Surely, the gas can is protected. It’s just a can, for goodness sake. Yet he was right. This one doesn’t have a vent. Who would make a can without a vent unless it was done under duress? After all, everyone knows to vent anything that pours. Otherwise, it doesn’t pour right and is likely to spill.

For government to be us, elected representatives and their publicly stated policy preferences — not an unelected “permanent government” of civil servants and corporate lobbyists that start coopting those elected officials the same day they enter office – would have to be the primary influence on what government does. How’s that workin’ out for ya?

For government to be us, it would have to actually matter what the law said — all those “constraints” Obama says he and other elected officials operate under. But if constitutional protections like the Fourth Amendment meant a damned thing, warrantless wiretapping would never have been an issue in the first place. And by his very threat to veto the proposed CISPA cyber-security bill, Obama made it clear it doesn’t really matter what the law is. The FBI has long privately assured Internet Service Providers that they’re protected from prosecution if they cooperate with “the authorities” in providing confidential customer information.

Next time Obama or anyone else of his ilk says “government is us,” give them a one-fingered salute.

If it were to be built close to land, it would interfere with shipping lanes, Mr Salmond said, and it would also interfere with military radar installations. No windfarms will be built there, he said.

My company continued to invest in the resort in good faith. It wasn’t until August 2009 that Mr Salmond began to show his true mindset. My son, Donald Trump Jr, and George got a call from the First Minister’s special adviser, Geoff Aberdein, lamenting the ‘terrible criticism’ over the release of al-Megrahi.

Last week, I asked whether you could think of any new ways to help people understand what £1.2 trillion means. There were lots of fantastic answers, but the prize goes to M. B. Evans who pointed out that, if they were seconds, our 1.2 trillion pounds of national debt would be equivalent to 38,052 years! Or, in other words, if we paid down the national debt at a rate of £1,000 a second, it would still take over 38 years before we had paid it off!

The issue of humanism is vita for several reasons. Although fundamentalist religions will likely always be part of human life, there is also a growing awareness that ethics and morality, including our sense of justice, must gain a footing apart from theology or religion. The reason is that faith is ineffable, ultimately. It is too personal, too subjective, and thus it tends toward schism rather than harmony. Whereas the humanist idea that an understanding of human nature, based on science and ordinary human reason, holds out promise.

The FBI and federal government have been caught red handed setting up groups, staging terrorists attacks, staging drills, creating patsies, and infiltrating activist groups. Here are 10 good tips to avoid the embarrassment of your group ending up in the headlines as another excuse to further the police state agenda. No matter if you’re a 9/11 group, anti-GMO, anti-war, Christian, Muslim or whatever the cause may be. If you run a group these tips are for you

Which gets me back to my political beliefs. I prefer to believe that people are fundamentally rational and benevolent, where by the latter I mean that they would, on the whole, prefer that good things rather than bad things happen to other people. I think it is clear that some people are like that and reasonably clear that practically everyone is to some degree like that. But it is not a full description of human beings, and I have no good basis to estimate how good a description it is, how many people to what degree fit my preferred pattern. My political beliefs come in part from modeling the world on the assumption that rationality and benevolence are the norm, the signal, everything else something more like random noise.

Which is to say that they come in part from wishful thinking.

Our warmakers believe they are exempt from normal moral rules. Because they are at war, they get to suspend all decency, all the norms that govern the conduct and interaction of human beings in all other circumstances. The anodyne term “collateral damage,” along with perfunctory and meaningless words of regret, are employed when innocent civilians, including children, are maimed and butchered. A private individual behaving this way would be called a sociopath. Give him a fancy title and a nice suit, and he becomes a statesman.

Let us pursue the subversive mission of applying the same moral rules against theft, kidnapping, and murder to our rulers that we apply to everyone else.

This mentality of the state results in catastrophic social consequences. As Peart told me during an interview at the offices of the Center for Constitutional Rights, despite having no intentions of being a criminal, his numerous stop-and-frisks gave him the creeping feeling that he perhaps he was, indeed, a criminal. Day in and day out, taxpayers are paying police to tell a generation of blacks and Latinos—on their way to work, school, a friend’s house or the park–that they are bad, bad people. That’s a pretty powerful way for the state to control people, when you’re not only controlling their movement, but their emotions and unconscious thoughts.

When I was young, the USSR was famous for horribly twisting history to make themselves look like the great and mighty ones. They even made jokes about it on the original Star Trek. But here was clear evidence that history – in America – had been altered. In this case, parts had not been added, but they most certainly had been taken away. That rather shook my view of history, as it had been taught to me at school.

And now I’m 60, I do know
That most of what I’m told ain’t so.
So, if you want me to be couth,
You’d better tell the bloody truth.

The pledge of allegiance flies in the face of liberty, freedom of conscience and the First Amendment. It is an odious government inspired ritual of which little kids are forced to recite mindlessly every school day long before they’ve acquired any working knowledge of American history or any reason why they should owe any allegiance to a government which looks upon them as virtual slaves.

Do you see how ominous this trend is!!!? If people drink less beer, the beer’s froth will produce less CO2, and less CO2 will make the weather colder, which will cause people to drink even less beer. It is a vicious cycle which, like a mere pebble starting the mighty avalanche, could freeze our socks off, with the onset of glaciers and an ice age which will plow Boston and Taxachusetts right off the face of the map.

The only way for you to prevent this horrible destiny is for you to drink more beer. Please do it. I know you hate beer, especially when the weather is cold, but I’m asking on bended knee. Your grandchildren are depending on you.

Mainstream political parties must be spooked by the rise of UKIP, because they’ve paid it the compliment of slander. By describing its members as racist, sexist clowns, they have inadvertently played into its hands. What they have failed to grasp is that their consensus on what respectable opinion looks like doesn’t hold much sway beyond the Westminster bubble and members of the chattering classes. Having spent years browbeating the public into holding the ‘right’ beliefs, they thought they had instilled a refined liberal conscience in everyone. They thought they could turn the searchlight on those who had left the ideological reservation and the nation would recoil in horror.

Environmentalists had a plan on how to bring down western industrialized civilization under the weight of dire prognostications of environmental doom, and the darn planet just refused to comply. You’d think Mother Earth would be more grateful.

Nationalism and its fruit — the powerful welfare/warfare nation-states that now infest virtually the entire planet — are the banes of the modern age. Their fundamental resources are violence and fraud, and their most indispensable fraud is the conviction they have inculcated in their subjects that the people’s very identity, the very essence of who they are, derives from and depends on the nation-state that dominates their lives.

For those who read this and are still afraid of being a victim of terrorism, let me offer a little bit of perspective. You are 17,600 times more likely to die from heart disease and 12,571 times more likely to die of cancer than a terrorist attack (so rather than worry about terrorism, pay attention to your health). You are also 1,048 times more likely to die in an auto accident than a terrorist attack (so pay attention to your driving and hang up that cell phone!). You are 8 times more likely to be killed by a cop or be electrocuted than be killed in a terrorist attack (so don’t fly your kite near power lines near a police station).

Our understanding of what caused these terrible crimes in Boston will depend upon the quality – and the range – of the questions brought to the inquiry. No doubt another whitewash "investigation" will be undertaken by a "blue-ribbon" committee chosen by the political establishment. This committee will, like its predecessors, do its appointed job of calming the public herd and urging an extension of government authority to police an already overly-policed populace. But independent journalists, along with men and women who use the Internet and other technologies to communicate their searches for truth, may find out more than we have thus far learned from babbling politicians and make-believe journalists.

I for one believe property rights are natural rights. The reason is simple: I believe rights to property are justifiable on grounds that make no essential reference to the existence of the state or civil society. But I also believe that such property rights need to be specified. In our world, this is usually done by law. What this means is not that these rights are not natural (or no longer natural). Rather, it means that in order to respect our neighbors’ property rights we need to pay attention to facts about the world, including facts about the law. Such is life.