Happy Belated Birthday to The Price of Liberty

Posted on 2017-10-04 by MamaLiberty

By MamaLiberty

October 3, 2017, was the 14th anniversary of The Price of Liberty. I can’t ever seem to remember that ahead of time, but it’s not really too important. No parties or parades were ever planned.

September 25 was my 71st birthday, and I seldom remember that either unless I get a card from my sister… one of only two people who ever remember at all. And that’s not important either, though I did use my BD as an excuse this year to buy something I’ve wanted for a long time.

I got a good set of stainless steel pots and pans about 40 years ago. Managed to lose the big fry pan somehow ten years ago, and never did buy another one. Then, the last few years, arthritis in my hands has made using these heavy old pans ever more difficult. The new set solves that problem.

But why did I wait so long? I never had any lack of something to cook in… even in camp with my very old nesting pots. It just seemed like a good thing to do right then, and they were “on sale” at Amazon.com as well. Certainly a point of joy in my life, but not terribly important in the long run. Continue reading →

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Lessons Learned: Puerto Rico and Maria

Posted on 2017-10-03 by TPOL Nathan

By Nathan Barton

When I first received this, I didn’t know where it was originally published. I got it from a correspondent who strongly supports local emergency preparedness AND is also a strong advocate of government.  I finally found it via DuckDuckGo at the Wall Street Journal, of all places!  Again, a surprise based on what it contains.  Giving full credit to the WSJ, here it is, with what I consider key points highlighted by me.

Headline: The emergency plan depended on generators but diesel was not delivered.

Oct. 1, 2017 4:23 p.m. ET

Hurricane Katrina taught the Federal Emergency Management Agency some harsh lessons in 2005. FEMA used what it learned to prepare and respond better when Harvey and Irma hit the U.S. mainland earlier this year. Now Maria has taken the bureaucrats back to school in Puerto Rico, and they’re not getting passing grades.

Ahead of the Category 4 storm that hit with 155 mile-an-hour winds on Sept. 20, the FEMA team in Puerto Rico said it was ready. But a week later much of the island was still in dire need of food, water and fuel—the basics of humanitarian relief. Continue reading →

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Football and freedom

Posted on 2017-10-02 by TPOL Nathan

By Nathan Barton

Although not particularly interesting to me personally, I have watched from the sidelines (pun intended) this entire brouhaha concerning kneeling instead of standing for the national anthem before sports events, especially football games.

It seems an incredibly stupid thing, in every aspect. It does not make sense. But then, so many things in our society, our world, the Fifty States, do not.  This is just one more.

It is another blow against the way of life that we take for granted here in the Fifty States.  Without fussing about whether it is a good or bad way of life, it is what we’ve had for a long time.  It is disturbing because it is a huge change in attitude and creates a conflict in our minds and hearts that is very difficult to deal with.

And (as is so often the case), the American people have done this to themselves.  Sport is a major element in our society, something which seems to be so embedded in culture, politics, and economics that many people cannot imagine life without it.  While professional sports is dominant, other parts of the sports “industry” are massive: college sports, high school sports, and even the “amateur” Olympics and the like. Continue reading →

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Las Vegas Massacre

Posted on 2017-10-02 by MamaLiberty

By MamaLiberty

Truly terrible event. I’m very sorry for all of the victims and their families.

But, as usual, even with minor happenings, the “news” and even the official accounts are rife with misinformation, outright contradictions, and political posturing. Too bad they can’t all calm down and be rational observers.

Some of this is stupid, some calculated to manipulate emotional hysteria, and some is just too predictable not to be almost amusing. Hillary Clinton using this tragedy to beat her old gun control drum, though there is nothing whatsoever that any “law” could have done to prevent such an attack. Or planting a big bomb, or a dozen other things, of course.

None of these cretins ever actually get around to explaining rationally and truthfully just how depriving the rest of us of our guns would stop such an atrocity. And, of course, there is no such explanation possible. Around 320 million people did NOT shoot at concert goers in Las Vegas. One person did… and he’s dead – however that actually happened. Maybe… Continue reading →

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Can we give up?

Posted on 2017-10-02 by TPOL Nathan

By Nathan Barton

It seems that daily, we get a fresh bout of news about something evil done to people – often by government and those who support more and more government.  Beating and killing and imprisoning people and stealing more and more taxes, creating more and more regulations, and enforcing everything with a heavy and often irrational hand.

And every day, we read about the next major catastrophe – manmade or otherwise – that is going to strike us down.  In addition to the traditional flood, fire, famine and earthquake, we have rogue asteroids and chemtrails and EMP and cellular brain-fry and many more threats.

Every day we read about how more and more people are trading freedom for security, being dumbed down still more and more by government schools and uncaring and unqualified parents, people who are more and more cruel and callous.

It isn’t just the mainstream media that pushes this diet of doom and gloom.  The alt-media and advertising promotes it more and more. Continue reading →

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Are we weird enough yet?

Posted on 2017-10-01 by TPOL Nathan

By Nathan Barton

As our society further slides into utter confusion and chaos, becoming less and less a society in which liberty can flourish, we keep seeing stranger and stranger events.

One of the latest is a proposal highlighted in MSN and USA Today this week: the National Park Service has approved an application to erect an 45-foot-high lighted statue of a nude woman on the “National Mall” – that strip of grass and concrete stretching from the Capitol to the Lincoln Memorial, lined by the various museums of the Smithsonian Institution and interrupted by the Washington Monument.  That obelisk is 555 feet tall, so this naked woman sculpture won’t overshadow it, but the glow in the dark feature may certainly distract people from the monuments and memorials and museums around it.  To say nothing of the cesspools of corruption and evil adjacent: the Capitol with its massive office buildings full of Congresscritturs and their immediate minions; the White House (palace of someone more powerful than any emperor in history), and of course, the looming facades of dozens of government office building teeming with bureaucrats and political appointees striving with all their might to outdo the corruption and megalomania of those in the two most imposing buildings around the mall. Continue reading →

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News, Fake News, and the Irrelevant “news”

Posted on 2017-09-30 by MamaLiberty

By MamaLiberty

Last weekend I took a complete vacation from reading any “news” at all.  Did some writing on my own, but ignored everything supposedly going on in the world. Big shock to some, I suppose, but nothing bad happened to me.

Monday, looking at my news feeds again, I saw very little that actually counted as “news” I needed to understand, and almost nothing that I could rationally do anything about. Whether any of it was real or not, I couldn’t actually know of course.

Why in the world is someone’s wardrobe dysfunction “news?” Or their sexual exploits or fantasies? Why would I care in the least if someone has sex with their dog, or anyone/anything else? NOT MY PROBLEM.

Of course, all of the various political manipulations and “scandals” have little or nothing to do with my personal life… and I sincerely hope it continues to be that way. Hillary’s emails and Wiener’s sex texting are silly compared to the reality of the damage done to actual people in most of these stories. Hillary and her insane spouse are responsible for piles of dead bodies… Shouldn’t that be more interesting than emails? At least once in a while?

I suspect that any real news would occupy one tenth of the space given to all of the nonsense now presented…  maybe a weekly would be sufficient.

What is “news” to you? Do you really care about most of what is being presented as “news.” And why?

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Foreign aid – the wrong thing for the wrong reasons

Posted on 2017-09-29 by TPOL Nathan

By Nathan Barton

The libertarian position on foreign aid is straightforward:

Foreign aid is unconstitutional. Foreign aid is an illegitimate purpose of government.

I am a firm believer in foreign aid.  I have donated to foreign aid projects many times: not just to support people preaching in foreign lands (even interstate – from one of the sovereign Fifty States to another) but to aid in times of trouble: floods, famines, earthquakes, medical emergencies, even war.  I encourage people to give to provide such help, to the right organizations and for the right purposes.

“Wait a minute, Nathan,” you say.  “How can you say that!?!  Here, we thought you were a free-market anarchist, a libertarian.”

As indeed I am.  But that does not mean that I cannot believe in and practice foreign aid.  And I have for decades: my Eagle Scout project was gathering a semi-load of relief supplies in the Metro Denver area in Colorado and getting it to South Dakota (a separate, sovereign and (according to corporation law) a “foreign” state). I’ve donated and helped provide aid for people in Nigeria and Ghana, in Honduras and Panama, and even some countries in Europe.

Because in the above paragraphs, the foreign aid of which I write is private.  Continue reading →

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Where ‘Liberal’ and ‘Conservative’ REALLY Come From

Posted on 2017-09-29 by MamaLiberty

By L. Reichard White

If liberals are all heart and no brain and conservatives are all brain and no heart, how would you describe libertarians?

How about, “Clearly libertarians are the perfect balance between the two.”

Here’s why that’s a pretty accurate assessment – – –

Long before history was enabled by writing, like us, our pre-historic small-group ancestors lived primarily by their brains, not their brawn.

Unlike other animals, they — like us — were born pretty much, as Rousseau and others put it, tabula rasa. That is, as “blank slates” with relatively few built-in instincts, drives, and other in-born behaviors.

For example, while hoofed animals can walk within a few minutes of birth and run soon after, it takes us approximately three months to learn to merely crawl.

The advantage to this lack of hard-wired behavior is that it gives us humans an unprecedented flexibility, allowing us to learn to live everywhere from the icy Arctic to the steaming jungles of Ecuador to the burning sands of the Kalihari. And, in the space station, even in “outer” space. Even, perhaps, on Mars, etc. Continue reading →

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Do we really need another example?

Posted on 2017-09-28 by TPOL Nathan

By Nathan Barton

Venezuela is a beautiful land and full of good people, rich in natural resources, and once one of the success stories of Latin America.

Today, it sounds like the South under Reconstruction, post-WW2 Germany or perhaps Biafra after their unsuccessful rebellion, or perhaps areas infected and afflicted by the Caliphate (the Islamic State). Consider:

Low supplies of food and medicine are leaving millions of people starving and desperate for medical treatment. A study published earlier this year reported that roughly 75 percent of Venezuelans lost an average of 19 pounds in the last year due to food shortages, Fox News reported.

Of course, this wasn’t a result of a horrible war or series of wars, nor a civil war or rebellion, nor of terrorism (as it is usually defined).

That is why the proper comparison should be to the likes of Zimbabwe, 1920s and 1930s Soviet Russia (including Ukraine and Belarus), China after the Great Cultural Revolution, or even Khymer Rouge Cambodia. Continue reading →

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