We’ve got deleting provisions that allow the Legislature to regulate private property of illegal aliens, preventing gays from being as miserable as heterosexuals, wind damage, land classification, waterfront assessment, and increasing taxes for community colleges.

It surprises me that there’s not a constitutional amendment to regulate the number of squares of toilet paper one can use when hitting the can. Heck, use the Florida Constitution instead, there’s enough pages to go around and it’s not like people aren’t metaphorically wiping their asses with it anyway.

Why people think that amending the constitution to give the state power into such private matters as what kind of insurance you might think about getting or determining what your land is worth or what it can be used for is beyond me. I want my constitution to recognize my rights, require that my representatives recognize them as well, and that’s all. “Prohibiting consideration of changes or improvements to residential real property which increase resistance to wind damage and installation of renewable energy source devices as factors in assessing the property’s value for ad valorem taxation purposes“, whatever the hell that means, isn’t a function of the Constitution.

The problem is that Floridians are treating their constitution as “living”, and this is what happens to living documents. They’re added onto constantly until the point where they’re unwieldy, impossible to comprehend, and thus useless in protecting your rights.

While I don’t think it will pass, Amendment #2 – preventing the state from having to honor a private contract between consenting parties – is dangerous insofar as it teaches the populace that in order to discriminate against those who’s views you don’t agree with that, all you have to do is get an amendment passed. That’s all fine and dandy when it’s not your ox being gored (and for the record, I’m not into the whole gay thing. Not my bag of tea, but I value rights enough to know that I must stand up for them even when they’re for a group I can’t relate to).

When you move the line that much, the fact that there is a line to being with gets diluted.

But hey! Free money for colleges!

TAMPA – Hillsborough County soon will begin enforcing its strict ordinances governing adult businesses now that a federal appeals court has ruled the restrictions are constitutional.

…

“But we will make sure that these businesses comply with the law,” she said.

The ruling from the 11th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals means that dancers at bikini bars will have to stay 6 feet away from patrons, and the sale or consumption of alcohol will be prohibited at adult businesses.

Additionally, adult video stores would be prohibited from having private viewing booths and workers would have to pass a criminal background check before they are hired.

When I lived in Atlanta, you could go to a nudie bar and have your 14th shot of tequila served to you by a butt naked chick grasping the glass in a way that would, from first appearance, be viewed as anatomically impossible. Now, if you wished to keep your nose centered between your eyes and mouth, you didn’t want to grope the girls but they’d touch you, that’s for sure.

In a free society, what I wish to pay for is my business. If I want to go watch some lady take off her knickers while consuming absinthe with a handful of Flintstone vitamins and having taco sauce poured over my freshly shorn genitalia for $25.95, that’s my business. No one else’s. Period. It doesn’t matter how ‘icky’ you find it, how morally degrading it seems to you, it’s none of your business.

But that’s the problem we have in our society, and both sides, left and right are to blame. When the left sees someone not caring enough, they give the government more power to take away things and redistribute. When the right sees someone parking their trailer in the wrong side of the gas station, the impose “community protections”. And both have the audacity to bitch when the other side does the same thing.

Look, we can’t live in anarchy. I’m not a full blown Libertarian because they don’t have enough of a plan to keep society from tearing its own throat out. The non-aggression principle works fantastic when everyone is non-aggressive. I can even understand the idea of zoning for businesses and residential areas. But that’s about it, folks. Once you say “You can run business of type X here”, that’s where the line is drawn.

Of course, that would take control away from the elite, and they’re not real keen on giving it up.

Now, the constitution doesn’t allow mini-tyrants local governments to prevent people from running nudie bars. So what to the tyrants legislators do when they can’t directly attack the constitution? They impose “regulations”

Imposing tight regulations is one way jurisdictions can attempt to control adult businesses after courts ruled cities or counties can’t pass such restrictive zoning requirements that leave no place for the businesses to operate. The regulations don’t outlaw the businesses, just stringently regulate them.

You see, you can still run a tittie-joint but the girls must wear county approved pasties, dance no more than 78″ away and not less than 72″ from the patrons, only operate between 3AM and 4AM, cannot serve any alcohol, and must employ only blind nuns who have never been in a car with anyone who’s ever had a speeding ticket. As long as you follow the near-impossible set of regulations, you can run your business as you see fit.

Reminds me a lot of “common sense gun regulations”.

Here’s another little factoid – I don’t particularly care for strip joints. Never have. For one, I am a very, very cheap bastard and paying $10 for a watered down coke just so some strung out bint can shake her plastic tits in my face isn’t what I’ve ever considered economical. For much less I could always get some girl drunk enough to take home which not only cost less, it generally ended up being much, much more enjoyable than just watching. Generally. And I know it’s cheesy, but the prude in me always felt sorry for the dancers even though most of them did not want nor need my pity.

But that’s me. If you like it, who am I to tell you no? And that’s what pisses me off so much. If you value freedom, then that means letting other people do things you would never consider. I’m not into the whole gay thing. Not my bag of tea. But I’ll be damned before I let some jack-ass politician tell me who (or what) I can and cannot have relations with.

Each time you allow your representatives to tack on more and more “regulations”, you limit your freedom more and more. Each time you vote to increase the power of the government, even when you think that particular increase is beneficial, it will never go away and always be added on to, generally by people who you didn’t want to have that power in the first place. Don’t like the way Bush uses his authority? YOU gave it to him. Maybe not directly, but by constantly assuming it’s the government’s responsibility to do X, you grant them more and more power.

This isn’t how free men and women live, this is how slaves are created.

A crackdown on guns is under way in the District. Police are asking residents to submit to voluntary searches in exchange for amnesty under the District’s gun ban.

The program is starting in the Washington Highlands neighborhood of southeast Washington on Monday and will later expand to other neighborhoods.

Officers will go door to door asking residents for permission to search their homes.

Police Chief Cathy L. Lanier said the “safe homes initiative” is aimed at residents who want to cooperate with police. She gave the example of parents or grandparents who know or suspect their children have guns in the home.

If weapons are recovered, they will be tested and destroyed if they are not found to be linked to any other crimes.

Just who in the bloody hell does this fascist bitch think she is? Someone in danger of losing a bit of her much-coveted power, eh. This sort of thing is unacceptable in a FREE country, is it not?

Let’s get this cow into a new job, shall we…junior fry cook at McDonald’s sounds about her speed.

(Clarification:  This braindead plan was announced March 12, and was put into action today.)

I read this “article” (which could have been written by just about any seventh-grader, really) that I saw in relation to the Sioux Nation “declaring their independence.” Naturally I had to investigate and find out what’s all the hub-bub, Bub. If there is a liberty issue to be addressed, I owe it to myself as a conscientious member of a newly awakened populace to educate myself.

Quite a little group of radicals involved:

The following people have identified themselves as members of the provisional government of Lakotah, or been so identified by other members of the movement:

• Russell Means, chief facilitator
• Jerry Collette , interim attorney general
• Robert Robideau, facilitator
• Tegheya Kte, aka Garry Rowland, (fully Clarence Gary Anthony Rowland), facilitator
• Phyllis Young, provisional government member

So I found out that this guy is a terrorist actor who has been stirring the pot with violent acts since the Seventies and has failed to even reach his own people with his message as evidenced by failure to be elected to tribal office…each time he ran.

That guy is a big Libertarian activist who has backed such revolutionary causes like Ron Paul’s blimp.

This other guy is lucky to be alive since his apparent terrorist act in 1975 went awry in Kansas.

That other guy is still an active member of AIM, you know the terrorists who took over a small town called Wounded Knee in, what, ’73?

And of course, this lady, who thinks that pretty much everyone living in her little corner of the world is a criminal because “parts of North and South Dakota, Nebraska, Wyoming and Montana have been illegally homesteaded” for years.

But since the message itself seemed important, despite the many and varied ‘issues’ one might have with the messengers, I decided to delve deeper.

And deeper.

And deeper still. (.pdf warning for that last one)

So a weekend of research on this issue, (which ranged from Jefferson making the Louisiana Purchase through some really convoluted stretching of the power of the president, to the Fort Laramie Treaties and how factions on both sides really screwed the pooch while trying to screw over the other guy, to international treaties to which the United States isn’t actually a signatory, all the way to the the United States Supreme Court ruling in 1980…with some interesting side roads and twisty paths along the way concerning radical movements of the last century, Indian Tribal politics, and even the constitutions of several states) has led me to one overriding conclusion:

The Sioux have not actually declared independence from the US, nor have they pulled out of any treaties with the federal government. As far as I have been able to find out, what we have here is a bunch of old hippie anarchists (possibly only the five mentioned above) who have absolutely no connection to the legally established government of the Sioux Nation.

Even the Sioux say so. When your own tribe tells you jump in a lake, perhaps you should go try on swimsuits.

What Means and his band have failed to take into account is about a hundred plus more years of legislation, accords, government and Sioux approved Acts, and even a lawsuit that created a bank account worth about one billion clams. (Geeze, you’d think that someone who brought a lawsuit like that against the Fed might be willing to use the accumulated interest to help improve the lot of their fellows. You know, if the plaintiffs were actually trying to help.)

Means has fallen for one of the classic blunders: hubris. He quotes Ghandi on his site, but has preached and partaken in violence– in opposition to Ghandi’s teachings. He has spent so much of his life preaching about how bad things are from outside the system, that he can’t even get inside anymore because his own people disavow his aims.

Five people and a web page do not a revolution make.

Now before you start calling me names and getting all up in my grill, let me finish.

There are many, MANY things wrong with how the Federal government treats with Indians. There is a five hundred plus year history of Europeans lying and cheating, killing and stealing. Displacing cultures, or even wiping them out. I personally didn’t do it. No, really, I didn’t. Just like I didn’t condone slavery or own any slaves myself. Just like I didn’t take shiploads of gold back to Spain or wipe out the buffalo or hand out pox infected blankets. It wasn’t me. It doesn’t mean that I don’t care. It just means that I cannot be attacked for the acts of my ancestors.

But I do understand that the current living conditions in Sioux Country are deplorable. The answer to the problems of the Nations seem pretty obvious to me: get off the Res and get an education, we are freaking GIVING it away. Get a job, don’t wait for the check in the mail. In other words, get off welfare. Speak to your grandpa and grandma, ask them to help preserve your language and culture by teaching your own kids, no one will stop you- but you have to do something to help yourself. Stop drinking. Stop eating food that will kill you. The answer is the same answer I think will solve most of the problems we have in life: stand up and do it yourself, dammit.

When someone (and I mean Means, yes, but others like him as well) decides they want notoriety and press coverage and fame that’s fine with me. (C’mon, the Spears is still making 400k a month and all she has to do anymore is get seen in the paper occasionally.) But at this point all Means is doing is throwing a temper tantrum because no one wants to hear his buffalo-crap anymore. He is distorting the message with static on the channel. If the public sees him as a spokesman, and he wants to claim that 70,000 Sioux are now the sole proprietors of five of the United States and everything and everybody that has done business or raised a family inside a border that is truly arbitrary (since your own tribe threw out the previous occupants less than a hundred years before white men arrived) has been a criminal, all the public will see is a nutjob and they can conveniently look the other way while he and his merry band are carted off and the problems still don’t get solved.

Liberty is worth fighting for, yes. It is worth your honor. It is even worth dying or killing for. I can understand how a person can feel that their voice is not being heard and how ‘something must be done’ can be transformed into ‘I am going to do something, ‘ and I applaud it. Losing sight of the goal is a danger we all face in this struggle. A revolution needs three things to go forth: at least one third of the population to agree that revolution is a worthwhile objective; at least one tenth of whom actually must agree to fight. –Second you need to have at least half the population who don’t care or won’t actively oppose your little revolution; sorry, but I think that the open carry gun guys in Montana alone would like as not have a little chat with you over the entire situation. –Finally, you need some kind of catalyst, something you can use as propaganda or agit-prop to get folks outside of your population to even care. So far, Mr. Means, in your entire career you have done nothing really but piss off the very people who may be tempted to agree with you. You, sir, are static on the wire, bad signal, your squelch is off. Maybe it’s time for you to just go off on a spirit quest and forget to come back.

(An aside..In 1877, there were only 20,000 Sioux. Something, and I don’t know what, seems to have improved for them since then.)

There’s a saying that goes, “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.” In The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis talks about a tactic the demons use to ensure people won’t believe in them which gives them a better shot at their soul.

If any faint suspicion of your existence begins to arise in his mind, suggest to him a picture of something in red tights, and persuade him that since he cannot believe in that (it is an old textbook method of confusing them) he therefore cannot believe in you.

I bring this up because when most Americans think of a tyrannical government, they think of the “Devil in red tights, holding a pitchfork.” They see Hitler with swarms of jackbooted army men with armbands, hands held in the air in salute, or 1984 where every person is part of the secret police and Big Brother is on every TV screen. None of these are “realistic” to us and when you think about them in that terms, it seems ridiculous that tyranny could ever happen here.

And the trick is played on us once again.

If, like the darkest fantasies of the extreme left believe, Bush actually canceled the 2008 elections, declared himself president for life, repealed the Bill of Rights, etc. the revolt would be instant and devastating. The devil would have overplayed his hand.

No, tyranny will not come to us in one, fell swoop. Instead of red tights and a pitchfork, tyranny will come to us in a dull gray suit, a $12 Supercuts hairstyle, and come across with all the banality of a quarterly meeting of dental hygienists.

Take for instance the case of Ezra Levant, a Canadian publisher brought up before the laughable “Human Rights Commission” for the unspeakable act of publishing the Mohammad cartoons. Watch the videos he has of his ordeal. Watch how detached the “human rights officer” is from the whole affair. For her, it’s just a job. She gets a sheet of paper that says do X, she does X. The fact that she is is a tine in the pitchfork of fascism is lost on her. The fact that she is instrumental in crushing free speech bothers her about as much as deciding what she will be having for lunch.

The ploy works too. People will watch these videos, not see the wispy mustached villain with his army of storm troopers, decide there is no tyranny to fear, and get back to watching American Idol.

We, as Americans on the whole, have stopped jealously guarding our liberty. We’ve been sold the devil in the 3 piece suit of “For the Children”, and “The Common Good”, all of which have been packaged into small, digestible bites so that we only see the parts and not the sum. Each small violation of our liberties is tolerable when you don’t realize the additive nature of control.

We allow our local police, people we gladly give authority to, to become militarized S.W.A.T. teams with soldiers’ training. Instead of protecting the populace, they’re attacking the enemy. That enemy is us.

We buy into the lie of public education as “free”, removing the market incentive for a school to perform well and then wonder why throwing more money at the problem doesn’t seem to work.

We’re enamored by politicians who give us great sound bites, are charismatic, and promise to solve all of our problems if only we’ll give them ultimate power over the minutiae of our lives. And we do. Over and over.

When something goes awry in this country, the first thing that happens is the incessant screams of those wanting the government to step in and fix the problem. Bridge collapsed? More government funding for roads. School shooting? Ban guns! Someone is a little too happy? Regulate entertainment.

The devil of tyranny has not only convinced us he doesn’t exist, but has managed to con us into wanting him to nonetheless.

I was reading this article aloud to Ted tonight, and we were discussing the various points of the new ID cards, and it really just boils down to one thing:

They’re absolutely doing it wrong. New, expensive, inconvenient ID cards are not the answer.

Detaining and searching a five-year old child because he has the same name as a suspected terrorist is not the answer.

Mile long lists of banned items are not the answer.

These things just piss off the populace, you know, the ones who are going to help should anyone decide to get frisky with a sodding box cutter again.

With the level of “security” one has to go through to fly these days, there is no way anyone is trying to fly a plane into anything in the near future. So aren’t these continue restrictions and invasive policies just a case of shutting the barn door after the horse has already escaped? We’re wasting entire GNPs worth of money on the attempted prevention of something that’s already happened. And now new ID cards? Oh, but Baby Boomers are exempt?

You guys do know they have old terrorists, too, right?

MRS appropriately quotes Heinlein:

When a place gets crowded enough to require ID’s, social collapse is not far away. It is time to go elsewhere.

Hey, Scaled Composites…faster, please.

And the jumper survived.

The lack of freedom to end your own life is surely one of the biggest infringements possible on personal liberty. Suicide is declared a “sin” by organized religion. The less cynical part of me understands that’s because they believe we only have the one life, and shouldn’t waste it. The more cynical part of me is much bigger, however, and puts the less cynical part in a painful armlock while explaining that churches really only care about how many tithers they have.

Secularly, public services (police/fire) routinely go to very great (read: expensive) lengths to prevent suiciders from following through. “It’s WRONG to take your own life!” we’re told. And we allow this perception to continue because to declaim otherwise somehow makes us less compassionate, less human. Well, some people really want to be dead, don’t they? They’re so miserable that death seems preferrable to crawling out of bed one more lousy day. Sure, sometimes the miserable feelings stem from bad chemicals but that’s a genetic flaw that might not be worth keeping in the gene pool. And if there’s one thing that never changes it’s that Nature is a bitch, and while WE may think survival of the fittest no longer applies to us, just open any newspaper to see otherwise.