Killer cops? Maybe not?

Posted on 2017-09-24 by TPOL Nathan

By Nathan Barton

Events last week at Georgia Tech are one of several examples of “The Year of the Jackpot” situation we here in the Fifty States (and around the world) find ourselves in.

The Blaze’s Matt Walsh had an excellent analysis and commentary on it – from a right-libertarian (minarchist) point of view.

An LG-etc. activist (now confirmed as 21 years old) on the Georgia Tech campus wrote three suicide notes, called 911 to report an armed and dangerous man wandering the area of campus (which was, apparently himself) saying the man had a knife and a gun strapped to his hip, and then went outside, confronted campus police, who (by video recording) asked him at least 20 times to put down his weapon and surrender to them so that they could help him.  He then rushed them, with knife in hand, and they shot – and killed – him.

Readers and friends (and acquaintances) know I’m no fan of law enforcement. Even campus law enforcement.  But I find myself agreeing with Matt Walsh far more than I do with the dead man’s fellow LG-whatever activists, fellow Tranzis, and fellow snowflakes: this was a pretty clear case of suicide-by-cop.  With some pretty obvious political overtones. Continue reading →

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Where’s government? Where Are the liberals?

Posted on 2017-09-23 by TPOL Nathan

By Nathan Barton

Welcome to West Texas and Southeastern New Mexico.  Most folks who know the area know it as the Permian Basin, named for a geological formation identified as being the same as the original Perm area in Russia.  And “basin” as basically being a huge bowl filled with black gold – petroleum.  West Texas intermediate, specifically, as well as natural gas, ranging from sweet (few contaminants) to sour (filled with nasty stuff you don’t want in people’s houses).

My family has been familiar with, and lived in, the Permian Basin since the late 1920s.  My father was born there, in a city of 30,000+ people, that today has about 300 – on a day when the county fair is going on.  That was back when rotary drills were the latest technology, and a well a couple hundred feet deep was a wonder.  Most people still used impact drills, and the big four-legged drilling rigs that looked like extended fire lookout towers (and sometimes served that purpose, even in the desert).

Now, I know folks don’t read this column (usually) just to get tidbits about the past.  There is a point to this.  Just be patient. Continue reading →

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Ensuring an American society in chaos for the next generation?

Posted on 2017-09-22 by TPOL Nathan

By Nathan Barton

A website recently published some interesting and disturbing data. The “Citizen’s Commission on Human Rights International” or CCHRINT,  provides quite a bit of information on the prescribing of psychiatric drugs to both children and adults in the Fifty States. It is startling.

All Psychiatric Drugs
0-5 Years 1,080,168

Breakdown:
0-1 Years 274,804
2-3 Years 370,778
4-5 Years 500,948
6-12 Years 4,130,340
13-17 Years 3,617,593

Grand Total 0-17 Years 8,389,034 kids on psychiatric drugs

That is nearly 1% of the TOTAL population of the Fifty States. It is, in the words of one politician, “YUGE!” But now, let us throw in adults.

Again, complied by CCHRINT, but taken from what seem to be valid and generally accurate sources. (Admittedly, some are government sites, but you can argue that government would try to understate such things, if they could.)

Total US “patients”
Grand Total 78,694,222 Continue reading →

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The Year of the Jackpot – approaching fast, or here at last?

Posted on 2017-09-20 by TPOL Nathan

By Nathan Barton

The stories seem to come thick and fast. Here are just a few:
GQ Magazine reports from Washington, that in Seattle an armband-wearing, ranting neo-Nazi knocked out after being tracked down with Twitter through the streets of the city. “Antifascists” exhibited THEIR brand of aggressive, violent transnational socialism and pretend anarchism by punching him out – in true mob fashion. GQ blames the “Trump Era” and therefore The Donald, and not the mob or Twitter, used to hunt down the evil monster to prevent him from speaking to people.

Fom KHOU, we learn about a woman’s complaint about Hobby Lobby decor. This time, the preferred method of communicating the idiotic ravings is Facebook. A snowflake posted a picture of a fake raw cotton plant on Facebook urging the craft store giant Hobby Lobby to take down its decor calling for ‘a little sensitivity.’ The whinging poster seems to be upset with raw cotton, a commodity gained largely at the expense of black slaves [up to about 150+ years ago], being used as a decoration. The poster is joined by a large gang of idiots: over 15,000 shares and more than 166,000 comments. Continue reading →

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Hey, it’s just money; or is it?

Posted on 2017-09-19 by TPOL Nathan

By Nathan Barton

What is the problem? No, it is not just the idea that the answer to all government-recognized ills is to “throw money at it.” That is a symptom of the disease. Three recent stories in Freedom Net Daily let us see this:

The Independent Institute writes about $13 billion being spent each year for supplies for “public education.” Vicki Alger writes in part: “One fed up grandparent and former public school superintendent successfully sued an Idaho district for charging fees for regular classes and requiring parents and guardians to purchase specific brands of school supplies — basics the district is supposed to be providing. Yet what most teachers and parents don’t realize is just how much funding public school districts already get for supplies. For perspective, American public elementary and secondary education spending now totals more than $625 billion, according to the U.S Department of Education. (By the way, that’s nearly $130 billion more than the entire Department of Defense budget.) Of that amount, public schools spend nearly $43 billion on supplies. Once we remove all the supplies spending associated with administration, overhead and maintenance, transportation, food service, instructional staff, student support, and ‘other’ support services, we’re left with over $13 billion in supplies spending associated exclusively with instruction. (For state-level supplies spending, see the article.) This amount works out to around $267 for each of the roughly 50 million elementary and secondary school students.” Continue reading →

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Still Not My Problem

Posted on 2017-09-13 by MamaLiberty

By MamaLiberty

[Republished from July, 2014]

Not my problem. I’m sure a lot of people would consider that a harsh thing to say, but if you’ll stay with me a bit you should easily see that it is the only real answer to the whole “politically correct” thing sweeping this country and, incidentally, the world.

“You made me mad. You didn’t make me happy. I’m offended.” You can probably add a hundred more such phrases people use to control what you do, say and even what you believe. That’s exactly what happens when a few people can choose any word or object, assign a specific (often NEW and ugly) meaning to it, and then demand that nobody use that word or object because it “makes them feel”… whatever. Continue reading →

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The nanny state: a society of tattletales

Posted on 2017-09-13 by TPOL Nathan

By Nathan Barton

Tom Woods recently reported on a well-known conductor whose career may have been ruined by a snitch, this weekend at the Oregon Bach Festival. Overhearing a conversation between two good friends (one British white, one Florida black), she construed their jesting as the Brit (the conductor) making a racist joke.  And she reported it – to the press.

That’s right.  So incensed by the “tone” of the private (or at least semi-private) conversation between two good friends, this woman ran to the press to “rat them out,” for something which the black Floridian (a singer) said was absolutely NOT racist.  And the media, ever looking for ways to sell their papers (or the ads on their websites), by blowing things out of proportion, did so.

This is not an isolated incident.  Indeed, it is something which happens every day – probably thousands of times a day. Tom Woods and others are constantly reporting on things like a libertarian fired by his employer for being a Nazi, after an Antifa posting “outed” him, or even progressives eaten by their own. Someone does something that another person doesn’t like: Continue reading →

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“Keep public lands in public hands”

Posted on 2017-09-11 by TPOL Nathan

By Nathan Barton

The title of this commentary is taken from a sign showing up in Southeastern Utah and other places, trying to counter the obvious attempts by Trump, his cronies, and the GOP (and other evil people like Libertarians) to sell off every acre of public land as soon as possible. They claim what is being done now, in smoke-filled rooms behind closed doors, is just what happened in Russia when the mafia-nominklatura took all the people’s factories and farms and lands and robbed the state of trillions.

Well, they’re wrong.  Trump won’t sell off the military bases.  Everything else, but his warmongering is more important than giving his buddies, family, and fellow billionaires Fort Hood, Fort Irwin and Joint-Base Lewis-McCord.

Seriously, they really do believe that Trump, his minions, and the GOP and Libertarians (the party – minarchists) want to sell it all: BLM land, USFS land, Park Service land, and even the Mall in DC.  To private business, to placard them with billboards and rename Mount Vernon to “Hilton Mount Vernon” and Rocky Mountain National Park to “Wells Fargo Rocky Mountain National Park,” to paint a McDonalds logo on every natural arch in the country (and that big artificial one in St. Louis: The McDonalds Westward Expansion National Memorial. AND McDonald’s Arches National Park in Utah! (That would be right near Burger King Canyonlands National Park – only fitting since two of the few fast-food chain stores in Moab are the McDonalds and Burger King right across from each other on Main.)

Sorry, back to being serious. Continue reading →

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Police state? Irma and the Virgin Islands

Posted on 2017-09-08 by TPOL Nathan

By Nathan Barton

The first screaming news stories appeared yesterday.  The governor of the US Virgin Islands was sending out the National Guard to grab all the weapons and ammo that his Islands’ residents have, as part of the preparations for Cat 5+ Hurricane Irma. Even the mainstream media was reporting this confiscation, although no doubt with glee.

This morning, thanks to Tom Knapp, there is a  lot more light on the subject, and it might not be quite what the conservative (NOT libertarian) alternative media is screaming.  Tom, in Freedom Net Daily, posted the story from the New Orleans Times-Picayune. “The governor of the U.S. Virgin Islands has ordered the territory’s national guard to begin seizing guns and ammunition from citizens in preparation for Hurricane Irma’s landfall. In an executive order signed Monday, Gov. Kenneth Mapp instructed Adjutant General Deborah Howell ‘to take whatever actions she considers necessary to carry out the assigned mission’ of maintaining and restoring public order. ‘The Adjutant General is authorized and directed to seize arms, ammunition, explosives, incendiary material and any other property that may be required by the military forces for the performance of this emergency mission,’ the governor said in the order. The order went into effect Tuesday at 12:01 a.m.”

Mama’s Note: The “bold” section above is mine. The idea of government enforcers going around confiscating ANYTHING is abhorrent. For any reason. I don’t believe for a moment this would be voluntary, or even friendly. That’s stretching credibility much too far. The word in that order to SEIZE things seems to back that up. Continue reading →

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Your friendly local weapons shop?

Posted on 2017-09-06 by TPOL Nathan

By Nathan Barton

Trump has announced that his administration is removing the restrictions imposed by the former squatter at 1600 PA transferring military equipment to “civilian” police departments across the nation.

As any of us would expect, the Fifty States are divided in response to this, just as they were in the original restrictions to the 1033 program.  On the one hand, we have civil libertarians and libertarians (such as the Free Thought Project) screaming about the militarization of police and its impact on civil society.  Among other things, there is a list on-line that provides hundreds or thousands of pages of data about what has already been handed out as “welfare” to the nation’s cities and counties.  (See my footnote below for some ideas on that.)

And of course, there were the “law-and-order” and similar groups singing hosannas of praise for “being tough on crime.”  And asking for more.

Fully recognizing that I am going to tread on toes (“Again, Nathan?  You and your rabble rousing!”), I am going to be a contrary liberty lover, and explain why this transfer of military equipment is a good idea. Or at least not the horrific idea so many people condemn it as. Continue reading →

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