The secessionist old-guard takes a look at both last year’s secession petitions and the current rumblings over marijuana laws, Obamacare, and gun laws.
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Author: Noonan
All Nations Party Main Website Launched Reply
The most recent expansion of the new pan-secessionist political party, the All Nations Party’s Internet presence, headed at least de facto by popular Youtube libertarian personality “fringelements” (Ryan Faulk), the subject of one of ATS’s more recent interviews. Complete with an updated array of blog entries and Youtube videos.
John Robb’s “Brave New War” Reply
I’ve been following John Robb’s blog Global Guerrillas for a few years, and while I was able to absorb some of his prescient thinking online, I just recently finished his 2007 book, Brave New War. It’s written the way all books concerned with big ideas should be written. Straightforward, unpretentious, no-nonsense. Brave New War is as fast, loose and effective as the open-source networks of insurgents and transnational gangs Robb describes. It’s a tight notebook and a quick read. While many of Robb’s examples are drawn from his analyses of US adventures in Iraq, his observations will be cutting edge for most readers. So many of us are still thinking about war the old-fashioned way—the way that is so over it almost seems quaint.
Marinaleda: 21st Century Communist Town Reply
A Promising New Blog Reply
Check it out. As well as its related Youtube channel. Attempts to synthesize, in a way, the ideas of the alternative and reactionary right with a sort of Wittgensteinian postmodernism, as well as from various reactionary sociologists and philosophers like Nietzsche and George Fitzhugh. He even occasionally calls it “Postmodernism of the Right”.
Monsanto found guilty of chemical poisoning in landmark case Reply
(NaturalNews) A French farmer who can no longer perform his routine farming duties because of permanent pesticide injuries has had his day in court, literally, and the perpetrator of his injuries found guilty of chemical poisoning. The French court in Lyon ruled that Monsanto’s Lasso weedkiller formula, which contains the active ingredient alachlor, caused Paul Francois to develop lifelong neurological damage that manifests as persistent memory loss, headaches, and stuttering during speech.
Reports indicate that the 47-year-old farmer sued Monsanto back in 2004 after inhaling the Lasso product while cleaning his sprayer tank equipment. Not long after, Francois began experiencing lasting symptoms that prevented him from working, which he says were directly linked to exposure to the chemical. Since Lasso’s packaging did not bear adequate warnings about the dangers of exposure, Francois alleged at the time that Monsanto was essentially negligent in providing adequate protection for its customers.
Special meeting with Iranian President Ahmadinejad Reply
New York, NY – 150 prominent anti-war activists, religious leaders and supporters of Iran attended a special here on Sept. 25 with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. He is in New York to address the opening meeting of the 67th session of the UN General Assembly.
For the past year there have been escalating threats by the U.S. over Iran’s alleged development of nuclear weapons. Many speakers made it clear that Iran has no nuclear weapons and no plan to develop them. In fact, Phil Wilayto, one of the event organizers, said, “Iran has called for a nuclear free Middle East.” Unlike Israel, which has over 150 nuclear weapons, Iran has signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and allows inspectors of its nuclear facilities.
Eugene Genovese, RIP Reply
The historian Eugene Genovese has died at age 82, leaving a legacy that will be confounding ideologues for decades to come. His scholarly focus was the antebellum South, and his most famous book was Roll, Jordan, Roll, a study of slavery that broke important ground by presenting slaves as more than just victims and investigating the rich culture they built for themselves. It was the sort of book you might expect to be written by a leftist, and sure enough, Genovese came out of the left. He wasn’t some mild-mannered liberal, either: His first major public controversy came when he announced that he welcomed a Viet Cong victory in Vietnam.
New Hampshire Jury Nullifies its First Felony Marijuana Case Reply
Doug Darrell beat the odds and walked home from his trial as a free man on Friday, a major win for the state’s new jury nullification law. Facing felony drug cultivation charges for growing marijuana plants behind his house, the 59-year-old Rastafarian saw all of the charges against him dropped after jurors in his trial successfully convinced their peers to nullify the case on the grounds that Darrell was simply trying to obey the customs of his religion.
“Many of us wondered what kind of precedent this would set,” said juror and FSP participant Cathleen Converse in an exclusive interview with Free Talk Live. “But after chewing on all of the possibilities and re-reading the definition of nullification, we all decided that the only fair thing to do was to vote with our consciences and acquit the defendant of all charges.”
Father-daughter dances banned in R.I. as ‘gender discrimination’ Reply
Father-daughter dances and mother-son ballgames — those cherished hallmarks of Americana — have been banned in a Rhode Island school district after they were targeted by the American Civil Liberties Union.
The ACLU, the self-proclaimed guardian of the nation’s liberty, says such events violate the state’s gender-discrimination law. The organization challenged their existence following a complaint from a single mom who said her daughter was prevented from attending a father-daughter dance in the Cranston Public Schools district.
The story has created a furor both online as well as in Cranston, a community located south of Providence and considered one of the safest places in America.
Who Owns the Benefit? The Free Market as Full Communism Reply
There’s a wonderful phrase for how capitalism works in the real world (I’m not sure who first came up with it, but I associate it with Noam Chomsky): “The socialization of risk and cost, and the privatization of profit.”
That’s a pretty good description of what the state does under actually existing capitalism, as opposed to the free market. Just about everything we identify as problematic about corporate capitalism — the exploitation of labor, pollution, waste and planned obsolescence, environmental devastation, the stripping of resources — results from the socialization of cost and risk and the privatization of profit.
Why haven’t the cybernetic revolution and the vast increases in productivity from technological progress resulted in fifteen-hour work weeks, or many necessities of life becoming too cheap to meter? The answer is that economic progress is enclosed as a source of rent and profit.
Why Objective Law Requires Anarchy Reply
Why Objective Law Requires Anarchy was originally published in the Autumn 1998 issue of Formulations by the Free Nation Foundation, written by Roderick T. Long.
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“I see no ethical standard by which to measure the whole unethical conception of a State, except in the amount of time, of thought, of money, of effort and of obedience, which a society extorts from its every member. Its value and its civilization are in inverse ratio to that extortion.” –Ayn Rand
While libertarians all agree on the need for a drastic reduction in the size and power of the state, the libertarian movement has long been divided between the anarchists, who believe that the state should be done away with entirely, and the minarchists, who wish to reduce it to a few functions regarded as essential. This dispute also goes on within the Free Nation Foundation, whose membership (including the Board of Directors itself) is split on the issue of anarchism (also known as anarcho-capitalism, or market anarchism) vs. minarchism (also known as limited government). I welcome Adrian Hinton’s contribution as an opportunity to advance this discussion.[1]
Right-wing radio: Romney loses, GOP dies Reply
Leading conservative talk show hosts Rush Limbaugh and Laura Ingraham are both arguing that the Republican party will or should be shut down if Mitt Romney loses in November — an idea that, however hard to believe, gives you an indication of the right wing’s dissatisfaction with the Republican party.
After the Arab Spring Reply
From the American Conservative.
The attacks on U.S. diplomatic posts in Cairo and Benghazi, including the murder of the ambassador to Libya and three other personnel, have occasioned a torrent of facile commentary in this country. Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus says President Obama “sympathizes with the attackers in Egypt,” while Twitter is ablaze with brave moral pronouncements about the the sanctity of free speech and how the U.S. should never under any circumstances criticize violence-inciting propaganda originating from within our borders.
No surprise here… Reply
Hacker Group Claims to Have Romney’s Tax Returns Reply
Mitt Romney’s tax returns are reportedly in the hands of a team of hackers who plan on releasing them publicly at the end of the month unless a ransom is paid.
The group allegedly obtained the files from PricewaterhouseCooper’s Tennessee office on Aug. 25, in what was described on PasteBin as a Mission Impossible-like caper:
