There must be some kind of way out of here
said the Joker to the Thief
There's too much confusion
I can't get no relief
Businessmen they drink my wine
plowmen dig my earth
Every one along the line
nobody of it is worth
No reason to get excited
the Thief he kindly spoke
There are many here among us
who feel that life is but a joke
But you and I we've been through that
and this is not our fate
So let us not talk falsely now
the hour's getting late
Honored by his friendship, exasperated by his manipulation, grateful in a thousand ways that Rex tolerated and defended me, admired and published my work, he flew me to Costa Rica and gave me a status unequaled in the Gulch that Rex built at enormous personal risk.
He gave his life to advance the cause of liberty, totally deaf to the rule of law. Paradoxically, it could have saved him. Among hundreds of crystal clear recollections, none was as sharp as Rex firing from the hip, one two three rounds in the compound after dark. Lord knows what the neighbors thought. Our next door neighbor was the concrete-walled Russian Consulate. The baroque Belgian Embassy across the street probably went on high alert. We had a tighter perimeter than they did. Gunfire in the diplomatic quarter was frequent, usually something disagreeable and dangerous. Rex handed me the gun and I held it at arm's length like a duelist, plugged a tree to feel what the trigger and recoil were like, swept my jacket aside and stuck it behind my back.
If you have occasion to fire a Makarov, it pulls to the left.
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Showing posts with label the rule of law. Show all posts
Showing posts with label the rule of law. Show all posts
Sunday, February 2, 2020
Saturday, January 25, 2020
Keeping the flame
Historically, liberty required courage and self-sacrifice, Minutemen standing guard, Marines ready to deploy, ships at sea, submarines, Air Force silos and bombers to deter aggression. It takes a special sort of hero to patrol our highways, streets, and ports. I admire them -- brave, strong, clear-eyed defenders of peaceful American civilian life. We do a terrible disservice to ourselves and our innocent children, if we fail to stand up for liberty and its defenders. They are few in number, 1 million LEOs and 2 million soldiers, sailors, and airmen. 99% of us are civilians. Only 12% of Americans are legal gun owners capable of engaging a threat, if they're in the right place at the right time and adequately trained for battle.
I carried a gun a couple years in Central America, never liked it. The work I do is challenging, and at times I distrusted myself to have a lethal weapon nearby. I bought an air pistol to deal with critters, and it looks like a Ruger 9mm to impress the neighbors, but peace and freedom have to be guarded by others. My job is to defend liberty with words, often explicitly, but in fiction as well. Imagined stories are important, to show why armed men and women have to fight for freedom and justice. It's a controversial concept, often misunderstood by lunatic criminals and communists who feel entitled to kill. That's why my nonfiction work addresses the rule of law. No one has a right to kill, unless it's in self-defense and there's no immediate existential alternative to save life in an emergency.
Keeping the flame in literature is, in fact, more important than keeping the peace by force, because lawmen, military, and armed civilians need intellectual moral support. Morality is controversial and often misinterpreted. It has nothing to do with God or Allah. The supreme value in a free society is liberty. The highest virtue is courage. Having less of it than other people, I lacked enough physical courage to defend liberty by devoting my life to military service or sworn law enforcement. I did what I could, writing about justice and creating stories about courage, a crystal clear personal issue, because I know what it means to face danger alone. Our overseas troops are hamstrung by terms of engagement and prosecutorial military law. LEOs are hobbled by procedure and judicial due process. An individual cop or soldier on patrol is in terrible peril, if attacked by a murderous enemy gang. Courage is the moral power to face death, to rely on one's experience and talent, to fight evil with clarity and valiant resolve as a defender of civilian liberty.
http://www.wolfdevoon.net
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I carried a gun a couple years in Central America, never liked it. The work I do is challenging, and at times I distrusted myself to have a lethal weapon nearby. I bought an air pistol to deal with critters, and it looks like a Ruger 9mm to impress the neighbors, but peace and freedom have to be guarded by others. My job is to defend liberty with words, often explicitly, but in fiction as well. Imagined stories are important, to show why armed men and women have to fight for freedom and justice. It's a controversial concept, often misunderstood by lunatic criminals and communists who feel entitled to kill. That's why my nonfiction work addresses the rule of law. No one has a right to kill, unless it's in self-defense and there's no immediate existential alternative to save life in an emergency.
Keeping the flame in literature is, in fact, more important than keeping the peace by force, because lawmen, military, and armed civilians need intellectual moral support. Morality is controversial and often misinterpreted. It has nothing to do with God or Allah. The supreme value in a free society is liberty. The highest virtue is courage. Having less of it than other people, I lacked enough physical courage to defend liberty by devoting my life to military service or sworn law enforcement. I did what I could, writing about justice and creating stories about courage, a crystal clear personal issue, because I know what it means to face danger alone. Our overseas troops are hamstrung by terms of engagement and prosecutorial military law. LEOs are hobbled by procedure and judicial due process. An individual cop or soldier on patrol is in terrible peril, if attacked by a murderous enemy gang. Courage is the moral power to face death, to rely on one's experience and talent, to fight evil with clarity and valiant resolve as a defender of civilian liberty.
http://www.wolfdevoon.net
.
Sunday, October 20, 2019
Private government
In the first, fundamental sense of the term, private government describes the power of each individual to control the conduct of his or her life, whether right or wrong, in sickness and in health, for better or worse, courageously, cowardly, or cooperatively with others. In America, toleration of differences and separation of church and state were a precondition for national union, and it resulted in a widely understood right of individuation legally protected by the First Amendment. The state cannot compel a citizen to attend a church or be taxed to support a religious sect. Individual decisions concerning education, career, marriage, and finance are largely unregulated, despite a mountain of legislation and administrative rules imposed to limit individual choice. Liberty stubbornly persists as a matter of personal aspiration or folly, contrary to the best efforts of family, neighbors, and politicians to induce conformity.
That, however, is not the topic I wish to discuss. Private government has another meaning pertaining to constitutional law, not in the present, but the future. In tempestuous infancy and adolescence, the U.S. Constitution was a legalized tug of war with periodic explosions. Colonial frontier pioneers did not perceive an obligation to be stewards of the planet. The Federal Convention of 1787 did not debate LGBTQ or transgender privileges, and the Civil War was not fought to give birthright citizenship to foreign anchor babies.
American constitutional thumb wrestling was a brief struggle in the sweep of human history, even if we graft it to the dead root of English common law. Some historians point to ancient Rome as a source for concepts like contract, or Bible stories as the source of all law. Athenian aristocrats experimented with democracy and trial by jury. The Code of Hammurabi is taught in U.S. law schools as the ancient basis of equity and criminal law, improved incrementally by thousands of years of judicial and legislative thought.
Wait a minute. Spaceflight was derived from rock throwing?
Obviously not. The American Experiment was a clean break with all previous governments, and it was totally rewritten twice, by Civil War and by 20th Century Supreme Court decisions. If the Founding Fathers knew what we've done to their Constitution, they'd shout from their graves to damn us. Everything in law today is a radical break from its original intent, no better than juvenile delinquency, defying Madison and Franklin and Otis. You don't know who Otis was. Nor do you know why Franklin proposed that judges should be elected by lawyers, or why Madison opposed a Bill of Rights. Without Madison, Franklin, and Otis, there would be no Constitution to reinterpret and coin gay marriage rights.
Be that as it may, I'm not interested in political footstamping or current notions of political rights. What matters is the future, and I'd like to return to the idea of private government. Let's suppose that the public tussel of democracy is arbitrary and unpredictable. The United States is a bankrupt nonprofit corporation, a global welfare fountain that no one owns.
Private government is totally different. Instead of voting, free of charge, expecting the U.S. to hand you a pile of benefits, in a private government there are joint venturers (partners) who pony up "cash calls" to retain their right to elect a board of directors. There are no taxes, no regulation of commerce, no social benefits. The sole function of a private government is national defense, funded by insurance companies, banks, and wealthy individual citizens who can afford to buy a vote to determine the scale and scope of national defense. It's less nutty than it sounds. The American Revolution was funded entirely by private backers and fought by volunteer civilians.
I wrote a short story and recorded a lecture to explicate the idea.
.
That, however, is not the topic I wish to discuss. Private government has another meaning pertaining to constitutional law, not in the present, but the future. In tempestuous infancy and adolescence, the U.S. Constitution was a legalized tug of war with periodic explosions. Colonial frontier pioneers did not perceive an obligation to be stewards of the planet. The Federal Convention of 1787 did not debate LGBTQ or transgender privileges, and the Civil War was not fought to give birthright citizenship to foreign anchor babies.
American constitutional thumb wrestling was a brief struggle in the sweep of human history, even if we graft it to the dead root of English common law. Some historians point to ancient Rome as a source for concepts like contract, or Bible stories as the source of all law. Athenian aristocrats experimented with democracy and trial by jury. The Code of Hammurabi is taught in U.S. law schools as the ancient basis of equity and criminal law, improved incrementally by thousands of years of judicial and legislative thought.
Wait a minute. Spaceflight was derived from rock throwing?
Obviously not. The American Experiment was a clean break with all previous governments, and it was totally rewritten twice, by Civil War and by 20th Century Supreme Court decisions. If the Founding Fathers knew what we've done to their Constitution, they'd shout from their graves to damn us. Everything in law today is a radical break from its original intent, no better than juvenile delinquency, defying Madison and Franklin and Otis. You don't know who Otis was. Nor do you know why Franklin proposed that judges should be elected by lawyers, or why Madison opposed a Bill of Rights. Without Madison, Franklin, and Otis, there would be no Constitution to reinterpret and coin gay marriage rights.
Be that as it may, I'm not interested in political footstamping or current notions of political rights. What matters is the future, and I'd like to return to the idea of private government. Let's suppose that the public tussel of democracy is arbitrary and unpredictable. The United States is a bankrupt nonprofit corporation, a global welfare fountain that no one owns.
Private government is totally different. Instead of voting, free of charge, expecting the U.S. to hand you a pile of benefits, in a private government there are joint venturers (partners) who pony up "cash calls" to retain their right to elect a board of directors. There are no taxes, no regulation of commerce, no social benefits. The sole function of a private government is national defense, funded by insurance companies, banks, and wealthy individual citizens who can afford to buy a vote to determine the scale and scope of national defense. It's less nutty than it sounds. The American Revolution was funded entirely by private backers and fought by volunteer civilians.
I wrote a short story and recorded a lecture to explicate the idea.
.
Tuesday, June 25, 2019
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