An Aging, Bankrupt Empire The U.S. government has created borders within the country’s borders at every airport in the country. Technologies abound in ticketing and check-in on one side of the border while commerce thrives on the other. In between is a massive government apparatus requiring that shoes be kicked off, laptops be unpacked, and less than 3.1 ounces of liquid be carried in any one container. The only technology in sight is the offensive porno scanners. And for those that refuse scanning, a bru... (more)
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Rejecting the CIA's Communist Methods In a series of interviews in 1977, television journalist David Frost asked Richard Nixon about the legality of his actions as president. Nixon responded, “Well, when the president does it, that means it is not illegal.”
That mindset has also long been a guiding principle for the CIA, and unfortunately the American people have gone along with it, in the name of the Cold War, “national security,” and now the “war on terrorism.”
Th... (more)
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Everybody's a Target in the American Surveillance State “Everybody’s a target; everybody with communication is a target.”—A senior intelligence official previously involved with the Utah Data Center In the small town of Bluffdale, Utah, not far from bustling Salt Lake City, the federal government is quietly erecting what will be the crown jewel of its surveillance empire. Rising up out of the desert landscape, the Utah Data Center (UDC)—a $2 billion behemoth designed to house a network of comput... (more)
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Democracy Is Our Hunger GameWhatever good you have heard about The Hunger Games, the reality is more spectacular. Not only is this the literary phenom of our time, but the movie that created near pandemonium for a week from its opening is a lasting contribution to art and to the understanding of our world. It's more real than we know.
In the ... (more)
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Setback for The New Brown ScareTwo years ago, members of the Michigan “Hutaree” militia were jailed and charged with conspiracy to violently overthrow the government. As is the case in most of these incidents, the feds had planted an informant among the group. The arrests made a splash in the news, especially among progressive journalists who, beginning at the dawn of the Obama presidency, began weaving tog... (more)
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Are You Libertarian Enough? So-called political compromise is upheld as a high virtue. To be an ideologue is a great vice. The old mantra that the problem in American politics is everyone is an extremist and no one is willing to meet halfway persists, despite its transparent inapplicability in the real world. The distance between the two political parties is small enough to smother a gnat.
For many libertarians there is no worse a sin than to stick stubbornly to purity of principle, to make the... (more)
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Trayvon Martin and the Cult of Government Supremacy Nineteen days before the killing of Trayvon Martin by self-appointed block "captain" George Zimmerman, Manuel Loggins was murdered by an Orange County Sheriff’s Deputy in the parking lot of San Clemente High School. Loggins, a deeply religious man, often visited the school to walk on the track and discuss the Bible with his daughters, who were with him on the morning he was murdered... (more)
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Trayvon Martin Killing: Was "Stand Your Ground" Law to Blame?Civilian disarmament advocates have implicated Florida's "Stand Your Ground" self-defense law in the shooting death of 17-year-old Miami resident Trayvon Martin by self-appointed crime watch "captain" George Zimmerman on February 26. The Sanford, Florida Police have refused to charge Zimmerman, insisting that "under the law, it had no call to bring charges... (more)
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Some Thoughts on Trayvon Martin's DeathThere is growing outrage over the killing of black seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin, a legal and unarmed guest of the Florida gated community whose (perhaps unofficial) neighborhood watchman, George Zimmerman, shot Martin dead last month in an incident that raises all sorts of uncomfortable questions about racial tensions and violence in modern America. A common theme has focused on the r... (more)
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Is School Like Jail? The people in my community love their public schools. So too it is in most of the country. If only they knew the costs, and I don't mean just the financial costs, which are two and three times those of private schools. I also mean the opportunity costs: If only people knew what they were missing!
Imagine education wholly managed by the market economy. The variety! The choice! The innovation! All the features we've come to expect in so many areas of life -- groceries, software, cl... (more)
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The Ascendence of Sociopaths in US Governance An International Man lives and does business wherever he finds conditions most advantageous, regardless of arbitrary borders. He's diversified globally, with passports from multiple countries, assets in several jurisdictions and his residence in yet another. He doesn't depend absolutely on any country and regards all of them as competitors for his capital and expertise.
Living as an international man used to be just an interesting possibility. But few Americans opted... (more)
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Governments Can't ResistThe old adage that we don’t learn from history is true enough, but it needs amendment. Governments, in particular, don’t learn from history. That’s the conclusion I reach after a wild weekend ride with Forty Centuries of Wage and Price Controls, a delightful book by Robert Schuettinger and Eamonn Butler. They s... (more)
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You Call This a War? I'll Show You a WarIn light of Obama’s “National Defense Resources Preparedness” Order, I’d like to comment on a troubling trend I’ve seen in American discourse about war since 9/11. From left to right, it was often said that the U.S. government’s interventions abroad as well as its activities at home did not rise to the level of drama and seriousness that ... (more)
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What a Lovely Day for the Total StateAh, what a weekend, with blue skies, singing birds, budding cherry blossoms and the government's announcement that it has totalitarian control over everything. Wait, what was that last thing? It was an Executive Order released late Friday that no one on the planet seemed to notice until about 30 hours later. It is unnumbered, but called "National Defense Resources Preparedness."
Let's call it NDRP. The first I heard of it was Sunday morning. Something called The Examiner had a wri... (more)
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Obama Apologizes For Kandahar Massacre But Not For His Own KillingsHow shall the world view the apology by President Obama for the massacre of 16 Afghan villagers allegedly by a lone U.S. serviceman in Kandahar Province when the President is himself personally responsible for the extra-judicial killing of hundreds of civilians by means of drone aircraft strikes whose crime he defends? Army Staff Sgt., Robert Bales, of Lake Tapps, Wash., is being held in prison in Fort Leavenworth, Kan. Mr. Obama is free to travel the campaign trail.
“We&rsq... (more)
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The Lorax: An Allegory on IPAnyone who read Dr. Suess's "The Lorax" as a kid might dread the movie version. No one really needs another moralizing, hectoring lecture from environmentalists on the need to save the trees from extinction, especially since that once-fashionable cause seems ridiculously overwrought today. There is no shortage of trees and this is due not to nationalization so much as the privatization and cultivation of forest land.
And yet, even so, the movie is stunning and beautiful in every w... (more)
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Hank Hill vs. the BureaucratsThanks to Adult Swim re-airing King of the Hill five nights a week I recently caught an old episode that has expanded my list of approved politicians to now feature two: Ron Paul and Hank Hill. The episode is "Flush with Power" from season four.
It makes sense that the only politician in American history whose integrity would rival Dr. Paul's is a fictional cartoon character.
In this episode, the Texas... (more)
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The Obama Administration: All Your Privacy And All Your Stuff Belong To UsDid you know that the federal government claims that it can take away your constitutional rights any time that it wants to? Over the past several decades, there have been an endless parade of laws and executive orders that have been slowly and methodically carving up our rights under the U.S. Constitution. Most Americans are not even aware of the "creeping totalitarianism" that is happening. Most Americans just trust the "authorities" when they tell us that certain things "must... (more)
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The Death-Dealing 'Divinity' in the White House "I could be well moved, if I were as you
But I am constant as the Northern Star,
Of whose true fixed and resting quality
There is no fellow in the firmament.
The skies are painted with unnumbered sparks;
They are all fire, and every one doth shine.
But there's one in all doth hold his place.
So in the world: 'tis furnished well with men,
And men are flesh and blood, and a... (more)
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Doug Casey on the Nanny State L: Doug, you're going to love this; there's a new study out, purporting to show that eating any amount of any kind of red meat is bad for you – making you 13% more likely to die, in fact. So, with your growing herd of cattle in Argentina, you're close to becoming a mass murderer.
Doug: I saw that. I wonder what you have to do to make it 26% more likely to die?... (more)
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Why They Hate Free SpeechSometimes — why not now? — you just have to reflect on what an amazing man Thomas Jefferson was. I mean, he really got the whole idea of liberty, maybe better than anyone before him, and far better than most people today. What a man! What a dream he had!
I’m reminded of his bravery and brilliance from reading this magisterial work: Perilous Times: Free Speech in Wartime From the Sedition Act of 1798 to the War on Terrorism by Geoffrey R. Stone. It’s a s... (more)
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The Myth of the Fair and Benevolent State: Policing the WorldIn the string of military conflicts that the United States and NATO have been involved in since the second world war they have always attempted to maintain the high road by claiming that they were responding to some kind of threat, and apparently helping the people that they were bombing.
This approach is largely accepted by the general public who is either too afraid or unable to suspect malicious intentions on the part of their masters. In helping themselves to rationalize the n... (more)
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War: The Health of the State, not so Healthy for Human BeingsAt more than ten years into the US government's never-ending "war on terror," that government's excuses for atrocity after atrocity keep getting less and less convincing.
"A few bad apples."
"An isolated incident."
"The video doesn't tell the whole story, and when we find out who leaked it he's going to jail."
"It appears that you had a lone gunman who acted on his own in just a tragic, tragic way."
That last direct from ... (more)
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American Massacres Have Been Common for Centuries For hundreds of years Americans have been committing massacres of women and children, old men and sometimes even young men, mostly unarmed or armed only with primitive weapons. The early massacres were mostly of Indians who refused to leave their lands when Americans decided it was God's will that they steal those lands for nothing or for a few trinkets. In the Civil War Sherman and Grant routinely massacred Southern civilian populations with bombardments of cities, burning homes and A... (more)
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Economics of the TimelineMost of us hadn't thought about Davy Jones of the Monkees in many years. Suddenly, he died at the age of 66 and we were all instantly living in his world. Tributes were everywhere. His YouTube videos were slammed with hits. Praise for his life and works appeared on blogs everywhere.
People were honoring his memory by looking back at the timeline of his life, seeing the change in his face and appearance from the youngest age when he played the Artful Dodger to his last year, in whi... (more)
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The First Amendment Needs a Rape Kit The newest attack of vague language is aimed at your 1st Amendment rights of Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Assembly and Freedom to Petition. It is found in the pending legislation of H.R. 347.… As currently worded, it might as well have been called the “Federal We’re Too Important To Be Annoyed By Your Protest Act of 2011.”
— Gene Howington The Federal Restricted Buildings and Grounds Improvement Act of 2011 (PDF) ma... (more)
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The DC Gang: Dictators Without BordersAs an anarchist, I have little use for "national sovereignty" as a political concept. Boiled down, "national sovereignty" is simply the assertion that mutual recognition of turf lines on the part of various overgrown street gangs ("states") is sacrosanct: The writ of the UK's parliament doesn't extend to Missouri, nor are the peasants of Azerbaijan subject to the orders of Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe.
The funny thing about "national sovereignty" is that its most vociferous defenders ... (more)
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