In recent years, the United States has been providing military aid and advice to an increasingly militaristic Georgia, whose military budget has increased 30 fold since 2003 (much to the chagrin, I am sure, of the Georgian taxpayer). US intelligence services played a fundamental role in the 2004 election of its pro-Western president, Mikheil Saakashvili, who, in turn, has been aggressively courting Georgian membership in NATO.
None of these developments have been exactly welcomed by the Russians, who share a huge border with Georgia and run important natural-gas pipelines through the region. To understand why, Americans should consider how the US government would react if (say) Texas declared its independence and received massive amounts of military aid and advice from the Russians, all while the Texas president feted his Russian counterpart at state dinners in Austin and promoted Texan membership in a post –Cold War Warsaw Pact that had already expanded greatly in the previous 15 year...
First, what of the incredible human and physical cost of such activities? Those tanks and men we see slogging between towns and villages carry huge opportunity costs. War materiel and the troops who operate it have alternative uses in the market, and it represents a tremendous social failure when they are employed for destructive purposes. This applies to all military activities and is uniquely engineered by governments...
But more than this, the loss of human life is the greatest cost. What activities and contributions are foregone when a small child dies after a Russian or Georgian bomb slams into the side of an apartment building?
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Given the recent and not-so-recent history of US military interventions on foreign soil, there is little objection that our government can make when other governments invade countries, kill scores of innocent people, upend families, destroy homes and businesses, and contemplate regime change.
What game theorist in the Pentagon thought that the United States could intervene so heavily in the political and military affairs of Georgia without some eventual response from the Russians?
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In all of this analysis, it is important to separate the governments involved from the people who suffer from their actions. The people do not have a dog in this fight — and they suffer the most from its being waged. As the US government has "freed the hell out of Iraq" — to quote a popular bumper sticker — Russia is freeing the hell out of South Ossetians and Georgians. In both cases, state violence hinders mutual cooperation and the development of peaceful institutions in society that characterize civilization itself.
Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, instead of ending the prior interventions in the housing market that are responsible for the current crisis, Congress is increasing the level of government intervention in the housing market. This is the equivalent of giving a drug addict another fix, which will only make the necessary withdrawal more painful.
The provision giving the Treasury Secretary a blank check to purchase Fannie and Freddie stock not only makes the implicit government guarantee of Fannie and Freddie explicit, it represents another unconstitutional delegation of Congress’ Constitutional authority to control the allocation of taxpayer dollars.
The worst possible candidates from the Republican and Democrat parties have floated to the top, much like what you see when you glance down into a toilet bowl...
The "political system" virtually guarantees that the most corrupt, the best liars, the most compromising, becomes the presumptive candidate. Both candidates are also the politician of their party most willing to violate the Constitution by continuing an unlawful war, and by initiating and approving the highest amount of unconstitutional Federal spending...
Think about it. The political system in America is populated with men and women who give lip service to the Constitution, but then go on to vote for every unconstitutional spending bill presented to them. They talk about the virtues of our constitutional republic, and then act to subvert and violate that very system of government.
A pure constitutionalist has no place, and no political base, in America in 2008.
Burke is often referred to as the father of modern conservatism. It hardly requires much imagination to figure out what he would think of the neoconservatives’ imperial program of global democracy. To appreciate Burke’s arguments, though, one would have to shut off Rush Limbaugh and learn about conservative thought by reading actual books...
Although followers of the War Party tend to be more familiar with the conservatism of Sean Hannity than that of John C. Calhoun, whom they’ve never read, it is Calhoun whose wisdom is especially valuable here. Calhoun warned that majority rule, which can be justified only on the basis of convention and utility rather than on any strictly moral foundation, can work only in places where there exists a basic commonality of interests among the people. Otherwise, majority rule becomes just another form of tyranny, as interest groups with mutually exclusive goals use their electoral strength to oppress each other...
It is simply not true that any moral obligation exists for those fortunate enough to live under politically stable regimes to spend their blood and treasure from now until the end of time to bring liberty to the peoples of the world...
Anyone responding that the spread of democracy is more important than dollars and cents has simply taken leave of his senses, taking up residence in the Never Never Land of liberalism where there are no constraints and anything is possible if you simply wish hard enough...
No conservative, whose hallmark is a disposition toward stability, would risk his own country’s well being, both financial and moral, in a ceaseless crusade of visionary schemes. A real sense of history, as well as an appreciation of what is possible in this fallen world, should sober us up from the utopian fantasies of liberalism. Great American statesmen of the past understood this: we can be an example to the world, but beyond that we dare not go. No mother should ever have to be told that her sons died trying to straighten out the political situation in Nigeria. As Lord Byron said, "Who would be free, themselves must strike the blow."
How many deaths of other people’s children by bombing or starvation are we willing to accept in order that we may be free, affluent, and (supposedly) at peace? To that question I answer pretty quickly: None. And I know that I am not the only one who would give that answer: Please. No children. Don’t kill any children for my benefit.
War devastates the homefront as surely as it does the killing fields. Soldiers are conscripted, sent hither and yon to kill and maim or to be killed or maimed; their families relocate, following the jobs created by artificial wartime booms. War is the great scatterer, the merciless disperser.
The cost of war might be measured not only in body bags, in returning boys without legs, arms, eyes, faces, but also in divorce, dislocation, novels never written, children not fathered. During the Second World War, the divorce rate more than doubled, normal patters of courtship were disrupted, Daylight Saving Time was imposed nationwide over the objections of rural America, and the subsidized daycare industry was born via the Lanham Act, which sponsored 3,000 daycare centers in incarcerate the neglected children of Rosie the Riveter.
Almost every healthy manifestation of local culture was smothered – terminated – strangled – by U.S. entry into the Second World War...
The best reason to oppose the military-industrial complex is the most intimate: because it can kill your son or brother or cousin, and its social and economic fallout can destroy your town.
Government intervention into nearly every aspect of our lives is so common that people often lose sight of how things would operate absent the intervention. Furthermore, people seem to be convinced that government really is the answer when it comes to medical care...
Until the post–World War II era, medical services were pay-as-you-go affairs. Those who could not afford the best care depended on charity hospitals or doctors who were willing to stretch out the payment structure. In other words, people purchased medical care the way that they purchased most other goods: directly and in close relationships with those people who provided the services...
... during World War II, when the government had strict wage-price controls... could not offer higher pay in order to attract workers. Thus, they turned to providing tax-free “benefits” such as health insurance... For the most part, employers offered insurance plans... to provide protection from catastrophic illnesses or accidents. The idea at that time that an insurance company would pay for regular doctor visits and the like was seemingly far-fetched...
... health insurance as a means of increasing de facto income without increasing tax liability became increasingly popular...
According to dictionary.com, a fascist State has such features as a dictator with great powers, the suppression of criticism and opposition, regimentation of business, etc., and aggressive nationalism. I give us a high grade, almost an A...
We have fascism because that is what we have wanted and now want. We have voted for it, time and again. Both major parties, and no other parties are worth mentioning, are fascist and have promoted fascism. Votes cast for either major party are votes for fascism and fascist policies.
And why have we wanted fascism? Because we have wanted the government to solve problems that we (mistakenly and falsely) thought it could solve...
Government is our master. It has the power to be our master, and we have given it ever more power to be our master, such as by amending the Constitution so that the income tax became legal, or such as by allowing legislation to set up the central bank we call the Federal Reserve System...
We thought we could limit its powers. We thought wrongly. For we ourselves went ahead and decided to give it even more and greater powers to solve problems that we personally should have been solving...
As master, Government does not serve us. It does not solve those problems that we hope it will. Instead, it acts on its own behalf. It acts in such a way as to secure its own power and longevity. It acts so as to increase its powers. Its aims are not our aims. Therefore its deeds only by coincidence solve the problems we delegate to it...
We have fascism because we blundered. We erroneously thought we had found a low-cost solution to our many problems, in the form of a servant called Constitutional Government...
We are asking for an impossibility, which is that government solve problems that only we can solve. And that impossibility takes concrete shape in the form of a fascist system in which the master has dictatorial power, suppresses dissent, regiments us, and involves us in an aggressive nationalism. Who knows what other heinous facets of fascism will be revealed to us next?
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The only way out of this trap is not to attempt the impossible, not to grant government such powers, not to ask it to solve our problems, and instead to assume the responsibility for solving our own problems. The stark choice is between slavery and freedom. And fascism means slavery. The present course is slavery and will bring more slavery, without satisfactory solutions to any of our problems. And the amazing thing is that the moment we abandon fascism and powerful government, we will discover that the problems that government is now exacerbating and making worse will suddenly become tractable and manageable...
It is illusion to think that we control the daily machinations of Government by our votes. We do not. The only way to control this Government is to cut its legs off at the hip. Nothing less than fundamental changes like ending the income tax and ending the Federal Reserve will do.
But since oil is otherwise exclusively traded in dollars, this means that oil producers have vast amounts of assets held in dollars. Especially since the War on Terror and the PATRIOT Act, many oil-producing nations and banks are concerned the US government may freeze assets based on flimsy pretexts. This fear contributes to dollar weakness, and therefore also high oil prices.
Recently I and other members of Congress spoke out against H Con Res 362 and exposed this seemingly innocuous bill for what it really is – a call for a blockade and a build up to war with Iran. Thankfully it has not come to the floor for a vote as I had fully expected it would. But to even propose legislation like this, and get an alarming 261 cosponsors, makes the oil markets jittery and encourages more capital flight from the dollar. We only isolate ourselves on the world stage with actions and attitudes like this. After all, how can it be wise for the rest of the world to bank on America, when we tend to freeze assets and blockade entire countries for no good reason?
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The best policy is always free trade with all and entangling alliances with none, but instead we isolate ourselves by picking sides and making enemies out of our friends or potential friends. In the recent conflict with Russia and Georgia, it appears that once again the administration is going to pick sides and send taxpayer money, when we are in a deep recession here at home. There is no good reason for us to put a dog in every fight around the world...
However, our interventionist mindset when it comes to foreign policy never ceases to get us into sticky situations, for which we pay a premium at the gas pump.
The tragic events in the nation of Georgia show that U.S. foreign policy is a bust. In particular, NATO must go. This may seem counterintuitive, but this relic of the Cold War has nothing to contribute to peace. On the contrary, it is a destabilizing tool of America’s provocative imperial foreign policy...
Considering that NATO was ostensibly created to counter the Soviet Union in Europe, how could expanding the organization up to the Russian border not be provocative? What was the point, except to show the Russians who’s boss?
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the Bush administration’s words and deeds almost certainly emboldened the Georgian government with respect to South Ossetia and Russia, encouraging it to take measures it probably would not have taken otherwise...
The Bush administration, then, made implicit — and perhaps explicit — guarantees to the Georgian government it was in no position to back up. Thus the American imperium is revealed as a costly, provocative, but in essential ways impotent force in the world. For this the taxpayers are coughing up hundreds of billion dollars a year. And people are dying.
The message of Georgia is clear. We need a top-to-bottom rethinking of American foreign policy. The American people’s interest lies in peace and free trade. Let others work out their own problems. Most of all, let’s keep the U.S. government from making the world’s problems worse than they already are.
1. Government is inherently incompetent, and no matter what task it is assigned, it will do that task in the most expensive and inefficient way possible.
2. The American government is corrupt from top to bottom.
3. If you rely on the mass media to inform you about your community, state and nation, you will, with rare exceptions, be woefully ignorant of what is really going on.
4. The universal franchise is a bad idea. The notion that the destiny of the nation should be put in the hands of ignoramuses, parasites, boobs, party hacks and idiots is absurd on its face.
5. Public education in America is a failure and is so flawed it cannot be reformed.
6. Not much has changed in the past 5,000 years of human history.
it’s hard to garner much sympathy for the Georgians. The Russian counteroffensive merely gave the Georgians a stiff dose of precisely the same medicine they were planning to give to the Ossetians.
All in all, it was a humanitarian tragedy, but hardly a heartrending tale of Georgian victimhood.
But America long ago ceased to analyze events with anything remotely resembling an objective moral standard. Nowadays, the only yardsticks our imperial elites understand are power and self-interest...
But from all the whining in the media, you’d think it was the Russians who actually started the war...
In truth, each and every one of these principles has already been embraced – and even glorified – by the very neoconservatives who now so viciously denounce Putin...
Given recent history, the rest of the world must be watching Washington’s anti-Russian hissy fit with slack-jawed disbelief...
Putinism – as he defines it – IS a dangerous and destabilizing ideology. But he needn’t go all the way to Moscow to find it.
Banks can only expand comfortably in unison when a Central Bank exists, essentially a governmental bank, enjoying a monopoly of government business, and a privileged position imposed by government over the entire banking system. It is only when central banking got established that the banks were able to expand for any length of time and the familiar business cycle got underway in the modern world...
So now we see, at last, that the business cycle is brought about, not by any mysterious failings of the free market economy, but quite the opposite: By systematic intervention by government in the market process. Government intervention brings about bank expansion and inflation, and, when the inflation comes to an end, the subsequent depression-adjustment comes into play...
What is the governmental role in the cure of depression? In the first place, government must cease inflating as soon as possible. It is true that this will, inevitably, bring the inflationary boom abruptly to an end, and commence the inevitable recession or depression. But the longer the government waits for this, the worse the necessary readjustments will have to be. The sooner the depression-readjustment is gotten over with, the better. This means, also, that the government must never try to prop up unsound business situations; it must never bail out or lend money to business firms in trouble. Doing this will simply prolong the agony and convert a sharp and quick depression phase into a lingering and chronic disease. The government must never try to prop up wage rates or prices of producers' goods; doing so will prolong and delay indefinitely the completion of the depression-adjustment process; it will cause indefinite and prolonged depression and mass unemployment in the vital capital goods industries. The government must not try to inflate again, in order to get out of the depression. For even if this reinflation succeeds, it will only sow greater trouble later on. The government must do nothing to encourage consumption, and it must not increase its own expenditures, for this will further increase the social consumption/investment ratio. In fact, cutting the government budget will improve the ratio. What the economy needs is not more consumption spending but more saving, in order to validate some of the excessive investments of the boom...
Thus, what the government should do, according to the Misesian analysis of the depression, is absolutely nothing. It should, from the point of view of economic health and ending the depression as quickly as possible, maintain a strict hands off, "laissez-faire" policy. Anything it does will delay and obstruct the adjustment process of the market; the less it does, the more rapidly will the market adjustment process do its work, and sound economic recovery ensue.
The Misesian prescription is thus the exact opposite of the Keynesian: It is for the government to keep absolute hands off the economy and to confine itself to stopping its own inflation and to cutting its own budget...
The Coolidge crisis had become the unprecedentedly prolonged Hoover-Roosevelt depression.
Ludwig von Mises, alone armed with a correct theory of the business cycle, was one of the very few economists to predict the Great Depression, and hence the economic world was forced to listen to him with respect.
The time is ripe – for a rediscovery, a renaissance, of the Mises theory of the business cycle. It can come none too soon; if it ever does, ... we would see a massive retreat of government from the economic sphere. But for all this to happen, the world of economics, and the public at large, must be made aware of the existence of an explanation of the business cycle that has lain neglected on the shelf for all too many tragic years.
Jon Tennett loves to tinker in his garage. It's not an uncommon pastime for an 81-year-old man, but what is unusual is the city's response.
Because Tennett fixes his neighbours' lawn mowers and other small machines, the City of Pickering has charged him with operating an illegal business - even though he's never charged a penny for his work.
Why do we have such a hard time imagining a world without a central bank? In the United States, the central bank was a 20th-century invention. No central bank of the current sort existed anywhere in the world before the 19th century. Somehow we got along just fine because the monetary system was self-managing. It was rooted in real commodities that provided the stable link to real economic activity. Banks were treated as regular enterprises that had profits and losses, and could succeed and fail. What guaranteed their stability, even with the evil of fractional reserves, was the competitive system.
All that came to an end, gradually, with the advent of the central bank. Money lost its connection to anything real beyond the linen paper on which it is printed. Banks became protected from failure. Most important, the central bank started to guarantee government debt. With what did it guarantee that debt? More linen paper, stuff which can be printed up without limit.
With this innovation, the fiscal restraint on the state came to an end. All the talk about congressional authorization of spending and the constitutional restraint on the state became white noise or a tissue of lies. The people got out of the habit of asking, "How precisely do you expect to pay for this?" We all just assume that there is some magic money machine out there that will achieve our every dream.
The lack of criticism of the Fed tells you all you need to know. It is the one sacrosanct institution because it is the most necessary institution to modern statecraft. Without it, we wouldn't fund both welfare and warfare. We wouldn't dream of a world empire and debate policy the way we debate art, as merely a matter of preference. There would be strict, physical limits on what the state could and could not do...
Deny the dictator the capacity to make all the money he needs at a whim, and his status shrinks dramatically.
The central bank is sacrosanct because its absence would force all sides to give up their fantasies of power. The Right would have to give up its crazed belief that it can do "heroic" things by seizing control of the state, things such as defend or overthrow any government in the world — or things such as make everyone in the country obey their own view of what constitutes the virtuous life.
The Left would have to surrender their vision of a state that uses coercion to achieve perfect equality, fairness, and distributive justice throughout the world.
This is why you hardly ever hear a fundamental question on the right of the Fed to exist. This is why the political culture frowns on anyone who attacks the heart of the state. This is why it is so "unrespectable" to mention the case against the Fed, and why serious critics are treated to a kind of shunning — and why, if you want to go places in Washington, you must never entertain the idea that the central bank ought to be abolished. Indeed, you should fête and publish the head of the Fed.
The central bank has failed in its overt mission for nearly 100 years. It has destroyed our money, funded unjust wars, given rise to a ghastly bureaucratic state, and pumped up more credit bubbles than we can count. And yet we are supposed to chalk up all of this to miscues and mistakes along the way, and then believe the head of the Fed when he promises to do better next time. What's more, the Fed has never actually accepted real responsibility for any of its misdeeds.
Just who is crazy here? If we really believed in authentic science — not the pseudoscience of public policy — we could conclude that this failed central bank has got to go. Its creation is not a footnote, but a main step in making possible all modern tyranny. Its abolition is a key to freedom itself.
Take a look at Motley Crue again. Despite achieving affordability and legal immunity, the band still decided to stop pursuing this dead-end lifestyle. Drugs cause an assortment of interpersonal issues from health problems to broken friendships and wrecked families. Even if drugs were free, the personal cost of doing drugs would always be high. Even without legal consequences or the high prices, drug use of Motley Crue's caliber would still be rare and an extreme case.
It is not an accident that college students, with plenty of time on their hands, have a reputation for heavy drinking and drug use. Students don't mysteriously mature from age 22 to 23 and stop drinking. They get jobs, which increases their time cost of drugs and alcohol and leads to lower usage.
Other groups associated with high rates of drug abuse have a similar profile: lots of time and few responsibilities
Smoking weed has the lowest time cost of all the drugs. In fact, the time cost is lower than alcohol. An individual can smoke a joint and be sober in an hour. I've yet to see the drunk who can do the same. Further, one cannot binge for days on marijuana as is possible with crack cocaine and other substances with low durations.
Without the legal system ruining the lives of nonviolent drug users, there will be a light at the end of the dark tunnel known as drug addiction. Not all problems will disappear. Drugs will continue to wreck lives, just as alcohol dependency has been doing for centuries. But one day, hopefully, drug addiction will be treated by doctors, friends, family, and church — not prison bars and an aggressive police state. Drug addicts will be allowed to peacefully readjust to society, becoming productive members without the scars of the penal system. They will have a chance to recover and to rock on, just like Motley Crue.
To deter and protect against school shootings, trustees have altered district policy to allow employees to carry concealed weapons if they have a state permit and permission from the administration... the small community is a 30-minute drive from the sheriff’s office, leaving students and teachers without protection. The district’s lone campus sits 500 feet from heavily trafficked U.S. 287, which could make it a target...
"When the federal government started making schools gun-free zones, that’s when all of these shootings started," Thweatt said. "Why would you put it out there that a group of people can’t defend themselves? That’s like saying 'sic ’em’ to a dog."
The gun policy Teachers and staffers in the Harrold school district can carry firearms beginning this fall if they, have a Texas license to carry a concealed handgun, are authorized to carry by the district, receive training in crisis management and hostile situations, and use ammunition that is designed to minimize the risk of ricochet in school halls.
If the President’s son can be misunderstood, so can you and me. One word spoken in jest over the telephone or out of context in a series of e-mails can trigger the audit that makes you the focus of attention. And once you are the focus, everything else they see and hear may only affirm their suspicion...
This is why the Constitution and Bill of Rights were written. The founding fathers were not protecting criminals. They were protecting us, from an intrusive, sometimes clumsy, sometimes evil government. We are now forfeiting those hard earned, well reasoned, personal liberties out of panic.
“Well,” you say, “But I’m innocent.” Yeah, so was Jesus, the apostle Paul, John Bunyan, Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandella. Good luck. We will send postcards.
According to one source, the United States has 2 million people in prison. Only Rwanda has a higher percentage of the population. Much of it is due to these drug laws...
... scientific evidence overwhelmingly indicates that cannabis is substantially less harmful than alcohol and should be treated not as a criminal issue but as a social and public health issue...
Among the finding of the Senate report? Marijuana is not a gateway to the use of hard drugs. Marijuana use does not lead to the commission of crime. Marijuana users are unlikely to become dependent. Marijuana use has little impact on driving. Liberalizing marijuana laws is unlikely to lead to increased marijuana use. Marijuana prohibition poses a greater risk to health than marijuana use.
Clearly, in our attempts to get it right, to wage war on drugs and minimize their impact on our children, we overstepped and got it wrong. And we’ve hurt a lot of people in the process. Now we haven’t the political courage to face down public ignorance on the subject and begin the tedious, thankless work of re-education. Once more Ron Paul is the voice crying in the wilderness, calling us back to our senses and speaking out for those thousands of forgotten men and women behind bars who have no voice or no hope. They are the victims o[f] our good intentions, our human sacrifices to keep the demons from our own doors and our own children. But it is wrong.
Eddlem said he would have voted to convict Luisi in a state court; he simply felt there were no grounds for a federal prosecution. He opposes nullification, he added in an e-mail, but judges who ignore the Constitution pose a far greater threat than a "handful of 'nullification' radicals."
So, also, if the government may dictate to the jury what laws they are to enforce, it is no longer a trial by the country,” [*9] but a trial by the government; because the jury then try the accused, not by any standard of their own --- by their own judgments of their rightful liberties --- but by a standard dictated to them by the government. And the standard, thus dictated by the government, becomes the measure of the people’s liberties. If the government dictate the standard of trial, it of course dictates the results of the trial. And such a trial is no trial by the country, but only a trial by the government; and in it the government determines what are its own powers over the people, instead of the people’s determining what are their own liberties against the government. In short, if the jury have no right to judge of the justice of a law of the government, they plainly can do nothing to protect the people, against the oppressions of the government; for there are no oppressions which the government may not authorize by law.
Now that military officers... have reached a split verdict convicting Salim Hamdan, a onetime driver for Osama bin Laden, of supporting terrorism, but innocent of terrorist conspiracy, do you feel safe?
Or are we superpower Americans still at risk until we capture bin Laden's dentist, barber, and the person who installed the carpet in his living room?
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Hamdan was not defended by the slick lawyers that got O.J. Simpson off, and he most certainly did not have a jury of his peers. Hamdan was defended by a Pentagon-appointed U.S. Navy officer, and his jurors were all Pentagon-appointed U.S. military officers with an eye on their careers. Even in this kangaroo court, Hamdan was cleared of the main charge...
Do you think you are made more safe when you stand there while "your" government implements its own version of Joseph Stalin's show trials?
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One would hope that the Hamdan verdict would be enough shame and ridicule for the U.S. in one day. But no, Bush didn't stop there. On his way to the Beijing Olympics, President Bush expressed "deep concerns" for the state of human rights in China. But not in Guantanamo, nor in Abu Ghraib, nor in the CIA's torture dungeons used for "renditions," nor in Iraq and Afghanistan, where the U.S. is expert at bombing weddings, funerals, children's soccer games, and every assortment of civilians imaginable.
As the good book says, clean the beam from your own eye before pointing to the mote in your brother's eye...
What would President Bush say if, heaven forbid, the Chinese were as rude as he is and asked Mr. Superpower why the land of "freedom and democracy" has one million names on a watch list. China with a population four times as large doesn't have a watch list with one million names.
What would President Bush say if China asked him why the U.S., with a population one-fourth the size of China's, has hundreds of thousands more of its citizens in prison? The percentage of Americans in prison is far higher than in China and is a larger absolute number...
China's human rights policy is not perfect. China's greatest human rights failing is that China is the Bush regime's prime enabler of its war crimes and human rights abuses in Iraq and Afghanistan. By financing Bush's budget deficit, China is financing Bush's gratuitous wars. Indeed, China can be said to finance the weaponry that the U.S. gives Israel to enable the suppression of the Palestinians and with which to bomb the civilian population of Lebanon...
... even if Ivins was in on the plot, he wasn't alone – and the rest of the poisoners are still out there.
Did Ivins wind up a "suicide" because he knew too much and was about to reveal what he knew to investigators? We may never know the answer to this question, but that should hardly stop us from raising it.
This whole sorry episode exemplifies media complicity with U.S. government agencies in creating narratives that reflect well on official Washington.
Instead of a political conversion, I had the sensation of discovering more vivid renditions of my own inchoate feelings, and more elegant articulations of what I had already believed. And I found I had joined a political community.
"If you have ever worked on a farm, nothing else seems like work." -- quoting John Maynard Keynes.
"You know," I confided one day to one of my conservative friends on campus, "it was important for the baby boomers to secure abortion rights and the right to die -- that way, they can kill off both their offspring and their aging parents. No one will ever have to depend on them." All very unfair of me, no doubt.
Conservatives, they [ liberals ] say are always looking for an enemy -- and when they can't find one they fabricate one. It's a short step from there to believing that threats are imaginary, and enemies non existent, which is the great modern liberal temptation.
