Incompressible

The Australian government is at it again , trying to clean up the wild, wild West of the Internet. They want to implement a "mandatory ban" on 1,000 URLs (the web address in our browser). The proposed 1,000 URLs are, of course, so objectionable that no decent human being could possibly justify wanting to visit them. But that's beside the point. The question is whether individuals or the government should filter the internet - I have never visited nor ever will visit any of those 1,000 URLs. I doubt anyone else on this debate forum has or will. Within Australia, there are probably only a very small number of people who visit sites of that nature. So what's the point of banning them? This is a wedge issue, an attempt to get a "foot in the door" on controlling the broader internet. The problem is that ISP filtering - what the AU "internet filter" attempts to implement - is not even close to enough. Any website on the blacklist can mirror itself (make ...

I've searched high and low for numerological interpretations of 9/11/2001 but none are very satisfying. So, I've invented my own. Here it is: Let's start with the number of the beast: 666. Many theologians interpret 666 as, in fact, a truncated representation of the fraction 2/3, representing the fraction of humanity that Satan will succeed in deceiving and bring with himself to eternal Hell. But 666 not only represents this fraction of lost souls, but it is the symbol of the Beast himself. In this sense, I interpret the three 6's as each representing one third of humanity and the grouping of all three 6's together as the false theology of universalism, that is, that all men will go to heaven. This is widely believed, even between different religions, to be the central dogma of any world religion operating under the umbrella of a Satanic world government. The 6's are all the same because all men are to go to heaven, all men are good ... all men go to heaven. But...

This is a great video discussing the NIST report on WTC7. Looks like NIST has made new fundamental discoveries regarding the laws of physics... time to send Einstein et. al. back to the drawing board!!

I live a few blocks from two movie stores, Blockbuster and Hollywood Video. A month ago, the Blockbuster store began a Going Out of Business sale. That leaves the Hollywood Video store as the only movie store for several miles in every direction. I was surprised to find out, last night, when I stopped at Hollywood to pick up a movie at 10:55pm that the store was closing in five minutes. I was shocked... how can a movie store close at 11pm on a Friday night ?? I asked the clerk when they started closing at 11pm. It's been since a few weeks ago. She claimed that it's because business is too slow after 11pm. But when she let me out of the store, locking the door behind me, two cars pulled up, and the customers walked up to the door, shocked to find it locked. After puzzling on this for a few minutes, it struck me that the new Hollywood hours were instituted right about the same time Blockbuster put up the Going Out of Business sale signs. Why should Hollywood stay open past 11pm f...

2003: George Bush invades Iraq over massive popular dissent. 2008: George Bush bails out banks over massive popular dissent. 2009: Barack Obama bails out banks a second time, over massive popular dissent. 2009: Barack Obama increases troop deployment to Afghanistan over massive popular dissent It's 4-0, people. The elites get what they want every time and you get stuck with the bill. Keep believing in the Red, White and Blue propaganda they're shoving down your throat on both sides of the political spectrum. There is no left versus right anymore. It's just them versus us. We don't even have majority rule, anymore. That's when you know the whole political machine has become detached from reality and serious problems lie directly ahead. The US Federal government is on a crash course with the US citizenry.

Looks good , I'll be looking forward to its release. Folks, the problem with American schools is simple: 1) State subsidy of K-12 education creates a de facto monopoly of mid- to low-end education 2) All monopolies provide low and ever lower quality services at high and ever-higher prices. Parents: "Our schools are failing!" Schools: "We demand more money!" That's it, folks. Your children's education is doomed so long as the state subsidy exists - unless you're rich and you can afford to send your kids to an elite private school. There is no surer way to destroy something than to subject it to state subsidy. The solution is equally simple. End the state subsidy and open the market for education to free and open competition. The lush quality and variety that characterizes your local grocery store - the retail market being the closest thing we have to a free market in the US anymore - will once again characterize the education market. Rather than being...

According to Alex Jones' website prisonplanet.tv and this online video , Google has clandestine ties with US intelligence agencies. It's difficult to imagine, in fact, a company the size of Google not having relations with the intelligence agencies. While I have no evidence to support my worries, it seems to me that Google is the closest that you could come to a mechanism for controlling the Internet. Let me explain: - Every conceivable piece of information is available on the Internet, at least, information which is not highly commercially valuable - Much of this information is of the sort that governments would prefer to have censored, consider the "Great Firewall of China", for example - Information on the Internet only becomes visible if it turns up in search results. That is, if a webpage containing information damning to the government is buried on page 11,000,000 of your search results or is not present at all, you'll never see it. - Google is offering a...

Video and article here . Of course, no charges or even disciplinary measures will be taken against the assaulting officer. It's always the big, fat bully slobs that do this stuff.

Here is an example of disproportionate use of force by a police officer. He told her to stop running and warned her that he would use a taser. Well, that makes it perfectly all right. As bad as this is, the news story under discussion in the other thread is the tasering of a ten year old girl . Several posters have tried to make the case that even a 10-year-old can be a "threat." Well, kids younger than 10 have killed people, so I guess there should be no lower limit. Taser that 2-year-old, he might quick-draw a gun from his ankle-holster! The average weight of a 10-year-old girl is 70.4 lbs. The average weight of an adult male is 189 lbs. That's roughly three times the weight of the child. The difference between a heavy-weight boxer and a light-heavyweight boxer is just 25lbs (12.5% mass difference). In terms of a boxing match, this would be like a 150 lb. man boxing a 450 lb. man, all-muscle. The absurdity of describing the officer's actions as being defensive or ...

Listen to the Rothmeister (right-click and download, takes about 10 minutes to download) explain the real power structure underlying American politics for the last century or so.

POSTED: NO TRESPASSING When you hear the phrase "private property", you might think of those obnoxious red-and-black signs intended to evoke the image of a grumpy old hermit in a ramshackle house with a shotgun and two Dobermans ready to shoot on sight anyone who dares cross his property. In the Austrian tradition of economics, this is not what is meant by the phrase "private property". Property is an exclusive right to use a physical resource. Some people (including some Austrian economists) hold that classes of physical objects (such as images, texts, motion pictures, inventions, blueprints, and so on) can be property but I think this is a categorical mistake and results from a fundamental failure to really grasp what property is. Ask yourself, why is there property? Our nearest living evolutionary relatives have little or no concept of property. Somewhere between the time we parted ways on the evolutionary tree and today, humans began to engage in behavior that ...

Peter Schiff discusses Obama's upcoming summit to find the root cause of job losses and come up with a "solution." Quote: In the private sector, all individuals have a choice to either work for themselves or someone else. Since labor is far more productive when combined with capital (office equipment, machinery, business models, and intellectual capital), those who lack these assets themselves often choose to work for others who have sacrificed to accumulate them. This increased productivity is shared between the worker and the owner of capital, and both are better off. However, for one person or company to choose to offer a job to another, there must be an incentive to do so, and they must have the necessary capital. In the first place, employers must commit to paying wages and benefits, comply with government mandates and regulations, and subject themselves to potential lawsuits from disgruntled employees. All of these costs must be measured against the extra profits an...

Whenever they execute them quickly, you know there's something fishy. Gore Vidal believes, and persuasively argues, that the government's "Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, acting alone and out of revenge for Waco, bombed the OK City building" story is either false or, at least, substantially different from what really happened. There's an Atlantic article that I read some time back which went over the whole thing in detail and pointed out quite a few subtle inconsistencies in the state's arguments and rather glaring loose ends in the FBI's investigation which were never pursued. McVeigh was rapidly executed (6 years from date of charges!). Muhammad's case smells fishy in the same way to me. I remember when Ashcroft reassigned his case to Virginia. At that time, I was nearly neocon in my politics and I cheered the decision's obvious purpose to get him executed ASAP. But reflecting back, I see a lot of weirdness about the case against Muhammed. Fir...

I've posted on gun control in the past. Here are reproductions of those posts for your consideration. I propose that most people reason about gun control in the following manner: - Guns enable the more efficient production of violence, much like textile machines enable the more efficient production of clothing - Since violence is undesirable, we should want its production to be as inefficient as possible. This is in contrast to the production of desirable things, like clothing, which we want to be as efficient as possible. - Obviously, it's impossible for guns, once invented, to be wished out of existence entirely since someone will always produce them, and the fewer there are, the greater the incentive to do so. - Therefore, we should desire the fewest number of owners of guns possible since this will make the production of violence less efficient for all but the few persons/organizations which do own guns. And, we can then turn our attention more fully to the oversight of the...

So, it turns out that the US flag is actually an adaptation of the flag of the East India Company , a private corporation granted monopoly license under the British Crown. Originally, rebels were turning the flag on its side and affixing some stars as an emblem of the rebellion. George Washington later introduced a version of the flag that put it back in its correct orientation, with the cross of St. George redacted. Have you ever asked yourself why Washington, D.C. is not part of the 50 states? The answer is simple: It is actually the property of a corporation granted monopoly privileges by the British Crown... the US Federal Government is actually a sister corporation of the British East India Company! We have been a British colony all along and only a small number of people on the inner circle of Washington (and London) have known about this... the first to know would have been our first President, Mr. Freemason himself, George Washington. When King George could not hold onto the co...

Only in California . I posted this story because it beautifully illustrates the dynamics of how political power, special interests and pet peeves (pun intended) interact to create the ramshackle hodge-podge of statutory laws, layers of (often contradictory) regulations and bureacracies we call "government". Here's the long and short of the story. A local city councilman is horrified when he learns what declawing actually is (amputation from the last knuckle down), only learning after having had his cat declawed. So, he decides - "lefty" that he is - that he should do his best to ban declawing in the city. This idea begins spreading around to other cities and veterinarians grow concerned. So, to head off the locals, the state veterinary association petitions the state government to pass a law banning bans of declawing! And now, local governments are scrambling to implement their bans before the ban of bans (try not to get confused) is passed. The one person who...

"What is the US government doing in Iraq and Afghanistan that is driving men like Hasan and, earlier, Akbar to kill their fellow soldiers out of rage against the US government and its military?" The official line, "they went nuts" just isn't reasonable. Neither is the Israeli-esque suggestion that they were brainwashed by clerics. Maybe you can believe that, in one case, someone just went nuts and started shooting people up for no reason. But this is now a pattern. This has happened on more than one occasion. A (presumably) Muslim member of the US Armed Forces starts shooting/blowing up fellow soldiers in what can only be interpreted as an act of one-man-war* against the US military in retaliation for its actions in Iraq and Afghanistan. What are these men seeing that our media is not showing us? Please don't get me wrong, I'm not expressing anything other than moral outrage and condemnation of this man's actions. Murder is murder. But events so terr...

Found this little gem linked on lewrockwell.com. The author of the article describes in breathless language, "a bedroom door bangs open and two men in black bulletproof vests storm shouting into the kitchen. 'Broward Sheriff's Office!'" as swat-clad officers take down a major menace to society... (dun, dun, DUNNNN): the unlicensed contractor . Here's the reason that deploying paramilitary cops against people who perform construction work without a license from government is justified: ""We try to stick to people doing work that could cause safety issues. If you improperly install exterior doors, they could blow in during a hurricane," said Det. Daniel Belyeu, of BSO's economic crimes unit." That is very serious. Why are we relying on the local sheriff to take care of this problem? We should really bring in the national guard, or even better, the 20,000 US soldiers permanently deployed within the US, or even better yet, we should call i...

Carl Sagan, on the event of the Voyager probe's distant image of Earth, called the "Pale Blue Dot", said the following (excerpt): "Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those ge...

In another thread about a video discussing the International Planned Parenthood Foundation (IPPF), the issue of rights has come under discussion. Taken separately, most of the statements excerpted from the IPPF's declaration on sexual rights are relatively innocuous and I don't understand the outrage directed towards them. However, the general unease of evangelical conservatives towards the IPPF's agenda is not completely unfounded because the IPPF (and, locally, Planned Parenthood) really is not a human rights organization. Founded by big-mouthed eugenicist Margaret Sanger, Planned Parenthood's agenda was originally to reduce the birth rate of undesirable populations (Google "Negro Project") by making birth control readily available (preferably free) and educating (indoctrinating) on its use. Eugenics is one of the most egregious failure of social engineering. Social engineering is the attempt to use government to bring about a certain outcome within the soc...

In this article , Bob Higgs indicts the moral deficiency of democracy - it is no different than the moral deficiency of any form of government. The root problem is a double-standard where one set of moral rules governs one class of people and another set of moral rules governs everybody else. As I explained recently in another post, the root problem lies in a grave misunderstanding of law. Law is a system for non-violent resolution of real disputes. Real disputes (not just academic disputes) can only occur where there is scarcity (Hoppe). You and I cannot have a real dispute over air or salt-water (or religious ideas or logical beliefs) because there is a super-abundance of each of these, in nature. Real disputes concern who has the exclusive right to control (use, dispose of) a particular scarce resource. There are two possible ways to resolve a dispute. First, is by martial contest: the winner takes the spoils. This is how scarce resource disputes are decided in the rest of the anima...

Oh boy, I'm sure glad the cops are keeping us all safe from this predator . With the American economy crashing down around our knees, a collapse unwittingly engineered by the "genuises" on Wall St. (while the Marie Antoinettes in Washington extend the Bush spending frenzy into the Obama era like there's no tomorrow, crying "let them eat cake!"), with a prison population of 1% of the entire US population, with growing social ills and tensions, with cops that are deploying paramilitary weapons and tactics against civilian protesters (Pittsburgh G20)... Susan Finkelstein's desperation to get to the World Series and how she intended to go about getting there is what is wrong with the world. Let's not lose sight of what's really important, what's really wrong with the world and that is Susan Finkelstein. May she rot in prison and never be let out!

Walter Williams, in this article , pillories the power grabbing American government and critiques the debates surrounding bailouts (and, I would add, war) as never going above the political tactical question of whether Congress and the President can maneuver toward the desired objective without losing too much popularity. Politics in America has gone from distrust of government's ability to respect the rights of individuals to a moral nihilism whereby the only check on government power is the potential for popular revolt or civil war. Government is a dangerous servant and a terrible master. Liberals should be careful what they wish for in government interventions into the economy. Conservatives should be careful what they wish for in government interventions into foreign affairs. Both prongs of government action empower the permanent bureaucracy and increase the control government has not only over our mercantile but our hedonic activities. Even though he didn't practice what h...

As always, the failure is government . This should never be surprising yet people never fail to be amazed when the government fails and, incredulous that government failures can be indicative of a deeper problem with government qua government, turn to blame everything in the world except government. Despite the conspiracy theories on this forum, the reality is that the demand for flu vaccines is real and, in particular, the demand for H1N1 vaccines is real. I see lines of co-workers in the cafeteria getting the jab. I forgo the flu vaccines each year and suffer for it. This is because I believe it's good for my immune system to get a full-body workout once in a while but those flu shots are looking better and better each year. Now that my kids are entering school this year, I'm really re-thinking the flu shot. To ascribe to the government an over-arching conspiracy to engineer and release H1N1 and then brainwash us through the media to go get the shots is to give them far too ...

This article exemplifies many of the processes by which bad laws are rationalized: Quote: MADISON, Wis. — All Wisconsin drivers, not just teenagers, would be banned from sending text messages while driving under a bill that passed the state Senate on Tuesday. Lawmakers approved a bill 27-5 that would prohibit drivers from using a text message device such as a cell phone, I-Phone, or Blackberry. The penalties would be between $20 and $400, the same as disorderly driving. The ban passed after lawmakers balked at the initial proposal affecting only drivers under age 18. Some senators said if texting were dangerous for young drivers, it was dangerous for all motorists. Because there is no correlation between inexperience and probability of collision. Here, there is a false appeal to equality, that is, by reasoning that unequal things (more experience and less experienced drivers) are equal. Driving at freeway speeds may not be safe for many 17 year olds but is safe for most 37 year olds w...