• The strange birth of New York’s gun laws.
• Oooh, now this is cynical. And fraught with … well, just fraught. (Tip o’ hat to JB.)
• Darn. They’re ruining it for me! (Tip o’ hat to MJR.)
• At least Twitter is is trying to mitigate its consent to censorship.
• “Why Conservatives Should Be Libertarians.”
• The Barefoot Bandit will probably serve just under five years. Federal and state sentences to be concurrent. Seems a reasonable mercy — and with luck a chance for that bright but screwed-up boy to get his head together. (HT to PT.)
• A troop of gorillas visits a human camp. (First couple of minutes are boring; stay with it.)
• The halo effect. And its impact in politics. (HT Beth and Dave Gross.)
• A free privacy tool for you Windows users. And another. Both look useful and — better yet! — easy to use. (Courtesy of JB.)

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• It just had to happen eventually, didn’t it? Ron Paul action figures. I like the man. But seriously, I agree with Joel. It’s getting a little nuts. Okay, maybe the superhero action figure is sorta funny. But since when do free people set up idols to worship?
• The dog: man’s best friend for more than 33,000 years.
• If this is a “minor infraction” I’d hate to see what serious violence is. But of course, if the cop loses his job over this, some other PD will consider him prime material for their wrong-house-puppykittyciding-drug-raiding SWAT team. (Tip o’ hat to C^2.)
• I am unacquainted with the art of Mr. Rhymes and know his name only because I love to read about celebrities, even if (and sometimes because) I’ve never heard of them. But he’s dead-bang right about the Megaupload bust.
• Why is it that they take our freedom in big gobbling gulps, then dole it back in such tiny, wimpy doses? Hey, Indiana: Free people have a right to resist the state and all its agents — particularly those who come storming in unannounced. Period. Without a lot of ifs, ands, and butts.
• Speaking of which …
• Oh yeah. Remember what was left of the Fifth Amendment once the NDAA got through with it? You can forget about that now.

Finally — marketing for the (very!) soon-to-be-released Hunger Games is getting fiendishly (and I mean that literally) clever. Lionsgate has now opened CapitalCouture.pn — a site that “celebrates” the style and fashion of the games.

If you don’t yet know The Hunger Games trilogy don’t be offput by the shallow, fashion-obsessed site. That’s the point of the thing. In the books (and the looks-to-be-fantastic movies being made from them), hapless teens from outlying districts are forced to fight to the death in an annual display of subjugation to the all-powerful state of Panem (thus the .pn in the URL, though in reality that belongs to Pitcairn Island). The games are orchestrated in Panem’s capital city, a vision of future decadence based on Rome of empire days.

Costumes are hugely important to the games (and become inadvertently vital to the success and survival of Our Heroine, Katniss Everdeen). So I think this is a darned clever way of showcasing them and hyping the movie. Even if it is shallow, ugly, and grotesque — just like Panem, the capital, and the games.

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…going on today. Just learned this via Dave Duffy’s blog.

This money bomb is specifically to give Paul a boost in South Carolina, where he’s not likely to make New Hampshire-like or Iowa-like v*te totals.

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• What happens when a corporation gets just a bit too uppity in its definition of IP.
• I suppose as times get harder, we can expect more of this sort of thing. Shudder.
• But if it can be made harder on the forces of tyranny … (Some notes on guerrilla warfare)
• “Complex Systems, Dysfunctional Industries, and Catastrophic Collapse.”
• Preparedness. Basic.
• Fascinating. They haven’t found the suspect, two decades later. But they’ve found his seventeenth century ancestor.
• Yeah. Right. According to this I’m supposed to go to either Switzerland … or the U.S. How about you?
• Good going. Excellent calm way to challenge a cop who thinks the law doesn’t apply to him.
• Have you ever seen — even once in your life — anybody in the media ask ask a question like this about any candidate other than Ron Paul? After spending months reporting around Paul (“Candidate Fatass came in first in the poll, while Candidate Bigmouth was third …”) it’s about time he’s getting “too much attention.”
• Just so you’ll know what your masters have in store for you. And how judiciously they’ll use it, of course.
• Snort. Chortle.
• Inhale.

(More thanks to The Usual Suspect(s). :-) )

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These days of course you couldn’t get me to v*te unless you stuck a gun in my ear. But that doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy the show.

And I’ve always found it quite a show. Some of my fondest memories from childhood involve trying to keep my eyes open late-late at night as election returns trickled in. Sometimes when I couldn’t make it, Mom would wake me up around midnight to tell me who the new governor or president or senator would be.

When the TV networks perfected the art of calling elections seconds after the polls closed, they ruined that. But the Internet has brought a little of the excitement back. Never mind that the “experts” called the New Hampshire primary for Romney hours ago. The v*tes are still being counted and an interactive AP/Google map is letting us watch, precinct by precinct, district by district.

With 75 percent of the v*tes counted, it’s just as the experts said — Romney 38 percent, Paul (bless his heart) just under 24 percent.

Did you ever think you’d see Ron Paul polling at 24 percent, beating the cr*p out of candidates anointed by the mainstream?

But the map tells an even more interesting story. Look at all those green spots. Those are the areas Ron Paul won. A lot of green, snaking its way down the west side of the state. That’s encouraging.

I wait for results to come in from Keene, that bastion of Free Staters. (Nothing yet; the big suspense of the night.) (In the end, the big disappointment of the night.)

It’s true that most of those places Ron Paul took today are small ones. Take a look at Millsfield. Paul got 53.3 percent of the vote there. All eight votes worth. In his “big win” areas, he got so few votes — 125, 77, 133, 149, 164 — that it seems marvelously strange that such tiny totals are being reported to the entire globe. Still, in those polling places, he got way more than all those establishment hacks, more than New Englander Romney, the man the media has already crowned.

And we all know it’s true that none of this means anything. At least not in the big political picture. No doubt Candidate Standard-Brand R or Candidate Standard-Brand D will be elected president next November and things will keep rolling down the road to catastrophe.

But you look at those green lights shining out of the New Hampshire hinterlands … and doesn’t it give you at least a hint of hope? Doesn’t it tell you we’ve got more friends out there than we know? Doesn’t it confirm that “… Something’s happening here, but you don’t know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?” That somewhere, in the backwoods and the small towns and the hearts and minds of Americans, a very healthy sort of independence is putting down deep roots?

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Politics, the morality of voting, and the hope or hopelessness of Ron Paul’s candidacy aside … this is worth the donations that could put it (or its shorter versions) on television.

ADDED: Dave Duffy has a fine editorial on Paul today, too.

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New poll: Paul is above the rest in Iowa.

Can he win New Hampshire?

Money quote from the latter: “If those two unexpected events do occur, then all hell will rain down upon the Paulistas. The GOP establishment will throw everything including the kitchen sink, the garage door opener, and two dozen pair of oversized baboon dentures at Paul to keep him from becoming the nominee.”

Never mind that it makes no difference; what a drama it would be.

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Ron Paul’s gradual rise above that field of R-Party evil clowns (in Iowa, at least) got me wondering: What would happen if Paul actually won the presidency?

I think we know that Paul, being a proven man of his word, would attempt to make government smaller, less tyrannical, and more constitutional. But that just brings up other questions.

What, specifically, would he try to do in his first weeks and months as president?

Would the traditional “shadowy forces” arrange a convenient fatal heart attack for him? (“Such a shame, but that’s what happens when you elect such an old man …”)

Would an uncomprehending and resentful Congress, the Supreme Court, and legions of entrenched bureaucrats simply counter everything he tried?

Would the media continue to treat him as a laughable freak, a quirky but ultimately inconsequential whim of a crazed electorate — something to endure for four years before getting back to “serious” governance?

Or maybe you think Paul would become as corrupted in the presidency as all the rest. I don’t. But I also don’t think he’d be able to (or allowed to) accomplish anything that would matter in the long run.

Of course, there are lots of other questions to ask first: Would Paul as the R nominee simply drive voters back to Obama? Who would he choose as his running mate? Etc. And none of the questions I’m asking here really matter.

But even to an anarchist like me, it’s encouraging to watch the rise of the Paulistas, despite the media’s best efforts to pretend Paul doesn’t exist. It means something. About mindset. About real change from the ground up. It means something the Rs and the media don’t dare consider.

So what do you think? What would happen if Ron Paul became president of the U.S.?

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