6/27/20 Mike Swanson on America’s ‘Zombie Firms’

Mike Swanson discusses the continuing economic fallout from the coronavirus, focusing in particular on what are sometimes called “zombie companies.” These firms stay afloat largely because of easy money available at low interest rates, even though their business may be fundamentally unsound. Crucially, the government response to the coronavirus has continued to enable this behavior by bailing out firms that would otherwise go bankrupt. Swanson argues that in a healthy environment such firms should be allowed to go bankrupt—a vital feature of any market economy—as would huge sectors of...

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Shame On You, Charlie Savage

We all know you know better than to write such garbage as this. Someone says that "intelligence" says that the Russians are paying to have Americans killed in Afghanistan, huh? And you put your name on that? I mean sure, if you were David Sanger, but you're Charlie Savage and that means that you have really done a terrible, terrible thing here. And in paragraphs 5 and 6 you admit that you don't know that it's true at all. "An operation to incentivize the killing of American and other NATO troops would be a significant and provocative escalation of what American and Afghan officials have said...

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911 is a Joke

The CDC should be abolished immediately. Total incompetence. Criminal negligence. “It’s not our culture to intervene,” said Dr. George Schmid, who worked at the agency off and on for nearly four decades. He described it as increasingly bureaucratic, weighed down by “indescribable, burdensome hierarchy.” Who the hell put government in charge of anything in the first place is what I want to know.

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6/22/20 Vincent Bevins on the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World

Scott interviews journalist Vincent Bevins about his latest book, The Jakarta Method, in which he lays out some of the history of the U.S. government’s support for violent right-wing coups all over the world. During the Cold War, America backed brutal extremists in Indonesia, Brazil, Chile, Iraq, and elsewhere, who were responsible all told for the deaths of millions of civilians—all in the name of defeating the threat of communism and socialism. Unlike the well-known and well-publicized crimes of left-wing dictators like Pol Pot in Cambodia, almost nobody in the United States today knows...

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‘The Computer Got It Wrong’: How Facial Recognition Led To False Arrest Of Black Man

Check out this story from NPR about the false imprisonment of a man based on facial recognition technology. What's interesting to me is the first part of the headline: Ain't nobody's fault! The box did it! This is a theme heavily explored by the great Neil Postman in his book Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, the diffusion of responsibility from those who possess political authority onto the sophisticated tools that they use to oppress us. As you'll see, the pigs went off the computer hit alone, did no other corroborative police work whatsoever before arresting this...

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6/19/20 Pete Quinones: The Monopoly on Violence

Pete Quinones talks about his new project, The Monopoly on Violence, a documentary featuring interviews with many prominent figures in the libertarian and anarchist movements. The film explores the history of both statism and anarchism, explaining the nature of government as the only entity with a monopoly on the legal use of force, and advocates alternatives to this barbaric system. You can watch now on YouTube, and soon the documentary will be available on Amazon and Netflix. Discussed on the show: “The Monopoly On Violence” (YouTube) Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest...

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