Shards and Phractures

...right...? I mean...Presidents lie.  Wilson promised not to send soldiers into WWI.  Roosevelt made similar promises, while trying to get Japan to throw the first punch.  "I am not a crook."  "Read my lips."  "WMD."  "I didn't inhale."  "You can keep your insurance." ...but you can trust the rest of the government, right? The military lies.  Tonkin, My Lai, Abu Ghraib, Pearl Harbor..."truth is the first casualty of war." ...but you can trust the rest of the government, right...? The IRS lied ("we would never audit political opponents."). The NSA lied ("we would never spy on American citizens."). Now we find out even the CDC lies ("we would never cover up negative vaccination data."). So, I guess you can trust the government, right?  Except for any agent or agency that's been caught lying in the past, that is...which sure seems to me to be...well...

I'm working on my Master's Degree, and I had to give a presentation on "the history of a chosen resource."  My professor knows some of my libertarian outlook, and where I work, and practically dared me to pick gold.   Challenge accepted. This was the final slide in my class presentation last night.  It shows the price of gold since 1800. I humorously and facetiously pointed out the "huge spike" caused by the Civil War, and the equally huge one caused by the Great Depression, before focusing on the real spike.  Something profound and basic had to have happened to change this otherwise flat graph to an exponential progression; I jokingly asked what could possibly have happened around the time of the Nixon administration to have caused it? "Gold is gold," I said.  "Gold doesn't double in power every eighteen months.  Gold doesn't release a new model with sunroof and bucket seats.  Gold doesn't crash the asking price by ...

Had the privilege of voicing "The Jeffersonian Secessionist Tradition" by Thomas DiLorenzo, available for your listening pleasure right here: The Jeffersonian Secessionist Tradition Hope you enjoy; comments, criticisms, critiques, always welcome. -=ad=-

...great post by Chris Rossini over at Economic Policy Journal: You, Mr. & Ms. libertarian, are of the same pedigree as John Hancock!  It's true that you're not smuggling a physical good (as Hancock did) but if you'reabsorbing the ideas of liberty and then sharing those ideas with others, you're still a smuggler. I've always described being a libertarian as "rolling snowballs downhill."  Every time you discuss freedom, or Ron Paul, or Lew Rockwell, or libertarianism, the real Lincoln, alternative health, paleo diets, etc, etc...you pack a small snowball and set it loose to roll down a hill. Most snowballs rolled down a hill grind to a stop.  Some bounce off the slope and disappear.  But...every now and then... On occasion, one of those snowballs will hit just the right trajectory, and pick up speed, and just like in the old cartoons, it will just keep getting bigger and bigger until it reaches the bottom of the hill and creams all of the u...