Thursday, January 31, 2013

The Wealth of Nations



The Wealth of Nations
posted by Bevin Chu
January 31, 2013
Taipei, China

1. You cannot legislate the poor into prosperity, by legislating the wealthy out of prosperity.

2. What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving.

3. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else.

4. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it.

5. When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work, because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that is the beginning of the end of any nation!


Saturday, January 26, 2013

Wake Up America!

Wake Up America!
A letter sent to me by a fellow gun rights defender
posted by Bevin Chu
Taipei, China
January 26, 2013

You're sound asleep when you hear a thump outside your bedroom door. Half-awake, and nearly paralyzed with fear, you hear muffled whispers. At least two people have broken into your house and are moving your way.

With your heart pumping, you reach down beside your bed and pick up your shotgun. You rack a shell into the chamber, then inch toward the door and open it. In the darkness, you make out two shadows. One holds something that looks like a crowbar.

When the intruder brandishes it as if to strike, you raise the shotgun and fire. The blast knocks both thugs to the floor. One writhes and screams while the other crawls to the front door and lurches outside.

As you pick up the telephone to call police, you know you're in trouble.

In your country, most guns were outlawed years before, and the few that are privately owned are so stringently regulated as to make them useless.

Yours was never registered.

Police arrive and inform you that the other burglar has died. They arrest you for First Degree Murder and Illegal Possession of a Firearm.

When you talk to your attorney, he tells you not to worry: the authorities will probably plead the case down to manslaughter.

"What kind of sentence will I get?" you ask.

"Only ten-to-twelve years," he replies, as if that's nothing.

"Behave yourself, and you'll be out in seven."

The next day, the shooting is the lead story in the local newspaper. Somehow, you're portrayed as an eccentric vigilante while the two men you shot are represented as choirboys. Their friends and relatives can't find an unkind word to say about them.

Buried deep down in the article, authorities acknowledge that both "victims" have been arrested numerous times. But the next day's headline says it all:

"Lovable Rogue Son Didn't Deserve to Die."

The thieves have been transformed from career criminals into Robin Hood-type pranksters. As the days wear on, the story takes wings. The national media picks it up. Then the international media. The surviving burglar has become a folk hero.

Your attorney says the surviving thief is preparing to sue you and he'll probably win.

The media publishes reports that your home has been burglarized several times in the past and that you've been critical of local police for their lack of effort in apprehending the suspects.

After the last break-in, you told your neighbor that you would be prepared next time. The  District Attorney uses this to allege that you were lying in wait for the burglars.

A few months later, you go to trial. The charges haven't been reduced, as your lawyer had so confidently predicted. When you take the stand, your anger at the injustice of it all works against you. Prosecutors paint a picture of you as a mean, vengeful man.

It doesn’t take long for the jury to convict you of all charges. The judge sentences you to life in prison.

This case really happened.

On August 22, 1999, Tony Martin of Enmesh, Norfolk, England, killed one burglar and wounded a second.

In April, 2000, he was convicted and is now serving a life term.

How did it become a crime to defend one's own life in the once great British Empire?

It started with the Pistols Act of 1903. This seemingly reasonable law forbade selling pistols to minors or felons and established that handgun sales were to be made only to those who had a license.

The Firearms Act of 1920 expanded licensing to include not only handguns but all firearms except shotguns. Later laws passed in 1953 and 1967 outlawed the carrying of any weapon by private citizens and mandated the registration of all shotguns.

Momentum for total handgun confiscation began in earnest after the Hungerford mass shooting in 1987. Michael Ryan, a mentally disturbed man with a Kalashnikov rifle, walked down the streets shooting everyone he saw. When the smoke cleared, 17 people were dead.

The British public, already de-sensitized by 80 years of "gun control", demanded even tougher restrictions. The seizure of all privately owned handguns was the objective even though Ryan used a rifle.

Nine years later, in Dubliner, Scotland, Thomas Hamilton used a semi-automatic weapon to murder 16 children and a teacher at a public school.

For many years, the media had portrayed all gun owners as mentally unstable or worse, criminals. Now the press had a real kook with which to beat up law-abiding gun owners. Day after day, week after week, the media gave up all pretense of objectivity and demanded a total ban on all handguns.

The Dubliner Inquiry, a few months later, sealed the fate of the few sidearms still owned by private citizens.

During the years in which the British government incrementally took away most gun rights, the notion that a citizen had the right to armed self-defense came to be seen as vigilantism.

Authorities refused to grant gun licenses to people who were threatened, claiming that self-defense was no longer considered a reason to own a gun. Citizens who shot burglars or robbers or rapists were charged while the real criminals were released.

Indeed, after the Martin shooting, a police spokesman was quoted as saying, “We cannot have people take the law into their own hands."

All of Martin’s neighbors had been robbed numerous times, and several elderly people were severely injured in beatings by young thugs who had no fear of the consequences. Martin himself, a collector of antiques, had seen most of his collection trashed or stolen by burglars.

When the Dubliner Inquiry ended, citizens who owned handguns were given three months to turn them over to local authorities. Being good British subjects, most people obeyed the law. The few who didn't were visited by police and threatened with ten-year prison sentences if they didn't comply. Police later bragged that they'd taken nearly 200,000 handguns from private citizens.

How did the authorities know who had handguns?

The guns had been registered and licensed. Kind of like cars. Sound familiar?

WAKE UP AMERICA!

THIS [civilian disarmament] IS WHY OUR FOUNDING FATHERS PUT THE SECOND AMENDMENT IN OUR CONSTITUTION.

"It does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set brush fires in people's minds”
--Samuel Adams

If you think this is important. please it forward to everyone you know. You had better wake up, because Obama is doing the very same thing over here. And there are stupid people in congress and on the street who will go right along with him.


"After a shooting spree, they always want to take the guns away from the people who didn't do it. I sure as hell wouldn't want to live in a society where the only people allowed guns are the police and the military."
-- William S. Burroughs, icon of the Beat Generation, one of the most politically trenchant, culturally influential, and innovative artists of the 20th century

And yes, even Karl Marx insisted on the right to keep and bear arms!

Marxists, should the worker be armed? - Quora

“workers must be armed and organized. The whole proletariat must be armed at once with muskets, rifles, cannon [sic!] and ammunition… Under no pretext should arms and ammunition be surrendered; any attempt to disarm the workers must be frustrated, by force if necessary.”
-- From the Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League, by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels in 1850.

Tuesday, January 01, 2013

Deconstructing Japan’s Claim of Sovereignty over the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands

Deconstructing Japan’s Claim of Sovereignty over the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands
by Ivy Lee and Fang Ming
The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol 10, Issue 53, No. 1, December 31, 2012.


The China Desk: Ms. Ivy Lee is a brilliant scholar and a personal friend. This is one of the strongest rebuttals of spurious Japanese territorial claims to Diaoyutai penned so far. Highly recommended. 

“The near universal conviction in Japan with which the islands today are declared an ’integral part of Japan’s territory‘ is remarkable for its disingenuousness. These are islands unknown in Japan till the late 19th century (when they were identified from British naval references), not declared Japanese till 1895, not named till 1900, and that name not revealed publicly until 1950." Gavan McCormack (2011)1

Abstract
In this recent flare-up of the island dispute after Japan “purchased” three of the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands, Japan reiterates its position that “the Senkaku Islands are an inherent part of the territory of Japan, in light of historical facts and based upon international law.”  This article evaluates Japan’s claims as expressed in the “Basic View on the Sovereignty over the Senkaku Islands” published on the website of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Japan.  These claims are:  the Senkaku/Diaoyu island group was terra nullius which Japan occupied by Cabinet Decision in 1895;  China did not, per China’s contention, cede the islands in the Shimonoseki Treaty; Japan was not required to renounce them as war booty by the San Francisco Peace Treaty; and accordingly Japan’s sovereignty over these islands is affirmed under said Treaty.  Yet a careful dissection of Japan’s claims shows them to have dubious legal standing.  Pertinent cases of adjudicated international territorial disputes are examined next to determine whether Japan’s claims have stronger support from case law.  Although the International Court of Justice has shown effective control to be determinative in a number of its rulings, a close scrutiny of Japan’s effective possession/control reveals it to have little resemblance to the effective possession/control in other adjudicated cases.  As international law on territorial disputes, in theory and in practice, does not provide a sound basis for its claim of sovereignty over the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands, Japan will hopefully set aside its putative legal rights and, for the sake of peace and security in the region, start working with China toward a negotiated and mutually acceptable settlement.

To read the rest of the article, visit
http://japanfocus.org/site/view/3877