Ten Rules of the "War on Terrorism" I confess that I have trouble sometimes figuring out the nature and logic of the so-called war on terrorism. The following are what seem to be the principles of this “war”:
1. Since the “war on terrorism,” according to U.S. officials, is a real war, the president has all the powers of a military commander in a real war, and those powers, they say, are the same omnipotent powers that are wielded by military dictators. Thus, during the war on terrorism, the... (more)
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Sociopathy Is Running the USI recently wrote an article that addresses the subject of sociopaths and how they insinuate themselves into society. Although the subject doesn't speak directly to what stock you should buy or sell to increase your wealth, I think it's critical to success in the markets. It goes a long way towards explaining what goes on in the heads of people like Bernie Madoff and therefore how you can avoid being hu... (more)
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Money and Finance as if You MatteredDuring the 2008 credit crisis, a horde of central bankers, Treasury officials and large corporations screamed that the end of the world was upon us — unless trillions of your money were spent (or created) to prop up the existing financial and banking systems.
The presumption was that the existing structure must never be changed, or the Fed's control over the financial and monetary system ever brought into question. Everything is just as it should be. This is a minor blip on ... (more)
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Chimps Throwing Poop And 29 Other Mind Blowing Ways That The Government Is Wasting Your MoneyWhy do chimpanzees throw poop? The federal government would like to know and is using your tax dollars to investigate the matter. Every single year, we all send huge amounts of our hard-earned money to the federal government. We hope that they will spend that money wisely. Unfortunately, that is simply not the case. You are about to read some examples of how the government is wasting your money that are absolutely mind blowing. Anyone that claims that there is... (more)
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We're All Branch Davidians NowNineteen years ago, just outside Waco, Texas, the FBI demonstrated once again that the state at its core is a killing machine. Monarchy, democracy, or republic – any government as conventionally defined is a legal monopoly on violence. The state is always inclined toward oppression, division, conquest, and bloodshed, because these are its tools of trade.
Matters are no different here. The myth of a free America was always seen with bitter irony by those not ble... (more)
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The Secretive ServiceThrough the media and the indoctrination schools, we are propagandized into the greatness of the SS and similar agencies. They are the best and brightest, the most dedicated and hardworking, the bravest and the most patriotic. In fact, as the hilarious Cartegena affair shows, they are the typical lazy, shiftless, and stupid bureaucrats, living it ... (more)
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Despair and the StateThe sad and tragic story of Andrew Wordes — the chicken farmer who was driven to despair by government harassment and killed himself last month — continues to haunt me. And it turns out to be just one of millions of cases of similar psychological torment caused by government, directly and indirectly. These are wholly unnecessary events, inflicting terrible loss on the world.
For every one person who these days wh... (more)
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How Regulators Wrecked Our MowersWhen I was a kid, lawn mowers worked. You pushed them and they cut grass. The grass went into the bag. Then you emptied the bag. The results were great. There was no grass to rake. It all went into the bag, because that's what lawn mowers did.
Then the feds got involved. Or so I now gather. I didn't know this for a long time. Every time I would buy a mower, I would be disappointed in the results. I kept buying mowers with ever-larger engines. Then I would buy them with different b... (more)
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A Message From a US EscapeeIn 2006 I was woken up and pulled out of bed at 3:00 a.m. It must have been a Sunday or a Monday morning, I can’t remember. My bedroom door burst open with a loud voice yelling at me to get out of bed. When I opened my eyes, all I saw was a flashlight beaming in my face. I was taken out of my bedroom, and into my kitchen by a person in black SWAT-looking like gear. This stranger had a machine gun and was telling me what to do and where to go in my own home.
When I entered my... (more)
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Will Justice Be Served in Zimmerman's Trial?It is hard to imagine how George Zimmerman could get a fair trial. Where do you find a juror who has not heard of this case, and would you really want someone like that on a jury anyway?
For weeks, most of Trayvon Martin’s champions have called for the arrest and trial of Zimmerman. Although I sympathized with some of their grievances, I did not add my voice to that ... (more)
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Obama's Progressive Goal: Make Us Poorer By Any Means PossibleCalifornia regulators recently announced their plans to try to force people to live in dense housing developments rather than single-family homes, which environmental bureaucrats believe are wasteful and contribute to dread global warming. Likewise, the Obama administration’s Environmental Protection Agency has issued an order that effectively will keep electric power companies from buil... (more)
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The Good News (for Animals) on Health CareThere's so much bad news about health care these days. Maybe it's time for some good news.
One sector, technology, is advancing at a pace never seen before. Customers have a range of services to choose from, and price competition is very intense. The doctor sees you whether you have insurance or not. Customers mostly pay directly for services. Overall spending is increasing, but that's because there are more services to purchase. Competition between providers is very intense.
... (more)
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The liberal betrayal of Bradley ManningMore than three years into the presidency of Barack Obama, it’s almost a cliche` now to ask: What if George W. Bush did it? From dramatically escalating the war in Afghanistan to institutionalizing the practice of indefinite imprisonment, Obama has dashed hopes he would offer a change from the Bush’s national security policies -- but he hasn’t faced a whole lot of resistance from liberals who once decried those policies as an affront to American values.
Like thos... (more)
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Commerce, Our BenefactorWhat if we had the following economic system?
This system would shower the globe with free goods day and night, asking nothing and giving nearly everything. Most of what it generated would be free goods, and every living person would have access.
Anyone who amassed a private profit would do so only because he or she served others, and the system would require this person to cough up communally owned information: Everyone on the planet would know the reason for anyon... (more)
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Iran and the Recurring Bad DreamMaybe U.S. energy independence isn't such a great thing after all. Some years ago, when the American political class was whooping it up for war with China, what stopped the push were the American commercial interests who essentially asked, "What, are you crazy? This is bad for business. We need China, and China needs us. You can't do business during a shooting war."
In contrast, an isolated Iran is a dispensable Iran. And an energy-independent U.S. is a warlike U.S., presuming to ... (more)
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'Necessary Force' "I always thought police were nothing but good and were there to protect people," testifies Elizabeth Polak, a registered nurse from Phoenix. Her view of the State’s enforcement caste changed dramatically as a result of what she witnessed in Denver on the evening of March 25, 2008.
Polak, returning to her apartment following her daily jog, saw a man and a woman having an unremarkable conversation near the entrance to the building. Two police officers appeared... (more)
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The State versus George Zimmerman and Trayvon MartinAny take on the shooting of Trayvon Martin should start with an obvious — but often missing — disclaimer: I don’t know exactly what happened in Sanford, Florida on the night of February 26, 2012.
It’s likely to the point of near certainty that you don’t either. Even the people closest to the events have only partial knowledge at their disposal, and the rest of us necessarily access that knowledge indirectly. We’re reduced to choosing from betwee... (more)
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Meddling in Sports--A Proper Presidential Role?Barack Obama, presumably with nothing better to do, has intoned that the Augusta National golf club should lift its ban on women, thus allowing female golfers to compete in the famous Masters tournament.
I personally agree with the president that the ban should be lifted, and I would also oppose the ban on African-Americans that was in place as recently as twenty years ago. We might wonder, h... (more)
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Should We Worry about the Class Divide?Charles Murray's new book Coming Apart has generated an incredible amount of handwringing on all sides. For those who are skilled at ignoring such debates -- good impulse, I say! -- his thesis is that the ebb and flow of wealth and status between classes that once characterized American culture has ended.
He... (more)
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Death by RegulationI had previously heard nothing about the tragic and remarkable case of Andrew Wordes of Roswell, Ga., who set his house on fire and blew it and himself up as police arrived to evict him from his foreclosed-upon home. It was Agora's 5 Min. Forecast that alerted me to the case, and this report remains... (more)
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Ernesto Lira Meets the Drug War The full horror of the federal government’s much-ballyhooed, 40-year-old war on drugs is on display in the case of Ernesto Lira.
Lira’s “crime”?
According to this article in the New York Times, the drug-war gendarmes caught him driving with “three foil-wrapped grams of methamphetamine in his car.”<... (more)
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Market Failure? The Case of CopyrightHow gigantically humongous and intrusive is the federal government? A traditional measure is to look at the pages of regulations in the Federal Register, which is, by now, probably the world's largest book collection. The problem with this approach is that it takes no account of how a single bad regulation can have monstrously deleterious effects.
Copyright regulation is a good example of this. There was no universal enforcement until the very late part of the 19th century, and te... (more)
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Are We Oppressed by Technology?Do we really need an iPad 3 after it seems as if iPad 2 was released only a few months ago? Was it absolutely necessary that Google give us Google+? Do phones really have to be "smart" when the old cell phones were just fine? For that matter, is it really necessary that everyone on the planet be instantly reachable by wireless videophone?
The answer to each question is no. No innovation is absolutely necessary. In fact, the phone, flight, the internal combustion engine, electricit... (more)
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The Hutaree Case: Next, Time, They'll Send in the Drones Next time the Regime identifies a group of people as "domestic terrorists," the result might be a summary mass execution, or imprisonment in military custody, rather than a trial. This is one very plausible result of the dismissal of "seditious conspiracy" charges against members of Michigan’s Hutaree militia.
Thanks to the legal environment created by the NDAA, the Feds won’t have to run the risks involved in submitting the next "domestic terrorism" c... (more)
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Understanding The Slave MentalityIn the initial stages of nearly every recorded tyranny, the saucer eyed dumbstruck masses exhibit astonishing and masterful skill when denying reality. The facts behind their dire circumstances and of their antagonistic government become a source of cynical psychological gameplay rather than a source of legitimate concern. Their desperate need to maintain their normalcy bias creates a memory and observation vacuum in which all that runs counter to their false assumptions and preconcepti... (more)
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The U.S. Military and MassacresThe murderous rampage of U.S. Army Staff Sgt. Robert Bales in Afghanistan has received much deserved media attention. Sgt. Bales’s shooting spree, killing 17 Afghan civilians, was quickly condemned by the Obama administration as a horrible incident and an aberration that was in no way representative of the “exceptional character” of the U.S. military.
It is a matter of state doctrine that such “incidents,” no matter how frequent, are treated as singul... (more)
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A Gruesome Hate Murder and No One CaresThe modern United States upholds an official code of antiracism. Despite any disparities in the criminal justice system or how the rest of the state treats people, violent crimes against some minorities are condemned especially loudly when they are thought to be motivated by bigotry. Unless the victim is of a national origin officially determined to be the "enemy," that is. Shaima Al Awada, an Iraqi mother of five and a devout Muslim, was brutally beaten to death with a tire iron in her own Cali... (more)
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