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Better than if we went back to the gold standard, abolished the fed, killed all free trade agreements, exacerbated our fun race to the bottom with no respect for rights or the environment, piled on isolationism and protectionism, inflamed xenophobia, and pretty much killed globalization. Oh yes.

And when has Ron Paul proposed all of these? What is so bad about a gold standard? It's bad because it prevents government from creating fiat money? Where in the USA Constitution does it give the federal government the power to create the Federal Reserve? When has he opposed free trade when it did not interfere with sovereignty? Did you know that a Canadian company sued California to permit that company to sell a known cancer causer in the state? When CA banned MTBE, Methyl tert-butyl ether, the Canadian company sued the US using NAFTA's Chapter 11 saying CA was blocking it's investments in MTBE, which is a known cancer causer. As for any race to the bottom, so called fre trade agreements many so called left wingers say they speed up the race to the bottom whereas right wingers support them. Isolationism? Ron Paul: 'Isolationism isn't what I advocate'. Protectionism? Protectionism vs. Liberty. He argues against isolationism and protectionism. Get your facts straight.

Falcon

Just to note that curing vitamin D deficiency (very inexpensive, either from sunlight or supplements) can prevent many cases of cancer:
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/cancerMain.shtml
as well as many cases of heart disease, stroke, hypertension, autoimmune diseases, diabetes, depression, chronic pain, osteoarthritis, osteoporosis, muscle weakness, muscle wasting, birth defects, periodontal disease, influenza, autism, and more (there are different degrees of scientific evidence for those). See:
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/

But vitamin D supplements or sunbathing is so cheap, there is not profit in telling people about this...
"Treating Disease With Vitamin D"
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml
"Why Michelle Obama is More Likely to Die From Breast Cancer than Hillary Clinton"
http://curtisduncan.blogspot.com/2009/10/why-michelle-obama-is-more-likely-to.html

There are other inexpensive treatments to prevent or cure cancer with various degrees of anecdotal evidence (like IV vitamin C as a cancer treatment),
http://www.medpagetoday.com/HematologyOncology/OtherCancers/2938
but curing vitamin D deficiency (now widespread as we all spend more time indoors at computers) has lots of scientific evidence about its value in relation to cancer and a wide variety of other things because vitamin D is essential to regulating the expression of thousands of gene. That is why being vitamin D deficient has such widespread negative effects -- sort of like deleting thousands of files at random on your hard drive... What's amazing is that humans survive at all with so little sunlight... So big is this effect of vitamin D deficiency on health that for Western Europe alone it has been suggested:
"A Decade Of Vitamin D Supplementation Would Save $4.4 Trillion Over A Decade; Would Save $1346 Per Person Per Annum"
http://www.lewrockwell.com/sardi/sardi111.html

Where are the US CDC, FDA, AMA, and other acronyms doing about all this? Good question...

Essentially, the US RDA for vitamin D is about ten times too low, as it was set decades ago for healthy bones, not a healthy heart, a healthy brain, a healthy immune system, or a healthy weight. The toxicity fears have also been overblown (vitamin A is much more toxic, and according to Dr. Cannell who runs the vitamin D council website, many people through supplements have too much vitamin A which interferes with vitamin D.)
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/vitaminDToxicity.shtml
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/newsletter/2008-december.shtml

Although just how much vitamin D as supplements you need depends on things like your weight, your skin color, your behavior outdoors, your latitude, your personal biochemestry, and so on, so regular blood tests are important (even though people still disagree over what the optimum level should be). Example:
http://heartscanblog.blogspot.com/2009/01/why-rda-for-vitamin-d.html

The average light skinned human adult in a bathing suit at moderate latitudes under noonday summer sun will make 10,000 to 20,000 IUs of vitamin D in twenty minutes or so in their skin, and up to 50,000 units before their skin turns pink (sunburns are of course bad for you). The reaction is self

I think he's talking about those governments that murdered 162,000,000 of their own citizens.

Yeah, that's who I want defending me from the asshole who wants to sell me flour. Or concert tickets.

Ron Paul was a real conservative

Maybe he was at some point, but he supports Federal legislation against abortion with the Sanctity of Life Act. His support of gay marriage only extends to letting states decide individually, which simply moves the government decision from one area to another while playing both sides. He also believes there is a war on religion and Christmas.

Ron Paul is simply another one of today's neo-cons with a different marketing scheme.

There is an artificial shortage of doctors maintained by restricting admissions to medical schools and even more so by restricting the total number of medical schools as well as increasing tuition for medical school much faster than costs.

http://www.nytimes.com/1986/06/29/business/curbing-the-supply-of-physicians-who-said-we-have-too-many-doctors.html?&pagewanted=all
While [the AMA] is devoted to improving the quality of medical care, education and the profession, it also operates as a cartel to protect the economic interests of its members.

http://wallstreetpit.com/5769-the-medical-cartel-why-are-md-salaries-so-high
The Medical Cartel: Why are MD Salaries So High?

By Mark J. Perry|Jun 24, 2009, 2:47 PM|Author's Website

Greg Mankiw features the chart below on physicians' salaries in the U.S. vs. various European countries and Canada, showing that MDs in the U.S. make about $200,000, which is between 2 and 5 times as much as doctors make in other countries. How do we explain the significantly higher physician salaries in the U.S.?

The Medical Cartel: Why are MD Salaries So High?

One explanation is the restriction on the number of medical schools, and the subsequent restriction on the number of medical students, and ultimately the number of physicians. Consider the difference between law schools and medical schools.

In 1963, there were only 135 law schools in the U.S. (data here), and now there are 200, which is almost a 50% increase over the last 45 years in the number of U.S. law schools. Unfortunately, we've witnessed exactly the opposite trend in the number of medical schools. There are 130 medical schools in the U.S. (data here), which is 22% fewer than the number of medical schools 100 years ago (166 medical schools, source), even though the U.S. population has increased by 300%.

http://www.lewrockwell.com/archives/fm/08-90.html
"During the great depression, as Milton Friedman notes, the AMA ordered the remaining medical schools to admit fewer students, and every school followed instructions. If they didn't, they risked losing their AMA accreditation."

During world war II, they needed doctors quickly and they created so many (about 16,000) that there was a glut until the 1970's.

---

The nursing shortage takes care of itself because pay sucks and hours are terrible. You work long enough to get experience to go work somewhere besides a hospital. A friend of mine's wife is an RN and basically works when she wants to now that she has left the hospital system.

Women.

Yeah?

Homosexuals.

Right.

Atheists.

Laws or just bloviators?

Non-US citizens.

Most certainly. I guess they didn't get endowed by their Creator, eh?

Add citizens the government suspects to be threats:

On February 3 Dennis Blair, director of National Intelligence told the House Intelligence Committee that it was now "defined policy" that the U.S. government can murder its own citizens on the sole basis of someone in the government's judgement that an American is a threat. No arrest, no trial, no conviction, just execution on suspicion of being a threat.

"What will determine the hierarchy when money is disposed?"

That's what James P. Hogan goes into at length in the 1982 sci-fi book, Voyage From Yesteryear.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyage_from_Yesteryear
"Since the availability of power from fusion reactors and cheap automated labor has enabled them to develop a post-scarcity economy, they do not use money as a means of exchange, nor do they recognize material possessions as symbols of status. Instead, competence and talent are considered symbolic of one's social standing - resources that cannot be counterfeited or hoarded, and must be put to use if they are to be acknowledged. As a result, the competitive drive that fuels capitalist financial systems has filled the colony with the products of decades of incredible artistic and technical talent, and there are no widespread hierarchies. No one person or group of people can know everything, so no one person or group of people is expected to speak for all. They have no centralized authorities; some would say they have no government at all."

In one interchange in the book, it is made clear that people there think what humans aspire to on Earth, to make a bunch of money and then sit on their behinds or just do frivolous recreational things, would be considered mental illness there, and further, such a mentally ill person would be taken care of by that society by giving them every material thing they wanted. Stuff was so easy to come by there, with robots making most stuff, and with cheap energy (they had fusion power in the story, but solar and wind and geothermal etc. can also provide more than what we need).

And that society does have a meritocracy of sorts, but the difference is that is not a strict hierarchy, but instead a complex and fluid mix of hierarchies and meshworks (see de Landa),
http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/meshwork.htm
where competence is recognized in very small local hierarchies about single issues within a gift economy framework. If you think about aspects of how, say, Debian GNU/Linux works, or some other open source projects taken as a whole across the entire community, there are some similarities.
"Study Reports On Debian Governance, Social Organization"
http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/04/14/1349202

But, even while there is meritocracy in the society James P. Hogan depicts, again, there is neither fiat dollar money as we know it, nor credentials, nor titles, nor formal government, nor a lot of other things we accept as "normal". They do this by assessing each others competence in different areas with skills they have learned from birth. So, not really a "popularity" contest.

Now, that is just a fictional world. Debian is at least real. The key issue is that as less and less labor is needed, a variety of different possibilities open up for organizing society. So, it only takes in the USA about 1% of the workforce for farming using air conditioned tractors with stereo systems vs. 90% for farming with horses 200 years ago; 12% and dropping for manufacturing with CNC machines and design software versus 30% for manufacturing with hand-operated drill presses and the same thing I predict will happen for many services (addressing vitamin D deficiency may potentially cut medical care costs by 30% or more).
"A Decade Of Vitamin D Supplementation Would Save $4.4 Trillion Over A Decade; Would Save $1346 Per Person Per Annum"
http://www.lewrockwell.com/sardi/sardi111.html

The fact is, much of accumulation of money is precisely about winning a popularity contest. Granted, often times the contest is rigged -- so, for example, I read that the oil companies and car companies and tire companies got together t

for one i don't think publci education really existed as it does now and nobody cared if you went to school, worked on a farm or were taught in home.

More or less. Compulsory public education as we know it today started in the mid-1800s. Prior to that, education was the responsibility of local communities and the individuals who actually had children.

and being home all day just talking to your mom is going to seriously gimp that.

This is not how "homeschooling" works at all. Homeschooling parents often work together to school their kids, and such children generally get more---and better---social interaction than they do in public schools. When kids are allowed to learn at their own pace, and interact with whom they want, when and how, they do a lot better than they do by being forced to sit in a classroom learning what the teacher says, when the teacher says, at the rate the teacher says, and then getting a few brief periods of "social interaction" (lunch hour, recess, after school activities) in an equally tightly controlled environment. And like I said in another post, if I had a kid and wanted him to have social interaction public school--style, I can beat him up and steal his lunch money myself. :)

Human beings are curious and gregarious creatures, and like to learn and be social, if you let them do it at their own pace and leisure. Force them to do how you want, and they learn to hate it.

Every year the educrats in the New Hampshire State House try to pass another bill regulating homeschooling. And each time, hundreds of homeschooling parents come out to the public hearings and floor votes, with their kids. I'm not personally involved in homeschooling activism, but I repeatedly get to see how it works since I'm up at the State House on some liberty issue or another on a near-weekly basis. It's amazing to see how well-adjusted and well-behaved all the homeschool kids are. Most of them far exceed what the public schools expect of them at any given age (e.g., someone who would be in the second grade reading at a fifth-grade level). I once had an hour-long debate with a fourteen-year-old homeschooled kid (I'm 29) over the merits of the argument presented in this book (and I would have to say the kid did better at it than I did). And spending a day at the State House watching how the sausage gets made is one hell of a better civics lesson than reading some dumbed-down, error-ridden "social studies" textbook in a boring classroom no one wants to be in.

I would rather see a shiny metal phased out first.

It already has been.

Whoever decided that gold should be basis of anything was a dumbass.

How is gold worse than paper? There is a fixed amount of gold on Earth. Paper can be created endlessly and the numbers printed on the paper can be increased endlessly. Paper always loses purchasing through inflation (more dollars chasing the same amount of goods), gold, in the long term, retains it's purchasing power. When paper fails gold often regains popularity as money. Governments, of course, hate gold currency since they can't redistribute wealth from the poor and middle class to the rich through inflation with it.

Gold has other uses as well. For example, it's highly conductive. It's extremely malleable. It's beautiful, etc.

"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power."

America is, and pretty much always has been, a fascist nation. I think the recent bailouts of the banking giants and car manufacturers should prove that it is fascist now; Andrew Jackson himself was fighting fascism when it came to central banking back in the 1830's. War and weapons define the American economy. Boeing and Raytheon and Xi could be considered the ultimate achievement of which a fascist society is capable.

Lew Rockwell is fond of referring to the central government as the Welfare-Warfare state. Our country has always defined itself through these two socialist conspiracies against mankind - welfare both corporate and personal, which stunts economic growth and creates a class of victims wholly dependent on the largess of their tormentor - and warfare, which is the extension of corporate power through the state in order to secure resources overseas. We should abandon this socialism, this corporatism, this fascism - and create a government that exists only within strict Constitutional boundaries. Nothing else will do for the good of mankind.

Citations are here:

http://www.lewrockwell.com/blog/lewrw/archives/37540.html
http://www.lewrockwell.com/blog/lewrw/archives/38439.html
http://www.lewrockwell.com/blog/lewrw/archives/38040.html

She's a shill, just like Beck is. No difference here, other than he likes to incite his listeners, and Maddow likes to make them think they're smart by pretending to be logical.

Citations are here:

http://www.lewrockwell.com/blog/lewrw/archives/37540.html
http://www.lewrockwell.com/blog/lewrw/archives/38439.html
http://www.lewrockwell.com/blog/lewrw/archives/38040.html

She's a shill, just like Beck is. No difference here, other than he likes to incite his listeners, and Maddow likes to make them think they're smart by pretending to be logical.

Citations are here:

http://www.lewrockwell.com/blog/lewrw/archives/37540.html
http://www.lewrockwell.com/blog/lewrw/archives/38439.html
http://www.lewrockwell.com/blog/lewrw/archives/38040.html

She's a shill, just like Beck is. No difference here, other than he likes to incite his listeners, and Maddow likes to make them think they're smart by pretending to be logical.

A good analogy would be ordinary bank records vs. the contents of a safe-deposit box. The first the bank has access to, and the customer has limited expectation of privacy regarding them. The second the bank does not have access to, their key physically can't open the box alone, and the customer has a higher expectation of privacy about the contents.

Up until the 1970s, you're bankrecords were, in fact, confidential and the customer had as much expectation to privacy there as with his health records entrusted to his doctor.

Then this was assaulted by the "Right to Financial Privacy Act" in 1978, which "let federal agents write their own search warrants, but limited the subjects of those warrants to financial institutions."
http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig6/napolitano2.html (I don't respect Lew Rockwell so much, but Judge Napolitano seems to know what he is talking about, and this was in a speech of his as well here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8QwTKKSvR8)

I heard various things about Government unwarranted snooping and seizure on safety deposit boxes, but I can't find a credible link about that at the moment.

I would not put it past these companies to create new flu strains and unleash them on the public, knowing sales would be generated. We've known about this strain since March 2009 and there are shortages of the vaccine so everyone is scrambling to buy it. One company in 2008 in it's SEC filing (sorry I do not recall it) claimed that they expected a 800% increase in antiviral sales in 2009 from government stockpiling.

and here's a gem.

"That the so-called swine flu was first observed in Mexico just at the same time Nicholas Sarkozy, president of France, was visiting there to announcement the establishment of a new French vaccine plant in Mexico, has to be more than coincidence." http://www.lewrockwell.com/sardi/sardi122.html

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Aventis-Vaccine-Factory-in-by-Doreen-Carlson-090519-669.html

Even our own government has in the past infected it's own population to see how disease spreads.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_biological_weapons_program#Experiments_on_non-consenting_individuals

I'm not one to cook up conspiracy theories, but it's always healthy to question things IMO.

This thread really demonstrates how narrowly most /.'ers view libertarianism, which isn't surprising considering the recent antics of the national LP like nominating that fraud Bob Barr and the ridiculous wikipedia article. As a voluntaryist/anarchist/"little l" libertarian, I'd like to point out that the philosophy of individual liberty requires as an absolute, the respect of everyone else's liberty first and foremost, provided they are not harming anyone or anyone's property (generally speaking. discussions on property rights abound. libertarians would never oppose voluntary communes, etc. as long as violence is not used to force others to participate). This boils down to the non-aggression principle. Because of this ultimately respectfully pacifist ethos, most libertarians do not actively seek to suppress fringe speech or otherwise interfere with the nonviolent activities of other individuals. This does not mean that they agree with said (often crazy) speech. For instance, I've never even heard of the Heartland Institute, nor any of the other allegedly-libertarian organizations or individuals referenced in TFA for attacking free software. Free software is incredibly libertarian, though telling me how I can or cannot prioritize traffic on my network is not. My customers are not forced to remain so.

People interested in individual liberty should check out The Free State Project and Reason Magazine. For fun, check out Free Talk Live, a liberty-oriented radio show that takes calls on absolutely any subject and reports regularly on the FSP.

The Ron Paul and Lew Rockwell style libertarians oppose net neutrality because they oppose the government regulating the internet in any fashion. They view it as a slippery slope which will lead to many draconian regulations and eventual loss of many freedoms now enjoyed.

The internet seems to be working well at the moment. Why does it need to be "regulated" in order to remain "neutral." Does regulation = neutrality? I think not.

Lew Rockwell also supports idiocy about not using vaccines. Forgive me if I take anything they have to say with a big grain of salt... they've proven that they aren't terribly connected to logic or science.

Here is another good article against some provisions of net neutrality.

http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig8/swanson7.html

Not all self-described libertarians agree or use the same arguments on every subject.

The Ron Paul and Lew Rockwell style libertarians oppose net neutrality because they oppose the government regulating the internet in any fashion. They view it as a slippery slope which will lead to many draconian regulations and eventual loss of many freedoms now enjoyed.

The Cato Institute, which is considered a libertarian think tank is often made fun of by the LRC and Paul supporters, usually for good reasons.

Libertarianism, like most isms have a large umbrella to hide under.

The real story of HMO's, of course, is one of considerable government meddling and regulation which ended in spiraling health costs which, not surprisingly, begat more government meddling and regulation.

HMO's are part of the legacy of price and wage controls supported by "conservative" president Richard Nixon who supported them (among other ill-conceived reasons) as a means for controlling health care costs. The high costs of the early seventies were not produced by free market health care, but by the ever expanding government giveaways of Medicare and Medicaid which removed individuals from the process of making health care transactions and created a situation where third parties (i.e. government) were making the payments to health care providers. You can imagine that in a system where the consumer of health services is responsible for none of the costs, a little excess demand might result. And that was indeed the result. No longer restrained by paying for health care, patients ended up in the doctor's office for every stubbed toe and every bloody nose resulting in spiraling health care costs due to such massively inflated demand.

-- The Myth of the Free-Market HMO.

Absolutely. Not only that but most of them were doing what was economically imperative to compete in the current market of the day.

Actually you're wrong here. Owning slaves cost more than paying freemen a living wage. Economists studying economics and slavery in the US concluded southern slave owners could not compeat on price with northerners who paid living wages. Owning slaves have additional costs. For instance those watching or guarding slaves have to be paid and there's the cost of chains and shackles. If not for the Civil War slavery would have ended within another generation or two. If not for the "Fugitive Slave Act (which Abraham Lincoln strongly supported)" slavery who have ended sooner.

When everyone else is using slave labor (cheap immigrants, outsourced call centers, H1B Visaed IT)

That is not slavery. In every one of those cases the workers have a choice, and most get paid more than others in the same area, in the case of outsourcing, or more than those at home in the case of immigrants. These people are very much willing to work for what they get paid. Just because they are willing to work for less than you are does not make them slaves. But they do drive your cost of living down.

Falcon

This is interesting?

California energy was NEVER deregulated. Never. Ever. Not once. Not a part of it, not a sliver of it, not the entire market.

What happened was MORE regulation.

Here are some links to the flip-side of what the government-run TV channel said in the link provided above:

http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig/paul12.html
http://mises.org/story/872

The truth: Enron was a monopoly, and monopolies are almost always created by State regulation and preferential treatment. The market was never deregulated, instead it was a State-corporate creation that sounded like "privatization" or "deregulation" just as much as "free speech" can still include stifling laws preventing speech.

"Higher education" is really a medieval style guild system, and it has no place in modern society. With ubiquitous internet access anyone with sufficient talent and motivation can teach themself any subject to any level. The only remaining step is to decouple the certification from the training.

It's true that some people will learn better with a teacher and fellow students, but there's no reason this has to be within academia. Students could save a lot of money by cutting out the middle-men and hiring teachers directly.

http://www.lewrockwell.com/north/north748.html

Maybe, but the problem is sufficient motivation. I was definitely NOT motivated when I first enrolled in college for a Computer Science degree. I quit after about three semesters. After a few years of partying my ass off, I decided to get a real job. After a few years of manual labor I began to appreciate the value of an education. When I say "the value of an education" I mean the ability to get a sufficiently challenging and satisfying position (clue: most of them require a degree). Now I'm enrolled again at 27 years old, with about three years to go before I graduate with my first degree in Electrical Engineering. I enjoy it, and I'm now taking it seriously. But that doesn't mean I'm motivated enough to learn all this material, all the fundamental concepts and higher level applications, without people who know what the hell they're talking about within easy reach. Try as you might, you can't replace real human interaction with the motivated types you find in a good engineering program with internet access.

"Higher education" is really a medieval style guild system, and it has no place in modern society. With ubiquitous internet access anyone with sufficient talent and motivation can teach themself any subject to any level. The only remaining step is to decouple the certification from the training.

It's true that some people will learn better with a teacher and fellow students, but there's no reason this has to be within academia. Students could save a lot of money by cutting out the middle-men and hiring teachers directly.

http://www.lewrockwell.com/north/north748.html

Perhaps the subjects were exercising some kind of innate (as opposed to imposed) subconscious aversion to violence, even as their conscious "do this task and get paid" desire was driving.

Television is passive so such an aversion is easy; you are not physically participating in the (depicted) violence anyway, so the brain uses the Numbing Technique. The result is that associated imagery (advertisements) are also blurred.

A video game is active so such an aversion is more difficult; your brain is directing your muscles to do the (depicted) violence, which is incompatible with Numbing. The way out then, perhaps, is to use the LookAside Technique; averting your "active" attention, even if not your eyes (as mentioned in the summary). The result is that associated imagery in your peripheral vision is soaked up and its recall improved.

In any case, this spells trouble for Ender Wiggen wannabes...

OK, I guess I was wrong about attributing the line above as coming from the USA's Founding Fathers. I could not find a reference of it's use before Lincoln used it in the Gettysburg Address of 1863. I guess I expanded the use of "the people", which was used before and during the Revolution as meaning they have rights including the right to overthrow an overbearing government, to the whole quote.

BTW, to twist the entire idea of self-determination around H.L. Mencken argued it was the Confederates who were fighting for the right to self-determination, without offering evidence or logic.

Falcon

everyone else eating, drinking and smoking while I'm not, fuck you lazy buggers go find a buffet

And yet these "lazy buggers" were enabling you to be employed in a job that you voluntarily accepted, knowing that the work entailed serving people who were "eating, drinking and smoking" while you weren't. Maybe the cook at the buffet should be complaining that people are too lazy to prepare their own food?

I never look down my nose at people doing the crap jobs and yes they are way underpaid for the hard work they do.

I never look down my nose at these people either. They provide a valuable service to society and many of them are honest, hardworking people. At the same time, how are they underpaid? The cost of labor, like the cost of everything else, is determined by supply and demand. (Not by selfish rich people, contrary to Marxist fairytales.) There is a large supply of people willing to work these jobs for the wages they get. Therefore their wages are not higher. On the other side of the equation - there would be little to no demand for fast food, frozen fish, casual dining, etc. if the laborers were paid the same or better than "white collar" workers and the prices of the goods/services they produced were set to reflect this. (In other words, they'd be overpaid for a week to a month and then be very quickly unemployed.) Tangentially, this is why higher minimum wages increase unemployment among unskilled laborers.

You could have asked Google before discounting his claim entirely. After about a 5 minutes' search, I found at least two resources of note. Here's a blurb you might find interesting:

Although the Vikings could not know it, their movement north during the Medieval Warm Period of AD 1000-1400 represented a pattern that had occurred many times before in the human past. Throughout prehistory and history, peoples have shifted their range northward in response to improved climates. Conversely, they have sometimes retreated from higher latitudes during phases of colder climate.

Although I was not able to find any references that the Vikings made use of a northern route into Siberia, the general understanding is that a warm period occurred during this time that would have (potentially) opened up parts of the northern sea routes to curious travelers.

Naturally, this doesn't fit in well with the notion that never before has enough warming occurred to have accomplished this. It's telling that the parent is rated +5, insightful when he could have spent a couple of minutes (just as I did) in effort to disprove the original poster's claim.

I'm not suggesting whether the original poster is correct as I haven't found evidence to prove it, but near as I can tell from the resources available from Google, it appears he may very well be correct.

Funding parties that oppose policies the U.S. government doesn't like most certainly is interference:

http://informationclearinghouse.info/article22868.htm

http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts06192009.html

The neo-cons are openly bragging that they are supporting the Iranian opposition ie interfering in their society:

"The National Endowment for Democracy has spent millions of dollars during the past decade promoting âcolorâ(TM) revolutions in places such as Ukraine and Serbia, training political workers in modern communications and organizational techniques.

âoeSome of that money appears to have made it into the hands of pro-Mousavi groups, who have ties to non-governmental organizations outside Iran that the National Endowment for Democracy funds.â

Yes, you say, but what does a blow-hard propagandist like Timmerman know about such things? Well, he should know! His very spooky Foundation for Democracy in Iran has its own snout deep in the trough of NEDâ(TM)s âoeopen covert actionsâ against the Iranian government.

How does the âoeFoundation for Democracy in Iranâ seek to âoepromote democracyâ in Iran with our tax dollars? Foundation co-founder Joshua Muravchik gives us a hint in his subtly-titled LA Times piece, âoeBomb Iran.â

Frankly, what I find more disturbing than the fact that the US government continues meddling in this new magical era of Obama is how many in the United States continue to be taken in by these events color-coordinated from afar. Pundits have turned their websites green in âoesolidarityâ with this âoegreen revolution.â Self-described âoelibertariansâ have thrown all critical thinking aside to embrace their inner green. As if hoping, somehow, that this time it will all be true. That the âoepeople powerâ really is on the march. That it is a binary world where there are evil incumbents â" the old guard â" oppressing thrusting âoereformersâ who are Twittering away toward the bright tomorrow of a world where everyone wants to be just like us! Democracy!"

http://www.lewrockwell.com/blog/lewrw/archives/027782.html

Even the Voice of America admits Ahmadinejad was ahead going in to the elections:

http://www.voanews.com/english/2009-06-08-voa60.cfm

Note that I think Ahmadinejad is a cruel and reactionary leader, but if that is the Iranian peoples choice I think we ought to stay out of it 100% and focus on our own dire economic circumstances, decayed infrastructure, and lack of healthcare in the U.S. first and foremost. Endless meddling in other peoples affairs only leads to wasted blood and treasure and blowback, something I very much agree with Ron Paul on despite being a leftist activist.

Queue anarcho-capitalist reply.

First, all government is force. It uses force to do what it wants to do. So far, no government has ever done what every voter has wanted them to do. Ever. Have you read laws that enable "government agents" to work on your behalf? Ever?

The private sector does EVERYTHING better, because it is done voluntarily. They don't force you to make a decision against your will.

It's ok for 10 crooks in office to take your money by force, or tell you what you can do with your land or your body or your tools (by force), but if CmdrTaco and I decide to lift your wallet, it's illegal?

More: http://www.lewrockwell.com/blog/kinsella/kinsella15.html

No, that's us here in Oregon

One that has been approved by the UN security council in accordance with chapter 7 of the UN charter. For example, the war in Afghanistan is a legal war. The 2003 Iraqi war was not.

Actually, neither of those two wars are legally wars under the US Constitution. Because, of course, they're not "wars" if Congress doesn't declare them to be wars... you know, the same way that no one dies if you don't declare them to be dead...

It's pretty messed up.

It retards the progression of democracy and social justice abroad and creates future demand for corruption.

I disagree that all bribery is bad. As Murray Rothbard writes:

"What of bribery of government officials? Here a distinction must be made between "aggressive" and "defensive" bribery; the first should be considered improper and aggressive, whereas the latter should be considered proper and legitimate. Consider a typical "aggressive bribe": a Mafia leader bribes police officials to exclude other, competing operators of gambling casinos from a certain territorial area. Here, the Mafioso acts in collaboration with the government to coerce competing gambling proprietors. The Mafioso is, in this case, an initiator, and accessory, to governmental aggression against his competitors. On the other hand, a "defensive bribe" has a radically different moral status. In such a case, for example, Robinson, seeing that gambling casinos are outlawed in a certain area, bribes policemen to allow his casino to operate - a perfectly legitimate response to an unfortunate situation."

"Defensive bribery, in fact, performs an important social function throughout the world. For, in many countries, business could not be transacted at all without the lubricant of bribery; in this way crippling and destructive regulations and exactions can be avoided. A "corrupt government," then, is not necessarily a bad thing; compared to an "incorruptible government" whose officials enforce the laws with great severity, "corruption" can at least allow a partial flowering of voluntary transactions and actions in a society."

The State versus Liberty

Bruce, you are a smart guy, a tremendous supporter of Free and Open Source software, and probably 10x smarter than the average /. denizen. So hopefully you understand that while governments pretend to represent the interest of those who help appoint them, they in fact consistently represent their own. They consistently attempt to transfer power and money away from others and to themselves. They tend to be composed of people of great intelligence, ambition and drive, and initially they are often ethical and principled people as well. But there is something about a system of unlawful power and control over others that tends to erode ethics and principle over time. Every decision tends to be a compromise between the bad and the worse. Every decision represents an attempt to force some people to do the will of others, to act against their own interests, under threat of prison rape and death. The "decision" is merely which lobbying group gets to be on top. Government is at its very core the institutionalization of one of the most evil religious beliefs that has ever existed: that some people have the right to control others without the latter's consent. You say you are "pro-government," yet you've demonstrated by your actions that you are neither evil nor stupid. The only other possibility is that you are misinformed; that you do not understand the nature of what it is that you support. I would like to challenge you to become informed. LewRockwell.com is one of many great places to start; the link in my sig is another. Both sites are unashamedly libertarian, as I am; however, you needn't be in order to understand and appreciate that government is evil. Actually, governments act against genuine liberal interests (e.g., the environment, free speech, due process, medical and religious freedom) just as often as conservative ones. You probably agree that the Bush administration was evil to the core, but every power the Bush regime appropriated for its own use still exists and even if you support the way Obama uses this power, eventually another regime will arise which you do not, and these powers will then be used against you. In the end, freedom and despotism are the only options; there is no in-between, because once power can be abused, it will be abused, and one will surely and inevitably give way to the other. By being "pro-government" you are throwing your hand in with the despots. I would urge you to reconsider.

It isn't, it's an affront to safety.

No more so than say, mayors goofing around with assault rifles. http://freedominourtime.blogspot.com/2008/02/restoring-right-to-resist.html

In fact, I would guess that there are many fewer fatalities due to accidents with guns than with cars. So why not take away everyone's car? Both guns and cars provide utility. For brevity, I will cut short the reductio ad absurdam.

In any case, your desire to prevent me or anyone else from having a gun infringes on the freedoms of others predicated on a perceived risk, not on a committed crime, and thus you prejudge people before they have in fact comitted a crime which is generally a no-no.

And besides which, your safety concerns (if they were genuinely only safety concerns) would easily be remedied by civilian firearms training programs. These are required by several states, especially for concealed carry permits. If you would still see this as a safety issue even with adequate training (whatever that may be), why don't you feel the same about government employees having those weapons? I grew up in DC and I feel a vague sense of unease when an armed government employee is in close proximity. Perhaps this is because I've been around much more police violence than you have. But surely you remember Rodney King.

Secondly you make an assumption that if everyone were armed then those who would seek to do harm would be interested in the continuance of thier lives. This is also a falsehood in todays current climate. Those who would seek to do harm in the situation you're likely describing care nothing more than completing a 'mission' with no regards to their own lives.

Here you misread my argument. The vast majority of crime is still robbery/rape/etc. and is motivated by self-interested greed/power hunger. These are people to whom death may not scare to the same extent it scares most people in our society, but these are not suicidal people in general. My argument in its main is directed at what a traveler would do to protect him/herself in their destination after the flight (though yes, armed people will also protect their lives against those unconcerned with the loss of their own). It is sad that people believe that they are safer when frequently apathetic "public servants" and criminals have weapons. This next link is only a sample of what is beginning to happen as we entrust more of our safety to people in government. http://www.newsvine.com/_question/2009/04/08/2656511-did-transit-workers-do-enough-in-subway-rape-case

And that's when the police themselves aren't the criminals: http://www.lewrockwell.com/grigg/grigg-w84.html
Or inciting/perpetrating violence at demonstrations and trying to cover it up. http://digg.com/world_news/British_police_kill_passer_by_at_London_G20_protests_Video

The answer is that we must each take responsibility for our own safety to a large extent.

As far as "opposite ends of the political spectrum" goes, you may be right, but only if you're of the socialist-fascism bent rather than the socialist bent. I'm (as you should be able to tell from my posting history) also very much against the majority of the acts of the Republicans in the last decade. I am a civil libertarian on all fronts.

Resorting to name-calling indicates that you are resorting to ad-hominem and emotional based attacks

No, after years of arguing with idiots my patience for dealing with stupidity is simply not what it used to be.

The government controls the military and the instigation of wars.

No. People, chief amongst them capitalists, are the ones who comprise and control the government. Government is not some entity that exists on its own, independent of everything else. Government is simply another word for "people in power", who incidenatally are usually influenced and controlled by those who are also very greedy: i.e. capitalists. If governments would not exist, they would be promptly invented by the richest capitalists in order to protect their loot from the "rabble" they so detest.

In a Capitalist society, there is a separation between state and economics, just as there is separation between church and state

Again, you have no clue. Capitalism is an economic system, wholly separate from a political system. That is why Fascist countries were also capitalist countries. You can have feudal-capitalist societies, just like you can have democratic-capitalist ones. The same applies to Communism, which being an economic system can in theory be coupled with democratic governance just as it can with a despotic one. That is why capitalists, being driven by personal greed, are just as likely to start wars as any other kind of fanatic, be it religious or political. Your whining will not change that fact. In the absence of political governance, the capitalists simply hire mercenaries to wage their wars for them, be it to conquer foreign sources of wealth, or as in the case of the Robber Barons of the Gilded Age, domestic, in form of their own disobedient workers. And that is history, not mere unsubstantiated musings of some worthless drug addicted pop "philosopher".

If you are interested in rational dialogue, consider reading the works of the late author Ayn Rand, such as Atlas Shrugged.

Oh no, not another moronic acolyte of the High Priestess Of All Encompassing Greed That Devours The Universe Zinovyevna! She, rational! That's a hoot. If her dope induced, vacuous, voluminous ode to teenage angst is your definition of "rationality", why, then I recommend you play the game Bioshock for a counter-point.

Here's an excerpt from that article. It's an interesting read, though a little tinfoilish. (lewrockwell.com/blog/lewrw/archives/026241.html#more)

So what is fueling this revolution? A brief glance at the website of one of the Moldovan NGOs leading the effort to overthrow the elected Moldovan government, that of the "Hyde Park Organization," reveals an interesting benefactor: at the bottom of the page, next to a seal of the United States, one can read that "This website is hosted free of charge through the Internet Access Training Program (IATP). IATP is a program of the Bureau of Educational & Cultural Affairs (ECA), US Department of State, funded under the Freedom Support Act (FSA)."

Digging a bit further, one can see on the website of the US Agency for International Development that the United States government, through cut-out organizations like the International Republican Institute and the National Democratic Institute, is funneling large sums of money to Moldova for programs with such fascinating titles as "Strengthening Democratic Political Activism in Moldova (SPA)." USAID boasts that this program is "cultivating new political activists who can formulate and pursue concrete political objectives..." No doubt.

Another program, titled the "Internet Access and Training Program" may hold a clue as to where all these Twitterers came from. According to the US government, this program "provides local communities with free access to the Internet and to extensive training in all aspects of information technology." Does the training come with iPhones?

The media, with story-line already inked out, mock the Moldovan president's claims that the protests were "well designed, well thought out, coordinated, planned and paid for," but isn't that what the USAID website has already claimed? After all, to what end does the US train and fund NGOs in projects such as the "Moldova Citizen Participation Program," whose goal is to "build... the capacity of citizens to create tangible and positive change in their own communities through civic activity and democratic practices...by providing training, mentoring, and funding for citizen-initiated projects and strengthening the capacity of NGOs and citizen groups to mobilize their community, advocate for change, and hold government accountable"? In the previous color revolutions we have seen the perversion of "democracy" to mean getting enough people getting to the street to overthrow an elected government.

Seems like the Virginia state police has painted a picture of the average terrorist that describes themselves much more accurately than it describes anyone on Slashdot.

Silly person, the Virginia State Police can't be terrorists because they're the "good guys"! They are the ones who label others terrorists, not the other way around!

Besides, they have uniforms and badges and *everything*!

Don't you understand how this works?

Now move along and stop this crazy-talk before the police taser you three times within seconds, then shoot you three times point-blank in the chest with a .40-cal while in convulsions for being a "person of interest"!

Strat

And they admit that because of the way the government is funded through the Fed they can never pay off the debt. What makes that a good thing?

I have no idea what this refers to, but I strongly suspect that the source is nonsense.

http://www.nolanchart.com/article2991.html

http://www.lewrockwell.com/north/north532.html

http://www.campaignforliberty.com/blog.php?view=14757

It kind of makes me wonder if there were groups of professional copiers who were pissed off 500 years ago when Gutenberg introduced movable type to Europe.

I don't know about that invention, but the invention of music notation pissed off the existing music-teaching cartel and resulted in retribution against its inventor!

What? In politics maybe, but not the libertarians I know.
Private property is the solution to limited resources, and modern intellectual property is not limited in any sense.

The model was not to blame. It merely made it easier to handle government policy on bank lending.

The problem was the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) compelling banks to make loans to low-income borrowers.

http://www.lewrockwell.com/dilorenzo/dilorenzo125.html

Lincoln violated the constitution numerous ways and suspended habeas corpus! Lincoln authorized the military to arrest and indefinitely detain anyone suspected of aiding the rebels.

http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig5/young-andrew7.html

Lincoln helped destroy the constitution and make the US government what it is today!

Once again, the ends don't justify the means. I am pro freedom and anti prejudice. Abraham Lincoln helped enslave us, and because the north won, they made him look great all through the rest of history.

Because of Abraham Lincoln, no state is allowed to recede for any reason.

Luckily there are libertarians who are not in support of the bullshit concept of Imanginary Property.

The Mercantilism of Our Time

There's also the story of how Watts sat on the patent for the steam engine, keeping innovation hindered until the patent ran out. Only then did he begin producing steam engines on a large scale.

But you have to admit, at the core of your argument you are saying "He holds something good, and I want to receive the benefit of that, so I think we should deny him the right to do what he wants with his good thing that I want."

He invented it, why doesn't he have the right to do with it as he please? Even if that involves keeping people from having it.
Agreeing to anything else (make him produce it! Yeah! It's for the good of all!) is a slippery slope. Who determines if it's good for all, and when does "good for all" become "we all want free stuff".

At the core, I do not have a problem with IP or the owner's control of it. I have a problem with the current method our country uses to enable the owner to control it. The existence of patent trolls, etc.

Luckily there are libertarians who are not in support of the bullshit concept of Imanginary Property.

The Mercantilism of Our Time

There's also the story of how Watts sat on the patent for the steam engine, keeping innovation hindered until the patent ran out. Only then did he begin producing steam engines on a large scale.

It is true that the gold standard has to deflate in the same way that fiat currency must inflate: that is how the system is designed. It is not a problem in either case as long as the rate stays within a couple percentage points of zero. With fiat currency the rate of inflation can be pretty easily manipulated by whoever controls the money supply, in our case the Fed. If the Fed could be trusted to maintain a low, positive rate of inflation then we would probably be okay, but that has not been the case:

Celent calculates that the M0 money supply [currency in circulation and bank reserves held at the Federal Reserve] "has recently increased at a pace never seen before in US history," and has increased as much in the last 90 days as it has in the last 83 years.

By the week of 3 December 2008, the money supply was a staggering $630 billion, or 74% higher than it was during the week of 3 September 2008. An increase of this size in the past took on the order of a decade.

(source, Dec 2008)

In addition, inflation at any positive rate devalues the currency over time. As long as you have a decent income you won't be racing the inflation rate, but any uninvested savings will steadily lose value. Contrast this with the deflation of a gold-backed currency (or one backed by any physical store of value): the rate is low, so you won't notice much day-to-day, but your long-term uninvested savings steadily gain value. As the economy grows, everything gets cheaper.

This is all a little simplistic, of course, but one important item keeps being forgotten in the mostly unheard debate about our currency: the US was on the gold standard (with a few deviations here and there when government moved to fiat currency to fund wars) for 300 years, and the dollar remained very stable throughout that period. We have been on a fully fiat currency for 38 years and now the Fed is using all the tricks of its trade to try and restore the semblance of stability.

You think life without the banks is something you actually want?!

Of course not. But life without these enormous banks that hold so much power need to go. Smaller regional banks, an end to fractional reserve banking, an end to the Federal Reserve, and a gold-backed currency needs to be the future.

...You also forget that black holes were first postulated in the 18th century by Laplace relying only on Newton's laws long before general relativity was even conceived....

Laplace was a mathematician who invented a mathematical theory way back then already. Ever since then the black hole hypothesis has been looking for a physical reality to back up the theory. That is exactly BACKWARDS to the scientific method. In REAL science someone makes a puzzling observation or an experiment has an entirely unexpected outcome. It is only after that theories are put forth to try to explain and figure out what is going on.

(....I'd also like to point out that you are the one relying on the mathematics to support a postulate for which there is no experimental motivation...)

Not at all. The laws of electrodynamics are never even applied to the cosmos at the large scale, because it is assumed (believed) that they apply only on small scales, such as within and between atoms. That is patently false. Modern space probes show that the electrical action of the solar wind extends to the distant edges of the solar system. It is also interesting that modern space probes show that the average charged particle energy from the sun INCREASES with distance outward. This indicates that there is an accelerating field that overcomes the gravity of the sun.

Many modern observations from space probes leave scientists "surprised" and forces them to come up with esoteric constructs in order to explain the data by means of long-held currently accepted theories. Gravity obviously is involved in the mechanics of the universe, but it alone is insufficient to explain in a simple and systematic way what modern observations show. If you are truly interested you can begin here:

http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig9/hogan1.html

It'd be akin to the United States suddenly declaring that we no longer wish to part of the United Nations. Right now we all see that as clear cut: the UN is a loose organization and if our country wants to leave we should be able to: we're a sovereign government.

http://www.lewrockwell.com/paul/paul82.html