Blog 177 | The Libertarian Institute

Douglas Macgregor Joining Pentagon As Senior Advisor To Acting Secdef

by Steven Woskow | Nov 11, 2020 | Blog

Good news!

President Trump’s newly installed acting Pentagon chief is bringing on a senior adviser in a sign the administration wants to accelerate the withdrawal of U.S. troops from the Middle East before the end of his presidency in January, three people familiar with the move told Axios.

Why it matters: A senior administration official says a wave of firings at the Pentagon and the hiring of Ret. Army Col. Douglas Macgregor is in part a settling of Trump’s personal scores — but senior White House officials also have made clear “they want them more publicly to talk about getting out of Afghanistan by the end of the year.”

Trump, who ran in 2016 on a promise to bring U.S. troops home, is frustrated with the slow pace of withdrawing troops from the Middle East, another senior administration official said.
The president has told advisers on numerous occasions he wants troops home from Afghanistan by Christmas.

The Great Dave Smith on The Joe Rogan Experience

by Scott Horton | Nov 11, 2020 | Blog

Great stuff in here. Especially on Yemen.

Who’s that great libertarian’s favorite Institute?

C.J. Hopkins: The War Is Over …..Globocap Triumphs!

by Steven Woskow | Nov 11, 2020 | Blog

OK, so, that was not cool. For one terrifying moment there, it actually looked like GloboCap was going to let Russian-Asset Hitler win. Hour after hour on election night, states on the map kept turning red, or pink, or some distinctly non-blue color. Wisconsin … Michigan … Georgia … Florida. It could not be happening, and yet it was. What other explanation was there? The Russians were stealing the election again!

But, of course, GloboCap was just playing with us. They’re a bunch of practical jokers, those GloboCap guys. Naturally, they couldn’t resist the chance to wind us up just one more time.

Seriously, though, while I enjoy a good prank, I still have a number of liberal friends, many of whom were on the verge of suffering major heart attacks as they breathlessly waited for the corporate media to confirm that they had successfully voted a literal dictator out of power. (A few of them suffer from IBS or other gastrointestinal disorders, so, in light of the current toilet paper shortage caused by the Return of the Apocalyptic Plague, toying with them like that was especially cruel.)

But, whatever. That’s water under the bridge. The good news is, the nightmare is over! Literal Hitler and his underground army of Russia-loving white supremacists have been vanquished! Decency has been restored! Globalization has risen from the dead!

And, of course, the most important thing is, racism in America is over … again!

More here

Cannabis Reform’s Momentous Election Night

by Steven Woskow | Nov 10, 2020 | Blog

Even in conservative Mississippi

As most had expected, cannabis reform was a big winner on Election Night 2020. While the nation’s leadership remains in flux, the cannabis results have been anything but. In five states — South Dakota, Mississippi, Arizona, Montana, and New Jersey — voters headed to the polls and let it be known that they want medical or adult-use cannabis. And in one state, voters said yes to both marijuana laws at the same time. The cannabis clean sweep appears to signal another momentous milestone for the marijuana movement that now reaches well across the aisle. As cannabis reform moves closer to a bipartisan topic with each election, the five states to pass regulations this time around send several messages to the nation. Not only is America ready for legal cannabis, but the message it sent could have been even more substantial had it not been for the pandemic and some lingering opposition in some states.

Cannabis Reform’s Momentous Election Night Could Be The Long-Awaited Tipping Point

Declassify the Russiagate Papers!

by Sheldon Richman | Nov 10, 2020 | Blog, Foreign Policy, Justice

Here’s something constructive Trump could do before leaving office at noon on January 20: he could order — demand, insist — that all classified intel and other documents related to the origin of the Russia/election investigation be declassified and released to the public forthwith — unredacted. From what has already gotten out, we know that Russiagate was not a good-faith probe into possible Russian meddling in the 2016 election, much less outright collusion with the Trump campaign. All the evidence that has actually been obtained tells the story of a partisan and otherwise self-interested campaign to undercut or constrain an elected president who upset the foreign-policy establishment (although I can’t can’t fathom why), if not drive him from office altogether.

For example, only this year we learned that in 2017 the company that originally and allegedly confirmed that “the Russians” hacked the DNC server and leaked unflattering emails about the Clinton campaign to Wikileaks actually did not know that that was the case. As Ray McGovern wrote recently that

exactly five months ago, on May 7, 2020, House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff was forced to release sworn testimony by former FBI official Shawn Henry, head of the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, that there is no technical evidence [emphasis added] that the DNC emails published by WikiLeaks were hacked — by Russia, or by anyone else.

Adding insult to injury, Schiff was able to hide Henry’s testimony from Dec. 5, 2017, until May 7, 2020.

Why did Schiff and the former intel officials, some of whom now have lucrative TV commentator gigs, lead the American people all those years to believe that Russia hacked the server, which the FBI never even took possession of or examined? The answer won’t suggest good faith, I suspect.

Trump’s out. (I’m not sorry about that.) He could now do something decent and leave the stage after exposing those who, to protect their political and financial status, insanely played with fire by aggravating Russian-American relations.

Techno-Agorist: Do NPCs Dream of Electric Sheep?

by Ryan Burgett | Nov 9, 2020 | Blog

I am a huge fan of Philip K. Dick. His short stories have always been my favorite science fiction of all time. In high school, I read through my big volume of his short stories so many times that the binding literally fell apart. Recently, I decided to read through his full-length book, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Boy-oh-boy was that weird. After finishing, I decided to revisit the movie Blade Runner, which was loosely based on that classic.

The movie is dramatically different from the book, but it is still immensely enjoyable. It asks important questions about humanity and about life. In the movie, Harrison Ford plays Rick Deckard, a cop whose job is to hunt down androids called “replicants.” These replicants are indistinguishable from humans outside of their increased strength and artificially-short life spans. As Deckard hunts these humanoid robots down, he is faced with questions about what it means to be human.

By the end of the movie, Deckard as well as you the viewer are left with the impression that life isn’t about what material your body is made out of, but instead, it’s about your mind, your life, and the collection of experiences which make you who you are.

The NPC meme is still very popular these days. NPC is an acronym for non-player characters in games. These are those programmed characters who walk around, mindlessly looping through the same pre-programmed lines and actions.

The NPC meme is shockingly apt because we live in a world and country full of real-life NPCs. These are people who seemingly act only on programming, mindlessly walking about repeating the same pre-programmed lines.

As I watched Blade Runner and contemplated the questions it asked, I began contrasting our real-life NPCs with the fictional replicants of Philip K. Dick’s world.

Real-life NPCs mindlessly suck up and repeat what they are told by the establishment, agenda-driven media. They are the ones who demanded an end to the war on terror during the Bush years but then forgot about it when Obama came to power and the media said to look the other way. They are the ones who went on and on about election fraud and Russian meddling in 2016 yet in 2020 cannot imagine there could be any fraud in the US election system. They are the ones who scream, “My body, my choice!” while also demanding that we all be forced to wear medical devices on our faces and be injected with who-knows-what from corrupt pharmaceutical companies.

NPCs are impossible to reason with because all that they can do is what they are programmed to do. They just repeat pre-programmed lines. Given the choice, I would rather live in a world with artificial humans who think rather than one with biological humans who don’t. Replicants are far superior to NPCs because they consider, they reason, they learn and grow.

Unlike with replicants in the world of Blade Runner, I don’t believe that NPCs should be put down, or “retired” as Philip K. Dick put it. The crazy thing is that if the media ever tells the NPCs that they should want me to be put down for not repeating their lines, they will hop right on board with it just like they did with brown people in the middle east, one day shouting against war and then last week voting for a neoconservative with a decades-long record of championing the warfare state.

Let’s be better than that. Let’s use our brains. Let’s be a positive contrast to the NPCs of the world today and maybe, just maybe, we can start to break their programming.

Originally posted at: https://technoagorist.com/44

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