Author: Simon

The very idea strikes terror into the hearts of the left and the right. I found a marvelous comment on the subject here. Libbies want to take away various freedoms. So do conservatives. Only the Libertarians seem to offer a pro-freedom outlook but the folks in this country don’t care enough about ALL freedoms to…

The essence of politics – being unkind to strangers. That is because the essence of government is theft, kidnapping, and murder. The libertarian view is that a balance should be stuck so that in general “theft, kidnapping, and murder” is minimized by striking a balance between the freelancers and the organized variety (criminals and government).…

More about receptors. By making the filling of brain receptors by some methods illegal what is to prevent the controllers from making filling them in other ways against the law? “Stop smiling, you will attract the police.” “OK son you are allowed to pursue happiness – but if I find you are happy you are…

My French has atrophied considerably but my eyes are still pretty good. Looks Not Safe For Work to me. H/T Libertarian Republican

  The Gate of Horn was mainly a folk venue in Chicago in the early 60s. I saw Joan Baez there and Lenny Bruce too. I may have seen Gibson and Camp there but I’m not sure. They were a staple on the WFMT “Midnight Special”. I was an engineer at WFMT while I was…

I came across a Yahoo entertainment entitled “cheat on your husband (with your husband)” – not the full title to be sure. It is a how to. No graphic pictures. Just talking heads. (Get yer minds out of the gutters – or did I just put them there? No matter.) A commenter posted this in…

The Agitator has the story. The war on drugs has failed. Its failure has been so categorical and self-evident that the statement itself is bromidic. By any reasonable metric of success—addiction rates, violence, the availability of drugs in our schools— it’s clear that our 40-year jihad against certain plants and chemicals has done far more…

Not for this election that is for sure. But one down the road. Maybe not too far down the road. Montana gives a big hint about the future. It is all about the efforts of Republicans in Montana to gut the state’s medical marijuana law passed by referendum. Patients for Reform Not Repeal’s campaign committee…

such a long long time to be gone and a short time to be there Love one another.

What is addiction? You can’t get addicted to a substance your body doesn’t have receptors for. Which means the body makes an analog to fill those receptors. For opiates the analogs are called endorphins. For marijuana anandamides. If those receptors are unfilled due to some defect in body chemistry (frequently caused by PTSD but there…

A friend at Talk Polywell posted a link to this bit which is a cyclical theory of disorder. I have a different theory. Wars cause breakdowns in order. For one thing regular patterns and flows get disturbed. Wars are murder, robbery, rape, and theft. No surprise that they encourage such behavior generally. But the same…

Roni Golan is a personal friend of mine. His daughter was bartending at the Irish Rose when we were having coffee with Tom Bridgeland the author of the piece linked here. She of course put the above card in our hands and I promised to blog it. We sat at the booth Eric, I, and…

Post 9/11 I used to ask “Do you support drug prohibition because it finances criminals at home or because it finances terrorists abroad?” Because the Taliban used the sales of Afghan opium to support their terrorism efforts. Just recently I came across this blog post on the Lame Cherry blog that confirms that and also…

I just got this press release in the mail. === The only way to completely protect patients, cultivators, and providers of medical cannabis from federal enforcement is by changing federal law. The Drug Enforcement Administration keeps raiding cultivators and providers, and the Department of Justice continues to intimidate patients, property owners, and lawmakers in several…

The brilliant folks at Yahoo have come up with a new faster and more secure way to access your e-mail. It is so secure I can’t even get into my own account. Even after accepting their new terms of service which I couldn’t read – probably because of a traffic overload. So I brought up…

Romney does have a heart. For some things. For others not so much. With respect to Israel and the Palestinians Romney points out that culture matters (I love a culture that allows women with double Ds to wear bikinis – follow the link for a look). General George Patton said something similar about Islam almost…

All who follow a code of ethics or principles are self-governors. Our system is meant to protect the self-governors from those without ethics and principles, perpetrators of fraud, rape and violence. The state does not run the affairs of people in a free society. It upholds justice between people who conduct their own affairs. The…

It is my opinion that those who can should be doing as much as they can for those who can’t. What used to be called noblesse oblige. Besides if you are an engineer there is good money in it. The image of Edison in the video struck a chord with me because of my work…

I have touched on this a time or two in the past but since Pat Buchanan brings it up I thought I’d touch on it again. What is the most popular socialism in America? Moral Socialism or Economic Socialism. First let me quote some from Pat. In his New York Times report, “In California, GOP…

Eric and I were discussing the need to beat Obama. He thought that libertarians should bend over backwards to see that Obama was defeated. I had a little different point of view. ===== I agree with you generally on beating Obama. But I also think it is unwise to let them get too comfortable with…