Blinding You With ScienceIt is such a kick to read the transcripts from the White House’s health care “war room” in the first days of release. What a meltdown, and you get to watch it all in real-time.
I’m not trying to be cruel to the kindly despots who have wrecked so much of what worked in the existing system, only to replace it with an unworkable central plan that’s robbing people all over the country.
But still, there is justice in this humiliation.
Somehow, the Republic... (more)
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InformationLiberation Makes Reddit r/Politics' Prestigious Banned Domains List!What an honor, the control freak moderators over at r/Politics have included yours truly on their banned domain list along with a host of other wonderful websites like Infowars, Raw Story, Reason, Techdirt, Breitbart, Drudge Report, WorldNetDaily, Photograph Is Not A Crime, BlacklistedNews and others. I must say I'm flattered to be listed among such prestigious websites... (more)
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Obama Proves He's Really Good at Killing PeopleA new book (Double Down: Game Change 2012, by Mark Halperin and John Heilemann) claims that US president Barack Obama told his aides during his last election that he's "really good at killing people." He's right.
For example, last Friday a drone strike targeting Hakimullah Mehsud of the Tehreek-e- Taliban Pakistan (TTP) reportedly ended his life and at least 25 other lives. As if to provide further proof of the president's status as a successful killer, the death toll from that d... (more)
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The State Can't Enforce Its Laws Without Disobeying ThemI just read that the parents of an autistic high school student arrested in a drug sting operation in Temecula, California last December have filed suit against the school district. The parents were “initially happy their son had made his first and only friend last year at school,” but became suspicious when his “school friend” kept making excuses for not coming over. The “friend,” actually Riverside County Sheriff's Deputy Daniel Zipperstein, “pressured their lonely and vulnerable son with more... (more)
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Obama, NSA Spying and the Dangers of Secretive, Authoritarian Government “The perception here is of a United States where security has trumped liberty, intelligence agencies run amok (vacuuming up data of friend and foe alike), and the once-admired “checks and balances” built into American governance and studied by European schoolchildren have become, at best, secret reviews of secret activities where opposing arguments get no hearing.” – New York Times columnist Roger Cohen Recent reports indicating that President Obama was aware of and per... (more)
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The Noble Lie of Government Healthcare"If you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan."
These words, spoken by U.S. President Barack Obama in various forms and iterations, have become a running joke amidst the rollout of the Affordable Care Act. All across the country, hundreds of thousands of citizens are receiving cancellation notices in the mail. Th... (more)
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The Virtue of VigilantismMost of us are brought up believing that we live in a nation of laws, that certain objective rules govern society, and that enforcing those rules is the sole province of government and its agents. When we have a problem, we rely on the police and the courts to solve it, and whatever decisions they make are deemed final and binding. Horror stories about lynchings and mob justice instill an inherent fear of taking the law into our own hands. Leave it to the professionals, we are told. They will ta... (more)
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Hey FDA, Mind Your Own BusinessOne of the first things I learned in my health care career is that pain is an inherently subjective experience. Different people experience different levels of pain in different situations, and everyone has their own idiosyncratic problem areas — one can’t bear dental pain while another finds back injuries unbearable. Because of this fact, backed up by neurological research, I was taught that we cannot take a cookie-cutter approach to pain management and that each patient deserves individual att... (more)
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The Unbearable Lightness of LeavingMemories are a moveable feast.
The thought occurred to me last week while I was walking my dog down the gravel road at the end of my driveway. The trees were a festival of color, the air was crisp, the road was idyllically quiet. I tried to memorize the scene and the feeling.
When I move to the Newer World, I will miss aspects of Canada. My willingness to say goodbye is an indication of how deeply I believe North America has become a careening danger to the freedom ... (more) [Wendy is moving to Galt's Gulch, Chile, a newly created libertarian community outside of Santiago.] |
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Movie-Maker John Carpenter's Prophetic Vision"I'm disgusted by what we've become in America. I truly believe there is brain death in this country. Everything we see is designed to sell us something. The only thing they want to do is take our money."--John Carpenter John Carpenter's films, known primarily for their horror themes, inevitably feature pulse-pounding soundtracks, slow-moving camera work and hair-raising jolts to the nervous system as evil pops into the foreground with unexpected intensity. However, whil... (more)
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The Website is Fixable, Obamacare Isn'tSince Obamacare made its debut, discussions have focused on Ted Cruz' efforts to defund the law and the shockingly bad functionality of the Website itself. Fortunately for Obama, polling indicates that Senator Cruz has lost, at least for now, the battle for hearts and minds. The President has not been nearly so lucky on the technological front. If current trends continue, the rollout may go down as the worst major product launch in history. But given the government's enormous resources, it's saf... (more)
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An Open Letter to Russell Brand - Let's Start a Revolution!
Russell Brand recently spoke with Newsnight's Jeremy Paxman about economic inequality, how voting doesn't change anything, political apathy and revolution. Stefan Molyneux doesn't think he went far enough. Let's continue that conversation.
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Market vs. Monopoly: Beating the 'Intellectual Property' RacketThe strongest argument in favor of the fiction of “intellectual property” is consequential rather than moral: Creators of good things — novels, songs, drugs, what have you — we are told, will essentially go on strike if government doesn’t guarantee their profits by vesting them with monopoly “rights” to ideas. Instead of writing that next blockbuster or producing a cure for cancer, they’ll content themselves with flipping burgers or digging ditches for a living, and we’ll all be worse off.
... (more)
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Is the Drug War Toast?Public opinion now decisively favors legalizing marijuana. Fifty-eight percent of Americans want the war on pot to stop.
Once marijuana is legal, the drug war as we know it will need a new life breathed into it to survive. Pot accounts for the vast majority of arrests and illicit drug users. It is much easier for the federal drug warriors to whip up hysteria over “tens of millions... (more)
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Infrastructure is Not “Progressive”Frankly, I have a hard time understanding what goes on in the heads of “progressives.” On the one hand, they constantly complain — and rightfully so — about the power of big business and corporate domination of our society and economy. But on the other, their rhetoric is full of nostalgia for the government policies that made corporate domination possible in the first place.
We see it in Rachel Maddow’s 30-second spots on MSNBC standing in front of the Hoover Dam, yearning for the... (more)
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Our World Through Thomas Paine's EyesI've just spent a harrowing weekend reflecting on Thomas Paine's Common Sense, the pamphlet that came out in January 1776 and turned the public toward seeking independence from Britain. I say harrowing because the distance between the ideals found in this pamphlet and those of today's America is so vast as to be nearly unrecognizable.
The presumption throughout the text is that tyranny should never again be tolerated. Despotism was for the old world. Tyranny was outdated. It belon... (more)
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Red Light Cameras, Drones and Surveillance: Fleecing the Taxpayer in the Age of Petty Tyrannies“There is no crueler tyranny than that which is perpetuated under the shield of law and in the name of justice.”—Charles de Montesquieu
We labor today under the weight of countless tyrannies, large and small, carried out in the name of the national good by an elite class of government officials who are largely insulated from the ill effects of their actions. We, the middling classes, are not so fortunate. We find ourselves badgered, bullied and browbeaten into bearing the brunt o... (more)
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We May be "Sheep," but Cops Aren't Good ShepherdsReferring to a recent incident in which an Oregon traffic stop led to a shootout in which the driver died, a police officer opined: “If sheep continue to disobey orders we will have much more of this.” He also referred wistfully to the days before “dash cams and YouTube”; the era before police encounters were recorded offered “easier times when it came to dealing with the sh... (more)
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