Last night he gave the usual bilge, truly putting the frighteners on and informing everyone (for about the 10,000th time since 1988) that immediate action is required otherwise thermageddon is guaranteed. Though he has changed his tune a little – the threat is now no longer imminent but (conveniently), “in the pipeline”. That it is going to be catastrophic though, he is in no doubt at all.

Littered throughout his presentation was continuous references to his grandchildren (with pictures). He uncritically presented just about every single contentious alarmist claim as absolute fact (including claiming that temperature had continued rising for the last 15 years – now you have to be a special kind of propagandistic shill to do that without also appending “statistically insignificant rise”), most of which I think many of you, my friends, are already well equipped to debunk.

The place was absolutely packed – hundreds of people were there and I have to admit, as I listened to one questioner after another identify whichever hack activist group or pleading green lobbying special interest they were from, I truly felt like I was alone in enemy territory. I almost backed out and let my fear get the better of me. But I kept putting my hand up regardless – Hansen’s scaremongering could not go unanswered and if it wasn’t by way of putting points and questions to him then it was going to have to be heckles.

Shortly before the mike came to me, one of the activists in the audience pointed out that he [Hansen] was only preaching to the choir, saying that it was important to get people from ‘outside the choir’ to attend such events and asking how.

That was my in. Hansen responded to her that it was very important to get people from ‘outside the choir’ in to such talks but didn’t know how.

I stood up and laid into him. I said that he was high on the hyperbole and hysteria and low on the facts. Most of the people there would unfortunately take him at his word and not look any further so I said I felt obliged to point out that most of his claims were highly controversial and some were flat out wrong and that I’d be happy to go through them with him there and then and debate him.

The crowd then turned on me, exploding in incredulity.

I said that my question to him was that if he truly wanted people from ‘outside the choir’ to get involved then what on earth did he expect to happen when he (and he did) ridiculously claim that there was an “enormous well funded denial conspiracy, funded by big oil and gas”, thereby immediately dismissing anyone who dared to air a single sceptical thought.

After several hostile exchanges with the crowd immediately around me and a bit of back and forth between myself and Hansen, he finally got around to (not) answering my question. His response was bizarre. He came out with the hackneyed bollocks that the basis of science was scepticism blah blah blah. He then said that he had debated Richard Lindzen previously (Lindzen is one of the world’s most famous climate sceptics and most highly published atmospheric physicist). He said (referring to Lindzen) that it was “hard to win against an articulate guy”). He also – bizarrely – claimed that Lindzen had been shown to be wrong again and again and that he [Hansen] would no longer have any kind of debates, public or otherwise, with Lindzen or others because – apparently – “even when he has been shown to be wrong on so many occasions, he just shifts to another point to pick on”.

Pathetic!

This is from the same charlatan whose predictions have been so far off they’re not even on planet (c.f. his “scenario C” prediction where he predicted temperatures on the basis of humans stopping their carbon emissions totally over 20 years ago – guess what? – actual temperature data (in spite of fiddling by the likes of Hansen) has come in well BELOW this despite humans pouring ever more gigatonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere). This is the same fraud who regularly provided undocumented post-hoc “adjustments” to NASA’s GISS temperature data set (oh and uses the same data set to “extend” a single data point across thousands of miles to cover where there are no temp stations), that just happened to cool the past and warm the present, creating false warming trends. Any bona fide adjustments required (e.g. because of station recalibration or resiting) would be largely random – the fact that it isn’t should be the first warning that fraud is being perpetrated.

And yes this is the same guy who, in the sweltering heat of the U.S. 1988 summer, when presenting the case for climate hysteria to Al Gore’s committee, knowing the eyes of the world would be on him, purposefully turned off the air conditioning in the building beforehand without telling anyone to exacerbate people’s experience of the heat. That was 1988. You think this was the act of a selfless scientist guided to find and preserve the truth, or a shameless propagandist?

Following the talk I ended up being accosted multiple times outside the lecture theatre. Thankfully there were quite a few people backpatting me and saying “very brave”, but plenty were wanting to argue. I was happy to oblige.

Depressingly, my alarmist interlocutors demonstrated the identical pattern of ignorance I’ve become so used to know which demonstrates how they get their “information” and POVs from a very insular mutual masturbation circle that has nothing to do with sceptics but is happy to paint them in unrealistic cartoon colours. Amongst the numerous points of common ignorance that are so, so common with these people:

Complete lack of awareness of:

• The fact that CO2’s effects follow a pattern of logarithmic decay. The more you add, the less of an effect it has.
• What feedbacks are
• What climate sensitivity is
• Why the above two are absolutely essential to the alarmist catastrophic case
• The fact that the common sceptic view rests upon those two elements
• The fact that the majority of sceptics (myself included) are ‘lukewarmers’ – as in we think humans are contributing to warming but that it is mild and no catastrophe is imminent (or “in the pipeline”)
• The fact that regular measurements of CO2 have only been taken since 1958
• The fact that the temperature sensing network has changed dramatically in the last century – in scale, distribution, technology and methodologies. Depressingly they don’t even have the slightest scientific bone in their body that may initially ask them if they are comparing like with like when talking about temp readings from 1880 and temp readings from 2013. They always have to be prodded, and many refuse to entertain the issue even though, in ANY other branch of science it would be grounds to instantly doubt (if not entirely throw out) the data and any claims made for it (such as the putative 0.8 degree C rise since 1880).
• The fact that Venus’s atmosphere is driven primarily by i) pressure and ii) proximity to the sun and NOT CO2. (Duh).’

[I would appreciate any eagle-eyed comments noticing spelling and grammatical mistakes.]

The tourists who had come to view Westminster Abbey gathered to view the spectacle as tanks rolled down the street towards the “Supreme Court” building on Parliament Square. There had been no warning of troop movements. The BBC had just gone off air—no one knew why—but otherwise everything was as normal. Soldiers jumped out of the vehicles, armed with machine guns. Something was happening. And there were no media present; just tourists snapping the sight with the cameras on their phones.

A court official ran out, shouting, “you can’t come in; this is illegal!”, and within a few seconds policemen, dozens of them, ran out of the Supreme Court building, blocking the entrance. Major Jackson approached them and explained his business, provoking much shouting and arguing the tourists couldn’t quite make out.

Minutes later, the news broke on Sky. The Queen had agreed, at the first meeting of the Privy Council after the election, to suspend habeas corpus and order the arrest of the judges of the “Supreme Court” on grounds of high treason. The BBC had been taken off air, but a similar stand-off was taking place outside Broadcasting House. It was reported that BBC staff were refusing to leave the building, and commanders outside were awaiting political orders on how to proceed.

The news rippled through the crowd, which stood back to allow whatever act or drama was unfolding before their eyes to continue. No one knew if the court officials would stand down, or what action the soldiers would take. Everyone now knew the soldiers had been ordered to arrest all 12 of the “justices of the Supreme Court”, and to gun down anyone who stood in their way. There were to give no quarter.

Major Jackson issued his final threat and ran back towards the men. The policemen were standing firm, and so was the court official. What they were doing was treason—revolt against the sovereign. The soldiers took aim, and with a nod from Jackson opened fire. The court official collapsed in a bloody mess, murmuring “how dare you?” as he expired. Some of the policemen fell; the others ran; the crowd screamed. But the way had been cleared. Jackson tried the door: it was locked. The cowards had locked themselves in.

The glass door would not withstand a direct collision with a tank. The tank glided up the stairs and jolted against the door, which momentarily remained in place, although shattered in pieces as vein-like cracks appeared, before those pieces fell to the ground. The tank rolled back, and the men ran in the building.

They ran down the corridors of the building, but had difficulty making contact with the enemy. They searched the building room by room, until at the back of the building on an upper floor, he found them cowering together, a group of court officials and judges dressed in haughty finery.

“You can’t touch us: we are judges”, one of them exclaimed.

“You will come with us, or be gunned down on the spot”, Jackson informed them.

“Under what law?”, asked one of the judges.

“By order of Her Majesty the Queen. We will not debate the Common Law with you. You will come, or die now”.

They submitted, all twelve of them. Their fine robes were ripped off—each of them demeaned their apparel, which was meant to signify Royal authority and the majesty of the Law—and they later emerged from the building, cuffed and cowed.

Tom Smith, the new prime minister, had promised a radical restoration of the Law, the law the Queen was required to uphold as a condition of her accession to the throne. He had humiliated the Queen in private consultation as he stressed to her that she was now required to reverse the damage she had allowed to be done over 60-odd years as monarch. In the end, she had no choice: to refuse to appoint Smith would have required another general election, which she would have lost. Smith had campaigned against our membership of the European Union, the constant ingress of Africans and Asians into our country, the official promotion of multi-culturalism and the anti-racialist hysteria, and the failure of our judges to uphold English Common Law, including the provisions of the Bill of Rights and Magna Carta. The aged Queen could not be sure of winning an election on a platform to maintain bureaucratic rule, in London and Brussels, in defiance of the constitution she had sworn to uphold.

Smith, surrounded by a phalanx of guards, came out into Downing Street, where workmen were busy removing the illegal structures that prevented the public from gaining access to the Queen’s Highway along the street, and gave more details of what was going to happen. There would be no long and drawn-out court case for the traitors of the Supreme Court: the Queen had agreed to appoint a Star Chamber that would handle the case speedily. The sole question to be resolved was whether those judges had declared themselves to be a Supreme body, no longer, as required under the Common Law, a committee of the House of Lords. If the answer to that question was that they had declared themselves to be so, they would each be publicly executed in Parliament Square the following day. Justice must be seen to be done.

Smith gave a deadline of 2pm for the BBC workers to hand over Broadcasting House. The RAF stood ready to bomb the building, he said. He was prepared to do it. A den of traitors, who had used or misused their control of information to pretend that foreign rule, multi-culturalism, bureaucratic hypertrophy and such like were in the public interest, had to be held to account one way or the other. Commissioner Sir Jamil Ahmed of the Metropolitan Police was also being arrested, he said, indicating that he, and all the other police chiefs in the United Kingdom would be subject to charges of misprision of treason. All of them knew that the entire political class had agreed to support foreign rule and the dispossession of the English people. The law did not permit them not to take action against treason. They were all guilty.

Having delivered a brief explanation of the day’s events, Smith disappeared back inside Number 10. No one knew what would happen next—who else would be arrested or what other buildings would be attacked. For a government to take power—and then take down the Establishment—this was quite unexpected. We knew Smith wanted to withdraw from the EU and was likely to curtail immigration. But no one could have predicted a palace coup on day one of the new administration.

Minutes later, it was reported that troops were surrounding Buckingham Palace. The Queen was inside—the Royal Standard was up—so had they come to defend the Queen or pose a menace to her? Press commentators argued both sides of this point, but those in the know, with connections in the Constitutional Alliance, which had taken power under Tom Smith, insisted the troops had arrived to prevent the defection of the Queen. She could steal out of the Palace and lead the bureaucratic counterattack. What were the troops’ orders if the Royal Family attempted to leave the Palace? Would the troops open fire on the Monarch herself? No one had clear answers. It felt like the October Revolution in Russia: the CA had come to power peacefully, but was now using force to impose its agenda.

Late morning, the BBC flickered back to life. Broadcasts resumed for a good half an hour, in defiance of the Order in Council, with Charlotte Dimbleby, the latest scion of the media family, known affectionately as “Dimplebottom” among the media elite, for some reason, presenting a frenetic denunciation of the elected government. Everyone must come out against the government, she argued.

“Get to Hyde Park as soon as you can. Hyde Park is the meeting place. If the people are united the government will not dare move against us. Bring whatever you need to defend yourselves”.

The BBC’s rogue broadcast had a link-up with a unit on the ground in the park, and sure enough, people were converging in small groups on the park. The Socialist Workers with their loud hailers were there, but there were more people standing on the sidelines watching what would happen. This was a government prepared to use force, and no one knew how far to push their luck. Every few minutes Charlotte and her studio cut into the live broadcast of Hyde Park with yet more pleas for popular manifestations against the new government.

Then shouting was heard at the rear of the studio, as a group of armed men pushed their way into the studio. They fired on the presenters. Charlotte slumped over the desk, and a clear image was broadcast of blood pouring out of her mouth. The cameramen were taken out. And the BBC was off the air again. It was later reported that stormy arguments raged within the BBC on whether to flout the Order in Council, with a radical group gaining control of the airwaves for a time. SAS teams had entered Broadcasting House and BBC facilities in Salford and elsewhere in a bid to prevent the broadcasts, and Charlotte had been gunned down by one of those teams.

Without the BBC, the opposition was in disarray. Sky covered the day’s events, but coverage was restrained: the facts were reported, but no attempt was made to organise popular resistance, lest a military attack on their facilities be mounted too. Finally, the 2pm deadline came and went. Our soldiers were pulled out of the BBC headquarters. A cordon sanitaire was thrown up around the facility, to prevent the workers within from fleeing for their lives. Combat aircraft were heard overhead and within seconds began to strafe the building. The first bomb shattered the windows and was followed by an explosion within. Flames poured out of the windows, with plumes of smoke rising into the heavens, deftly avoided by our airmen. The next bomb and the next found their targets, and soon the building was yellow and black, cloaked in flames, smoke and soot. They came running out of the entrance, but the army was ready for them. All of the workers who sought to leave were machine-gunned down—live on Sky TV. Smith intended the revolution to be televised, as a warning to anyone seeking to resist. The Salford workers gave themselves up, surrendering their facilities, and escaping, however unjustly, with their lives.

By late afternoon all the police chiefs were in custody. More and more reports emerged of more junior judges being arrested. Smith had only mentioned the justices of the Supreme Court, but CA sources told Sky that the entire judiciary would now be held to account. They had enforced European legislation over that passed by our Westminster Parliament, justified by their interpretation of the flagrantly unlawful European Communities Bill 1972, which the Queen had, illegally, purported to sign into law in an act that made King John’s handing over of England to Pope Innocent III a minor act of Royal perjury in comparison. The numbers being arrested continued to climb, but it seemed clear that some police constabularies were refusing to take part in the raids on homes of the members of the judiciary, despite government assurances that police officers with ranks lower than Assistant Commissioner would not be held accountable for political crimes. It would take a while to get full control of the machinery of state, a necessary consequence of a full-fronted attack on the Establishment.

The magistrates were easier to deal with. It seemed these were not going to be executed. The gallows would never be out of operation if all the traitors were hanged, and so some kind of line had to be drawn. It was announced on Sky that magistrates who had colluded in the administration of unlawful imposts such as the Council Tax—in other words, all of the magistrates, as they had all agreed to enforce “statutes” that flouted the Common Law’s prohibition of personal taxation established ever since the Peasants’ Revolt—would be subject to large fines provided they handed themselves in to the nearest police station, and would thereby not forfeit their lives. A similar concession was available for council officials who had levied a range of “fines”, in violation of the Bill of Rights. They handed themselves in in such large numbers there was no room to sit down in police jails.

The government hadn’t yet announced what was to happen to senior civil servants, including those at the Revenue and Customs who had claimed an extra-judicial right to levy fines. This was partly for fear of a collapse of the entire machinery of Whitehall. Smith was going to deal with the senior civil servants over the next few days. What counted for now was to gain physical control of London. MPs and Lords were another group of potential targets, but once again Smith had delayed an accounting with them until later in the week. Ultimately, everyone who was anyone in the British state was a traitor, but you couldn’t get them all. It was necessary, however, to get enough to them to instil fear in the rest and thus extract compliance from what remained of the state machinery.

The crowd in Hyde Park marched around, yelling slogans, and tried to move into Green Park and thus towards the Palace, but were thwarted by the troops. Penned into the park, with insufficient toilet facilities and growing weary of standing around and arguing with each other, they started to drift home. It looked by the end of the day as if Smith was basically in control. He had removed the organs of propaganda, and seized some of the key members of the Establishment. Most importantly, he had most of the army’s top brass on side, assisted by the consideration that he was a constitutionally elected head of government with the notional support of the Queen and the Privy Council on his side. He was starting to wonder what to do next. He knew he needed to act fast, as the Establishment was unlikely to go down without a fight.

At 10pm, as the new Cabinet met for the first time, news was received, by text message, that an unauthorised gathering of troops had been spotted in Horseguards Parade. This information had not been relayed by the Cabinet Secretary or the other members of the civil service in the Cabinet Office, who feigned ignorance. But thousands of men with automatic weapons and a few tanks between them had now congregated, close enough for an assault on Downing Street. This was mutiny and this was treason—and Smith knew instinctively that Sir Jocelyn Neville, the Cabinet Secretary, was not as ignorant as he made out to be. A brief call to the Palace established that the Queen had not authorised the gathering of troops, or was not admitting to having done so.

Tanks were moved in place to take on the rebels, and the media got ready for a pitched battle on Horseguards. Negotiators moved in defuse the situation. Floodlights lit up the area, and leaflets were dropped by helicopter telling the men gathered there what they were doing was treason. As the negotiations wore on, Crown forces thickened in numbers, to the point where the rebellion was seen to have failed. The commanders of the rebel force handed themselves over, and were executed on the spot, in front of the cameras on Horseguards Parade, without the luxury of a court martial. The rest of the men were arrested, but assured their lives would be spared.

By midnight, the rebellion was over. Sir Jocelyn was taken into “protective custody”—a ruse bureaucrats like himself had often used to justify unlawful imprisonment of political dissidents. The Cabinet Office was emptied of civil servants, and trusted security personnel brought in to sweep the building for eavesbugging devices and to examine the email boxes of all Cabinet Office personnel. Smith decided that they could not rely on existing Cabinet Office staff, who were likely to be in collusion with rebel elements. They were all to be prevented from turning up for work in the morning, with their salaries and pensions cancelled. The failure of the rebellion was a good sign. A window of opportunity had been created to build a free state. It could only be built by intimidating and cashiering the senior personnel of the previous regime.

In the morning, the Star Chamber met. No one knew where the Star Chamber was meant to meet, as the Star Chamber had been abolished after the Civil War, but Smith decided to hold the trial of the judges in Westminster Hall. As no plea of mitigation would be accepted, all that had to be established was whether the justices of the Supreme Court had claimed to be a Supreme Court. The judges of the Star Chamber were handpicked; the verdict was never in doubt and the trial took 15 minutes, all told.

Immediately afterwards, the judges were led in chains into Parliament Square, where the gallows had been erected, waiting for them. And, one by one, they were led up on to the platform, submitted their heads to the noose and a head covering and took their final leap. It could not have been done any other way, or else the judiciary would have frustrated all attempts at reform. The final execution of the junior judges would take weeks, but the machinery was now in motion.

Smith responded to the news of the cashiering of the judges of the Supreme Court with a statement before the cameras in Downing Street:

“I have just received a message from an official of the Star Chamber. It reads, ‘be pleased to inform Her Majesty that the judicial conspiracy against the law has been crushed’”.

In the days that followed, MPs and peers who had supported the bureaucratic regime were arrested too, a development that had been expected, although in some quarters it had been hoped that politicians would be spared in the interests of “toleration” and democracy. Smith knew that such limp-wristed considerations would defeat the revolution he was putting in place. We needed a new Establishment, and the best way to get it was to hang the old one.

For too long our political system has been under the control of a group of people who have never represented the people that elected them. A person who is elected by a constituency should no longer have the right of personal opinion. Their only concern should be voicing the concerns of the majority of their constituents.

When there is a vote in Parliament the elected representative should simply vote on what the majority of his constituents want.

In the case of Capital punishment personal feelings of morality should not come into the equation. If 60% of the people he represents want a return of Capital Punishment he should be obliged to vote for it.

In the case of voting for a referendum on Europe the same conditions apply. Failure to represent the people should be regarded as an illegal act resulting in the representative losing the right to stand in an election for life.

MP’s are simply mouth pieces for the people, when the wishes of the people are treated with contempt we find ourselves in the situation we have today. Lies and personal gain are the principles our MP’s live by. False promises and dishonest lip service has been the cornerstone of UK politics for decades.

All that is required to run a democratic government is duly elected members of the public that represent the wishes of the people from their area, and a group of legal advisers to ensure no laws are broken in the implementation of any decisions voted upon.

Political parties would be outlawed in business as they are openly rigging results, yet the public have no authority to seek justice in this is matter. Our Monarch is only interested in her private gravy train, the family business and making sure her face stays on stamps.

In reality democracy is probably the most corrupt form of government ever conceived. It is easily manipulated with secret deals and personal interest among the elected membership. Indeed it could be argued that general elections are nothing more than continuing the pretence of a charade we mistakenly call freedom.

Since I was eighteen there has never been a government in power that expressly served the wishes of the people. In fact I struggle to think of one popular government during the entire time. What is needed is a complete change in political philosophy, a change of earthquake magnitude that alters completely the political system of the country. We need a system whereby the wishes of the people are implemented without the personal opinions of a few representatives making undemocratic decisions on our behalf.

We need revolution!

We’re Losing Revenue! Quick, Let’s Tax E-Cigs! Could this be what it’s really all about?

Italian MEP Giancarlo Scottà tabled this extraordinary written question a couple of weeks ago.

I wish to put a question to the Council regarding an issue which has recently been attracting a great deal of interest, but which has never been addressed from the point of view set out below.

I am referring to ‘electronic cigarettes’, devices considered to be ‘nicotine-containing products’ which therefore fall within Article 18 of the proposal for a directive of the European Parliament and of the Council on the approximation of the laws, regulations and administrative provisions of the Member States concerning the manufacture, presentation and sale of tobacco and related products (COM(2012)0788 — 2012/0366 (COD)).
The consumption of traditional cigarettes provides the Member States with sizeable revenues, as a result of the substantial taxes to which they are subject.

According to a recent report by ANSA (Italian news agency) of 21 April 2013, in the first two months of 2013 alone, Italy’s coffers registered a loss of EUR 132 million, corresponding to a fall in revenue from duty on tobacco of approximately 7.6%. Of course, this shortfall cannot be completely blamed on the increasing use of electronic cigarettes, but it is certainly partly responsible.

In light of the above, can the Council state what action it intends to take to address the differences in tax revenue materialising in State coffers following the proliferation of electronic cigarettes, which currently appear to be free from any form of duty?

Now, just pause for a moment and digest that.

He seems very upset that Italians are stopping smoking at such a rate that it is depriving his government of moolah. This, from someone in a profession of which approximately 100% claim that they would be delighted if everyone in the world quit smoking immediately.

What a surprise, then, that he is hinting at taxes being applied to e-cigs for the sole reason that they are stopping people from smoking and, therefore, reducing Italian government receipts.

Looks very much like that is the gist of it, eh?

Now, it’s easy to condemn Scottà for his absurdly hypocritical concern but you can bet your house that more politically astute MEPs have had this very same thought bouncing around their heads ever since the e-cig revolution burst on the scene and disturbed their comfy status quo.

It dovetails nicely into the fears of the tobacco control industry too, doesn’t it? You see, they’re desperately constructing a damage limitation exercise while e-cigs continue to soar in popularity and show up their movement as being laughably ineffective, wedded to corporate pharma interests and – the best bit – not as interested in health as their prior emotional string-pulling has led the world to believe.

We seem, then, to be witnessing an unholy alliance of grasping state representatives weeping as their budgets decline, while simultaneously an unwanted guest – in the form of e-cigs – breezes in and smashes the sound system at tobacco control’s carefully crafted mood music party.

Legislators want the money, obsessive anti-smokers want the decades-long ego-stroking to continue (as well as the cash it affords them too, natch). And they all hate e-cigs for fucking it up.

It would neatly explain why Linda McAvan – the most dangerous European alive today – and her junk scientist chums are endorsing utter garbage as fact during internet televised kangaroo ‘workshops. We’ve seen the same behaviour before, and I’ve written about it, but never has it been displayed so honestly in the public domain.

It also proves that – at the highest level – the ability of e-cigs to aid smoking cessation is incontestable no matter how much tobacco control circle their wagons and try to deny it.

If it was truly about health, furrow-browed politicians who harangue us relentlessly to abandon tobacco – and the lucrative industry which has profited by producing ever more imaginative but ineffectual wheezes to bully smokers into submission – would be welcoming the advent of the e-cig and allowing them to be advertised as smoking cessation devices.

Like I said, that would be if it were truly about health which, of course, it has never been.

Nice of Signor Scottà to admit it.

H/T Rursus via e-mail

We need to ‘gird our loins’ and go to battle folks, I need your assistance on this one! Please retweet this post to anyone you think might pay attention, and kick into action those who you think will continue dozing. I know its easier to continue playing solitaire – but you could put your computer to better use this morning, trust me.

I shall explain.

A year ago, I wrote of a worrying case where Social Workers went to the High Court for permission to enter the home of a person of sound mind because ‘it was thought’ that possibly they were making decisions as a result of ‘undue influence’ by their son who lived with them. No one actually knew whether they were or not, but on the basis that they might be – such permission was granted. Fair enough, a judge had listened to the arguments from ‘a’ social worker – we are not allowed to know who – and a document was drawn up delineating what subjects the son was allowed to speak of to his parents in their own home…in particular, he should not discuss with his parents any arrangements for securing the family home. What happened to the home in which he and his parents lived was to be entirely a matter for the local authority to decide if and when they thought it should be sold…..presumably if and when the parents became vulnerable through mental incapacity.

Social Workers were outraged – why should they have to grovel before a judge and explain themselves before they could enter a home and decide the basis on which family relations should be conducted? The fact that they wanted to do so should be perfectly sufficient! They lobbied hard to be given an automatic right of entry to any household they wished, irregardless of whether the occupants were vulnerable for any reason…in order to dole out health advice or dictate how individuals conducted their family affairs.

The Government agreed to consult on the matter. Raccoon readers were kind enough to make a magnificent response to the survey! The results of that consultation were published a few days ago. The Government were not minded to give that power to Social Workers:

We believe it is highly significant that members of the public were far more strongly against the proposal compared to health and social care professionals [...] it is clear that some people perceive themselves at greater risk of unwarranted intervention by social workers than of abuse in their home.

The Social Workers have thrown a hissy fit! We, the public, don’t understand! Nanny knows best! We have to be encouraged to eat our ‘five a day’, and Social Workers are the people to do it… no sooner was the Government’s conclusion to the survey announced than the Social Workers flounced into print:

A survey of social workers carried out by the College during the consultation had found overwhelming support for the power, with practitioners citing cases where they would have used it had it been available. Walker said:

“It seems that the weighting [the government has] given to individuals’ responses doesn’t reflect the evidence or the professional view.”

They are mobilising ‘the professional view’ to lobby the Government before the second reading on the 21st May of the Bill that would give them this power. This is becoming a battle of wills. Nobody is objecting to them going to court if they really believe that there is a specific problem in a specific household – but that is a world away from all Social Workers having the power to enter any house at any time and dictate how the occupants live!

Remember that Social Workers do not have to be publicly named, nor do the local authority have to be publicly named – There have been 358 applications from Bristol City Council, South Gloucestershire, North Somerset and Bath & North East Somerset councils in the last 3 years alone demanding the right to take control of households, their finances and the welfare of the occupants. Just in one relatively small area!

Newcastle MP Paul Farrelly has written to the Lord Chancellor demanding to know why Stoke on Trent City Council has requested that some families be imprisoned for challenging orders governing the welfare of their loved ones. (No public record exists of Judge Cardinal’s ruling on Miss Maddocks and secrecy rules forbade anyone to name Stoke on Trent City Council who had requested that Miss Maddocks be imprisoned. The social worker who gave evidence against her could not be named either.)

Kingswood MP Chris Skidmore said:

‘It cannot be right that local authorities and council bureaucrats should run roughshod over the lives of individuals and their families. At the centre of elderly care must be the concept that families and loved ones must have a right to care and look after the best interests of patients, whatever their condition’.”

I have spoken to John Hemmings MP on this matter, and he told me this morning, quoting yet another case:

‘Although the senior judiciary have now moved to stop secret imprisonments for contempt of court, it remains that we have a number of other secret prisoners where there is no public accountability as to why people have their liberty denied. I have passed the Rachel Pullen case to the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights (RP v The United Kingdom). The key to this case is that as with many others in fact she does have capacity. It is simply that the courts have ignored all the evidence that she has capacity and only taken into account the single expert that says she doesn’t. I have provided examples of a number of cases where the capacity assessment is plainly wrong.

In England we allow a single social worker to imprison someone by claiming that they don’t have capacity – and the Courts will accept this. That is basically wrong.’

They are misusing the power they have at present, a power that they argued was essential to protect the vulnerable, the young, the elderly, the mentally incapacitated. Now they seek to extend that power to all of us, at any time, under any circumstances, just because they think they should – and they don’t want a nosy judge overseeing how they use that power.

They don’t like the fact that the Government listened to the public in that consultation – they want our voices to be overruled. What do we know, ignoramuses that we are?

Lord Reid once said:

“English law goes to great lengths to protect a person of full age and capacity from interference with his personal liberty. We have too often seen freedom disappear in other countries not only by coups d’état but by gradual erosion: and often it is the first step that counts. So it would be unwise to make even minor concessions.”

Please help to reinforce the will of those in parliament who are listening, and will try to protect our freedom. Lord Howe will be introducing the ‘Care Bill’ into the House of Lords for its second reading on May 21st 2013. Make sure he doesn’t think the public’s response to the consultation was a ‘fluke’ – and drown out the voices of the professionals!

Its in your ‘best interests’. You can e-mail Lord Howe via this link. Tell him that you do want your voice to be heard!

http://www.libertarian.co.uk/multimedia/2013-05-14-sig-porn.mp3

In the timeline below I have tried to record the dates relating to her trial and where possible the reasons for its interminable, Kafka-esque delays. My sources for this have been the printed media and a variety of blogs, so it is possible that some details may need amending. Nevertheless, I believe the overall picture of the way the powers-that-be are dealing with this fundamental freedom of speech case is damning. There are now two cases and multiple charges against West. Does anyone know what the current position is regarding these?

Whether anyone agrees with Emma West’s comments or not, she should have the right to voice her opinion in a free society without then having her life effectively put on hold by the marmoreal process of the courts, with the threat of prison and the forcible removal of her children hanging over her head.

27 November 2011
- A video of Emma West recorded on board the tram where she was travelling is placed on YouTube. The incident recorded is believed to have taken place on 28 October.
- Emma West is arrested and charged with two racially-aggravated public order offences.

28 November 2011
- First appearance in court.

6 December 2011
- Bail is denied on the grounds that she is being held in “protective custody” because she and her family are in danger.

7 December 2011- Remanded in custody at HMP Bronzefield, a “restricted status” (between top level Category A and medium level Category B) prison.

13 December 2011
- Bail is granted.

3 January 2012
- Case scheduled.
- Case adjourned.

17 February 2012
- Case scheduled. Emma West appears in court and pleads not guilty.
- A second charge of racially aggravated fear or provocation of violence is laid against West by fellow tram passenger Ena-May Eubanks, who claims that West punched her. West denies that this incident ever happened.
- Case adjourned.

11 May 2012
- Pre-hearing review scheduled.

11 June 2012
- Case scheduled.
- Case adjourned because the CPS is seeking further psychiatric reports.

16 July 2012
- Case scheduled.
- Case adjourned because the CPS is seeking further psychiatric reports.

5 September 2012
- Case scheduled.
- Case adjourned because the CPS is seeking further psychiatric reports.

2 January 2013
- Case scheduled.
- Case adjourned because unspecified expert not available.

3 March 2013
- Emma West is scheduled to appear in court on charges of assaulting two police officers at her home in January 2013. She denies these charges.
- The trial on these charges is rescheduled to the next day.

4 March 2013
- Assault case scheduled for trial.
- Case adjourned.

10 April 2013
- Public order case scheduled for trial.
- Case adjourned for legal reasons.

15 April 2013
- Assault case scheduled for trial.
- ?

10 May 2013
- Public order case listed for mention.
- ?

Unanimous Consent and the Utopian Vision
or
I Dreamed I Was a Signatory In My Maidenform Bra
by L. Neil Smith

The relative invisibility of Libertarianism after 40 years of backbreaking, heartbreaking labor, has little to do with any lack of money, ideas, personnel, or anything else Libertarians may occasionally whine about. It isn’t the fault of an evil northeastern Liberal conspiracy. Nor, as the more timid among us often recommend, is it reason to tone down Libertarian rhetoric, to soften principle or its expression, to make it more conservative or “practical” in approach. All of that has been tried, again & again.
What Libertarians lack, in their hearts & minds, what they fail to communicate to others, is a vision of the new civilization they intend creating. It may be sufficient motivation, for Libertarians, that America today, politically, economically, socially, is repulsive. It may be enough, for Libertarians, that what they propose is morally right. It is not enough for others. Most people require a fairly concrete picture of the future which will motivate them to learn what Libertarians mean by “right” & “wrong”, & inspire them to work toward its fulfillment.
It may appear contradictory that the achievement of practical ends relies on fantasy. Nothing could be further from the truth. What Libertarians need is a foot in the door. There’s no conflict between imagination & realism, any more than there is between “radical abolitionist” & “moderate gradualism”. Each has a role in the creation of progress. Neither can afford to try operating without the other. Division-of- labor is more than an abstract economic principle, it’s a matter of life or death for the cause of individual liberty. Utopianism, far from being a hindrance or embarrassment, is a vital, effective means toward that goal.
Libertarians take their own philosophy too much for granted. Their concept of what it can accomplish is too abstract. They wrongly assume others can see its potential as clearly as they do. They often fail to see it themselves. As a remedy, they must ask themselves, each day for the rest of their lives, certain fundamental questions. Why are we Libertarians? What do we wish to accomplish? What constitutes success? By what signs will we know we’ve won? What’s in it for us? What’s in it for me? What do I really want?
Their present answers range from the negative to the obscure. ‘Well, you know …” “Because I want to see that bastard (the idea’s to insert the bastard of your choice) get what’s coming to him!” “Because what’s going on now is wrong & I want to stop it” “Because I’m afraid civilization’s gonna collapse unless we do something”. A common variation noted by Dave Nolan is, “Because I know civilization is going to collapse — & I wanna be around to say ‘I told you so’!” The best of this rather unsatisfactory lot I first heard from English Libertarians who said, “Because, even if I were convinced my efforts would came to nothing, I can’t honestly imagine doing anything else.”
I’d like to share with you some of my answers. Before I began spreading them around through my novels, they were somewhat different from those of most Libertarians. To the extent that I’m a fanatic, they’re responsible. They’re what drive & motivate me. They’re the reason I’ll keep disturbing the peace until I’m hauled off to some 21st Century Super-Dachau & lasered to death, or the pigeons are paying respects to my statue in some private city park.
One, of course, comes from years of filling my head with “garbage”, pulp science fiction in which I watched cultures, societies, whole galactic empires created, tinkered with, torn down, & built all over again by talented (& some not-so-talented) yarn-spinners who, like me, were obsessed with finding out what makes civilizations tick. They taught me that the future is malleable, mutable, sometimes even by one person standing at a sensitive-enough leverage point. I’ve been looking for that leverage-point ever since. I have an idea what I want the future to look like. I want a principal role in its making. In short, I have my own Utopian dream, rooted in the Libertarian philosophy of Unanimous Consent. I want to see it come true soon enough to enjoy it myself. That’s what I really want.
Many years ago, Joan Baez commented smugly that there are no right- wing foIk songs. I’d noticed the same thing, but as a professional guitar player busily compromising his new-fledged Objectivist principles to the Goldwater campaign, I was disinclined to gloat about it.
There are no right-wing Utopias, either, no novels of the colorful Buckleyite future. The conservative view of heaven is the status quo ante — a dead, flat, black-&-white daguerreotype of a past that never existed. Any status quo will do, as long as it ain’t Red. If people are tortured in banana republic jails, it’s acceptable as long as they’re not Communist jails. If a long train of abuses & usurpations are visited upon individual freedom in this country, it’s fine, as long as they’re not left-wing abuses & usurpations, & even better, if they’re in the name of National Security.
Traditionally, Utopia is the territory of the left. Imaginative stories gave ordinary people images of what had previously been abstractions, & this had more to do with the progress of socialism than anything Marx, Engels, Lenin or Geraldo Rivera ever did. The dictionary, in a burst of candor, defines Utopia as “the ideal state where all is ordered for the best, for mankind as a whole, & evils such as poverty & misery do not exist”: not only self-contradictory in practice, but more than sufficient reason why Utopia is a province populated, almost exclusively, by the enemies of freedom.
However, the word “Utopia” only became synonymous with ”impossible dream” when the internal inconsistencies, the inherent cynicism, the utter failure of socialism became unmistakable to everyone. In some instances, its sterile, no-exit character was already visible in the pages of otherwise optimistic Victorian novels before it became political reality, & Utopia bored itself to death. Socialist victories in the real world became disasters, creating economic, social, & military devastation, smashing the Utopian promise along the lay.
Thus Utopian novels fell out of print when idealists on the left stopped believing their own fairy tales. Dispirited, disoriented, beaten in a way they never understood, reduced to petulant nihilism, they couldn’t dream any more. Rather than being exceptions, today’s few, sad, threadbare left-Utopias make the case. Read B.F. Skinner’s Walden Two, for its constipated lack of scope. Examine Ursula LeGuin’s The Dispossessed for its injured socialist perplexity. Try Arthur Clarke’s The Songs of Distant Earth. He’s peddling shopworn goods & he knows it. He ought to, he lives in Mrs. Bandaranaika’s Sri Lanka!
The great tragedy is that, when Left Utopia fell into dishonor, it took all the rest with it. Shattered socialist dreams have discredited any dreams at all of a rational, humane, social order. Libertarianism was born an orphan in an age of disUtopias like Brave New World, 1984, & Eugene Zamiatin ‘s We. Ayn Rand wrote disUtopias, Anthem, Atlas Shrugged, We The Living, admirably showing us the dirty, bloodstained underside of collectivism’s brilliant promises. But she & others like her made too few promises of their own. She pointed out a great deal to avoid, but very little to aspire to, which, I submit, is piss-poor motivational psychology.
Before I began writing, there were semi-Libertarian Utopias, glimmers in the works of Robert Heinlein & Poul Anderson, the short stories of Eric Frank Russell, brighter, more explicit pictures drawn by H. Beam Piper & Jerome Tuccille. But somehow they failed to stick to my philosophical ribs.
Nor were our “basic” Libertarian works much better. Where most Utopian fiction failed to be Libertarian enough, Libertarian non-fiction failed to be Utopian at all. Where was the glowing promise in John Hospers’ Libertarianism, Murray Rothbard’s For A New Liberty, Roger MacBride’s A New Dawn, or David Friedman’s The Machinery of Freedom? Where was the excitement in Paul Lepanto’s Return to Reason, Harry Brown’s How I Found Freedom In An Unfree World, or Bob Lefevre’s This Bread Is Mine? Where was the color in Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson? Where was the fire in any of them? Was it enough merely to be satisfied that most of our “beginner’s books” weren’t too boring?
If Rand had written The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, or edited its pessimistic ending, if Heinlein had written Atlas Shrugged, pacing it like Door Into Summer, Dave Bergland would be in the White House right now, auctioning off the furniture, because we’d have captured people’s imaginations. Their hearts & minds, money & votes would have followed faithfully behind.
People want Utopia. They’ve watched Star Trek until the emulsion wore off the celluloid & helped Star Wars outgross World War II, because Kirk, Spock, & Luke Skywalker assure them that there is a future, one worth looking forward to, in which human beings (& other critters) will still be doing fascinating, dangerous things. Having a good time.
It says here 84% of us got hooked reading Atlas Shrugged, which I’ve described as anti-Utopian. But it wasn’t just to watch civilization crumbling around my ears that I waded through that kilopage. Its fascination was in an all-too-brief glimpse of a small, working, slightly kinky Libertarian society. Atlas Shrugged is mainly disUtopian, but, in the end, every bit as cheery as Piper’s A Planet For Texans, & almost as delightfully bloodthirsty.
Those of you who haven’t read my novels may well ask what kind of Utopian vision I think Libertarians ought to communicate. Once, in a moment of mixed premises & moral depravity, I defined it in terms of “freedom, immortality, the stars”. No, I didn’t dig that out of the pages of The National Enquirer, I meant freedom in the Libertarian sense of society without coercion, immortality as a foreseeable extension of individual freedom into time, & the stars as an equally logical extension of that freedom into space, as human beings reach for what seems to me to be their evolutionary Manifest Destiny. For our purposes, Utopia might just be a place where people look forward to getting up in the morning.
I do have more specific desires, a more detailed dream. It’s expressed in the Covenant of Unanimous Consent which I first wrote as a kind of substitute for the Constitution & the Bill of Rights & later included in my science fiction novel of the Whiskey Rebellion, The Gallatin Divergence. The Covenant now circulates in more than forty countries, thanks, among others, to Dagny Sharon & Libertarian International. It has Signatories in a majority of the states & provinces of North America. I wouldn’t be surprised if the desire & dreams expressed in the Covenant are similar to your own. If we differ, it’s because I don’t believe it pays to be bashful about it. We must share the dream with others, so they’ll begin to work toward fulfilling it, too.
For practice, let’s try building a Utopia right now. You already know the rules. Morally, in this future society, each individual is free to live his or her life as an end in itself, & to defend it against anyone who would compel otherwise. Ethically, this is accomplished by adopting a single custom: individuals are forbidden (the specific mechanism, you’ll appreciate, is still being debated) to initiate force against others. Socially & economically, a voluntary exchange of values, rather than force, is the customary basis for human relationships.
H.G. Wells used to start with the premise “What if …?” What if you could travel to the Moon in a gravity-proof ball? What if you fell asleep & woke up 200 years later? What if you found a way to become invisible? I have a what if for you. What if one Commandment, “Thou shalt not initiate force”, became the fundamental operating principle of society, soon enough for all of us to see it?
For the moment, we’ll skip over how we got to Utopia from disUtopia, although it is the critical question. That’s not quite the cop-out it seems. We’re trying to envision a new society uncontaminated by a previous social order. In science, this is called a controlled experiment. In writing, this is called poetic license. On the other hand, our Utopian vision, what it says to us & to others, can be a major force, in itself, in getting us from here to there. So I guess that makes things even.
We’ll also skip over the possibility, some say inevitability, of thermonuclear war or a spectacularly unpleasant economic & civil collapse. There are reasons, as you’ll see later, why I’m unconvinced of the inevitability of it all. In any case, it’ll either happen or it won’t. If it does, we’ll either live through it or we won’t, & we’ll succeed in carrying off the Millennium, with or without an introductory catastrophe, or, in the long run, like John Maynard Keynes, we’ll all be dead.
A frequent error Utopia-builders make, understandably, is leaving items they’re unaware of out of their extrapolation. In the surviving Utopian mutation of the leftist repertoire, Doomsday predicting, Paul Ehrlich, the Club of Rome, the Ozone boys, & most science fiction writers make a mistake amidst their orgasmic cries of disaster: they aren’t figuring on Signatories to the Covenant in particular or Libertarians in general.
Before we get smug, remember I said this is our fault. Look how it happened: think of all those “Buy Gold, Buy Silver, Buy Irradiated Garbanzo Beans” ads, pamphlets, & seminars we’re so fond of. In our projections of the future, we’ve made the same mistake — we forgot about us! Aren’t we gonna affect the future? You bet your dried war-surplus fruit preserves we are!
The shape of the future is always determined, just like the present was, by two factors, almost exclusively. The first is the virtually unlimited power of the individual human mind, & of the free market system which is its most monumental achievement. The second factor, often forgotten, is no less important: the inefficacy of evil.
It won’t surprise anyone at this conference to hear of the power of mind & market. The human mind may inhabit what one cynic called “a sort of skin disease on a ball of dirt”, but its grasp encompasses the span from subatomic particles to the intergalactic void. The mind alone is the reason our species became dominant on this planet in a microsecond of geologic time. Yet, aren’t we confronted every day with the victories & gloatings of evil? How can it be inefficacious when it owns the world?
Let’s ask what condition humanity, its culture, technology, & economy would be in, if villains always won. Hasn’t there been overall progress in the human condition over the last several thousand years? Would there have been Scientific Method, an Industrial Revolution, a Declaration of Independence, a Non- Aggression Principle, or a Covenant of Unanimous Consent if evil were all that omnipotent? Despite the most hyperthyroid governments, the most pointlessly murderous wars, & the most disgustingly despicable badguys in all of history, 20th Century America offers the highest standard of living & the greatest individual liberty that has ever been available.
None of this is any testimony to government, war, or badguys, but to the human mind & the ineptitude of its enemies. The mind & market always find a way. The point liberals, conservatives, & many Libertarians always miss is that this isn’t any reason not to ask what kind of world a truly uninhibited human mind would create, economically, socially, technologically. The three areas overlap, but we’ll begin with economics.
The economic future will be as different from our times as ours are from pre-industrial eras. No one in 1687 could imagine freedom from the constant threat of death by starvation, exposure, or disease, which characterized those times. Few in 1987 can visualize a future of vastly greater wealth, world peace, & no bureaucrats to pry into every moment of their daily lives. Historical blindness works both ways, of course. Those born in the future will react with a mixture of embarrassment & amusement when we try explaining to them. The insane were once beaten, tortured, & chained, a practice that seems ludicrous & terrible to us. The IRS will seem equally barbaric to our grandchildren. We’ll try to tell them, but they’ll attribute it to senile dementia & never really believe us.
With taxation gone, not only will we have twice as much money to spend, but it will go twice as far, since those who produce goods & services won’t have to pay taxes, either. In one stroke we’ll be effectively four times as rich. There’s no simple way to estimate the cost of regulation. Truckers say they could ship goods for one-fifth the present price without it. Many businesses spend a third of their overhead complying with stupid rules & filling out forms. The worst damage it does is to planning. Since you don’t know what next year’s whim of Congress will be, how can you plan? Plans that require ten, twenty, fifty years to nature? Might as well forget them.
Let’s figure that deregulation will cut prices, once again, by half. Now our actual purchasing power, already quadrupled by deTAXification, is doubled again. We now have eight times our former wealth! What kind of world will that result in? Future generations won’t remotely grasp the concept of inflation, or that the State once imprisoned people for competing with its own counterfeiting operation. They’ll be used to a stable diversity of competing trade commodities, gold, uranium, cotton, wheat, cowrie shells, which will not only flatten a lot of wildly swinging economic curves, but give newspapers something to print besides government handouts: “Cowries sold late on the market today at 84. Oats & barley at 42. Uranium at 87.” 87 what? Sheep, gold grams, kilowatts, gallons of oil, who cares, as long as they’re free market rates, determined by uncoerced bidding, buying, & selling?
Hardly anyone, of course, will carry sheep, seashells, or barrels of oil around with them. 21st Century barter will be carried out on ferromagnetic media in electrical impulses. But I suspect a few of us surly old curmudgeons, having spent our lives being swindled with paper & plastic, will insist on something in our pockets that jingles. Young folks will look knowingly at us & wink.
The future, as I see it, canes in segments: first, continuation, for however long, of things as they are, counterpointed by our increasing success at convincing people of the necessity & desirability of Unanimous Consent.
Having sold people on freedom, we’ll make changes from whatever’s left of what we have now to a truly free society: degovernmentalization of culture & the economy characterized by an eight-fold increase in individual purchasing power, & an end to the importance of the State in our lives. Eight times richer, we’ll be free to do whatever we wish with our new wealth. Why stick with black & white when you can have color TV in every room? Why drive a ’77 Ford when you can afford a brand-new Excalibur? Why eat hamburger when you can have steak & lobster every night?
Increased spending appears in the economy as increased demand, leading, despite government economists, not to shortages, but increased production — somebody’s gotta make all those TVs, Excaliburs, steaks & lobsters — which creates other delightful consequences. With all that loose money, there’s new investment in established companies & zillions of new ones trying to satisfy everyone’s newfound consumer greed. New factories will spring up, old ones expand, obsolete machinery will be junked & new installed. More people will be working, producing goods & services demanded by a newly-rich population.
As labor becomes scarcer, wages will skyrocket, hours shorten, work- weeks truncate. “Headhunters” will flourish, not only stealing managerial talent, but bribing assembly workers to desert for even better wages, conditions, & benefits. Unable to figure out what happened, unions will dry up and blow away. Despite increased wages & benefits (leading to more buying, demand, production, & jobs), prices will plummet as demand drives industry to greater efficiency. Plants now standing idle half the time will operate fullblast around the clock. Society will be geared to operating 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Against a chronic labor shortage, capitalists will take measures like free training, day-care, occupational therapy. Everything socialism expected from government, the market will provide, as companies compete ruthlessly for workers. Companies desperate for our talents will have to change their petty, coercive manners. Restraints on your freedom, insults to your intelligence, will disappear, simply because, for once, they need you, not some anonymous, numbered, plug-in module, but you.
Oh, they’ll resist. They’ll try imports & foreign labor, but it’ll be their undoing, as living & working standards – & expectations — arise abroad. And free world trade will have another effect: increased demand, increased production, more jobs & lower prices. Monotonous, isn’t it?
They’ll try more automation, but that’s another trap because it always results in more — not less — employment. For every quill-pushing 19th Century clerk perched at his desk, how many computer designers, engineers, manufacturers, assemblers, installers, repairmen, number jockeys, & key-punchers are there today? For every buggy-whip maker, how many folks involved in automotive ignitions? And automation has another side-effect: it increases production, which lowers prices.
In a free society, the availability & quality of goods & services increases constantly while prices drop. Wages & living standards improve continuously. What we now call a “boom” is normal & permanent, &, with no government around bloating the currency, good times have nothing to do with inflation. The “forced draft” advances in technology we associate with war are a snail’s pace, when an entire people is free to pursue the buck with all ten greedy little fingers. Which is why them future whippersnappers’ll think we’re hallucinating about the bad old days of price-control, strikes, inflation, tariffs, & the IRS. And they’ll want to know why we didn’t buy out those pestiferous oil-sheiks with our lunch money.
Most problems are trivial, viewed in the proper perspective. The high-tech solution to our strange desire for flat clothes wasn’t a bigger, more complicated automated ironing-board, but simply clothes that stayed flat. The wrong perspective can lead to disaster. In the 1890s, according to Bob LeFevre, the government decided, Club of Rome fashion, that mere private corporations would never withstand the costs of prospecting, drilling, extracting, refining, & distributing petroleum. Therefore, oil should be a State monopoly. A book I have from the 50s opines that no single government could finance an expedition to the Moon & it would be done by the United Nations. (If you think Challenger was a mess, think what that would have been like.) These predictions should be kept in mind whenever we contemplate the inevitability of disaster or the impossibility of our dreams. The only prediction we can make safely about the future is that it will be far more fantastic than we can safely predict.
We now live in a cramped, narrow, depressed culture, largely unaware of its limitations simply because there’s never been anything better. Faced with sizeable problems, we mistakenly view them from the level to which we’re limited by this society. Solving our problems demands a vastly wider scope. We have to learn to think big, bigger than we’ve ever dreamed or dared.
Take the objection that firing 15 million bureaucrats would cause a depression. They’re unlikely to support us if it means doing away with their own jobs. LP candidates keep a low profile on this subject. But think big: as Hospers pointed out, millions of GIs were absorbed into the post-WW II economy without a ripple, despite less than free market conditions. We can get the Utopian message across, even to government workers, with a slogan like Australian John Zube’s “Vote Yourself Rich”. A booming free market has chronic labor shortages. No one will have to persuade bureaucrats to enter the private sector. They’ll desert in hordes. The State will shrink like the little dot when you turn off your TV, & vanish.
Other crises are amenable to the same sort of reasoning. I’m not a very enthusiastic catastrophist, although current government liabilities seem to spell doom for Western civilization. Social Security is short several trillion bucks, & it now looks like the early 21st Century will go down in a flourish of Molotov cocktails. In 1666, a great London fire wiped out a third of the total wealth of England, a catastrophic loss amounting to 10 million dollars. Could it be we’re using the wrong scale to assess our problems? Trillions seems like about as much money as there’ll ever be, but “seems” is a pretty conditional word. We still have enough time to create a market so vast & strong that several trillion dollars seems trivial by comparison. The Utopian vision will buy us time & hasten the day when a free economy straightens out the messes left by our predecessors.
Trade & automation will shoot living standards up dizzily. Those prone to Future Shock are in for a rough ride. New materials, production methods, life-styles & opportunities will arise by the myriad every day. Every hour. Already in our times, a manufacturing counter- revolution is occurring. Investment casting, laser & electron discharge cutting, detonic welding, computer- controlled machining, are decreasing the plastic & cardboard in our lives, increasing titanium, steel, & glass. There may be fewer stampings & spotwelds over the coming decades, more solid forgings. At the same time, plastics seem more like steel & glass every day, while cardboard gets stronger & longer lasting. As uranium was once thrown aside to get at lead & tin, we’re stumbling over untold sources of wealth, energy, & comfort. Nations won’t just emerge, they’ll splash like the over-ripe melons Marx mentioned, but in a different way than he intended, into the 21st Century. Marshall McCluhan’s one-horse Global Village will turn into Times Squared.
New territories opened by the free market will make over-population one of the future’s biggest jokes. Antarctica, Greenland, Northern Canada will feel the plow & deliver up their wealth. The floor, surface, & cubic volume of the sea, the Moon, Mars, the Asteroids, the rest of the Solar System, & open space itself will be subdivided. Even if total population reaches 40 billion — or 400 billion — we’ll have more elbow- room than we do now.
In the coming century, poverty & unemployment will be a dark, half- believed nightmare of the remote past. Elaborate discussion of private charity will be academic in a world where any basketcase who twitches once for yes & twice for no is desperately needed for production quality control. They’ll put chimps & gorillas on the payroll. Killer whales & dolphins will be buying split-level aquariums on the installment plan.
Pollution will be another dead issue. No competing industry can afford the waste of energy & materials. Without an EPA to “protect” us, individuals will sue polluters, because every square inch of the Earth will be private property. Not that there won’t be wilderness — when they auction off the National Forests, I’ll be right there, bidding with the other hunters & fishermen. Heaven is being able to fire a rifle in any direction from my front porch & not hit anyone but trespassers.
As with charity, our concern with police & security is a waste of breath. Peace will break out uncontrollably. Cops will be re-trained for office- jobs. With victimless crime laws repealed, cities populous & prosperous again, 99% of the crime we endure will vanish. Our descendents won’t understand how it became an issue. Middle-class values are market values. Wider respect for property, education, & long-range planning will mean less crime. A single mugging in Central Park will get four-inch headlines in New York’s several dozen newsplastics. In the absence of laws against duelling, people will be more polite to each other, less inclined to offer unwanted advice. Either that or, thanks to natural selection, they’ll soon have faster reflexes.
Lacking gun control to protect them, the few criminals left won’t live long enough to transmit their stupid-genes. The next century will give us a welcome look at the other side of a familiar paradox: people free to carry weapons usually don’t need them. Prisons will be abandoned when those who never did anything to hurt anyone are released. The rest will be out working to restore their victims’ property or health. Crimes against persons & property, including murder, will be civil offenses, with volunteer agencies acting for those without relatives or friends to “avenge” them. Restitution may even be possible for murder, given techniques of freezing corpses for later repair. Those who commit irrevocable murder will suffer the cruelest punishment of all: exile to a place where there’s a government!
Our opponents’ concern with conglomerates & monopolies is as misplaced as ours with charity & crime. Before the 19th Century government invasion of the market, super-companies had reached optimum size & were beginning to shrink. Today, although government keeps competition off their backs, huge companies must divide themselves into dozens of competing subsidiaries in order to survive. Increased competition will doom these dinosaurs, break up concentrations of wealth & paper frozen by securities & tax laws, & produce companies smaller than today’s. Survivors will be stuck with the boring old laissez-faire task of pleasing as many customers with the best quality goods & services possible at the lowest possible prices.
It’s possible you’re way ahead of me by now, & you may have noticed I haven’t been following my own advice. All these predictions have been pretty abstract & impersonal. Now it’s time to answer the question “What’s in it for me?” Basically, we’re all going to have our cake & get to say “I told you so”, too. Right off, the free market boosts our purchasing-power eightfold, & this, of course, is only the beginning, although I hesitate to risk your willing suspension of disbelief by estimating wages & prices several decades into a Unanimous Consent boom. So let’s just way we now have eight times as much disposable wealth. Even this modest multiplier offers us a range & choice of goods & services unimaginable today.
Your basic material well-being will be easier to maintain when a loaf of Grandma’s Automated Bread goes for a nickel & steak for 20 cents a pound. $2 shoes? Wristwatches at a dime a dozen? How about suits & dresses for ten bucks, disposable outfits for a dollar? The toughest decision may be durability versus disposability: an imposing 2087 Rolls- Rolex Fusionmobile good for generations, or a plastic Mattel- Yugo easily discarded when you’re tired of it; a Saville Row three-piece ironclad business suit, or a toilet-paper toga. Increased leisure-time & lots of loose money will mean what it always has, more emphasis on expensive, hand-crafted, one-of-a-kind items. We all may wind up running second, third, or fourth businesses on the side, which means more jobs, more buying, & so forth.
How about spending two to four grand on a home that’s built to last, helped out by the slump in land prices when government holdings hit the market? The trend will be back to single private dwellings, on substantially larger lots, paid for in full out of this month’s paycheck. If you can afford a home in the city & another in the mountains or at the beach, why not? An unhappy note for Howard Roark. Higher Living-standards will encourage a most unRandish human vice for embellishment. They’ll bring back the Baroque, Roccoco, Victorian gingerbread, medieval gargoyles, & the new times will bring their own elaborate forms, as well. Aztec Modern, anyone?
Choose between a $500 automobile, a $2000 airplane, or some combination. Without government support for highways, we may all be soaring to work on rocket- belts, & Laissez-Faire Airlines will fly you anywhere in the world for twenty bucks. Highways & railroads will benefit from a free market. Speed, safety, & efficiency will improve. 60-lane, 300 mile-per-hour ribbons of plastic will power your electric car by induction, provide guidance if you want to read or watch TV, dissipate rain, fog, ice & snow. Or, as I predicted in The Probability Broach, highways may evolve into contoured swaths of grass for steam- powered hovercraft. Or both. Or something entirely different.
Our grandchildren will have a good laugh over the “Energy Crisis” of the last decade, which diehard Carterites are presently trying to revive, not just because the shortage was purely political in nature (which will puzzle them) but because free market technology will ultimately make fossil fuels obsolete. Fusion, using water for fuel, lasers or particle accelerators for sparkplugs, & producing, as its only by-product, clean, inert, useful, helium, will be running our civilization the day after government gets out of the way. Fusion is the thermonuclear reaction that powers the stars. Quasars are billions of times more energetic, & we don’t know what powers them. When science & industry are free of interference, we may find out, & energy will be practically limitless, virtually free.
I could go on for hours discussing miracles you can read about in Popular Science, Analog, or any of the 15 novels I’ve written. I’ve elaborated on them to this extent because I believe they’re only possible under free market conditions, which explains why we never got the picture-phones & flying automobiles which science fiction promised us in the 30s & 40s. Read those other publications with that caveat in mind, you’ll get the idea.
More important are the social, psychological effects of liberty. I can’t tell you what it’s like to be free, having never had a chance to try. I’d be up against the unpredictability of human action any Austrian economist or quantum physicist delights in lecturing about. Those few leftists who still believe in a static notion of how things ought to be, which they’re willing to impose at bayonet-point, work their butts off making society dull & boring. In Unanimous Consent Utopia, the one rule is that no one imposes his views on anyone else, which makes for an open-ended culture, impossible to describe in detail. There’s no single Libertarian future, but as many different futures as there are individuals to create them. For each Sunday-supplement guess I could make about who’ll take care of the street lights or paint the stripes down the middle of the road, coming generations will produce thousands of answers not even remotely similar to mine. Our future may be weird & confusing, but it’ll never be dull & boring.
So instead, try an experiment with me, one that’ll give you a clearer picture of the future than I could draw in another hour or another hundred hours. Lean back in your chair. Relax. Imagine now that you’ll never have to worry about money again. Never again for the rest of your life. You’ll never waste another golden moment of your precious time tearing your hair, biting your fingernails, or shredding the inside of your mouth over paying the bills. There is no limit to what you can afford. It’s no longer a significant factor in your plans.
Now say quietly to yourself: “All my life, I always really wanted ______ ”. Fill in the blank. Finish the sentence yourself. Only you know what it is you always really wanted. “All my life I always really wanted ______ ”.
You may be surprised. How many things have you denied yourself, never even acknowledged, because there wasn’t enough money? Because your dreams were consumed to feed the bureaucrats, build bombs, atomic submarines, & government office buildings? Unanimous Consent will change all that. Everything you always really wanted could be yours, if you were free. Retirement? Save it out of pocket change. Kid’s education? New home, car, boat, plane? All of the above? Nothing more than ordinary, easily-accessible dreams which will hardly dent the family budget. If you were free.
“All my life, I always really wanted ______ “.
Is it illegal? A machine gun to mow down beer cans on a lazy country afternoon? A nickel bag that really costs a nickel? An android sex- slave? A dynamite collection? A date with a one-legged jockey? Driving your car at 185? It’s yours, as long as you don’t hurt anyone. If you were free.
“All my life, I always really wanted ______ “.
The number of Signatories to the Covenant of Unanimous Consent is doubling every year. Everything you always really wanted can be yours before the 21st Century is three decades old. The only thing the Covenant can’t give you, the only goods it can’t deliver, is power. And through that one “failure”, that single “sacrifice”, we achieve everything else.
“All my life, I always really wanted ______ “.
That, my fellow Libertarians, is the promise of Unanimous Consent, an invention so fundamental, so potent, revolutionary & unstoppable, that Scientific Method & the Industrial Revolution pale by comparison. Now you understand why I’m a fanatic, why I must make you a fanatic, why, doubling our number every year, we must create an entire nation, a whole world of fanatics. I’m fighting for everything I always really wanted! That’s what’s in it for me! That’s what Unanimous Consent is all about!
Everything. You. Always. Really. Wanted.
To the traditional strategies of our movement, education & politics, add a third, Unanimous Consent Utopianism, which will break trails for the other two. While others teach & run for office, I’ll continue writing science fiction. Educators & candidates will find, as they’re already finding, that their students & voters came to them because of promises I made them.
That’s the only way our future’s going to happen. We’re going to win as soon as we recognize, as soon as we communicate, as soon as we act on one simple fact. In order to “capture the hearts & minds” of America & the world, in order to have the major part in determining what the future is going to be, we must first pull off a coup d’etat in the Province of Utopia.
“All my life, I always really wanted ______ ”.
It’s as simple as that. It really is.

The proceeding is the transcript of a speech given at the December 1987 Future of Freedom Conference held at the Pacifica Hotel in Culver City, California.

Copyright © 1987 by L. Neil Smith. All rights reserved.

Reducing the age of consent to 13 for all sexual acts would bring the UK in line with Spain, although Spain has a legal caveat that allows for prosecution where sexual consent is obtained by deception in the case of a person aged between 13 and 16. Until 1995, the age of consent in Spain was 12. Indeed, Britain’s age of consent is high by the standards of European countries, many of which have an age of consent for heterosexual acts of 14 or 15, although the age of consent for homosexual acts is not necessarily the same. Among other developed nations, Japan has an age of consent of 13, although this is subject to further restrictions.

An interesting note to this matter is that until 1993, English common law held that a boy under the age of 14 could not commit rape as a principal offender because he was irrebuttably presumed to be incapable of sexual intercourse. That a boy of that age is indeed so capable has been the subject of some publicity.

While there is some merit in arguing about the moral, physiological, emotional and cultural import of an age of consent, and the extent to which children need to be protected both from the attentions of adults and their peers, we should also consider all this in the context of what consent has come to mean in the implementation of the law. Consent is not, and never was, the same as a contract, whereby terms are mutually agreed and non-performance brings with it an entitlement to compensation. Rather, consent is a highly complex concept which is changing rapidly in its meaning.

It has been established in law that there is a point at which consent becomes ineffective. This has generally been expressed as the idea that a person cannot consent to an act that results in physical injury to him or herself where such injury amounts to a level just below actual bodily harm. Over twenty years ago, Sean Gabb wrote about this situation and pointed out that in addition to personal consent, an additional criterion of “public interest” is provided that judges the actions by “what is acceptable in a civilized society and what is not.”

Where there is widespread agreement on what constitutes civilization – and particularly where sexual morality is a matter of consensus, be that consensus the result of religious teaching or otherwise – there may be argued to be a valid argument as to what constitutes a public interest in sexual mores, even if such an argument is not in accordance with a purist libertarian worldview. If, on the other hand, the context is one of secularism, post-modernism and moral relativism, there can be no abiding public interest, because there is no commonly agreed moral basis for that public interest to rest upon.

There may be an appeal to “common sense” and reference to public opinion such as finds expression in the media and through various interest groups, but these things are shifting sands. To recognize that this landscape is changing is fundamental to understanding the way in which consent and sexual morality are being redefined in law. To apply these changed standards of today retrospectively to events that occurred thirty or forty years ago, and then to act as if these standards were somehow universal points of principle at that time, is a form of delusion that is dangerous and that would lead – indeed some would argue has already led – to a society that is unbalanced and hypocritical.

After the current purge of aged or dead media figures has run its course, the media caravan will doubtless move onwards -  perhaps in time to the rock stars of the era and their teenaged admirers, who were the subject of far greater infamy in their day than those currently under scrutiny. Again, there will be the suspicion that at least some of the accusations are motivated by a desire for financial compensation, and the defence put forward that only now, despite the effluxion of time, have the victims gained the courage to speak out against their attackers. For all those who are genuine victims with no ambiguity about that status, there are also those who come into a grey area where any victimhood is a matter of perception and a range of other subjective factors will come into play.

What is needed in such a situation is a proportionate view of all of the factors involved and a balanced judgement so that justice, and not merely a media-driven sector of public opinion that often veers close to a witchhunt, is served. It seems improbable that this can be satisfactorily achieved in the current circumstances.

What, then, does consent now mean? Consent can be given, but it has historically been considered invalid if there was fraud or deception involved, such that the person would not have consented had the facts been known. This has been applied in cases of impersonation, and also famously in R v Clarence (1888) 22 QBD 23 where the defendant knowingly infected his wife with a venereal disease. As well as the aforementioned invalidity of consent in cases of physical injury, R v Chan-Fook (1994) 1 WLR 689 established that the definition of actual bodily harm could apply to psychological injury as well as physical harm. This effectively means that consent can no longer cover anything more than trivial injury.

Consent within marriage was historically presumed, but fr0m 1991 (R v R) the courts have removed the exemption in law for marriage and thus given rise to the offence of marital rape. Allied to this was a change in the definition of rape, in which hitherto the victim had had to prove that there was a “continued state of physical resistance.” Lord Hale, writing in the seventeenth-century, opined that “rape…is an accusation easily to be made and hard to be proved, and harder to be defended by the party accused, tho never so innocent.” Until 2003, English law on the matter was largely framed with this maxim in mind. Since that time, however, the balance of the law has shifted considerably to give weight to the plaintiff (who may often remain anonymous) and to remove protection from the defendant (who is invariably publically named, often at the cost of his reputation even if acquitted.)

Under the Sexual Offences Act 2003, the requirements for a defence of mistaken belief in consent were made more stringent in that they must now be both genuine and reasonable. There is now a set of presumptions against said reasonableness, including where violence is used or feared, the complainant is unconscious, unlawfully detained, drugged, or is by reason of disability unable to communicate a lack of consent. This has changed what was formerly a subjective test into an objective test. It also means that a man may be convicted of rape even if he believed that the victim consented, if the court were to consider the circumstances unreasonable. It remains impossible for a woman to commit rape as a principal offender, although she may commit rape as an accomplice.

All of these things are the result of complex changes in the way that society sees the nature of consent, and of the weakening of consent as a concept and as a defence. One major factor that has prompted this has been the assertion that too few rapists are convicted; this perception continues although it would be near-impossible to establish a sound statistical basis for deciding whether someone who was in law innocent of an offence was in fact guilty of an offence. The weakening of consent has certainly resulted in an increase in rape convictions, and such are reported to be at an all-time high with a current 63% conviction rate. It should not be a great surprise that if the legal definition of consent is weakened, it will become easier to obtain more rape convictions, an outcome which has been seen by a number of groups as highly desirable, and which serves both the ends of a near universally-accepted societal agenda (to see perpetrators of sexual violence punished) and a much more invidious Leftist political agenda that benefits from the demonization of men as creatures of violence and sexual aggressors. The corollary of this, however, is that some of those who are convicted would not have met the legal definition of rape that applied before the change in the law had occurred. The law is thus not merely convicting more rapists, it is creating more rapists.

It is because of this that any argument about the age of consent carries considerably less weight than it would have done in the pre-2003 era. It might, indeed, be argued that consent has largely lost the meaning that it once had. Its importance now is increasingly that of a folk memory of its former significance, where in practice such a wide range of circumstances exist that can override it or question its validity that any sensible person would be foolish to rely upon it alone as a defence. And where, as a society, does that leave us?

The Creatures Outside Looked From Pig To Man, And From Man To Pig … Busy in Puddlecoteville again, and likely will be for the next few days.

However, after yesterday’s revelation that Labour despise the working man (and woman) so much that they will lie to deprive them of their meagre pleasures, I couldn’t help but notice this exchange in the commons yesterday.

Angela Eagle (Wallasey, Labour): Many of us were shocked by the omission from the Gracious Speech of the promised legislation to ensure plain packaging for cigarettes. The public health Minister, Anna Soubry, publicly supported the proposal, and when the Leader of the House was Secretary of State for Health he said:

“The evidence is clear that packaging helps to recruit smokers, so it makes sense to consider having less attractive packaging. It’s wrong that children are being attracted to smoke by glitzy designs on packets.”

Note: Anna Soubry supported the proposal when she had no business doing so as a minister before a public consultation has been concluded. If this was done by a Tory about a policy Labour disagreed with, they would be scandalising Soubry and calling for her resignation.

Andrew Lansley (South Cambridgeshire, Conservative): The hon. Lady asked about standardised packaging. I initiated the consultation on standardised packaging, and I did so, as I said at the time, with an open mind. As my right hon. Friends have made clear, no decision has been made in response to the consultation on that. I think that the hon. Lady will recall that the nature of the Queen’s Speech is to put forward proposals for legislation where the Government have decided what their policy is, not to venture into legislation where no policy decision has taken place. It is completely false to imagine that there was ever a question of including reference to standardised packaging in the Queen’s Speech; there never was, and it would not have been appropriate to do so.

As we see above, Labour are desperate to bypass a consultation (to which half a million citizens objected) because they couldn’t give a flying fuck what you think. And they are brazenly happy to employ bare-faced lies in doing so.

While Tory Lansley – to his credit – at least recognises that the public are a feature of something which is called, err, a public consultation.

Why do Labour hate the electorate so much that they will lie their arses off to ignore their views? Wasn’t their movement originally set up in objection to Tories and Liberals doing exactly that to working people?

Clever man, that Orwell.

The Daily Mail reports that solicitor Danielle Morris has been fined £2,500 and ordered to pay £5,250 in costs by the Solicitors’ Regulation Authority on a charge of racial and religious discrimination. A previous complaint against her and her former employer arising from the same matter resulted in an undisclosed settlement being paid. It is reasonable to suppose that this was not an unconsiderable sum.

What had Ms Morris done to merit this action? It transpires that she uttered the words: ‘I cannot stand Jewish people,’ and then briefly defended that opinion when challenged by a colleague. When the matter was escalated, Ms Morris initially denied making the remark. Subsequent attempts by Ms Morris and by her employer to apologize for any offence caused were refused in favour of legal action by her former colleague, a process that resulted in three and a half years of investigation and proceedings.

Ms Morris expressed an negative opinion – one that many would consider obnoxious – which she has said was formed as the result of an incident of queue-jumping by an Orthodox Jewish man in which she was the victim. But it is important to note what she did not do as well. She did not deny or debate the Holocaust. Nor did she state that she supports anti-Semitic violence, or groups which promote anti-Semitism. She has subsequently made it clear that her remark was made without a full consideration of its implications. One might say that it was made in the heat of the moment.

In a free society, an individual must be permitted to state that they personally dislike any group, whether its composition be racial, religious or otherwise, and must be free to criticize aspects of that group, including expressing personal opposition to its beliefs and practices. The law should not be able to intrude into matters of personal opinion, whether or not that opinion is soundly based. Secondly, a person should not be able to claim that they have been discriminated against by virtue of another expressing a simple dislike of any group to which they belong or for which they feel a particular solidarity. To reduce discrimination to a matter of mere offence is to demean genuine cases of racial and religious hatred that do not just involve words, but acts. Lastly, where a remark of the nature reported is made in the heat of the moment and it subsequently emerges that it has caused offence, an offer of an apology should be accepted by a court or tribunal as an appropriate restitution without the need for financial redress, having an eye to the desirability of preventing further claims of this nature escalating to this level in the future. The long-established maxim that de minimis non curat lex seems to have fallen by the wayside in discrimination cases. To prosecute trivia is tyranny.

We should note that Ms Morris’s lawyer is reported to have stated that his client had “‘not been aware’ of the long history of the persecution of Jewish people.’ and that ‘Because of her age she has had limited direct contact with those who had been familiar with the discovery of the horrors of the holocaust or the attitudes which had led to these events. She now has a greater understanding of the offence she had caused and the context in which her remarks could be seen.”

It is entering dangerous territory when every unfavourable reference to the Jews, or every criticism of Israel, is treated as an assault on the memory of the Holocaust or an incidence of anti-Semitism, and merits the kind of defensiveness that the observations above show. To treat it thus, particularly in the case of an isolated unguarded remark expressing someone’s personal opinion, diminishes that which should be treated with seriousness. It also plays into the hands of those who have a much more developed agenda against the Jews than Ms Morris, who will claim that this is a case of “over-sensitivity” and further proof of a “Jewish desire” to ensure that debate of these issues is conducted solely on their own chosen terms.

There are still cases of genuine anti-Semitism in our society, expressed in verbal and physical expressions of violent hatred. More generally, there seems to be a prevailing Left-driven cultural animus that finds expression in support for Palestine and opposition to Israel, a position that looks at times like an intellectual justification for what in any other context would be anti-Semitism pure and simple, particularly since Hamas, the terrorist group that currently runs Palestine, calls for the murder of Jews and the obliteration of Israel. The 2011 organized pro-Palestinian disruption to a Prom concert by the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, one of the great ensembles of the world, is an example of this. I also question the involvement of publically-funded academics in boycotts of Israel, which have rightly been pointed out as Stalinist behaviour of the most illiberal kind. It is difficult to see Ms Morris’s comment as being on the same level as any of this.

Working gun made with 3D printer

By Rebecca Morelle Science reporter, BBC World Service, Texas

(The Libertarian Alliance’s officers have inserted a caveat at the end of the post.)

The BBC’s Rebecca Morelle saw the 3D-printed gun’s first test in Austin, Texas

The world’s first gun made with 3D printer technology has been successfully fired in the US.

The controversial group which created the firearm, Defense Distributed, plans to make the blueprints available online.

The group has spent a year trying to create the firearm, which was successfully tested on Saturday at a firing range south of Austin, Texas.

Anti-gun campaigners have criticised the project.

Europe’s law enforcement agency said it was monitoring developments.

Victoria Baines, from Europol’s cybercrime centre, said that at present criminals were more likely to pursue traditional routes to obtain firearms.

She added, however: “But as time goes on and as this technology becomes more user friendly and more cost effective, it is possible that some of these risks will emerge.”

Defense Distributed is headed by Cody Wilson, a 25-year-old law student at the University of Texas.

Mr Wilson said: “I think a lot of people weren’t expecting that this could be done.”

The gun was assembled from separate printed components made from ABS plastic – only the firing pin was made from metal

3D printing has been hailed as the future of manufacturing.

The technology works by building up layer upon layer of material – typically plastic – to build complex solid objects.

The idea is that as the printers become cheaper, instead of buying goods from shops, consumers will instead be able to download designs and print out the items at home.

But as with all new technologies, there are risks as well as benefits.

Personal liberties

The gun was made on a 3D printer that cost $8,000 (£5,140) from the online auction site eBay.

It was assembled from separate printed components made from ABS plastic – only the firing pin was made from metal.

Mr Wilson, who describes himself as a crypto-anarchist, said his plans to make the design available were “about liberty”.

He told the BBC: “There is a demand of guns – there just is. There are states all over the world that say you can’t own firearms – and that’s not true anymore.

“I’m seeing a world where technology says you can pretty much be able to have whatever you want. It’s not up to the political players any more.”

Asked if he felt any sense of responsibility about whose hands the gun might fall into, he told the BBC: “I recognise the tool might be used to harm other people – that’s what the tool is – it’s a gun.

“But I don’t think that’s a reason to not do it – or a reason not to put it out there.”

Gun control

To make the gun, Mr Wilson received a manufacturing and seller’s licence from the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF).

Donna Sellers, from the ATF, told BBC News that the 3D-printed gun, as long as it was not a National Firearms Act weapon (an automatic gun, for example), was legal in the US.

She said: “[In the US] a person can manufacture a firearm for their own use. However, if they engage in the business of manufacture to sell a gun, they need a licence.”

Amid America’s ongoing gun debate in the wake of the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, US congressman Steve Israel recently called for a ban on 3D guns under the Undetectable Firearms Act.

Groups looking to tighten US gun laws have also expressed concern.

Leah Gunn Barrett, from New Yorkers Against Gun Violence, has said: “These guns could fall into the hands of people who should not have guns – criminals, people who are seriously mentally ill, people who are convicted of domestic violence, even children.”

3D printing technology has already been used by some criminal organisations to create card readers – “skimmers” – that are inserted into bank machines.

Many law enforcement agencies around the world now have people dedicated to monitoring cybercrime and emerging technologies such as 3D printers.

Ms Baines from Europol said: “What we know is that technology proceeds much more quickly than we expect it to. So by getting one step ahead of the technological developments, we hope and believe we will be able to get one step ahead of the criminals as well.”

(The Libertarian Alliance’s officers would like to point out that they share this post publicly for information purposes only. So far as can be known, no officers of the LA, or members so far as can be ascertained, own or plan to manufacture firearms, all such persons being too busy on other matters. The officers further urge that readers must comply with the current status of law on owning firearms in their respective territories.)

The following article was written by Roderick T. Long and published on Austro-Athenian Empire, May 15th, 2010.

“I don’t try to make you believe something you don’t believe, but to make you do something you won’t do.”
— Ludwig Wittgenstein

“Over and over, you’re falling, and then catching yourself from falling. And this is how you can be walking and falling at the same time.”
— Laurie Anderson

I’ve written before about the importance of Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions for left-libertarians. Here’s another example.

Left-libertarians and right-libertarians – or mainstream libertarians, or “normal” libertarians, or whatever one wants to call them (I’m tempted by the irony of “modal libertarians” myself) – often get frustrated with each other. Left-libertarians pull their hair out when right-libertarians at one moment acknowledge the existence of pervasive government favouritism to big business, and then at the next moment lapse back into treating criticisms of big business as criticisms of the free market. (Here, for example, is Kevin Carson wondering why John Stossel, who in the past has “tipped his hat to the ideas of corporatism and crony capitalism,” suddenly “smile[s] and nod[s]” when Michael Medved “responds to allegations that big business is corrupt and exploitative, in the corporatist economy we live in, by arguing that ‘it can’t happen, because in a free market ….’”) Right-libertarians, for their part, can’t see why left-libertarians keep harping about corporatist intervention when the right-libertarians have already acknowledged its existence and badness.

I think Kuhn’s discussion of the pendulum may help to illuminate what’s going wrong here. Kuhn writes:

Since remote antiquity most people have seen one or another heavy body swinging back and forth on a string or chain until it finally comes to rest. To the Aristotelians, who believed that a heavy body is moved by its own nature from a higher position to a state of natural rest at a lower one, the swinging body was simply falling with difficulty. Constrained by the chain, it could achieve rest at its low point only after a tortuous motion and a considerable time. Galileo, on the other hand, looking at the swinging body, saw a pendulum, a body that almost succeeded in repeating the same motion over and over again ad infinitum. … [W]hen Aristotle and Galileo looked at swinging stones, the first saw constrained fall, the second a pendulum …. (Structure, pp. 118-121)

For Kuhn, the change from the Aristotelean to the Galilean interpretation represents a “Gestalt switch” associated with a paradigm shift; and I think the dispute over corporatism among libertarians involves something similar.

Aristotle and Galileo both noticed the same two facts about the swinging stone: a) it keeps swinging back and forth for a long time, and b) it eventually stops and hangs straight down. The difference, I would say, lies in what they saw as fundamental or essential. For Aristotle, hanging straight down (or getting as close as possible to doing so) was what the stone is essentially doing, while the period of swinging back and forth is an accidental imperfection – noise in the signal. For Galileo, by contrast, swinging perpetually back and forth in the same arc (or getting as close as possible to doing so) is what the stone is essentially doing, and it’s the gradual shortening of the arc until it hangs straight down that’s the accidental imperfection or “noise.”

One can imagine the Galileans shouting “But the stone keeps swinging back and forth in almost the same arc! Why do you ignore that?” and the Aristoteleans answering “I’ve already acknowledged the forces that constrain the stone in its fall! Why do you act as though I haven’t?”

Ludwig von Mises tells of a similar dispute [PDF] with his mentor Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, when the Cantillon effects that Böhm-Bawerk dismissed as mere “friction” were for Mises an essential explanatory phenomenon in monetary analysis.

Just as Aristotle and Galileo saw different things when they looked at a swinging stone, and just as Böhm-Bawerk and Mises saw different things when they looked at the expansion of the money supply, so right-libertarians and left-libertarians see different things when they look at the existing economy.

Of course, like Aristotle and Galileo, they both notice (at some level of abstraction) the same facts: there’s a lot of more or less corporatist policies and there’s a lot of more or less free exchange. But for the right-libertarian, free exchange is what essentially characterises the existing economy, while the corporatist policies are so much friction; and just as you don’t constantly mention friction when talking about how a mechanism works, right-libertarians don’t constantly mention corporatism when talking about how the economy works. For the left-libertarian, by contrast, corporatism is a far more essential feature of the existing economy. (Though for most left-libertarians the free exchange is probably essential too, which may be part of what distinguishes us from some mainstream anarchists. So the analogy isn’t perfect. But never mind.)

Thus left-libertarians and right-libertarians are frustrated with each other because they’re arguing from opposite sides of a Gestalt shift, where what looks essential to one side looks accidental to the other; and persuading our opponents may be less a matter of getting them to assent to some specific list of propositions and more a matter of getting them to look at the world through the lens of those propositions. (One reason I find this explanation plausible is that I used to be more of a right-libertarian than I am now, and it rings true to my recollection of my own self-understanding.)

Now Kuhn often gives the impression of thinking that in cases like this neither side is more right than the other – that the Aristotelean and Galilean interpretations of the swinging stone are equally valid, and the choice between the two is a matter of nonrational commitent. It’s controversial whether at the end of the day that is precisely what Kuhn thinks, but let’s leave questions of Kuhn interpretation aside. Whether or not that’s Kuhn’s view, it’s not my view, and I don’t think that anything Kuhn has pointed out forces us to such a relativist position.

So I don’t want to suggest that this disagreement between left-libertarians and right-libertarians is a matter of a merely optional difference in perspective, like the Duck-Rabbit or the Necker Cube. Unlike Kuhn (perhaps), in such disputes I think both sides don’t recognise all the same facts, or at any rate don’t equally fully register the significance of those facts. Just as I regard Galileo’s interpretation of the swinging stone as explanatorily superior to Aristotle’s (explaining a broader range of facts, for example), and likewise Mises’ interpretation of monetary expansion as explanatorily superior to Böhm-Bawerk’s, so I think that the interpretation of the existing economy that sees corporatism as systematic and all-pervasive is explanatorily superior to the view that sees it as mere friction in an essentially free-market mechanism.

Right-libertarians could, of course, agree with the analysis I’ve just given of the disagreement, but insist that they’re the Galileo/Mises and we’re the Aristotle/Böhm-Bawerk. That would be a fair enough response; nothing I’ve said in this post supports the left-libertarian view of what’s essential over the right-libertarian view of what is so.

I do think, of course, that there’s a lot of important left-libertarian work out there that does make the case for the explanatory superiority of seeing corporatism as essential – including, obviously, Kevin Carson’ two books. (See also Charles Johnson’s recent summary of the nine ways in which corporatism operates.) But that goes beyond the aim of this post, which is simply to offer a way to think about this dispute of ours.

She seems to have no clue about the year long public consultation on plain packaging, or even the shabby evidence that prompted it. Here’s a perfect example.

(Established smokers rarely change brands.)

Really, love? Because, you see, the campaign for plain packaging disagrees with you. They even cite it as a case study in their literature in favour.

“Our share grew by over 0.4% during this period – that might not sound a lot – but it was worth over £60 million in additional turnover and a significant profit improvement.”

£60 million is one hell of a lot of smokers changing to just a single brand, and there are around 200 of them in all. This is precisely why the tobacco industry would like to keep branding which distinguishes them from their competitors. It also neatly skewers the simpletons who are so lacking in the scantest knowledge of how business works that they believe industry objection can only mean that the policy will be brilliant. Like Simon Chapman, for example.

Anyway, back to sixth form throwback Tanya.

Or does the government feel pressure from Ukip, some of whose members seem to think that smoking, along with misogyny, homophobia and racism, is patriotic?

Yep, that’s right. It’s there in most of their material, “bash up a Paki”, it says, “stab a gay”, and if you get time while it’s still light why not sexually abuse a woman, eh?

It beggars belief that the Graun allows idiots like this to make such tendentious sweeping statements, but then these are desperate times for those whose only concern is telling all us plebs how to live our lives.

Of course Ukip backs smoking. It thrives on the rhetoric of the pub

Because, it would seem, anyone who uses a pub and talks politics is obviously insane and should be ignored. Only those with a town house in Islington and a healthy addiction to ground coffee and qinoa seeds should be allowed to comment in this democracy of ours. They’re really not learning, are they?

The freedom to smoke is a freedom of sorts – and Nigel Farage smokes. This is like David Cameron legislating for morning coats

No, it’s nothing like that .. even remotely. That would be a law to force someone to do something. Government is legislating increasingly to force the public to not do something. It’s a subtle difference too complicated for Tanya to comprehend, obviously. Or perhaps she is just playing deliberately dumb. I don’t know which flatters her less, to be frank.

Who else smokes these days? Children mostly, and poorer children more than anyone, and the numbers are rising.

You’re shitting me, surely! You mean that after advertising bans, bans on vending machines, graphic warnings on packs and hiding cigarettes behind screens, that youngsters are smoking more than ever? Jeez, put those tobacco control incompetents in jail, then! Not just because they are incompetent and dangerous, but also because they have been wildly extolling such policies as being overwhelmingly successful.

They are quite obviously fraudulent liars and any of their subsequent policies should be roundly ignored … err, like plain packaging, perhaps?

When representatives of Imperial Tobacco, British American Tobacco (BAT), Philip Morris International and Japan Tobacco International met the government this year. Imperial Tobacco threatened to pull its packaging manufacture from the UK.

No mention whatsoever that the DoH was compelled to invite these companies to make their views known as part of legislation on impact assessments designed specifically to stop governments from abusing democratic process. And there I was believing that the Guardian was in favour of civil liberties and against fascism, eh?

They insisted plain packaging would assist counterfeiters and smugglers. If this fascinates you, I suggest you watch British American Tobacco’s amusing and ostensibly racist promotional video Who’s In Control?, in which cartoon eastern European gangsters drool over the financial possibilities of regulation

Ah, racist. The ultimate refuge of a lefty scoundrel bereft of coherent arguments. Course it is. It features people from other countries in a bad light because they are criminals, so is obviously racist. The BBC were also racist when their Panorama programme highlighted criminal Chinese gangs driving illicit fags in Scotland. I remember Tanya’s ground-breaking exclusive on the Beeb and its fucking racist right-wing bastards, I’m sure I do.

Are these theoretical gangsters Bulgarian, or Romanian, is the obvious question.

Well, err, no. But it helps Tanya’s contorted anti-UKIP agenda to suggest it, doesn’t it?

We could muse further on these apocalyptic fantasies

{cough} Is she seriously supporting plain packs and accusing others of that?

But the independent studies undertaken all agree – young people and women don’t like plain packets, and tobacco knows it.

{cough} Independent?

Plus, whether they say weak pliable women (shame on you, Tanya) or youths like it or not (a bit of a no-brainer that they wouldn’t), tobacco control’s ‘evidence’ says nothing about whether they will subsequently quit. In fact, their own studies admit that kids are blithely unaware of the packaging and have no interest even if they were. Hey, this isn’t big evil tobacco saying this, it’s those most enthusiastic about plain packs!

[T]he British government, theoretically dedicated to the health of its citizens, has a duty not to sink to lobbyists

Which is exactly what they might have done by rejecting emotional, evidence-free shroud-waving rubbish by people paid to do nothing else but lobby government and campaign for legislation which precious few others actually want.

As ever with this government, hollow rhetoric will do.

As ever with the Guardian, hollow baseless ideological, spectacularly ill-researched rhetoric will do. How on Earth this collection of intellectual savants lose £44m per year is anyone’s guess.

Good grief.

My heart sank when I saw the Hall guilty plea. Yewtree needed a first scalp, and now they have it. The concept of justice has been entirely trampled now by a stampeding mob frenzied by moral panic.

I can understand why an elderly man in his position would accept a plea bargain, for the reasons described by Ecks above. But it is sad.

Ecks quotes me, some time ago, saying they want a Steven Lawrence Moment. I still stand by that. The thing they are after though is a complete repudiation of the 1970s. It represents the period between the two Feminist waves, when First Wave Political Correctness all but collapsed, and before Second Wave PC had been installed, under which we now live.

First Wave PC was the Victorian/Progressive system. It was installed at the behest of upper class matrons, seeking a puritan value system to maximise their own benefit (strict control of men and morality, such as temperance, censorship etc). They then demanded the vote in the expectation that women voters would maintain that system in place. Having achieved as much as they could, FW Feminism withered away. Intelligent educated women gravitated to marxism and other such ideologies. As such, there was nobody left minding the Feminist store; and as a consequence, that first wave of PC broke down.

It turned out that women en masse, even with the vote, didn’t really like it that much; because it restricted their freedom too. Feminists believed that women are naturally reluctant virgins who only have sex due to male pressure. That isn’t true. When the Pill arrived, the women were truly free. And Puritanism wasn’t what most of them wanted.

So, the second wave arose, out of a small cabal of upper class, prudish protestant and Jewish princesses. By tying themselves to the Left, they could pretend to be new and radical, even though all they were doing was resurrecting the aged Victorian system. (A few more liberal feminist writers spotted this, and denounced the Radicals as “Neo-Victorian” in the Village Voice, but were sadly ignored).

One has to grudgingly admire them for their success. The breakdown of the Victorian system by 1970 was so complete that people less motivated- or less mad- would have thought the situation hopeless. But they persevered. It took torrents of propaganda, endless political manouevering, moral panics of an insane nature like Satanic Ritual Abuse, and a cunning alliances with remants of first wave puritanism on the American Religous Right, the adoption of “trauma” narratives from loony therapists, the Recovered Memory cult, and enormous dogged persistence, but they did it. They reinstalled sexual Puritanism.

Hence the need to kill, specifically, the 1970s. It represents the world without puritan feminist rules. It represents a time when they were not in control. It is thus vital to their campaign to show this period as one of horror, degradation and misery. It is saying, “look, when you tried freedom, see what happened! Do you want that again?”.

People have forgotten that men like Savile and Hall and Dave Lee Travis were once, in the 70s, genuinely big names, admired by millions, especially youngsters. By the 1980s, they had become rather faded stars as the 1970s became tragically unhip, with memories of flared trousers and everything made of nylon. The Smashie And Nicey characters represented that perfectly; these two faded, naff, minor celebs past their sell-by date. A bit creepy, old hat, representatives of an era that had entirely passed in the wake of Punk and Alternative Comedy and so on. Nowadays, it is rather hard to believe that they were ever cool, and so the idea that any young woman might have thrown herself at them seems so hard to believe; indeed the women themselves, now older, would have found that they had once done so hard to believe. Unlike the big rock stars who (besides being considered generally left wing and thus jolly good sorts) are stil considered admirable and “cool”, if in a retro-nostalgia kind of a way, and who everyone knows had numerous underage girls on their tour buses and who, surely, some of whom must have been more insistent than a naive young groupie expected- these faded 70s has beens were perfect targets for represnting the repudiation of the era. Because all one can imagine today is a naff old man in an ugly sweater and combover, seedily fiddling with a naive waif. The mental image is important. In the mind, we might well create a sympathetic mental image of a young Mick Jagger with a fangirl. But not that silly old fucker off It’s A Knockout. Perfect!

Well, the Radicals have played their joker on this one, and it looks like they’re not heading for an early bath. (How long before we hear of Eddie Waring in his pork pie hat, doing something unspeakable?) This is the damnation of an era. An era when the matrons briefly lost control of everybody else. They will not willingly let that happen again.

Dark times ahead, I fear.

Note: I had a long Skype conversation last night with Neil. Right at the end, he pulled out a couple of his favourite guns. Such lovely objects they were – so cruel, perhaps, to show them to a man who could get five years minimum for possession of the same. But he is working on a plan to change that state of affairs. SIG

My Little Pony
by L. Neil Smith
lneil

Attribute to The Libertarian Enterprise

On the desk beside my keyboard lies an artifact that I have kept at my side for more than half of my life. We’ve been through a lot together. Both of us have undergone a lot of changes over the years, but both of us, deep down inside, remain essentially the same as we began.

The object in question started its existence as a “Colt Super .38 Automatic”, one of the first few — according to a letter I used to have from the company historian — manufactured by the Hartford armsmaker when they retooled to make civilian weapons again after World War II. I was born in 1946; the pistol and I are about the same age.

For those among my readers who aren’t conversant with firearms, this one is of a type generally known as “1911″, for the year Saint John Moses Browning’s nearly immortal design was finalized and adopted by the US Army. Those first 1911s were all .45s. Later, in the 1920s, it’s said the FBI urged Colt to make the same piece in a different chambering, old and strangely new at the same time. They took .38 ACP* (meant for the 1903 Pocket Hammer pistol) and loaded it up about 25%, to create .38 Super, which they believed could penetrate the armored cars and primitive “bulletproof vests” of gangsters in the Prohibition Era.

Early in my own career, I was extremely interested in .38 Super. It had a longer reach — shot flatter — than the .45, due to its much higher velocity and, in terms of kinetic energy, hit much harder. High performance hollowpoints and softpoints were coming into vogue (this was the SuperVel era), and that made .38 Super seem almost perfect to me.

My first .38 Super (my first “big” gun of any kind, as I’d worked my way up through .22s, .25s, .32s, and ,380s) was a Star Model AS, a handsome piece based loosely on the 1911, but with a much improved — and safer — ignition train (trigger to sear to hammer) interrupted by a better disconnector and a safety that is still unequalled in the business. Quite unlike the 1911, which merely blocks the sear (in my professional opinion as a gunsmith, Colt’s later bells and whistles only complicated a bad situation and did nothing to fix it), it lifted the hammer completely off the sear, taking it out of the ignition train completely, then set it down again gently when it was time to shoot.

Ironically, this wonderful arrangement is only found on two other handguns, both antiques, the 1911 Steyr, and the C96 “Broomhandle” Mauser.

We all used to shoot at an abandoned brick factory south of town, and I greatly enjoyed the fact that, whereas my earlier calibers only bounced off the loose bricks that littered the place, or, at best, cracked them into two or three pieces, .38 Super turned them into airborne dust. From that moment on, I was hooked on big, powerful handguns.

The .38 Super is not without defects. The principal one is the design of the back end of the cartridge, sporting what’s known as a “semi-rim”. This roughly refers to how a cartridge rests in the chamber. Revolver cartridges are stopped by a rim that keeps them from falling through the cylinder onto the ground. (Not really, but it works as an illustration.) Most auto pistol cartridges are stopped by — the cartridge rests on — a tiny, wire-thin shelf formed where the bullet enters the mouth of the case, an amazing feat of manufacturing precision.

The latter usually produces the greater accuracy.

Like tiny .25 ACP and .32 ACP, .38 ACP and its better-muscled clone .38 Super has a rim, but only a small, half-hearted one. Colt’s .38 Super chambers were originally cut to let the cartridge rest on this semi-rim, but in practice, it turns out that the cartridge mostly relied on the extractor — a spring-loaded hook that helps to throw the empty case out of the gun once it’s been fired — a terrible, unreliable, inconsistent non-system, simply fraught with potential problems.

Later, people experimented with .38 Super chambers that used the case-mouth, but by then I’d moved on to other calibers like .45 ACP, .40 S&W, and 10mm.

I don’t actually remember where I acquired my Colt (I have a good many old friends I can’t remember meeting for the first time). I swapped or bought it from somebody, I suppose. Although it was already more than 20 years old, it looked “new in the box”. I do remember that I had to sell the Star to get it, but for the most part, I never looked back. They were both finely-made weapons, but it was much easier to get magazines, grips, and other parts for the Colt. The Colt would readily accept the Ace .22 conversion system, and was easily convertible to other chamberings, as well. That last turned out to be important.

When I devised my system of calculating the relative self-defense”efficacy” of different handgun cartridges (kinetic energy times the cross-sectional area of the bullet — an attempt to account for all sorts of real-life phenomena observed by yours truly and others), I discovered that, unlike .45 ACP (which generates a 59) or .40 (63) or 10mm (81), .38 Super yields an Efficacy number of 47, higher than .38 or 9mm, but right along the border (50) of acceptability for self-defense. I’d take it in Harm’s Way myself any time (and have on more than one occasion) but I wouldn’t recommend it to others, and it isn’t 45 ACP.

From somewhere (again, I don’t recall) I acquired the top half of “Colt’s Mk IV/Series 70 Government Model .45 Caliber”. In case anybody wants to know, the Series 70 is the one with the “swamped” barrel and the “spring finger” bushing that everybody’s been told will break. This gunsmith has never seen a broken bushing in person or held one in his hand. I’ve heard from people who’ve heard from other people, and I’ve seen one photograph. Meanwhile “my little pony” has worked every time I called on it for the past third of a century. With a change of ejector (there’s a trick to that if anybody’s curious) I could now shoot .45, .38, or .22. With time, it was the .45 that stuck. The .38 Super slide and barrel and the .22 Ace eventually acquired their own frames, and the .45 lies on my nightstand (or in my holster) to this day.

But none of this happened before the biggest change of all. Louis W. Seecamp was a post-World War II immigrant from Germany. As a boy (this is coming from a gun magazine article dimly remembered 30 years or more later) he’d been thrilled to see actual bullet holes in wooden crates from South America on the Hamburg (I believe it was) docks.

Later, as a German soldier on the Russian front he’d had an adventure that had nearly killed him. A Soviet officer had popped up out the brush ahead of him, shooting him in the face with a .30 caliber Tokarev pistol. Going down, Louis had fired back with a 9mm Walther P-38, killing the Russian. The .30 bullet, as I recall, took out all of the teeth on one side of Louis’ head, and during the many months in the hospital that had followed, he had plenty of time to contemplate the usefulness of double action autopistols in large (for wimpy Europeans) calibers, as opposed to the rather small-caliber single action he’d been shot with. If his Walther 9mm couldn’t have been fired fast, from the trigger, or if the Russian had been toting something with a bigger hole in the front end, Louis would have been dead.

Louis came to America after the war and worked for a large eastern gun manufacturer (I think it was Marlin) long enough to acquire a love for lever action rifles. When he retired, he hand-made a couple of magnum lever actions that apparently never got beyond the prototype stage, and also designed a method by which a Colt 1911 could be retrofitted to become double action (like the Walther) on the first shot.

The system required that a channel be milled from the trigger to the hammer into the right side of the frame above the upper grip screw bushing. The channel contained a new “draw bar” and spring that could be used to bring the modified hammer to full cock, then cam off and release it. A new pivoting trigger was installed for this “double action” stroke, and the old trigger was cut down and used — the back of the new trigger pushed on it — for “single action” firing. The channel was covered with a thin steel cover plate held on by the right grip.

A new trigger guard, your choice of rounded or squared, was added (the old one had to be cut away) and the now-modified frame was then refinished.

The system was simple, elegant, and rugged. Louis offered to modify people’s pistols in gun magazine ads, and, as soon as I could scrape up the princely sum of ninety bucks (my wife at the time fumed about it, but the gun outlasted her and a second wife, as well), I sent my .38 Super off to him. I later learned that it and another .38 that arrived the same day, were the first in that caliber Louis ever converted.

Early in my relationship with the lovely and enchanting creature who was to become my third — she says my last — wife, the Colt .38 Super hung, in what served as a competition rig in those days, from a corner of our bedroom door. Cathy, to whom I will have been married for 25 years this July 2nd, was happy to have it there, which was one way I knew that she was (and remains to this day) the only girl for me.

But as usual, I digress.

In addition to a change of action type and caliber, I did other things to my Colt, which served as a platform for many experiments. I couldn’t afford an adjustable rear sight, but Colt’s factory sights were terrible, so I gave it a fixed rear sight and matching front sight from the Miniature Machine Company in Deming, New Mexico, sights that have now been on the gun and have served very well for almost three decades.

Somewhere along the line (after many experiments with rubber and spring-loaded mechanical recoil buffers), I installed a full-length recoil spring guide rod and the appropriate plunger. That it’s a once-piece rod will tell some of you its age. These were first reputed to improve accuracy. This hasn’t been my experience, but they do greatly enhance reliability of feeding, something I’d already worked on by reshaping and polishing the feed ramp and chamber mouth. I also funneled the magazine well, a change I probably wouldn’t bother with today.

[Full-length
recoil spring guide rod]

Something I definitely wouldn’t do again is bob the hammer to about half length, as was the fashion at the time. On a double action piece it isn’t quite so bad, but I performed the same operation on my Gold Cups, and I’m really sorry every time I try to thumb the hammer back. Someday I’ll replace those hammers, probably with the wider kind.

Other changes include a King’s drop-in beavertail grip safety (my worst beef against the 1911 is that spike that sticks out the back and gouges the web of my thumb) and a tapered oversized thumb safety from the same fine outfit. Oversized safeties aren’t really necessary on double action guns, but they’re a nice option. I don’t care for the kind — I have one on my Grizzly — that stand out abruptly from the backplate.

With Jeff Cooper, I do not believe in extended slidestops.

I’ve used a variety of mainspring housings, including the original arched steel, Pachmayr flat rubber, flat steel, and even nylon. The flat housings are pretty, but I found when I shot NRA Falling Plates that the Army was right in substituting an arched housing. If you don’t have that extra length to lever the weapon upward in your palm (I have average-sized hands) you’ll shoot low in a hurry every time. I finally settled on a military housing with a lanyard ring, not because I plan attaching the weapon to my belt or a cord around my neck, but because it’ll make star fractures in a skull if absolutely necessary. Now and again I go back to a pretty flat housing, but arched is what works.

[arched
housing left view]

[arched
hoursing right view]

[flat
housing left view]

[flat
housing right view]

In case you’re curious, this is what happened to the top half of the .38 Super.

[left
view]

[right
view]

I’ve had every kind of grip imaginable, from distressed wood with a Colt medallion, to rosewood with an inset Mexican peso, to various smooth or checkered panels, to fake ivory (pretty, but too slippery), to Roger’s patent spacegun wraparounds. I had the first Pachmayrs with palm swells and a silly lip at the bottom, flatter Pachmayr “combat” grips, later with the center web cut out (I stippled the frontstrap of the grip frame long ago), and LaserGrips. I settled on the plain black checkered plastic “Navy-issue” type grips that Springfield Armory ships. They’re relatively thin, comfortable, durable, and cheap. Most of all, they’re plain, which is what I like best.

What’s left? I bought a dozen of the original K.A.R.T. magazines with removable floorplates when they first became available, some with a plastic “slam pad”. When I tried Chip McCormick’s eight-shot “Shooting Stars” a decade later, it was all over. They are well made, very reliable, and fit flush with the bottom of the grip. Except for one or two original Colt magazines in which I installed eight-shot followers and springs, they’re all I use in my 1911s now — except for the ten-shot magazines from the same company that I often carry as spares.

When I acquired my first EAA Witness, a Tanfoglio clone of the CZ-75, I realized that, over all the years I’d spent with “my little pony”, that’s what I’d been laboring to turn it into. I now carry a Witness — either a .40, a 10mm, or a .45 — as often as I carry the Colt.

[My
Little Pony]

Sometimes I even carry a Glock 10mm.

Some have argued against the double action pistol, saying it’s a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist, when you can carry a single action pistol “cocked and locked”, and that it’s impossible to put the first two bullets from a double action in same hole. As a gunsmith, I don’t care for the Colt safety. And thinking about wound ballistics, I want to know exactly why putting the first two bullets in same hole is desirable.

That’s about all, except for a final thought.

Amidst all of the arguments from self-defense ethics, crimes statistics, and the history of government abuse, we tend to forget something I believe is important, and that is the aesthetic pleasure many of us derive from our guns. (There is a rare illustration of this in the 1990 movie Hard to Kill when Steven Seagall’s old partner brings him a favorite 1911 while he’s recuperating after being in a coma.)

H. Beam Piper writes with an enjoyable personal understanding about the warm light from a fireplace shimmering on the polished steel and wood of the weapons in his guncase. I noticed myself, a long time ago, that looking over my collection of guns fills me with the same pleasurable feelings as looking over my collection of banjos and guitars.

It is important for gun owners and freedom fighters to realize that it is this feeling of pleasure — quite as much as anything else — that drives those who hate us and our guns to try to take them away from us. H.L. Mencken famously wrote about neopuritans who awaken in the dead of night, trembling with the fear that somewhere, someone is happy.

Look closely at Sarah Brady, Charles Schumer, Michael Bloomberg, or Richard Daley next time their evil, insolent, inhumane faces are on television. The late, unlamented Howard Metzenbaum is said to have admitted “off the record” on more than one occasion that he knew gun legislation would do nothing to reduce crime — he just wanted to see the middle class disarmed. Mencken describes the victim-disarmers to a T.

Whenever you take personal, private pleasure in your ownership of weapons, it’s a mighty blow for freedom and against neopuritanism — as surely as any letter you might write to an editor, any boycott of some anti-gun corporation, even any generous donation to the pro-gun organization of your choice. For each adrenaline-filled fraction of a second you might spend defending yourself or your family or the Bill of Rights with your weapons, you will experience hundreds of hours of that pleasure, as long as we all continue to fight for the right to do so.

Notes

*ACP means “Automatic Colt’s Pistol”.

Four-time Prometheus Award-winner L. Neil Smith has been called one of the world’s foremost authorities on the ethics of self-defense. He is the author of 25 books, including The American Zone, Forge of the Elders, Pallas, The Probability Broach, Hope (with Aaron Zelman), and his collected articles and speeches,Lever Action, all of which may be purchased through his website “The Webley Page” atlneilsmith.org.

Ceres, an exciting sequel to Neil’s 1993 Ngu family novelPallas was recently completed and is presently looking for a literary home.

Neil is presently working on Ares, the middle volume of the epic Ngu Family Cycle, and on Roswell, Texas, with Rex F. “Baloo” May.

The stunning 185-page full-color graphic-novelized version of The Probability Broach, which features the art of Scott Bieser and was published by BigHead Press www.bigheadpress.comhas recently won a Special Prometheus Award. It may be had through the publisher, atwww.Amazon.com, or at BillOfRightsPress.com.

Note: Worth reading and considering. Richard North is right that there is no point campaigning to leave the European Union, if it simply means handing back absolute and unaccountable power to the same rotten Establishment that got us there in the first place – and which, even if imperfectly, is kept under some control by the EU. SIG

EU referendum: the way forward

Booker and I have often referred to the establishment of the European Union as a slow-motion coup d’état, a revolution by any other name. And if it is really the case that the EU is the fruit of a revolution, that makes eurosceptics – almost by definition – counter-revolutionaries.

It is perhaps better, though, to look forward. Rather than simply seek to undo the damage that has been done, our energies would be better directed at plotting a revolution of our own, seeking a better, more equitable society in which democracy has a chance of thriving.

But, if it is revolutionaries we are, then we must behave like them. And that means we must have a plan – a strategic plan. No revolution has ever succeeded without one. And, like the Harrogate Agenda, my suggested plan has six points, which I conveyed to the CIB on Saturday. These are:

1. A credible exit plan 2. Reassurance for business
3. An alternative to the EU
4. A network for dissemination
5. Agitation
6. A coalition of allies

1. A credible exit plan

The absence of a credible exit plan, agreed by the bulk of the eurosceptic movement, is a major weakness. If we cannot agree on how to extricate ourselves from the EU, how can we expect the electorate to have the confidence to support withdrawal?

However, the emphasis must be on credibility. And such a scheme, we would argue, is to invoke Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty, leading to a negotiated exit based on UK membership of the EFTA/EEA as an interim settlement. To ensure short-term continuity, we would have all EU repatriated, giving time for examination and selective repeal, and the enactment of replacement legislation as necessary – all over a period of some years.

In any exit negotiations, we would also go for a “sunset clause” on any agreement, with an option to renegotiate terms at, say, five-year intervals – one aim being to strengthen the role of EFTA.

2. Reassurance for business

Although the EU has been characterised as an economic union, it is a political construct with the objective of political integration – the final state being the United States of Europe. It is the means by which we are governed.

Continued membership or withdrawal, therefore, is not a matter for business. It has no right to determine, and nor should it have any say in how we as a people are governed. We should not accept any role for business in a referendum campaign.

However, business has a right to expect a predictable and stable regulatory and trading environment, the status of which is affected by our membership. Therefore, we need to be able to assure the business community that, should we leave the EU, there would be no adverse effects.

In effect, that would mean “protecting” membership of the Single Market – which could be achieved through EEA membership. And, as long as that membership is assured, business has no locus in the broader debate.

3. An alternative to the EU

Withdrawal from the EU, simply to hand back power to the Whitehall/Westminster matrix is not an attractive option. But, as much to the point, the EU is a symptom of a greater malaise. Leaving the EU, therefore, may not solve our more deep-seated problems.

If one adds to this the general principle enunciated by Richard Stokes MP in October 1940, that it “is no use fighting for a negative object”. To attract the broadest constituency, we need to mount a positive campaign, offering an alternative, more attractive vision of society.

This is where we believe that The Harrogate Agenda could have a role. This has the added advantage, from a campaigning point of view, of being incompatible with our membership of the EU.

4. A network for dissemination

Spreading the message is an essential part of any campaign, but reliance on the media is not going to be sufficient. Formal and informal networks will have to be built, some not dissimilar to direct marketing networks. Activities should include formal training and education, as well as more general propagandising.

Many revolutionary organisations have acquired their own newspapers, or news magazines, as a means of better spreading the message.

5. Agitation

Major changes in political systems are rarely achieved without a degree of what might be loosely called “agitation” – action against government through mechanisms outside the normal electoral process. In fact, working within the existing political system is rarely effective as political parties generally serve to create and reinforce the status quo.

Non-violent activities might range from street demonstrations of varying size to non-cooperation, passive resistance, and active civil disobedience. The essence it to reflect the withdrawal of consent to being governed under the current system, which has little effect unless it is communicated in very visible ways.

The problem which revolutionary groups confront, especially in England, it that we have generally a conformist and obedient society, and one which is often slow to complain, even when there is good cause to do so.

Conformity, of course, is learned behaviour, conveyed by parents and schools, and through employers, plus official actions and sanctions. By the same measure, non-conformity and outright disobedience has to be taught, with guidance and active instruction given.

Activities can range from the most simple, such as the late-payment of official imposts – such as Council Tax, water bills, BBC license fees and other such fees. Even a low-grade nuisance campaign can have an effect, such as refusing direct debit payments, and sending cheques instead (without official reference numbers). Instead of being sent to payment offices, these can be addressed personally to the private offices of chief executives, stressing their administrative systems.

A very wide range of activities is in fact possible, many entirely risk-free and totally within the law. All tend to rely on numbers for their effect, but the range is limited only by the imagination of campaigners, and the extent of any networks, which are needed to spread ideas, techniques and experiences.

6. A coalition of allies

When it comes to confronting governments, we have the inherent advantage of numbers – there are always more of “us” that there are of “them”. However, that advantage is only manifest if people are prepared to work together, and offer mutual support.

For that purpose, we get perennial cries for “umbrella” and “co-ordinating” groups, none of which ever come to anything. Not least, to maintain a fragile unity, compromises have to be made on strategy and objectives, which weaken strength and resolve.

Thus, the only real possibility of magnifying the effect of the disparate organisations is to form loose coalitions, willing to share information, occasionally co-ordinate action and to work towards the development of common strategies on certain issues. This will become essential in the event of a referendum campaign, where bids will have to be made for the official “no” campaign funding.

Conclusion

This outline does not pretend to be comprehensive, or in any way represent a definitive statement. It aims to make the points that a plan is needed, and then offers some elements which might be included in such a plan.

I was grateful to the CIB for inviting me to their meeting and for giving me a friendly and attentive hearing, and for the vibrant questioning.

Whether you agree or disagree with the detail, I would nevertheless aver that we will achieve nothing, and have achieved nothing, without strategic planning, aimed at achieving defined objectives. In my view, we either reconcile ourselves to that or we fail.

To me, that certainly is not an attractive option, and one which I intend to avoid.

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