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Your Car: The American Dream Machine By Sam Aurelius Milam III The paragraphs below are from the Renewal Notice for Vehicle Registration, used by the California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV).
When the Social Security system was created, the government made a promise. For those of you who still think the government has any credibility at all, here's what a Social Security card used to look like, a long time ago. Check the bottom line. Whatever the government promises, don't believe it. The next item came from Liberty Bell, March 1993:
This says that if you don't pay they can take your car. Worse yet, they can take any car you own, even your most expensive one, even if it's registered, in lieu of the unregistered car. In other words, the DMV is a protection racket, dealing in threats, intimidation, and extortion. This last item is from the Renewal By Mail form:
This means that you must agree in writing, under penalty of perjury, that you won't demand the right to be presumed innocent until proven guilty, but will instead agree to be guilty until proven innocent, and that you will bear the burden of proof of your innocence. While doing so, you'll provide information that may be used against you. You're not permitted to note, adjacent to your signature, that you're signing under duress. Any "other marks" besides your signature will invalidate the application. Since the possession of a driver license is a privilege, not a right, you can't object. Your only alternative is to get by without a license.
The California Department of Motor Vehicles has converted certain of the common rights of man into privileges over which it exercises complete control. As these privileges have become prerequisites to survival in present-day society, the power of the DMV has grown far beyond the driver's seat of a car. The DMV is today far more than a simple nuisance. It is an integral part of a great and insufferable evil. It is authoritarian, oppressive, and an affront to the American tradition of liberty. The DMV now contributes to the enslavement of a once great people, and it must be abolished. Only the people can guard the guards. Now is the time. This is the place. You are the people.
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The Gun Owners of California, 3440 Viking Drive, #106, Sacramento, California 95827 916 361-3109 by Sarah Foster The day following the firestorm at the Branch Davidian complex, President Clinton issued a warning (or threat?) that people "tempted" to join cults and become involved with the likes of Waco's David Koresh should be "deterred by the horrible scenes." Senator Howard Metzenbaum also discovered a lesson: Waco showed the need for tight federal firearms laws. Did the Senator call for a similar control on firearms by federal agencies such as the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF), which have each developed a mini-army with all the hellfire of the modern military at their disposal? Are you kidding? As a libertarian I find these remarks chilling and read other lessons in the fire. For me, the Waco horror was a lesson in how quickly the media and the American public will excuse any action of government, no matter how egregious, against a person or group it thinks is bad enough. Thus, because Koresh was labeled a cult leader it was OK to launch a military-style operation against him and the Branch Davidians, the only reproach being that ATF failed to "do the job right" at the get-go and things got messy. Which brings us to guns and Senator Metzenbaum's claim that here was proof positive of the need for their control. But Waco, if anything, proves the opposite. Those scenes should put us on red alert against such a proposal. We've seen such scenes 100 times over on our TV screens. We've watched what governments do to people they don't like: in Germany, in China, in Russia. But this time it was our government we watched, folks. The government of, by and for the people of the United States. That wasn't Tiananmen Square or the Warsaw Ghetto on our TV screens. It was Texas, and those were real American tanks and soldiers moving against real American citizens, none of whom had been formally charged with either a state or federal crime. Waco showed our government in action: a government whose agents now think there's nothing wrong in conducting "no-knock" raids and full-scale military operations against civilians, a government whose agents use tear gas against women and children, a government whose agents have so little compassion they mock the sufferings of their victims. That's right. TV reporters in Dallas, who were first on the scene as the flames subsided, allegedly saw the commandos giving each other the "high five" sign and heard them joke about how much they enjoyed -- enjoyed -- their "Texas barbecue." The fact that a large number of ordinary people possess effective weapons and could muster significant firepower is apparently the only thing keeping our government in check. Think about it. If our government behaves as it does while we still have some gun rights, have you any doubts how it would behave if we have none? These two articles are reprinted from the Interim Report March 1994, of the Freedom Network News, 1800 Market Street, San Francisco, California 94102 Wild West's Leaders Warning to Washington: At a special meeting in Denver, Colorado on March 13, Utah politicians evoked American Revolutionary War analogies in urging fellow Western state leaders to declare their independence from Uncle Sam. The meeting was to protest the "systematic destruction" of the culture of the rural west by federal bureaucrats. "We have to send another shot heard around the world," said Rob Bishop (Republican member of the Utah House of Representatives) referring, of course to the shots that were fired at Lexington and Concord the shots that sparked the American Revolution in 1776. A sea of angry westerners in cowboy hats including 200 ranchers, county commissioners, miners, state legislators, and recreationists from across the western US gave standing ovations to every speaker as they damned the federales into the ground. "We've become territories managed by a ruler as remote as the king of England" said Bill Howell, director of the Southeastern Utah Association of Local Governments (alluding to the arrogance of King George toward the 18th-century American colonists). There were calls to break the bonds of federal tyranny and invoke the 20th Amendment "States Rights" provisions1 to seize power back from Washington, DC. Republican Rep. Met Johnson, leader of the Utah Legislature's so-called "cowboy caucus," said proposals for putting Uncle Sam back into his rightful constitutional place range from diplomacy to near-insurrection.
ARIZONA SHERIFF DECLARES WAR ON WASHINGTON,
DC
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Lions and Tigers
and Bears! Oh, My!
by Sam Aurelius Milam III There's a sickness in the land. I call it Riskophobia. Consider. People seem to want guarantees of absolute security on everything you can imagine, from restaurants with no cigarette smoke to risk free silicon implants for women who want to be appreciated for more than just their minds. I even heard some woman advocate that the government should force the cigarette industry to make fire-safe cigarettes, for people who want to smoke in bed. No kidding. It was on 60 Minutes last March. These fear-mongers and bleeding-hearts all have one thing in common: the assumption that government should provide complete and mandatory security for everybody at any cost. Logical extremes are fun and instructive. Let's consider one. What would it take to have an absolutely safe highway? What if (for example) an 80,000 lb diesel tanker is carrying 25,000 gallons of nitrogen trichloride at 55 miles per hour? Suppose:
But what are the consequences of such protection? A regulatory agency using the above scenario might require that all traffic must be far enough apart, and the highway must be wide enough, that the truck can continue perpendicular to its intended route, starting with a full tank of fuel, until it runs out of fuel and coasts to a stop without ever colliding with any other vehicle or hitting any roadside obstruction. The truck must then still be far enough from the edge of the highway, and from all other traffic on the highway, that if the tank spontaneously ruptures allowing the nitrogen trichloride to vaporize and blow downwind, nobody will be hurt. A really strict regulator might also insist that the effects of a hurricane velocity tail wind should be included in calculating not only the truck's final position, but also the dispersion of the nitrogen trichloride. Ridiculous? Even this, however, isn't enough. What if the truck swerves left instead of right? Clearly, the design of the highway must accommodate oncoming traffic, perhaps a tanker filled with chlorobenzene. A really dedicated bureaucrat might even specify hurricane velocity tail winds in opposite directions, for both trucks simultaneously. Of course the scenario is ridiculous, but no more so than the idea that government should try to regulate all the risk out of the world. Risk reduction is a good idea, but is absolute security really a good idea? No! Risk reduction at any cost is lunacy. People who advocate it would be better off in Heaven and everyone else would be better off without them. Risk reduction by government coercion is tyranny. A government strong enough to prevent all hazards is far more dangerous than any possible combination of hazards it might prevent. If you're careful, quick, and lucky, you might avoid the occasional blind, drunken lunatic who's fondling his girlfriend while driving defective equipment in bad weather. Maybe your iron constitution can handle the cholesterol in your bacon, the sugar in your Frosted Flakes, the oil and salt on your potato chips, and even the stuff that ends up in your drinking water. But the demands and restrictions of a berserk regulatory bureaucracy hell-bent on protecting you at all costs cannot be avoided, cannot be resisted, and once allowed, will grow without limit. It may be a jungle out here, but people are better off, in the long run, living in a jungle than in the sterile cages of a government zoo.
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Frontiersman
If you don't want to keep receiving this newsletter, print RETURN TO SENDER above your name and address, cross out your name address, and drop the newsletter back in the U.S. mail. When I receive it, I'll terminate your subscription. Back issues or extra copies of this newsletter are available upon request. Permission is hereby granted to reproduce this newsletter in whole or in part, provided that the reproduction is accurate and that proper credit is given. However no such reproduction may under any circumstances be sold or redistributed for profit. I solicit letters, articles, and cartoons for the newsletter, but I don't pay for them. Short items are more likely to be printed. I suggest that letters and articles be shorter than 500 words, but that's flexible depending on space available and the content of the piece. I give credit for all items printed unless the author specifies otherwise. Unless the author provides instructions to the contrary, I'll credit the author by name and town (or whatever) of residence. This newsletter isn't for sale. If you care to make a voluntary contribution, you may do so. The continued existence of the newsletter will depend, in part, on such contributions. I accept cash and postage stamps. I don't accept checks, money orders, anything that will smell bad by the time it arrives, or anything that requires me to provide ID or a signature to receive it. In case anybody's curious, I accept gold, silver, platinum, etc. I'm sure you get the idea. Teach Your Parents Well by Sam Aurelius Milam III On Tuesday, April 12, 1994, the MacNeil/Lehrer NEWSHOUR presented a segment comparing Toronto and Detroit, vis-a-vis the prevalence of crime. During the segment, Grace Fouche (of Detroit) expressed perplexity that her son, Sala, while improperly handling a gun had inadvertently killed a close friend. If you think education is dangerous, try ignorance. The young man was ignorant, and the fault is entirely that of his mother. He was ignorant because (as she revealed by her own testimony) she failed to either teach him how to safely handle a gun or make sure that some competent instructor did so. It's really stupid to teach your children everything except for what they really need to know. Guns exist and they aren't going to go away. Most people will probably encounter a gun at least once during a normal lifetime. If the woman doesn't see to the proper training and education of her children, who will? Perplexity is a poor consolation for failure. The Holocaust on Tape
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