USA Today.  Relevant chunks: “The world can seem like a pretty depressing place, especially if you follow the news, which tends to focus on the scary and depressing. But in fact, despite the legitimate risks and downsides — war, invasion, depression, asteroids, hackers, disease! — in most ways, things are better than they have ever been, and they’re getting better all the time…

…Things aren’t perfect today, of course, and there are still plenty of things to worry about. But it’s worth noting just how far we’ve come. It’s also worth noting that most of these advancements are the result of free enterprise and open markets, and worth remembering that politicians, for their own selfish purposes, might stop this progress at any time. Free markets are great, but they don’t offer the opportunities for graft and personal aggrandizement that un-free markets do. And to politicians, that’s a bug, not a feature.”

His latest Antiwar.com column.  Relevant chunks: “…the Russians have announced they are withdrawing the bulk of their forces on the eve of the renewed Geneva negotiations. Unlike in the US, where any hint that we might declare victory and get out is perceived as a sign of “weakness” that would bring a collapsing “world order” down on our heads, in Putin’s Russia foreign policy is directed by realists who refuse to be manipulated by their allies and realize that their power has limits.

Unburdened by the conceit that the fate of the world depends on asserting his nation’s role as an international policeman, Putin is free to cannily pursue Russia’s real interests. Those interests were served by shoring up  Assad’s regime, which was crumbling under a sustained assault from the US and its Islamist allies in Riyadh and Ankara (with the Israelis cheerleading from the sidelines). In the meantime, the head-chopping jihadists of al-Nusra and its spin-offs – covertly supported by the Saudis and Turkey – have been declared terrorist outfits by the United Nations, and negotiations are underway in Geneva while the ceasefire continues to hold (albeit somewhat shakily).”

Even though we make up less than 5% of the world’s population.  Yikes.

28,000 Americans died in 2014 due to opioid overdoses, which make up 60% of all overdose deaths in the US for that year.  The painkiller business is big business, they’ll do all they can to prevent marijuana from becoming a legal, patent-less, cheap alternative.

-The ability to accept the spontaneous change that is the outcome of liberty.  The spontaneous forces that operate unseen in a free society will produce outcomes no one can predict.  But it is crucial that we accept these changes, or at least refrain from looking longingly at the State as a remedy.  Politicians almost to a person rail almost exclusively against the outcomes of the spontaneous forces of a free society.  They offer a phony salvation via State-sanctioned coercion, but that same salvation in practice results in nothing more than mass impoverishment, a free fall to a sub-animal quality of life.

Being “for liberty” means having “faith” in liberty.  It means that, if liberty is treated as an inviolable principle, the spontaneous forces that are unleashed will handle any “crisis” that appears.  Indeed, one only need worry when liberty is abandoned in order to “address” the crisis.

Liberty is important because of the invisible forces it unleashes that benefit all of us without any central direction.  But it’s the most difficult public policy to defend precisely because its benefits are largely hidden from view.  It’s too easy for political demagogues to find examples of “winners” or “losers” emerging from the market process as proof that it has failed, and almost too difficult for defenders of liberty to counter that the process that created language, money, culture, and manners, would vastly raise the quality of life for everyone on the planet if only we stepped out of its way.

The 51-foot long Echo Voyager, from Boeing, which can operate on it’s own for months.

By the candidates.  The only outcome possible: enrichment of the Political Class at the expense of those paying their tab.  Us.

Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs”.  There’s even a petition to sign.

Says Ron Paul-supporting Nassim Taleb.  Here’s a quote of Taleb’s, from Reason which quotes his Facebook page:

“What we are seeing worldwide, from India to the UK to the US, is the rebellion against the inner circle of no-skin-in-the-game policymaking “clerks” and journalists-insiders, that class of paternalistic semi-intellectual experts with some Ivy league, Oxford-Cambridge, or similar label-driven education who are telling the rest of us 1) what to do, 2) what to eat, 3) how to speak, 4) how to think…and 5) who to vote for.

With psychology papers replicating less than 40%, dietary advice reversing after 30y of fatphobia, macroeconomic analysis working worse than astrology, microeconomic papers wrong 40% of the time, the appointment of Bernanke who was less than clueless of the risks, and pharmaceutical trials replicating only 1/5th of the time, people are perfectly entitled to rely on their own ancestral instinct and listen to their grandmothers with a better track record than these policymaking goons.

Indeed one can see that these academico-bureaucrats wanting to run our lives aren’t even rigorous, whether in medical statistics or policymaking. I have shown that most of what Cass-Sunstein-Richard Thaler types call “rational” or “irrational” comes from misunderstanding of probability theory.”

It seems to me that people realize something is grievously wrong with the way they have been governed, and they want it to change.  The problem is, most people don’t understand that the slow destruction of political liberty is to blame, which is why they’re rushing headlong into the arms of “Anti-Establishment” authoritarians like Trump and Sanders.

Hilarious.  Trump’s anti-Establishment facade is wearing thin, it’s been clear from the beginning he’s an unabashed authoritarian, and clearly cannot wait to take the reins of power.  There’s nothing “Ron Paul” about Trump.  Sometimes it seems that the majority of the people want an Authoritarian, but also need their conscience assuaged by Anti-Establishment rhetoric.  With Trump you get both.

RT: “The Colorado Court of Appeals has ruled that residents there convicted of marijuana possession before recreational weed was legalized may be eligible to have those decisions overturned.