Monopoly “Money” Bernard von NotHaus, the creator of the Liberty Dollar, is optimistic that he and his associates will have the benefit of “a spectacular trial” for the supposed crime of providing customers with something of value – platinum, gold, silver, and copper coins – in exchange for something innately value-less – the decorated ragpaper […]

The Judicial War On Fatherhood Portrait of a policy failure: Somehow, this young father was left unmolested to raise his two beautiful children. How on earth did such a thing happen?The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers. Dick the Butcher, adding his contribution to Jack Cade’s Utopian promises, from Shakespeare’s Henry VI, […]

Pistol-Packing Positivists: Our Enemy in Blue How would you react if you were waylaid by an armed and bellicose stranger who has the means to kill you and your family and the power to get away with the crime? Very few of us would react with the self-possession displayed by 28-year-old Jared Massey when his […]

Let’s … Be Careful Out There (Very Important Update, 11/28) Vancouver, B.C. October 14: Canadian police swarm 40-year-old Polish expatriate Robert Dziekanski and electrocute him to death with Taser International’s renowned “non-lethal” implement of torture. (For the November 28 update, see the bottom of this essay.) The kind folks at Taser International, makers of the […]

Imperial Dread Among precautions against ambition, it may not be amiss to take one against our own. I must fairly say I dread our own power and our own ambition. I dread our being too much dreaded…. Sooner or later, this state of things must produce a combination against us which may end in our […]

The New Conservatism: Chekists and Collaborators A multi-use facility: One of the newly constructed immigration detention centers that could very easily be used to pen protesters, dissidents, or draft resisters. Colorado congressman Tom Tancredo, a Republican presidential hopeful, is the House’s most conspicuous advocate of border enforcement. He is also a stalwart defender of the […]

A Commissar Arises Commissar Andrew Thomas addressing his neo-totalitarian comrades at a gathering of the artfully misnamed Federalist Society.A little more than two years ago, Matthew Bandy of Phoenix, Arizona was a well-mannered and unremarkable 16-year-old boy who displayed a defect common to males of his age: An undisciplined adolescent libido. A little more than […]

His Name is Genarlow Wilson Like practically anybody blessed with a modicum of self-awareness, twenty-year-old Genarlow Wilson of Douglas, Georgia is ashamed of many things he did when he was younger. In his case that sorry assortment includes abuse of recreational drugs, chiefly alcohol and marijuana, and early promiscuity. But unlike most people whose mistakes […]

Treason Behold the face of a traitor: David Addington, Chief of Staff to Dick Cheney, who spoke of collaborating with terrorists in an assault on the United States Constitution. He deserves the long, lonely drop to the end of a hangman’s rope* — along with several others we should compel him to name. “Treason against […]

Jury Rights Day “How does it become a man to behave toward this American government today?” wrote Henry David Thoreau in 1849. “I answer that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it.”Thoreau’s assessment was inspired by his disgust over Washington’s war of aggression against Mexico, and — what was much the same thing — […]

UPDATED — Briefly Considered: Gen. Petraeus — US Security Not An “Objective” in Iraq [The following transcribed excerpts have been updated and corrected from the first version, thanks to a suggestion from a reader — WNG.]Senator John Warner: “[I]f we continue what you have laid before the Congress here as a strategy [to continue the […]

The Untouchables (Updated) Of course, what they don’t tell you is that “combative or resistant behavior” can include a word, glance, or momentary hesitation that a State-employed thug doesn’t like. I know little about the political views of the Rev. Lennox Yearwood of the “Hip Hop Caucus,” and I care even less. For all I […]

Briefly Considered: Scrimp and Save, Make Your Payments … And Lose Your Home Anyway We’re going to see a lot more of this: Iraq War vet Shawn Howell worked two jobs but still couldn’t keep up with his ARM payments and had to sell the house to avoid foreclosure. Thousands of families who made payments […]

I Can’t Stand Bullies, Revisited* Don’t you just love it when a soft-handed, soft-bodied, lisping, chinless neo-con nebbish like Thomas Friedman gets all butch?”We hit Iraq because we could,” concludes the Stone Cold Steve Austin of the New York Times op-ed page, who establishes his bad-ass bona fides by exclaiming, “Well, suck on this!”That defiant […]

The Kitty Genovese Effect: How The Regime Endures (Updated) By mid-April [1965], the Kitty Genovese story had taken hold and the nation began a lengthy period of analysis and self-deprecation. Why would civilized people turn away from another human being in dire need of assistance? As the details of the killing emerged, it became plain […]

“Liberation,” Then and Now A representative of the “Coalition of the Willing” confronts an ungrateful Iraqi.*(Warning: In the essay that follows there is one historically accurate vulgarism.)Oliver Otis Howard was, by most accounts, an earnest Christian and a genuinely decent man — in the conduct of his private affairs, in any case. Like too many […]

How The “War On Drugs” Brought Communism To America Alan and Stephne Roos of Bothell, Washington are victims of Communism. The couple — a butcher and dental assistant, respectively — lost their automobiles to the officially sanctioned form of theft called “asset forfeiture” because their 24-year-old son Thomas has used them to conduct drug transactions.Neither […]

Weimar Republicans “Patriots” from the pro-war group “A Gathering of Eagles” swarm anti-war demonstrator Carlos Arredondo, a Gold Star Father whose son, Lance Corporal Alexander S. Arredondo, USMC, was killed in Iraq. Carlos Arrendondo, a native of Costa Rica, wasn’t even a citizen of the United States when he learned on August 25, 2004, that […]

The State on Steroids Steroid-enhanced uber-villain Bane. Seeking to fine-tune the utopia of peace, plenty, and progress that is the United States of America under the reign of Bush the Dumber, the Drug Enforcement Administration recently carried out what the State stenographers in the prestige press call the “largest crackdown in American history on illegal […]

The Totalitarian Entente “At a time when we are fighting terrorism abroad,” eructated the squalid mass of corruption known as Ted Kennedy, “the United States Senate says, `We are going to fight terrorism, hatred and bigotry here at home.'”The instrument chosen to carry out this domestic “anti-terrorism” campaign is a “hate crimes” measure appended to […]