Category Archives: liberty

Critical Thinking

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Not only is critical thinking extinct in the public sphere, but in the personal as well. Dysfunctional individuals and families clearly outnumber the functional. I think people had more sense during prehistoric times. Just when you think someone couldn’t possibly be any dumber, they out-do themselves. We’ve replaced individual responsibility with collective dependence. Nothing, absolutely nothing, demands more of us than liberty. Socialism demands we take care of others at the point of a gun. Liberty demands we take responsibility for ourselves, reap the rewards and suffer the consequences.

WANTED DESPERATELY: NOTA

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Ask a hundred U.S. citizens what the country needs more than anything and you’re likely to get a hundred answers.  An end to poverty, an end to racism, an end to terrorism, free college, an end to liberals, an end to conservatives, an end to climate change, a balanced budget, and on and on.  Most responses would be likely be well-meaning, pie-in-the-sky fantasies with little forethought as nearly all of us are inclined to do now and again.  Including me.  I know it’s hard to believe that the Artful Dilettante himself engages in such flights of fancy, with outcomes devoid of any realistic chance of their actually happening.   But I do, and I’m going to share one such flight of fancy.

Years ago, long before any of us were born, there was a cool, popular little slogan, “What this country needs is a good five-cent cigar.”  Perhaps.  But what this country really needs now more than anything is one fundamentally and openly anti-statist, anti-establishment, pro-liberty news and information network.  As big as PMSNBC and FOX.  A 24-hour nonstop frontal assault on the welfare-warfare state and everyone who plays a role in it.  With facts, reason, and heepin’ helpin’ of ridicule and sarcasm.  It has been said that ridicule is the greatest weapon against the powerful, that the former Soviet Union was destroyed by ridicule.  Once the establishment becomes the national joke, it’s toast.

This country desperately needs an antidote to the stale, statist pablum endlessly touted by the lamestream media, including talk-radio.  Every major network supports either the Democrats or the GOP, liberals or conservatives.  But none of them supports “none of the above.”  All of them miss, or likely choose to ignore, the fundamental problem—it’s not the Democrats or the Republicans,  it’s Democrats and Republicans.  It isn’t liberals or conservatives, it’s liberals and conservatives.  You see folks, the problem is statism.  The solution is liberty.

NOTA would excoriate the welfare-warfare state, and identify the true cause of nearly everything that ails us—the government.  There would be no sacred cows—be it the War on Drugs, the War on Terror, or the War on Poverty.  NOTA would daily trash and expose the crimes of the Fed, the CIA, the FBI, Congress, the President, the bureaucracy, the major parties, and heap generous helpings of ridicule and scorn upon those responsible.

Among other things, NOTA would daily:

  • Expose every known and suspected crime of the United States government including the creation of the Fed, the assassinations of JFK and MLK, the 9/11 cover-up, and the Bush, Clinton, and Obama Family Crime syndicates;
  • Challenge the very legitimacy of the federal government laying out a point-by-point indictment of its having grossly exceeded the Constitutional limitations specified in Article 1, Section 8, and the Tenth Amendment;
  • Discuss secession as a rational (and quite reasonable) solution to this problem;
  • Expose the welfare state as a legacy of failure and the decades of misery and poverty to which it has subjected the poor and unfortunate;
  • Expose the War on Terror as multi-trillion-dollar, taxpayer-funded wet kiss to the military/intelligence/security complex and world banking consortium;
  • Support privatization as the only solution to our failed, dysfunctional government-run education system. I lived in the Washington, D.C. metro area for many years.  I listened to the WMAL morning show on my way to work every day.   Some time ago, the show dedicated a whole week to education reform.  The most radical idea discussed was whether or not to add 15 minutes to the school day.
  • Tell the American people about the financially and morally bankrupt Social Security System. Tell them how Congress has completely bankrupted the so-called Social Security Trust Fund and replaced it with worthless government IOUs to the tune of $24 trillion.
  • Expose the conspiracy of perpetual debt and how the government condemns us to life of debt slavery;
  • Expose the surveillance/monitoring state and how the government is turning us into a nation of informants rather than citizens, how we are monitored 24/7—our financial transactions, our web searches, our e-mails—all justified by the bogus War on Terror.

I don’t want to hear that NOTA isn’t needed or wanted.  It’s needed and wanted.  Every major network and all the so-called “alternative media” (i.e. conservative talk) are statist, pro-establishment sock-puppets .  Every one of them supports one or another major party, or either the phony liberal or conservative positions.  An anti-statist, anti-establishment network is desperately needed.  And wanted. There are millions of Americans who yearn for a major news and information source that speaks truth to power and gives voice to our reflexive distrust of government.

And I don’t want to hear that it isn’t possible.   As author/philosopher Paul Rosenberg so poignantly articulated in his novel The Breaking Dawn, “You can win every battle in life so long as you’re not afraid to die.  If you go into any struggle with that attitude, you’ll win and live to talk about it.”