Molon Labe! (19 page)

That suggestion will be regarded as shocking, but it should not be. To the objection that a rejection of a court's authority would be civil disobedience, the answer is that a Supreme Court that issues orders without authority engages in an equally dangerous form of civil disobedience.

— Robert Bork, 1997

Congress and President immediately reply with the
Dangerous Weapons Act
of 2007, which requires the federal registration of all currently owned center-fire, semiautomatic rifles and their ammunition. (Handguns, shotguns, and rimfires are, for the moment, exempt.) The NICS apparatus is modified to act as the registry. Again, the amnesty period is just 90 days. Failure to register affected firearms means an automatic 5-year felony prison term.

It has, after all, been explained to us that the heart of the matter is not personal guilt, but social danger. One can imprison an innocent person if he is socially hostile. And one can release a guilty man if he is socially friendly....

And it must be kept in mind that it was not what he had done that constituted the defendant's burden, but what he might do if he were not shot now. "We protect ourselves not only against the past but also against the future."
(quoting the organizer of the Department of Exceptional Courts of the People's Commissariat of Justice, N.V. Krylenko)

— Alexandr Solzhenitsyn,
The Gulag Archipelago
, Vol. 1

Plumbing supply houses are within a week cleaned out of large diameter (8"+) PVC pipe and end caps, purchased mostly with cash. Enrollment in the shooting academies plummets as students don't want to risk travelling with unregistered firearms.

President Bush insists that the
DWA
is not a stepping stone to confiscation, that handguns and sporting long guns are not next, and that lawful owners should have no qualms about mere registration. Gunowners do not believe him. Even the NRA joins in the hoots and hollers.

To implement a popular (i.e., not actively resisted) tyranny, discover through constant polling the general shape and dimension of your target people's activities and simply erect your wall just slightly outside such. A wall is not a wall if one never bumps into it...

For those who do encounter the regulatory boundary, their first reaction is to retract, rather than to circumvent or smash through. This retraction readjusts their active area to that of the masses, which is precisely the point. De Tocqueville's term "compresses" is particularly apt here. Circumferential regulation compresses those who otherwise would "live large outside the box" or "color outside the lines."

Often, in moments of waggish humor, our legislators have proscribed many harmless activities, for the simple reason that they could do so without fear of consequence. For example, the 1994 prohibition of bayonet lugs on assault weapons. There had hardly been an historic criminal issue of bayonets, much less a recent rash of drive-by bayonetings — but that was not the point, obviously. Watching the henceforth frantic removal by gun importers of tiny bits of steel from rifle barrels was responsible for gales of laughter within many marbled halls.

If such mocking legislation can compress even an armed and informed citizenry, then it can compress
anyone
. We have built a wall around the very people most equipped (both psychologically and materially) to reduce it to rubble. Their lack of resistance has served to embolden our more craven colleagues, and thus has increased general regulatory velocity.

What are holistic healthnuts and privacy paranoids to
gunowners
? If riflemen ranchers did not dare open fire, then what will homeschoolers do — pelt us with their phonics workbooks?

The war has been won. All that remains is the mopping up. By the 2020 we will declare as felonious contraband all semi-automatic rifles and shotguns and require their confiscation. (Superposed shotguns will not be affected, so as not to alienate the cultured man with a Perazzi.) Lines will form around the block as assault weapons owners queue for their own castration.

What is vital to apprehend is that this castration is merely a formality, for we have long ago castrated that most important organ. Their
spirit
.

We may have to throw them a bit of constitutional "just compensation" in order to appease the Republicans and the NRA, but this nominal sum will easily be absorbed by the federal budget.

— Julius N. Harquist,
The Gaian Convergence
, p.89

     River Lethe Press (2007)

To consider the judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions is a very dangerous doctrine indeed, and one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy.

— Thomas Jefferson

— Camus

2007 USA social news

The summer's record heat and drought sparks racial tensions in several metro areas. L.A. experiences riots more intense than in 1992, and this time white neighborhoods suffer widespread damage. It takes National Guard troops a week of fighting to quell the disturbances. 386 people are killed, and property damage is in the tens of billions of dollars. Martial law is kept in force until November.

A multi-drug resistant (MDR) strain of
Salmonella typhi
sweeps southern California. The etiologic agent (
i.e.,
origin) is illegal aliens from Mexico. L.A. County (with a population greater than Georgia) is particularly hard hit. The percentage of Hispanics in southern California exceeds 50%, resulting in a stampede of white flight to Oregon, Washington, Arizona, Utah, and Colorado. Property values crash in L.A. Rural mountain properties in the Rockies increase by 40% in value within a year.

2007 USA economic news

Gold is $1,429/ounce. The stock market, at 4,823, is in its seventh year of decline. Bonds have been performing well, however, inflation is beginning to take off.

Virginia

Summer 2007

Katherine Jessup was a cancer patient on a heavy regimen of chemotherapy. The powerful drug Cis-Plat nauseated her and she couldn't keep it down. She needed another drug to relieve the nausea so that she could tolerate her chemo. This other drug, tetrahydrocannabinol, was very affordable, easy to administer, and had decades of clinical trials and common usage with few or no side effects.

It was, however, illegal.

C
₂₁
H
₃₀
O
₂
Cor THCC is a phenol derived from hemp resin. It is more commonly known as
cannabis
. Marijuana.

While prohibiting marijuana, the federal government allows the pharmaceutical industry to sell a synthesized form of THC as an oral medication — Marinol. Real genius at work here. Since the issue is nausea, patients can't keep oral medication — including Marinol — in their stomachs long enough to work. That is why THC must be ingested through the lungs.

Katherine Jessup had never been a drug user. She had never smoked marijuana, or even cigarettes. Only after lengthy studying which proved the medicinal value of marijuana for alleviating severe nausea did she try it. It worked very well, and reduced some of the pain from cancer. Since she and her husband did not want to buy marijuana on the retail market and support a criminal drug culture, they decided to grow what she needed in their basement. The process was surprisingly easy, just like the instructional YouTube video promised. A few grow lights on a timer and some fertilizer were the basic supplies. After seven months of homegrown medical marijuana, Katherine Jessup began to recover. She and Tom even resumed their lovemaking. Her doctors thought that she would go into remission soon.

She never had the chance to find out.

Acting on a tip, the DEA raided the Jessups and found several marijuana plants growing in their basement. The tipster was later learned to have been a "friend" who staunchly supported the War on Some Drugs. The irony of her daily vodka martini habit was lost on most everybody.

The feds charged the Jessups with cultivation with intent to sell. Judge Gray instructed the jury to ignore Katherine Jessup's "medical cannabis" defense, opining that it was just a ruse to justify their "pot habit." The jury reluctantly found her guilty, and several jurors later wept when Judge Gray sentenced her to the custody of the Bureau of Prisons for a term of five years. The jurors hadn't heard of the Fully Informed Jury Amendment (FIJA) and didn't know of their 1,000-year old right to judge both the facts and the
law
and acquit nonviolent offenders of harmful and unconstitutional legislation.

At the Federal Prison Camp in Allentown, Pennsylvania Katherine Jessup lasted only five weeks. Denied the one drug which would have allowed her chemotherapy, she was found dead in her cell one morning having choked on her own vomit during the night. Her case and subsequent death caused howls of protest, but, like most protest, it went nowhere.

Judge Gray, who tried to justify his actions by federal drug case sentencing guidelines, got a few death threats, but nothing came of them. It was typical American outrage: high heat, low Btu's. Emotionally satisfying, but ineffective.

Katherine's husband, Tom, sentenced to three years probation for cultivation, went into an emotional spiral, lost his business, became an alcoholic and killed himself in a one-car crash. Only the Internet press carried the story of his tragic death.

Washington, D.C.          FBIHQ

September 2007

Special Agent Douglas Bleth is not looking forward to his follow-up meeting with the Director. He has not yet identified the Wyoming "general."

The Director rises and smiles. "Ah, Bleth, good to see you again. What do you have for me today?"

Bleth says, "We've made some progress, though not as much as we'd have liked."

Frowning, the Director says, "
Hmmm
. Go on."

"Two things we
are
sure of. One, that the Wyoming re-location is expanding to other counties."

"
Really?
"

"Yes, sir. We have access to weekly aggregates from the Wyoming SecState's office. New relocators are concentrating in several other counties along last year's model."

"So," the Director says, "they're marching onwards, eh?"

Bleth nods and says, "We've identified five, and maybe seven, new counties that they're moving into."

This surprises the Director. "
Seven?
Plus the five they already have?"

"Yes, sir. Assuming their 2010 electoral success, that would make up to twelve of Wyoming's twenty-three counties. Half the state."

"Half the state . . ." the Director echoes.

"Yes, sir, but something else we've learned is even more disturbing. Their numbers are also increasing within particular congressional districts overlapping the first five counties they saturated last year. Take Senate District 16, for example. While much of it is in Sublette County, which they already have, the rest extends into neighboring Lincoln County. New people are pouring into Lincoln. But here's the interesting thing. When they took over Sublette in 2006, they only moved to the
southern
part of the county, the part that's within Senate District 16. The northern half of Sublette is in SD 17, which also extends into Fremont and Teton Counties."