What a couple of years!
Ouch. Even though prices are (slowly) dropping. Even the Rally in the Black Hills is showing signs of a drop in attendance and not just because it isn’t a zero- or five-year. Five-dollar Diesel and Four-dollar-plus regular with ethanol HURTS.
Continue reading“Inter arma enim silent legis” is a Latin phrase meaning “In times of war, the law falls silent.”
Generally bureaucrats and politicians try to suspend civilian rights during war time. (The relatively “good” ones, that is – the bad ones try to do it all the time. If I dare speak of ANY politician or bureaucrat as “good.”)
For instance, President “Honest Abe” Lincoln requested an opinion on the suspension of a basic right (habeas corpus), during the War between the States. And the court held that the president cannot suspend the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus, nor authorize a military officer to do it. Even so, Lincoln and many of his commanders pretty much did so, time and time again. And of course, how many battalions does the Supreme Court have?
But the courts are ALSO not the good guys. Sadly, time and time again, courts have upheld this maxim of tyranny. Usually, at least.
Continue readingWe’ve seen sea-changes before: some concept, some invention, some new way of doing things that has an incredible impact on our society. And the lives not just of this generation, but many future generations.
Social media is one example.
In an obviously apocryphal story, a man wrote:
“I enjoy social media like Twitter and Facebook so much that I decided to have the same fun in meat space as in virtual space. So now when I walk down the street, I tell everyone what I am doing and where I am going and what I had for lunch and show the passers-by the cute pictures of my grandchildren and my cats. I tell them what I like to eat, and share recipes. I give thumbs-up to people I see do neat things – even if I don’t know them. I tell strangers I really like what they are wearing. And that I think they have great smiles.
“And you know what? It’s working! I’m being “friended” by a lot of people and I am even gaining followers now. In fact, right now, I’m being followed by FOUR people as I walk down the street doing my thing. Really nice folks, too: two cops, a private detective, and a psychiatrist!”
Now, don’t get us wrong. Social media is NOT inherently evil – it is a tool. No different than email or regular (snail) mail or radios or television. BUT it can be easily put to bad, evil uses. And its use – especially addiction and misuse – of social media can and has created many problems.
Continue readingThe connections (for many people) between beverage alcohol (booze! – beer, wine, hard liquor, and all the other stuff) and liberty is close. Not so much for ALL lovers of liberty – including those of us here at The Price of Liberty. We are, basically tee-totallers: we don’t drink the stuff except maybe in medicine (and prefer not to then).
Just as we don’t do drugs – recreational in particular – but really try to also minimize all the other stuff the medi-crats and medi-technocrats try to get us to ingest, rub on, inject, and even breath in.
But NOT doing booze or drugs does NOT mean – as lovers of liberty – that we believe that people should be prevented from making their own decisions about doing this stuff. ESPECIALLY not when it is GOVERNMENT supposedly trying to prevent them.
God gave us all free will. Even if we are stupid about it. But as Heinlein once said, “Stupidity cannot be cured. Stupidity is the only universal capital crime; the sentence is death. There is no appeal, and execution is carried out automatically and without pity.”
(This ties back into our recent discussion of free speech, silence, and similar topics, of course. Knowledge is power; spreading knowledge is therefore vital to the cause of liberty.)
So…
Continue readingDuring a couple of days on the road, we here at The Price of Liberty are watchning an example of the evils of government right here in South Dakota.
In a panicked response to angry activists and people, the Oglala Sioux Tribe has passed laws to STOP “Christian” churches from worshipping on the Oglala Lakota Nation, until (still undeveloped/ unpublished) forms of registration are distributed, completed, and approved by the tribal administration. And they banned a Baptist missionary for “hate speech” while linking him to another religious group (not his at all) which was protested and threatened with being burned out by a “protest” crowd. To FURTHER outcry (from a different group of people), the very next day the council delayed the ban for a few weeks.
What is going on?
Continue readingAbort the tyrannical government!
Every time we think that we’ve maxed out on how insane and stupid our so-called government leaders can get, the news headlines prove we again have underestimated the capacity of the politicians, bureaucrats and other forms of parasitic life to make life miserable. As the American (and European, and world) economy continues to melt down; as the various wars and push to wars continue, as more and more crazy ideas slip through the legislatures and Congress, it is easy to sympathize with the artist of this cartoon:
Of course, in an era where those protesting and occupying the Capitol (“the insurrectionists”) – and that guy down the street at the White House – are seriously being accused of seeking to overthrow the FedGov, posting the above cartoon is no doubt treason. So be it.
Continue readingThere comes a time when people have been so seeped in evil, so corrupted, that they no longer hide it in darkness. Instead, they boast of how corrupt, how rotten, how evil they have become. Deborah Birx is an example of that. We must remember that is NOT an exception to how people in government do things – it is the STANDARD.
Continue readingWe here at The Price of Liberty, and indeed most people in North America (even Mexico) do not have a gut understanding of what the price of liberty actually can be – actually has been. But even more, we do not understand the price of silence – the nigh-absolute silence imposed by totalitarian tyranny on every member of society – even the very top echelons of their government and other institutions.
Perhaps we can get something of a feel for that price by listening to (and watching) a recent video interview of Dr. Jordan Peterson of a lovely young lady who is an escaped “enemy of the state” from the People’s Democratic Republic of Korea – North Korea. Her tale is both encouraging and enlightening, and terrifying.
But are we willing to learn from her tale – and the story which was part of her personal pathway to liberty? That among other things, silence is the ally of tyranny, and that the price of silence is staggering and often measured in part by blood and tears?
Continue readingOver at Agora Financial, a libertarian investment and publishing firm based in Baltimore, their editors and writers have been sounding alarms about the signs of the FedGov (and the EU and others) pushing a “cashless society.”
One in which plastic cards, chips (RFID etc.) and other technology, has replaced the funny money we all have grown accustomed to: little green pieces of paper with pretty (or ugly!) pictures and numbers; tokens of base metal with a tiny amount of copper, pretending to look like silver (or even gold – remember the Susie B Anthony dollar coin back in the 1980s?).
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The Price of Liberty 
Winter is coming… time to move?
Thanks to Steve C who told us about this hilarious send-up ad (our opinion here at TPOL) by the Russians urging people that it is “time to move to Russia.”
The short video advert has gotten a lot of mixed reviews – my thought is that (as several have written) it is a great self-parody: satire. The voiceover, the pictures chosen, even some of the phrasing, all point that direction. In many ways, it resembles the old heavy-handed Soviet propaganda that is certainly not a modern Russian style of doing things.
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