Dueling Barstools

Another day, another mainstream media outlet employing the Gary Johnson rule, which excludes Gary Johnson from national polls–therefore ensuring he never polls high enough to qualify for debates this fall.

This is what I tell the TSA when steered towards the nude body scanner.

I’m opting out because if you, on behalf of the State, insist you can search my person or effects without even reasonable suspicion of criminality much less the probable cause the Fourth Amendment requires, you’ll have to earn it and touch me. Furthermore, in accordance with sound medical advice, I never willingly expose my body to radiation absent a clear medical benefit, such as, at minimum, diagnosis.

(Adapted from a previous post about the TSA.)

Via:

It is really a spectacular shame that more people don’t actually have a clue how laws are really conceived and passed in this country. I’m sorry to ruin the illusion, friends, but laws are not generally the result of well-intended, intelligent, and fair-minded people. They are more often than not the culmination of financial and political incentives for lawmakers mixed with the wants of highly-motivated special interests. Not only is this the lesson Public Choice teaches us, it is also the lesson every politician I ever interviewed with the Daily Caller confirmed.

Via:

Quantum mechanics operate at the atomic and subatomic scale. Under these rules, even if all particles are removed from a region of space, it is not empty. Virtual particles come into and out of existence. If it seems strange, that is because it is strange. That is what happens though. These particles have no “creator,” yet they exist. Approximately 13.75 billion years ago, the universe was an infinitely small point. It came into existence. If quantum mechanics apply, then the early universe can be explained with physics and without creation.

No attempt or pretence, that was ever carried into practical operation amongst civilized men — unless possibly the pretence of a “Divine Right,” on the part of some, to govern and enslave others — embodied so much of shameless absurdity, falsehood, impudence, robbery, usurpation, tyranny, and villany of every kind, as the attempt or pretence of establishing a government by consent, and getting the actual consent of only so many as may be necessary to keep the rest in subjection by force. Such a government is a mere conspiracy of the strong against the weak. It no more rests on consent than does the worst government on earth.

This isn’t the first time I’ve featured Spooner.

Legit quote via MMA’s best writer Jonathan Snowden:

A lot of fans ask me ‘what does it feel like to walk into the Octagon with the fans screaming?’ It’s kind of like you’re skydiving at a rock concert.

That sounds fantastic.

The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.

Consider trekking to San Diego this October and listening to David Friedman speak at Libertopia, which is an awesome event.

Ugh.

(CNN) — Western governments, including the United States, appear to be stepping up efforts to censor Internet search results and YouTube videos, according to a “transparency report” released by Google.

“It’s alarming not only because free expression is at risk, but because some of these requests come from countries you might not suspect — Western democracies not typically associated with censorship,” Dorothy Chou, a senior policy analyst at Google, wrote in a blog post on Sunday night.

“For example, in the second half of last year, Spanish regulators asked us to remove 270 search results that linked to blogs and articles in newspapers referencing individuals and public figures, including mayors and public prosecutors. In Poland, we received a request from a public institution to remove links to a site that criticized it. We didn’t comply with either of these requests.”

In the last half of 2011, U.S. agencies asked Google to remove 6,192 individual pieces of content from its search results, blog posts or archives of online videos, according to the report. That’s up 718% compared with the 757 such items that U.S. agencies asked Google to remove in the six months prior.

Overall, Google received 187 requests from United States law enforcement agencies and courts to remove content from its Web properties from July to December, up 103% from the 92 requests the Mountain View, California, company received in the previous reporting period.

In one incident cited in the report, a U.S. law enforcement agency asked Google to take down a blog that “allegedly defamed a law enforcement official in a personal capacity.” The company did not comply with that request.

In another, a separate law enforcement group asked Google to take down 1,400 YouTube videos (Google owns YouTube) because of “alleged harassment.”

And in Canada, the passport office asked Google to delete a YouTube video “of a Canadian citizen urinating on his passport and flushing it down the toilet,” according to the report.

Shit like this is why Seasteading is important. We need fresh ‘ground’ to innovate new systems that serve humans better than existing governments.

A tax cut means higher family income and higher business profits and a balanced federal budget. As the national income grows, the federal government will ultimately end up with more revenues. Prosperity is the real way to balance our budget. By lowering tax rates, by increasing jobs and income, we can expand tax revenues and finally bring our budget into balance.

John F Kennedy

Bonus Picture. Because I will be in Honolulu next week:

June 14, 2012, Santa Fe, NM - Saying “Enough with the excuses and blame,” Libertarian presidential candidate and former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson responded to Ohio speeches today by both President Obama and Mitt Romney by stating that neither will “commit to the steps that are truly necessary to put America back to work.”

In a statement, Johnson said, “While Barack Obama and Mitt Romney deliver dueling economic speeches in Ohio, the simple fact is that neither of them will commit to the steps that are truly necessary to put America back to work in an economic environment freed from the burdens of smothering deficits and government meddling that are, in fact, killing jobs and preventing recovery.

“We are in deep, deep trouble economically, and virtually every American is paying the price. Yet we have a president making excuses and promising that things will get better if we just let him have four more years to keep going down a failed path. And we have a Republican candidate promising to do better, but without offering anything dramatically different from the same policies that have gotten us into this mess.

“Enough with the excuses and blame. Neither creates jobs — except for speechwriters. We must eliminate deficit spending now, not someday off in the future when it won’t hurt so much. I pledge to send Congress a balanced budget in 2012. And whether Congress adopts a balanced budget or not, we need a president who will veto every bill that will cause us to spend money we don’t have. It can be done. I did it 750 times as governor.

“If reducing taxes a little bit on businesses is a good idea, as both Obama and Romney have suggested, cutting them to zero and turning America into the job-creating monster of the global economy is a better idea. I propose to do just that.

“And if we are to expect investors to invest and employers to employ, the nation’s chief executive must act aggressively to cut regulatory burdens and align them with common sense. Uncertainty and angst about ‘what the government will do to us next’ are just as much job-killers as are high taxes and out-of-control spending.

“This economy will only recover and let America get back to work when Washington stops helping us to death and faces the fact that we cannot spend or tax our way to prosperity. Stop the deficits, stop the government interference in the economy, stop printing money, and get out of the way. That’s what government can do to help.”

To be governed – is to be watched, inspected, directed, indoctrinated, numbered, estimated, regulated, commanded, controlled, law-driven, preached at, spied upon, censured, checked, valued, enrolled – by creatures who have neither the right, nor the wisdom, nor the virtue to do so.

Via The Federalist Papers:

According to a study completed by USA Today, the real federal budget deficit for 2012 is more than 5 trillion dollars. The difference is due to an accounting trick that let’s Congress exempt itself from including the cost of promised retirement benefits. Liabilities for Social Security, Medicare and other retirement programs rose by $3.7 trillion in 2011, according to government actuaries, but the amount was not registered on the government’s books. Under those accounting practices, the government ran red ink last year equal to $42,054 per household — nearly four times the official number reported under unique rules set by Congress. The typical American household would have paid nearly all of its income in taxes last year to balance the budget if the government used standard accounting rules to compute the deficit.

In other words, shit’s fucked. Consider joining me at the Seasteading conference–a new frontier is sorely needed.

This is brotherly love:

But as to whether the mess caused a rift between cousins Renzo and Cesar? Well, that ain’t happening, either, according to Renzo.

The two are just too close, and have too much history together to be wedged apart by one confusing night.

“We may have different view on certain things, but at the end, the love that I have for him would overlook even if he’s a serial killer,” Renzo said. “I’ll be digging holes with him. I’ll hit him with the shovel a couple times, but I’ll be digging holes with him. What else can I do?”

[Updated at 5:02 pm]

I was surprised but pleased to see Drudge link to noted Libertarian Penn Jillete’s EPIC rant on the war on drugs and particularly Obama’s disgusting hypocrisy thereto, embedded below. This issue is where I, and many others, part ways with the GOP and the rather large Drug Warrior segment of the Tea Party. The very principle of prohibition is contrary to basic notions of self-ownership and liberty, see, e.g., Lincoln quote below. If the GOP had any brains, much less principled commitment to freedom, it would have a come to Jesus moment and plant the Gadsden flag on this issue, where it rightly belongs. But who am I kidding, tepid social conservatives such as Rubio, Christie, Daniels, and Jindal are the future of the party, while Gary Johnson, Mike Lee, Justin Amash, Rand Paul, and Ron Paul are dismissed to the children’s table where their antiquated notions of individual liberty, adherence to the Constitution, and Washingtonian (beware of foreign entanglements) foreign policy cannot harm the GOP’s stakeholders.

Prohibition will work great injury to the cause of temperance. It is a species of intemperance within itself, for it goes beyond the bounds of reason in that it attempts to control a man’s appetite by legislation, and makes a crime out of things that are not crimes. A Prohibition law strikes a blow at the very principles upon which our government was founded.

-Abraham Lincoln (1809-65) U.S. President. Speech, 18 Dec. 1840, to Illinois House of Representatives

I call an animal, a species, an individual corrupt, when it loses its instincts, when it prefers what is injurious to it.

David Boaz’s article here. Blurb below from Boaz’s facebook page:

Congratulations to the president for getting on the right side of this generation’s civil rights struggle. He can be an important leader for equality under the law.

But of course, this announcement does raise questions. Was he telling the truth to voters in 2008 when he said, “I believe that marriage is between a man and woman and I am not in favor of gay marriage” and when he told voters in 2004 that “My religious faith dictates marriage is between a man and a woman, gay marriage is not a civil right”? Or when he told voters in 1996, “I favor legalizing same-sex marriages, and would fight efforts to prohibit such marriages”? Has he been wrestling with a conflict between his religious faith and his belief in the Constitution, or just with conflicting political pressures?

Rhetorical question, imo.

Nevertheless, he’s in the right place now. And he says he’s been “evolving,” so we know he sees his new position as the evolved one. Good for him.

[Updated at 5:04 pm] And here’s Chris Barron (GOProud), via Reason, weighing in on Obama’s sudden evolution:

GOProud’s Chris Barron reacts to Barack Obama’s late and somewhat tepid support for marriage equality:

“It is good to see that after intense political pressure that President Obama has finally come around to the Dick Cheney position onmarriage equality. I am sure, however, the President’s newly discovered support for marriage is cold comfort to the gay couples in North Carolina.  The President waited until after North Carolina passed a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage.”

“This is hardly a profile in courage by President Obama.  For years now, President Obama has tried his hardest to have it both ways on this issue.

“The real kudos here goes to LGBT activists and their allies who finally forced the President into yielding on this issue.”

Zing.

The answer is to return to first principles. The government should protect us from force and fraud and then leave us alone. It must recognize that our freedoms come from our humanity, that our souls are immortal, that it is merely a temporary institution based on fear and force. It cannot spend more than it takes in. It cannot kill except in actual self defense and it cannot take our property and give it away. Freedom is the ability to obey your own conscience and free will. Government is fear and force telling you what to do.