Hello Freedomphiles! I have this friend named Jason Brightman, who writes and illustrates a comic called Frayed Ends. In
the first issue, there is a big public debate over whether or not to
ban sticks, and the group against banning sticks held signs that said
"Sticks don't poke people. People poke people."

It was terribly
hilarious, and telling. Now, Jason is a huge liberal, so I don't think
he intended it the way I took it. But it made a great point. Violence
is the problem, not the tools people use to inflict it. If you ban
guns, they'll use knives. If you ban knives, they'll use baseball bats.
If you ban baseball bats, there will be an insurrection.

Case in point. Scotland, where private ownership of firearms is illegal, is holding
a "Knife Crime Summit" to try and figure out what to do about the
"knife culture" there.

Hello
Freedomphiles! This is just hilarious. I guess this dude's girlfriend
had never seen any of the Star Wars movies all the way through, so he
had her tell him the story from what she saw. He added some animation,
and zing - comic gold....
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Hello Freedomphiles! Ripped from the headlines...

BAUM,
Kansas - It's an exciting time in America, and an exciting time for a
small town in Kansas, as President Barack Obama stopped by, bringing
some unusual phenomena with him.

When he touched down at
Cornfield Airport, the temperature - at an all time low for this time
of year - immediately rose to exactly 70 degrees, the clouds parted,
and it was sunny in this little Midwestern hamlet once again.

"It
was amazing," said Clem Clemson, who - until today's encounter with
Obama, - had been the Grand Dragon of the local Klan chapter. "People
were just dropping their parkas in the street and following him.
Wherever he went, flowers would bloom, grass would become greener,
graffiti turned into multicultural murals. Hey - by the way, who is
Dick Gregory?"

The crowd grew larger as Obama worked his way
through town. "People just walked away from their businesses and joined
the procession," commented Daffodil Summers. "I was a Moonie, a
Scientologist, a Branch Davidian - but I've never seen anything like
this."
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Hello
Freedomphiles! So, imagine you are sitting down to eat a nice dinner
with huge portions when a flash bang grenade flies through your window
and eight men with automatic weapons burst in, screaming. They throw
your family to the floor and kneel on their necks as a creepy woman in
horned-rimmed glasses walks in with a clipboard and a graphing
calculator.

"How much do you weigh, ma'am?"

"Umm...a hundred and twenty pounds?"

"Unacceptable. You only need 1200 calories a day, and you have seventeen hundred on your plate. Officer Fannypack!"

You feel the pressure on your neck lessen as the man on you turns to address the bean-counter, "Yes, ma'am!" he answers smartly.

"Kindly remove one drumstick from this woman's plate."

And
then, as quickly as they arrived, they are gone, leaving nothing behind
but a broken window, a cloud of smoke, and the overpowering smell of
Drakkar Noir.

Okay, so this isn't going to happen any time soon, but it was fun to write. And across the pond, the Nanny State is going door-to-door and lecturing people about how much food they eat.
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Hello Freedomphiles! According to Daily Mail Online, your HDTV may be useless, if you don't get your eyes checked. They reference a new study, saying that if you aren't seeing as well as you could, you might as well have a regular old TV.

They
quote a study that found "as many as a third of adults and children
either need glasses, contact lenses or a stronger existing prescription
to experience the benefits," while "60 per cent of Britons have not had
an eye test in the past year, rising to 79 per cent in Scotland."

They
quote expert Phillip Hyde, who said: 'Even a marginally short-sighted
person sitting on a sofa watching an HD broadcast may not see the full
benefits in enhanced image quality. A small change in prescription can
potentially make a big change in the quality of the picture that you
see."
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Hello Freedomphiles! My hero, Reason Magazine's Radley
Balko, has been all over the place lately, laying waste to drug war
myths. He was the first writer I really connected with over at that
magazine, because of his piece, The Case of Corey Maye. That article also opened my eyes to the increased use of military tactics and weapons in law enforcement.

Radley has a piece right now on Culture11, where he is taking on David Freddoso and the Drug War in an op-ed battle....
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Hello Freedomphiles! Have you ever heard of the Gates Commission?
Born in March, 1969, it was Nixon's commission to study the need and
efficacy of the draft. It was comprised of fifteen people - five
against the draft, five for it, and five undecided. Among the five
against the draft were early libertartians W. Allen Wallis, Alan
Greenspan, and Milton Friedman, for whom ending the draft was a pet
project.

During the commission's deliberations, William
Westmoreland, commander of US troops in Vietnam, went toe-to-toe with
the world's most famous libertarian thinker, saying that he didn't
think an army of "mercenaries" was a good idea.

Friedman shot back: “Would you rather command an army of slaves?”

Westmoreland, ruffled, replied, “I don’t like to hear our patriotic draftees referred to as slaves."

And without missing a beat, Friedman came back with: “I don’t like to hear our patriotic volunteers referred to as mercenaries."

In
the end, Friedman swayed the other ten, and the commission returned
with a unanimous recommendation that the draft be ended. Even Nixon
gave him some props, saying, “I would not have followed through after
the election had I not become convinced that a voluntary army was
economically feasible and militarily acceptable.”

Friedman was
right. Who do you want in the foxhole next to you? A volunteer that
wants to defend his country, or a slave with a gun shoved in his hand?
Not to mention the disincentive for government to jump into ill-advised
wars. They have to convince the country it is a good idea first when
they have to convince citizens to fight the war for them.

Fast forward thirty years, and Charles Rangle is still trying to undo Friedman's good work - but not because he thinks the country cannot defend itself without conscription.
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Hello
Freedomphiles! The small town of Vassalboro, Maine is feeling the
crunch of these hard economic times, and one man thinks he has the
answer. Donald Crabtree thinks his new business is going to not only
bring the citizens of the small town out to spend money, but it may
even draw customers from the neighboring towns.

His idea? The Topless Coffee Shop, which will open its doors next month.

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Hello
Freedomphiles! It must be National Teen Sex Day, because my stack of
stuff is polluted with stories. First, the six kids who were arrested on child pornography charges, now this interesting little report is out.

It
would seem some 49 state attorneys general (I'd like to know which
state's attorney general decided he had no interest in this)
commissioned an exhaustive study of online predators and what could be
done about them.

With tens of thousands of convicted sex offenders (whatever that
means these days) on sites like MySpace and Facebook, the fear was that
they had found an all you can eat buffet for pedophiles.

So,
this year-long study was commissioned, and the newly created Internet
Safety Technical Task Force went into action, and talked to "academics,
experts in childhood safety and executives of 30 companies, including
Yahoo, AOL, MySpace and Facebook."

The result was a 278-page report that concluded, essentially, "Don't worry about it. The threat is completely overblown."

John Cardillo, chief executive of task force member Sentinel Tech Holding,
which maintains a sex offender database, said, “This shows that social
networks are not these horribly bad neighborhoods on the Internet.
Social networks are very much like real-world communities that are
comprised mostly of good people who are there for the right reasons.”

This really does a lot to dispel what Sara Totonchi of Southern Center for Human Rights calls the stranger-danger
myth, mentioning that 80 to 90 percent of sex crimes are committed by
"parents, grandparents, priests, friends, and acquaintances," not some
creepy dude on the internet. We need to stop looking at MySpace and
start giving Uncle Eddie some added scrutiny.

Still, some are
not convinced. What are facts when you have hysteria and hyperbole on
your side? Richard Blumenthal, largely responsible for getting the task
force created, said that he thought the truth “downplayed the predator
threat,” and said, “Children are solicited every day online. Some fall
prey, and the results are tragic. That harsh reality defies the
statistical academic research underlying the report.”
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Hello Freedomphiles! According to a new survey, 98% of doctors believe that some of their patients were victims of excessive force by police:

The survey of 315 physicians, contained in the January issue of the Emergency Medicine Journal and based on 2002 data, is believed to be the first doctors' account of suspected police brutality, says H. Range Hutson, lead author and assistant professor of emergency medicine at Harvard.

Most of these incidents went unreported because unlike child abuse, there are no laws requiring doctors to report suspected police brutality. And 95% said the injuries were caused by fists and feet....
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Hello Freedomphiles! Money.co.uk is reporting on an interesting new study. Thinking of getting rid of your internet connection in these troubling economic times? Don't act too fast, because according to the study, you'll actually lose in the end....
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Hello Freedomphiles! A new survey has found that 20% of teens have sent sexually explicit photos to each other, either over the internet or with their cell phones. Of course, my first thought was, man, I grew up in the wrong age.

But my second thought was the Newark, Ohio girl who was arrested for creating and distributing child pornography for doing the same thing. And the kids in Florida (same link) who were convicted of producing and distributing child porn for recording themselves getting it on and sending it from her computer to his.

So, I guess one in five teens is a child pornographer....
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Hello Freedomphiles! As I've documented in many blogs and op-eds over the years, people in America have gone off the deep end when it comes to sex offenses and offenders. We retroactively add new punishments onto people who have already served their sentences. We arrest a young girl who sent a naked picture of herself to a friend for distributing child pornography. We make sex offenders of high school kids who have consensual sex with their boyfriends. We make sex offenders of drunk guys that pee in alleys.

Its going completely nuts, and the sex offender registries are so filled with people who are a danger to no one as to make the lists completely useless.

Now, the case I am looking at right now involves a read dirtbag pedophile who was caught with actual pictures of children engaged in sexual acts. But he was also caught with something else - anime images - cartoons - of children having sex.

These images were not separated from the ones of actual victimized children, and treated as the same. He also had email stories about parents molesting their children.

The PROTECT Act of 2003 stipulates clearly that "it is not a required element of any offense under this section that the minor depicted actually exists."

Well, that's just wrong....
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Hello Freedomphiles! Do you remember a blog I did entitled What's Your Buffy IQ? It was a PARADE magazine quiz about BtVS. There were a couple of errors in it, but mostly it was pretty good.

At any rate, at the bottom of that entry, I had a couple of YouTube videos from someone who calls themselves buffyverse12. They were trailers for seasons one and two, and they were so well done, I swear this person needs to be making trailers for major motion pictures.

They have a gift....
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Hello Freedomphiles! On a blog elegantly titled SKANKS in NYC, 36 year-old Canadian model Liskula Cohen was named (on my birthday, no less) "our 1 skanky superstar." It's pretty damned rude, actually, with the author saying:

Ok so there are so many nasty bithces in the NYC scene, so now we can write about them.

I would have to say that the first place award for "Skankiest in NYC" would have to go to Liskula Gentile Cohen. How old is this skank? 40 something? She's a psychotic, lying, whoring, still going to clubs at her age, skank.

Yeah she may have been hot 10 years ago, but is it really attractive to watch this old hag straddle dudes in a nightclub or lounge? Desperation seeps from her soul, if she even has one.

Wow. That's harsh. First of all, I am 34, and I take offense to his characterization of my age bracket as "old." So my knees pop when I get up, and "because I said so" is heard coming from my mouth daily - I'm still hip! I'm still cool! I listen to punk rock! Oh, damn. I need to drink some Metamucil and take a nap.

At any rate, rather than shrug this off as some douchebag whose never seen fame (the model appeared on W and Vogue) raging anonymously on the net between wankfests and World of Warcraft tournaments, she decided to sue....
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Hello Freedomphiles! Nigerian bikers have found a bizarre way around the country's new helmet law - they are wearing dried pumpkin shells, called calabashes, on their heads.

Seriously.

Kano Federal Road Safety Commission commander Yusuf Garba said that they weren't going to tolerate the use of gourds as personal safety devices, reminding people that they are supposed to be vegeatable after their accidents, not before....
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Hello Freedomphiles! Sad news - punk icon Ron Asheton, proclaimed by Rolling Stone to be the 29th greatest guitarist of all time, was found dead at age 60 this morning in his Ann Arbor home. Asheton, with his brother Scott, friend Dave Alexander, and the inimitable Iggy Pop formed The Stooges, thought by many to be the first punk rock band....
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Hello Freedomphiles! According to The Telegraph UK, parents have abandoned classic fairy tales because they are not PC enough. It stems from a poll of 3,000 parents by TheBabyWebsite.com, who report that "a fifth of parents said fairy tales were no longer politically correct."

Here are the top ten read stories, and the top ten abandoned stories....

Hello Freedomphiles! This week marks the 50th Anniversary of the release of I, Pencil, Leonard Read's outstanding illustration of the free market's amazing ability to bring blindingly disparate resources and skills together to create something as simple as the pencil.

Read was the founder of the very first libertarian think-tank, Foundation for Economic Education (FEE), because he believed that the culture's march toward collectivism was simply a matter of poor economic education. The libertarian movement wouldn't be what it is today without his efforts a half-century ago.

Everything that was published by FEE was free to reprint, so I am going to post the incomparable essay in its entirety...

Hello Freedomphiles! I am sure you are all well-aware of Bush's "abstinence only" sex education preference. We all think they won't work - people generally start having sex as soon as their bodies tell them they want it. I mean, c'mon, you can't tell me that even if you didn't have sex as a teenager, it wasn't because you didn't want to have sex as a teenager.

It's not my fault you were a dork.

At any rate, a new exhaustive study by the federal government has led to some completely unsurprising conclusions. There have been others, but the new study is the most rigorous, comparing not just teens, but teens with similar views. Janet E Rosenbaum of Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, whose report will appear in the January issue of Pediatrics, explained: "This study came about because somebody who decides to take a virginity pledge tends to be different from the average American teenager. The pledgers tend to be more religious. They tend to be more conservative. They tend to be less positive about sex. There are some striking differences, so comparing pledgers to all non-pledgers doesn't make a lot of sense."

In the end, they determined that pledgers were no less likely to engage in premarital sex than the non-pledgers....
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Hello Freedomphiles! So, the UK has passed a new anti-porn law, banning "extreme" pornography. And like Justice Potter Stewart, British law enforcement officials will have to "know it when they see it."

A wank tape will be considered obscene if it "is grossly offensive, disgusting or otherwise of an obscene character." Well, that's as clear as mud....

Hello Freedomphiles! That image is from Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season 8, the continuation of the Buffy story only found in comics. I highly recommend it, by the way. I have the first three compilations in trade paperback, and they just get better each time.

But that's not why I am writing this. PARADE Magazine, of all things, has a pretty good fifty question Buffy quiz up. I scored as a Slayer, of course, because I am a Whedon geek.

Click here to give it a try.

A couple of things, though. They got two questions wrong....

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Hello Freedomphiles! I've always contended that the economic school with which I share the most is the Austrian School, founded by Ludwig von Mises and popularized by the likes of FA Hayek (Nobel prize winner), Murray Rothbard, and Ron Paul.

The main areas where I differ are in the administration of justice and national defense. I don't think that we should have private armies, and I definitely think that funding a national army through user fees would be inefficient because of the free rider problem. What I mean is that everyone benefits from national defense, whether they pay or not.

I also don't like the idea of private police and fire departments, as well as private justice system. I think they need to be completely impartial, and I am not sure that is possible in a free market. These are the primary reasons I am a libertarian and not an anarchist.

If I agreed with the Austrians on this, there would be nothing stopping me from being an anarcho-capitalist like them. But I subscribe more to Nozick's "Night Watchmen State," where the only proper functions of government are protecting our life, liberty, and property, as well as enforcing contracts.

At any rate, The Ludwig von Mises Institute has a new version of their Are You an Austrian? quiz up....

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Dickipedia: "You're Glib!"

Hello Freedomphiles! Ever heard of Dickipedia? It's self-described as a wiki of dicks. And it delivers. Here's a sample from their delightful entry on Tom Cruise...

Hello Freedomphiles! My Christmas gift to you is my list of the 15 Best Christmas Songs ever, and of course, your gift to me is tolerating another one of my lists! You may not agree with me, but whatever - make your own damned list. Let's get started...

Hello Freedomphiles! Santa put the City of Tempe, Arizona and the Surveillance State on the naughty list this year, saying "Ho Ho Ho! Death to the surveillance state! Free movement for all people!'' Check it out...
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Hello Freedomphiles! You know, I find it really hard anymore to get actually angry at the Westboro Baptist Church. They're just so stupid and over-the-top bigoted, they're kinda funny.

I guess I wouldn't feel the same if they were picketing my gay son's funeral, but the really interesting thing about them is that they bring people together. On both sides of the gay marriage debate, for example, you will find people that absolutely loathe Fred Phelps and his nutbar "church."

They may have done more to advance the cause of gay tolerance than any rainbow flag waving parade.

Well, they're doing their part to get Santaphiles to line up with gays and veterans against them, by releasing this video, which says you are going to Hell if you join in the festive celebrations of Christmas, which have a lineage to the pagan holiday of Saturnalia...
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Hello Freedomphiles! In Middletown, New York, when First and Webb Horton Memorial Presbyterian merged, they had the old First Presbyterian Church building sitting empty. They decided to make use of it, and attempted to do something about the homeless problem. So, they opened a "warming station" that can hold up to twenty of the city's poor and desperate.

"This is what churches do," said Rev. Jack Lohr, pastor of the United Presbyterian Church. "At the bottom, no one should have to be out there on a night like last night."

But Alex Smith, the city's corporation counsel and official Grinch, is threatening to close it down for violating zoning codes preventing a "residential use" of the downtown buildings....
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Hello Freedomphiles! So, the proponents of Proposition 8 in California, which ended gay marriage there, aren't happy with their victory. They want more. So, they have filed a lawsuit seeking to anul all the marriages that were performed before the ban went into effect.

"Proposition 8's brevity is matched by its clarity," said a spokesdouche. "There are no conditional clauses, exceptions, exemptions, or exclusions: 'Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.'"

And California Attorney General Jerry Brown just did an about-face on Proposition 8....

Hello Freedomphiles! I am no fan of red light and speeding cameras. I think it is antithetical to our right to confront our accuser, because tickets people get from them are incontestable. It doesn't matter if you are driving the car, either. They make them a non-moving violation, so your only recourse is to send a check.

Now, studies have indicated that they increase accidents. It has also been shown that in many places (TX, for example), they shorten the yellow lights to maximize profits. And that's all they are, really. A state money-making scheme.

But here's another reason their incontestability is wrong - malicious intent....
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