Another Unexpected Recovery from a Brain Dead Accident Victim | The New American

Ann Shibler writes:

Forty-eight days after being declared dead, Zack returned home under his own power...

These types of "miracles" that come to our attention really do challenge the medical community’s protocols when it comes to medical treatment of the minimally conscious and even brain-dead patients. But this can only be for the better. The more miracles there are, the more improved and longer-lasting treatments will become. Perhaps others will be given the time and care they need to recover, and not so quickly relegated to the morgue.

Another Unexpected Recovery from a Brain Dead Accident Victim | The New American

The Supreme Court Lessens Executive Power | The New American

This looks like a good ruling.

"Some 70 U.S. treaties may be affected by Tuesday’s Supreme Court ruling making the president’s unilateral imposition of treaties unconstitutional. The Supreme Court ruled that treaties are not binding on states unless they explicitly say so or if there is legislation to make that clear."

The Supreme Court Lessens Executive Power | The New American

FIRST THINGS: On the Square » Blog Archive » Evidence-Based Standard of Care

Excellent perspective on having a child with Down syndrome.

"And I will try to remember the fear and shock I felt when the words “Down syndrome” first became a part of our reality, and have compassion for every person who has trouble understanding the blessing Penny is to our family. And yet I will also hope and pray that physicians advising women and families who are frightened and uncertain and faced with life-changing decisions will offer those women a true choice, an informed choice, a choice based on the evidence that all of life is fragile and uncertain, with potential for heartbreak and potential for great joy."

FIRST THINGS: On the Square » Blog Archive » Evidence-Based Standard of Care

Radio 4 news hit by giggling fit -- BBC

I love this.

BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Radio 4 news hit by giggling fit

Beware of Fantasy by Charley Reese

Charley Reese writes, "Americans in particular should keep in mind that we are currently engaged in mismanaging two occupations of two countries that we illegally invaded. Neither enterprise is going well. Neither is our economy. In short, we have enough on our own plate without trying to steal a bite off of China's plate. We should make sure that Afghanistan and Iran are the last wheezes of the sick American Empire and shut it down and return to our republic."

Beware of Fantasy by Charley Reese

William F. Buckley Jr.: the Establishment’s “House Conservative”

William F. Buckley Jr.: the Establishment’s “House Conservative”

The FBI Hyperlink Honeypot, and what you can do to stay safe

The Liberty Papers »Blog Archive » The FBI Hyperlink Honeypot, and what you can do to stay safe

Agricultural Welfare

Deroy Muroch, writing for Scripps Howard, has a column on how ridiculous farm subsidies are in the present conditions.

Masson’s Blog - A Citizen’s Guide to Indiana » Agricultural Welfare

How Saudi Justice Is Sometimes More Merciful Than American Justice

The Liberty Papers »Blog Archive » How Saudi Justice Is Sometimes More Merciful Than American Justice

New York Global Warming Conference Considers 'Manhattan Declaration'

We, the scientists and researchers in climate and related fields, economists, policymakers, and business leaders, assembled at Times Square, New York City, participating in the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change,

Resolving that scientific questions should be evaluated solely by the scientific method...

recommend --

That world leaders reject the views expressed by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as well as popular, but misguided works such as "An Inconvenient Truth."

That all taxes, regulations, and other interventions intended to reduce emissions of CO2 be abandoned forthwith.

New York Global Warming Conference Considers 'Manhattan Declaration' - by Heartland Institute staff - The Heartland Institute

Ludwig von Mises on the folly of the minimum wage

The 1927 comments of Ludwig von Mises on government interventionism still ring true in 2008.

Generally, however, in the capitalist system, with its rapid strides in improving human welfare, progress takes place too swiftly to spare individuals the necessity of adapting themselves to it... The worker too must adjust himself to changing conditions, must add to what he has learned, or begin learning anew. He must leave occupations which no longer require the same number of workers as previously and enter one which has just come into being or which now needs more workers than before. But even if he remains in his old job, he must learn new techniques when circumstances demand it.

All this affects the worker in the form of changes in wage rates. If a particular branch of business employs relatively too many workers, it discharges some, and those discharged will not easily find new work in the same branch of business. The pressure on the labor market exercised by the discharged workers depresses wages in this branch of production. This, in turn, induces the worker to look for employment in those branches of production that wish to attract new workers and are therefore prepared to pay higher wages...

If, however, the government fixes minimum wages by law above the height of the static or natural wage, then the employers will find that they are no longer in a position to carry on successfully a number of enterprises that were still profitable when wages stood at the lower point. They will consequently curtail production and discharge workers. The effect of an artificial rise in wages, i.e., one imposed upon the market from the outside, is, therefore, the spread of unemployment...

What does create a new situation in the labor market is the element of coercion involved in strikes and compulsory union membership that prevails today in most of the industrial countries of Europe. Since the unionized workers deny access to employment to those who are not members of their union, and resort to open violence during strikes to prevent other workers from taking the place of those on strike, the wage demands that the unions present to the employers have precisely the same force as government decrees fixing minimum wage rates... Thus, the higher wages exacted by the trade unions become a cause of unemployment...

For the unemployed to be granted support by the government or by the unions only serves to enlarge the evil... The jobless worker who is on relief does not consider it necessary to look about for a new occupation if he no longer finds a position in his old one; at least, he allows more time to elapse before he decides to shift to a new occupation or to a new locality or before he reduces the wage rate he demands to that at which he could find work. If unemployment benefits are not set too low, one can say that as long as they are offered, unemployment cannot disappear...

It is obviously futile to attempt to eliminate unemployment by embarking upon a program of public works that would otherwise not have been undertaken. The necessary resources for such projects must be withdrawn by taxes or loans from the application they would otherwise have found. Unemployment in one industry can, in this way, be mitigated only to the extent that it is increased in another.

From whichever side we consider interventionism, it becomes evident that this system leads to a result that its originators and advocates did not intend and that, even from their standpoint, it must appear as a senseless, self-defeating, absurd policy.

Liberalism, The Organization of the Economy

The War on Recession - Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. - Mises Institute

Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. writes, "Take a look at Murray Rothbard's book The Panic of 1819. Here we have America's first big financial panic. The public was going nuts demanding answers. Congressmen proposed this and that. Debates raged in the papers. But government ultimately took no action at all. Sure enough, the panic went away on its own. So it was in 1920 and 1921. The government didn't intervene and voila normalcy returned."

The War on Recession - Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. - Mises Institute

Congress Raises the Debt Ceiling To Accomdate Bush’s Legacy | The John Birch Society - Truth, Leadership, Freedom

When President Bush took office, the national debt stood at $5.7 trillion. Today it is $9.2 trillion and rising, projected to increase to $9.7 trillion by the time President Bush leaves office — up by $4 trillion in eight years. This is the legacy our children and grandchildren will inherit from the fiscal policy of this administration.

Congress Raises the Debt Ceiling To Accomdate Bush’s Legacy | The John Birch Society - Truth, Leadership, Freedom

More Lies From the Fascists by Paul Craig Roberts

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. Mr. Roberts writes:

The choice between FISA and the Protect America Act has nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism, at least not from foreign terrorists. Bush and his brownshirts object to FISA, because the law requires Bush to obtain warrants from a FISA court. Warrants mean that Bush is accountable. Bush and his brownshirts argue that accountability is an infringement on the power of the president.

To escape accountability, the Brownshirt Party came up with the Protect America Act. This act eliminates Bush’s accountability to judges and gives the telecom companies immunity from the felonies they committed by acquiescing in Bush’s illegal spying.

Bush began violating the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) in October 2001 when he spied on Americans without obtaining warrants from the FISA court...

As the lawmakers who gave us FISA understood, spying on people without warrants lets a political party collect dirt on its adversaries with which to blackmail them. As Bush illegally spied a long time before word of it got out, blackmail might be the reason the Democrats have ignored their congressional election mandate and have not put a stop to Bush’s illegal wars and unconstitutional police state measures.

Perhaps the Democrats have finally caught on that they cannot function as a political party as long as they continue to permit Bush to spy on them. For one reason or another, they have let the Orwellian-named Protect America Act expire.

With the Protect America Act, Bush and his brownshirts are trying to establish the independence of the executive branch from statutory law and the Constitution. The FISA law means that the president is accountable to federal judges for warrants. Bush and the brownshirt Republicans are striving to make the president independent of all accountability. The brownshirts insist that the leader knows best and can tolerate no interference from the law, the judiciary, the Congress, or the Constitution, and certainly not from the American people who, the brownshirts tell us, won’t be safe unless Bush is very powerful.

George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison saw it differently. The American people cannot be safe unless the president is accountable and under many restraints.

Pray that the Democrats have caught on that they cannot give the executive branch unaccountable powers to spy and still have grounds on which to refuse the executive branch unaccountable powers elsewhere.

Republicans have used the "war on terror" to create an unaccountable executive. To prevent the presidency from becoming a dictatorial office, it is crucial that Congress cease acquiescing in Bush’s grab for powers. As the Founding Fathers warned us, the terrorists we have to fear are the ones in power in Washington.

The al Qaeda terrorists, with whom Bush has been frightening us, have no power to destroy our liberties. Compared to the loss of liberty, a terrorist attack is nothing.

Meanwhile, Bush, the beneficiary of two stolen elections, has urged Zimbabwe to hold a fair election. America gets away with its hypocrisy because no one in our government has enough shame to blush.

More Lies From the Fascists by Paul Craig Roberts

The Anti-war Speech That Earned Eugene Debs 10 Years in Prison

Prominent labor organizer and political activist Eugene Debs delivered a speech in Canton, Ohio, on 16 June 1918. Because of it, he was prosecuted under the Sedition Act for interfering with the draft, leading to a 10-year prison sentence and the stripping of his US citizenship. Mr. Debs said:

The feudal barons of the Middle Ages, the economic predecessors of the capitalists of our day, declared all wars. And their miserable serfs fought all the battles. The poor, ignorant serfs had been taught to revere their masters; to believe that when their masters declared war upon one another, it was their patriotic duty to fall upon one another and to cut one another's throats for the profit and glory of the lords and barons who held them in contempt. And that is war in a nutshell. The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and all to lose -- especially their lives.

They have always taught and trained you to believe it to be your patriotic duty to go to war and to have yourselves slaughtered at their command. But in all the history of the world you, the people, have never had a voice in declaring war, and strange as it certainly appears, no war by any nation in any age has ever been declared by the people.

And here let me emphasize the fact -- and it cannot be repeated too often -- that the working class who fight all the battles, the working class who make the supreme sacrifices, the working class who freely shed their blood and furnish the corpses, have never yet had a voice in either declaring war or making peace. It is the ruling class that invariably does both. They alone declare war and they alone make peace. Yours not to reason why; Yours but to do and die. That is their motto and we object on the part of the awakening workers of this nation. If war is right let it be declared by the people. You who have your lives to lose, you certainly above all others have the right to decide the momentous issue of war or peace....

You need at this time especially to know that you are fit for something better than slavery and cannon fodder. You need to know that you were not created to work and produce and impoverish yourself to enrich an idle exploiter. You need to know that you have a mind to improve, a soul to develop, and a manhood to sustain....

They are continually talking about your patriotic duty. It is not their but your patriotic duty that they are concerned about. There is a decided difference. Their patriotic duty never takes them to the firing line or chucks them into the trenches....

The Memory Hole > The Anti-war Speech That Earned Eugene Debs 10 Years in Prison

Bernanke: Federal Reserve caused Great Depression

Despite the varied theories espoused by many establishment economists, it was none other than the Federal Reserve that caused the Great Depression and the horrific suffering, deprivation and dislocation America and the world experienced in its wake. At least, that's the clearly stated view of current Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke.

Bernanke: Federal Reserve caused Great Depression

Vision Forum at the Supreme Court Hearing on the Second Amendment: Part I

Bob smiled. “Well, if you are going to use that evidentiary argument, then do you realize that in every state that has passed concealed carry laws, the crime rate has dropped in each of those states? So I believe that the Supreme Court should affirm the appellant decision overturning the gun ban, and thus allow law-abiding citizens to carry concealed weapons.”

Doug's Blog: Vision Forum at the Supreme Court Hearing on the Second Amendment: Part I

von Mises on "The War on Drugs"

Excellent commentary by von Mises in 1927 on the folly of our present-day "war on drugs".

By way of context, this was written midway through the 1920 to 1933 of the legal prohibition of alcohol production and consumption in the United States.

Also, the meaning of the term "liberal" has morphed into almost the opposite since von Mises wrote. The present-day equivalent would be closer to today's libertarian.

von Mises writes:

As the liberal sees it, the task of the state consists solely and exclusively in guaranteeing the protection of life, health, liberty, and private property against violent attacks. Everything that goes beyond this is an evil...

It is universally deemed one of the tasks of legislation and government to protect the individual from himself. Even those who otherwise generally have misgivings about extending the area of governmental activity consider it quite proper that the freedom of the individual should be curtailed in this respect, and they think that only a benighted doctrinairism could oppose such prohibitions...

No words need be wasted over the fact that all these narcotics are harmful. The question whether even a small quantity of alcohol is harmful or whether the harm results only from the abuse of alcoholic beverages is not at issue here. It is an established fact that alcoholism, cocainism, and morphinism are deadly enemies of life, of health, and of the capacity for work and enjoyment; and a utilitarian must therefore consider them as vices. But this is far from demonstrating that the authorities must interpose to suppress these vices by commercial prohibitions, nor is it by any means evident that such intervention on the part of the government is really capable of suppressing them or that, even if this end could be attained, it might not therewith open up a Pandora's box of other dangers, no less mischievous than alcoholism and morphinism...

For if the majority of citizens is, in principle, conceded the right to impose its way of life upon a minority, it is impossible to stop at prohibitions against indulgence in alcohol, morphine, cocaine, and similar poisons. Why should not what is valid for these poisons be valid also for nicotine, caffeine, and the like? Why should not the state generally prescribe which foods may be indulged in and which must be avoided because they are injurious? ...

We see that as soon as we surrender the principle that the state should not interfere in any questions touching on the individual's mode of life, we end by regulating and restricting the latter down to the smallest detail. The personal freedom of the individual is abrogated. He becomes a slave of the community, bound to obey the dictates of the majority...

All mankind's progress has been achieved as a result of the initiative of a small minority that began to deviate from the ideas and customs of the majority until their example finally moved the others to accept the innovation themselves. To give the majority the right to dictate to the minority what it is to think, to read, and to do is to put a stop to progress once and for all...

The propensity of our contemporaries to demand authoritarian prohibition as soon as something does not please them, and their readiness to submit to such prohibitions even when what is prohibited is quite agreeable to them shows how deeply ingrained the spirit of servility still remains within them. It will require many long years of self-education until the subject can turn himself into the citizen. A free man must be able to endure it when his fellow men act and live otherwise than he considers proper. He must free himself from the habit, just as soon as something does not please him, of calling for the police.

Liberalism, The Limits of Governmental Activity

The Fed's New Tricks Are Creating Disaster - Frank Shostak - Mises Institute

Frank Shostak writes, "The engine of economic growth is not money, however, but real savings. If the pool of real saving is declining or stagnating, then the economy -- also in terms of GDP -- will follow suit, irrespective of what the Fed is doing."

The Fed's New Tricks Are Creating Disaster - Frank Shostak - Mises Institute

von Mises on the power of ideas

The more I read by Ludwig von Mises, the more I find to like.

von Mises writes (1927), "Repression by brute force is always a confession of the inability to make use of the better weapons of the intellect -- better because they alone give promise of final success. This is the fundamental error from which Fascism suffers and which will ultimately cause its downfall... The ultimate outcome of the struggle, however, will not be decided by arms, but by ideas. It is ideas that group men into fighting factions, that press the weapons into their hands, and that determine against whom and for whom the weapons shall be used. It is they alone, and not arms, that, in the last analysis, turn the scales."

Liberalism, The Argument of Fascism