According to the WSJ (via EPJ), Fed Chairperson Janet Yellen has a huge security team that is angering the neighbors at her new private gated residential community. One resident contrasted Yellen’s slovenly and disrespectful security team to that of former FBI Director Robert Muller which consisted of people who were “businesslike” and apparently didn’t set up camp like the new invaders. I guess Ms. Yellen is really super important, privileged and special, and deserving of not only protection but enabling handlers to do whatever they want and get away with it. That’s the new American way now.
Speaking of the Fed, S.W.A.T. teams in Massachusetts say they are a “private” corporation (as in “private sector”), and thus do not need to obey public records laws. I guess that’s sort of like the Fed claiming to be a “private” entity (and itself thus not subject to the laws that everyone else must obey).
Investigative journalist James Risen has this extensive article in the New York Times on Blackwater employees’ extreme misconduct in Iraq. (Iraq has not only been a crony boondoggle for the merchants of death war profiteers, but a place for neanderthals to express their murderous rage and violence toward innocents and get away with it.)
Philip Weiss discusses news reporters talking about Sykes-Picot but ignoring the Balfour Declaration.
And William Grigg provides some history of the Prohibition era, and shows how the “law enforcement” wing of prohibition — in modern terms, the drug war — become the gangsters joining the “private” ones.
Shaming, isolating, and shunning government’s leeches worked for the American colonists; they dealt so severely with friends and family assisting the British Empire’s tyranny that few Americans dared do so. The Crown had to import from England those “swarms of officers” that the Declaration denounced. The same tactics still work. Are you friends with a bureaucrat or cop? Why? Are your children or siblings contemplating positions with Leviathan? Let them know you take such attacks on freedom personally and that as enemies of all mankind, they can no longer expect a welcome in your home. Don’t be shy about telling the rest of the family your reasons for excluding the miscreant, either.
I wholeheartedly agree with that sentiment and advice. Everyone should take it personally. The entire federal government is a police state, and the police state is a threat. When someone becomes an agent of the State, and the federal Leviathan monster in particular, one is joining up with an invading and occupying quasi-foreign Regime, making up new rules and diktats as it goes along. Shaming and shunning is the appropriate treatment for traitors, which frankly is what they are, given the modern transformation of the Regime into the criminal racket that it is. Leviathan is a thoroughly treasonous organization in the precise Constitutional sense of the word: “Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them …” referring, in my view, to those agents of the federal bureaucracy acting criminally against the people of the states, with the feds arming up as they have, and expanding their military powers within the borders and coasts, and “Homeland Security” (sic) forces as well, and their infiltrating local police departments with military equipment, as well as the spying, fusion centers, the TSA gropesters and all the rest. They really are “levying war” against the people, in their war on our security, their war on our medical freedom, their war on our private lives and our food choices, etc., etc., etc. Each and every one of these foreign invaders and occupiers of the Regime and their enforcers and minions needs to be ostracized.
Besides all that stuff, Murray Sabrin sent Robert Wenzel this letter to the editor he had published in the New York Times in 1976 describing exactly what the Federal Reserve’s “printing press” actually is: counterfeiting.
Karen Kwiatkowski says that if the neocons are so gung-ho on more war in Iraq, they should join up themselves.
Kelley Vlahos writes about Iraq War vets (the ones those neocons caused to be Iraq War vets) asking Was it worth it?
Pat Testa and Walter Block write about libertarianism and circumcision. They say that if one wants that, then it should be on a voluntary basis. Obviously, a baby is not able to make that decision.
The U.S. Supreme Court has gotten some decisions right in recent weeks, such as ruling that warrantless cell phone searches are unconstitutional and ruling that abortion protest “buffer zones” on public streets and sidewalks are also unconstitutional. But in ruling that Aereo’s providing customers with access to view broadcast TV on the Internet violated copyright law and therefore like cable providers they must pay broadcasters a fee, the high court has created many more problems and distortions now. For instance, this ruling will no doubt cause big problems for Internet cloud services and for everyday ISPs as well. The 6 Supremes voting “nay” on Aereo said that the process looks and seems like the way cable TV provides broadcast TV shows to customers, and therefore it is the same thing. Not so, say dissenters Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito. You see, they actually read the copyright law, as Mike Masnick pointed out. (Not that copyright law should matter in a free society, as that is a result of legislation, not law. Therefore it is invalid. But I digress.)
Well, when Congress wrote its laws regarding broadcasting over the airwaves, that really became yet another usurpation, and a new overall monopoly in which Washington’s overlords get to decide who may and who may not broadcast their shows and their views on the “public” airwaves. So, while nobody should “own” the airwaves, we have a Congress and an FCC which since then “own” the airwaves. But in my view, those who get into the broadcasting business should really know what they are dealing with. If some content is traveling freely “in the air,” it is not like it is traveling through a private, physical cable. It is indeed “public,” and anyone and everyone who wants at it should do so in whatever way they wish, without paying some extortion fee to the government or to some other group. If you don’t like that then perhaps broadcasting your shows over the airwaves is not for you. (For some people the ability to broadcast their stuff over the airwaves can be free advertising for them.)
Of course, that doesn’t mean that the rebroadcasters such as Aereo have a right to claim that they created and produced specific programs that customers might see — that would be fraud, a totally different issue.
Kit Daniels writes about UN gun-confiscation proposals as models for gun-takings in America, despite that gun-related violence has declined in the U.S. (except for perhaps police instigated gun-related violence).
Laurence Vance says that libertarians are right about drugs and the drug war, and fisks a writer named John Waters in Waters’s recent assertion that libertarians are wrong about drugs. Here is the best part of the Vance article, in my view:
I have never read anywhere that Waters was in favor of alcohol prohibition. What, you ask, does this have to do with what he writes about drug prohibition in “Why Libertarians Are Wrong About Drugs”? It actually has everything to do with it. To see the folly of what Waters says about drug prohibition, I have substituted the word “alcohol” for “drug” the five times it occurs in the fifth paragraph of his article:
“But this harmless world is not the real world of alcohol use. There is ample experience that an alcohol user harms not only himself, but also many others. The association between alcohol use and social and economic failure, domestic violence, pernicious parenting and criminal acts while under the influence is grounds for prohibition even if we accept no responsibility for what the alcohol user does to himself. The alcohol user’s freedom to consume costs his community not only their safety, but also their liberty.”
Like most drug warriors, Waters makes an arbitrary distinction between drugs and alcohol that does nothing but weaken his case. If he actually favored alcohol prohibition, then perhaps we could take him a little more seriously.
The drug warriors do not seem to see their cognitive dissonance when they refuse to also include the dangers of alcohol consumption, as well as remember the failures of alcohol prohibition from the 1920s. And they really believe that the government owns our bodies and has a right to dictate to us what chemicals we may or may not ingest.
Here is a discomforting article on Infowars regarding the government’s intrusive and totalitarian “biometric” database. The article cites the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the ACLU which warn that we should expect an “overwhelming number” of false matches in the government’s facial recognition, iris scanning and palm print technologies. The FBI will be placing all the collected biometric information in a combined criminal and non-criminal database. Expect many, many people to be the victims of false identification, unnecessary police harassment and S.W.A.T. raids. I realize there has been some good news on the liberty front, such as the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that warrantless cell phone searches are unconstitutional and a federal court ruling that the feds’ “no-fly” list is also unconstitutional. But this whole biometric database thing is so extreme, so obviously to become a tool of gangsters and government harassment and suppression of dissent, that this, too, should be ruled “unconstitutional.”
Speaking of the ACLU, S.W.A.T. teams and the police state, Radley Balko has this post on the ACLU’s recent report on police militarization. Basically, S.W.A.T. raids are mostly unnecessary, they are terrorizing innocent people, and the drug war is the main reason for them now. End the drug war, legalize freedom (as Ron Paul would say), and stop the damn S.W.A.T. raids.
Michael Rozeff explains the neocons’ militaristic (but non-productive and un-American) vision of America. The neocons value government power, but not decent, honest aspects of life, just armed military might and State power. Very empty souls.
Free Range Kids author Lenore Skenazy quotes from an article in the Boston Globe by psychologist Peter Gray on how kids who are deprived of their natural instincts to play independently while they are children can contribute to greater incidence of depression and anxiety later on in life. (But the school totalitarians don’t want to let kids play independently, and the neighborhood nazis don’t like to see a child playing in a yard unsupervised, or else they’ll call the police. So now a lot of parents and other adults are helicoptering and overprotective of the kids, and maybe that’s a good reason why so many of the kids whose natural inclinations were stifled and suppressed grew up to be depressed, anxious, and miserable. I think that much of our whole society is anxious and miserable, quite frankly, but the processed foods and prescription drugs also have a lot to do with it.)
Jacob Hornberger clarifies libertarianism versus statism in this post aimed at Catholics regarding the issue of immigration. (I can’t believe just how ignorant so many people are on the immigration issue, especially the conservatives. In my view, to many people their Archie Bunker anti-foreigner narrow-mindedness is more important than free markets, private property rights, and economic prosperity.)
And Jonathan Turley discusses the newest idiocy in American culture: social media clauses in prenuptial agreements. (How did so many Americans become so dumb now? is it the processed foods, the video games, the prescriptions, or the zombie texting obsessions?)
Robert Wenzel interviews Lew Rockwell on his new book, Against the State. There are plenty of reasons to be against the State. Lew Rockwell gives many examples of how the State goes against us, our freedom, our economic and personal security, and explains how we would be better off without it.
Hans-Hermann Hoppe bravely explains the justness of private property, and the unjustness of the State, and how the capitalist-entrepreneur’s self-defense against the State’s unjust aggressions is just.
Jacob Hornberger and Sheldon Richman of the Future of Freedom Foundation discuss and thoroughly review the history behind the turmoil in the Middle East and the long-term results of government interventionism. Sheldon Richman expands on his recent article, The Middle East Harvests Bitter Imperialist Fruit. Since World War I, the European and American interventionists interfered with what would have been a natural evolving and development of society in that region, suppressing the populations’ natural inclination to grow out of their continuing primitivism. (However, given how primitive Americans are in supporting government wars of aggression and senseless murders of foreigners and destruction of whole foreign societies, and the cell phone zombies, the progressive-influenced “sexual revolution” i.e. immediate gratification and irresponsibility, and local police beating, tasing, shooting and killing innocents, Americans should talk about “primitive” foreigners. But I digress.)
According to Boston Herald columnists Holly Robichaud and Joe Battenfeld in recent interviews on WRKO, Massachusetts candidate for governor Donald Berwick may very well upset Attorney General Martha Coakley and state Treasurer Steve Grossman (D-AIPAC) for the Democrat nomination fro governor in this September’s primary. Berwick was an Obama Medicare flunky whose campaign promotes medical “single payer” for Massachusetts victims, and who loves the British National Health Service. As Nat Hentoff writes, in a 2009 interview Berwick declared, “It’s not a question of whether we will ration health care. It is whether we will ration with our eyes open.” Yech.
Most readers already know about the intrusions, the economic destruction, and the tearing apart of the medical system that ObamaCare has caused. Even some progressives have admitted that ObamaCare is lousy. So I don’t understand why voters in Massachusetts would want to entrust politicians even further and more comprehensively with their private medical matters.
But even in Massachusetts, doesn’t Berwick know about the real failures of RomneyCare? Health care costs in Massachusetts went up, not down, and emergency room exploitation also escalated. And RomneyCare also adversely affected some hospitals’ care for the poor, it killed some 18,000 Massachusetts jobs, and ultimately the state’s Rulers imposed health care price controls. (Of course, the free-market way is the answer to the problems in health care, obviously.)
And given that Berwick is an actual doctor — an “MD” — I wonder what his opinion might be of the irresponsible behaviors of Boston Children’s Hospital doctors against Justina Pelletier? Does he think it was okay for them to suddenly remove her from her treatment and medications and unjustifiably place her in psychiatric facilities? And, speaking of the rise of fascism in Massachusetts, have any of the local media stenographers asked him (or any of the candidates) about last year’s Watertown police siege, or Gov. Patrick threatening motorists with jail if they drove during the Blizzard of 2013?
However, I predict that the majority of voters in Massachusetts, with their health and their paychecks victimized by ObamaCare’s disastrous results, will perceive Donald Berwick as an ObamaCare-RomneyCare promoter and will probably elect the lefty socialist Republican Charlie Half-Baker, whose own Medicare savings plan in the early ’90s was used as a model for RomneyCare. Heads I win, tails you lose, etc., etc., etc.
Dale Steinreich writes about how one mom of a five-year-old was able to treat her son’s zombie-like behavior which was labeled as ADHD. She removed all the processed food from the kid’s diet and he was then much better. Steinreich also mentions a study which showed a linkage between ADHD and chemical food dyes in many processed foods. But obviously it isn’t just kids who consume products laden with dyes and other chemicals. A lot of people are eating foods loaded with chemicals that run throughout the bloodstream and to the brain, affecting the neurotransmitters and thus their moods, their ability to concentrate and reason.
And then we have Michelle Obama the school lunch dictator who wants the schools to force-feed the kids with the processed foods and chemicals contained in them, because she believes that parents are too ignorant regarding diet and nutrition to feed their own kids. There have been schools now in which bagged lunches from home are actually banned. And if a kid brings in her own lunch, Mommy gets in trouble. That’s nuts.
In addition to the kids whose minds are being poisoned by the chemicals in the processed foods as well as by the extra vaccines additives and others toxins such as with those kids who have been unnecessarily and dangerously put on the psychiatric meds, we have a population of adults whose behaviors and thinking are affected by all these chemicals they are consuming on a daily basis. We can look at the extremist feminists who hate men and have made it their life’s goal to make life very difficult for the men, as Patrice Lewis has written about just recently. And as Fred Reed has referred to, the feminizing of the schools has institutionalized the phenomenon of suppressing the boys’ normal behaviors and referring to those behaviors as “disorders.”
Now, could it be that the feminists now are so extreme and hateful and vengeful as a consequence of all the processed foods and prescription drugs they have been consuming? I looked up some common brands of oral birth control pills, and among some of the side effects included are “depression,” rage and “confusion.” And I’m bringing that up because supposedly many feminists are big on promoting (and thus probably using) contraception. All those years of those synthetic chemicals going through their systems and affecting their brains and thus moods and behaviors, just like any other prescription drug as they all go through the bloodstream and into the brain. Walking time bombs.
And I wonder if all that is many times worse now because the feminists of today are much more totalitarian and bitter than the ones of, say, the early 1970s. Even Helen Reddy wouldn’t be as bad as they seem to be today. The drugs seem more powerful, with even stronger chemical effects, and the processed foods certainly have much more chemicals in them now than 50 years ago.
And it isn’t just the feminist extremists, just look at the population in general. Average Americans are obedient zombies who passively and subserviently accept what government bureaucrats tell them, accepting the police state, the TSA molesting and groping at airports and local police-Nazis treating innocent civilians as criminal suspects. In 2004 the zombie Americans showed their approval of two criminal wars of aggression and reelected George W. Bush.
I think there are definitely connections and that Big Pharma and Big Agra really have been playing a large role.
This week marks the 40th anniversary of the Boston school busing crisis that was caused by the local central planners’ attempts to desegregate the Boston public school system. Kids from mostly white South Boston were bused to schools in Roxbury while kids in mostly black Roxbury were bused to South Boston schools. People were complaining that they felt their kids weren’t getting as good an education as they should be. Bruce Gellerman of WBUR has this report that summarizes the major events of the Boston school desegregation crisis. That report includes some interviews and some clips from the School Committee hearings on that matter. (The “n-word” is also spoken, so sorry about that.)
While it isn’t really mentioned in that report, the whole mess was a result of centralization. The government planners made things worse, not only in causing even further racial tensions in a city but in further reducing the quality of education.
The public school bureaucrat, for his part, is faced with a host of crucial and controversial decisions in deciding on the pattern of formal schooling in his area. He must decide: Should schooling be — traditional or progressive? free enterprise or socialistic? competitive or egalitarian? liberal arts or vocational? segregated or integrated? sex education or not? religious or secular? or various shades between these poles. The point is that whatever he decides, and even if he decides according to the wishes of the majority of the public, there will always be a substantial number of parents and children who will be totally deprived of the kind of education they desire . . . The more that education becomes public, the more will parents and children be deprived of the education they feel they need. The more that education becomes public, the more will heavy-handed uniformity stamp out the needs and desires of individuals and minorities.
Consequently, the greater the sphere of public as opposed to private education, the greater the scope and intensity of conflict in social life . . . Hence, in education as well as in all other activities, the more that government decisions replace private decision-making, the more various groups will be at each others’ throats in a desperate race to see to it that the one and only decision in each vital area goes its own way.
Contrast the deprivation and intense social conflict inherent in government decision-making with the state of affairs on the free market. If . . . education were strictly private, then each and every group of parents could and would patronize its own kind of school.
. . .
Moreover, if the residential areas are racially segregated, as they often tend to be, the result of a compulsory geographical monopoly is the compulsory racial segregation of the public schools. Those parents who prefer integrated schooling have to come up against the geographical monopoly system. Furthermore, just as some wag has said that nowadays “Whatever isn’t prohibited is compulsory,” the recent tendency of the public school bureaucrats has not been to institute voluntary busing of children to widen parental discretion, but to swing in the opposite direction and institute compulsory busing and compulsory racial integration [p. 132] of the schools — often resulting in a grotesque transfer of children far from their homes. Once again, the typical government pattern: either compulsory segregation or compulsory integration. The voluntary way — leaving the decisions up to the individual parents involved — cuts across the grain of any State bureaucracy.
It is curious that recent movements for local parental control of public education have sometimes been called “extreme right-wing” and at other times “extreme left-wing,” when the libertarian motivation has been precisely the same in either case. Thus, when parents have opposed the compulsory busing of their children to distant schools, the educational Establishment has condemned these movements as “bigoted” and “right-wing.” But when, similarly, Negro parents — as in the case of Ocean Hill-Brownsville in New York City — have demanded local parental control of the school system, this drive in its turn has been condemned as “extreme left-wing” and “nihilistic.” The most curious part of the affair is that the parents in both cases have failed to recognize their common desire for local parental control, and have themselves condemned the “bigots” or “militants” in the other group. Tragically, neither the local white nor black groups have recognized their common cause against the educational Establishment: against dictatorial control of their children’s education by an educational bureaucracy which is trying to ram down their throats a form of schooling which it believes must be imposed upon the recalcitrant masses.
The compulsory state system already developed was grist for the totalitarian mill. At the base of totalitarianism and compulsory education is the idea that children belong to the State rather than to their parents. One of the leading promoters of that idea in Europe was the famous Marquis de Sade, who insisted that children are the property of the State.
There is no need to dwell on education in Communist countries. Communist countries impose compulsory state schooling, and enforce rigid indoctrination of obedience to the rulers. The compulsory schooling is supplemented by State monopolies on other propaganda and educational fields.
Rothbard wrote that book in 1972, and foresaw how progressive educational usurpers in America would reduce the quality of government education and its results.
Individuality is suppressed by teaching all to adjust to the “group.” All emphasis is on the “group,” and the group votes, runs its affairs by majority rule, etc. As a result, the children are taught to look for truth in the opinion of the majority, rather than in their own independent inquiry, or in the intelligence of the best in the field. Children are prepared for democracy by being led to discuss current events without first learning the systematic subjects (politics, economics, history) which are necessary in order to discuss them. The Mole effect is to substitute slogans and superficial opinion for considered individual thought. And the opinion is that of the lowest common denominator of the group.
It is clear that one of the major problems comes from the dullest group. The progressive educationists saw that the dullest could not be taught difficult subjects, or, indeed, simple subjects. Instead of drawing the logical conclusion of abandoning compulsory education for the uneducable, they decided to bring education down to the lowest level so that the dullest could absorb it — in fact, to move toward the elimination of subjects or grading altogether.
We now have Common Core, which is mainly a political tool being inflicted on the young to even further discourage their critical thinking abilities and individuality.
Finally, here is Thomas Sowell in 1981 arguing in favor of parental choices in the education of their kids:
Butler Shaffer writes that after the Establishment-picked Obama’s 8-year presidency, then we will have the Establishment-picked Hillary presidency. “The First Woman President” (such as it is) will crack down on dissent and criticism of the Regime even harder than “The First Black President” did. If you criticize Hillary for being the fascist anti-civil liberties tyrant she probably will be and for the warmongering war criminal she already is, you are thus a “sexist,” just as criticizing Obama for the same **** means you are a racist. Of course, it takes utterly unthinking, dim-witted and narrow-minded morons to come to such conclusions. And I think that when Hillary rises to power, our society’s ongoing war on men, the anti-male, “every man is a rapist just because he is a man” idiocy will escalate even further.
Speaking of the war on men, Patrice Lewis has this honest column today about whether men are justified in hating women, justified by the feminists’ extremism, that is.
Women who are conditioned to believe their lives are one long string of victimhood are rarely able to settle into mature, content, happy relationships where men are valued and children are welcomed. Men who have never met a feminine woman often conclude that marriage is too dangerous and shy away from committing themselves to being responsible husbands and fathers.
Feminists, having taken over everything from court systems to universities to government, have become drunk with power. Men have learned the hard way what happens when they challenge a feminist. Bluntly put, a man’s life can be ruined by women. A woman can remove his beloved children from his care; she can have him jailed with an unsubstantiated accusation of rape; she can ruin his career by crying harassment because he “looked at her sexually.”
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