Russell M. Middleton - Commentary
This site originally published in MICHIGAN in 2002.
Any Browser.org Russell M. Middleton
Click to go Home
Commentary
and
Questions

9-11-01 the shockwaves

Why would the USA, as a nation, rather shoot down a commercial airliner full of innocent passengers, than arm the flight crews?
Are they a nation of cowards?
Have the institutionalized bullies won?

See also - John Walker Lindh, Making Sense of America's Traitor

The biggest tragedy of 11 September 2001 is how easily it could have been prevented by an armed flight crew, or heaven forbide, armed citizens. If this means bringing back the bodies of a few criminals and/or other antisocial types, so be it.

The "Right of Self Defense" used to be a right recognized as self evident for all living creatures. Some where, along the path to the present, under the guise of "civilization", this right has been lost.

Some would have us believe that "mutual assured vulnerability" will cure the injustices of the past.

In our modern, inward directed, bedroom communities, every criminal act erodes our trust of our neighbors. It starts at an early age with the ineffective response of parents and schools to bullying. We tend to blame the bullyee instead of the bullyor, because it requires less vigilance. We've raised generation after generation of fearful citizens who believe, if we could just disarm, declaw, and defang the world, everything would be wonderful.

For 3 billion years living things have had to fight for their existence. What arrogance we humans have to think this rule doesn't apply to us any more.

"They (humans) believe that science, technology and culture have placed them on a different plane from the rest of the animal world. They think that all their apparatus has somehow managed to protect them against their natural impulses. That when they cover their hairless bodies with clothes, when they paint their faces with make-up, and when they wash away and disguise their personal scent, they are able to suppress the primal urges which in fact guide their every move." — Matt Haig, The Last Family in England, Vintage 2004, p. 197.

"The role of guns in U.S. society is a subject of intense policy debate and disagreement. However, current research and data on firearms and violent crime are too weak to support strong conclusions about the effects of various measures to prevent and control gun violence, says a new report from the National Academies' National Research Council. A comprehensive research program on firearms is needed if criminal-justice and crime-prevention policy is to have a sound basis." — Charles F. Wellford, John V. Pepper, and Carol V. Petrie, Editors, Committee on Law and Justice, National Research Council, The National Academies, 16 Dec 2004

Yet the following people think they know the answers already. -- Handgun-Free America - Link broken. (The advocacy group Handgun-Free America, disbanded for lack of funding.)

The curious thing is nearly all of those quoted are considered to be educated. Either education isn't all that we think or academia has an agenda.

"Education and the free dissemination of information are the ultimate and ultimately the only tools allowable for leading any democratic institution. Anyone who espouses liberty and democracy yet promotes more secrecy, regulation and laws, no matter how benevolent in appearance, is a closet tyrant and poses a greater threat to "life, liberty & the pursuit of happiness" on this planet than all the great and petty despots who have gone before. The biggest bullies of all time have been governments against their own people." — Russell M. Middleton

What is an ATROCITY?
dictionary.com
General Patton e-mail
How do western democracies respond?
How to Interrogate Terrorists by Heather Mac Donald, City Journal (A quarterly magazine of urban affairs, published by The Manhattan Institute, edited by Myron Magnet.)

"Like we here at HCI have said for years, don't resist, cooperate with aggressors and you won't get hurt. Using weapons for self-defense just escalates the violence in these types of situations." Source -- http://handguncontrolinc.org/terrorist_page.htm

The gun is the most efficient tool yet devised for an individual to defend him or herself. It is no more evil than tooth or claw. We ignore this truth at the peril of our country, our culture, our very existence. See The Noble Uses of Firearms by Alan Korwin .

"The United Nations is not really composed of "nations," but is instead composed of members of the governments of various nations. The "nation" and the "government" are not necessarily synonymous. Few people would argue the Pol Pot regime represented the Cambodian people, that Saddam Hussein represented the people of Iraq, or that the Duvalier regimes represented the people of Haiti. Almost all governments, especially dictatorial governments, are concerned foremost with their own political stability. Hence, the government-centric United Nations manifests an instinctive bias in favor of controlling insurgencies by controlling the arms of the insurgents, rather than by addressing the oppressive conditions that created the insurgencies."13 (Kopel p.4)

13 Andrew Latham, Assistant Professor at Macalester College and member of the Canadian delegation to the "Inhumane Weapons Convention" (1994/95), perfectly articulated the U.N. perspective, "The ready availability of weapons makes it far too easy for substate groups to seek remedy for grievances through the application of violence." Andrew Latham, Light Weapons and Human Security -- A Conceptual Overview, in SMALL ARMS CONTROL: OLD WEAPONS, NEW ISSUES 13-14 (Jayantha Dhanapala et al., eds. 1999). See also Sami Faltas, Weapons Collection Programmes: Questions to Answer and Challenges to Face, at 3 (Bonn International Center for Conversion, 1998) ("Ultimately, the ownership of arms should not be left to the personal choice of individuals. The state needs to preserve its monopoly of the legitimate use of force. So sanctions against the illegal possession and use of arms are necessary and should be imposed."), available at http://www.iansa.org/documents/2003/weapons_collections.htm. Sami Faltas is the researcher in charge of the Bonn International Center for Conversion's Surplus Weapons program.

David B. Kopel, Paul Gallant & Joanne D. Eisen, MICRO-DISARMAMENT, UMKC Law Review Volume 73, Number 4, Summer 2005, available at http://www.davekopel.com/2A/Foreign/MicroDisarmament.pdf.

Don't Finance the Murder of the Bill of Rights
Bill of Rights logo
Bill of Rights Enforcement!

Ten Universal Laws of the Warrior Code

The Ten Universal Laws of the Warrior Code are contained In Dawn Callan's book: Awakening the Warrior Within - Secrets of Personal Safety and Inner Security. Published by Tenacity Press.

These Laws encourage individuals to live impeccably with more joy, more choice, and more peace. This is a path not without risk, but not without rewards. Living by the Warrior Code will enrich daily living on your own terms.

1. Pay attention. Stay in the present. Its the only place anything is really happening.

2. Take responsibility. This is your life, take it back. Either you get to own it, or you blame someone or something else for it.

3. No kvetching. No whining, no sniveling - it takes you out of the present and lets you abdicate responsibility.

4. Don't take any shit. It's very bad for one's self-esteem to take any abuse. Stand up to your tyrants, both internal and external. The cost is too great not to.

5. Do it anyway. Hard choices temper our strength and our integrity; they make the difference between a life of mediocrity and a life of excellence.

6. Don't quit. Look at what stops you, at where you give the effort up. That is the edge between becoming a victim or a warrior.

7. Keep your agreements. A warrior is only as good as his or her word. The way we build self-trust and trust in others is by making and keeping agreements.

8. Keep your sense of humor. Otherwise what's the point? Humor helps us to stretch beyond ourselves and our own limits.

9. Love one another. Otherwise where's the meaning? It's the way we remember we're not alone in this universe.

10. Honor your connection to Source. There is a force in the universe, greater than ourselves, that creates us, sustains us, provides for us, cares for us, guides us, and loves us. It speaks to us from within. Trust it.

Source: http://www.lifemasters.co.za/top10warrior2003.htm

The taking up of arms gives an individual power and brings with it great responsibility. This was recognized ages ago when a 'code of conduct' was developed called the Chivalric Codes and Rules .

chivalry
noun [U]
Chivalry means very polite and honourable behaviour, especially shown by men towards women.
"Thank goodness," she said, as she willingly handed him her suitcase, "the age of chivalry is not dead".
In the medieval period of history chivalry was the system of behaviour followed by knights that put a high value on purity, honour, kindness and bravery.
-- Cambridge International Dictionary of English
Thanks to Andrew Harley, Richard Eradus and Ivan Salcedo (Cambridge University Press)

From the introduction to "The Myth of National Defense" by Hans-Hermann Hoppe

"Even aside from day-to-day security risks, the reality of terrorism and its resulting mayhem has demonstrated the inability of government to provide adequate security against attacks on person and property. The lesson of September 11 is indisputable: government had not only failed to act as a guardian of security and protection but had actually been the primary agent in creating insecurity and exposure to risk, and, moreover, did not achieve secure justice once the crime had been committed.

"However, this was not the lesson that was drawn from the affair. Instead, the political elite successfully exploited public fears to vastly increase government spending, central credit inflation, bureaucratic management, citizen surveillance, regulation of transportation, and generally wage an all out attack on liberty and property.

"Meanwhile, US foreign policy pursued in the aftermath became more aggressively interventionist, violent, and threatening (the US refused even to rule out the employment of nuclear weapons against enemy regimes) than it had been before, thereby increasing the number of recruits into the ranks of people who are willing to use extreme violence as a means of retribution.

"In the same way that government intervention in times of peace can generate perverse consequences in markets that do not tend toward clearing, in times of war, military intervention can thus have the effect of harming the prospects for peace and security and bringing about a permanent state of violence and political control. Truly, the political affairs of our time cry out for a complete rethinking of the issues of defense and security and the respective roles of government, the market, and society in providing them." — Hans-Hermann Hoppe

Growing anti-Americanism in some parts of European society has not gone unnoticed.

In the wake of the Dunblane Massacre (13 March 1996), Mrs Ann Pearson, a friend of some of the bereaved families led a witch-hunt campaign of hysteria and hatred against shooters. She founded a very widely supported campaign, named the Snowdrop Petition because March is snowdrop time in Scotland, gained 705,000 signatures in support, and was successful in pressing Parliament, under the new 1997 Labour government of Tony Blair, for a UK-wide ban on handguns. Firearms (Amendment) Act 1997, given Royal Assent on February 27 1997, prohibited the possession of handguns by law-abiding citizens of England, Wales and Scotland. Although the Tory legislation banned only handguns greater than .22 calibre, the new Labour government went further with the Firearms (Amendment) (No. 2) Act 1997 and banned virtually all handguns.

"The 'false and designing' man of the 1990s, Tony Blair MP, who got himself elected as Prime Minister in part by scapegoating 57,000 innocent law-abiding people for the crimes of one madman in his speech at the 1996 Labour Party Conference." — Cybershooters - The internet's leading source of information for shooters.

Now ten years on it may be time to look at some crime statistics and ascertian whether the bullying of lawful shooters has had a positive social effect. Starting with 1986 let us compare Crime vs Guns for UK and USA.

It has come to my attention that some "scholars" argue the American Civil War 1861-1865, was about states rights first and that the slavery issue was only raised later to justify the Union's actions. I think not, and submit these two documents for your consideration.

  1. DECLARATION OF THE IMMEDIATE CAUSES 26th April 1852
  2. South Carolina Ordinance Of Secession 20th December 1860

BBC One, Scotland from the Sky, Our Working Lives (Or the British Government's perennial mismanagement of Scottish Industry.)
Scotland from the Sky Series 2

In this film, Jamie Crawford uses remarkable aerial images to find out how the Scots have harnessed our precious natural resources to power the country's industry. He combines old aerial photographs with present-day drone and helicopter footage to tell a range of tales, from a remote loch near Ullapool to the Carron ironworks of Falkirk.

From the air it is clear that island of Belnahua on the west coast of Scotland has been almost entirely hollowed out. For here was a thriving slate industry. The deep quarries are now flooded by the sea.

It was not until more modern times that the central belt became the beating heart of industrial Scotland. Jamie meets a worker from Ravenscraig who talks about the harsh and dangerous working conditions they had to endure in one of the largest steel foundries in the world, and recalls the tragedy when Ravenscraig finally closed in 1992.

Jamie travels to Shetland to follow in the footsteps of his dad who went there to work during the oil boom, to witness the Herculean task of dismantling an old oil platform. And once the oil runs out, a new industry will take its place - wind power.

A GUIDE TO THE INDUSTRIAL HERITAGE OF CENTRAL SCOTLAND by JOHN CROMPTON

Your Turn -- I would really like to hear what you think.
- Contact Me
Contact Me about this page. All rights reserved. © Rm² 2001