Great Moments in Presidential History

Anti-Statism, Humor, Vulgar Politics
By / / 1 Comment / 1 minute of reading
Share

In an earlier post, I mentioned how important it is that we stop treating presidents like gods and recognize they’re just ordinary jerks.

In that spirit, here’s a transcript (and audio) of LBJ ordering some pants, belching, and talking about his “nuts” and “bunghole.”

It’s not as good, though, as the incident Gene Healy recounts in The Cult of the Presidency, in which “asked by a reporter why America was in Vietnam, LBJ unzipped his fly, wagged his member at the audience and exclaimed, ‘this is why!'”

Healy suggests LBJ’s behavior there was the result of being intoxicated by power, but maybe it was just those uncomfortable pants.

In any event, perhaps it says something encouraging about the present times that the press would no longer suppress such a story.  (Would they?)

Great Moments in Presidential History Read Post »

How to Mirror a Censored WordPress Blog

Anti-Statism, Police Statism, Technology
By / / 1 Comment / 2 minutes of reading
Share

A couple of days ago David mentioned that the Mises Institute providing its entire online media and literature library as a set of free torrents can be seen as part of a distributed or grassroots intellectual guerrilla resistance against the state.

This is just one aspect of the Mises Institute’s effort to be completely open source. All of the intellectual eggs of the Austro-Libertarian movement are no longer being kept in one basket. The more people who seed those torrents, the easier the burden on the Mises Institute. But more importantly, should statist or natural disaster strike, the world won’t lose the vast wealth of information hosted by the Mises Institute. Indeed, not only will the information not be lost, but there will be no downtime in its worldwide online distribution. Should states decide to actively move against us, they’ll be in for one hell of a game of ‘whack-a-mole’. They’ll face the same problems the RIAA, Hollywood, and others are facing in their War on Piracy Copying.

Austro-Libertarianism has gone viral, folks.

All this is to set the context for another example of open source anti-state resistance that I recently discovered.

WordPress is an open source website and blogging platform. It’s an easy to use, yet powerful, tool for getting our ideas online where people around the world can access them. It’s free, as in speech and beer. This site is powered by it. My site is powered by it. The Mises Institute’s site is powered by it.

But some countries like China and Australia censor the internet, blocking access to unapproved sites like YouTube and Twitter, filtering or blocking or shutting down or otherwise regulating websites and blogs.

There are ways to get around this censorship, however. Here’s one: The good folks at Global Voices Advocacy, an organization defending free speech online, have heroically created a guide to mirroring a censored WordPress blog. It’s covered by a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license, just like The Libertarian Standard. Get it. Share it. Even if you don’t need it yet, someday you might. Others already do. In the spirit of the Mises Institute’s torrented online library, we’re hosting the guide here as well.

Update: Via The Register, Google has put together an online interactive Transparency Report detailing how governments around the world are censoring the internet and Google services. Google also provides a Government Requests map detailing government “requests” that Google provide data on its users.

~*~

Cross-posted at Is-Ought GAP.

How to Mirror a Censored WordPress Blog Read Post »

Bodrum Days and Nights: The Fifth Annual Meeting of the Property and Freedom Society: A Partial Report

Anti-Statism, IP Law
By / / 11 minutes of reading
Share

I had the good fortune to attend to the Fifth Annual Meeting of Dr. Hans-Hermann Hoppe‘s Property and Freedom Society (PFS) earlier this month. It was held in beautiful Bodrum, Turkey at the Hotel Karia Princess, from June 3-7, 2010. For those interested, I provide my own (somewhat personal, no doubt partial) report below.

Group photo2 from the Fifth Annual Meeting, June 2010, Hotel Karia Princess, Bodrum
Group photo from the Fifth Annual Meeting, June 2010, Hotel Karia Princess, Bodrum

As a brief overview: the PFS was founded by Dr. Hoppe in 2006, as a more radical counterpart to the Mont Pelerin Society. As Guido Hülsmann has noted, a goal of the PFS was to play the role that the Mont Pelerin Society was originally designed to play: spreading the uncompromising intellectual radicalism of freedom. The PFS is centered around Austrian-anarchist libertarian ideas, with a diverse, worldwide membership, not as dominated by American libertarian intellectuals as many other libertarian groups. The Property and Freedom Society’s very name emphasizes the importance of property rights to human freedom, so it is no surprise that its motto is Frédéric Bastiat‘s dictum, “Property does not exist because there are laws, but laws exist because there is property.” (See also Hoppe’s The Role of the Property and Freedom Society in a Crazy World and the History and Principles of the PFS.)

In Professor Hoppe’s opening address for this year’s meeting, “The Property And Freedom Society—Reflections After Five Years,” he concludes:

After our first meeting, 5 years ago, here at the Karia Princess, my plan became more specific still. Inspired by the charm of the place and its beautiful garden, I decided to adopt the model of a salon for the Property and Freedom Society and its meetings. The dictionary defines a salon as “a gathering of intellectual, social, political, and cultural elites under the roof of an inspiring hostess or host, partly to amuse one another and partly to refine their taste and increase their knowledge through conversation.” Take the “political” out of this definition—and there you have it what I have tried to accomplish for the last few years, together with Gülcin, my wife and fellow Misesian, without whose support none of this would be possible: to be hostess and host to a grand and extended annual salon, and to make it, with your help, the most attractive and illustrious salon there is.

…

Bodrum Days and Nights: The Fifth Annual Meeting of the Property and Freedom Society: A Partial ReportRead More »

Bodrum Days and Nights: The Fifth Annual Meeting of the Property and Freedom Society: A Partial Report Read Post »

TLS Podcast Picks: Matt Ridley’s The Rational Optimist

Podcast Picks, Technology
By / / 1 minute of reading
Share

Recommended podcasts:

  • Matt Ridley on The Rational Optimist & “Ideas Having Sex,” Reason.tv (June 16, 2010): “Best-selling science writer Matt Ridley’s latest book is The Rational Optimist, which explains why the author is upbeat on the prospects of a planet and a civilization that seems to lurch from one pending political, economic, or environmental catastrophe to another. … Doomsayers have it all wrong, writes Ridley, who argues that prosperity and innovation have outraced even the visions of Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill.”

TLS Podcast Picks: Matt Ridley’s The Rational Optimist Read Post »

Scroll to Top