Tag: posts

Bill Clinton
has said that he hopes there is a female president in his lifetime,
but added that he has “no idea” if his wife is planning on
running.

From
Politico:

Former President Bill Clinton said Monday he would like to see a
female president, but he has “no idea” if his wife, former
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, will run in 2016.

“I hope we have a woman president in my lifetime, and I think it
would be a good thing for the world as well as for America,”
Clinton said at a conference in China, according to Agence
France-Presse.

Although Bill Clinton claims to have “no idea” about his wife’s
plans for 2016, Democratic strategists and donors
are preparing for a what is widely considered as an
inevitable Hillary Clinton presidential campaign.

Follow this story and more at Reason
24/7.

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at @reason247.

Bill Clinton
has said that he hopes there is a female president in his lifetime,
but added that he has “no idea” if his wife is planning on
running.

From
Politico:

Former President Bill Clinton said Monday he would like to see a
female president, but he has “no idea” if his wife, former
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, will run in 2016.

“I hope we have a woman president in my lifetime, and I think it
would be a good thing for the world as well as for America,”
Clinton said at a conference in China, according to Agence
France-Presse.

Although Bill Clinton claims to have “no idea” about his wife’s
plans for 2016, Democratic strategists and donors
are preparing for a what is widely considered as an
inevitable Hillary Clinton presidential campaign.

Follow this story and more at Reason
24/7.

Spice up your blog or Website with Reason 24/7 news and
Reason articles. You can get the widgets
here. If you have a story that would be of
interest to Reason’s readers please let us know by emailing the
24/7 crew at 24_7@reason.com, or tweet us stories
at @reason247.

“Holding Border Patrol Accountable: Terry Bressi on Recording
his 300+ Checkpoint Interactions” is the latest video from
ReasonTV. Watch above or click on the link below for video, full
text, supporting links, downloadable versions, and more ReasonTV
clips.

View this article.

By early last week, a race once too close to call
had become almost too close to comprehend. More than 2.2 million
people cast a ballot in Virginia’s contest for attorney general,
but by Monday morning, Republican Mark Obenshain led
Democrat Mark Herring by only 17 votes — a lead that appeared to
vanish by week’s end, when Herring inched ahead by 164 votes. A.
Barton Hinkle says narrow elections like this can have broad
consequences, and for those who care about the consent of the
governed, that is one more reason to limit government’s scope.

View this article.

Over the weekend the privately designed and created digital
currency/investment vehicle (it was designed as the former, seems
to be working more effectively right now as the latter) hit an
exchange value of over $500–closing at $528.32–on it most prominent exchange, Mt. Gox. (And
as of the minute I write this, already up to $640 today.)

You first probably heard of Bitcoin from one of your kooky
friends, in the wilder ends of agorist economics (end the Fed,
escape the State, black markets rule, you can buy drugs with them
anonymously online!) and/or high-tech futurism (new technologies
are giving us wider and wilder freedoms from state control than you
could ever know.)

The value of Bitcoin in dollar terms survived its
first supposed bubble back in April (when it topped off at
$266 before falling to $65 within a week), and the
shutdown of Silk Road, its most prominent use for actually
buying goods and services

Lots of alarming reports arose about people having their
Bitcoins stolen, or the
system being gameable, or Bitcoin
exchanges disappearing overnight.

Despite all that, in the short term at least, believing in the
wild future seems like it was a very, very smart idea. There are
various scruffy festivals and conferences I attended in 2011 where,
if even half the people there were putting any money where their
mouths was, the assembled wild-eyed dreamers easily have a market
cap exceeding $40 million today.

For some perspective: if you dropped a grand on Bitcoin the
first time (I believe) it was mentioned here at Reason,
on
April 20, 2011, it would have been worth around $4.4 million
yesterday.

If on the day Reason.TV first
ran a video interview with Jerry Brito about Bitcoin, for those
who trust the image more than word, on June 1, 2011, you had spent
a thousand bucks on Bitcoin, you could have turned that yesterday
into $54,465.

If, on the day that Wired magazine confidently declared
that Bitcoin was through–“The Rise
and Fall of Bitcoin,” out on November 23, 2011–you spent a
grand on the dead digi-currency, that would have been worth
$221,982 yesterday–a lot of gift subs to Wired.

if you bought in the first time we wrote at Reason
about Bitcoin’s
first known appearance in a lawsuit, on August 15, 2012, you
could have cashed that out yesterday for $39,873. 

If you dropped a grand at the height of the April “bubble,” on
April 10 this year, right before it all seemed to come crashing
down, that would have been worth $1,986 yesterday, nearly doubling
your investment.

If you had dropped that grand on May 21, the day
my Reason article on government attempts to regulate
or stymie Bitcoin appeared, that would amount to $4,292
yesterday.

If you had put a grand of U.S. fiat money into Bitcoin the day

before the Silk Road bust–which you might recall led
many to think a death blow had been struck to the currency–you
could cash out that grand yesterday for $3,657. If you had dropped
a grand on Bitcoin a mere month ago, that would be worth
$3,139–substantially more than tripling in a month. 

(All estimates
based on the day’s high via this chart for the buy price,
and yesterday’s close of $528.32 for the sell. And remember, this
morning it has soared another 20 percent or so. This morning.)

What any of this means for the future of Bitcoin as either
currency or investment vehicle is uncertain, of course as past
performances are no result of future guarantees and all that. And
as anyone will tell you, wild fluctuations in value aren’t really
the best quality for something you want to use as a currency, as
opposed to an investment vehicle. But it is worth noting that
academics have found
that even reports of the occasional hack, scam, and theft of
Bitcoin seems to have no effect on its market capitalization or
worth, and hacker types are doing their best to make sure Bitcoin
can stay largely anonymous, though means
such as “dark wallets.”

But that lots and lots of people are putting their money into
their belief that private, largely anonymous, state-free, black
market friendly, digital currency vehicles are the wave of the
future at the very least should put a smile on the shade of Sam
Konkin, libertarian
movement father of agorism and hopefully put a lot of
change in the pockets of his fans.

Reason on
Bitcoin.

Thirty-five years ago today,
agents of the Peoples Temple, a tighly knit and deeply paranoid
church that had relocated from San Francisco to Guyana,
assassinated the visiting congressman Leo Ryan and embarked on a
mass murder/suicide that claimed more than 900 lives. The
congregation’s commune was nicknamed Jonestown, after church leader
Jim Jones; the chief means of death was a powdered drink doused
with cyanide. (The drink was probably Flavor-Aid, but it has gone
down in popular memory as Kool-Aid. I’ll bet they’re still tearing
their hair out about that at Kraft Foods.)

Later this week, we’ll be observing the 50th anniversary of John
F. Kennedy’s death. The two anniversaries are linked by more than
just the time of year: Mark Lane,
one of the first and most influential of the Kennedy conspiracy
writers, was in Jonestown when the massacre began, along with
fellow JFK theorist Donald Freed. (In addition to their work on the
nonfiction shelves, Lane and Freed had a hand in writing

Executive Action, one of the lamer conspiracy thrillers of
the ’70s.) As Jim Jones told his flock that the world was plotting
against them, he incorporated Lane and Freed’s ideas into his
spiel. Later, Lane himself would a featured player in some of the
conspiracy theories that inevitably appeared after the massacre. As
I wrote in
The United States of Paranoia, Mae Brussell believed
that Jonestown existed

so the secret government could
“experiment on black people; mind control; electrodes; sexual
deprivation; fear; mass suicides.” [Larry] Layton, “a robot in the
hands of Jim Jones,” had assassinated Ryan to keep the truth from
coming out, and the mass slaughter that followed had been a part of
the cover-up.

Not every conspiracist shared Brussell’s interest in brainwashing.
In 1975, the JFK assassination theorist Mark Lane allegedly told
her that he’d “never appear with you publicly. People know you’re
crazy. There’s no evidence of mind control in the United States.”
But Lane had a Jonestown connection of his own: He had been one of
the Temple’s attorneys, and he had argued shortly before the
massacre that “American intelligence organizations” were making “a
deliberate effort” to “destroy the Peoples Temple, to destroy Jim
Jones, and to destroy Jonestown.” Brussell could now quote Lane’s
words of praise for the Guyana settlement (“It makes me almost weep
to see such an incredible experience with such vast potential for
the human spirit and soul of this country to be cruelly assaulted
by our intelligence agents”) as she painted her old rival as a part
of the grand machine. “I’m very proud to say that I’ve hated his
guts and tried to expose him for years,” she told her
audience.

It shouldn’t be surprising to
see such speculations after COINTELPRO, CHAOS, and other measures
fanned the Left’s fears of the government. But that wasn’t the only
factor at work. Every subculture accumulates demons, and by the
late 1970s the New Left and the counterculture had plenty of demons
to contend with. If it is possible to discuss “the sixties” in
reference to events that took place in 1978–and culturally
speaking, I think it is–then the deaths at Jonestown, a colony
that until its destruction had presented itself to the world as a
multiracial socialist utopia, marked the end of the sixties, a
moment even more deflating than the Charles Manson murders or the
Rolling Stones’ lethal concert at Altamont. The massacre also came
within a month of the assassinations of San Francisco’s liberal
mayor George Moscone and the city’s first openly gay city
supervisor, Harvey Milk. If there were ever a time when a spirit of
doom hung over the California counterculture, this was it.

Brussell’s grand conspiracy narrative found a way to link Jonestown
to the San Francisco shootings, and it managed to work in the
Symbionese Liberation Army, the Manson murders, the Zodiac killer,
and the sixties assassinations too. As history, it was a
jerry-rigged assemblage of facts, half facts, rumors, and guesses.
But as a mythic translation of a jarring historical moment, it had
a powerful pull. Brussell transformed a collection of free-floating
anxieties into an external enemy with a name.

Where are they now? Lane went on to serve as attorney
for the far-right Liberty Lobby. Freed co-scripted the Robert
Altman film
Secret Honor. And the massacre itself intensified a moral
panic that cast every small, strange, and young religion as a
potential death cult.

Bonus links:

• Tim Cavanaugh revisits
San Francisco in the age of Jonestown.

• Alan Moore and Peter Bagge
interview Kool-Aid Man.

• The Jonestown Express, the colony’s in-house funk band, covers
Joe Tex’s “Ain’t
Gonna Bump No More.” The music starts at :56.

The
United States in August and September began considering in earnest
whether or not to become militarily involved in Syria. There are
many tough and contentious questions about that decision, but one
fact is undeniable: It would be expensive. Veronique de Rugy
analyzes some of the many costs of going to war with that
country.

View this article.

Via Benn Swann comes this
charming tale of SWAT team overkill. The Columbia, South Carolina
police department – along with 499 other municipalities across this
sweet land of liberty – received a “free” MRAP (Mine-Resistant
Ambush Protected) vehicle featuring bullet-proof skin and a rack
capable of holidng a 50 caliber machine gun. Such vehicles cost
about $658,000 but this one was gifted to the police by the
Department of Defense.

Swann notes:

Though the vehicle was “free” to the citizens of Columbia, they
were purchased by taxpayer money.  500 surplus military
vehicles costing $658,000 each adds up to $329 million dollars of
surplus DoD spending (and therefore taxing) on vehicles which are
so unnecessary to the military they are being given away to
American cities.  Though this wouldn’t fix the debt, it is yet
another multi-million dollar piece of wasteful spending by the
American federal government.

The most troubling aspect of the situation, though, is the
reason for obtaining such a vehicle.  Another town which
recently obtained federal funding for a military armored vehicle –
though this one was through the Department of Homeland Security –
was Concord, New Hampshire.  When the ACLU and New Hampshire
Civil Liberties Union submitted a public records request, they
discovered that groups like the Free State Project and Occupy New
Hampshire had been cited
as domestic terror threats, and their presence was listed as a
reason the police department needed an armored vehicle.

Read more.

The vehicle came as part of the infamous “1033 program,” through
which Defense gets rid of excess stuff it didn’t need in the first
place by putting it into circulation via local police departments
(it’s like a gun giveaway in reverse and with tons more firepower).

Read Reason on that.

And read about that horrifying Free State Project – in which a
bunch of libertarians are moving to New Hampshire to influence
state and local government in a small-government direction –

here. Good luck finding any violent terrorists among the
participants.

No journalist has done more to highlight the militarization of
police than former Reason staffer Radley Balko (archive here),
now at the Huffington Post (archive here).
Watch this interview about his recent book
Rise of the Warrior Cop.

Via Benn Swann comes this
charming tale of SWAT team overkill. The Columbia, South Carolina
police department – along with 499 other municipalities across this
sweet land of liberty – received a “free” MRAP (Mine-Resistant
Ambush Protected) vehicle featuring bullet-proof skin and a rack
capable of holidng a 50 caliber machine gun. Such vehicles cost
about $658,000 but this one was gifted to the police by the
Department of Defense.

Swann notes:

Though the vehicle was “free” to the citizens of Columbia, they
were purchased by taxpayer money.  500 surplus military
vehicles costing $658,000 each adds up to $329 million dollars of
surplus DoD spending (and therefore taxing) on vehicles which are
so unnecessary to the military they are being given away to
American cities.  Though this wouldn’t fix the debt, it is yet
another multi-million dollar piece of wasteful spending by the
American federal government.

The most troubling aspect of the situation, though, is the
reason for obtaining such a vehicle.  Another town which
recently obtained federal funding for a military armored vehicle –
though this one was through the Department of Homeland Security –
was Concord, New Hampshire.  When the ACLU and New Hampshire
Civil Liberties Union submitted a public records request, they
discovered that groups like the Free State Project and Occupy New
Hampshire had been cited
as domestic terror threats, and their presence was listed as a
reason the police department needed an armored vehicle.

Read more.

The vehicle came as part of the infamous “1033 program,” through
which Defense gets rid of excess stuff it didn’t need in the first
place by putting it into circulation via local police departments
(it’s like a gun giveaway in reverse and with tons more firepower).

Read Reason on that.

And read about that horrifying Free State Project – in which a
bunch of libertarians are moving to New Hampshire to influence
state and local government in a small-government direction –

here. Good luck finding any violent terrorists among the
participants.

No journalist has done more to highlight the militarization of
police than former Reason staffer Radley Balko (archive here),
now at the Huffington Post (archive here).
Watch this interview about his recent book
Rise of the Warrior Cop.

• The Senate is holding its
  first ever hearing on how to regulate digital currencies today.
  It will take place before the Senate Homeland Security and
  Governmental Affairs Committee.
• Google is
  implementing software to block links to child pornography.
  Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt explained that Google as well as
  Microsoft and other corporations already work with law enforcement
  to eliminate illegal images.
• Mary Cheney, daughter of Dick Cheney, criticized her sister and
  Wyoming Senate candidate Liz Cheney for her
  opposition to gay marriage.
• Tornadoes tore across the Midwest yesterday,
  killing at least six in Illinois, injuring many more, and
  leveling towns.
• Israel has
  indefinitely detained an alleged Al Qaeda weapons specialist
  for over three years without charges or a trial.
• A gunman
  opened fire today in the building of left-wing French
  newspaper, Liberation, leaving one man seriously
  injured.

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