A friend was lamenting today about having to throw away an expensive bottle of hairspray in order to pass through airport security. That would be bad enough, but then she commented that it was her own fault. That is the truly tragic part. We have all been assaulted with the TSA’s ridiculous propaganda for so […]
Friends, neighbors, and relatives, lend me your ears. This is a supposedly free country, where we subscribe to various notions of personal liberty, privacy, and periodically reaffirm our commitment to things like the Castle Doctrine, which states that a man’s home is his castle. In other words, what goes on within the walls of our […]
A few recent stories in the news have caught my attention, so I wanted to comment on them. First, CNN ran an editorial on hate crimes. I already responded to it in the comments, but I wanted to address one other point the authors made. In the last paragraph, they make the claim (without a […]
A survey by the Library of Congress in 1991 showed that Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand was the most influential book in America, second only to the Bible. I run into very few people who have actually read it, and at 1,200 pages, it is daunting. However, in recent months there has been a resurgence […]
Allow me to introduce you to the Peterkins. If you’ve never been exposed to this book, I strongly encourage you to read it. Especially the first story in the book. As this article describes: The charm of the story is not in the plot, but in the telling, building up layers of complication, and the […]
We all know what this law says, or at least most of us do. Why is it that so many people who work in government either forget this law, or believe they are exempt from it? I had to comment on this story which brilliantly illustrates this point. The State of Hawaii is ending its […]
Last winter I received a rather curious letter in the mail. It was from a company calling themselves RedLightViolations.com. I’ve seen other scams by mail, and at first glance, I thought that this was just another. It purported to be a citation, issued by authority of the State of Illinois, for running a red light. […]
If you were born within the last forty years, chances are good that you share a healthy skepticism when it comes to claims by our government that the Social Security system can be repaired. We’ve been hearing the gloom-and-doom predictions for at least the last ten years that when the Baby Boomers begin to retire, […]
When discussing individual rights, I like to borrow a concept from software engineering and say that human rights are digital in the sense that one either possesses them or they do not. All humans possess a right to property, a right to self-defense, and the right to freely contract, for example, while they do not […]
If I ever write a book about my conversion to anarcho-capitalism, I think this will be its title. Because this is easily the number one most-uttered response by those to whom I explain my belief that centralized government is immoral and must be abolished. What about the roads, indeed. On the one hand, it is […]
If you’re like most Americans, you haven’t been following the story of Ed and Elaine Brown, because it has enjoyed very little coverage by the major news media. But the story has been unfolding for six months now, and unless you’re from New Hampshire (where local newspapers seem to be the only outlets covering this […]
I wish there existed an organization (and there probably does, I just haven’t looked) dedicated to commemorating September 10. Dedicated to remembering what life in this country was like before September 11, 2001. Before this country lost its collective mind, and embarked on what The Onion aptly called “Operation Piss Off the Planet.” When you […]