The Liberty Lamp: Libertarian News & Editorials

Check out the above link for something really hillarious. It's a humorous made-up scenario where WWII is played as a Real Time Strategy (RTS) computer game. If the war had really gone like this, it would have been so much better :).

Today the US House of Representatives stupidly passed a motion to renew the insideous "Patriot Act". Next, it will go to the Senate, where they will doubtlessly approve and make it law. One positive aspect of all this, though, is that the opposing group was quite large, probably around 40% of the total 535 members (assuming they were all present, which probably wasn't the case- It rarely is!).

In other news, some morons tried (fortunately unsuccessfully) to bomb the London transit system again. As you might expect, this turn of events was used as "evicence" (or an excuse?) to pass the aforementioned cowpie load of legislation. Coincidence? I have a hunch, but unfortunately, to draw a certain conclusion, this kind of crap will have to happen a few more times (by then we'll all be old).

Write to your Senators, people... I can almost guarantee you that they won't listen (but I'd love to be proven wrong!), but at least then no one will be able to say you didn't "try to work with the system" when the camel-breaking straw is placed :(.

Just a little post of mine at the good old Patriot Debate forums:

...Your exchanges with wlrube in this thread bring up an interesting quandry here, perhaps something worth an in-debth investigation. Rember what you posted about increased crime over the last three decades or so. At the same time, the size and reach of government (especially the Feds) has increased too. Could there be a link between the two? If so, what is it about our governmental systems are creating more crime when they should in fact be at worst having no effect, and at best actually reducing crime levels?

The positive side of a government is that you can more efficiently stop criminals from doing what they do best. The down side to this, though, is that at the same time, you can also amplify the reach and scope of criminals within the system itself.

The bottom line is that government, at its most fundamental crux, is nothing more and nothing less than a chanler and amplifyer of individual and collective will, which is 99.9% of the time directed at others. In a sense, it can be argued, the result of all this is that such large power structures fundamentally need to create a culture of "do as I say, not as I do" amongst core and vestigial participants. Rare and special is he (or she or It or whatever) that leads by example, something all of us need to do. This is not a new concept for people, especially amongst those that were part of the international Scouting movement (that's you, GRLT Mr. Green).

I have finally gotten around to scanning the most important hand-outs from the media access seminar I went to last Saturday. The resulting PDF document (see title link) is over 6 megabytes in size (about 1MB per page of the document). I apologize for the huge file size, but this is the result of the fact that most of the text you see is a scanned image rather than plantext. Why is this? Because I don't have any OCR (optical character recognition) software. I think it's worth the download wait though.

The Writings section of PhoenixOfLight.org has been updated to include a few new entries, covering such topics as how to deal with law enforcement raids/interrogations, and an e-book about September 11th, 2001 and what may have led to it. Check it out, and be sure to send some feedback!

Today's post is an important educational read about the US Constitution and property law for all of you who haven't read Mr. Badnarik's book, Good To Be King (Available on Amazon). The above PDF is a sample chapter of his work pertaining to what the differences between "rights" and "privelages" are. In it's most simplified form, the scholar stipulates that rights are things that are inherently yours and cannot be taken away from you. Conversely, privelages are "gifts", if you will, that can be taken away just as easily as they are given at potentially any time.

This is honestly a very easy to read, informative, and really quite fun essay. I encourage all our readers to check it out. It will only take maybe 20-30 minutes of your time and is well worth it!

The book reviews section of the site is now up and running. Our first review, How to Be Invisible is definately worth a read. This book will give you a lot of useful information about how to protect your idendity and personal information from identity theft and other people who don't need to know what you're up to. I'd say this is a must for any political/social activist and American in general. Also, if you've read anything good that you want others to read about, you can submit your review and we'll put it online as well. Just send an email to the webmaster.

This just in: The Phoenix of Light Network website is soon (hopefully within the next week or two) going to have a brand new feature- book reviews! Yes, that's right, kiddies those things that some of us can actually... read! Seriously though, it will feature quaziregular reviews of books I've read, and what I think about them. You can all chime in too here on the blog, but considering that almost no one ever posts there, that probably won't happen.

Anyway, the books (at least the first few) will be libertarian/disestablishmentarianist in nature. Other ones will not be, but should be interesting to the general civic activist or simply to the avid readership as a whole. Stay tuned!

For those of you who actually pay attention to the layout of this page, you will notice that the design scheme has changed yet again. I did not really want to do this, but I seemed to have no other choice after trying to fix the problems with the previous one. It took me hours, and I didn't get anywhere! Anyway, what you see is not what you'll get, because I'll be tweaking this in the next day or two. In the meantime, check out what's going on on the home page.