Category: Aggregated

The best negotiator I knew always acted like an idiot. He acted so well that I thought he was really stupid. I also thought at the time that he was my best friend. That was probably an act also. Just two years later he stopped talking to me forever. I ran into him in the street the other day. He smiled and shook my hand. I felt warm, like he liked me again. Then he was gone. Negotiation is first about warmth. Two sides deciding if they want to be friends with each other. If they want to be in … Continue reading →

Conspiracy Theorists USED TO Be Accepted As Normal Democracy and free market capitalism were founded on conspiracy theories. The Magna Carta, the Constitution and Declaration of Independence and other  founding Western documents were based on conspiracy theories. Greek democracy and free market capitalism were also based on conspiracy theories. But those were the bad old days …Things have now changed. The CIA Coined the Term Conspiracy Theorist In 1967 That all changed in the 1960s. Specifically, in April 1967, the CIA wrote a dispatch which coined the term “conspiracy theories” … and recommended methods for discrediting such theories.  The dispatch … Continue reading →

The trial of Ross Ulbricht, admitted founder of Silk Road, is over. He has been convicted on all the charges brought by the government. It is a terrible tragedy. An anonymous commenter to the post, where the Ulbricht family expressed shock at how unfair the trial was, explained best what happens when the government has you in their crosshairs; Having been through a federal criminal trial myself, this description sounds like standard operating procedure. While I feel badly for the mother, she does express an astonishing naiveté of the system and process. A federal trial is not designed to find out … Continue reading →

The growing number of secession movements around the world gives rise to our topic: breaking away from current government structures that do so much harm to liberty, peace, and prosperity. Recorded at “Breaking Away: The Case for Secession”—the Mises Circle in Houston, Texas, on 24 January 2015. Comments open on YouTube The Best of Jeff Deist

Three stories that were making daily headlines last week all had one very important thing in common. One was the shambles unfolding over Ukraine. The second was the ongoing shambles over Greece and the euro. The third was the ever-growing flood of refugees from Africa and the Middle East desperately trying to escape to safety in Europe. Over Ukraine, I cannot recall any issue in my lifetime when the leaders of the West have got it so hopelessly wrong. We are treated to babyish comparisons of President Putin to Hitler or Stalin; we are also told that this crisis has … Continue reading →

It was just over 12 years ago today when then Secretary of State Colin Powell spoke to the U.N. Security Council on February 5, 2003, and lied to a packed auditorium of world leaders and the entire world, making the case that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. It was only after the second US invasion of Iraq (not to be confused with Obama’s third) that we learned that not only did Saddam not have WMDs, but that the whole invasion was merely a pretext for the US to gain control of yet another middle-eastern regime and one … Continue reading →

The current issue of the Cato Policy Report (January/February 2015) contains a short article about a book by Zhang Weiying called The Logic of the Market: An Insider’s View of Chinese Economic Reform, which was originally published in Chinese (and said to be a best-seller in China in that form) and was recently translated into English. The author is the director of Peking University’s Center for Market and Network Economy and is described as a leader among pro-market economists in China, a description that accords well with the quotations given from his writings. In the article, a quotation from a recent Wall Street … Continue reading →

Foreign Affairs is the publication of the elitist Council on Foreign Relations, a collection of former and current government officials, academics, and corporate and financial executives who regard themselves as the custodian and formulator of US foreign policy. The publication of the council carries the heavy weight of authority. One doesn’t expect to find humor in it, but I found myself roaring with laughter while reading an article in the February 5 online issue by Alexander J. Motyl, “Goodbye, Putin: Why the President’s Days Are Numbered.” I assumed I was reading a clever parody of Washington’s anti-Putin propaganda. Absurd statement … Continue reading →

As the debate over marijuana legalization continues in the United States, a new study suggests that smoking the controversial plant is about 114 times safer than drinking alcohol. In fact, alcohol was found to be the deadliest drug on an individual level, at least when it comes to the likelihood of a person dying due to consuming a lethal dose. Heroin and cocaine were the next most deadly substances, followed by tobacco, ecstasy, and meth. Trailing up the rear was marijuana. According to the team of international researchers behind the study, published in the journal ‘Scientific Reports,’ the findings suggest … Continue reading →

If you’ve never been to prison, you have no idea what prison is like. No matter how many episodes of Orange Is the New Black you’ve binge-watched, the experience of life behind bars is basically unfathomable to those of us who have only ever known freedom. So when first-time offenders find themselves locked up, they enter the system not knowing what to expect, how to behave, or how to keep themselves safe. Last week, The Marshall Project published a pair of extraordinary 20-minute videos about what inmates must do in order to avoid becoming victims of sexual abuse. The videos, which … Continue reading →

Do you have a coin jug at home? Perhaps it isn’t a jug, per se, but a coffee can, glass jar, or maybe even an old fashioned piggy bank? It might be holding far more money than you realize! If you spend much time surfing various survival/prepper message boards and other forums, you’ll no doubt run across the term “junk silver.” People want to know, “What is junk silver? And, should I buy it?” The term refers to coins containing a high amount of actual silver, unlike most common coins minted today. Here’s the cool part. If you have a … Continue reading →

ummoned from his slumber by the insistent pounding on his front door, Mark Casterline opened his bedroom window to ask what was wanted. By way of reply a blinding spotlight was trained on him. An instant later his front door was kicked in to admit more than a dozen armed men, who dragged him naked from his bed. “They intended to kill me,” Casterline said during an interview in the kitchen of his home outside of Ontario, Oregon. “I was sound asleep when the SWAT team showed up and had no idea why they were in my house. They came … Continue reading →

‘The head of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Rajendra Pachauri, resigns amid sexual harassment allegations by a 29-year-old female researcher at an institute he runs in India. The 74-year-old Indian and a […]