend Falwell on the pernicious evil of making witchcraft into childs-play after this hits general circulation.)

UPDATE: Get your pre-ban’s at ebay! It went for $51! I’m sure she’ll really enjoy it!

No More Guns In Church! – Followup

Kim du Toit provides the link to the followup on this story.

Big Lake pastor to stand trial in killing of chapel intruders
GRAND JURY: Mielke indicted on charges of manslaughter, criminally negligent homicide

Had this happened in Texas, no charges would have been filed. Note the money quote:

The location of the men’s wounds probably swayed the jury, as did the distance between the chapel and Mielke’s home and the fact that the pastor chose to confront the men rather than call 911, Kalytiak said.

Yup. Depend on the State. They’ll show up after a while and take a report.

I bet the spree of church break-ins has stopped.

UPDATE: Not guilty on all charges.

“We Come from Hearty Stock”

or:  Our Ancestors Said: “Fuck You, We’ll Leave!”
 
Mrs. du Toit has an excellent essay up on the kind of people who came to America – the unruly, unrepentant non-conformists.

What the hell happened to us?

I’ve said before that when a society becomes too restrictive, then the individualists will head for the new frontier. Unfortunately we no longer have much of a new frontier.

We’d better figure out a way to exploit space, and soon. I hate to think what will happen when the pressure builds up because there’s no longer a safety valve.

The Sun May Have Set, But Some Brits Still Have A Pair

Also from Samizdata comes this story of Geoff Bean an unrepentant and belligerent Brit who has no patience with government bureaucrats. Here’s part of what he wrote to his government:

Were I a one-legged homosexual Afghan refugee/terrorist living on the welfare state, you and your ilk would not dare write in such a manner for fear of having all the human rights lawyers in creation round your necks, but as you are speaking to an honest, hard-working and overstressed Englishman, you appear to think you can behave like all too many of the vast and ever-increasing army of totally useless, non-productive, arrogant and bloody-minded officialdom, who are now only too successfully doing more damage to this once great and free nation than was ever achieved by Adolf Hitler.

That’s the kind of attitude we need more of here before we become more like there. Go read it.

Buy that man a beer!

Socialized Medicine – Equally Bad Care for All

Samizdata reports on the status of socialized medicine in England – this time in how it relates to soldiers injured in service.

Seems that if you were injured and need to see a specialist or require surgery, you get to wait six months to a year to see a government-paid doctor.

Or you can get it taken care of expeditiously if you want to pay for it yourself.

“I’m sorry leftenant, but that mine fairly mangled your foot. We can have it off and get you fitted for a prosthetic in, oh, eight months. What? What do you do until then? Well, here’s a prescription for painkillers, and stay off that…foot. Eh wot?”

Remember Hillarycare? With that plan you couldn’t pay for it yourself.

Lileks on the Wellstone Assassination Theorists

“Before you write me off as a crank . . . ” – ink’s dry, sir. Ink’s dry. “. . let me ask you a simple question. Do you know what caused the crash?” I’m guessing gravity had something to do with it. “If you don’t know, then how can you know that I am wrong?” He’s got me there. I also don’t know why the shuttle crashed, which is why I cannot rule out the possibility that Romulan warbirds fired their disruptors as the ship began its descent. But I suspect you are wrong about this, because you are wrong about nearly everything else. Want proof? Mr. Fetzer’s U of M website links to his other sites, assassinationscience.com and assassinationresearch.com.

As the saying goes: when all you have is an assassination-related URL, everything looks like a covert hit.

Oh, and Lileks also assassinates some ants. Good read.