Remembering Mr. Miyamoto"People don’t want to confront... that their government could have done something like this unless it was absolutely necessary. ...it’s almost like people find some sort of relief in the idea that sometimes you have to just mass murder tens, hundreds of thousands of innocent people... that it’s unrealistic to think the world could work differently."
~ Anthony Gregory
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Hiroshima & Nagasaki: 66 Years LaterThe 66th anniversary of the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was approaching and a neighbor, a retired fireman and WWII veteran, asked if I thought the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were justified. He said he did because many American soldiers and marines might have been killed in a land invasion of Japan’s main islands. Okinawa, he said, was bad enough. Invading Japan would have been far worse. In no way was he dismissing the killing of so many civilians but lik... (more)
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Thank goodness you are still free to make a shoe with red solesIt was a close call, but “A court on Wednesday refused to grant a preliminary injunction requested by the Christian Louboutin company against Yves Saint Laurent, alleging trademark infringement on shoes that featured red soles suspiciously similar to those of Louboutin. The decision not only cleared the way for YSL to continue producing its shoes, but also seemed to give coverage to other shoe manufacturers... (more)
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This Is What Happens When You Ban Heroin How appropriate that California is home to the newest ban on caffeinated beer. This haven of busy-body progressivism has long been a national leader in the war against liberty and property. Talk-radio conservatives are mocking Governor Jerry Brown’s crusade against the dread alcohol-caffeine combo, lamenting the implications for our dwindling personal responsibility, freedom and common sense. This is classic California, they seem to agree.
But they do ... (more)
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Pity the Poor, Persecuted PoliceMichael Kennedy is Chief of Police in tiny Sunriver, Oregon, an unincorporated resort village in the Beaver State's Deschutes County. Kennedy insists that his police force has been terrorized for years by a marauder named Robert Foster.
"He breaks the law all the time," Kennedy insisted in a June 15, 2010 sworn deposition.
"Well, have you ever arrested him?" asked Portland attorne... (more)
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The Totalitarianism of the Progressive Mindset The left loves to talk about humanitarianism, putting people above profits, and saving the poor and disadvantaged from the inequity of private enterprise. Yet behind the rhetoric of all economic interventionism is the iron fist of the state.
The statists will usually try to obscure this fact, or even deny it. They will perform philosophical gymnastics to argue that, in fact, they do not favor state violence at all, since we all live in a community ruled by a governme... (more)
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Our Troops do NOT Protect Our Freedom and We Should Stop Thanking Them for Doing SoLet's make one thing crystal clear, no member of the US military contributes in any way whatsoever to protecting the freedoms of the American people. As a matter of fact, they are more likely to turn their weapons on you than they are to defend your Constitutional rights.
The only people on this planet Earth who can affect your freedom are members of Congress, local legislators and the members of enforcement institutions who will blindly follow the rulers who sign their paychecks.... (more)
On the other hand, your local pizza guy deserves your utmost thanks. - Chris, InfoLib
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Surviving the Inanity It’s easy to be skeptical. Sometimes, though, you have to either laugh at the lunacy or go running into the ocean screaming, “Get me out of here.”
The United States is just few hundred billion dollars short of the national debt being 100 percent of GDP and is waging illegal wars in a handful of different countries. The 40-year-long war on drugs is still destroying civil liberties and local governments are telling people what they can and can’t ingest. So ... (more)
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Why Expand the Drug War?Here we go again. Amidst all the talk about out-of-control federal spending and debt, what does the U.S. government do? It goes out and spends more money by expanding the drug war in Mexico.
Hey, when a federal program has failed to show any success after 40 years, what else would you expect federal officials to do, especially in the midst of a spending-and-borrowing crisis?
Even worse, according to an article in the New York Times, the expansion invo... (more)
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"Market" Panic: The Era of Regime Certainty has BegunIn a 1997 paper for the Independent Review, economist Robert Higgs argues persuasively that the Great Depression lasted so long largely due to the phenomenon of “regime uncertainty”:
Taken together, the many menacing New Deal measures, especially those from 1935 onward, gave businesspeople and investors good reason to fear that the market economy might not survive in anythin ... (more)
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Los Angeles, America's HarbingerIn a piece for the Wall Street Journal, Joel Kotkin tells of the demise of Los Angeles. No, you won't see Snake Plissken or Rick Deckard racing through the City of Angels just yet. But the city's political machine is doing all it can "to leave behind a dense, government-dominated, bankrupt, dysfunctional,... (more)
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8 Reasons Raw Foodies Are Dangerous Extremists (Satire)This week, the United States government, working closely with local authorities, heroically raided and arrested raw-food terror kingpin James Stewart in Venice, California. Stewart, who runs the private healthfood cartel, Rawesome Foods, "posed a major threat to the establishment," claimed an unnamed but armed, undercover double-agent involved in the arrest.
After two SWAT-style stings in one year, Stewart now faces several felony charges including: conspiracy to sell milk to mino... (more)
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The Legal Kidnapping of a Child In June 2009 the Swedish police boarded an airplane bound for India. They had no warrant or reasonable cause to assume that a crime had been or would be committed. Still, they arrested Christer Johansson and his Indian wife Annie and seized their seven-year-old son Domenic. Over the last two years the couple has been allowed to visit the child only one hour every five weeks and never on Christmas – the Swedish government workers are on vacation and can’t be bothered.
<... (more)
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'Science' and America's Police StateSo, you're sick and tired of being hassled by Transportation "Security" Administration (TSA) thugs, who fondle your "junk" and force 95-year-old grandmothers to take off their adult diapers?
Well, that's tough – because it's about to get worse.
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Barack Obama: Crazy or Con Man?Politicians say the darnedest things.
On a daily basis they regale us with fairy tales like “the best way to prevent a humanitarian crisis is to bomb that country’s already starving and demoralized populace back to the Stone Age,” or “the best way to get the economy going is for me to steal half your money, blow a huge chunk of it on bureaucratic ‘administration’ costs, and hand the rest over to my campaign donors.”
At some ... (more)
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The Latest Black Swan: Caylee's LawBlack-swan law: a law created in response to a highly unrepresentative situation or legal case, which is typically rushed into effect and then used to regulate everyone's daily life.
Never trust a law named after a person. It is most likely a politician's act of self-aggrandizement or the result of public frenzy. Caylee's law is the latter. Caylee's law is the generic term used to describe bills being considered by at least 16 states by which a parent or legal guardian's fa... (more)
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Scary Story: The State vs. AnarchistsBeware: Should you happen to spot me on the streets of Westminster, you are exhorted to summon law enforcement immediately! That London borough’s “Counter Terrorist Focus Desk” considers me a threat to the public safety (“Anarchists should be reported, advises Westminster anti-terror police,” The Guardian, July 31).
Yes, I am an ana... (more)
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Armed Bureaucrats Are Not Public Servants -- Your Local Pizza Guy IsIt's 9:45 PM and you forgot to eat. You'll be working on a project, there's nothing to cook quickly, and no time to go out and deal with the late-night dining selection. Who do you call?
An old friend comes over and both of you just want to sit around, catch up, and maybe have a few drinks. You're both peckish but don't want to bother with the time or effort needed for a full culinary production. Where do you turn?
There's a meeting of several peop... (more)
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Peaceful Anarchy: Imagine A Society Without the State"I am an anarchist. I suppose you came here, the most of you, to see what a real, live anarchist looked like. I suppose some of you expected to see me with a bomb in one hand and a flaming torch in the other, but are disappointed in seeing neither. If such has been your ideas regarding an anarchist, you deserved to be disappointed. Anarchists are peaceable, law-abiding people. What do anarchists mean when they speak of anarchy? Webster gives the term two definitions – chaos and ... (more)
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The Seven-Lesson Schoolteacher - By John Taylor Gatto, New York State Teacher of the Year, 1991Call me Mr. Gatto, please. Twenty-six years ago, having nothing better to do at the time, I tried my hand at schoolteaching. The license I hold certifies that I am an instructor of English language and English literature, but that isn't what I do at all. I don't teach English, I teach school -- and I win awards doing it.
Teaching means different things in different places, but seven lessons are universally taught from Harlem to Hollywood Hills. They constitute a national curriculu... (more)
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"From Each According to His Ability, To Each According to His Need"Well, there was something that happened at that plant where I worked for twenty years. It was when the old man died and his heirs took over. There were three of them, two sons and a daughter, and they brought a new plan to run the factory. They let us vote on it, too, and everybody - almost everybody - voted for it. We didn't know. We thought it was good. No, that's not true, either. We thought that we were supposed to think it was good. The plan was that everybody in the factory would work acco... (more)
"...The plan was that everybody in the factory would work according to his ability, but would be paid according to his need..."
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Why Capitalism Is Worth Defending As Obama demonizes the wealthy and pitches a dozen plans to restructure the economy, opponents of this program need a reminder of what exactly we’re fighting for. We are resisting bureaucracy, central planning, and encroachments on our freedom and communities. Yet this does not get to the heart of the matter. We are not only an opposition movement, countering the president and his partisans’ agenda. More fundamentally, we stand in defense of the greatest engine of material pr... (more) Related:
> Give Capitalism a Chance
> Intro to Austrian Economics |
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"Shared Sacrifice": Obama's DemagogueryThe most offensive claim made during the debt-ceiling controversy is that there’s a moral equivalence between cutting government spending and raising taxes. President Obama asks for “shared sacrifice” to reduce the budget deficit. In his view, if the government spends more than it takes in — it currently borrows more than 40 cents of every dollar spent — the “balanced” approach is to “cut” spending and raise taxes.
There are q... (more)
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The Government Is Watching YouMost Americans seem detached from the U.S. government’s military actions in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and elsewhere. U.S. forces not only engage in wanton killing and harsh treatment of prisoners, but also surveillance and other intelligence activities that might appall the American people if they were used at home.
Well, guess what: “Technologies and techniques honed for use on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan have migrated into the ha... (more)
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Ideas and the Culpability for ViolenceThe violence perpetuated by Anders Behring Breivik in Norway unleashed the usual torrent of blaming anyone who might have influenced the murderer's thought. He was first described as a right-wing Christian — a description designed to put a certain community on notice. As more evidence rolled in, he has been more accurately described as an anti-Islamic nationalist, but the tendency to pin this violence on any nonleftist is still there.
There were footnotes in his 1,500-page m... (more)
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Grappling with the Banality of EvilA headline from the UK Guardian reads "US soldier admits killing unarmed Afghans for sport."
"The plan was to kill people, sir." That is what Jeremy Morlock respectfully told an army judge about his participation in a "kill team" of soldiers in Afghanistan who targeted harmless civilians and then staged the corpses to look like dead insurgents. Members of the kill team took trophy ph... (more)
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Nelson Mandela and VolunteerismThis week Nelson Mandela celebrates his 93rd birthday. In honor of the event, the Nelson Mandela Foundation is asking people to donate 67 minutes of their time to public service. Although the foundation and the media reporting on it undoubtedly mean well, the entire discussion perpetuates the myth that paid work is somehow useless to society.
But the truth is just the opposite: If someone is actually getting paid to do work, he or she knows that at least... (more)
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The Missing Lesson From Norway: Never Trust a Man in Uniform Roughly a decade ago, Al Pacino starred in a movie entitled S1m0ne, a cyber-era updating of the Pygmalion myth in which a film director creates an uncannily realistic digital actress. Despite the fact that "Simone" was a computer-rendered composite fantasy... (more)
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Norway and the War Against IslamActually the killings in Norway by accused murderer Anders Behring Breivik are logical from the standpoint of those who have been claiming that the West is in a war against Islam. If we’re really at war, as these people have been claiming ever since 9/11, then what’s wrong with killing the enemy? Isn’t that what war is all about? In war, doesn’t one kill the enemy in order to win the war?
Ever since the 9/11 attacks, The Future of Freedom Foundation has pe... (more)
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