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    Caught in the Stream of Determinism: In Michigan, the mere act of selling a gun is now considered equivalent to murder. According to a report in the December 8 Detroit Free Press, Terry Walker, a cook who lives in Capac, Michigan, has been charged with involuntary manslaughter in the October 11 death of policeman Christopher Wouters. Officer Wouters was shot to death by Ljeka Juncaj while he was booking the suspect on drug charges at a Warren, Michigan, jail. The arresting officers had not searched the suspect, so they did not find the handgun Juncaj was carrying.

    Walker was 70 miles away when the crime was committed. So why is he being prosecuted?...

    No-Brainer Award: The headline of an August 31 Associated Press story in the Los Angeles Times declares the obvious: "Grad Student Bought Bullets Before Shooting." The article relates an obscure detail about an obscure incident in which a mentally disturbed graduate student shot a University of Arkansas English professor after being dropped from the school's graduate program. The detail is the fact that the student bought .38-caliber bullets from a local store only a few hours before committing the crime.

    This detail is both obvious and irrelevant-the shooter had to buy the bullets at some time, but it does not really matter when-and there is no reason to devote a whole article to this fact, even in the local Arkansas newspapers. The fact that this meaningless detail was reported in the Los Angeles Times, halfway across the country, indicates the bizarre extent of the anti-gun hysteria in the liberal press, which apparently regards buying bullets as a shocking act almost on a par with the actual crime of shooting an innocent man.-RWT

    The Spotted Owl Strikes Again: This year's election crisis provided the perfect cover for regulatory agencies to spring new controls on the American people, and to do so in an eerie kind of open secrecy, while everyone's attention was diverted elsewhere.

    The opportunity did not go unnoticed. The Northern Spotted Owl has struck again-not the owl itself, of course, but its appointed guardians in the federal bureaucracy.

    According to a tiny Associated Press report hidden in the back pages of the December 4 New York Times, the us Forest Service ordered the suspension of all logging on 11 million acres of national forest, "an area equal to 17,200 square miles that stretches from the Sequoia National Forest north of Los Angeles, along the mountains past Yosemite Park and Lake Tahoe, to the Modoc National Forest on the Oregon border." The logging ban, which went into effect on December 11, was demanded by environmentalists, ostensibly to protect the forests' endangered species-including the spotted owl, which became famous as the justification for a previous logging shutdown in Oregon....

"A Hate Crime Against Nature": On November 27, a shocking assault was reported to the police. What was shocking was not so much the assault itself, but its "victim": a tree.

    The tree happens to be a famous tree. It is the former home of Julia Hill, a photogenic young environmentalist who occupied the giant redwood for two years, from 1997 to 1999, in a successful attempt to force its owner, Pacific Lumber Company, to agree not to cut it down. Hill gave herself an "environmentalist name," "Butterfly," and she also named the tree, calling it "Luna," on the premise that the tree is endowed with a personality.

    Some time in the week before November 27, someone used a chainsaw to make a 32-inch-deep cut along 19 feet of the tree's 38-foot circumference. The cutting, Hill's reaction, and the fate of the tree were subsequently covered in detail in a series of articles in the San Francisco Chronicle.

    According to an initial November 28 report, titled "Vandals Slash Giant Redwood," "Fresh sawdust at the scene and the precise placement of the cut indicates that the vandalism occurred within the last week [and was committed] by someone adept at sawing large trees, authorities said." In other words, the culprit is most likely a disgruntled logger-though this will not be much help in narrowing down the search.

    The ironic twist to this report is the demand by Hill and her supporters that local Sheriffs spare no effort to track down the chainsaw-wielder and charge him with trespassing and vandalism. Bear in mind that Hill trespassed on the tree for two years, yet she was never charged for her crime. Now she declares that she feels the attack on the tree "as surely as if the chainsaw was going through me," and she wants the law to work on her behalf....

    One Last Orgy: The practice of slipping through new regulations while the nation isn't looking is not limited to elections in which there is a vote-counting crisis. An op-ed in the December 13 issue of usa Today presents the results of a study examining the volume of new regulations imposed in "post-election quarters," i.e., the three months following a presidential election. According to Jay Cochran, a research fellow at George Mason University, regulations increase by 17% on average during this post-election period. In quarters before a change of administrations-when an incumbent has been defeated, or a president is finishing his second term-regulations increase by more than 29% on average.

    But the Clinton administration is setting new record. Cochran explains: "Clinton is on track to produce 29,000 pages of regulations in his last three months, which will crown him as the new regulatory king." That's a 65% increase over the average rate of new regulations during the last three years of Clinton's tenure....

    The Song Remains the Same: An ominous indicator of Russia's future is reported in a Washington Post report of December 8: "The lower house of Russia's parliament, the State Duma, voted overwhelmingly today to restore as Russia's national anthem the music of a song written at the behest of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin."

    Note, however, that only the music of the former Soviet anthem has been restored; the old words have not been adopted, and no new lyrics have yet been written. As the Post's correspondent points out, in post-Soviet Russia, "all attempts to find a unifying national sense of purpose, or even unifying symbols, have failed." (Russia's interim anthem, chosen by Boris Yeltsin, suffered the same wordless fate.)...

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