NATO, that is.  Then again, where would they be without their dearest enemy? Antiwar

Excellent post by Daniel Larison up at The American Conservative in which he describes the horrific conditions that the Saudi war on Yemen has imposed upon the people there.  Millions are at risk of starvation, but the world doesn’t seem to care.

The Guardian.  Prohibition is far too rich a vein of money and power for world governments to just throw it away.

Mashable.  Well, I would say “duh”, but those who employ drug dogs aren’t really looking for drugs so much as they are looking for an excuse to search through someone’s belongings.  As I’ve said before, rats are much more effective sniffers than dogs.

In one more example of how the Drug War corrupts character on the Blue side of the law, Florida cops were caught lying about the details of an arrest after footage surfaced contradicting their premeditated fabrications.  In a twist, however, they’ve actually been charged with a crime, and the innocent victim of their little escapade had his charges dropped.  Rare, indeed. Cop Block

It can’t be pointed out often enough how artificial all these interactions between crooked cops and civilians are.  Without the Drug War, all the stings, no-knock raids, and undercover operations that police now engage in would never happen.  Police could deal with actual crime, rather than get sucked into the corrupting environment of black markets.

Admits the Drug War has failed. LA Times

Washington’s Dangerous Addiction To Military Power

The Sober Political Reality for Libertarians

The High Price of “Reassuring” Despotic Clients

Bill Nye Epitomizes the Left’s Authority Complex

The Political Class always escapes punishment, while any peasant caught raising his head is beaten down

Andrew Jackson, virulent opponent of a central bank, will be removed from the $20 bill

Watch the world’s blackest material absorb the light from a laser

John Greer was murdered in his own doorway by officer Adam Torres in 2013 in Fairfax County, Virginia.  The officer has been given a nice little plea deal where he pleads guilty to involuntary manslaughter in exchange for what will amount to less than a year behind bars, which he’ll probably be able to avoid.  Now the daughters of the murdered man have released what reads like a grovelling apologia for official excessive force.  They think the cop shouldn’t go to prison for murdering their father, that him being barred from owning a firearm is enough of a punishment, and society shouldn’t punish his relatives by locking him up.  It’s like some mass Stockholm Syndrome has infected society, so poisoned are we by this blind worship of law enforcement.

How would John Greer be treated, if the situation were reversed, and he had murdered officer Torres?  He would be fast-tracked to a needle, if he survived his badged captors that long.

Police-worship is a poison, blinding us to official crime and abuse, and signalling to other officers that a slap on the hand is all they’ll ever get, even if they take innocent life.

A minimum wage was sold at the turn of the twentieth century plainly as a means to keep minorities unemployed so that white men would be guaranteed a job.  It was common knowledge for the next 80 years that a minimum wage causes unemployment.  Now, the minimum wage is a golden calf of the Progressive movement, who’ve won a battle in California, with the governor signing into law a $15 minimum wage.  What these Progressives don’t realize is that, by mandating a high minimum wage for all workers, they’re actually mandating a wage of $0 for the most vulnerable workers in that economy.  That means higher unemployment for young adults who’ve never held a job before, and desperately need the work experience.  The skills and discipline gained from an individual’s first job is worth far more than the initial low wage.  By mandating a minimum wage, lawmakers are forever denying those young workers those valuable skills, letters of reference, et cetera.  Unemployed and facing a bleak future, they have no idea who to blame.  A minimum wage works insidiously, its effects are indirect, and so blame is laid at the feet of employers rather than policymakers.  Realizing the high unemployment was a problem but also an opportunity to spend some money and look good doing it, government of course created an expensive program to get these unemployed young off their feet, which is the theme of Obama’s “First Job” initiative, which blows $5.5 billion on training and grants.  And all to address a problem that government itself created.

Recklessly speeding through a poor, crowded village at 60 mph in armored jeeps is a pretty good example of imperial arrogance at its most negligent.  This time it killed a young boy, who was struck by the speeding motorcade.  Ironic, in that the motorcade was heading to the “front lines in the war against Boko Haram”, whose victims include many, many children.  It’s ironic also is that the motorcade carried liberal neocon vulgarite Samantha Power, who harps endlessly about the necessity of this or that war via the destructive “responsibility to protect” doctrine, and who was instrumental in drumming up support for the Libya debacle, as well as the Ukraine intervention that installed a totalitarian thug State.

As Antiwar.com‘s Daniel McAdams reports, Power’s convoy was late for a photo-op with the victims of Boko Haram, so they thought it’d be just fine to speed through a crowded village to get there in time.  Lives don’t matter to these people, only power and prestige.