The claim that the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were attacked because fundamentalists hate our prosperity and freedom is a ridiculous lie.

If I were Osama, and the United States government were actually looking for me, I'd be clean-shaven by now, crewcutted, wearing jeans and a ZZ Top T-shirt, and living in a nice little house in Lincoln, Nebraska.

People - pardon me, journalists and politicians - have often accused me of believing that I'm above the law. And yet, who isn't? Everywhere you prod it, even with the shortest stick, the established system isn't simply corrupt, it's unequivocally putrescent. The law is created by demonstrable criminals, enforced by demonstrable, interpreted by demonstrable criminals, all for demonstrably criminal purposes. Of course I'm above the law. And so are you.

I propose a Constitutional Amendment providing that, if any public official, elected or appointed, at any level of government, is caught lying to any member of the public for any reason, the punishment shall be death by public hanging.

As to the media, they are protected by the First Amendment, as they should be.

We're most likely to lose our rights when we allow ourselves to be persuaded to deprive others of theirs.

Human rights are an aspect of natural law, a consequence of the way the universe works, as solid and as real as photons or the concept of pi. The idea of self- ownership is the equivalent of Pythagoras' theorem, of evolution by natural selection, of general relativity, and of quantum theory. Before humankind discovered any of these, it suffered, to varying degrees, in misery and ignorance.