Mises.org Available as a Torrent Download!

Anti-Statism, Education, Technology
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The Ludwig von Mises Institute has issued the second release of all of the content on their website as torrent files. This means that you can download all of the content available on Mises.org (as of June 15, 2010) by downloading various torrent files and opening them up with your torrent client (e.g., uTorrent, Vuze, or Transmission). This is great both for those who read Mises.org or listen to the media from that website. Thank you David Veksler, Jeffrey Tucker, and everyone else at the Mises Institute who made this possible!

The benefits of this are enormous. All of the information, wisdom, and knowledge on Mises.org is available for $0 to the general public, via Torrent download.1 This directly contradicts what Statists would have us believe is the nature of the free-market — people exploiting each other to succeed. How then do they explain the Mises Institute? The Mises Institute is a truly philanthropic organization, which helps thousands through education: education through peace and persuasion, not “education” at the barrel of a gun.

This will help the Mises Institute, its patrons, and Mises.org readers in numerous ways. Instead of having to navigate to the page or Media section of Mises.org and use browser plugins or spiders, those with a thirst for knowledge and understanding of economics and the free market can simply download everything they want through one torrent file. It also saves the Mises Institute tons of bandwidth, because people downloading torrents simultaneously share in the upload burden by seeding the file (if you download the file, please try to seed until your upload:download ratio is 1.2, this is normal Torrent etiquette). There is a dynamic carryover effect to torrenting: one person might only seed for a few weeks, but dozens of people who leeched from him might seed for a few weeks as well. Thus, there is a kind of digital compounding or interest-effect. Contrary to what you might think — and contrary to what advocates of intellectual property and particularly copyrights would tell you — this will not hurt Mises.org sales of books, but rather boost them, as explained by Jeffrey Tucker.

We can also think of this as a kind of grassroots, guerrilla intellectual resistance. The entire Mises.org media, book, journal, and PDF library will be distributed to thousands of hard drives around the world, will be shared by thousands of people. It can’t shut it down simply by shutting down the Mises Institute anymore. This has two benefits: (1) People can access Mises.org content even if the Mises.org website is down, provided they have the torrents; (2) If the US government wanted to shut down Mises.org, it would still face the distributed world-wide torrents, which would be almost impossible to shut down by a central authority.

So for those of you who are interested, please download: Help Mises.org and yourself at the same time. Download the books, pdfs, journal articles, videos, and mp3 files; listen to, watch, or read them; enjoy the overwhelming amount of knowledge you can have at your fingertips. This is truly a great example of Austrian economics at work: both parties clearly gain something from the interaction ex ante and almost certainly ex post too!

The Mises.org blog announcement:

Mises Torrents 2.0 Available

It’s been about a year early since the first public release of torrents containing all the document and media content on Mises.org. The Mises Institute staff adds new content frequently, so it is time for version 2.0.  Here are the 2010 torrents: Mises Media (132 GB), Books (8.6GB), Journals (4.1 GB), PDFs (324 MB), and ReasonPapers (1.4 GB).

For more files and details see the original announcement.  If you are new to BitTorrent, install the uTorrent client, open the links above, and you’ll be on your way.

If you downloaded an earlier version of this content, please do not re-download everything.  In both uTorrent and Vuze, you can get just the missing files.  In uTorrent,  start the download and let it create the placeholder directory, then stop it.  Overwrite the placeholder directory with your existing files, then “Force Re-Check.”  You can do the same in Vuze –  just enable the option to “Truncate existing files that are too large” under Options->Files.  Then resume.

By my best calculations, we seeded last year’s torrents to thousands of computers worldwide and served over 4 terabytes from our servers alone.  Please help us spread the word and make this release even bigger.

Join the discussion and post a comment

  1. I would like to thank Manuel Lora, Michael Barnett, and Geoffrey A. Plauche for their helpful insights and comments on this blog post. ↩

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Atlas Shrugged movie finally filming?!

Pop Culture
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The good news: they’re finally making an Atlas Shrugged movie, and they’re filming right now!

The bad news: pretty much every other detail associated with this story.

Just a few years ago, we were looking forward to an adaptation starring Angelina Jolie with a script from the writer of Braveheart.

Now we will get a $5 million movie directed by — and starring, as John Galt — a guy from the CW’s One Tree Hill. The screenplay is by Brian Patrick O’Toole, who did not write Braveheart, but who instead has written several direct-to-video horror movies with titles such as Evilution and Necropolitan.

I don’t want to pick on these people. It’s possible that they’ll make a decent movie. I can’t blame them for trying — I would, if I were them — and maybe freedom from studio meddling will let them make a film that’s true to the book’s ideas.

On the other hand, there’s nothing in the creators’ backgrounds to inspire confidence that they’re up to the extraordinary challenge that Atlas Shrugged presents.  Rand’s epic, cinematic book — whatever you think of her personally or of Objectivism — deserved a big budget and Hollywood’s best talent, especially now that it has surged in popularity again.

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Congressman Assaults Student on Washington Sidewalk

Police Statism, The Left, The Right, Vulgar Politics
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Apropos Jacob Huebert’s excellent post a few days ago on the time Before We Worshipped Presidents, our lesser rulers are getting increasingly used to their special, above-the-law status as well. Watch how Democratic Congressman Bob Etheridge responds to being peacefully asked a simple question by a well-dressed student on a public street:

Congressman Etheridge thinks he can interrogate and assault someone simply for having the temerity to ask him a question in public, apparently without fear of retaliation or legal consequences, despite being recorded. He has a right to know who the student is? I don’t think so. He’s not police. I don’t think even a police officer would have cause under positive law to demand identification and assault the student simply for video recording and asking a question in public. In any case, their authority is illegitimate and what we have here clearly is assault even under current positive law.

What’s more disturbing is that this incident is indicative of just how much our petty tyrants view themselves as being above us and the law — though I suppose assaulting one person on the street is an improvement over assaulting millions through his legislative acts; if only he and his fellow control-freaks would cease the latter, the world would be a much better place and their private crime manageable.

…

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The Ghost Writer

Fiction Reviews (Movies), Pop Culture
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Libertarians may especially enjoy Roman Polanski’s The Ghost Writer, which is now playing in second-run theaters and coming to DVD in August.

I wish I could tell you more about why, but it’s the sort of movie that’s best entered with minimal knowledge. The plot involves a man (Ewan McGregor) assigned to write the memoirs of a former British Prime Minister (Pierce Brosnan) who has recently been charged with war crimes for torture. An earlier ghost writer who worked on the book was found washed up on the beach at Martha’s Vineyard, and McGregor’s unnamed character tries to solve the mystery and avoid the same fate.

It was delightful to see the movie not only call attention to the Blair/Bush/Obama war crimes but also depict the CIA as nothing other than a force for evil in the world.

Above all, though, it’s a great, old-fashioned suspense thriller — written for intelligent adults, not teenagers — which is refreshing at a time when it seems that most movies are little more than a series of special effects, brutal killings, and/or dirty jokes.

I recall that Murray Rothbard referred to a certain type of film as a “movie movie.” I’m not sure what that means, but I’m pretty sure this is one.

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Before We Worshipped Presidents

Anti-Statism, Police Statism, Vulgar Politics
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Last week, Lew Rockwell posted an item about officers “subduing” and arresting two people who had the audacity to stand where President Obama’s motorcade wanted to go.

I recalled this yesterday as I read an October 1900 newspaper article, which reported an indignity that VP candidate Theodore Roosevelt suffered when newsboys threw mud at him “and greeted him with insulting language . . . as he departed from the church at which he had attended.” The story was a small item several pages into the paper and there is no indication that the boys were “subdued” or arrested, or that they got into any trouble at all. Instead, the mud-spattered TR just huffed off on his way.

The story included no quotes from experts on how terrible it is that our youth would show such disrespect for a great political leader and no editorializing.

Today, of course, this would be the top news story for a week, Chris Matthews would rend his garments over the blasphemy against our civic religion, and the kids would likely be tazed or killed, and, if they lived, charged with felonies.

Another newspaper article from the same month mentioned that trick-or-treaters stopped by the White House and were greeted by President and Mrs. McKinley. The kids weren’t participating in a photo op, but were just knocking on the front door as they would at any other house. Because you could do that, because the president was not a god.

For more details of the good old days when people treated presidents like the ordinary jerks they are (and how far we’ve fallen), I highly recommend Gene Healy’s The Cult of the Presidency.

(Cross-posted at The LRC Blog.)

UPDATE: Norman Horn points out that The Cult of the Presidency is now available online for free in PDF, Kindle, and ebook formats.

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