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The Superfluous Man
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John Markley's blog on current politics and political philosophy, from a libertarian perspective. Has commentary on economics, war and peace, the nanny state, law enforcement, and the nature of statism.
Recent Posts Tagged With 'law enforcement'
The soft bigotry of low expectations
Perusing Hit and Run, I encountered this post about some police caught on video who, having stormed a house during a drug raid, decided to settle in and spent several hours playing a bowling game on the resident's Nintendo Wii.My instinctive reaction...
Race and police misconduct
I’ve been following the case of the arrest of Henry Louis Gates with some interest. (Here's a quick bit of background, in case you've spent the last few weeks living in a sensory deprivation tank or on some sort of eremitic desert religious retrea...
The Democratic Party I grew up with
I feel sorry for whoever owns the company that makes those “Dissent is Patriotic” bumper stickers. Their stock price must be in the toilet by now.I have thought for years that the bombing of the Oklahoma City Bombing was the best thing that ever...
Motorhome Diaries crew arrested in Mississippi
Learned via Facebook: The Motorhome Diaries crew- Jason Talley, Pete Eyre, and Adam Mueller- were arrested in Jones County, Mississippi for filming a police officer who had stopped them. Talley was apparently choked and pepper sprayed. Eyre was ch...
Today Bureaucrash, tomorrow the world!
My apologies for my absence from this site. I haven't been idle, however- I'm now one of the regular bloggers on Bureaucrash. It's given me a chance to do some "entry-level" writing on libertarianism, which I haven't really done since college. I'l...
Lawless legislation
The dread scourge of unlicensed Christmas desserts
I guess there were no thermobaric bombs available
From Radley Balko comes the news that the Sheriff’s Department of Richland County, South Carolina, now has an armored personnel carrier with a .50 caliber machine gun. Is there no end to this insanity? Did the Sheriff just sit down one day an...
Lapdog of government
There’s something I’d like to add about the subject of my recent Strike the Root article about Mothers Against Drunk Driving and the police. (Short version: MADD is collaborating with law enforcement to tell teenagers their friends have been kil...
New Strike the Root article
I've got a new article up at Strike the Root. Have a look. ...
Please to explain...
I was reading about the case of Amelia S., a 17-year old girl from Indiana with clinical depression who fled National Guard boot camp without authorization and returned home. The Guard tried to force her back to training, in defiance of rules regard...
The dread menace of elderly altruists, thwarted at last!
From Rad Geek comes the bizarre story of an elderly man in Florida who was arrested and fined $2,000 for offering a woman who said she needed help getting home- who was actually an undercover agent of the Miami-Dade County’s Consumer Services Depa...
A quick vocabulary lesson
Is a little respect for the English language too much to ask from one of the country’s most prestigious newspapers? The answer, of course, is yes. I found this in today’s online Wall Street Journal: When Steven Barber turned in a short story t...
Various immigration thoughts
At Hit and Run, Kerry Howley posted a quote from Paul Samuelson that got me thinking. Samuelson said:Finally, let's discuss poverty. Everyone's against it, but hardly anyone admits that most of the increase in the past 15 years reflects immigration ...
And I would have gotten away with it if it weren’t for your meddling right to a trial!
Radley Balko never fails to disturb. He links to a story at Tennesseean.com, which informs us:Defense attorneys would be banned from advertising their expertise with drunken driving cases under a bill advancing in the Senate.Sen. Rosalind Kurita, a C...
THIS is what people finally get outraged over?
This post is angrier and more profane than unusual. The loveably wacky John Markley who writes about hallucinatory spiders and defending a libertarian society from an invasion of malevolent scorpion men is on break for the night.A few days ago, the...
Injustice and its non-celebrity victims
Over at Hit and Run, Michael Moynihan has a post about Mumia Abu-Jamal that got me thinking. Why did Mumia Abu-Jamal become such a prominent cause, as opposed to any of the myriad other people imprisoned in this country, many under circumstances far...
New article
Now that I’m done alienating the cosmopolitan libertarians by accusing them of caring more about PC respectability than the carnage wrought by the warfare state, I can move on to dismaying the paleolibertarians by accusing immigration opponents of ...
Rapists and their enablers
Found this via Hit and Run. In a summary of a study of the economics of prostitution in Chicago, we learn:What's particularly interesting is the authors' section on bargaining and the law. They estimate that roughly 3 percent of all tricks performed...
