Follow-Up on Recent Articles and Posts

I have just a few follow-up comments on some recent article and posts. On my article on news media bias and the gun control issue, I singled out Joe Mathieu and the WBZ morning news because I was very frustrated. I do have them on much of the time mornings about 5 to 7. In my article, I did write a sort of “disclaimer”: “I obviously can’t listen to this one station all day, so it’s possible that in WBZ’s newscasts they have covered both sides of the gun debate. And if they have, then my apologies.” But I wanted to reiterate that in all the newscasts I heard, there were plenty of sound bites with Elizabeth Warren and her emotionalistic “The next time someone uses a gun to kill one of us, a gun that we could have kept out of the hands of a terrorist, then members of this Congress will have blood on our hands,” as well as the typical “How many children will have to die before we have more gun control,” etc. Not once did I hear any newscast sound bites with someone commenting on “gun-free zones” as a contributing factor in mass shootings, or that most of the recent mass shooters had already passed background checks, or that assault weapon bans don’t prevent those kinds of attacks.

And on my most recent post on Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Half-Baker and the state regime’s recent socialist and fascist intrusions, I know, I can be someone sarcastic regarding these political hacks and their pandering to interest groups and so on. But if you get someone in there with some degree of integrity and honesty who is principled, like a Ron Paul, I will definitely write about them, too. And in my recent post on Libertarian Party nominee for President, Gov. Gary Johnson, it is obvious from his and Bill Weld’s recent appearance on CNN that they are very exasperating and frustrating in their absurd comments and policy positions. But I thought that bringing up Johnson’s successful experience in the private sector would be informative.

U.S. Should Exit from NATO, Interventionism Causes Ongoing Crises

Jacob Hornberger makes some terrific points in his article, America should exit from NATO and the national security state. The refugee crisis is the result of U.S. and NATO interventions, invasions and occupations, and the interventionists who do not like the U.K. “Brexit” vote have no one to blame but themselves.

Political Opportunists and Central Planners in Massachusetts Like Never Before

Besides promising to sign the transgender bathroom bill, Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker seems to be wrong an just about every other issue as well. Either he doesn’t understand basic principles of law and justice, economics and liberty, and/or he is just pandering to this or that important bloc of voters in anticipation of his next election or reelection bid. And the state’s attorney general, Maura Healey, is also wrong on just about every issue. She is in part ideological with being a militant lesbian/Social Justice Warrior, and part political opportunist. I am sure she will be the Democrats’ nominee for governor in 2018, and that she probably can’t wait to be the first “openly lesbian governor.”

Gov. Charlie Baker’s latest is his pandering to the police unions. He filed a bill to increase the penalty for assaulting a police officer. But whatever happened to equal justice, equal treatment under the law? In other words, the government’s penalty for assault against someone should be the same regardless of who the victim is. We are supposed to have equal value under the law. “Justice is blind,” you know. If someone assaults or shoots a police officer, then that assaulter should be given the same penalty as if he assaulted any other victim. Morally and legally, the victim’s occupation shouldn’t be involved in determining punishment.

And some people have been using the rationalizations such as “Police officers have a dangerous job,” “Police officers save lives,” and so on. But so do firefighters have a dangerous job and save lives. You’ll have to have special protections for them, too, and add more to the punishment for assaulting firefighters. And EMS workers also save lives. What about them? In fact, Utah Gov. Gary Herbert just signed into law giving emergency medical responders extra protections. But what if someone assaulted a patient on the ambulance but not the responder? And also, last year a doctor was shot and killed at a Boston hospital. Doctors save lives, so therefore they must be like police and firefighters and be given a higher degree of value by society than the rest of us, no?

We really need to segregate certain classes of people into groups of those more deserving of protection and those deserving of less protection. Yup.

And now Gov. Charlie Baker is pandering to the anti-immigration crowd, because he wants their votes, too, in 2018. His new policy is to allow Massachusetts state police to detain immigrants, supposedly not as a primary purpose of enforcing immigration law on behalf of the feds, but, Baker says, “they will now be able to assist in detaining for our federal partners individuals who pose a significant threat to public safety or national security.” In other words, the state police will have carte blanche to act on their own personal prejudices when they are dealing with immigrants and will have new powers to harass them and turn them over to the feds.

In defiance of Baker’s new order, Boston’s mayor Marty Walsh stated, “Our police officers do not enforce immigration laws, and we will continue our policy to not detain anyone for immigration purposes that is otherwise eligible for release.” While I disagree with Mayor Walsh on most things, I agree with him on this issue. I doubt that his views on immigration are the libertarian views but probably from the leftist viewpoint, but that’s okay.

As I have stated many times here, all human beings have a right to their freedom of travel and freedom of movement, and a right to sell their labor to anyone who is a willing and able buyer, as long as it’s all voluntary and as long as they are peaceful. Government borders and the immigration police state are obstructions to a prosperous, free-market capitalist society and free trade which is part of what “made America great” in its first century of existence. Too bad the socialists, like today’s immigration socialists, came to power and have taken much of that freedom and prosperity away. So, Gov. Charlie Half-Baker is wrong on the immigration issue as well.

Besides Baker’s immigration police state, a further issue which shows what a police statist he is, like the attorney general Maura Healy, is the marijuana legalization issue. Baker and Boston Mayor Marty Walsh are both opposed to legalization, despite all the destruction, the deaths and financial costs caused by the drug war, certainly far worse than the negative effects of drugs themselves on the society. The drug war itself is, in fact, a criminal racket. As Jacob Hornberger observed, “Here in the United States, we periodically learn about payoffs to law-enforcement officers and judges by drug cartels. Of course, most of the corruption never comes to light. One part of the corruption that exists in plain sight, however, involves the program known as ‘asset forfeiture,’ by which federal and state cops are stealing money and property from people in the name of the drug war, appropriating it to their own use, and never charging the victims with a crime.”

The drug war is a criminal racket, with corrupt government officials profiting from it and law enforcement officers breaking into the homes of innocent people and terrorizing them and killing them or their dogs, and in many cases stealing money and property from innocent people. And for what? Being in possession of a damn plant or consuming some drug is not a crime. Why don’t they go after all the damn boozers out there? How many drunk-driving accidents and deaths were caused by alcohol consumption? Does it matter? Nope. And how many illnesses, cancers and deaths are caused by cigarette smoking? Does it matter? Nope. The police statists focus on just street drugs like a religious obsession, for some reason.

As Laurence Vance has written, the war on drugs is a war on freedom. Vance also noted:

The number of annual deaths caused by all drugs — legal and illegal — pales in comparison with deaths caused by tobacco. And likewise the costs to society and the economy. If smoking tobacco is as bad as the government says it is, then it only makes sense to ban the cultivation, processing, sale, and use of tobacco, and to do so immediately. It is tobacco traffickers who should be sentenced to long prison terms. It is tobacco dealers who should be arrested and whose lives should be ruined. It is tobacco peddlers who should be fined and scorned. It is tobacco users whose property should be confiscated.

Now, lest there be any misunderstanding, I am not in favor of any government at any level banning tobacco. That is because I am not in favor of any government at any level banning the buying, selling, growing, processing, use, or possession of any substance. And that is because, as a libertarian, I believe in individual liberty and personal responsibility instead of a nanny state run by bureaucrats looking out for my health and safety.

And police statist/nanny statist Gov. Charlie Half-Baker now has his new law meddling into the lives of medical patients and their relationships with their doctors. The new law is central planning on steroids, with the government limiting doses of prescription opiate pain killers to 7 days, regardless of what an actual doctor thinks. It mandates a state-wide database of all medical patients being given opiate drugs. Hmmm, bureaucrats love vast databases of the people’s private information, so I’m sure they will expand it to include other forms of drugs, treatments, categories of conditions and diseases, and who has what conditions and is receiving what treatment, etc. It appears, however, that the legislature decided to remove Baker’s proposal to involuntarily detain and incarcerate “hospitalize” for 72 hours drug addicts going into the emergency room. Whew, that was a close one, but we now have a clue as to where Gov. Bureaucrat’s mentality is. It’s for our own good, after all.

And the state’s attorney general, “Meddling Maura” Healey, is also a police statist/nanny statist, in which Healey now has the state banning the sale of e-cigarettes to minors, and she wants to intervene in the fantasy sports arena. And her authoritarian anti-free speech fascism is shown in her going after organizations and think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation whose research and publications express climate change/global warming skepticism (referred to by the Left as “denial”). So these socialists and fascists on the Left oppose not only the 2nd Amendment, but the First Amendment, Fourth Amendment and Fifth Amendment as well.

So Gov. Charlie Half-Baker and attorney general “Meddling Maura” Healey are even worse than Michael Dukakis and Scott Harshbarger, and worse than Deval Patrick and Martha Coakley as well. They seem to be political opportunists and are doing a lot of pandering to law enforcement groups and other social activist groups. Central planners and authoritarians who just don’t get the ideas and principles of freedom that were the basis for the formation of America right there in their own state of Massachusetts, where supposedly a Revolution was fought to bring freedom to the people.

More Idiocy from “Libertarians” Gary Johnson and Bill Weld, on a CNN “Libertarian” Town Hall

I really wanted to comment on the recent CNN Libertarian Town Hall with candidates Gary Johnson and Bill Weld. I skimmed through the transcript and it’s just so lengthy and annoying, but really Johnson and Weld are so annoying and so stupid, it might be better to just refer to the live tweets by Justin Raimondo as compiled by Robert Wenzel. (Justin did write a more lengthy article for The American Conservative on that CNN fiasco.)

Perhaps a “Johnson-Humphrey” ticket might be more attractive than a Johnson-Weld ticket. Yes, they’re that bad. If we could only go back in time, 1964 sounds really good to me. We sure had a lot more freedom then. I want to say that if the American people knew then what they know now, they would’ve voted for Goldwater. However, most Americans don’t even know now what some of us actually do know now, like about U.S. government getting into foreign wars or starting wars of aggression being a really bad thing, like the drug war’s destruction, and so on. So they probably still would’ve voted for Lyndon Johnson. Whatever.

Back to 2016. I have read more about Gary Johnson, and I see that his early experiences are much to admire. According to Wikipedia, Johnson started his own construction business and grew the business to be one of the largest construction businesses in New Mexico. According to some of the articles cited by Wikipedia, Johnson had an idealistic (and unrealistic) approach to government from an early age. This particular New York Times article states, “Among the ‘seven principles of good government’ that pepper Johnson’s speeches are ‘always be honest’; ‘always do what’s right and fair’; ‘determine your goal’ and ‘develop a plan to reach that goal.'”

So this tells me that Johnson is like many people: very naive about the nature of government, and the corrupting influence it has on even the most honest of people. I have just recently used this quote by Murray Rothbard in his The Anatomy of the State, but it’s worth repeating:

The State, in the words of Oppenheimer, is the “organization of the political means”; it is the systematization of the predatory process over a given territory. For crime, at best, is sporadic and uncertain; the parasitism is ephemeral, and the coercive, parasitic lifeline may be cut off at any time by the resistance of the victims. The State provides a legal, orderly, systematic channel for the predation of private property; it renders certain, secure, and relatively “peaceful” the lifeline of the parasitic caste in society. Since production must always precede predation, the free market is anterior to the State. The State has never been created by a “social contract”; it has always been born in conquest and exploitation. The classic paradigm was a conquering tribe pausing in its time-honored method of looting and murdering a conquered tribe, to realize that the time-span of plunder would be longer and more secure, and the situation more pleasant, if the conquered tribe were allowed to live and produce, with the conquerors settling among them as rulers exacting a steady annual tribute.

So if Gary Johnson really wanted to “always be honest,” and “always do what’s right and fair,” then he should have stayed in the private sector, in which he would have continued to serve others voluntarily, in which he would receive his profits not by forcibly seizing funds from customers as the State does, but through voluntary contract and voluntary transactions.

Nevertheless, when Johnson was governor of New Mexico, he used his veto pen 200 times and those vetoes were overridden only 5 times. Not bad. He made cuts in the rate of growth of the state budget, and really was a true “fiscal conservative.” However, as far as I can tell now, his #1 issue is the legalization of marijuana. But only marijuana. Not other drugs. I think it’s because, to his own admission, he likes marijuana. It’s not because he has any principled understanding of the moral case for drug freedom. If he did, then he would have a principled understanding of the moral case for economic freedom, religious freedom, freedom of association, and so on. Alas, he clearly does not have such an understanding.

According to that Times article, he also really liked cocaine when he tried it, but didn’t continue with it. And I know that many people want to say that Johnson’s having marijuana isn’t detrimental to his health, but I disagree. It has been detrimental to his cognitive health.

One study showed that marijuana usage over time can severely lower an individual’s IQ. (Add that to whatever fluoridated water he may have been consuming all his life, and we’ve got real trouble here.) However, I don’t think that Johnson began to use the marijuana until later in life, particularly after a terrible accident in 2005 in which he used marijuana for pain for the next three years. It’s possible that that whole accident experience, in which he says he had “broken my back, blowing out both of my knees, breaking ribs, really taking about three years to recover,” could’ve affected his cognitive functions as well. In addition to that kind of stress and damage to the body, I can just imagine all the further damaging medical treatment and hospitalization he may have received. (Now, there is a syndrome known as “pump head,” in which during heart surgery the cardiopulmonary bypass can cause fragments to enter the bloodstream and get to the brain and cause troublesome cognitive issues, so it’s possible that other types of invasive surgeries and procedures such as what Gary Johnson suffered through could cause such similar issues.) And then there are all the vaccines and prescription drugs, the processed food with high fructose corn syrup and other crap he may have consumed all his life. Yech.

Besides the possible negative consequences of his accident and treatments, what other explanation could there be but his becoming a pothead as to why he has become so stupid since his days as governor? (Sorry to be so blunt, Gov.) After 4 years now as a “Libertarian” Party member, he still does not comprehend the actual principles of libertarianism, as I have mentioned. And it isn’t just “ignorance,” he really is stupid now, especially given his dumb answers to questions at the CNN Libertarian Town Hall and other places (as noted above by Raimondo).

A lot of people are citing Johnson’s comment that Barack Obama is a “good guy.” No, Obama is not a “good guy.” How can any informed person in his right mind say such a thing? Obama’s war on journalists and government whistleblowers, his war on medical marijuana, his assassinations of non-convicted suspects without charges, his drone murders and other warmongering, his medical care intrusions and other acts of criminality, show that no, Barack Obama is not a “good guy.” He is a “bad guy.”

And Johnson also said, “Hillary Clinton, a wonderful public servant.”

Yikes! Does he really believe that? I think that maybe it’s more than just marijuana he’s been smoking. Besides being a corrupt sleazebag and a degenerate, Hillary is a real criminal. And not just from the Clinton Foundation racket and the email server criminality but a real war criminal as well, even going back to her days as first lady, aiding and abetting her criminal husband in his ethnic cleansing of Kosovo and his continuing bombing and sanctions against Iraq throughout the 1990s, as she urged and supported Bill Clinton to continue doing those horrible things.

“Wonderful public servant.”

And Bill Weld wants a “thousand-person FBI task force treating ISIS as a gigantic organized crime family”?

No, the real libertarian answer to that is to abolish the FBI, because it is the government that should be treated as a “gigantic organized crime family”! (See Rothbard quote above.)

In that CNN Libertarian Town Hall, Gary Johnson said that “Planned Parenthood does a lot of good,” even though they do a lot of bad, including promoting abortion, promoting risky sexual promiscuity in adolescents, and other sick things.

One thing that Gary Johnson clearly does not understand is that there needs to be total separation of medical care and State. In that case, Planned Parenthood would be on its own. Without government’s support via stealing private wealth and finances from the workers and producers of society, Planned Parenthood’s survival would be just as dependent on private, voluntary funding and support as the Catholic Church is. And that’s the honest, non-criminal way that society should have things.

I wish Gary Johnson would understand that there needs to be not only total separation of medical care and State, but total separation of education and State, drugs and State, agriculture and State, international trade and State, retirement planning and State, and so on. Those are the libertarian solutions to society’s problems.

The libertarian solution is the voluntary solution, in which bureaucrats do not have any more artificial authority over your life than your neighbors do (i.e. none), in which bureaucrats are not above the law as they are now, in which bureaucrats may not steal from the people (no involuntary transactions, no coercion, no legalized criminality by the State against the people).

I don’t think that Bill Weld ever had any promise, given that he has been in government his whole life. But, as noted above, Gary Johnson did have some promise in the private sector. Sadly, he decided to blow all that and get with the wrong crowd (the government crowd, that is).

This is giving me a headache.

Are Gary Johnson and Bill Weld Helping Hillary?

Justin Raimondo thinks the “Libertarian” Party duo are acting as straw candidates on behalf of Hillary, and that they’re doing it “consciously.” (Funny, they often sound like they’re unconscious.) Justin quotes them at their recent CNN Town Hall with Chris Cuomo, making the most unbelievable statements. If you are a libertarian, believe in promoting liberty, self-ownership and self-determination, the non-initiation of aggression and private property and freedom of association, freedom of speech, religion and so on, it would be best that you not pay attention to Gary Johnson and Bill Weld. They are statists, fascists, socialists, certainly not “libertarians”! It would be best that you instead read Murray Rothbard, Ron Paul, Mises Institute articles, FFF.org and LewRockwell.com articles, and many others that I often link to here. It is very sad what the “Libertarian” Party has become. I will have more comments on Johnson and Weld soon.

On Award-Winning ‘News’ Radio and Objective Coverage

Here is my latest article on LewRockwell.com, On Award-Winning ‘News’ Radio and Objective Coverage

In response to the Orlando nightclub mass shooting, the U.S. House Democrats are making fools of themselves in their sit-in filibuster, as they display their childishness and ignorance on the gun control issue. Their purely emotional calls for more gun control and denying guns to people whose names are placed on a no-fly list or a terrorist watch list without due process are thoroughly lacking in rational thought.

But I’m more disappointed in the news media who are covering the pro-gun control crowd’s emotional arguments, but not covering any actual intellectual, historical and empirical arguments against gun control.

For example, I listen to news radio WBZ in the morning and its newscasts are typical of such a description. WBZ and its morning news anchor Joe Mathieu most recently have been boasting of their 2016 National Edward R. Murrow Award for Best Newscast, in addition to their “2014 Peabody Award for Overall Excellence; a 2014 National Edward R. Murrow Award for Continuing Coverage; and the 2013 National Association of Broadcasters Marconi Award for News Talk Station of the Year,” according to their website.

Now, I obviously can’t listen to this one station all day, so it’s possible that in WBZ’s newscasts they have covered both sides of the gun debate. And if they have, then my apologies. Although WBZ’s weeknight talk show host Dan Rea did interview gun rights advocate John Lott after the Orlando shooting, what I am talking about more is the mainstream media’s actual newscasts, which purportedly are “objective,” and “fair and balanced” (or they’re supposed to be).

For example, in the discussion of the no-fly list, which causes many innocent people to be denied their right to travel, and the terrorist screening database, in which the Washington Post notes that “auditors found that 38 percent of the records contained errors or inconsistencies,” the gun control crowd make the assumption that such government lists of people are legitimate. Why don’t Joe Mathieu and his award-winning WBZ news team and other media outlets ever cover the issue of names falsely placed on those lists, which thus denies people their right to due process?

Besides those who are uninvolved and haven’t been accused but nevertheless had their names wrongly placed on a list, those who are actually accused of something also have a right to not have their names on a no-fly list or a no-buy-guns list, when they haven’t been charged with anything let alone convicted, as Glenn Greenwald pointed out. Perhaps Joe Mathieu and his WBZ news team or other media outlets could interview Glenn Greenwald on the importance of due process?

As Judge Andrew Napolitano observed, “… if the government wants to silence your speech or deny you the right to self-defense, it must meet a very high burden in a public courtroom. It must demonstrate to a judge and jury that its need to silence or disarm you is compelling, and its goals may not be attained by any lesser means. Americans need not demonstrate a compelling need to speak or bear arms; the government must demonstrate a compelling need to prevent us from doing so.” Judge Napolitano could also be someone of interest to WBZ News on these matters.

Besides the issues of rights to self-defense and due process, there are the matters of practicality when it comes to gun restrictions imposed by the government. For example, in covering all the “who, what, why, when, where, and how,” do the news professionals ever bring up cities such as Chicago which has the strictest gun laws in the country yet the highest rates of gun-related murders? Do these mainstream media news people ever interview gun control researchers such as the aforementioned John Lott, author of More Guns, Less Crime?

Dr. Lott wrote in the Wall Street Journal in 1998, “Americans use guns defensively about 2.5 million times a year, and 98% of the time merely brandishing the weapon is sufficient to stop an attack.”

Do the mainstream newscasters ever quote someone who asks, What if someone at that Orlando nightclub had been armed? Has WBZ News pointed out that many of the recent mass shootings have occurred at “gun-free zones,” areas in which people are disarmed by local or state governments?

UCLA Law Professor Eugene Volokh listed several instances in which a private citizen (not a police officer) used a firearm to stop a mass shooing.

What about the fact that criminals don’t obey the law, so if they want to go kill a lot of people they will get their guns illegally on the black market, or steal them? I haven’t heard that point made on the award-winning WBZ news radio.

By the way, I myself am not a gun person. The “right to keep and bear arms” also means that individuals have a right to not keep and bear arms if they don’t want to. But the right of the people to defend themselves is very important, in my view.

And regarding the Orlando shooter, if he couldn’t get guns, then he might very well have made a bomb just as the Boston Marathon bombers did, and still could have killed a lot of people. That might have been even worse, because a bomb can kill a whole lot of people in an instant.

Terrorist murderers or murderers-wannabe will find the means to do their killing without guns. And that’s another thing. If Islamic extremism is associated with recent mass shootings, what exactly is causing the Islamic extremism? Do the WBZ and other media news people ask those questions?

As I pointed out in this article, the main contributors to radical Islamic extremism are the bureaucrats of our own U.S. government. Do mainstream media news outlets ever inform their listeners that the FBI intentionally radicalizes young Muslim males at the mosques, and that the CIA funds and arms ISIS as well? Or that up to 90% of those killed by the CIA’s drone-murder program are innocent civilians? The U.S. government needs to end the interventionism, the warmongering, and the invading and occupying of foreign countries which provokes foreigners.

The mainstream news media outlets also do not seem to cover alternative, non-statist solutions given to local gun-related violence in the cities such as Chicago and Boston.

Why are the city youths getting involved in guns, violence, gangs, or drugs? First, they actually are bored and have nothing to do. So let them get a part-time job, especially now when school’s out. But the problem is there are very few jobs available for them. And that is mainly because of the minimum wage. The minimum wage makes it illegal for an employer to pay an entry-level, low-skilled worker below what the government tells the employer to pay. Many times the employers can’t afford to pay entry-level workers higher wages, so the employers end up cutting those jobs.

As Murray Rothbard wrote, the minimum wage is the government’s way of outlawing jobs.

If the minimum wage is, in short, raised from $3.35 to $4.55 an hour, the consequence is to disemploy, permanently, those who would have been hired at rates in between these two rates. Since the demand curve for any sort of labor (as for any factor of production) is set by the perceived marginal productivity of that labor, this means that the people who will be disemployed and devastated by this prohibition will be precisely the “marginal” (lowest wage) workers, e.g. blacks and teenagers, the very workers whom the advocates of the minimum wage are claiming to foster and protect.

WBZ might consider interviewing economists Walter Williams, Thomas Sowell, and Walter Block on those minimum wage issues.

Besides abolishing the minimum wage, the second solution to the problem of gun violence in the cities is ending the drug war. The war on drugs has caused a black market in street drugs, thus causing a rise in price which incentivizes those in need of money to get involved in that kind of illicit trade. The drug war creates pushers, traffickers, gangs and turf wars, and corrupt police and bureaucrats profiting from the drug war. End the drug war.

I never hear on WBZ or other news media outlets any inclusions of those alternative perspectives in their newscasts regarding the problems of gun violence. The news media outlets mainly relay the government’s propaganda toward reducing the people’s freedom and toward the further empowerment of government’s bureaucrats and police, and the news media act as stenographers for the Left’s agenda of civilian disarmament, economic disempowerment of those at the bottom of the economic scale, and for bureaucrats’ insatiable desire for control.

Democrats Just as Bad as the Republicans in Shredding Due Process

When progressive writer Glenn Greenwald condemns Democrats for their continuing to shred due process regarding gun rights, you know those Democrats must really be misbehaving. Dianne Feinstein and her cohorts use “terrorist” fear-mongering to deny innocent people due process.

More Court Approval of Police-Criminals

The 8-member U.S. Supreme Court ruled that even though government police officers violate the law when stopping motorists at random and without suspicion or for any traffic-violation related reason, such police who stop the citizen-victim can still arrest him for outstanding traffic warrants or if they find drugs in the car or on the citizen-victim’s person.

It was a 5-3 decision, in which “liberal” Stephen Breyer voted with the 4 authoritarians, now known as “conservatives.” (I wonder who’s blackmailing Justice Breyer now. His joining them just doesn’t make any sense, given his record. It seems to be the way all those J. Edgar Hoovers in Washington seem to be doing things now. Why else but blackmail would Chief Justice John Roberts twice incoherently rubber-stamp ObamaCare?)

The above is a Fox News story, and in the comments there are the usual simple-minded neanderthal reactions to the dissenting justices. “I have no worries,,, i have no warrants,,, and i respect the law,,, only liberal Trash dont like this ruling” and “Pay your tickets.” are some of the responses.

Sadly, thanks to 12 years of government schooling, police-worshiping authoritarians don’t understand why it is important that government agents follow rules as specified in the Constitution, why due process and “reasonable suspicion” are important. So with the Social Justice Warriors out there having a big influence on public policy, the speech police, and plenty of other examples of the Sovietizing of Amerika, the conservatives are next to be targeted by police pulling them over for no good reason (having a Trump bumper sticker, etc.) and they will regret supporting these pro-police state decisions. Pat Buchanan may be on to something in his concern about a declining white population. Will a future majority of police be people of color, and thus be pulling over white people for no good reason to harass and terrorize them, as it has been the other way around for years? And now that just about all your personal, private information is in government databases, everything will be fair game for all over-zealous police, such as if you are behind in child support, if you owe credit card companies, etc. It isn’t just a matter of “I pay my parking tickets, I have nothing to worry about,” so conservatives should think twice about supporting expanded police powers in violation of Constitutional rules, in Obama-Hillary’s Amerika.

What Will Delegates Do at the Republican Convention?

It appears that some influential Republicans are going to attempt to take the Republican Presidential nomination away from Donald Trump at the convention. Given that the Republican National Committee has hired an anti-Trump insider to head the convention rules committee, she may influence the committee to change the rule that requires delegates to have to vote for the candidate to whom they are bound on the first ballot. However, if they don’t do that, and if Trump doesn’t get enough delegate votes on the first ballot, then the delegates are not bound on subsequent ballots.

“But Trump has secured more than enough bound delegates from the states’ conventions, primaries and caucuses to win the nomination on the first ballot,” you say? However, while the Trump delegates are bound to vote for him on the first ballot and not for someone else, I don’t think they are forbidden from abstaining to vote on the first ballot. If they do that, they can ensure that he won’t get enough votes on the first ballot.

I hope the hacks take the nomination away from Trump, and replace him with someone more “electable.” And I am not saying that because I want a Republican to win, because they all suck. I am saying that because, if by chance Trump actually is the Republican nominee, he will not only lose all 50 states to Hollery, but there will be down-ballot domino effects, in which many other Republican candidates will lose in November. This is bad for the U.S. Congress, and for us, in which the Democrats would retake both the House and the Senate, giving the new President Hillary a rubber-stamp Congress. That’s waaaayyy not good. However, another Republican nominee such as Paul Ryan will also lose to Hitlery, but will probably not cause a down-ballot loss of other Republican candidates. That’s a little better.

If there must be a President Hillary Rotten Clinton, then at the very least we would need a continued Republican Congress to give her nothing but gridlock and frustration. Liberty lovers should hope for nothing to get done in Congress. (The actual desired situation for liberty lovers is to see the repeal of all laws which violate the rights and property of the individual, and to see laws, mandates and orders from the Congress to dismantle every agency, commission, bureau, or department whose existence is nothing but a criminal racket, which is to say just about all of that which exists in disgusting, stinky Washington.)

Say No to Profiling and No to Gun Control

Robert Wenzel has this excellent must-read post on how libertarians should respond to the recent Orlando nightclub shootings and to the government’s propaganda. The bottom line is that libertarians should continue to call for shrinking government in its size and power, not for its expansion.

One point that Wenzel makes is in response to calls for Muslim or Arab profiling to catch possible terrorists. He notes that the Sandy Hook school shooter and the Aurora Colorado theater shooter were not Muslims or Arabs.

And I was about to make that very point today, after hearing Donald Trump in the news referring to profiling, and this morning some conservative talk show hosts calling for profiling Muslims, or “infiltrating mosques,” etc. As I noted already, the FBI has already been infiltrating mosques and attempting to entrap helpless patsies to want to commit jihad, so that the FBI can thwart the plots that they themselves concoct.

But regarding the calls for singling out those of one ethnic or religious group and profiling them, such profiling could not have prevented several recent mass murders:

• Germanwings Airlines co-pilot Andreas Lubitz had depression and was apparently suicidal when he took down the plane and killed 144 people.
• Anders Breivik used a bomb and a gun and killed 77 people (and injured many more) in the 2011 Norway attacks. His attacks were apparently anti-Muslim inspired. (Should we profile anti-Muslim crackpots like Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer?)
• Adam Lanza shot and murdered 27 people, most of them little children, at the Sandy Hook School. (I wrote about him here.)
• The Aurora Colorado theater shooter James Holmes killed 12 and injured 70.
• Dylann Roof allegedly killed 9 people, apparently out of anti-Black racist motivations, in a South Carolina church.

Now, none of those killers (and alleged killer) had anything to do with being Muslims or Arabs, or sympathized with ISIS or al-Qaeda.

However, As I wrote here, most of those killers did have some things in common: psychiatric drugs, which are known to have serious side effects.

As I noted before, the South Carolina church shooter, Dylan Storm Roof, was on the benzodiazepine anti-anxiety drug Xanax and the pain killer Suboxone. (Another well-known benzodiazepine drug is Valium.) Suboxone is a dangerous drug known to cause violent outbursts.

Last year’s Santa Barbara college shooter, Elliot Rodger, was on Xanax and the pain killer Vicodin.

The Aurora Colorado theater shooter James Holmes was taking the SSRI antidepressant Zoloft and the anti-anxiety drug Clonazepam. (Other SSRI drugs include Prozac and Paxil.)

The Germanwings Airlines co-pilot Andreas Lubitz who took down his plane and mass-murdered 144 people had been on Lorazepam, an anti-anxiety drug, as well as an unnamed antidepressant.

And Columbine High School shooter Eric Harris had been on Luvox, an SSRI anti-depressant also used to treat obsessive-compulsive disorder and anxiety disorders.

While it was not officially confirmed that Sandy Hook School shooter Adam Lanza had been on psychiatric drugs, a parents rights organization sued the state of Connecticut to release Lanza’s medical records, but the request was denied “because ‘it would cause a lot of people to stop taking their medications’.” I guess that answers that question.

…

As I have written previously, for those who are taking any of those drugs and want to get off them, to prevent a possible dangerous reaction to withdrawal, see Dr. Breggin’s book on psychiatric drug withdrawal, Psychiatric Drug Withdrawal: A Guide for Prescribers, Therapists, Patients and Their Families.

And by the way, it appears that the Orlando shooter may have been on steroids, which are also known to have serious side effects, including aggressive and violent behavior.

Will anyone in the mainstream media try to find out if the Orlando nightclub shooter Omar Mateen was taking any of those damn psychiatric drugs?

Nope. And that is because mainstream media outlets have big pharmaceutical companies as their sponsors. Former CBS News reporter Sharyl Attkisson found that out the hard way.

But the most important issue in these shootings is that they have mostly been occurring at gun-free zones. The state of Florida mandates that establishments such as the Orlando nightclub must be gun-free zones, so that many innocent people can be shot by one deranged psychopath and no one is able to shoot him to stop him from shooting. The people on the Left are either very naive or just plain dishonest, because they must know that if someone like those above want to shoot and murder innocents they will get their guns illegally if they have to, on the black market or they will steal them. You will not prevent criminals from having the means to commit their heinous acts. Look at Chicago, with its strictest gun control laws in the country but with a very high murder rate. The gun-grabbers have to end their aiding and abetting criminals and murderers.

More Libertarian Commentary

Laurence Vance on who the real heroes are.

Jacob Hornberger says that “open borders” is the only moral and practical solution to the immigration problem. (I would add the importance of private property borders, the right to be armed, and getting rid of the drug war and the welfare state.)

Jeff Deist comments on the Libertarian Party convention.

Robert Wenzel says that libertarianism isn’t about being “fiscally conservative and socially liberal”  and has this commentary on “libertarian” Gary Johnson wanting to replace the income tax with a more aggressive tax.

Police State News, U.S. Government Treason, the Communists, Speech Fascists, and the Globalists

From the Intercept: The U.S. Senate stuffs in its annual intelligence authorization bill a secret provision to give FBI authority and power to get Internet users’ email and other Internet usage information from the service providers without a warrant, i.e. illegally and unconstitutionally.

Also from the Intercept, the FBI wants to exempt from the Privacy Act a massive unconstitutional biometric database.

Ryan McMaken says that the FBI and NSA won’t keep us safe.

John Whitehead says that violence begets violence in the war on terror.

Brandon Smith analyzes groups such as the SPLC who dishonestly connect Liberty Movement libertarians and conservatives with actual “extremists” such as the KKK, etc.

Radley Balko discusses a federal appeals court ruling on the use of police S.W.A.T. raids for regulatory inspections.

Pater Tenebrarum says that free speech is under attack.

Thomas DiLorenzo comments on Bernie Sanders’s sick commie utopia.

Ludwig von Mises on the success of socialist newspeak.

Richard Ebeling says that real Americanism means liberty, not government paternalism.

And Andrew Cockburn on the Pentagon’s real strategy of keeping the money flowing.

The Latest on Transgender Madness

For Father’s Day, the idiots of the Boston Globe have a story by a father who is transgender (now “female”) reunited with his adult son after estrangement, and with that the son’s own story.

Meanwhile, WND has an article regarding the common thread connecting many of those with gender confusion, and that is that they have deep, unresolved psychological issues in general. Many of them regret gender reassignment surgery, and it would be better that they instead try to resolve their psychological issues and accept themselves for whatever sex they were born with.

And also according to WND, the people of Sioux Falls, South Dakota have come to their senses on the transgender bathrooms issue.

And finally, Laurence Vance discusses the absurdity of “gender identity.”

The Latest Government Intrusions in Economics and Finance

Robert Wenzel discusses Donald Trump’s idiotic energy policy.

Jörg Guido Hülsmann describes how fiat money destroys culture.

William Anderson on how campaigns spawn really bad economics.

And Douglas French on insider trading or what free market capitalism is all about

The Latest from Big Medicine

Bill Sardi has an article stating that “we can’t afford to cure cancer.”

Someone has said there are just too many jobs in the pursuit of a cancer cure to allow any therapy to be proven and put into practice.  Recognize the nation is dotted with cancer research centers that hold billions of dollars of debt.  For example, the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, Washington holds $176 million of debt.  [Moody’s Investor Service] Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, the nation’s cancer research center, holds $1.9 billion of debt.  [Moody’s Investor Service]  A cancer cure would leave research centers like these on the hook for loans that could not possibly be paid back. 

Better for cancer research centers to live off the $4.95 billion of research grants that get divvied out by the National Institutes of Health each year than to find a cure. 

In light of this revelation, the public may be better served by private enterprise that is not reliant on public funding to find a cure for cancer. (More…)

The Telegraph with an article on the uselessness of statin drugs.