A couple of months ago, we covered the story of police in Helena, Montana who shot a fleeing man in the chest. Brian Temple, who had committed no crime at the time, was shot in the chest as he was driving away. He was subsequently charged with felony assault on a police officer. (Funny how that works, isn’t it – the man who gets shot in the chest gets charged with felony assault, while the offi... (more)
The administrators of two file-sharing sites have been sentenced to fines and a year in jail for linking to copyright works. Breaking a long run of operators being acquitted for similar activities, a Spanish court decided that the act of linking constituted a for-profit “public communication”. The lawyer for one of the defendants has denounced the decision, saying that it can only be understood in “political terms”.
In common with many similar sites, FenixP... (more)
The downgrading of US debt this summer didn’t have huge economic consequences, but the psychological ones were truly devastating for the national elites who have run this country for nearly a century. For a State that regards itself as infallible, it was a huge blow that market forces delivered against the government, and it is only one of thousands that have cut against the power elite in recent years.
Another recent example was the vanishing of the much-vaun... (more)
He knew that in January 1996 he wandered into a stranger’s apartment in Clay and pounded Christina Gristwood in the head three times with a hammer he found on the counter. He left her brain-damaged and paralyzed on one side.
Seven years later, he tried to confess to Onondaga County jail deputies while he was held on a different assault. Later, he tried to admit in open court that he beat Gristwood, but the judge kept resisting the con... (more)
The DOJ card players have a credibility problem. 17 well-publicized "terrorist" plots since 2001 have been federal setups that never approached the professionalism of an early talent screening for American Idol. The federally micromanaged Fast and Furious gun running operation purposely ran guns to Mexico, and then blamed it on the 2nd Amendment. After it became known that over 200 people were killed a... (more)
ST. AUGUSTINE, Fla. -- Just before firing Sean May the day after he was sent home for wearing an American flag pin, the Casa Monica Hotel answered some questions in an email Friday.
"The Casa Monica Hotel located in St. Augustine, Florida, is an American-based, homegrown historic hotel," the email reads. "The property reflects its pride in America and great patriotism by flying the Stars and Stripes high over the hotel. The American flag greets every guest and employee with its sy... (more)
WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — The Treasury Department on Friday indicated that it is seriously thinking about issuing floating-rate notes for the first time.
Treasury separated floating-rate notes from the pack and asked dealers for more specifics. The request came in the latest series of quarterly questions for a meeting of the advisory committee that coincides with the large bond and note auctions known as the quarterly refunding.
At the Casey Research/Sprott Summit When Money Dies, Rick Rule spoke with Stefan Molyneux about energy and gold investments and his outlook for the near-future market overall.
The flu paranoia season is upon us, and, as usual, the government-medical complex is ramping up its fear mongering over ... the flu. Coughing, sneezing, sore throat, diarrhea, fever, and other simple stuff has been elevated to life-and-death status. When I was a child, no one thought much about the flu - no one wanted to be sick, but if you got the flu you did your best to plow through it and get over it. Sure, the flu can kill some folks whose immune systems are not prepared for the onslau... (more)
As a dual citizen, I answer to more than one government, not including the third I may be living under at a given time. You may also include the fourth “international” government whose norms may also apply. After all, NATO troops are stationed thirty minutes from my grandparent’s rural village in one of the countries of my citizenship.
One of the governments I am a citizen of leaves me completely alone, I have not heard from nor been solicited by this ent... (more)
A Pennsylvania police officer threatened to falsely charge two Ron Paul supporters with wiretapping for videotaping him making an ass out of himself. After threatening to arrest the men for wiretapping because they dared to stand up to his "authority," the activists pointed out videotaping police is not wiretapping and it is not a crime. Well, that made the cop fly ... (more)
Every night, 23-year-old Seattle resident Benjamin John Francis Fodor kisses his sleeping children, embraces his live-in girlfriend, then suits up to hit the streets as a crime fighter. During one recent evening patrol Fodor came upon what he believed was a fight outside a nightclub. He claims that when he intervened to break it up, some of the participants turned on him, and he was forced to use p... (more)
A former NYPD narcotics detective snared in a corruption scandal testified it was common practice to fabricate drug charges against innocent people to meet arrest quotas.
The bombshell testimony from Stephen Anderson is the first public account of the twisted culture behind the false arrests in the Brooklyn South and Queens narc squads, which led to the arrests of eight cops and a massive shakeup.
[...]Anderson worked in the Queens and Brooklyn South narcotics squad... (more)
We've covered, repeatedly, the misdeeds of various law enforcement officials lately, but this latest story might be the most egregiously ridiculous case. Apparently EPA Agent Keith Phillips pushed heavily for a case against a guy named Hubert Vidrine, who was eventually charged with "knowingly storing hazardous waste materials without a permit." It later turned out that there were some serious problems with the case against Vidrine. First, he was storing oil, which was not considered hazardou... (more)
Imagine you are in command of the state, defined as an institution that possesses a territorial monopoly of ultimate decision making in every case of conflict, including conflicts involving the state and its agents itself, and, by implication, the right to tax, i.e., to unilaterally determine the price that your subjects must pay you to perform the task of ultimate decision making.
To act under these constraints — or rather, lack of constraints — is what constitutes po... (more)
The protesters of the "occupy" movement imagine themselves to be in the spirit of history's great radicals — speaking truth to power and all that. As many have said, the movement seems blind to the real source of power in society, else they would be protesting government bureaucracies and the Federal Reserve.
Actually, however, it is even worse than that. The protest movement is not just blind to the actual driving force behind impoverishment and injustice. The main ethos of... (more)
In Cleveland and other American cities homes are being demolished because four years after the housing bust there is nothing better to do with them. Therein lies a lesson in Austrian business cycle theory.
In a world of uncertainty, waste — the destruction of value — is inevitable. Human action, which aims to replace inferior circumstances with superior circumstances, often involves laboring to transform scarce resources from a less useful form to a more useful form. F... (more)
Details emerging from the dubious Iranian terror plot strongly suggest that the plan to assassinate a Saudi ambassador was concocted not by Mansour J. Arbabsiar, who thought he was overseeing a drug deal, but by the DEA informant working on behalf of the federal government.
“The legal document describing evidence in the case provides multiple indications that it was mainly the result of a Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) sting operation,” reports Asia Times’... (more)
