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FREEDOM OF SPEECH:

Congressman calls for government to label WikiLeaks a terrorist organization and arrest Assange. You notice how the government constant invaded our privacy and reads all our paperwork, but it can't stand it when it's privacy is invaded and somebody else reads its paperwork. Government hates free speech.

Latest WikiLeaks document dump exposes the lies, excess and abuse of government.

ECONOMY:

Sweden's government is cutting taxes and raising interest rates, and as a result Sweden is enjoying 6.9 percent economy growth. This isn't rocket science. German spending cuts produce economic recovery. This isn't rocket science.

REGULATION:

The US leads the world in auto deaths per capita despite, or maybe because of, the overwhelming regulations on cars. Yet Democrats are pushing for more regulations.

FEDERAL RESERVE:

How QE2 could technically bankrupt the Fed. While this is technically meaningless since the Fed can always print more money, if it happened it might end the people's support for the system and collapse the dollar.

HEALTH CARE:

Fructose, you know that stuff the government subsidizes and its corporate minions push on us in pretty much every product on grocery store shelfs, linked to all kinds of bad diseases and early death.

Guess who supports government's "tough, new" food regulations that will drive small food producers out of business enabling giant food producers to produce even lower quality food at an even higher price? Giant food corporations. What a shocker.

GLOBAL WARMING AND ENERGY:

Reportedly attendance at this year's IPCC global warming fraud conference is down 50 percent from last year's conference, you know the one where Obama showed up and got stoned because of climategate and a freak ice storm. Naturally the people who didn't show up were the more moderate ones, so this year's radicals are calling for WWII-style rationing to slow human development.

WAR ON DRUGS:

Smoking nutmeg through an apple to get high.

POLICE STATE:

Homeland Security Director Janet Napolitano orders a stop on packages sent from Japan.

"For TV entertainment, we normally watch video tapes of Japanese TV sent to us by my wife's relatives living in Japan. We were just notified today from the relative in Japan who sends the box with the tapes that he couldn't send the box to the USA, but the Japanese postal clerk didn't know why when asked for the reason.

We then took a look at Japanese postal web sites to try to find out what's going on and discovered that Janet Napolitano, loyal minion of the NWO takeover agenda and obedient lapdog to the Indonesian Usurper in the White House, had set up new Department of Homeland Security (DHS) shipping restrictions on November 17, 2010 that blocks the shipping of any NON COMMERCIAL parcel into the United States that weighs more than 0.9 pounds (under 16 ounces) without first supplying the Social Security number (or taxpayer ID number) of the RECEPIENT of the package (and it's likely that the new DHS shipping restriction will soon also apply to detailed ID requirements on the part of the person sending the package as well)."

I'm impressed at the speed with which government is destroying America. George Bush moved at a snail's pace compared to Obama. These guys literally recognize no limits on their power. Their modus operandi is to do as much damage as they possibly can as fast as they possibly can before they get ousted. Needless to say, Republicans are helping them every step of the way.

The truth about airport security:

"Exactly two things have made airplane travel safer since 9/11: reinforcing the cockpit door, and convincing passengers they need to fight back. Everything else has been a waste of money."

The rest is just oppression.

Homeland security has started groping people boarding buses in Tampa, Florida. Note they're also looking for smuggling and illegal immigrants. Terrorism is just the excuse.

Supreme Court considers banning video game.

Great Menchen quote:

"The mob is competent to rule the rest of us — but it must be rigorously policed itself."

That's too funny. People can't be trusted with salt, Four Loco or marijuana, but we can be counted on to rule wisely through violence.

When the FBI entrapped that poor patsy in Portland, their recording equipment conveniently failed at the first meeting, so the evidence of entrapment is lost.

American actor put on terrorist watch list because he advocates stopping drilling for natural gas. He thinks it's funny now, but he won't when they arrest him and he finds out they were bugging his house and taking everything he said out of context in order to prosecute him as a terrorist.

WAR:

One of the most sophisticated cyber warfare tools ever created targeted Iran's nuclear program. I wonder who might have done that.

For $35,000, this rifle better be revolutionary.

FOREIGN POLICY:

I just had a discussion with a couple of conservative military vets about foreign policy. The arguments that seemed to have the most effect were: 1) aristocrat policies are designed to enrich and empower the aristocrats and their cronies whether the policies are domestic or foreign and 2) just like our government has dug a hole that's crashing our economy with domestic policy, it's done the same thing with foreign policy, and it's time to stop digging. These guys already understood that domestic policy was corrupt, self-serving and counterproductive, so they were open to the idea that the foreign policy foisted on us by those same aristocrats was equally corrupt, self-serving and counterproductive.

POLITICS:

Southern Democrats switching parties to Republicans. How much more obvious can it be there's no significant difference between the parties? How much more obvious can it be that aristocrats have no principles other than seizing our power and wealth for themselves? Aristocrats just replace the D or R on their chest whenever it suits them. Sure, Obama has given Democrats a bad name even faster than Bush gave Republicans a bad name, but they're both terrible.

MEDIA:

Because cable TV, like network TV, is a government protected monopoly that provides a low quality product at an overly expensive price, people are moving away from cable to the internet. I watch more shows on the internet now than I watch on TV.

MISC:

Gary North's translated Gettysburg address.

Being too clean can make people sick and give them allergies. I don't have that problem. I don't use that anti-bacterial crap.

I think it's a mistake for consoles not to upgrade. They're losing ground to computers. The only way this makes sense is if the console makers intend to take their surrounding value and apply it to computers in the future.

Nude beaches in states A-M. Nude beaches in states N-W. Nudist recreation in Ohio.

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REGULATION:

Insider trading is no crime, but the Feds like to bust people on it whenever they need to score political points by making it appear they're tough on Wall Street.

"In the current situation, the expert networks allegedly acquired information from present and former managers of various companies, and then gave the so-called "inside" information to clients who then made investments accordingly. But neither the expert network people nor their clients are alleged to have committed any actual acts of theft or fraud. Did the networks steal the information? Did they engage in any acts of trespassing or breaking and entering to acquire that information? Apparently not."

Every investor tries to get as much information as possible so he can make money. There's no way that should be a crime. Ignorance is not a benefit to the market.

"This, by the way, is so elementary that it is amazing that more editorialists and pundits do not make note of it. After all, in the newspaper business a great deal hinges on scooping the competition. Indeed, reporters receive prizes for doing this, namely, jumping ahead of the crowd with information only they got a hold of so as to score! They and their editors should be especially keen on condemning federal insider trading laws – by the logic of such laws, scooping would have to be prohibited…"

But what's good the goose does not apply to the gander according to the goose. And never doubt these government agents and aristocrats are making insider trades all the time.

FEDERAL RESERVE:

One line summary of Bernanke's failed policy: you can't fix insolvency with liquidity. Our problem isn't lack of money. It's debt.

EDUCATION:

Interesting observation about school bullying:

"Schools exist to teach children two things: conformity and submission to authority. Anything else a child learns is completely incidental. This is why bullying persists. Forcing children to go to school and be around bullies is part of training them to believe they have to submit to horrible people for the rest of their life."

I think this bullying is a natural side-effect of the forced regimentation of schools, but it may well be a desired side-effect from the point of view of the bullies in the government.

POLICE STATE:

This is getting stupider. Houston voters voted to remove red light cameras from Houston streets, but a federal judge ordered the cameras to stay. This is a good lesson for people who think government works for our benefit. It does not. Government works for government's benefit, and judges are on team-confiscation. If the city has a contract, it should just buy it out.

More information shows that the FBI was the main force behind the Oregon plot, not the man they arrested.

You know how people who work out at gyms where flip-flops to protect them from germs and fungus on the floor? Think about all those people at airports forced to walk barefoot by the TSA. Being forced to take off my shoes was what convinced me to stop flying.

The farce that TSA makes us safer.

Because all the radiation from nude-scanners is absorbed by the skin, radiation doses on the skin are up to 20 times higher than the TSA claims.

Cincinnati man spends 2.5 hours arguing with TSA agents who finally pass him without a scan or search. So if you go the airport well over 2.5 hours early, you too might be able to avoid scans and gropes and still make your flight. But probably not.

"'As a US citizen, I have the right to move freely within my country as long as I can demonstrate proof of citizenship and have demonstrated no reasonable cause to be detained.'"

You shouldn't have to show proof of citizenship, but I recently read that courts consistently hold than citizens must show ID on demand from a police officer. That's a crock.

"As the situation escalated further airport police were called and more senior TSA officials but Mr Kernan refused to back down, remaining calm throughout.

Eventually causing a stand-off between police and TSA officers over who should resolve the situation, Mr Kernan was told by a superviser: 'Here’s what we’re going to do. I’m going to escort you out of the terminal to the public area.  

'You are to stay with me at all times.  Do you understand?'

He was then escorted by the police and no less than 13 TSA officer through security without a hand laid on him.

He said: 'And then came the most ridiculous scene of which I’ve ever been a part.

'I gather my things – jacket, scarf, hat, briefcase, chocolates.

We walk over to the staff entrance and he scans his badge to let me through. We walk down the long hallway that led back to the baggage claim area.  We skip the escalators and moving walkways.'

He was then waved away by annoyed officers and said: 'In order to enter the US, I was never touched, I was never “Backscatted,” and I was never metal detected."

Congratulations to this man. Nice job.

WAR:

Texas Gov. Rick Perry's desire to invade Mexico reaches a new level of stupidity.

"What the Pentaloons don’t understand, being armed Boy Scouts who believe their own propaganda – “Ooo-rah! Yes sir! Yes sir! Can do, sir!” is that they usually can’t. The chief reason is that people really, really do not like American soldiers invading their countries, wrecking cities and killing their children. The military, which thinks at right angles, cannot wrap its mind around this difficult thought. Thus Americans invariably begin by thinking, “We are right. We are for democracy. We are trying to help these people. Therefore they will love us.”"

They still don't understand that the Afghans don't want them there.

"An essential ingredient in our wars is underestimation of the enemy, reflecting a general American contempt for everybody else. Cheese-eating surrender monkeys, that sort of thing. The Viet Cong were rice-propelled paddy maggots who didn’t have a single B-52. Iraq would be a cake walk, the Afghans were louse-ridden towel-headed farmers, and so on."

No kidding.

"Here we come to the final error of American military interventions: the belief that everybody wants to be like America, that they want democracy or are capable of it, that we just have to show them how we want them to live and they will gratefully do it."

So true again.

FOREIGN POLICY:

Pat Buchanan says its way past time to get out of Korea.

"Unlike 1950, South Korea is not an impoverished ex-colony of Japan. She is the largest of all the "Asian tigers," a nation with twice the population and 40 times the economy of the North."

This is security welfare, and welfare of any kind is destructive to both provider and recipient.

"From 1941 to 1989, she played a great heroic role as defender of freedom, sacrificing and serving mankind, a role of which we can be forever proud. But having won that epochal struggle against the evil empire, we found ourselves in a world for which we were unprepared. Now, like an aging athlete, we keep trying to relive the glory days when all the world looked with awe upon us.

We can't let go, because we don't know what else to do. We live in yesterday – and our rivals look to tomorrow."

And we're quickly fading into the history we emulate.

POLITICS:

Former New Mexico governor Gary Johnson may pick up Ron Paul's mantle as the libertarian Republican leader for 2012.

MEDIA:

Commentary on how the media reports on the police state:

"What’s missing from all of these celebrations is an iota of questioning or skepticism. All of the information about this episode — all of it — comes exclusively from an FBI affidavit filed in connection with a Criminal Complaint against Mohamud. As shocking and upsetting as this may be to some, FBI claims are sometimes one-sided, unreliable and even untrue, especially when such claims — as here — are uncorroborated and unexamined."

This is why the media is in bed, literally and figuratively, with government, and it's why the mainstream media is dying. It gets all its news from the government. It does no work. It adds no value. It's a parrot for government. It can't afford to bite the hand that feeds it. Therefore it's the propaganda organ of government.

This is why WikiLeaks is so valuable. Not only does it inform, it makes government squirm like government makes us squirm. It looks like government is cyber-attacking WikiLeaks.

MISC:

The effect of patents and copyright on Hollywood. It's good to see Kinsella writing about the perils of centralized innovation. This is something that so far the mises.org anti-IP crew has failed to address, imo.

Spanish woman has laid claim to ownership of the sun and intends to charge royalties for anybody who uses it.

The laws of bureaucracy.

"As a 40-year student of bureaucracy, beginning with Ludwig von Mises's great little book, Bureaucracy (1944), I have come to recognize a series of near laws governing bureaucracy. This one is, as far as I can see, unbreakable, comparable to the law of gravity.

Some bureaucrat will enforce a written rule in such a way as to make the rule and the bureaucracy seem either ridiculous, tyrannical, or both.

There is no way to write the rules so that some bonehead in the system will not find a way to become a thorn in someone's side – a thorn that cries out for removal.

There are corollaries to this iron law of bureaucracy.

1. The bureaucrat in question will not back down unless forced to from above.

2. His superiors will regard any public resistance to the interpretation as an attack on the bureaucracy's legitimate turf.

3. The bureaucracy's senior spokesman will defend the policy as both legitimate and necessary.

4. Politicians will be pressured by voters to have the policy changed.

5. The bureaucracy will tell the politicians that disaster will follow any such modification of the policy.

6. The public will finally get used to it.

7. The politicians will switch to some other national crisis.

8. The internal manual will then be rewritten by the senior bureaucrats to make the goof-ball application mandatory.

9. Senior management will increase the budget so as to enforce the new policy.

10. Politicians will acquiesce to this increased budget.

This leads me to North's law of bureaucratic expansion:

Any outrageous interpretation of a bureaucratic rule, if widely resisted by the public, will lead to an increased appropriation for the bureaucracy within two fiscal years.

There is an exception.

If the enforcement of the interpretation requires major expenditures for new equipment, the process will take only one fiscal year."

 This is the nature of government.

"It is fun to imagine that the TSA screeners get their jollies by subjecting people to the process. This is unlikely. Most employees in a bureaucracy want to decrease the number of tasks they are required to perform. Like all of us, the want more for less. Adding a step is not in their self-interest.

On the other hand, it is in the self-interest of their supervisor. Now we come to another law of bureaucracy, an extension of Parkinson's famous law: "Work expands so as to fill the time allotted for its completion." Professor Parkinson had another law, less known but more rigorous: promotions take place when a bureaucrat increases the number of employees subordinate to him. Parkinson worked out the numbers in the 1950s. It was no joke. There is a large body of academic articles devoted to this rule."

Let's not confuse the general with the specific. Of course screeners want to do less in general, but they still enjoy forcing hot, young women into the nude scanners to take pictures of them.

I'm all for improving my diet, but I've never heard of anything like this super-nutrient astaxanthin. It comes in krill oil.

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FREEDOM OF SPEECH:

Feds seize more websites associated with file sharing. This is an example of the feds using copyright as an excuse to oppress us. They're adding to their case for regulating the internet.

ECONOMY:

Exposing the myths that the gold standard would stifle the economy and that price deflation is bad.

HEALTH CARE:

Zombie food pyramid is probably healthier for people than these or the classic FDA food pyramid.

WAR ON DRUGS:

Because New York City has put so much tax on a pack of cigarettes, raising their price to $12 a pack, a thriving black market has risen.

Medical applications of marijuana.

The chemicals in the recently banned synthetic marijuana were designed by the government. Designers are already designing alternatives.

Willie Nelson busted for pot possession. What were border patrol agents doing boarding Nelson's bus? He hadn't crossed the border. Does anybody think Willie Nelson is a danger to society? I just thought of a rime: laws of aggression are tools of oppression. Maybe Willie can work that into a new song.

POLICE STATE:

The FBI seduced another poor sap into a phony bomb plot. Bill Anderson is suspicious of the timing. The FBI probably has dozens if not hundreds of these patsies on a string, and every time the public become restless, they'll give one a fake bomb then bust him and act like they're protecting us.

MISC:

Using private spy satellites for marketing research.

FREEDOM OF SPEECH:

Feds seize domain of torrent search engine.

"Aside from the fact that domains are being seized seemingly at will, there is a very serious problem with the action against Torrent-Finder. Not only does the site not host or even link to any torrents whatsoever, it actually only returns searches through embedded iframes which display other sites that are not under the control of the Torrent-Finder owner."

Neither principle, decency nor law matters to government.

FEDERAL RESERVE:

Video illustrates the world after the death of the dollar. Needless to day, this is also alarmist.

POLICE STATE:

Even the mainstream media is suggesting airport security should look for terrorists, not oppress everybody looking for terrorist tools. Other ruling class outlets will immediately attack this idea as racial profiling, but nobody is suggesting that. That would be nearly as stupid as looking for terrorist tools. Private sector security forces should behaviorally profile people, not racially profile them.

TSA agent busted for assault has previous record. This is a public service announcement that government attracts and rewards the most depraved, violent and perverted Americans to grope us.

FOREIGN POLICY:

Chinese government supposedly working to ease tensions in Korea. Really? Maybe they shouldn't have armed North Korea to the teeth if they didn't want it killing people. The Chinese government has created a monster it can no longer control. I think it's most likely that North Korea uses its nuke against China than anybody.

POLITICS:

Apparently Obama is almost as bad at basketball as being president. He had to get 12 stitches after having his mouth busted today.

MEDIA:

It's kind of fun to read the complete bull*** sometimes in the news. This article claims second hand smoke kills 600,000 people a year world-wide. I can remember growing up in a house stinking with clouds of smoke that literally hung like fog in our house. The curtains, previously neutral, reeked of smoke and were colored like phlegm coughed up from somebody dying from cancer. The same was true of all our furniture. Yet here I am today, 40 years later, healthy as a horse. As disgusting and putrid as second-hand smoke is, it's not a killer. I've lived it my entire life, from a childhood of smoking parents then subsequently taking many girlfriends who smokes as obsessively. You may wish 40 years of second-hand smoke had killed me, but it didn't, and not only that, I'm healthy as a horse. So shut the **** up about it you lying pieces of ****. Excuse me while I die of a stroke. ;)

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ECONOMY:

A reminder that Thanksgiving today is as much a product of capitalism as the first Thanksgiving was. Jamestown and Plymouth were almost destroyed by communism before private property and free markets were allowed, enabling the colonies to thrive.

TAX AND SPEND:

The claim that government owns all wealth and generously allows us to keep some of what we earn used to be considered a crank idea, but now it's becoming the new normal. All politicians think this no matter what they say, and Americans better figure that out.

"The notion that the absence of taxation constitutes government spending is setting the stage for the total perversion of genuine tax reform. It is being used in an effort to impose as much as a trillion dollars a year in new taxes disguised as a trillion dollars a year of reduced government spending."

Specifically regarding Obama's deficit commission:

"Erskine B. Bowles and Alan K. Simpson, the chairmen of President Obama's deficit reduction commission, have taken a hard look at these tax expenditures — and they don't like what they see. In their draft proposal, released earlier this month, they proposed doing away with tax expenditures, which together cost the Treasury over $1 trillion a year."

Have I mentioned that government has turned everything upside-down? And in case you think just Democrats think this way.

"This is the sum and substance of the concept of tax reform held not only by the Obama administration but also by cowardly Republicans and conservatives. Simpson was a Republican United States Senator from Wyoming for eighteen years. Mankiw, the author of the Times' article, was chairman of President Bush's Council of Economic Advisors from 2003 to 2005."

Republicans are just as bad.

"In sum, the danger exists that Left and Right are about to unite to accomplish a colossal political fraud in the form of enormous tax increases sold to an unsuspecting public as reductions in government spending. The American people need to stand up and refuse to accept any form of the absurdity that in not taxing them, the government is spending their money and that the path to lower spending and taxes is raising their taxes. The basis of tax reform must be reduced government spending, not higher taxes."

I knew that Bowles-Simpson plan had to be a fraud. I'm happy to see it exposed.

HEALTH CARE:

USA Today gets it right: eating meat and avoiding bread and potatoes keeps you slim. Decades ago, everybody knew that, but then the FDA created the disastrous food pyramid with fats and meats at the top and grains at the bottom, backed that pyramid up with subsidies and regulations, and sparked our obesity and diabetes epidemic. Government makes us sick as well as poor and depressed. Freedom makes us healthy, wealthy and happy.

GLOBAL WARMING:

Study links cosmic rays to cloud formation as expected. This is one mechanism linking solar activity to climate changes on earth.

WAR ON DRUGS:

FDA bans synthetic marijuana. Owatonna, Minnesota, Huntington, West Virgnina, Green Bay, Wisconsin, Scranton, Pennsylvania, Minnesota state government, Michigan state government and more were considering bans. Claim the ban is temporary.

POLICE STATE:

According to a TSA bureaucrat, children under 12 are still subject to a pat-down, though it will be a little different pat-down than for 13 and up. Pistole liked again.

TSA harasses and detains woman over breast milk, causes her to miss her flight and takes her personal information and keeps it. This seems to me to be a clear case of abrogation of rights under color of law. This supervisor and possibly the other two agents should be prosecuted.

TSA's false trade-off: we do not have to subject to their nude-scanners or gropes to be more safe. The private sector, airlines and airports, can provide significantly better security with much better privacy protection at a lower price.

The feds are installing 300 spy cameras in Houston.

Tourists don't want to come to the US anymore. Imagine that.

Police discover record cache of liquid explosives in San Diego, but that record is only eight or nine pounds. Still, you can't help but wonder if this guy is yet another American that was pushed to the end of his rope by our policy of wiping out Muslims in the middle east.

"In addition to bomb-making charges, Jakubec, 54, is charged with two bank robberies. Now being held in lieu of $5 million bail, he was on probation for a 2009 burglary conviction when he was arrested last week.

Authorities are investigating Jakubec's intentions. He is a Serbian national who is a naturalized U.S. citizen, and he lived in the house with his wife.

Authorities also found Wednesday more blasting caps, adding to others discovered in the past week, but they were not removed from the house, officials said."

"Outside court this week, Jakubec's wife, Marina Ivanova, was distraught.

"He's crazy," she told camera crews. "I think he lost his mind. He lost his mind or something. ... I know that he was collecting, obsessively collecting stuff."

Bomb technicians must work slowly inside the house because the slightest friction -- such as opening a drawer -- could ignite the explosives, Prendergast said.

Jakubec appears to be a hoarder, and the clutter of paper and boxes in the house makes the hunt for explosives more difficult, the assistant sheriff said. Bomb crews were wearing less gear so they can move about the house without brushing up against anything and accidentally triggering the explosives, he said."

You can't tell much from those descriptions.

POLITICS:

Tom Delay convicted of doing what every politician does. They should all be imprisoned. Armed robbery should be illegal for everybody. But this post documents the many ways in which Delay's political prosecution and trial were corrupt. It's twisted to have corrupt prosecutors prosecuting a corrupt aristocrat in a corrupt court, but that's what America has come to. Another explanation of why this trial was so corrupt and the implications.

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ECONOMY:

Only government could be so incompetent as to allow a computer crash to crash the real estate market of entire city for months.

Thanks to government interventions in the marketplace, corporate profits were the highest on record last quarter.

The economy isn't adding jobs because there are no new startup businesses because government has made starting a business so expensive and difficult.

"Some new data reported by the Wall Street Journal helps get to the core of the problem in greater detail. In the current environment, which the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) laughably calls a recovery, business start-ups of job-creating companies have not kept up with closings.

As compared with other recession aftermaths, new businesses are not hiring as they once did. The number of companies with at least one employee continues to fall at a rate we’ve not seen in 18 years. Everyone speaks of this as a recovery, but the numbers don’t add up. New jobs in new companies are appearing a rate 15% less than the last recovery."

This isn't rocket science.

EDUCATION:

School bans sixth graders from bringing pencils and pens to school.

"The memo said students would no longer be allowed to bring writing implements to school. It said pencils would be provided for students in class and any students caught with pencils or pens after Nov. 15 would face disciplinary action for having materials 'to build weapons.'"

You can't make this stuff up.

HEALTH CARE:

Is this really Obama's biggest lie?

"No matter how we reform health care, we will keep this promise to the American people. If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor, period. If you like your health care plan, you'll be able to keep your health care plan, period. No one will take it away, no matter what."

I think his claim that he would reduce spending was his biggest lie.

GLOBAL WARMING:

Yet another climate fraud busted for manipulating data.

POLICE STATE:

Another government/TSA double standard.

"A woman reports that TSA agents at the Orlando airport leered at her build, and then singled her out for “additional screening.” Say, weren’t we all lectured endlessly about sexual harassment by the State and its media? As Karen De Coster shows, this sort of conduct is now routine for the government. Let some businessman tell an inappropriate joke at his office, and OMG, he must be destroyed. But federal attacks on women, children, the elderly, and the handicapped are now routine for “security” reasons."

They're ripping prosthetic breasts from cancer survivors, but if you make a joke some woman deems offensive, they will destroy you.

We were just saying some young men should wear speedos to the airport to protest the TSA, and now someone has.

Advocate for a 60s-style sit-in to shut down airports. This is a divisive tactic, and I don't support it because it aggresses against the free will of fliers. For that reason, I think it would backfire. The best way to put an end to TSA's abuse is to not fly and to write letters to the airlines and airports telling them TSA is the reason you're not flying. And keep talking about it.

Apparently now 61 percent of Americans disapprove of TSA's tactics. This is a big shift from 81 percent supporting TSA recently. Keeping this in the news is working. Aggressing against fliers is a very bad idea at any time, and it's doubly stupid when the momentum is going the right way.

I'm surprised only senior federal aristocrats and bureaucrats are exempt from TSA. I thought all federal aristocrats would exempt themselves.

Pretty young women should especially consider alternative travel arraignments to flying.

It seems that in order to head off delays from national opt-out day today, TSA turned off many nude-scanners and didn't grope many people.

WAR:

The case for war in Afghanistan took big hit when a study discovered 92 percent of Afghans had never heard of 9/11. The warmongers tell us the Taliban are closely aligned with al Qaeda. Wrong. They're closer to al Qaeda than they are to us because they have more in common, but the Taliban doesn't care about the US except they want us out of their country. And who can blame them?

The US military is wargaming economic collapse and societal breakdown in the US. I think it makes more sense to prevent the economic collapse by dramatically reducing the size and scope of government to Constitutional limits at least. But that's not what Obama wants. He wants economic collapse and to unleash the military on us. He admires Lincoln.

MEDIA:

New York Times claim the TSA outrage is manufactured by anti-Obama politicians. It must be weird to live in such a bubble that you don't realize that people other than politicians and their accomplice press think, feel and act. While some politicians jumped on the bandwagon, the people are leading this resistance and have done so from the start. Chris Matthews agrees. What's so twisted about this is, if George Bush's TSA had implemented these tactics, the leftist media would have howled up a storm.

Larry O'Loser admits to being a socialist. What a surprise.

MISC:

First they came... by Pastor Martin Niemöller

Resisting TSA Perverts a Test of American Character

Resisting TSA Perverts a Test of American Character
by Mark Luedtke

Imagine if armed thugs forced you to strip naked while they took pictures. Worse, imagine they did the same thing to your spouse and children, and you were helpless to stop them. Imagine if they lewdly molested your children while they forced you to watch. Imagine if they chuckled while they told you it was for your own good and offered a choice between the nude pictures and the grope. Does having that choice make you free?

You don’t have to imagine. All you have to do is take a flight out of Cincinnati, Columbus or many other US airports.

At least if the assailants weren’t employed by the government, there’s a chance these perverts would be arrested, prosecuted and imprisoned as sex offenders. But because these sexual predators wear government uniforms, they are legally molesting adults, children and the elderly constantly in dozens of US airports.

Because government is funded by theft and wields a monopoly on violence, it already attracts the most power-hungry and depraved individuals to government jobs. Now that TSA molests Americans as a matter of policy, TSA is also attracting the most perverted individuals in the country. Joining the TSA enables every freak that ever dreamed of molesting a child, or anybody else, to do so with impunity and to get your drivers license info for future stalking. And anybody who would be surprised to find that pretty young women seem to be singled out for “secondary screening” more frequently than others is hopelessly naive.

TSA told us to trust them. They told us the nude-scanners took blurry pictures and couldn’t store images. Both were quickly exposed as lies. US Marshals in an Orlando courthouse were just busted for storing 35,000 low-res nude-scanner images. You can bet TSA perverts are sharing hi-res nude pictures and notching their tasers after every grope. Nude pictures of you or your child will be posted on the internet soon. TSA tells us this is for our safety. The Israelis, who know a thing or two about thwarting terrorists, know better. TSA has never captured a terrorist. The same government that gave us the Tuskegee experiment tells us the nude-scanners are safe. Doctors disagree.

The horror stories are piling up fast. One pretty young woman frequently gets singled out for molestation. When she complained, agents handcuffed her to a chair and tore up her ticket. TSA molested an old woman in wheelchair. The most sickening video I’ve seen is a mother holding her petrified three year old daughter while a TSA agent molests her and her father videos it. Government-worship has so thoroughly corrupted many Americans that parents now betray their children by assisting government molesters. Anybody predicting this ten years ago would have been dismissed as paranoid. Now it’s normal.

I can’t help but see a parallel to the humiliating, dehumanizing tactics of the TSA to the way the Nazis stripped and dehumanized Jews before they exterminated them. Granted our government isn’t exterminating us - yet - but the Nazis did not appear out of the blue. As Hayek explained in The Road to Serfdom, the rise of the Nazis was a consequence of the collapse of the socialist society before them. The rise of the strongman is the last stop on the road to serfdom. The Weimar Republic put in place the tools the Nazis used to enslave the Germans and subsequently exterminate the Jews. Those tools included creation of the total welfare state, government control of health care, and a money-printing system that destroyed the German currency, collapsing the economy and government. The parallels to modern America are terrifying including how Germans thought they were free just as Americans do.

Those who say it can’t happen here are delusional. It is happening here with frightening speed, and it will get worse until we stop it or it’s too late to stop.

Stopping our rampaging government is the ultimate test of American character. Government wants to use TSA tactics on the streets, in businesses and at sporting events. Mobile scanners are already in operation. Over the last decade, government built the legal and physical infrastructure it needs for the final transformation of the US into Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union. Cameras watch from every street corner, President Obama claims the power to murder any American by presidential fiat, and Ben Bernanke is destroying the dollar and dragging us deeper into the Greatest Depression. Government courts uphold oppression. If Americans don’t reject government oppression fast, the strongman will soon rise here if he hasn’t already.

Because its abuses are so gratuitous, the TSA has become the focus of resistance. Pilot and flight attendant unions and the press are complaining, but they only want a narrow exemption for the rich, powerful and politically connected like themselves. Because businesses must satisfy customers, unlike government, many resistance sites advocate writing travel companies and boycotting airline travel. Travel companies are feeling the heat. But in order for our country to survive, Americans must overcome all government oppression. Refuse to submit, force TSA to retreat and then let’s build on that victory.

How should the US respond to North Korea's artillery attack on South Korea?

North Korea launched an artillery attack on South Korea that killed two and wounded at least 17 more including civilians. North Korea's government claims it may continue attacking the South.

"The North had claimed the South had provoked its attack by carrying out military operations near the border and firing across it. 

Seoul said it had been conducting military drills in the area beforehand but had fired west, not north."

How should the US respond to North Korea's artillery attack on South Korea?

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SOCIALISM:

The Teamsters are attacking Toys-R-Us because of labor disputes, not unsafe products.

ECONOMY:

Big business is enjoying its biggest profits in decades because Bernanke, Obama and Congress are robbing the American people blind and transferring our wealth to big businesses. The only power the Fed has is to steal our money through inflation. Taxes also steal our money. All government spending is paid for with stolen money (even borrowed money must be paid off with stolen money). And all that stolen money in the hands of the ruling class is always used to profit the ruling class at our expense.

TAX AND SPEND:

Great chart shows exactly what I wrote earlier about government turning our world upside down, turning virtue into vice and vice into virtue. As the chart shows, because of all the government handouts,

"In Entitlement America, The Head Of A Household Of Four Making Minimum Wage Has More Disposable Income Than A Family Making $60,000 A Year"

As wonderful as it is to have a chart showing this, I hope nobody is surprised by this.


It looks like the bailout of Ireland's government was pushed by the EU to benefit banks, not requested by Ireland's government.

REGULATION:

If you're the SEC, with your image destroyed by the Bernie Maddof failure, the failure to notice the Wall Street melt down before it happened, and best known for your regulators looking at porn on the job, what would be the best publicity stunt you could pull? Attack hedge funds, wildly unpopular with most Americans, for insider trading and leak news of the assault so you could frame the story on your terms. Laws against insider trading are bogus. First, it's a demand to keep investors ignorant, which makes the markets less efficient. Second, it's criminalizes profiting from valuable information for a few when profiting from valuable information is how economies work, and everybody else is free to do so. But worst of all, it's an act of aggression against free people.

"The worst part of it all is that hedge funds have been forced to instruct their traders to be careful what they say on the phones, for fear the phones are tapped. ZH thumbs the situation this way, "Traders at two $10bn+ HFs told not to speak to sales coverage on fears all conversations bugged."

As I have said before, the fear that someone may be monitoring your conversation is one of the most evil fears that a government can bring down on a nation. I continue to believe it is a form of solitary confinement. Wall Street is now in partial solitary confinement, as a result of some power tripping egomaniacs in government. Today it is Wall Street, tomorrow it could be your street. Welcome to the USSR."

In 1984, nobody knew when or if the government was listening.

FEDERAL RESERVE:

Fed minutes from earlier this month, they delay releasing them to keep us in the dark, show that Bernanke met some resistance with his QE2 plan, but he won the day anyway.

The supposedly smart and wise men at the Fed were wrong again and had to revise down their projections for US growth for the next two years. I don't think Bernanke has ever been right, yet we've empowered him to destroy our economy, and that's exactly what he's doing.

Because of the rising price of rare metals, crooks are stealing catalytic converters.

Theory that newfound awareness of Austrian business cycle theory is keeping businessmen from falling for the Fed's low-interest rate trap. Or maybe it's the banks since they still refuse to lend.

HEALTH CARE:

Bill proposes making it easy for states to opt out of worst provisions of Obamacare. This is another divide and conquer strategy. By getting rid of the worst offenses, they plan to make the bulk of Obamacare palatable and permanent. Don't fall for it. This is how Republicans plan to share in the looting like I predicted all along.

This guy gets it. Republicans are only claiming they want to repeal and replace Obamacare as a means of defeating Obama in 2012, then they'll drop that issue. As Obama, Pelosi and Democrats understood when they forced Obamacare down our throats, Obamacare, with modifications to allow Republicans to share in the looting, is here to stay.

GLOBAL WARMING AND ENERGY:

CO2 emissions dropped in 2009. The enviromarxists consider this a good thing proving that stunting human development is their goal.

Obama plans to push forward with his regulation of CO2 even though Congress can't pass a bill to that effect. That's because he's an evil dictator.

Did we really need a study to tell us that global warming saves lives? Don't we all know that more people die from excessive cold than heat? This is common knowledge. But we still need the study to get out there because the frauds will stop at nothing to force world-wide communism on us. We need every piece of ammunition we can get to stop them.

Joe Bastardi is everywhere including making north pole sea ice predictions on wattsupwiththat.com

POLICE STATE:

Imagine how warped these little kids are becoming by being forced by their parents to submit to these TSA gropes and watching their parents submitting to them as well.

Many people disputed my claim that TSA's powers make it a haven for perverts. Former Orlando TSA agent just pleaded no contest to child molestation.

What's the real reason TSA forces us to into nude-scanners?

"The companies with multimillion-dollar contracts to supply American airports with body-scanning machines more than doubled their spending on lobbying in the past five years and hired several high-profile former government officials to advance their causes in Washington, government records show."

Oh yeah. Because it enriches the aristocrats at our expense. That's the nature of government.

Great parody video shows the Japanese understand the TSA all too well. In keeping with the theme that government turns virtue into vice and vice into virtue, now the TSA wants us to think they're the victims. Poor babies. Only nobody is forcing TSA agents to pat us down or look at us on nude scanners. They're the ones using force against us, not vice-versa.

Head TSA thug says flying is not a right, but he fails to mention where the Constitution gives government the power to harass fliers.

Prison guards are not allowed to molest prisoners the way TSA is molesting fliers. More on the double-standard of TSA porn and molestation:

"The Chattanoogan reports that a man pleaded guilty in federal court in Chattanooga to downloading child pornography on his computer. For that, he will serve 80 months in prison and have 15 years of supervised release.

However, had he been working for the TSA he not only could have downloaded naked images of children (now 13 and above), but he could also have had the opportunity to molest boys and men. Ah! The privileges of wearing that special costume!"

I'm afraid Americans will never get over badge-worship.

It's nice to read somebody else who shares my feeling about how we're marching the same path the Germans went down that spawned the Nazis.

"I believe one of the most serious misunderstandings about totalitarianism is that it arrives as a full package that requires no assembly. That it is put on the people, like a winter coat. All at one time, and in full view for all to see."

Exactly. Nobody is saying the US today is like Nazi Germany in 1940. But the Nazis weren't teleported down from a spaceship to seize power. The tools that enabled them to rise to power were put in place decades earlier, the strife that enabled them to come to power was created decades earlier, and our government has very similar tools and is creating similar strife today.

More concern about the dangers of nude-scanner radiation.

Now Janet Napolitano admits she plans to expand TSA's police state tactics to other forms of transportation. Soon you'll have to have a body cavity search to get in your own car.

Author completely misses the significance of this poll which says 80 percent of Americans support the nude scanners. The problem isn't the poll. The problem is most Americans don't fly, so they don't care about taking nude pictures or molesting the ones who do. This is another example of how the ruling class divides us in order to conquer us, and they don't even have to break a sweat. All they have to do is run a poll. She does get this part right:

"All summer, while the perverts were installing their gizmos at airports, the local media reported how the agency was “increasing passenger security” and “adding a new layer to its multi-layered approach to fighting terrorism.” Sprinkled through the stories would be quotes from passengers cheering this desecration of the Constitution. One might lodge a mild protest — “Hey, maybe it’s going a bit far, but I don’t know, it’s a new world out there since 9/11” — but the three or four others praised the TSA and pledged cooperation."

The media manipulated public opinion before it took the poll, as it always does. Only people with principle, and there's far too few of those, and people who have been subjected to the abuse are resisting.

Ron Paul reports on being groped.

"Recently, Ron Paul had to go through his first invasive pat-down at the airport; his knee replacements bar him from the gulagoscan. This is one of the most well-mannered men I know, but after four very hard jabs to his genitals, he asked the blue-gloved TSA agent: “How can you live with yourself, feeling up strange men all day long?”

“I love my job,” sneered the goon."

I'm reminded of the tax collectors for the sheriff of Nottingham.

WAR:

Kind of like a broken clock, Barney Frank gets one half right.

"“It may be possible for a wealthy, western society, heavily to intervene in a non-western, non-white poor society and help them out but probably not us,” Rep. Frank said while participating in a panel discussion at the libertarian CATO Institute about reducing the United States’ defense budget.

“Given, much of what I think is unfair, the anger about America, the jealousies, whatever, we’re often the least useful people to go in there and all we do is make people angrier at us.”"

The same would be true of any outsiders who come in and start killing locals. Think about how the Iraqis turned on al Qaeda's foreign fighters in the Anbar awakening. There's no need for Frank to insult Americans. Nation-building is a centrally planned activity and is therefore doomed to fail no matter who does it.

"“So, on the one hand it is our obligation to be the world’s protector and we are pressed to do that. Well, they cut back on their military but on the other hand, they object to doing anything other than cutting the deficit. I will be again at the votes and they will talk about, ‘well maybe it’s time for the dollar not to be world’s standard.’ My answer to them is the Pentagon shouldn’t be the world’s military; if you really feel threatened, defend yourself,” he added."

But he's 100 percent correct on that one.

"Frank also expressed disapproval of the proposed missile defense system supported by President Barack Obama and NATO which is designed to defend countries like Poland and Bulgaria. The system will reportedly cost approximately $273 million over 10 years."

And that one too. Why should we pay for Europe's missile defense? Too bad Frank, if he has to be in Congress, is on the finance committee instead of some military watchdog.

Even if starting wars and nation building all over the middle east was a good idea, here's why it's going to end soon, and we would be smart to end it intelligently on our terms.

"According to the US government, 41.8 million Americans now receive food stamps. Meanwhile, Washington is spending $7 billion monthly on its nine-year old occupation of Afghanistan, not to mention billions more on trying to build an obedient Afghan army and to pay of Pakistani politicians and general."

The same is true with the welfare state. End it now, intelligently, instead of allowing everything to crash.

"All the platitudes, doubletalk, synthetic optimism and fudging at the NATO summit could not conceal the fact that for all their soldiers, fighter aircraft, heavy bombers, tanks, helicopter gunships, armies of mercenaries, and wizardly electronic gear, the western powers are being slowly beaten by a bunch of lightly-armed Afghan farmers and mountain tribesmen."

Of course they are. They're fighting in their homeland. We're the foreign fighters trying use violence to force a central plan on them. It's doomed to fail. Even the Pentagon recognizes that Afghan violence is at an all time high. And now Obama is bribing Israel?

"Obama came fresh to Lisbon from groveling before Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, pleaded with Israel for a token three-month freeze on settlement building in exchange for a huge bribe from Washington of advanced US F-35 stealth warplanes, promises of UN vetoes, and raising to $1 billion US arms stockpiled for Israel’s use.

Israel will likely accept Obama’s huge bribe, but with even more sweeteners, and not before rubbing his face in the dirt to show who really calls the shots in US Mideast policy. George H.W. Bush, the last president to tangle with Israel, came out far the worse for the experience and was not re-elected."

It's about time the Europeans got fed up, but through NATO we fund so much of their welfare states, they couldn't just refuse. All welfare is poisonous to both provider and recipient.

"While the US heads deeper into war and debt, its dragooned European allies are fed up with what was supposed to have been a limited "police action" to eliminate al-Qaida bases.

Instead, Europe got a full-scale war against Afghanistan’s Pashtun tribes raising uneasy memories of its 19^th-century colonial "pacifications." This is Britain’s fifth invasion of Afghanistan."

This was hasn't been about al Qaeda since the first few months, if it ever was.

"In a moment of unusual candor, British Defense Chief Gen. Sir David Richards, warned, "NATO now needs to plan for a 30 or 40 year role." In short, permanent occupation. It’s worth recalling that US forces have been implanted in South Korea and Japan since the end of World War II."

And John McCain advocated this position. No thanks.

"Afghan president Hamid Karzai is demanding the US scale back military operations, including night raids and death squads, that inflict heavy civilian casualties. Washington counters that Karzai is mentally unstable."

So now we're calling the puppet we installed names.

"America’s rational for invading Afghanistan was to destroy al-Qaida. But CIA chief Leon Panetta recently admitted there were no more than 50 al-Qaida operatives left in Afghanistan. The rest – no more than few hundred - fled to Pakistan years ago.So what are 110,000 US troops and 40,000 NATO troops doing in Afghanistan? Certainly not nation-building. Most reports show Afghanistan is in worse poverty and distress than before the US invasion."

As I pointed out above.

MISC:

The people developing the not-mosque at not-ground zero are applying for federal funds. Have I mentioned that government has turned our world upside down? Virtue is now a vice, and vice is now a virtue.

This is why Mike Brown is the worst owner in NFL history:

"And, the reality is, the Cincinnati Bengals are content to lose football games because the belief is that the team ultimately determines success and failure by profit and loss, and even though they are small market and even though they are low revenue, they don't spend a lot of money so they Cincinnati Bengals are financially successful year in and year out."

That's exactly right. Man I wish this site would change its imagery. Oh man I love the idea of making a sitcom about Mike Brown's ineptitude. Coach meets Major League.

Free kibbles

FREEDOM OF SPEECH:

Apparently the FCC is considering pushing net neutrality just days before Christmas while everybody is distracted with the holiday. I hope this leak is a trial balloon that gets popped. This is bad news.

RIGHT TO KEEP AND BEAR ARMS:

Man imprisoned for brandishing a weapon on his own property to ward off a trespasser. Government has turned our country upside-down.

SOCIALISM:

This claim by union leaders that TSA isn't doing enough to protect poor, little TSA employees from the big, bad public looks like a transparent ploy on the part of the union leaders to entice TSA workers to unionize.

TAX AND SPEND:

Here's a little fact that should be self-evident, but it never hurts to write it down and pass it on:

"In the late 1980s, some economists at Ohio University got together to do a little study for the congressional Joint Economic Committee. They wanted to know what happens when the government increases taxes and therefore collects more money for its coffers. Did government spending grow or did our debts shrink? These bean counters worked and slaved over their research and calculators and came up with something that is now known as the $1.58 study. This is what they found: "Every new dollar of new taxes led to more than one dollar of new spending by Congress. Subsequent revisions of the study over the next decade found similar results.""

That's the nature of government and something to keep in mind whenever an aristocrat claims he wants to raise taxes to balance the budget.

Warren Buffet wants rich people to pay higher taxes, but nothing is stopping him and his fellow billionaires from donating a bunch of money to the government. But I would ask him not to. The more money takes out of the productive private sector and hands over to the parasitic political economy, the poorer we'll all be. I think Buffet knows who butters his bread, the government, and he's working hard to win points with the aristocrats.

I don't agree with the claim that nobody knows what taxes they'll have to pay come Jan. 1. Of course we know. The Bush tax cuts are going to expire. Until Congress does something to change that, you plan for that.

REGULATION:

Regulators have held up Comcast's purchase of NBC Universal for a year, but one of the bureaucrats responsible for the hold up calls Comcast's naming of a new management staff for NBC Universal before government has blessed the deal "presumptuous and arrogant". I bet he's incapable of grasping the irony.

HEALTH CARE:

Notes on the the FDA's misnamed Food Safety boondoggle and banning caffeine.

Americans' salt intake hasn't changed in 50 years.

"The study also noted that although Americans' salt intake has remained relatively constant for almost 50 years, their rates of high blood pressure and heart disease have increased in the past 20 years. But America's ever-rising obesity rates may play a more critical role in this rise than salt intake, the researchers said."

"The average salt intake of the Americans in the Harvard study is similar to that found in international studies, the editorial said. This similarity suggests that humans may need a set amount of salt and are hard-wired to seek it, said McCarron, an adjunct professor with the department of nutrition at University of California-Davis.

McCarron led a 2009 study that analyzed urine samples in 19,151 people in 33 countries over a 24-year period. The average daily sodium intake was 3,726 milligrams a day, even across diverse populations and diets, and with no evidence of change over time. In a 12-year study of more than 13,000 people from Switzerland, also published in 2009, people averaged around 3,680 milligrams a day. "It's spooky how consistent this number is," said McCarron."

Salt regulations aren't about safety. They're about control.

GLOBAL WARMING AND ENERGY:

Al Gore admits corn ethanol was a bad policy. Knock me over with a feather. It's not often such an accomplished crook admits that stealing people's money at the point of a gun and using it to enrich others is bad policy.

POLICE STATE:

More evidence the nude scanners are not about safety; they're about enabling the ruling class to lord power over the rest of us.

"'Why not just distort the image into something grotesque so that there isn't anything titillating or exciting about it?' asks Wattenburg, adding that the modification is so simple that 'a 6-year-old could do the same thing with Photoshop... It's probably a few weeks' modification of the program.' Wattenburg said he was rebuffed when he offered the concept to Department of Homeland Security officials four years ago."

What would the perverts do if they couldn't have real nude photos to ogle?

Now even George Will is jumping in the anti-TSA bandwagon. I'm happy for all the followers, but you can tell the people with principles from the people without: the people with principles have been against the TSA all along. I gave up flying after I was forced to remove my shoes one time. The bloggers at lewrockwell.com led the way in documenting the abuses of the nude scanners and gropes. There's no reason for any of it but oppression. The people who jumped on the bandwagon after passengers became outraged are just opportunists.

It turns out that the radiation from TSA nude-scanners is as likely to kill you as a terrorist.

POLICE STATE:

I don't know why Boortz is so convinced Obama would beat Palin in 2012. I don't think this is a fait accompli by any stretch of the imagination. I hope neither of them run, but I think this matchup is highly likely. Antipathy toward Bush and Republicans empowered the most radical leftist in our lifetimes to win the Democrat nomination and ultimately the presidency. Now even worse antipathy toward Obama and Democrats is likely to lead to the nomination of a perceived Republican extremist like Palin. And I see no reason why that antipathy couldn't put her in the White House where she'll immediately earn even worse antipathy because she's not radical in the least.

MISC:

From Boortz:

"If you are an ex-firefighter who has retired early, pulling down $74,624 a year in disability pay for asthma and other lung ailments, it is probably best not to be featured in the news competing in martial-arts kickboxing matches ..."

Power corrupts. Government is power. Therefore government corrupts. This is what government has done to the time-honored noble profession of firefighters.

This guy seems to get it:

"It is not incumbent on a diagnostician to prescribe a remedy, and it would be quackery for him to do so when he has misgivings as to its curative value. It may be that the struggle between Society and the State is inevitable; it may be in the nature of things for the struggle to continue until mutual destruction clears the ground for the emergence of a new Society, to which a new political establishment attaches itself to effect a new doom.

Perhaps the malignancy is inherent in man. It would be silly to suggest that four-footed males, driven by the reproductive urge, ought to know better than engage in deathly battles over possession of females, and it is possible that the historical struggle between the social organization and the political organization is likewise meant to be."

Obviously both freedom and following a leader have both conferred survival advantages on populations throughout mammal, ape and human evolution, so we're stuck with a constant struggle between the two. The way to improve our lives is to identify and implement specific reductions in the power of government, tie the resulting improvements in our lives to those reductions in power, then use that as a basis for pushing for further reductions. If we can tie effect to cause, people will act to improve their lives. The problem we have in the US right now is we don't have time for a long process of this. We have to dramatically reduce the size and scope of government ASAP or America as we know it will not survive. Fortunately for us we have a powerful tool to help us: the Constitution. If we could elect a president who would nullify every unconstitutional program, bureaucracy, regulation, law, etc., we could quickly return to a trajectory of greatness. Unfortunately I've seen no evidence voters have reached that point yet. Maybe by 2012 they will have, there's always hope, but I strongly doubt it. And states might be pulling out of the union before 2016. 2012 might be the last opportunity to save America as we know it.

"Under primitive conditions, he relies on his own powers of resistance to robbery, his personal strength plus such weapons as he has at his disposal. That is his Government. Since this protective occupation interferes with his primary business of producing satisfactions, and is frequently ineffective, he is quite willing to turn it over to a specialist when the size and opulence of Society call for such a service. Government provides the specialized social service of safeguarding the marketplace.

The distinctive feature of this service is that it enjoys a monopoly of coercion. That is the necessary condition for the conduct of the business; any division of authority would defeat the purpose for which Government is set up."

This is a pretty good analysis up to this point, but it fails to acknowledge that government evolves out of family. Even a primitive man doesn't trust only to himself for defense against predation, unless he's been isolated for some reason, in which case he'll quickly die. He trusts to his family. Then to his extended family. Then to his clan. And all of those institutions have leaders. A father. A patriarch. A clan chief. This forms his government. The ideal of government is born from these familial instincts, and that's why we can no more abolish government than we can abolish family.

"Yet, the fact remains that Government is a human organization, consisting of men who are exactly like the men they serve. That is, they too seek to satisfy their desires with the minimum of exertion, and they too are insatiable in their appetites. In addition to the run-of-the-mill desires that possess all men, Government personnel acquire one peculiar to their occupation: the adulation showered on them because they alone exercise coercion. They are people apart.

The honorifics that stem from the exercise of power arouse a passion for power, particularly with men whose capacities would go quite unnoticed in the marketplace, and the temptation is strong to expand the area of power; the negative function of protection is too confining for men of ambition. The tendency then in the world of officialdom is to assume a capacity for positive functions, to invade the marketplace, to undertake to regulate, control, manage, and manipulate its techniques.

In point of fact, it does nothing of the kind, since the techniques are self-operating, and all that political power can accomplish by its interventions is to control human behavior; it effects compliance by the threat of physical punishment. That, indeed, is the be-all and end-all of political power. Yet, such is the makeup of the human that he looks up to, and sometimes worships, the fellow human who dominates his will, and it is this acquired sense of superiority that is the principal profit of officialdom."

In other words, power corrupts. But because the governed see the people in government through the lens of family leaders, they fail to acknowledge it unless the corruption passes the threshold of that instinct. And the act of voting for somebody further blinds them to that corruption. That's why people recognize that all other politicians are corrupt, but they continue to vote for theirs over and over.

"The transition from negative Government to positive State is marked by the use of political power for predatory purposes. In its pursuit of power, officialdom takes into consideration the ineluctable something-for-nothing passion, and proceeds to win the support of segments of Society bent on feathering their nests without picking feathers."

This the first good definition of state I've read, and it makes sense how the mises.org people use it.

"The instrument that puts the State into a bargaining position with its favorites is taxation. In the beginning, when the simple community sets up Government, it is admitted that its operatives cannot be productive and therefore have to be supported by the marketplace. Services must be paid for.

But the manner of paying for Government service poses a problem: taxes are compulsory charges, not voluntary payments, and their collection has to be entrusted to the very people who live by them; the compulsory power entrusted to them is used in the collection of their own wages."

This observation about the importance of taxes is why I advocate taking away the federal government's power to tax. As the agent of the states, the federal government should be forced to subsist on voluntary contributions from the states.

"Pushing on fast through the biography of political institutions, the practice of buying the support of privileged and subsidized groups sloughs off when the State becomes self-sufficient; that is, when the marketplace is completely under its domination. The State then becomes the only privileged class. Custom and necessity reduce Society to a condition of subservience to the bureaucracy and the police, the components of the State."

This is the tipping point we've passed in the US. Only a radical response by voters like the one I hoped for above will save us. Have many times have I written that our government is conquering us?

"This condition is currently known as totalitarianism, but it is in fact nothing but conquest, the conquest of Society by the State. So that, whether or not the State originated in conquest, as some historians hold, the end result of unchecked political institutions is the same: Society is enslaved."

This is the first essay I've read by somebody who really gets it. Excepting the omission that our instinct for government grows out of our family instinct, this guy seems to really get it.

"Sometimes nature will for a while impose abstinence, but the record shows that man is quite capable of overcoming such obstacles to his ambitions. The obstacle he does not seem able to overcome is his inclination to predation, which gives rise to the institution of the State; it is this institution that ultimately induces a climate of uselessness, of lack of interest in striving, and thus destroys the civilization it feeds upon. Or so the record shows: every civilization that declined or was lost carried an all-powerful State on its back."

"At any rate, history tells us, a civilization no more than gets started when a political institution attaches itself to it, feeds on it, and in the end devours it. And the roundelay starts all over again."

There you go. So if we want to reverse this process, we need to nullify every unconstitutional aspect of our federal government somehow, then we need to convince people that the improvement in their lives came from that reduction in the size and scope of government. I like the silver bullet idea of electing a president to do it, but it's not realistic. That's why Tom Wood's book Nullification is so important.