US politicians employ myriad slippery terms when it comes to “international agreements.” We hear things like “joint and multilateral declarations,” “international resolutions,” “frameworks,” and other nonsensical Orwellian terms that should mean very little when it comes to US law and the Constitution. Unless an agreement reached by the President with another head of state is a Treaty to be…
On Sept. 28, 2016, supporters of the right to self-defense as codified in the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution were handed multiple federal court “near victories” in a single decision from a very surprising source.
The ruling on five anti-self-defense measures codified in two statutes came from Ramona Villagomez Manglona, presiding judge for the U.S. District Court for the Northern…
This story begins not with the immediate, breaking news issue, but with a preface, a “Once Upon a Time…”
Once upon a time, when residents of the United States talked about education, the vast, vast majority of them did not discuss a mandatory, top-down, government-run, taxpayer-funded, one-size-fits-all indoctrination machine based on a Prussian model and run by an essentially uniform cadre of…
On October 1, 2016, the power to “grant domain names” on the Internet – that thing Al Gore told everyone he invented – will be turned over from the US to a non-profit corporation created in 1998 by the US government called the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). In 2014, when the plan was finalized by a division of the Department of Commerce, Reason Magazine’s Jerry…
Throughout the course of history, many utopians have promoted dreamy concepts of the “ideal city.” Plato and Socrates thought it would be a brilliant idea to have everything – including the best kind of bed – decided by the “Guardians,” who would be those born with “gold” in their blood. Jeremy Bentham, one of the early proponents of the political philosophy of Utilitarianism, designed…
Every US state has a motto. Some are interesting, like “Live Free of Die,” in New Hampshire, and some are sadly truthful, like, “Our Government is Vampiric” in Massachusetts. Just kidding. It’s more along the lines of “We’ll Tax You to Death,” or something like that. Anyway, some, like the motto for the 49th state, Alaska, are very upbeat and offer a sense of adventure. In Alaska, politicians…
The federal “Justice Department” has just issued a threat that highlights the strange dynamics of two forms of government coercion working against each other.
In this case, the oppositional forces are the federal “Americans with Disabilities Act” (ADA) signed by George HW Bush, and the tax-funded university system of California, specifically, UC Berkeley.
Like similar poles on two magnets…
A rhetorical theme is being struck by a number of public figures in the wake of the Manhattan bombing that seriously injured nineteen people, on September 17, 2016.
It’s not about security, terroristic threats, privacy, the attacker, his anger at US foreign policy, or anything along those lines. It’s about prices. Specifically, the criticism is being leveled at the ride-sharing giant, Uber, and…
As a journalistic institution, the dusty old Washington Post has a checkered reputation. Some Americans considered the paper an emblem of heroism thanks to the break its reporters Woodward and Bernstein made in the 1970s Watergate Scandal. Others cite the paper as one of the most economically left-leaning, pro-nanny-state rags in the nation.
But whether left, or right, or centrist, or anything…
People can tolerate a lot of frustration. We tend to be forgiving. But for most everyone, there come points in interpersonal relationships and communication when people exclaim, as character Howard Beale of the 1976 motion picture “Network” yelled, “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it any more!”
Perhaps September 11, 2016 was one such day for many people watching NBC News, for on…
