New College Major: "Useless Studies"

You know what those "_________ Studies" college major courses are?

They don't exist because they impart any useful skills for the demands of life after graduation.  Unless of course you can figure out a way to make ginned-up outrage into a paying occupation.

They exist for two reasons:

1) To enable the institution to meet hiring and student quotas. They serve perfectly to meet the ever-multiplying affirmative action laws and regulations (both in the faculty and student populations).

and,

2) To revenue farm, because universities are among the largest of our society's welfare queens (roughly a $100 billion cash sink at the federal level, a similar amount comes from states and localities). Think about it: Weak faculty members, and weak students, were once a market universities were neither interested in nor were they a market the university was able to tap.

Enter federal and state welfare (as well as donors who wanted to do a bit of cash virtue signaling). Now that the tap was turned on, administrators have become dependent upon the growth lathered on by debt-addled students who could never get into a rigorous program, hence never get into university.

And now we're going to "free" college for everyone.

Keep it up, y'all. Break that bank.

The sooner the country goes bankrupt, the sooner you'll crash the entire scam.

Blue Wave?

What "Blue wave"?

I am no Trumpkin, but the Left needs to up its game.

Obama lost SIXTY-THREE House seats and SIX Senate seats in his first midterms in 2010.

Clinton lost FIFTY-FOUR House seats and NINE Senate seats in his first midterm in 1994.

And THEY had an adoring press.

[Bush actually bucked the long trend and gained 2 Senate seats and 8 House seats in 2002.]

Trump has been under unrelenting, vicious attacks by most of the press, yet he is going to GAIN at least 2 seats in the Senate and will lose only between thirty and forty seats in the House.

Y'all are in trouble. Because the 2020 elections just started today, and what you thought was going to be a rout, really wasn't.

In addition, you squandered your opportunity to work with Republicans to get a more balanced Supreme Court by your underhanded treatment of the Kavanaugh nomination.  Your handling of that nomination assured that you will be run over if there are any more vacancies -- two more may well be in the cards within the next year.

Playing the "If you aren't a leftist, you're a creepy racist woman-hating redneck ignorant nazi gun nut homophobic bigot" card is probably too yesterday to work anymore.

What might work better for the left is working on actually solving problems.

Like, repealing the Prohibitions on drugs, gambling, and prostitution that drag the poor and minorities into the justice system disproportionately, ending all the wars, and working towards accountability and transparency for government workers -- including the police, who inflict such a horrendous toll on minorities through policing for profit and revenue farming in general.

And fixing those absolutely corrupt, murderous, bankrupt, and broken Left-led major cities all over the United States.

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Vote Libertarian * 800-ELECT-US * http://www.LP.org
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Written by Marc Montoni <AMCAmbassador@gmail.com>, October, 2018.  This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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For more information about the Radical Caucus, see www.LPRadicalCaucus.org or see the Facebook group https://www.facebook.com/groups/2497146127/  .
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Bottom-Shelf Sustenance

[Editor's Note: This article was written in 2010 by Chad Quella, who retains all rights to it.]

With a cartful of our staple groceries at the usual family trip to the Mechanicsville Kroger, we got into the shortest checkout line and waited.  But after a while of staying in one spot and not advancing in line, I began to pay attention to what was going on ahead of me.

It appeared that there was a new trainee on the register with a more seasoned employee beside her, but what had caused the delay was a non-standard transaction that required some hands-on training.  She would get plenty of experience with that type of transaction by the time her customer finished checking out.

Lined-up on the conveyor belt were five separate clusters of items, each topped with a receipt-like strip of paper.  It immediately struck me as poor decision-making that this customer in front of me had selected several gallons of milk, but also several pints of milk.  The milk in a pint bottle of course is more expensive than the milk in a gallon bottle, and anyway I couldn’t imagine what might be going on in this woman’s home that would require that much milk, or even allow it to all get drank before it spoils.  But hey, it isn’t my milk.

There were a few other things too, I recall a package of individually-wrapped cheese food slices, and a tub of cottage cheese.  Big dairy fan, I chuckled to myself.  But there was one last cluster of items, different from the rest in that it didn’t have a slip of paper on top, and rather than dairy, it was a package of seafood salad, a styrofoam tray containing a pair of deviled crabs, and a bag of fresh lobster from the seafood counter.

As I stood and waited and watched, these clusters of food slowly made their way down the conveyor belt being rung up in separate transactions, I realized that the little slips of paper were not coupons or shopping lists, they were being used as payment!

For the first time, I took a look at who was making these purchases.  A couple, probably in their mid-30’s, both quite overweight, sporting sweat pants and t-shirts.  No kids were to be seen.  I began to put together that the paper slips must be some kind of government-issued vouchers, and the pints of milk and other small items were probably rounding out the value of each voucher.  I was informed later that this is the form that WIC benefits are paid in, and the fact that it was the first of the month made this the likely case.

I watched, incredulous, as the gallons upon gallons of milk went back into the cart, and the lobster, crabs and seafood salad were rung up.  The lady produced a card for payment of these items.  I couldn’t see what kind of card it was, but the standard “debit or

credit” question went unasked.  The dairy-laden couple went on their way, allowing the Kroger bagger to take their load out for them, and leaving us to bag our own items.

Now maybe I’ve led a sheltered life, but I don’t recall ever having seen such a thing before.  I went home and googled “WIC lobster” on a whim.  Turns out I’m not alone!  A quick search turned up these results:

http://www.city-data.com/forum/new-jersey/333767-middle-class-food-stamps-9.html

http://www.topix.com/forum/city/grand-rapids-mi/TA3IUSIOJUJT93DGV/p2

Almost right on cue, local media added a little more insight – just not in the way they intended.  First, a story in the 8/10/10 issue of Style Weekly highlighted a Whitcomb Court mother of six, and her monthly early-morning dash to the nearest supermarket to exchange her government-provided purchasing power for food.  The story was meant to call attention to the “food deserts” that exist where, coincidentally, the few food stores that remain do almost all of their business at the beginning of the month, and almost exclusively in government benefits.

Then, our local TV news monster ran a similar story into the ground on their channels 12, 35, and 65 afternoon, evening, and night broadcasts on 9/1/10.  It was meant to highlight another Whitcomb Court resident who was fit to be tied because a government computer system snafu had delayed the automatic deposit of money-for-nothing into her account.

The TV story even went so far as to bemoan the plight of a sink full of dirty dishes – dirty because the woman couldn’t afford to buy soap.  But after she called an automated service for the umpteenth time that day and discovered that she had received her handout, the last shot in the story showed her at last standing over the sink scrubbing a frying pan. 

What the article and TV news report really did for me was provide some perspective on the welfare state and the establishment and political attitudes that produce it.  In neither case did the journalist inquire about how these poor, downtrodden mothers ended up single, living their pathetic existences in government-funded housing, clinging to government-provided money to go to some horrible store and use it to buy bottom-shelf sustenance for themselves and their children.

All they focused on was the fact that they were waiting for that check, and couldn’t wait to spend it when it came.

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Chad Quella lives with his family near Richmond, Virginia.

The Bamiyan Moment for America's Bigoted Social Justice Warriors

This is the Bamiyan Moment of America's intolerant social justice warriors and the perpetually offended: Vandalizing monuments.

OK.

Let's destroy them all. Every monument, any flag. We should even turn all the museums with any of that offensive garbage into rubble. Erase everything.

And let's slaughter those who still "cling to their flags and guns".

Screencap of a CNN video of Afghan Taliban doing to
the Buddhas at Bamiyan what the American Taliban
want to do to statues and monuments in America

After all, we have to model our cultural cleansing after what the Taliban did to all of those offensive statues of Buddha at Bamiyan and elsewhere.

But let's not stop there.

George Washington was a slave holder. So was Jefferson. Let's shove their monuments into the Potomac.

Maybe the William Ellisson historical marker in Sumter SC should be taken down, also?

We could spend years figuring out how to get our society completely rid of all symbols that offend someone.

In fact, we could make a "War on Offensiveness", that will last us for generations, like the War on Poverty or the War on Drugs.

Or -- as a much quicker alternative -- we could take all the American Taliban Social Justice Warriors and dump them over Niagra Falls.

Those willfully and stupidly ignorant of history are doomed to repeat it. And the worst thing is everyone else pays for their folly. The way Obama and the rest of the idiocracy is poking at Russia and China, one day it will be the USA that will be overrun, demonized and erased from history.

But I guess that will be just fine with the American Taliban leftist swills who will be sucking at the breast of the state in that era.

Abolish Blue Privilege: Abolish Government Police Agencies

It's not white privilege that keeps starting up the riot furnace, it is Blue privilege.

Government Bureaucracy Logic 101: Constantly maim and kill people for little to no reason -- then act surprised when violence erupts.

The State kills roughly 1,400 Americans every year, and injures or threatens to injure half a million or more.  That isn't a statistic, it is a documented LIST.  See below for the source for that number.

Yes, that's *every* year.

The dead are also disproportionately black, but only by a few percentage points.  The majority of the dead in that list of 1,400 are *white*.

How many times does a child whack a hornets nest until he learns not to whack hornet's nests?

Once.

The State apparently never learns.

No, actually, that's not right.  The state knows very well that whacking a hornets nest will get the hornets in the air -- but the state also knows that when the hornets are in the air, it won't be politicians, bureaucrats, or the teeming nerds and hangers-on who suck at the government breast who will be getting stung.  It will be innocent civilians who will begetting stung because of the state's manipulation of the hornets.  When your house is under attack, your car has been destroyed, your daughter raped, and your son beaten up, you're desperate to find something that will protect your property and your family.

Government has forced alternatives to itself off the market -- which means those innocents who are getting hurt have only one practical thing to turn to: the very same batch of criminal bureaucrats who started it all in the first place.

Stirring the hornets' nest is extremely profitable for the government, and that's why government thugs do it.

Cops *know* when they break someone's spine, or shoot people in the back, or crush the life out of them, that they will not be prosecuted.  Their fellow government employees will protect them; the system is set up to give them license to murder.

Cops also *know* at some point when they kill someone in a particularly pointless, brutal way, that the community will erupt.

They KNOW it.

There is NO WAY they DON'T know it.

They also KNOW that the system refusing to throw them in jail when they do it can ONLY have one result: Throw gasoline on the fire.

Once the cop-ocracy has set the firestorm, they usually pull back from it to save their own tails, and they leave the Korean store owners, the Jewish deli owners, and the corner drug store to fend for themselves.  They don't even bother trying to evacuate anyone.

Cops also know that once they've finished each cycle, their department will have a fat budget increase, and some of that loot -- which is stolen from the families of their victims -- is going to go to those very same cops in the form of bonuses, pay raises, and the inevitable paid vacation most cops get after they kill someone.

Paid vacations which look an awful lot like "paying a bounty" for killing civilians.

After a year in which a constant stream of brutality was captured on video, and grudgingly "discovered" by the lamestream media, one would think that government police bureaucracies would at least try to restrain their worst officers for a while.

But no.  They continue to put the worst of their thugs on full display.  Instead of getting rid of the thugs, they harass and arrest people who try to video document their actions.

For example, Baltimore cops engaged in harassment and eventually arrested the videographer who caught the six Baltimore cops in action, there's enough illegal activity to send the perps to jail for several years (but only if they were Mundanes).  Let's start with "witness intimidation".

President John F. Kennedy: "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible, will make violent revolution inevitable."

Government policing cannot be "reformed".  There simply far too many perverse incentives against any lasting change.

The only way to make police behave like responsible citizens is to eliminate their blue privilege and subject them to a healthy dose of the free market.  Already, private security plays a larger role in protecting lives and property in America than government cops do.  And insurance helps to make crime victims whole.

Government-run police on the other hand have proven to be failures at the job time and time again.  Every time they fail, their budgets increase, their pay and benefits fatten, and innocents pay the ultimate price for their failure.

Someday, people *will* wake up to just how big a failure it is, and they will start building alternatives.

Interactions with police are far, far more dangerous for citizens than for the cops.  ~1,400 Americans are killed every year by the cops, and many of them were people who simply didn't deserve to die.

The Kelly Thomas story: http://www.cnn.com/2014/01/13/us/california-homeless-beating-verdict/

These sites have documented that ~1,400 Americans are killed by police every year:

http://practicallawandjustice.liberty.me/2015/01/01/killed-by-police-preliminary-2014-data/

http://www.killedbypolice.net/

http://regressing.deadspin.com/were-compiling-every-police-involved-shooting-in-americ-1624180387

http://gawker.com/what-ive-learned-from-two-years-collecting-data-on-poli-1625472836

Police work is actually one of the safer occupations.  Deep-sea fishermen who put food on your table are ~100 times more likely to die any given year in work-related accidents.  Law enforcement does not make the top ten list of most dangerous occupations.

Law enforcement is made dangerous to a large degree because police themselves willingly escalate to extreme violence in way too many encounters.  Police also make their own job more dangerous by voluntarily enforcing immoral and unconstitutional laws.

How many cops would be alive today if they weren't so slavishly handcuffed to shock and awe tactics, flash-bang grenades, sledge hammers and door-breaching devices used in breaking through doors...

... at 3:00 am?

Since government policing simply cannot be reformed, the only thing that will increase citizen safety is to abolish government police forces, and replace them with neighborhood-hired private security.

There is a growing body of study on what a privatized system of security would look like:

http://www.guns.com/2015/02/27/opinion-its-time-to-consider-privatized-policing/

http://www.copblock.org/130/public-vs-private-police-which-would-you-choose-2/

http://thefreethoughtproject.com/tag/privatized-police/


The only thing that might help reform American justice is privatization. At least then if the neighborhood-hired cop starts beating up his customers, they will have some hope of recourse.

Private cops actually get prosecuted when they break down the wrong door (example: "Two Bounty Hunters Charged In Henrico / They Smashed Way Into Woman’s Apartment", ­ Richmond Times ­ Dispatch ­ Richmond, Va. ­ Date: Jul 7, 1995 ­ Start Page: B.1).

In contrast, government cops can break down the door, shoot the dog, shoot a sleeping innocent unarmed person, throw a grenade into a baby's crib, ransack the house ­ -- and yet get away scot-free.

Is the prospect of private police really so much scarier than what goes on now under the current paradigm?

Further reading:

Support Your Local Private Peace Officer: He Has A Dangerous Job


  -- By William Norman Grigg

Taxpayers Near Ferguson Must Turn to Private Security
  -- by Ryan McMaken   

Without "Qualified Immunity," Would Cops Be So Quick to Kill?
  -- By William Norman Grigg

Darren Wilson and the Reality of "Blue Privilege"
  -- By William Norman Grigg
 
"We Have Been a Paramilitary Organization": How the Police Talk When They Think We're Not Listening
  -- By William Norman Grigg

Why "Good Cops" Stay Silent: The Persecution of Officer Adam Basford
  -- By William Norman Grigg

Police Union Commissar: If You Resist, You Should Expect to Die
  -- By William Norman Grigg

To Crush a Cop-Watcher: Prosecutorial Abuse in Ada County, Idaho
  -- By William Norman Grigg

Enhance Public Safety: Disarm the Police!
  -- By William Norman Grigg   

Walter Block has a bibliography to offer on the subject of Privatize Police.

Can War Ever Be Justifiable?

A recent article by EJ Dionne noted the upcoming 150th anniversary of the beginning of the Civil War, and it urged the widespread adoption of the leftist view of that war: that it was all about slavery. Unfortunately, the article ignores the fact that, as in all things politic, "it ain't so simple".

There is no such thing as a "good war".

Ever.

The desire to go to war is all about one thing, and one thing only: Money. The slavery issue was just a way for Lincoln to make war into a “moral imperative”. In our time, “terrorism” is similarly used to justify government aggression.

Conquest is little more than a means for the elites -- who profit from the endless financial rape of mass numbers of people -- to either gain or retain "tax territory".

Tax territory simply translates into "wealth" -- money. Control more territory, and you control more people and the wealth they create. The more tax territory a government seizes, the more powerful an army and spoils system it can support. A powerful army makes possible further conquests of additional tax territory. Of course, if anything comes along that threatens a government's tax territory, expect a brutal response.

Which brings us back to the Civil War.

To believe the North's fight was motivated by an altruistic purpose, such as abolishing slavery, is to believe in fairy tales and Santa Claus. It, like every other fight in history, was about tax territory. The United States government didn't want to lose a large chunk of its tax territory, and so a fight was inevitable when the southern states decided they didn't want to continue being the cash cow for the Northern-dominated congress and its decades-long transfer of billions in southern wealth to the North.

Had Lincoln allowed the South to secede, slavery as an institution would have collapsed on its own. Besides the fact that it had become a huge political liability, there were pricey related expenses (enforcement, social, uprisings, mistreatment) which were rapidly overtaking any profitability. One can look at modern examples of subsidized industries that collapsed even after decades of government protection and subsidization -- steel, autos, textiles, etc.

The Fugitive Slave Act was in effect a direct subsidy to slaveowners at the expense of federal taxpayers. It worked to an extent, socializing the costs of capturing runaway slaves. But even with it, slaves still escaped. Had individual owners been required to pay their own enforcement costs for chasing down runaways, the entire institution would have collapsed before the War. Fugitive slave laws were subsidies that skewed the actual costs of the chattel slavery system, thereby helping it compete in the market against free labor.

Economic reality would have caught up with slavery in very short order under an independent south. Private slavery was subsidized by the public treasury and in that respect it functioned only as well as any other implementation of socialism: it externalized the costs of its activities on others. But eventually, all socialized industries collapse on their own.

"Two wrongs don't make a right". The principle applies to governments as much as it applies to children on a playground. While the slaves were freed from private owners as a result of the Civil War, the entire population of the country became enslaved to overbearing government bureaucracy that intruded into daily life with surveillance, subsidies, taxes, the draft, speech prohibitions, and regulation. That government has only continued to grow to the point where it now steals half of all wealth individuals create every year. Americans to this day are enslaved to the colossus that emerged from the Civil War.

Can one justify freeing slaves by enslaving free men? Can altruistic motives be ascribed to northern politicians who dragged 168,649 young men off the streets to fight for the freedom of others? Lincoln’s draft caused the death of about a fifth of them. One must not deny the fundamental injustice done to those young men. An instructive read on this subject is Jeffrey Rogers Hummel’s 'Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men'.

Can one justify freeing slaves at the price of subjecting non-slave-owning women and children to rape and murder? Unleash an army and rape and plunder will always travel with it. The Civil War was no exception. In her treatise “Rape in the American Civil War: Race, Class, and Gender in the Case of Harriet McKinley and Perry Pierson”, Maureen Stutzman found few rapes (335) prosecuted by the Union army. Most of the recorded instances were limited to 1863 and 1864 . One wonders why there were no rape prosecutions recorded earlier in the war, or in 1865. Lack of records does not equate to a lack of rapes. Southern legal records were often destroyed – so civilian reports of rapes and other crimes by invading troops are hard to come by. In addition, in an environment of subjugation of the southern citizenry, there was considerable reluctance to report rapes committed by conquering troops.

Can one justify freeing slaves at the price of slaughtering non-slaveowners? Various estimates suggest over 50,000 southern civilians were killed as ‘collateral damage’ due to the indiscriminate shelling of towns and cities – many of which were occupied mostly by women and children.

Slavery could have been ended the same way it was done within the limits of Washington, D.C., as well as in many other places in the world, and without bloodshed: simply by compensating slaveowners for the change in national rules. But apparently, that was too much to ask of the northern states, which had been transferring southern riches in a northerly direction since 1783.

Another bloodless alternative could have been simply an official declaration of an end to all enforcement of fugitive slave laws. The resulting uncontrollable exodus of slaves would also have brought collapse.

The slavery issue was a great propaganda tool for Lincoln – a white supremacist and separatist who cared little for the black race. John Wilkes Booth’ bullet elevated the man into a myth; otherwise Lincoln’s blathering about shipping blacks back to Africa would have ruined his legacy.

Lincoln, in his first year of office, rapidly implemented an unreconstructed Whig agenda of a centralized sultanate of government meddling and subsidization of the railroads, tripled protectionist tariffs, and federalization (and debasement) of the money supply.

A few years ago, liberals were criticizing George Bush for imprisoning people without charges, access to counsel, the right to confront accusers, or even a trial. Of course, now that Obama is doing the same thing, they are silent – but the point is that it was Abraham Lincoln who showed Bush & Obama that a president can get away with it.

Far from encouraging peace and compromise, Lincoln’s actions fanned embers into flames.

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Addditional reading:

Are you aware of the extent to which free blacks held slaves?  Then check out "Did Black People Own Slaves?" by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.


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Breathless Media Treatment For One; Yawn for Another

OK, let's see.

Scenario 1:

A guy (with two full carloads of very large friends, as well as a BB gun that looks like a pistol and a bunch of baseball bats loaded in the cars) chases down two very small guys and one girl. One of the small guys shoots at one of the following cars, killing one of the occupants. Despite the chase, the deceased becomes an "innocent victim", and outrage and protest follow. The jurors remain awake and alert during the trial and deliver a guilty verdict for the shooter and his cousin. They are sentenced to long prison terms -- terms which don't satisfy the family and friends of the deceased.

No charges are ever leveled against any of the other individuals in the two following cars for their role in the situation. Every one of the reporters covering the trial itself mention the racial composition of the jury, as well as the race of those involved -- repeatedly.

Scenario 2:

A business man steps out of his truck one morning, is immediately accosted, shot to death, and robbed by three crackheads. The initial shooting was reduced to a footnote and hidden on inside pages of the local daily, and not reported at all by most other papers and radio/tv stations in the area.

Two years later, the police at last arrest three suspects, with what would be considered pretty solid evidence in other cases. At the trial of the first one of the three, several jury members -- all but one of whom is the same race as the defendant -- fall asleep during the trial. Eventually they return a "not guilty" verdict, and set the defendant free. Outrage and protest follow, but again not on the front page. None of the reporters covering the trial itself mention the racial composition (or the sleep habits) of the jury; that's left to the victim's wife to say.

What's the main difference between the cases?

The first story was reported almost as thoroughly and endlessly as Michael Jackson's death; with almost daily updates on the progress of the case. Every reporter managed to play the race card in every story.

The second story was almost completely ignored; with only two major articles in the regional daily during and after the first trial. The reporters leave out the race of the victims and perps; except when the reporter on the second story mentioned that the march by family and friends of the victim was "all white" -- even though a black man is clearly seen in the accompanying photo of the march.

http://www.timesdispatch.com/rtd/news/local/crime/article/PBUR22_20090621-221803/275243/

So why the breathless coverage of one case, while the other, where there was a clear criminal (actually three) and an entirely innocent victim, elicits a media yawn? And speaking of yawns, what judge in his right mind fails to declare a mistrial when the jury falls asleep?

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Marc Montoni is a network technician and a frequent columnist on the issue of individual liberty, Drug Prohibition, gun laws, and land-use regulation. He currently serves as the Secretary of the Libertarian Party of Virginia and publishes a commentary blog at FreeVirginia.blogspot.com.


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Content available for commercial distribution. Contact author for permission.