Incompressible

Hans-Hermann Hoppe has  pointed out  the conflict of interest of granting a territorial monopoly on ultimate decision-making in many places in his writings. In the article above, he says, "... a monopolist with ultimate decison-making powers is particularly bad. While other monopolists produce inferior goods, a monopolist judge, besides producing inferior goods, will produce bads, because he who is the ultimate judge in every case of conflict also has the last word in each conflict involving himself. Consequently, instead of preventing and resolving conflict, a monopolist of ultimate decision-making will cause and provoke conflict in order to settle it to his own advantage. ... The result of a state, then, is not peaceful cooperation and social order, but conflict, provocation, aggression, oppression, and impoverishment, i.e., de-civilization. This, above all, is what the history of states illustrates. It is first and foremost the history of countless millions of innocent state vi...

Global warming is an exaggerated problem  says one of the principal contributing scientists to the IPCC report. Which is not surprising, really. I posted the views of one of Germany's leading climate scientists  as reported by Der Spiegel  way back in 2005. Global warming may very well be a problem, it may be human caused and it may even be a serious problem. But this is where it is crucial to apply critical thinking skills to the issue - even if these things are true, we must examine the likely motives and intent of the chief proponents of solving the problem of global warming, namely, governments, politicians and scientists in the employ of governments.  Particularly troubling to me is the frequent use of the phrase "scientific consensus" as if science is a democracy. Science benefits the most from the lone contrarian who happens to be  right  and can prove it. We should be very wary of language that stifles out-of-favor scientific opinions (so long as they are, really,...

From Wikipedia, "Freedom of association is the individual right to come together with other individuals and collectively express, promote, pursue and defend common interests. The right to freedom of association has been included in a number of national constitutions and human rights instruments, including the US constitution and the European Convention on Human Rights. Freedom of association in the sense of workers' right to organize and collectively bargain is also recognised in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and International Labor Organization Conventions. The right to freedom of association is sometimes used interchangeably with the freedom of assembly. More specifically the freedom of assembly is understood in a political context, although depending on the source (constitution, human rights instrument etc) the right to freedom of association may be understood to include the right to freedom of assembly." The right of free association is a fundamental human...

Turns out that private-public partnerships = private sector raiding public treasury. While the coziness between the Federal Reserve and the banking sector doesn't quite rise to the level of an all-out partnership, it's pretty close. Few married people are as close to their spouse as Goldman Sachs is to the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department. Of course,  conflicts of interest abound  and you and I are the ones footing the bill. But you're right, we all have a patriotic duty to pay our taxes. God bless Goldman Sachs, errr I mean America, Support our Troops and purple mountain majesty or something like that. Wall Street didn't just heist America to the tune of a few trillion, this is all just to protect the "necessary financial infrastructure" of the American public. It's the little people who would get hurt if these big fish weren't able to line their pockets. America is nothing like the mugging victim who gets hurt if he doesn't line the mu...

There is a sudden nexus of  negative energy  in the media regarding Craigslist. Maybe people all over the country suddenly got into their heads all at the same time to start committing more crimes on Craigslist. Given that this would be an astonishingly improbable coincidence, I wonder if this was on this year's Bilderberg agenda. It's a more likely explanation, anyway.

Classical liberalism  is, I think, little understood by the average American (or the average person from any country, for that matter). Misconceptions about what liberalism is abound. In American parlance, liberalism has become synonymous with democratic socialism. "Libertarianism" is roughly synonymous with classical liberalism in American parlance. American conservatives denounce liberalism because they reject democratic socialism. Many American liberals denounce libertarianism seeing it as nothing more than an adjunct wing of the Republican party, a front for Wall Street-style crony capitalism. This  is perhaps the most succinct summary of the ideas of classical liberalism I have encountered. It is the epilogue to a work of fiction titled  Jonathan Gullible . I cannot speak for all libertarians, nor will I engage in an argument over who are the true heirs of classical liberalism. But I find the moral arguments of classical liberalism put forward in this document to be insu...

Author Christine Smith has written a  superb article  discussing the displacement of God and family for which the government is responsible. The Christian community has long been saying that the government seeks to displace Christ as the role of savior, but the government does so much more than just this and the cultural displacement of the modern omnimax government has had profoundly negative effects. It is not an exaggeration to say that the government has had a central role in the breakdown of marriages, families, parent-child relationships, and the once-common expressions of personal faith and religious beliefs. I believe it's time we revive the ancient principle of liberty - not just for myself or my special interests - but for all people. It's time for a return to a principled commitment to the freedom of individuals to speak, think  and act  as they please so long as they respect the life, liberty and property of their fellow man. There is no salvation through political ...

It's 2009 and government  still targets civilians . It's been 64 years since the end of the Great Wars of the 20th century in which untold millions of humans died violently at the hands of men armed by their government with pistols, machine guns and atomic bombs. Thank God for government!

They could quote Antoinette with conviction:  Let them eat cake . Of course, there aren't any  more important matters  to attend to.

The UAE government brutally  tortured  a man who failed to deliver a load of grain valued at $5,000. The R-rated snippets of the XXX torture tape that are shown are stomach turning. This, friends, is torture. Waterboarding is also torture, just like the things shown in this tape are torture. That is not abstract, that is concrete. This man was brutalized, humiliated, and forced to undergo psychological and physiological destruction and terror (torture). Victims of waterboarding are forced to undergo psychological and physiological destruction and terror (torture). I don't understand what is abstract about that. Note that, while he has mercifully, graciously and most beneficiously repealed the US government's power to torture with its own hands, his Worshipfulness Don Obama has  not  prohibited the practice of rendition which could allow the US government to outsource torture. Rendition is a far more fearsome weapon since the worst the US government could inflict with its own ha...

So, there are one of two possibilities with today's  buzzing  of Manhattan by Air Force One - incompetence or psy ops. Now, if you support Obama, then you are not going to be inclined to believe that he and his administration (and the executive branch, by extension) are incompetent. It seems to me, therefore, that the only logical conclusion that Obama supporters can come to is that today's flyover was a psychological operation designed to rekindle the flagging memory of the 9/11 events. Whether the result of intentional malice or of negligent incompetence (we will likely never know which), this was a big, big mistake. Some heads need to roll.

Please report any  suspicious behavior . Edited to add: Just in case you thought this was too over the top to be real - it is not a parody. This was broadcast in Kansas City, MO, same place that gave us the MIAC report on Ron Paul terrorists. Is Missouri being used as a testing grounds for propaganda trial balloons? This ad is really, really creepy.

Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh revealed last month that he is working on a book that will reveal information about an  executive assassination wing  that operated under Dick Cheney. Now, this is relatively old news, but it's very important news and I'm bringing it up now because I think it is important to keep this story alive in the popular consciousness. The current push for investigations of waterboarding and other illegal interrogation practices used by the Bush administration - which have been long known to have occurred - could be an intentional distraction from the far more important story of the assassinations that occurred under the Bush administration (and could be continuing to occur under the Obama administration). There has been an ongoing consolidation of power in the executive branch - which today is unmatched since the end of World War II. Remember that Rome was a republic before Julius Caesar - a military general - was declared imperator (emperor). We t...

Actually, it should have gone to the dogs, but didn't. I'm talking about  Leona Helmsley's estate , of course. The contract clause of the Constitution says, "No State shall ... pass any ... Law impairing the Obligation of Contracts..." This means that private contracts cannot be changed by legislative edict. This clause is incredibly important because the willingness of private individuals to engage in profitable enterprise - which is the foundation of social welfare - crucially depends on their belief that they can realize a profit. In turn, their belief that they can realize a profit depends on their belief that they can hold parties to a contract liable to the terms in the contract. For example, lenders must have confidence that they can repossess the collateral for a loan if the loan is defaulted on. Otherwise, they will not take the risk of giving the loan in the first place. When lenders are too scared to lend, everyone is worse off. In the case of Leona Hel...

I noticed a thread on an internet debate forum titled "The use of torture to save lives". While we're at this game of torturing people and their children - only for the grandiose and laudable motive of "saving lives"  of course  - let's broaden our horizons. Saddam Hussein is reputed to have kept a paid rapist on his staff who specialized in sodomizing and sexually torturing Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib. So, my question for all the chest-pounding, gung-ho "conservatives" who advocate the use of torturing children to save lives, what about sodomy?  Let's say that the man with the intelligence of where the bomb is will not crack, even if his firstborn child is being tortured to death before his eyes  but he cannot abide being sodomized and his honor and manhood will cause him to break down and tell everything to make the sodomization stop. Would God be more abhorred by allowing thousands of innocents to die, or one man sodomizing another for the...

This CNN article  says exactly what I predicted the authorities (and media) would begin saying... we need global governance, greater cooperation between existing governments, this is all caused by the anarchy and "lack of government" in Somalia, and so on and so forth. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!

Wow,  this  is impressive! I guess the Somali pirates are so hated by the US government because they are competition in kind.

Either you're part of it, or you're the enemy. Somalia has been without a government since the mid-1990s. Rather than remaining embroiled in eternal, pervasive conflict as the Hobbesians predict, Somalia has steadily clawed its way out of abject destitution. Water, cell phones, internet cafes and other public infrastructure are produced in a political environment that is as close an approximation to a free market as exists anywhere on Earth. The CIA has been funding resistance within Somalia to disrupt the independent evolution of Somali law and security outside the umbrella of the UN. This is how the one-world crime syndicate* works. If there is any place where people can go to be free of the syndicate, free of the theft of taxation and the indignity of capricious and illegitimate regulation by the crime lords, they must stamp out it. Suddenly,  two-bit Somali pirates  are a  threat  to every living being on the planet. Now, we need the US and Indian navies and the United Nati...

These are the  jack-booted thugs of the rising police-state  that the authorities want us to entrust our safety to. These people are the reason we're supposed to disarm and make ourselves vulnerable to the all-caring, all-loving state. If it weren't for the camera catching this on tape, the thin blue line would have stuck together and allowed a murder to go unreported, despite the fact that  they  are the ones who are supposed to be preventing and investigating murder to begin with. What a joke.

The War on Drugs has languished on at one level or another for more than half a century.  This film  from 1938 showcases the often downright silly demonization of marijuana by government propaganda. Critics of the War on Drugs, such as  Milton Friedman , have long argued that the DEA is the drug lord's and pharmaceutical company's best friend. By keeping pain-relief drugs scarce, prices are driven up and profit margins remain swollen. Today in Oregon,  deaths due to overdoses of legal drugs  have surpassed deaths due to overdoses of illegal drugs. There are two possible explanations for this. Either deaths due to illegal drug OD have gone down so much that they are below the long-term OD rate of legal drugs or the OD rate of legal drugs has increased. Deaths due to illegal drug OD have not drastically declined. Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, Glaxo-Smith Kline - these are the names of the biggest kingpins supplying the drug addicts of this country. It won't be much longer be...