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
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.
Every problem plaguing society could be solved immediately, and it wouldn’t require taxpayers’ billions to fund it. Be it the Drug War, healthcare, immigration, etc., the solution lies in simply legalizing liberty, which means: legalize all voluntary behavior. The philosophy of liberty is simple: all voluntary association is to be allowed, force and fraud is to be punished. Unchain the invisible hand to correct the tragic mistakes of government “policy-makers”, who in reality do nothing more than divide up markets to favored cronies. Legalize liberty, then watch prosperity return and the parasitical Political Class wither away as they watch their hosts extricate themselves from their clutches. Nonintervention, at home and abroad, in the affairs of US citizens and foreign nations, is the only path to future prosperity.
Wait, didn’t the United States launch some massive, endless war on a tactic precisely to eradicate the very behavior that killed 3,000 Americans on September 11th? Wasn’t the justification for invading Iraq that it was somehow involved in the attacks? What about the trillions spent to supposedly eradicate “terror”? What about the mountain of innocent dead from US drone strikes? What the hell was all of this for if, when a government is found to have had a hand in the attacks, that government is shielded from the victims by the victims’ own government! Zero Hedge
The War on Terror was never about ending terrorism, it was about finding a way to make war perpetual.
“War is the health of the State.”-Randolph Bourne
The United States government never had any interest in finding the perpetrators of 9/11.
Idiots with badges, tasked with enforcing the War on Drugs, raided a home to find evidence of a marijuana-growing operation. They scared the crap out of the inhabitants, a father and his 13-year old son, but didn’t find anything illegal. The reason for this nonsense was that cops had observed the father and son visited a gardening store to buy supplies for growing tomatoes. Their suspicions grew when they found tea leaves in the family’s trash, mistaking them for marijuana, leading to another misbegotten SWAT raid. Not finding any evidence of illicit drug activity, the cops began rooting around through the entire house, looking for anything to justify the raid. Not finding anything this time, they then brought the drug dogs in for training. CATO
Ridiculous, but probably not as bad as mistaking okra for marijuana.
Ugly story from my home state of Oklahoma. Tulsa cops arrested Army vet Elliot Williams at a hotel in 2011, breaking his neck in the process, which paralyzed him. Medical staff and police at the jail that held Williams believed he was faking paralysis right up until the moment he died, even while he was screaming for help while face down during an hour-long forced shower. While he died, staff were caught on video taunting him, throwing him in a shower stall, and apparently never thinking to transport him to a hospital. It’s almost too much of a stretch to believe that the entire medical staff, the cops, and even the jail psychiatrist thought he was faking paralysis. It seems like more of a clear-cut case of pure sadism. The entire staff enjoyed watching him suffer. And, of course, they knew they could get away with it, which signals to other latent sadists that the profession most likely to give an outlet for their perverse desires. Daily Beast
Consequences of police militarization include the selection of the morally depraved for employment. Not to say that all cops are like this, but when one is revealed to be sadistic scum, the entire police establishment rushes to protect that person, no matter how egregious the crime. This, indeed, is a signal to the other morally depraved, violent, rage-filled, that they can find comfortable employment by unleashing those very characteristics that have so far prevented him or her from finding honest work in the private sector. That process leads to incidents like Williams’ slow death from a broken neck. Or the continuous stories of cops shooting family pets, or cops rushing into family homes guns a-blazing.
So putting a badge on those who should, in a normal society, be forever barred from employment in law enforcement is a consequence of a rapidly expanding police state. What’s the police state a consequence of? Prohibition. The Drug War has generated the black market crimewave that is used as the excuse for all the surveillance power, all the war goodies, and all the unaccountable excessive force that is dished out by people who, absent the Drug War, would never be allowed near a badge and gun. End the War on Drugs, or, to be even clearer, end all activity by government that has as its unintended effect the creation of black markets. Meaning, legalize all voluntary behavior. Only that will wither the bloated, artificial police state that has warped local police departments and has given rise to rampant criminal activity on the blue side of the law.
The nations that hold U.S. debt effectively hold the U.S. hostage. For all the bluster about America being the most powerful nation in the world, China, Japan, and the Saudis could end the party tomorrow. Which explains the spectacle of our leaders travelling abroad to assure their creditors that American taxpayers will do as they’re told, that they’ll pay up, and that they’ll be brought to heel. This leads to the spectacle of foreign policy being molded to bring the maximum benefit to the creditor countries. An Empire is controlled by its creditors, not by the citizens who always pick up the tab.
Activist Post. The video is embedded in the article, read the whole thing.