I’m Not The Only One

I recently came across this YouTube video which was shared by a friend on Facebook.

The film focuses on Joseph Kony, the leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), which has conducted countless raids on the people of Uganda.  The raids primarily consist of kidnapping boys and forcing them into their army and kidnapping girls to use as sex slaves as well as whatever items of value they find.  The Ugandan military forced the LRA out of Uganda in 2005.  Since then Kony and his army has found refuge in neighboring countries South Sudan, Congo and the Central African Republic, pillaging and engaging in child abduction in Uganda’s border villages. (more…)

The Free State Project recently reached 1,000 participants living in New Hampshire, shortly after Free Staters celebrated the project’s tenth birthday. The Free State Project, of which I am a part, is an effort to get 20,000 liberty-minded (libertarian, Constitutionalist, anarchist, voluntaryist, etc.) individuals to move to New Hampshire to keep it one of the freest and most prosperous states in the nation and keep it from going in the statist direction of other places like New York and California. As of today there are 11,665  participants, 1,010 of whom have already made the move.

The milestone got a fair amount of press, though a negative comment on one article did get my attention and prompted me to write this piece.  I tried to find this article again, and after trying for a week, was unsuccessful and decided I wanted to move on with this piece.  The commenter basically suggested the Free State Project was doomed to fail because it took ten years for 1,000 liberty lovers to move to New Hampshire while thousands of Massholes move north to New Hampshire every year. (more…)

One of the reasons I quit journalism after seven years in the business was because I got tired of defending journalism and the biased, unethical things that reporters and editors would do on an almost daily basis.  Sure, some offenses are more defensible than others, but they still contradict what journalists say they actually do.

One of my biggest pet peeves is, during election time, when newspapers publish a list of which candidates they endorse in the upcoming race.   Often this is a list of political candidates who have purchased the most advertising space from a particular newspaper.  In some cases, an editorial would run explaining why the newspaper had endorsed the candidate.

At the Queens Courier, the first newspaper at which I worked, candidates were able to bribe the publisher to publish an article smearing their opponents with less than flattering information that was ancient history and had no relevance whatsoever aside from the fact that a candidate had paid for said article to be published.

How can the editorial board of any newspaper say with a straight face that they are unbiased when they clearly make no effort to hide their bias and publish a list of the candidates they support?  How many people actually go out and vote for a candidate simply because their newspaper endorses them?  Is it any surprise that journalism has lost most if not all of the credibility this profession once had? (more…)

Ten years from now, when people look back on 2011, if they remember little else, it will most certainly be all the protesting that went on this year.  Perhaps inspired by ongoing Tea Party protests which began in 2009 and continued into the next year, Occupy Wall Street has inspired copycat protests in cities and states around the world.

Some college students, inspired by the larger Occupy Movement inspired by OWS as well as in a show of solidarity with OWS, have occupied public spaces on their universities’ campuses, protesting such issues as tuition hikes and demanding increased scholarship funds for low-income students.  The most famous of these campus occupations have been the one at University of California Davis during which campus police doused the protestors with large amounts of pepper spray.

The spraying of the occupiers quickly became infamous, spurring national debate about police abuse.  The image and video footage of the incident has since gone viral and has even evolved into an Internet meme called Casually Pepper Spray Everything Cop. (more…)

Yeah, I know I should’ve pounded this one out sooner, and I didn’t take this long to publish this entry because the questions were hard, because they weren’t.  The following are questions asked of Judge Andrew Napolitano by moderate comedian/fake news anchor Jon Stewart when the former appeared on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.  Other libertarian sites and bloggers have attempted to answer these questions in their own way, and I thought it would be entertaining for me and informative for the reader if I attempted to answers these questions before peeking at the answers of others and actually watching the Daily Show episode.  Here goes.

1.  Is government the antithesis of liberty?

Yes and no.  Government by itself is not the antithesis of liberty.  It is the initiation of force and the implied threat of such initiation of force that is a threat of liberty.  The use of force and the implied threat of force, both lethal and non-lethal, is the only real power government has and is the sole purpose for its existence. (more…)

Like Occupy Wall Street, many of the participants in the worldwide Occupy protests have been painted as being overwhelmingly leftist with big government advocates demanding the government fix the problems it has created.

The media further solidifies this image of the Occupy demonstrations as being a socialist movement by flooding newspaper, television and Internet with oodles of images of protestors wearing Che Guevara t-shirts, holding up images of Karl Marx and waving the anarcho-socialist flag.  But this isn’t Manhattan; labor unions and other big-government cheerleaders might be less likely to join an Occupy protest in libertarian-leaning New Hampshire.  In fact, the local limited government crowd might produce enough numbers to counter the progressive feel of other Occupy demonstrations elsewhere in the country. (more…)

Anyone who has their finger on the pulse of viral videos has most likely seen by now the YouTube video of a Manchester, New Hampshire high school student being manhandled by a police officer in the school cafeteria.  The video was quickly picked up by Cop Block, an organization dedicated to increasing police accountability and educating people on their civil rights.  Cop Block interviewed Frank Harrington, the 17-year old who was slammed into a cafeteria table by Manchester PD Officer Darren Murphy.  Cop Block also interviewed Harrington’s friend who video recorded the incident and in another video attempted to interview Officer Murphy.

Why was Harrington handled so roughly by this officer assigned to West Manchester High?  This kid isn’t exactly a model student.  At 17, he’s still taking sophomore classes, and doesn’t spend to much time worrying about classwork, or homework for that matter.  He stole his sister’s purse (also a student in the high school) with the intention of returning the purse to her after lunch period. His teachers and principal asked him for the purse, and he refused.  Apparently since the school officials felt they didn’t have the right to use physical force on Harrington to retrieve his sister’s purse without any legal repercussions, they sent in someone who they believed did. (more…)

I’ve had a few people ask me why police oppression/brutality is so high in New Hampshire.  The Free State Project has the goal of getting 20,000 liberty-minded people to move to New Hampshire, but some of the content posted by Free Stater-owned media outlets like the Ridley Report, Free Keene, Talley.TV and Free Talk Live have made some people hesitant about moving to NH.  One click on any of the above websites and it is not hard to find some coverage about NH judges, state and local police abusing their authority.

One such incident occurred in June when some Free Staters decided to hold a protest outside the Manchester PD headquarters.  Some protestors scribbled slogans on the police station with chalk such as “Badges Don’t Grant Extra Rights” and many held video cameras and cameraphones to document how the police would react.  Eight people were arrested and charged with misconduct and criminal mischief for committing such crimes as chalking on the sidewalk and walls of the station, not dispersing when told to do so, refusing to present state ID and “collecting evidence” with their electronic devices.  Some had their devices confiscated (stolen) from police officers and were arrested when they attempted to retrieve their possessions later.

I don’t know about New Hampshire being the freest, but it is freer than a lot of other places in the country. In my hometown of NYC, the protestors would’ve been arrested just for assembling in public without a permit. Forget no ID or chalking.  And in New York, a lot of those protestors would’ve needed medical attention, as the cops there are lot more hostile and brutal than in NH, even to those who don’t resist arrest. (more…)

Anthony Weiner, a Congressmember from my old hometown of Queens, is just the latest (and won’t be the last!) of many politicians embroiled in an embarrassing scandal.  At the same time, we recently learned that former Senator and failed Vice Presidential and later Presidential candidate John Edwards has been indicted by a North Carolina grand jury on six felony charges which if convicted he will face 30 years in prison and $1.5 million fine.

I’m not going to rehash the entire story regarding the New York Senator and his fondness for underage and college-age females but in the event you still don’t know about it just Google Anthony Weiner or check out the compressed version here.

While Congress is trying to determine whether Weiner used Congressional resources to send his semi-nude pics to young girls of all ages, the Weinermeister has decided to temporarily abandon his job to seek professional help for his sex addiction.  According to the Daily Mail of the UK, however, Weiner will continue to stay on the Congressional payroll and will still collect (not earn) $476.71 a day (calculated from his annual salary of $174,000).  Thankfully, Weiner got enough bad press and harassment from the public that he finally gave up his Congressional seat. (more…)

With March Madness upon us, a touchy issue comes up, the proverbial elephant in the room everyone can see but nobody wants to discuss: player compensation.

Let’s focus on college basketball, which with football, is one of the most popular collegiate spectator sports today.  Games between Division I teams are almost always televised with big-name sponsors paying a fortune for ad space, then there’s the ticket sales and the merchandising of everything from apparel to video games.  Everybody wins; coaches and support staff of winning teams enjoy high salaries, the universities rake in the revenue from ticket sales (when games are played on campus) and merchandising and the TV and cable networks rake in the advertising revenue.  Well, everybody wins except the players. (more…)

Silly Russians.

We’re nearing the end of 2010, and the United States still exists.  How could this have happened?

Since 1998, a whack job named Igor Panarin has made a name for himself (as well as some money from media appearances) predicting that the United States would dissolve and fracture into six territories.  By 2008 he finally announced that magical year would be 2010, giving his crackpot theory even more media attention, mostly from Russian state media.  Big surprise here, as the Russians are still no doubt sore from losing the Cold War and still brimming with anti-American sentiment.  I’d love to say this is some mentally ill transient sleeping on the sidewalks of Moscow, but he is actually the dean of the faculty of the Diplomatic Academy of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Russia and a former KGB analyst as well as a self-proclaimed experts on U.S.-Russia relations. (more…)

The other day I wondered how many American parents still raise their children to believe in Santa Claus?  More importantly, if so, why?

First off, since American culture is exported throughout the world, our depiction of Santa Claus is also exported around the world.  The American Santa Claus is often viewed by many non-Americans as the expression of mainstream American values such as materialism, commercialism and the commodification of goodwill.

In fact many Europeans see our fat jolly elf as a perversion of their Saint Nicholas.  Christians throughout Europe are not only rejecting Santa Claus, but are launching campaigns urging parents not to raise their children to believe in him. Check out this billboard in Scotland.

(more…)

The other day I came across the term “voodoo economics” while reading some nonsense written by Paul Krugman.

The term really gets under my skin for two reasons.  But before I get into that, a brief explanation as to to what voodoo economics refer and a history of the term. (more…)

Come on liberals, you can do better than this.

Democrats are grasping at straws to discredit Tea Party favorite Christine O’Donnell.  Bad enough head Republican honcho Karl Rove is talking trash about her, but now liberal pundit Bill Maher has uncovered old clips from when O’Donnell appeared on his old ABC show, Politically Incorrect from 20 years ago, when O’Donnell, then not even old enough to drink a beer, repeatedly admitted to “dabbling in witchcraft” as a mere teeny-bopper in high school.  Maher, who pretends to be a libertarian, is extorting her by threatening to show a different clip every week featuring O’Donnell admitting to having practiced in her past some witchcraft (she appeared 22 times on his previous show, and apparently the born-again Christian inexplicably mentioned her youthful exploration of witchcraft on every single appearance) until she agrees to appear on his current show on HBO. (more…)

Okay, it ALMOST ended slavery in the U.S., but I figured a title like that would be more eye-catching.

I know the whole Rand Paul story is old news, but the unfortunate byproduct of that story is that many people are claiming that only government could’ve killed Jim Crow and ended slavery and that the Civil Rights Act of 1964, private businesses would still be excluding minorities today.  This conclusion couldn’t be more moronic and requires a profound ignorance in both history and economics. (more…)