FEE is offering a free copy of “Common Sense Economics”

Details here.

The US FedGov and Torture

Reason.com has the story.

From the comments below the story:

I had the same procedure done to me once–not because I was a hunger striker but because they were afraid I was hemorrhaging profusely into my stomach.
They take a tube and they shove it up your nose, and then it goes down into your esophagus. In my case, like in most others, it doesn’t go through all those u-turns gently..
But the worst of it was that when you’ve got a big, thick tube going up your nose and down your throat, it feels like you’re being strangled. It’s just that you’re being choked from the inside of your throat instead of having someone cut it off by wringing your neck. It probably doesn’t need to be said that it also makes you feel incredibly nauseated.
They brought two giant orderlies into the ER to hold me down–so I’d stop screaming about how I was choking to death and stop trying to pull the tube out of my nose and up out of my stomach.
As big as the orderlies were, and as bad off as I was at the time (I’d lost almost 70% of the blood in my body by that time), I remember thinking I’d rather take a swing at them, and hit them with something in the ER big and heavy–rather than have to sit there with that tube in my nose for one more second.
They’re doing that to those hunger strikers every day?

Yeah, that’s torture.

 

Christopher Hitchens on Water-boarding:

“You may have read by now the official lie about this treatment, which is that it “simulates” the feeling of drowning. This is not the case. You feel that you are drowning because you are drowning—or, rather, being drowned, albeit slowly and under controlled conditions and at the mercy (or otherwise) of those who are applying the pressure. The “board” is the instrument, not the method. You are not being boarded. You are being watered. This was very rapidly brought home to me when, on top of the hood, which still admitted a few flashes of random and worrying strobe light to my vision, three layers of enveloping towel were added. In this pregnant darkness, head downward, I waited for a while until I abruptly felt a slow cascade of water going up my nose. Determined to resist if only for the honor of my navy ancestors who had so often been in peril on the sea, I held my breath for a while and then had to exhale and—as you might expect—inhale in turn. The inhalation brought the damp cloths tight against my nostrils, as if a huge, wet paw had been suddenly and annihilatingly clamped over my face. Unable to determine whether I was breathing in or out, and flooded more with sheer panic than with mere water, I triggered the pre-arranged signal and felt the unbelievable relief of being pulled upright and having the soaking and stifling layers pulled off me. I find I don’t want to tell you how little time I lasted.”

 

 

 

Anarcho-capitalism in the “Wild” West

Read about it here.

Charles Dana Gibson

Gibson was a rather well-known artist back in the late 19th/eary 20th century.  He is the creator of the glamorous “Gibson Girl”.  I found this site that has “A Widow and Her Friends”.  Pretty cool.

Filibuster hits the 12 hour mark

Just a couple of minutes ago.  See the filibuster here, and check out the filibuster clock, as well.  Sen. Paul just wants a simple answer: does Pres. Obama think he has the authority to kill American citizens on American soil without any sort of trial?

Upton Sinclair: evil propagandist

“In this connection, historians with an ideological axe to grind against the market usually ignore an authoritative 1906 report of the Department of Agriculture’s Bureau of Animal Husbandry. Its investigators provided a point-by-point refutation of the worst of Sinclair’s allegations, some of which they labeled as “willful and deliberate misrepresentations of fact,” “atrocious exaggeration,” and “not at all characteristic.”

Instead, some of these same historians dwell on the Neill-Reynolds Report of the same year because it at least tentatively supported Sinclair. It turns out that neither Neill nor Reynolds had any experience in the meat-packing business and spent a grand total of two and a half weeks in the spring of 1906 investigating and preparing what turned out to be a carelessly written report with predetermined conclusions. Gabriel Kolko, a socialist but nonetheless a historian with a respect for facts, dismisses Sinclair as a propagandist and assails Neill and Reynolds as “two inexperienced Washington bureaucrats who freely admitted they knew nothing” of the meat-packing process. Their own subsequent testimony revealed that they had gone to Chicago with the intention of finding fault with industry practices so as to get a new inspection law passed.”

Read more: http://www.fee.org/the_freeman/detail/of-meat-and-myth#ixzz2KZn2XIIh

The author of the “racist” articles in Ron Paul’s Newsletter

James B. Powell

The story is a little over a year old, now.

 

A couple of links for your inner sculptor

First, the 3D software to create virtual sculptures:

http://www.pixologic.com/sculptris/

Second, a company that uses 3D printing to make your virtual sculpture become reality:

http://www.shapeways.com/creator/

Yeah, I’m jumping on this bandwagon

The NFL Bad Lip Reading Video

The Dept of Justice report on homicide, 1980 – 2008

Read it here.  Also, don’t fall for the line that “28.6% of the people under the age of 18 that were murdered were done in by poison, while only 8.1% were killed with guns”.  What Table 2 is saying is that, of the people who were murdered with poison, 28.6% of them were under the age of 18.  Reading further into the report, it becomes clear that handguns are the most popular murder weapon.