Month: August 2002

A follow-up to my earlier post about Martin Schwimmer and the infamous Nigerian scam: it was indeed a joke. Whew!

Background: Student rights. Schools have increasingly come to be seen as enclaves of official action that lies beyond the reach of normal protections for personal liberty and privacy. While administrators and many politicians insist such extraordinary power is necessary to exert discipline in schools and prevent Columbine-style killings, civil libertarians wonder what kind of participants in a free society will result from a generation raised in what amounts to an age-specific police state. There’s also a school of thought that speculates that rare Columbine-style outbursts may even be fueled by the heightened tensions inherent in tight censorship and surveillance. [http://civilliberty.about.com/]

Arise Sir Alan. It seems Britain’s Labour government is quite keen to confer honorary knighthoods on men not usually regarded as being on the left from the United States. Earlier this year former New York mayor Rudy Guiliani was so honoured, and now it’s the turn of Federal Reserve Chairman no less. [Samizdata.net]

It’s actual illegal for Alan Greenspan to accept unless Congress consents. However, the law in question is the US Constitution, so he will no doubt accept without anyone in power saying anything, and without Congress consenting. To do otherwise would suggest that the Constitution is still in effect, and the government certainly isn’t going to allow such a dangerous precedent.

It’s time for civil libertarians to get real. [OpinionJournal]

And here we have a matching display of Conservative hypocrisy. The Wall Street Journal claims that it’s perfectly all right for the government to disappear people because the courts have ruled in favor of the government. Funny how this belief that the courts are always right doesn’t extend to Roe v. Wade.

Renewable energy? Not on my beachfront, say environmentalists. [OpinionJournal]

Here’s a nice display of Liberal hypocrisy. Rich elitist ecofreaks are all in favor of generating power using large numbers of windmills–except when the windmills would be built to close to their expensive summer houses.

Lessons From History. By 1953, the English were effectively disarmed — and compounding the insult, courts began prosecuting people for previously legal (and even encouraged) acts of violence in defense of persons and property. In the future, only the police were to use violence, and even they tended to be quite lenient toward violent criminals.

In a ‘coincidence’ that will surprise few readers who are familiar with the work of criminologists like John Lott and Gary Kleck, English crime rates almost immediately began a steady rise, for the first time in 500 years. The overall crime rate in England and Wales is now 60 percent higher than in the United States. And it wasn’t just crime in general: Gun crimes became far more common as well. [FirearmNews.com]

A review of historian Joyce Malcolm’s book, To Keep and Bear Arms: The Origins of an Anglo-American Right.

It turns out that the exploding Arab who detonated inside a taxi recently didn’t go off by mistake after all. According to an article in the Jerusalem Post, driver Issam Dahdal (who is an Arab himself) refused to drive the terrorist anywhere, at which point the terrorist deliberately blew himself up. Dahdal survived, but was badly wounded.

Biased BBC

A new weblog devoted to reporting on the leftist bias of the BBC.