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05/06/2003 Archived Entry: "Which ring of Dante's hell?"

Take Dante's Ring of Hell Test and find out which ring is your natural niche. (BTW, you may have noticed...I tend to open each blog with a distracting or amusing item because the world's horizon is not growing rosier and a smile once a day is to be valued.)

I was distressed to hear about the arrest of 12 anti-war demonstrators near the KSU [Kent State] campus this last Sunday, the 4th.

"The rally was held following the May 4, 1970, commemoration ceremony, which remembers the four Kent State students who were killed by Ohio National Guardsmen during a protest against the Vietnam War. Nine others were wounded in the shootings." When the lively but peaceful demonstrators were told to disband from a campus protest by riot police, the students moved into the streets where arrests commenced. As Fred Pierre asks in an antiwar.com article "When students cannot march for peace on a university campus, what is their alternative? Hundreds of students and townspeople are asking themselves this question after a noisy anti-war march was disbanded by Kent police. Campus is again under lockdown and protestors face immediate arrest. Can it really be thirty-three years after the students died at Kent State?"

It is frightening to contemplate the many "unnoticed" measures that are lodged and lost within the volumes and volumes of new law that is being enacted at record speed. Take just one example described by Richard Reeves in a recent op/ed. "On Thursday of last week, someone inside a secret meeting of the Senate Intelligence Committee spotted a new paragraph in the intelligence authorization bill for fiscal year 2004. The new wording would give the Defense Department and the Central Intelligence Agency the same kind of subpoena power used by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other law enforcement agencies. In other words, the military officials and CIA agents could legally search through your telephone, credit card and bank records, and e-mail logs, without court approval." The wall of distinction between the military and the police is being eroded, a wall that was purposefully constructed by the Constitution. Article 2, Section 27, "No standing army shall be kept up by this state in time of peace, and no soldier shall in time of peace be quartered in any house without the consent of its owner, nor in time of war except in the manner prescribed by law." One reason for the inclusion of the language was the fear that a standing army in peacetime would be used to police the domestic population -- the military would be used against its own people as they are in Latin American dictatorships. All in all, I am pleased to be living in Canada these days, out of mainstream of madness, and in a nation that the US accuses of caring "too much" about civil liberties. the US seems particularly annoyed by the comparatively strong emphasis Canada places on privacy rights.

On the Personal Front:

Applause to Karen de Coster for her vigorous defense of "glorious, wonderful dogs" on the lewrockwell.com site. Always trying for that added un-PC touch, Karen's dogs are pictured with confederate bandanas tied around their necks. Ahhh....

Best to all,
mac