The Department of Homeland Security has declared its intention to gather personal data on journalists or others who might use “traditional and/or social media in real time to keep their audience situationally aware and informed.” I suppose that would include those of us at the Independent Institute who blog, tweet, and update Facebook. New...
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A fourteen- or fifteen-year-old Dallas girl was deported by U.S. immigration officials to Colombia. She spoke no Spanish and they did appear not to have even checked her fingerprints to ensure she was who they thought she was. It’s true, she gave a false name to local police, but there is simply no excuse...
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On Saturday, President Obama signed into law the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) a/k/a the “Homeland Battlefield Bill,” (so named because it defines the entire U.S. as a battlefield in the War on Terror), that grants the executive virtually unlimited power to indefinitely detain any American citizen he deems a suspected “belligerent”—at his own...
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From preschool through high school and their careers, young Americans will now have all their data consolidated and shared by federal agencies. Thanks to years of the expanding surveillance state, data collection, and centralization of education, accelerated by an overlooked provision in President Obama’s stimulus program, everything about kids that is documented from the...
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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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Professor Brad Birzer, a man of unbounded energy, asked several of us to contribute a “top ten” list of books that make us human. Quite a challenge: limited to ten books, what would you (dear reader) choose and why? See my list at The Imaginative Conservative web site. It starts with a book by...
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There is no joy in saying “We told you so,” when the dangers against which we warned turned out to have been realized, and, indeed exceeded, so far beyond anyone’s imagining. As longtime observers of political economy, and the lessons so succinctly laid out by Robert Higgs in his masterful Crisis and Leviathan, we...
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Hillary Clinton, whose State Department has been involved in overseeing renditioning, who ran for president in 2008 on a more pro-torture platform than John McCain, has condemned Turkey for human rights abuses. In particular, Turkey has cracked down on journalists and has plans to restrict internet freedom. In 1998, responding to the internet gossip...
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