From the Libertarian Alliance.

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The British Medical Association has called for a smoking ban in cars. Sean Gabb of the Libertarian Alliance denounces this call for the following reasons:

1. It is not the business of the State to protect individuals from the alleged effects of their own actions. The argument that smokers may impose costs on others via treatment on the NHS is really a comment on the totalitarian implications of the coerced pooling of risk at the heart of state health care. Even if valid, this argument would also justify recriminalising gay sex to reduce the cost of treating aids, or banning all dangerous sports.
2. The argument from “passive smoking” is based on falsehoods. There is no way of gathering meaningful data, nor even sound epidemiological evidence that passive smoking exists. The alleged figure of 300,000 children harmed every year in the UK by passive smoking is what is called a “junk statistic.” It is in the same league as the claims made in the 1980s about the number of people who would die of aids by 1990, or the claims made in the 1990s about the numbers who would soon be dead from mad cow disease. It is almost as gross a falsehood as the fraudulent global warming claims made by British scientists.
3. These statistics produced by pressure groups and politicians are plainly dubious on their own account. Every single statistical claim reported by the media and accepted by the politicians seems to justify higher taxes or tighter controls on adult actions, or both. There was a time when it was necessary to bribe priests into saying that God wanted if before the authorities could oppress ordinary people. Nowadays, a set of junk statistics is produced.
4. The demand for a smoking ban in cars is also an instance of the “saving the kiddies” argument. This proceeds by hiding the agenda of control behind a cloud of hot air about the need to protect children.

Therefore, the Libertarian Alliance is against any smoking ban in cars.

Article by Adam Serwer.

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A bipartisan group of senators is poised to force through dramatic changes to how the US government handles suspected terrorists—over the objections of the White House and Senate Democratic leadership.

Legislative language that emerged from the Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday afternoon would mandate the automatic, indefinite military detention of noncitizens apprehended in the United States who are suspected members of Al Qaeda or associated groups. The wording, which is part of a must-pass bill to fund the military, also appears to allow the indefinite military detention of citizens and legal permanent residents. The bill would also extend restrictions on transfers of detainees from Guantánamo Bay, though only for one year.
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Article by Thomas Naylor.

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When I team taught a course on corporate strategy back in 1980 at the Yale School of Management with economist Martin Shubik and former New York Timeschief financial officer Leonard Forman, I never dreamed I would be invited back to Yale thirty years later to be the keynote speaker for a debate on, of all things, secession.  Yet on the evening of November 9^th, the Yale Political Union, the largest student organization on campus, held such a debate to consider the resolution, “Be it resolved that the United States of America be peacefully dissolved.”  One can’t even imagine how long it must have been since a politically correct Ivy League college organized a major debate on secession?

Founded in 1934 as a debate society, members of the Yale Political Union include Democrats, Republicans, Socialists, and others.  Each member belongs to one of seven political parties: either the Liberal Party, the Party of the Left, the Independent Party, the Federalist Party, the Conservative Party, the Tory Party, or the Party of the Right.  Past presidents have included Senator John Kerry, New York Governor George Pataki, and writers William F. Buckley and Fareed Zakaria.  The YPU’s list of past speakers reads like a veritable Who’s Who in American Politics.  Right wing writer and darling of Fox News, Ann Coulter, was there a couple of weeks earlier.

My charge that the U.S. Government is an immoral, undemocratic, over sized, materialistic, unsustainable, ungovernable, unfixable military machine run by and for the benefit of the superrich precipitated a lively and very intense response from the bright-eyed, bushy-tailed Yalies.

The liberal Democrats and the neoconservatives, both apologists for big government, didn’t like what I had to say one bit.  The rebuttal speaker, a young Filipino, made the case for America’s role as the global policeman.  The fate of America’s nuclear arsenal was the primary concern of another participant.  A conservative woman worried about the possible impact on copyright protection.  My favorite response came from a student from Rochester, N.Y., who feared that dissolution of the American Empire might threaten the future of the Super Bowl, which he considered to be an integral part of American exceptionalistm.

A lot more students came to my defense than I had expected.  They included several libertarians, some hard core leftists, and a Mexican socialist.  One student even claimed to be a fan of the Second Vermont Republic.

What was particularly gratifying about the debate was the extent of the engagement of these very bright, articulate Yale undergraduates in a conversation about a politically incorrect topic which had been summarily rejected by most Americans for over 150 years.  There seemed to be a willingness to think outside of the box and openly discuss heretofore unimaginable political options such as radical decentralization, Internet based direct democracy, secession, and even peaceful dissolution.

Many of the Yale debaters appeared to have been influenced by the Occupy Wall Street movement.  Although not everyone was in agreement with the goals and tactics of OWS, the movement has produced a tailwind of support for political change which was clearly evident in the debate hall.

After two hours of intense discussion, there was a motion to end debate and vote on the resolution.  Much to my surprise 45 percent of the participants voted to dissolve the United States.  Maybe there is hope after all, if that many Yalies opt for secession rather than empire.

Thomas H. Naylor

November 14, 2011

Founder of the Second Vermont Republic and Professor Emeritus of Economics at Duke University; co-author ofAffluenza, Downsizing the USA, and The Search for Meaning.  www.vermontrepublic.org

Jim Goad on the Antifa’s ancestors.

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Trending online news topics often cough up amusingly odd juxtapositions, such as when “Auschwitz” was #2 behind “LeAnn Rimes” and right ahead of “Holiday Bread Recipes” on Yahoo!’s home page. Although I didn’t get a screen capture, I swear to whatever God will listen to me that a few days ago, Kristallnacht was trending on Yahoo! amid a pack of similarly weighty topics such as Justin Bieber and Snooki.

What the hell was Kristallnacht doing in the news?

I won’t deny that it was horrible—I mean, especially if you were Jewish. But apparently it was trending because November 9th was the 73rd anniversary of the “Night of Broken Glass.” Only two more years, and they’ll be celebrating the Diamond Anniversary. Or the Platinum. I’m not sure. I always get those two confused.

Either way—long time ago, no? Why are we still “celebrating” it? Godwin’s Law dictates that “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.” Godwin’s Law should be extended to include online news sites—check enough headlines, and you’ll inevitably see something about the Holocaust. It’s inescapable. When they—and by “they,” I of course mean “the Jews”—said “Never forget,” they weren’t kidding!

Godwin’s Lawmen invoke their law as a sort of reductio ad absurdum argument to discredit anything perceived as even slightly to the political “right” of center. If you believe that some people in your mid-sized Midwestern city exploit their welfare checks, well, you obviously want to roast Jews alive and naked in open-pit barbecues while force-feeding them pork.

To counteract its lamentably pervasive effects, I propose Goadwin’s Law: Any time someone mentions Nazi atrocities, remind them that the communists killed more people.

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From UhuruNews.Com

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Article by David D’Amato.

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A new American Civil Liberties Union report documents an area of public policy you’ll never hear much debate about within the political class: “How private prison companies have capitalized on the nation’s addiction to incarceration.” The report sheds light on a societal cancer that generates billions for plutocrats.

The Drug War is among the ruling class’s expedient multitools, used to justify every totalitarian extension of the state from domestic repression to global meddling. As it does with everything else, the use of authority to constrain the drug trade creates in illegal drugs a new and artificial importance, a pot of gold materializing from “restrictionist price.”

Since drug prices are determined not by free exchange between consenting adults, but by arbitrary legal controls, drugs become far more profitable than they would otherwise be. The result is a state-created point of intersection with society that not coincidentally serves the ruling class’s interests.

Whatever its outward objectives, the War on Drugs is in fact primarily an economic distortion, formulated — deliberately or not — to accomplish specific goals. Among these goals is to provide life support for an unparalleled and well-documented mass incarceration society.

Per Damon Barrett’s exhaustive study of drug policy Children of the Drug War, America’s War on Drugs “giv[es] ‘the land of the free’ the contradictory distinction of having the highest incarceration rate of any country on the planet,” by no insignificant margin. US political administrations from Reagan’s through George W. Bush’s, Barrett points out, increased imprisonment of drug offenders by more than 1,000 percent.

This has naturally redounded to the benefit of America’s overgrown, welfare-hounding prison companies, firms like Corrections Corporation of America, which consume hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars. Even as states throughout the country go functionally bankrupt, prison companies are doing better than ever, cashing in on their relationships with policymakers and regulators.

Given that the Drug War hasn’t corresponded with anything like a reduction in drug use or drug-related crime (indeed, most data indicate that drugs are more readily available than ever), we can only conclude that monopoly capitalism is the true engine behind that war.

But we should take care to note that using the coercive mechanisms of the state to profit by caging human beings is not characteristic of a free market. Genuine free markets stand in stark contrast to the dishonest system of profiteering that binds the state and capital together today, colluding to produce prisoners faster than the prisons can swallow them up.

Market anarchists believe, in the words of Benjamin Tucker, that “attempts to arbitrarily suppress vice [are] in themselves crimes.” However one regards participation in drug use, alcohol consumption, or any other popular vice, a free society treats only invasion against others as a criminal act.

And it is invasion against peaceful society that the Drug War prescribes, allowing elites to capitalize on a market that would not exist but for that invasion. Like alcohol prohibition before it, drug prohibition has been a blessing only for organized crime — the “legitimate” sort sitting in Washington, and the gangs that wish to protect the high prices rendered by illegality.

Genuine free markets would vastly decrease the destructive power of drugs within society, a power that is today guarded greedily by powerful interests.

From Russia Today.

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Americans are in the crosshairs of terrorists worldwide purely due to Washington’s policy in the Muslim world, not because there is an Islamic enemy whose only aim is to kill Americans for their freedoms and lifestyle, insists a former CIA officer.

Historian Michael Scheuer, an author of “Through our enemies’ eyes”, who worked for the agency for over 20 years till 2004 and at one time was the chief of the CIA’s ‘Bin Laden unit’, says America’s greatest enemy – radical Islam – never existed: neither when Bin Laden was alive, nor now.

Israeli lobby drag America into wars

Actually, “it is America’s relationship with Israel that is causing this war [on Islam]”, and until Americans accept this, “we are not going to defeat this enemy,” the author says.

Michael Scheuer believes it is the Israeli lobby in America that is dragging the US into wars.

“In Israel itself as a country, it is not a problem. The real problem is the leaders of the Jewish American community in the US, who influence and corrupt our Congress to support Israel when we have no interest there,” he states.

“The American political establishment is caught between two things. They are extremely pro-Israel and they are almost Marxist in their belief that the spread of democracy is inevitable in all places, in all peoples, in all time,”evaluates the former CIA officer, adding that in their desire to protect Israel, the US establishment cannot tell what’s real.

Radical islamists will benefit

Michael Scheuer predicts that in countries caught up in the Arab Spring like Tunisia, Libya and Egypt, “there is not going to be a democracy that in any way resembles democracy in the west.”

At the same time, the anarchy being created in the Muslim world will make radical Islamists the only beneficiaries of the chaos engulfing the Arab countries.

According to Michael Scheuer, further radicalization of Islamist groups, particularly in Africa, is inevitable – thanks to guns becoming more affordable.

The endless flow of uncounted weapons and the opened prisons in the above countries have reinforced Islamist groups around the world, believes Scheuer.

“Their [American political establishment’s] mindless pursuit of secular democracy at the end of the day endangers the stability of the region and probably the whole world,” he says.

If Syria falls to Islamists – Israel will go down

As for the situation in Syria – it has been interfered in by the US unconscionably.

“Until they [the Syrians] removed the US ambassador, he was running around their country trying to encourage groups to overthrow the Syrian government. That is not the role of any diplomat, US, Russian, Chinese or British,” the author points out, saying that “Syrians were urged onto the streets cold-bloodedly,” without mention of the possibility of being shot dead by the government.

The author recalls that Syria, with its traditional support of Hezbollah, is naturally an Israeli zone of interest, not an American one.

“Syria is a country with no US interest. Since I was a little boy, we’ve been afraid of the Syrians,” the author says, laughing at the fact that “if you look at the map – it’s hard to imagine that this little blat of country called Syria could be a threat to the US.”

Clarifying a possible result of any American success in Syria, Scheuer says that “this is another good example of dichotomy in the thinking of the American leaders. Because as we call for democracy in Syria, if Assad goes – Israel’s security goes straight down.”

Israel sets US plans on Iran

Michael Scheuer reveals that America’s ‘plan on Iran’ depends on that of Israel.

“Both Republicans and Democrats are deathly afraid that Israelis will attack Iran off their own work. If Israel attacks Iran, the Americans will get blamed for condoning it, whether we did or not,” he explains.

“What we are seeing is a slow, almost non-accelerable advance toward some kind of a conflict with Tehran.”

He labels the alleged plot of eliminating a Saudi Arabian ambassador in the US with the help of a Mexican drug cartel“a comic uproar”, saying he can hardly believe Iran would risk a war with the US, Israel and much of NATO, just to kill somebody who is not even a member of the ruling family of Saudi Arabia.

“They’ve come down under belief that democracy is better for everybody. The truth is, American and western foreign policy interests in the Middle East have depended for 50 years on the maintenance of tyranny that gave us access to oil, that protected Israel and persecuted Islamists to protect us. All of that going by the wayside,” acknowledges the author, recalling the Israelis, who were first to realize that democracy might not be good for their security.

‘Libya will be anti-American’

Answering a question about war-torn Libya, the author pointed out that this country is notorious for having its Islamists fighting against the Soviets in Afghanistan, and then the same men encountering the Americans in Iraq and also in Afghanistan. Michael Scheuer is uncertain whether Libya will become a hotbed for terrorists, but “it will decidedly be anti-American and anti-NATO”.

‘We are fighting a religious war’

Despite being largely well-educated and technologically advanced,

“America lacks common sense”

, claims the former CIA officer, maintaining that for the last 20 years, the US has been very efficient in creating enemies and endangering security. The last four American presidents have been telling the population that the wars the US wages abroad are against a bunch of madmen, and in no way religious wars.

“We are definitely fighting a religious war. And until we come to realize that – we are never going to be able to defeat it,” Scheuer concludes.

“Let the Chinese deal with these [Islamist] people for the next 50 years, we’ve had enough of it, but the point is – the Americans cannot get out.”

From the European Union Times.

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Australia is set to become home to hundreds of U.S. Marines – as America moves its servicemen to a military base on the northern tip of the country.

In a bid to combat China’s increase in global military and financial power, between 500 to 1,000 officers are to form a permanent U.S. military presence at a barracks outside Darwin.

U.S. President Barack Obama is expected to formally reveal the plans – which will further anchor American influence in Asia but have prompted fears the area could become a target for terrorists – during a visit to the city next week.

The U.S. currently only has a limited deployment in its long-standing ally, including the Pine Gap Joint Defence Facility spy station near Alice Springs, which has coordinated air strikes in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The move represents a potentially significant geo-strategic shift, which is said to have been under consideration for some years as Washington looks to boost its Pacific Command.

A new base will not be built in the city, instead the marines will use the existing Robertson Barracks nearby.

It is currently home to 4,500 Australian soldiers and will need to be expanded to cater for the US Marines, reported the Sydney Morning Herald.

In a speech to a national security workshop today, Australian defence minister Stephen Smith said: ‘This would potentially see more ship visits, more visiting aircraft and more training and exercising through northern Australia. It would also include the pre-positioning of United States equipment in Australia.’

U.S. Marines are already based at Okinawa in Japan, and on Guam, a U.S. territory 1,500 miles north of Papua New Guinea, as America’s chief combat force in the Pacific theatre. The new plan would intensify the 60 year military alliance between the two countries.

Analysts said the move was largely a response to the rise of China, which is boosting its military spending and capabilities.

China is also becoming increasingly assertive on the high seas, where it claims sovereignty over essentially all of the South China Sea, a key global trading route.

Professor Geoffrey Garrett, chief executive of the US Studies Centre at the University of Sydney, said the U.S. strategy had two elements. He said: ‘China looms very large for both Australia and the US.

‘The first concerns strengthening America’s alliances and friendships in the region as an insurance policy that China’s until now very peaceful rise changes course.

‘The second is trying to build a regional economic architecture for the Asia-Pacific.

‘That will be based on the market principles of America and Australia that China over time will have powerful incentives to join.

‘Even if this entails domestic reforms it has been unwilling to undertake up until now.’

Asked about the U.S. potentially stationing troops in Australia, Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Hong Lei said Beijing had noted the reports.

He said: ‘We hope that bilateral co-operation between relevant countries will be conducive to peace and stability of the Asia-Pacific region.’

But despite the fears, Andrew Shearer, director of studies at the Lowy Institute for International Policy, said the move was ‘not all about China’.

He added: ‘Everyone draws the China connection but it’s as much to do with the rise of India as well. It’s not all about defence, but to be able to conduct disaster relief, counter piracy and keep shipping lanes free.’

From TIME Magazine.

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The voice of the people isn’t something the markets seem to want to hear these days. First there was Greece, the cradle of democracy itself, where early this month, the merest mention of a referendum offering its citizens a say in a series of severe austerity measures was enough to send the markets into a tailspin. The ultimate result: the collapse of Prime Minister George Papandreou’s ruling coalition, the rejection of any notion of bringing the proposal before the people, and the installation of a caretaker government under the leadership of Lucas Papademos, a former vice president of the European Central Bank and, until earlier this week, a visiting professor at Harvard.

Then came Italy. As Athens threatened to go under, Rome found itself under pressure not so much for its level of debt — which though high is generally considered within the limits of sustainability — as much as for the erratic behavior of its flamboyant prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi. On Monday, investors seemed to make the collective decision that he could no longer be trusted at the helm of the euro zone’s third largest economy and sent Italy’s cost of borrowing up towards crisis levels. By the end of the week, not only was Berlusconi finished, so was the very idea of holding a vote to replace him. The markets had spoken, and they didn’t like the idea of going to the electorate. “The country needs reforms, not elections,” said Herman Van Rompuy, president of the European Council on a visit to Rome Friday.(See the top 10 worst Berlusconi gaffes.)

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From the PPJ Gazette.

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New Mexico just proved that State law trumps unconstitutional federal regulations and that the power of the sheriff is superior over federal agencies.  This is the power of the Tenth Amendment!

Ten years ago, when Libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson was Governor of New Mexico, he signed into law a bill authorizing New Mexico to cut trees and thin overgrown forests that can prevent uncontrollable wildfires.  This law applies to federal lands when federal agencies neglect or mismanage forests and put lives at risk.

The US Forest Service, under the USDA, allowed the Lincoln National Forest in Otero County to become dense and  overgrown and it was a life-threatening hazard.  The agency refused to remediate the problem.

Federal agencies are party to a sinister plot for total control and depopulation through the United Nations, called Agenda 21 Sustainable Development.  Many federal employees who enforce bad environmental policies may not realize they are really enforcing UN Agenda 21.  Part of this plot is the Wildlands Project designed to remove humans from rural lands and allowing forests to grow out of control, even when forest fires threaten human life.

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