We live in an increasingly secularized world of massive and pervasive nation states in which traditional religion, especially Christianity, is ruled unwelcome and even a real danger on the basis of a purported history of intolerance and “religious violence.” This is found in most all “public” domains, including the institutions of education, business, government,...
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The House has overwhelmingly passed HR 1540, frightening legislation that codifies the president’s totalitarian power to detain militarily terrorist suspects indefinitely without meaningful due process, including U.S. citizens captured on American soil. This legislation has many other horrible war-on-terror provisions, but the solidification of the Bush-Obama claim of imperial prerogative over imprisoning any soul...
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Sean Gabb (Libertarian Alliance of UK) recently sent me a press release protesting the British Medical Association’s call for a ban on smoking in cars. With the usual caveat that smoking is dangerous, kills, causes impotence, flatulence, and everything in between. . . There are people opposed to cigarette smoking (myself included) and then...
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Ten years ago today, President Bush signed the Patriot Act into law. It passed with the support of all but 66 members of the House of Representatives and one Senator. We were told at the time that it was an absolutely necessary law to give federal intelligence and law enforcement authorities the tools they...
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Here’s a story about TSA agents accepting bribes to allow passengers to carry large quantities of the prescription narcotic oxycodone onto airline flights. I have two comments. First, people are allowed to carry prescription drugs on airline flights. These drugs were pills, and there is no security threat to carrying them, nor are there...
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This week, a “God blogger” published a Wall Street Journal column highlighting the “circumcision wars” in California. The “intactivists” opposed to circumcision are up against Jews and Muslims (among others) in San Francisco. I’m betting with the latter groups. I think circumcision is barbaric and demeaning to men but it doesn’t rise to the...
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In the aftermath of my own encounter with the TSA Thugs, I submitted complaints to “my” representatives: Barbara Lee, Dianne Feinstein, and Barbara Boxer. To paraphrase a favorite poet, I didn’t get no satisfaction, and Dianne Feinstein had the gall to include this line in her emailed response: As a frequent traveler, I understand...
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I just returned from a conference. The guy sitting next to me on the plane had with him a laptop computer, an iPad, an iPod, and a phone. Yep, four “portable electronic devices.” I figured the guy was probably a terrorist. Because they keep announcing it to potential terrorists on aircraft, I know that...
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The newest round of WikiLeaks revelations unearths troubling facts about the U.S. prison facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Operating for more than nine years now, the prison camp was originally said to be holding “the worst of the worst”—terrorists of the same moral plane and dangerousness as those who committed the attacks of 9/11....
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This Thursday, the District of Columbia Circuit Court of Appeals will hear oral arguments in a case brought by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) against the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) use of body scanners. The case asserts “that the federal agency’s controversial program violates the Administrative Procedures Act, the Privacy Act, the...
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