Politics in One Page In every election season, a new generation comes of age and experiences the political theater for the first time. The experience is formative. It challenges you to decide what you think about the world. Which candidate best represents my values and shares my sense of how things ought to be? More fundamentally, how should things be in politics?
As time goes on and you experience successive presidential election cycles, illusions begin to fall away. You start to see the whole thing... (more)
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Don't Be Fooled by the Political Game: The Illusion of Freedom in America"The shaping of the will of Congress and the choosing of the American president has become a privilege reserved to the country's equestrian classes, a.k.a. the 20% of the population that holds 93% of the wealth, the happy few who run the corporations and the banks, own and operate the news and entertainment media, compose the laws and govern the universities, control the philanthropic foun... (more)
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The Prohibitive Price of Government "Protection"When they reached Fort Hall in what would eventually be known as southeast Idaho, the leaders of the Oregon-bound Elijah Utter wagon train believed that the most dangerous part of their trek was behind them. Their fortunes would soon change dramatically for the worse, in large measure because of the involvement of the United States military.
The 44-member train assembled at a bridge crossing on the Portneuf River near ... (more)
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Hillary Clinton's Knowledge ProblemJust trust her. Truly, just trust her: to know precisely how much energy we ought to use, where it should come from, how it should be generated, how we should get from here to there, and the effects that her plan will have on the global -- the global! -- climate, not just in the near term but decades or a century from now.
If you do this, you will have embraced "science," "reality," "truth," and "innovation," and, also, "our children." If you don't go along, you not only reject al... (more)
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The Assault On Donald Trump Shows That Our Two Party System Is Really A One Party SystemWere you sickened by the Republican debate the other night? The hype leading up to the debate was unbelievable. Never before had there been so much interest in a debate this early in an election season, and it turned out to be the most watched program on Fox News ever. A record-shattering 24 million Americans tuned in, and what they witnessed was an expertly orchestrated assault on Donald Trump. From the very first moments, every question that was launched at Trump was an “attac... (more)
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Be Careful What You Say To 911What you say on 911 is recorded. It can and will be used against you in a court of law. My friend and publisher of numerous books on gun laws, Alan Korwin, says that in the vast majority of cases where people involved in self defense scenarios end up in serious legal difficulties, it is what they said on 911 that got them into trouble. He expounds on this in his book "After You Shoot". In a recent case in Florida, both male participants made errors. One is dead and one has been charged... (more)
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They Live, We Sleep: A Dictatorship Disguised as a Democracy “You see them on the street. You watch them on TV. You might even vote for one this fall. You think they’re people just like you. You're wrong. Dead wrong.”—They Live
We’re living in two worlds, you and I.
There’s the world we see (or are made to see) and then there’s the one we sense (and occasionally catc... (more)
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Is Politics Obsolete? Hillary Clinton talks of cracking down on the gig economy. Donald Trump speaks of telling American corporations where they can and can’t do business abroad. Bernie Sanders says we have too many deodorant choices. They all speak about immigrants as if it were 1863.
What the heck are these people talking about?
More... (more)
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Why Do Libertarians Pay Taxes?It never fails. Every time I write anything about taxes I get long, rambling e-mails from tax trolls who scour the Internet looking for articles about taxes so they can contact the writers and impress them with their knowledge of the tax code.
These tax trolls usually call themselves "non-taxpayers." They say things like: paying taxes is voluntary, the Sixteenth Amendment was not properly ratified, most Americans aren't required to pay income tax, many Americans have gotten refund... (more)
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Do We Need to Bring Back Internment Camps?Last week, Retired General Wesley Clark, who was NATO commander during the US bombing of Serbia, proposed that "disloyal Americans" be sent to internment camps for the "duration of the conflict." Discussing the recent military base shootings in Chattanooga, TN, in which five US service members were killed, Clark recalled the internment of American citizens during World War II who were merely suspected of having Nazi sympathies. He said: "back then we didn't say 'that was freedom of speech,' we p... (more)
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The Sorry State of Race RelationsThe headline story last week was as disturbing as it was ironic. The Gallup poll reveals that both blacks and whites think race relations are generally bad, and by wide margins. In general, two thirds of survey respondents say that people are not getting along and that tension is high.
The striking fact: this is the reverse of what people believed in the days after t... (more)
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First, They Came for the Bar Owners...Chris Penner, owner of the Twilight Room Annex club in Portland, Oregon, had bills to pay and a payroll to meet. He called up his business account only to find that it had been completely drained.
“All my money was gone,” Penner later related to the Oregonian newspaper. He was shocked, but not completely surprised, by this development: “I raced to the bank, ... (more)
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The American Nightmare: The Tyranny of the Criminal Justice SystemHow can the life of such a man
Be in the palm of some fool’s hand?
To see him obviously framed
Couldn’t help but make me feel ashamed to live in a land
Where justice is a game.—Bob Dylan, “Hurricane”
Justice in America is not all it’s cracked up to be.
Just ask Jeffrey Deskovic, who spent 16 years in prison for a rape and murder he did ... (more)
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Trump Is Right: John McCain is Not A HeroOn July 18th, Donald Trump enraged fellow Republicans by stating that Arizona Senator John McCain is “not a war hero." Trump referenced McCain’s imprisonment by the North Vietnamese stating, "I like people that weren’t captured."
Americans like to think of all their armed servicemen as heroic, and this is especially true of McCain, a POW who was imprisone... (more)
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Authoritarians Like Twitter, Too In May 2014, CNN aired footage of a Ukrainian helicopter being shot by pro-Russian militants. Taken with a cell phone camera and posted on social media, the video showed compelling evidence of the scale and technological sophistication of the Ukrainian conflict.
The video was also fake — it was actually over a year old, and from Syria. CNN retracted the footage and apologized, but the “incident” was still widely discu... (more)
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Cops and Donuts Don't MixOn a Sunday morning early last summer, I was driving south across the Potomac River to a hike in Fairfax County, Virginia. The previous night the hike leader posted online a map of the jaunt. It looked like a typical suburban stroll until I saw a Dunkin' Donuts marked near the start point. As the Food and Drug Administration has warned, donuts can be addictive and publicizing the location of donut stores can utterly destroy people's free will. (Or maybe I am confusing this with the FDA's hectori... (more)
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The Intellectual Intolerance Behind "Check Your Privilege"A decade ago, no one had ever been told to “check your privilege.” Now it commands an appreciable “market share” in academia and social justice rhetoric. But it does so despite sharply opposed interpretations of its meaning. In fact, its expanded footprint is partly because of its ambiguity.
It Could Be an Invitation to Debate
In a sense, “check your privilege” largely amounts to “check your premises” behind your views, and many are willing to recognize that ... (more)
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Operation Jade Helm and Texas 'Paranoia'Mainstream statists are yucking it up over the so-called paranoia of Texas citizens who are concerned about the U.S. military's giant training exercise in the Southwest called Operation Jade Helm. "Yuck, yuck," the statists are exclaiming. "Those paranoid Texans!"
The statist idea, of course, is that the military is our friend -- our protector -- our god. The military establishment (and the CIA and NSA) keep us safe and secure from the terrorists, the communists, the drug dealers,... (more)
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Trumpism: The IdeologyIt's not too interesting to say that Donald Trump is a nationalist and aspiring despot who is manipulating bourgeois resentment, nativism, and ignorance to feed his power lust. It's uninteresting because it is obviously true. It's so true that stating it sounds more like an observation than a criticism.
I just heard Trump speak live. It was an awesome experience, like an interwar séance of once-powerful dictators who inspired multitudes, drove countries into the ground, and died ... (more)
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Administrative "Law" and the Tyranny of "Tolerance"In a collectivist society, “offenses” aren’t defined by behavior, but rather by identity. This is compellingly illustrated by cases of Antonio Darden and Elaine Huguenin, New Mexico residents and business owners who, acting in the service of their principles, exercised their property rights by refusing service to potential customers.
Darden operates a hair salon in Santa Fe, where Republican Governor Susana Martinez has been a regular customer. Darden announced in 2013 th... (more)
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