The Panthers Were Right and Reagan Was Wrong on Gun ControlI suppose it takes a true radical these days to question the progressive's sacred cow: Ronald Reagan. You read that right. This paradigm of modern conservatism was one of the most important American champions of gun control in recent decades, and so he has become a convenient talking point for liberals who want to argue that even Ronald Reagan favored strict gun laws.
And indeed, he did--all throughout his political career. As president he used executive order to ban the im... (more)
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3 Important Lessons from a Canadian Border CrossingI was at the Canadian border, headed toward the freedom that exists a few feet beyond the last security check. I was gently waved down a side corridor.
Ninety minutes later, I was let go, but not before something truly alarming happened. I'm pretty sure that the Canadian government captured a mirrored version of my smartphone — which pretty much holds the whole of my life.
I'll explain precisely how this happened in just a bit — in the hopes that perhaps you can tak... (more)
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Police Are More Dangerous To The Public Than Are CriminalsThe goon thug psychopaths no longer only brutalize minorities – it is open season on all of us – the latest victim is a petite young white mother of two small children
The worse threat every American faces comes from his/her own government.
At the federal level the threat is a seventh war (Syria) in 12 years, leading on to the eighth and ninth (Iran and Lebanon) and then on to nuclear war with R... (more)
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All Government Policies Succeed in the Long RunA crazy claim you are probably thinking after reading my title. After all, “failed policies” are a staple of discussions and debates about government actions in the United States. Everybody, regardless of political preferences, has a list of what he regards as the most glaringly failed policies. This way of looking at the matter, however, is all wrong.
People label a policy as a failure because it does not bring about its declared objective. For example, drug policies do not reduc... (more)
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Withdrawing Consent Means More Than It May SeemWithdrawing consent to the state means more than this innocuous phrase may suggest.
To withdraw consent is far-reaching. It means a divorce from the state insofar as this is possible. It means having no loyalty to the state, seeing the state as fundamentally unfair and a source of continual injustices, being unwilling to help the state in any way, assuming and feeling no responsibility for the state’s actions, and seeing the state as hostile to peace and society. It means not part... (more)
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The Pine Bluff PD: From Merely Dysfunctional to Downright Deadly No tactical genius is necessary to bring about a bloodless end to a standoff involving a 107-year-old man armed with a handgun and surrounded by police officers inside an otherwise vacant house. All that is necessary is a willingness on the part of the officers to accept a minimal amount of risk, and a time horizon longer than a half hour. In fact, only someone with a perverse appetite for gratuitous bloodshed could arrange to end that confrontation with the violent death of the centenarian susp... (more)
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The "Domestic Terrorist" You Can Call a HeroI dreamed I saw Bernard von NotHaus, alive as you or me.
Said I, "But Bernard, you've been jailed two years."
"I never was," said he.
Bernard has been the called the Rosa Parks of the alternative money movement. More than 10 years ago, he had this idea that he would make his own money — not the fake stuff we are used to, but the real stuff made of actual silver. He called his currency the Liberty Dollar (and why not, since there is no trademark on the... (more)
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The Isolated War PartyIt’s a trying time for the warmongers. A deluge of national polls reveal a public decidedly against war with Syria. Congress is listening, and the authorization for military action faces opposed majorities in both houses. Obama’s progressive base is mostly against his idea to bomb. So are many liberals and most leftists. Even the president’s wife and Nancy Pelosi’s grandson don’t want war, a... (more)
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The State Attracts SociopathsWhat the government is good at is collecting taxes, taking away your freedoms and killing people. It's not good at much else. - Tom Clancy
In the science of chaos, "attractors" are operational principles around which turbulence and apparent chaos are harmonized. What the limited nature of our prior experiences dismisses as randomness or disorder, the study of chaos and complexity is revealing as deeper patterns of regularity. Attractors help to ident... (more)
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Fighting the StateIt's is unfathomable how much brain power goes into hatching schemes to "reform" societal governance. From increased taxation to prying apart the grip of the monopoly state, the breadth of the political spectrum spends a great deal of time arguing over the correct course of action. Progressives never fail to adopt a new scheme to ratchet up the size of government. Conservatives, bless their instincts, are always fighting the last war of state encroachment. For the libertarian, rolling back Levia... (more)
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John Kerry and the Orwellian Language of WarWhen is a war not a war? According to John Kerry, launching cruise missiles at Syria is not a war. Testifying before the US Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee, Kerry said, “President Obama is not asking America to go to war.”
Kerry’s argument seems to hinge on the idea that no American ground troops will likely be deployed. Of the proposed strikes, Kerry said, “I just don’t consider that going to war in the classic sense of coming to Congress and asking for a declaration of war ... (more)
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The Truth About How The US Will Save Syria
...and other lies. Stefan Molyneux discusses the rush to war, chemical weapon attacks, red line hypocrisy, endless violence, the military industrial complex and blood soaked economic illusions.
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How "Your" Government Works The Obama administration has announced the formation of a panel of “outside experts” to review the NSA’s surveillance practices. And a wide-ranging, diverse collection of experts they are; when it comes to institutional backgrounds and viewpoints, they span the entire spectrum from A to B. They remind me a bit of the space shuttle crew in an episode of The Simpsons: “They’re a colorful bunch … There's a mathematician, a different kind of mathematician, and a statistician.”
Richa... (more)
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Pelosi: Willing to "Protect" Syrian Children To DeathWhenever the ruling elite wants to engage in another bout of humanitarian slaughter, it will have its media auxiliaries soften up the public by barraging it with images of innocent people – particularly children – who are suffering and dying. Every “humanitarian” war makes those images go away. Children are still being mangled and murdered, of course – but those who control the state-aligned media are no longer interested in showing them.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi recentl... (more)
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Who's Really Getting Punished?I find it interesting how President Obama intends to punish Syria's dictator Bashar al-Assad for his purported use of chemical weapons against Syrian rebels. It provides a fascinating insight into the collectivist mindset.
To punish Assad, Obama says that he will use his military to "degrade" Assad's military. That inevitably means that Obama will bomb certain segments of Assad's military, such as artillery or armor units.
That means that inevitably there will be Sy... (more)
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How the State Destroys Social CooperationMany of our present economic difficulties, while blamed by politicians on freedom and markets, are in fact the long-run effects of government policies emphasizing short-run, visible benefits that mask hidden or delayed costs. In particular, our economic woes reflect government's reliance on coercion, whose harmful effects expand over time, in contrast to voluntary cooperation, whose beneficial effects expand over time.
Voluntary market cooperation expands because the more time sel... (more)
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Perpetual Chaos and CrisesI find it absolutely fascinating how the president, along with his national-security state apparatus, can instantaneously throw the entire nation into crisis mode, this time with everyone in angst over whether the president should or should not bomb Syria. It's a perfect demonstration of the power and influence that the U.S. national-security state and its military empire around the world have over the American people and how easy it is for this apparatus to keep the American people in a state o... (more)
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The Twisted Premises Implicit in the Drive for WarOn its own terms, the government’s case for war with Syria has problems. We cannot deny the monstrousness of Assad’s regime, but the Obama administration has failed to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the Syrian state is responsible for the particular chemical weapons atrocity that supposedly justifies a strike. Some of the very same folks who lambasted the Bush team for refusing to li... (more)
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The US Uses Gas To Kill CiviliansOne point that needs to be made, but rarely if ever mentioned, is that in the supposed rationale for US attack on Syria to avenge/prevent claimed civilian deaths by government gas attacks, the US government itself has used similar weapons openly as recently as the FBI/ATF attack on the Branch Davidian compound near Waco Texas in the spring of 1993.
76 men, women and children died in this senseless military style assault which used highly lethal military CS gas as a primary weapon.... (more)
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We're All Edward Snowden NowIn the last several days, I've had three phone conversations with friends — completely normal people who have their wits about them — during which they have declined to say something for fear of government surveillance. They will be talking normally and suddenly catch themselves and divert the conversation.
The topics we were discussing were mostly innocuous, and I can't imagine that government interlopers would care, but the impulse to self-censor was triggered anyway.
... (more)
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Elysium: The Technological Side of the American Police StateFrom George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World to the Wachowskis’ The Matrix, Stephen Spielberg’s Minority Report and most recently Neill Blomkamp’s Elysium, writers and filmmakers have used science fiction to both forecast the future while also holding up a mirror to the present. The best among these transcend what is largely escapist entertainment and engage their audiences in a critical dialogue about what happens when power, technology and militaristic governance converge.
... (more)
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The State: Judge in its Own CauseAt a 2011 press conference President Obama, in response to a question about Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning, said “We are a nation of laws. We don't let individuals make decisions about how the law operates.“
Is this really a nation of laws, though? There’s an old legal principle, “nemo iudex in causa sua,” which translated into English means “no one should be the judge of their own cause.” But in fact all the laws theoretically limiting the state’s power are interp... (more)
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