Foreign aid will still be paid. By the way, in case you forgot, Republicans love foreign aid.

Writes a high-school junior:

I am loving it here in Russia! Moscow is much different (better) than I thought it would be. Russia is such an up and coming place and Moscow is right at the heart of the booming economy, so there is such an air of prosperity and youth. There is also such a range in buildings here. New skyscrapers are being built next to a communist apartment building on the left and a 1700s mansion on the right. It’s absolutely amazing. One thing that shocked me is how free they are in so many situations. The Russians can just go ahead and do something that’s illegal in America… It was quite the shock to realize how many laws and rules regulate our lives in America.

Today and every day, there is news that amazes me. It doesn’t amaze me compared with what I expect of today’s crazy America or of the American Empire. It amazes me compared with what I used to expect some years back, when America was sane and a bit less expansive and militaristic than now. My mind is in the present but it’s also in the past America that I remember, grew up in and lived in. I won’t link to each item. They are all here. And I won’t give details.

Item #1. A woman gets shot and killed by police near the White House. She’s unarmed and there’s a baby in the car. The police had her stopped at one point. The whole area is barricaded. The behavior of the police is crazy. The barricades are crazy. You used to walk up to the gate and look across the lawn to the White House, or drive through the area unimpeded.

Item #2. In New York, there is a tragic incident involving a driver and bikers. It turns out that two [now upped to three] of the bikers are undercover police. Crazy.

Item #3. Near Damascus, the CIA is openly running a training program for Syrian rebels. This amazes me because there is no detectable outcry, and no war has been declared by Congress or even emperor obama. In fact, he may even have said he’s staying out of the war. The whole thing is amazing.

Item #4. U.S. Delta Force made a raid in Libya. This brought back my amazement at the whole Libya War in which the U.N. provided cover for the U.S. to lead foreign military intervention into Libya. After Bush’s blunder in attacking Iraq, one would have thought that obama might have thought twice about attacking Libya, with all the potential ramifications for other African countries. This decision amazed me. obama’s foreign policy constantly amazes me by its utter stupidity.

Item #5. U.S. SEALs made a raid in Somalia. This served to remind me of the U.S. involvement in a slew of African countries. This is all amazing and crazy. The U.S. government cannot even govern this country and yet it’s busy all over the world attempting impossible missions.

Item #6. Two young men in Georgia are arrested because they had forbidden equipment in their automobiles at school. One had a pocket knife, and another had fishing gear and knives. In Georgia, they face expulsion from school, 2-10 years in prison, and a big fine. Totally crazy. All such matters under the rubric of political correctness are crazy and amaze me.

As I said, none of this is surprising in the present as this is what states, empires and police states do. They flout their own laws. They pass inane laws. They over-regulate. They act according to the whims and limited intelligence of those in power. They cater to special interests and lobbies.

It surprises that part of me that’s still living in the past when I was blithely unaware of the state’s craziness and hanky-panky of those earlier times. My little world was largely insulated from such matters, until it came time for me to be drafted. The awakening began right then and there.

The Republican-controlled House has passed the “Federal Employee Retroactive Pay Fairness Act” to provide “for compensation of federal employees furloughed due to any lapse in appropriations that begins on or about October 1, 2013, for the period of such lapse in appropriations.” The vote was 417-0. This means that every Republican in the House that voted (13 Republicans did not vote), voted for the bill. Forget all their talk about fiscal conservatism, reining in government spending, eliminating unnecessary government programs and agencies, limited government, etc., etc., etc. The Republican Party is pure evil (just like the Democratic Party). It cannot be reformed. It cannot be taken over. It cannot be made libertarian. It cannot be restored. It should be abandoned. There is no difference between the parties when it comes to our life, liberty, and property.

No, I have absolutely no sympathy whatsoever for overpaid, underworked, and unecessary federal workers, 95 percent of whom help carry out unconstitutional activities of the federal government.

Might not be a good idea. It turns out that “British wartime girls married dashing U.S. soldiers to start new life in America… only to find their men were drunks, womanisers and thieves.”

Brian Dunaway wonders how Francis Fukuyama can still show his face in public after his 1989 essay “The End of History“. He wonders why that essay wasn’t the end of Fukuyama.

It was in that essay that Fukuyama referred to “an unabashed victory of economic and political liberalism”. LOL. He didn’t even understand that liberalism had been on a course of decline for 200 years, as Arthur E. Ekirch, Jr. had documented in his 1955 book “The Decline of American Liberalism”. America has neither economic nor political liberalism.

One might wonder the opposite, why genuine intellectual geniuses and scholars like Murray Rothbard and Ludwig von Mises have been almost entirely ignored while being so accurate and innovative in so much of their analyses.

Once an intellectual makes it into the establishment or is accorded celebrity status therein, with proper credentials as a person whose ideas support the empire and do not challenge it, as a person who basically accepts the empire’s dogma, he won’t be thrown off the team unless he becomes a whistleblower and tells some uncomfortable and threatening truths. Being right or wrong in analyses and predictions makes no difference. Truth is not the criterion for admission to the elite, which is why Mises and Rothbard were never admitted, even within academia. Playing along is what matters. Being a team player. By all means, what establishment intellectuals do is talk and write, write and talk, while maintaining the presumptions of the State and empire through every word they speak or pen. Lately, for example, Fukuyama has been writing about how to make bureaucracy in goverment work better (so-called good government vs. bad government). He’s finally woken up to the existence of principal-agent problems, but he is fast asleep on the kinds of issues raised by Mises and Rothbard that challenge government root and branch.

Most intellectuals who write on politics, like Fukuyama, or who sometimes take on government posts where they have the power to implement their ideas, like McFaul, have no incentive to change their basic outlook or even question it. They have every incentive to maintain the core political ideas that they absorbed when they got their degrees. This is how they get grants, how they become known and respected, how their travel opportunities multiply, and how their opportunities for better pay and jobs come from. This is how they gain access to those in office or to powerful members of the government’s bureaucracies. If they become critical of government, they will be cut off. They will be marginalized and viewed as rebellious kooks or radicals.

(Thanks to Chris Rossini)

The basic beliefs of Fukuyama and McFaul concerning freedom are representative of an overwhelming number of intellectuals and politicians in western societies, and they are attempting to spread their views to all other societies. Their view also permeates western societies, because vast numbers of people mistakenly accept the (democratically) legal as what is (naturally) lawful, even though the naturally lawful is based on opposite premises to the democratically legal.

Most intellectuals think of freedom as being the liberty of a citizen who has an equal participation in a democratic whole. But since a citizen is a legal role, not a person, not a natural person, and not even thought of as a human being, these intellectuals have a de-humanized conception of the human being. They reduce the human being to a citizen role or to a number of similar categories like worker, farmer, gay, policeman, soldier and gun-owner. Each category then has different “laws” that apply to it.

To most of today’s intellectuals, liberty within that citizen role is thought of as freedom. They do not conceive of freedom as a condition in which a person belongs to himself and to no one else. Instead, as they see it, either the citizen belongs to everyone else and everyone else to him in a communist-style collective or citizen state with a general will (see Rousseau); or else every citizen is a subject who belongs to the rulers of the State (see Hobbes). However, they think of such citizens as being “free” because they have a vote.

By contrast, the libertarian idea of freedom is that human beings are natural persons who belong only to themselves (see Locke). Such persons have societies that are based on freedom among likes. Everyone is naturally a self-owner who possesses his or her own free will, body, mind and separate humanity from anyone else. Each person is unique.

Rather than thinking of human beings as possessing this kind of freedom and likeness (and the justice that flows from them), most intellectuals are thinking of freedom and equality as arising through legalities constructed by democratic procedures and institutions. Actually, those procedures and institutions produce inequalities and destroy the freedom of natural human beings.

I am doing no more than explaining and paraphrasing some of the thought of Frank van Dun, who has analyzed the logic of law in the most precise way I have ever seen. He writes

“The vigorous currents of egalitarian and collectivist thought in the twentieth century and the strident rhetoric of ‘solidarity’ indicate the enduring popularity of the mereological conception of the human person as an integral and dependent part of a larger whole. So does the conception of his liberty as equal participation in the ‘democratic self-determination’ of that whole. It obviously does not bear any resemblance to a person’s freedom within the natural law. As far as a seemingly overwhelming majority of Western intellectuals is concerned, the idea of justice as freedom among likes holds no attraction at all. Even many ‘liberals’ cannot break free from the modern conception of liberty and equality as nomocratic legal constructs that must be democratically validated, regulated and enforced.”

Fukuyama and McFaul believe that democracy reduces conflicts and warfare. This is why they say “If democratic regimes ruled all countries in the [Middle East] region, conflicts between states would be less likely…”

A democracy can be militaristic, however, and prone to warfare, while an autocracy can be non-militaristic and avoid warfare. Large numbers of Americans relished going to war against the Spanish empire and then Germany in World War I. No lack of American martial spirit and support for wars, misleadingly but often termed patriotism, can be found in other cases.

An early example that contradicts the Fukuyama-McFaul thesis is the behavior of the empire of democratic Athens. However, the history of the U.S. provides many examples closer to home. Fukuyama and McFaul regard the U.S. as a democracy, but virtually every war that the U.S. has fought has been either aggressive, or avoidable, or instigated in one way or another by the U.S., or carried to an extreme degree. This includes the War of 1812, the Indian wars, the Mexican-American War, the Spanish-American War, the Philippine-American War, the Civil War, World Wars I and II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Grenada War, the wars in Yugoslavia, the Iraq Wars, the Afghanistan War, and the Libyan War. America’s “democracy” has not apparently succeeded in reducing its proclivity for war.

Great Britain has had a parliamentary democracy for centuries. It is far from clear that this ever restrained that nation from building up an empire and engaging in numerous wars while doing so.

On the other hand, it is not clear that the lack of democracy in the Soviet Union and Red China gave rise to aggressive wars by these governments. The Soviet Union invaded Hungary and Czechoslovakia on its periphery, but then think of the U.S. invasions of countries in this hemisphere, including Canada and Mexico. The Soviets invaded Afghanistan, but then so did the U.S. The Russian Federation is democratic, certainly more so than the Soviet Union, and it has had wars in Tajikistan, Chechnya (twice) and Georgia.

“Should Democracy Be Promoted or Demoted?” is the title of an article published in 2007 by Francis Fukuyama and Michael McFaul (currently the U.S. ambassador to Russia). They are learned scholars in their fields of political science and international relations. There is close, mutual and long-term interaction between them and government officials and policies, i.e., symbiosis.

Both these gentlemen belong to the establishment elite. Their efforts, careers, beliefs, attainments and influence are case studies in how the democracy that they espouse and strongly support actually works, which is through oligarchies (small numbers of people with power over many.) They belong to America’s education oligarchy. America also has corporate, military and political oligarchies. Taken together, they make up the establishment oligarchy or ruling class.

There is no surprise then in finding that Fukuyama and McFaul have the opinion that democracy should be promoted. They believe in it. They argue for it enthusiastically. McFaul’s life and livelihood revolve around it. At the same time, how convenient it is that the term “democracy” is a currently Pavlovian stimulus word that triggers responses from citizens in support of official policies propagated by the oligarchy. Democracy has been made into apple pie through the usual techniques of repetition from figures of authority.

The surprise to many Americans is likely to be how such scholars can be so biased, so blind, so mistaken and so shallow in their thinking. The surprise is how such intelligent and learned men can harbor so many misconceptions as to extol democracy. Maybe their educations are not all that their degrees symbolically represent. Maybe the academic journals in which they publish are not the founts of knowledge that they are reputed to be. Maybe there are whole fields of study in universities that rest on the shakiest and shallowest of foundations.

Reading this article of theirs is an exercise in detecting fallacies and misconceptions. For example, they mistakenly equate freedom with democracy. They wrongly place American democracy into one category and totalitarian or other autocracies into another, when in fact they differ only in degree, not in kind. They want the American empire to help construct democracies in 50 to 100 foreign lands when American democracy, such as it is, was not originally the constitutional form of government of the federal government or the states. And, to the extent that democracy has become American government, it has failed and has become oligarchy. Fukuyama and McFaul are operating under the false assumption that democracy somehow reflects a “public” interest, preference, and good. “Democracy promotion is intended only to help reveal public preferences in the society itself,” they say. This has been shown by Kenneth Arrow, for one, to be impossible; and certainly Mises and Rothbard have said the same in other frameworks of analysis.

The democratic dream world of Fukuyama and McFaul exists solely in their minds, as transferred onto paper in such improbable statements as this: “First and foremost, democracy provides the best institutional form for holding rulers accountable to their people.” I’d like to know how these scholars can declare that democracy is “best” when they do not even consider and evaluate important alternatives. The superiority of democracy is clearly not factual, not when the people or the oligarchs that “represent” them in actuality rule them as subjects and get to decide on laws that may delve into any area that the rulers want them to. Alternatives are available that are likely to be better. One institutional form is kritarchy. Another is anarcho-capitalism under natural law. Another is panarchism. Hoppe has argued persuasively that even monarchy is superior to democracy.

Another mistaken view of theirs is that democracy promotes economic welfare: “Second, democracies tend to provide more stable physical and economic welfare for their people than do autocracies.” Robert Barro has evidence that this is not so. We need only examine America over the past 25 years or to look at the fiscal instabilities that lie ahead to see that this is incorrect. Fukuyama and McFaul mistake the benefits of free markets with democracy.

James Orlin Grabbe (RIP) was a genius, a freedomist, and an entrepreneur. Before the days of LewRockwell.com, he was also the very first person to ever publish me – in 1998. I walked on air for weeks after he published my very first article. I continued to write for his Laissez Faire City Times for a number of years. This was the cusp of radical libertarian thinking on the web. He was unique. This man was, and remains, underrated in the world of ideas and resistance to the state. Grabbe received his PhD in economics from Harvard, and he later taught economics at the Wharton School of Business. Here is a snippet from his Wikipedia entry:

Some of Grabbe’s investigations surrounding controversial current events, made direct contact with sources in government essential, which led to further investigations.^{[citation needed]} The increasing popularity of the Internet made his articles (and essays) widely spread.^[20] Some of those published investigations are recognized today still as relevant, including his article “When Osama Bin Ladin Was Tim Osman”.^{[21][citation needed]}

Lesley Stahl of 60 Minutes, produced an investigative segment about misinformation on the Internet that aired on March 2, 1997.^[22] Grabbe was interviewed on the show and presented as a representation of misinformation found online. Her comments about the dangers of anyone being able to create content on the Internet, rather than relying on mass media, led to further commentary online.^[23][24][25]

It is entertaining to reflect back on the early days on the Internet and watch the major media organs gasp in horror at the thought of alternative, unedited push media that escaped the conventional gatekeepers of (dis)information.  A 1997 Salon piece notes the following:

Last Sunday’s “60 Minutes” brought its viewers a shocking exposi of the Internet: It turns out that the Net, the Web and particularly Usenet news groups are full of unsubstantiated “facts,” opinions, rumors and even lies. Stop the presses!

Correspondent Lesley Stahl took a whirlwind Net tour with Internet World editor Andrew Kantor, using search engines to find dubious reports emanating from the likes of J. Orlin Grabbe, a Reno, Nev.-based conspiracy theorist. It seems that wackos like Grabbe can use the Net to “instantly” reach 20 million people. (CBS doesn’t do its own credibility any favors by omitting the word “potential” before that 20 million figure, suggesting that Grabbe and his ilk have an automatic mass audience rather than an infinitesimal sliver of total Net traffic.)

“Forgery, fakery, falsehoods — they’re everywhere on the Internet!” Stahl concludes. “And rumors are so rampant that cyberspace is becoming a dangerous place, especially for corporate America.”

…Digging through the misinformation on Usenet, Stahl asks, “Shouldn’t this be expunged? … It’s wrong. It’s inaccurate, it’s irresponsible. It is spreading fear and suspicion of the government.”

A pioneering work for Grabbe is his “The End of Ordinary Money, Part I” and Part II. Here is Grabbe’s archives on digital cash, privacy and cryptology, gold, etc.

“In a clandestine, decade-long effort to defeat digital scrambling, the National Security Agency, along with its British counterpart, the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), have used supercomputers to crack encryption codes through ‘brute force’ and have inserted secret ‘back doors’ into software with the help of technology companies…

“Bruce Schneier, a security technologist, … said … [the] NSA has ‘subverted’ much of the Internet and tech companies that form its backbone. ‘They fundamentally undermine the social contract of the Internet – which is that you get what you think you get and it works,’ Schneier said. ‘An agency has subverted vast swaths of this to turn the Internet into a surveillance engine. Now the Internet doesn’t do what people thought it did. They’ve done it through secret agreements with companies, so essentially all the companies you deal with on the Internet have been lying to you. They have basically sucked the trust out of the Internet – the NSA and these companies. It’s a public-private partnership to turn the internet into a surveillance engine.”’

And we are its fuel.

Putin should NOT get the Nobel Peace Prize

Much as it pains me to criticize the very interesting and very important essay by Lyuba Lulko (http://www.lewrockwell.com/2013/10/lyuba-lulko/one-statesman-prevented-ww3/), I feel I cannot sit idly by and let him get away with his claim that Putin should be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Why not? Did not the heroic Putin save us from a conflagration in Syria, that the U.S. was threatening? Did not this undeclared imperialist invasive war against Syria, a country that posed no threat to the U.S. whatsoever, threaten to bring into it Iran and even Russia? Could this have turned into World War III?  Yes, yes, and yes. Thank God for Putin. Lulko makes all these points, and he does so superlatively.

Why, then, do I oppose the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Putin? I do so because this Peace Prize is irredeemably besmirched by it having been awarded to that war-mongering monster, Obama. This is a man who drones innocents from afar, murders women and children in Afghanistan, still has not removed all U.S. troops from Iraq (I do not here distinguish between formal members of the U.S. armies and others in the pay of Obama who are toting guns in that long suffering country).

It is not that Putin doesn’t deserve a Peace Prize. It is that the Nobel Peace Prize is unworthy of Putin.  Lulko comes close to this insight when he offers this quote: “Mr. Obama should give his Nobel Peace Prize handed to him in 2009 to a true man of peace, Mr. Putin, President of Russia.” If Mr. Obama were to offer this prize to Mr. Putin, the latter should refuse it. He should drop it like a hot potato. To repeat: It is not that Putin doesn’t deserve a Peace Prize. It is that the Nobel Peace Prize is unworthy of Putin.

Can this matter be rectified? Yes, of course. Nothing is beyond redemption. All the Nobel Committee has to do is apologize to the world for awarding its prize to Obama, take it back from him, and then award it to Putin. It would be somewhat tarnished even then, but under these conditions I would then agree with Lulko that this award should be given to Putin.

One further complication. There are others, too, who deserve an untarnished Nobel Peace Prize. Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden.

No, he was not perfect, but certainly far removed from Bush, Obama, and the rest of the bums:

Considering standing armies as dangerous to free governments in time of peace, I shall not seek to enlarge our present establishment, nor disregard that salutary lesson of political experience which teaches that the military should be held subordinate to the civil power … the bulwark of our defense is the national militia, which in the present state of our intelligence and population must render us invincible. As long as our Government is administered for the good of the people, and is regulated by their will; as long as it secures to us the rights of person and of property, liberty of conscience and of the press, it will be worth defending; and so long as it is worth defending a patriotic militia will cover it with an impenetrable aegis. Partial injuries and occasional mortifications we may be subjected to, but a million of armed freemen, possessed of the means of war, can never be conquered by a foreign foe. To any just system, therefore, calculated to strengthen this natural safeguard of the country I shall cheerfully lend all the aid in my power.

Thanks to John Lofton.

Phony Indian and real Keynesian Liz Warren is the latest official to use anarchist as a pejorative. They’re worried, folks, they’re worried. More and more young people especially realize they do not need the Warrens of the world to loot and rule them, to stage mass murders and run huge cage complexes.

A twit reporter on CNN, in questioning the wisdom of DC police doing so much shooting near the capitol building yesterday, was concerned that they could have hit some politicians!

Is there a bigger statist scold on Capitol Hill than that shrill harpy from Taxachusetts, Elizabeth Warren? In her latest tirade she warns her fellow Stakhanovite progressives that “We Are Not A Country of Anarchists!” She single-handedly puts the nanny in “nanny state.” The Okie-born Warren is a true granddaughter in spirit of the meddlesome Mathers, Beechers, and Lodges, and not the humble Massachusetts individualist anarchist Josiah Warren. Her loopy economic views make the late John Kenneth Galbraith seem as sane as a Dane, while her naïve 6th grade Civics view of government is a national embarrassment. If I had a magic lamp complete with a Persian genie who could perform all manners of prestigitation, and I could get just two slim volumes for this former Harvard Law professor to uncritically read for her further education and enlightenment, the two books would be Lysander Spooner’s No Treason:  The Constitution of No Authority, and Murray N. Rothbard’s Power and Market:  Government and the Economy. Each is characterized by unrelenting logic, brilliant insights, and cogent reasoning.  In No Treason, Spooner packs more intellectual dynamite into its explosive pages than any other book in print.  Playboy called it “(possibly) the most subversive document ever penned in this nation.”  No Treason blasts government by destroying the very legitimacy of the American State.  The celebrated Massachusetts’ constitutional lawyer Spooner meticulously (with the precision of a dedicated surgeon) dissects the  “social contract” basis of the United States Constitution. When he is finished, the once bloated corpse on the autopsy table is gone. The only remains are those of the heinous mass murderers and robbers which are its pretended agents. Rothbard, in Power and Market, demolishes any rationale or pretext for economic intervention into civil society by the government.  In one fell blow, he forever separates the market economy from the coercive apparatus of the State.  The very notions of “political economy,” “public policy” or similar parasitism become obsolete.  Government is revealed, as Spooner earlier demonstrated, a criminal band of murderers, looters, thugs, and thieves.

Something to cheer about the US government’s ongoing budget battle! US Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul wrote today on Twitter:

Due to the lapse in appropriations I will not be updating Twitter and Facebook regularly. Please visit @StateDept for updates.

— Michael McFaul (@McFaul) October 4, 2013

This means the hyperactive US Ambassador, whose every pronouncement is a diplomatic disaster, who continues his desperate attempts to put his long and impressive “regime change” credentials to work in Russia, will at least for the time being actually be doing something to help rather than harm US/Russian bilaterial relations: keeping quiet.

So here’s one of the unintended positive consequences of the US government shutdown: radio silence from Meddlesome McFaul.

(more…)

M.I.T. Computer Scientists invent self-assembling cube robots.

. . . by the DC police shooting and killing of an unarmed, mentally troubled woman? Will the perpetrators of this criminal act go unpunished? What can be done to prevent such brutalities?  The answers to such questions are to be found in the nature of the state, which is defined as an agency that enjoys a monopoly on the use of violence within a given territory. When the state begins to lose popular respect, and increasing numbers of people start to question the necessity for its imposed “order,” state officials invariably try to reinforce its wobbling foundations by exaggerated forms of violence. It is no coincidence that past empires have resorted to expanded warfare as ways of reconfirming their violent characters, just as the current American state eagerly seeks wars against whatever other nations can provide platforms to remind its citizenry that the uninhibited exercise of viciousness is what makes America “exceptional.” This mindset of uninhibited viciousness is also carried out by police forces across the country, providing Boobus Americanus with a daily “in-your-face, live-and-in-full-color” reminder of the fate that can be experienced by anyone unfortunate enough to be in the vicinity when the lessons of obedience to arbitrary force are being visited upon another as a reminder of the state’s authority.

That this shooting occurred near the capitol in DC in the early days of the make-believe “shutdown” of the federal government, should be a tip-off as to how its imagery serves the needs of the state to reinforce its violent, life-destructive character.

Will this act go unpunished? Yes. Will anything be done to prevent future brutalities? No. An alternative answer to either of these questions negates the principle of the state enjoying a monopoly on the use of violence. To even contemplate the control of state power to restrain its arbitrary and unrestrained use of force – whether on the streets of America or within the borders of other countries – is to raise the question of whether societies should be organized on the premises of violence. To begin asking such questions is to place in the minds of the millions of people the thought that maybe, just maybe, there are principles and values that transcend the interests of the state and its supporters. Should that occur, it is only a matter of time before the reverence for systemic violence evaporates.

“During a series of experiments in 2010 and 2011, the [NSA] gathered up location data” for our cell phones. Fortunately, the agency “never took the program to an operational phase” — or so “James ['Ding Dong'] Clapper, the U.S. director of intelligence,” alleges. Since the man lies as much as does the TSA, which is to say every time his lips move, it’s a good bet the NSA did indeed scarf up this data. And likely continues doing so.

But “the question is, had the agency taken [the program] operational, what did it expect to learn? Probably a lot, and there has been a lot of academic work on the subject with which I’m certain the NSA’s analysts would have been familiar.” The article then cites a study of data on cell-phone location that predicted participants’ circle of friends and acquaintances with 90% accuracy. “But,” the writer chirps with a noticeable lack of imagination, “there’s also a potential social benefit to tracking your phone’s location … If you’re sick or have been exposed to someone who is, your phone will have data showing who you’ve been close to. During a public-health emergency — say, an outbreak of the flu — phone data could be a treasure trove for epidemiologists and public-health officials.”

Oh, indeed. And under Obummercare, those “epidemiologists and public-health officials” come armed. How long before the NSA and the CDC, working in cahoots, are knocking on — or down — your door to haul you away because a guy who called about the ’08 Toyota you’re selling has been diagnosed with bird flu? Or with something even more questionable, such as “political dissidence”?

“The NSA whistleblower has recently made the shortlist of finalists for this year’s Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought.”

Oh, terrific!!! Warmest congratulations to Mr. Snowden — not because this award is any less socialist or political than the ignoble Nobel (a glance at past recipients proves that) but because it carries a monetary reward.

Meanwhile, “former NSA and CIA chief Michael Hayden” and “US lawmaker Rep. Mike Rogers, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee” added to the champ’s honors. “Speaking at a panel discussion on Thursday,” the first of these two sociopaths “admit[ted that] in my darker moments over the past several months, I’d also thought of nominating Mr. Snowden, but it was for a different list.”

At which point, Sociopath Rogers announced, “I can help you with that.”

Mr. Snowden, earning the hatred of such execrable sleaze is achievement enough for one lifetime. But you have also struck such a blow for freedom as few men are ever privileged to do! Millions worldwide join in heartily thanking and praising you!

While Leviathan’s thieves and thugs groan about their furloughs and delayed loot-sorry, paychecks, serfs who produce goods and services of value that the rest of us eagerly buy rejoice in memos such as this from their employers:

It’s once again time to celebrate a new [company name] milestone! Just moments ago, [company's] stock traded at $[nice amount] per share for the first time!  That’s just 32 short months since we first reached $[half that amount] per share on February 16, 2011. …

We are in what I believe are the most exciting times ever for [company]. … Every … employee plays an essential role in our success and should be very proud of this important accomplishment.

To celebrate this significant achievement, all employees will receive a bonus of approximately $[very nice amount, 4 figures’ worth], after taxes, and an extra day of vacation during 2014. …

A member of the “Management Committee” signed the announcement of this largess. Kinda gives the lie to the Progressives’ favorite canard that “management” only exploits workers while hogging all the profit itself, doesn’t it?

At any rate, Parasites, your hosts out here are laughing at your delayed plunder – especially those of us earning unexpected and handsome bonuses. Maybe you should consider real, honest work for a change.

All day long yesterday every online newspaper and every radio station in America blared the headline, “Shots Fired Near the Capitol in Washington, D.C.”  I suspect that nearly everyone who read or heard this assumed that another “lone nut” must have started shooting at people in a government building again.  Well, not exactly.  It was the D.C. cops who did ALL of the shooting — at a young, UNARMED mother with a child in the car.  They shot the mother dead.  She was apparently mentally disturbed, having rammed her car into the White House fence.  No one seems to be questioning the propriety of the D.C. cops executing her on the spot right in front of her eighteen-month-old child for her bad driving habits, not to mention spraying bullets into heavily-populated Capitol Hill.

Also, I guess its perfectly OK to murder an unarmed black woman in front of her infant child in broad daylight as long as the shooter is a black dude (D.C. cop).  Don’t expect the Soviet Poverty Law Center to say a peep about this, or Al Sharpton to hold any candlelight vigils.  There’s no money in that.  The role of the Soviet Poverty Law Center is to SUPPORT the police state as a paid consultancy, not to criticize it in any way.

Attention, all you victims the EPA has robbed by prohibiting you from draining a swamp on your land or by fining you despite the fact that you didn’t fill marshy ground when bureaucrats pretend that you did: if the “wetlands” in question inconveniences an airport Leviathan owns, well, even the Feds’ faux “shutdown” doesn’t delay “removing several” of these puddles.

Well, Daniel,  you were correct: the sociopaths gave the Capitol Cretins-sorry, Cops a standing O.

Travis Holte, who has a stronger stomach than I, sent me this video. I haven’t viewed it: catching a single picture of these criminals when I visit their “official” websites (reluctantly, and only in the line of duty when I’m reporting on their latest atrocity) ruins my day, let alone having to watch them en masse. But if any of you are bulimic, I suspect this clip will be just the ticket.

I said in a recent blog post that I disapproved of both socialism and Islam. As a laissez-faire capitalist, I must disapprove of socialism. And as a Christian, I must disapprove of Islam. In fact, if laissez-faire capitalism (or libertarianism or anarcho-capitalism or anything you want to call it) is the truth, then I must disapprove of all forms of economic thought that deviate from it. And if Christianity is the truth (in the sense of religious doctrine, not support of everything that people do in the name of Christianity), then I must disapprove of all forms of religious thought that deviate from it. But disapproval is not aggression, and neither is opposition. I certainly believe in the libertarian non-aggression principle. I do not favor bombing socialists or Muslims just because I disapprove of them.

That is what the subject line of my Conservative Action Alert said. Of course they did. They are Republicans. What did you expect? And it’s not that they are Republicans in name only (RINO), they are Republicans. And by the way, Ted Cruz, the conservative Republican senator that conservatives are so in love with right now, is a big supporter of two of the largest welfare programs in the federal budget: Social Security and Medicare, as I pointed out here. I guess the problem isn’t with just Republicans.

Having had been in a number of “emergency” situations on Capitol Hill during my decade there, I feel safe saying I never felt so unsafe as when the pumped-up, tattooed, shorts-wearing, military assault rifle-toting Capitol Hill cops were trying to keep us safe. Like the time we were told a dangerous criminal with a gun was roaming the halls of Cannon Office Bldg and we were ordered to…wait for it: all leave our safe, locked offices and gather together in the main lobby of the building, fully exposed to the supposed assailant!

Of course we were the kind of office that questioned authority, so we kept our door locked, shut off the lights, and pretended the room was empty when the cops came pounding on the door. It made no sense. It turned out the cops manning the metal detectors were too busy chatting up the cute female staffers to notice that someone had walked through with a “gun” — which, being the day before Halloween, turned out to be a toy, some staffer’s stupid idea of a costume prop.

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