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1 month ago | 
libertarianinstitute.org | John Weeks
This is reprinted from Jim Bovard's blog and expands on a post originally from 2023. Today is the 163th anniversary of the battle of Front Royal, Virginia (the town near where I was raised). On May 23, 1862, almost all the Yankee soldiers in Front Royal were captured,...
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1 month ago | 
libertarianinstitute.org | John Weeks
There is a charming scene in the film Clerks (1994) in which the sidekick character Randall discusses his misgivings about the film Return of the Jedi (1983) with the protagonist Dante. Randall is upset that the Rebel Alliance destroyed the Empire’s new military space station (the Death Star) while it was under construction, thereby slaughtering tens of thousands of innocent independent contractors.
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1 month ago | 
libertarianinstitute.org | John Weeks
On April 20, President Donald Trump dropped another executive order: Improving Education Outcomes by Empowering Parents, States, and Communities has been received by both supporters and critics as aiming at the complete elimination of the U.S. Department of Education (DOE). Now, look, if you love your children (which of course you do), then the best thing you can do is take executive control of their education. You could directly educate them. You could hire tutors.
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2 months ago | 
libertarianinstitute.org | John Weeks
Zohran Mamdani is running for Mayor of New York City to “lower the cost of living for working class New Yorkers,” according to his campaign website. He has promised to freeze the cost of rent “stabilized” apartments, put the “worst landlords” out of business, create faster and fare “free” bus service, provide “no cost” childcare, increase the city’s minimum wage to $30 per hour, and build 200,000 units of “affordable” housing.
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Mar 27, 2025 | 
libertarianinstitute.org | John Weeks
American libertarians, regardless of their preferred faction, understand the state is a monster. We view the state the way Karl Marx viewed capitalism (demonic) or William Lloyd Garrison viewed slavery (cannibalistic). Sadly, American libertarians live under the most powerful state in recorded history. The social order is not aligned with our values, so we advocate where we can. Lower taxes over here, less war over there, a little more liberty around the way.
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Mar 6, 2025 | 
libertarianinstitute.org | John Weeks
Thousands of scholars have taken on the central geopolitical question: Is the United States of America an empire? It’s a fierce debate that has unfolded over decades, places the moral status of our society at stake, and has four prevalent positions:1. Libertarian Institute Director Scott Horton says yes, it is an empire and that’s evil. 2. Neoconservative policy advisor William Kristol says no way, and the U.S. government is righteous and benevolent. 3.
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Feb 26, 2025 | 
libertarianinstitute.org | John Weeks
The central character Satan in John Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost has been interpreted as closely aligned with the complexities of the human faculty of reason. The link between Satan and rational cognition was demonstrated in Lucifer and Prometheus, by R.J. Zwi Werblowsky. Lucifer (Satan’s pre-rebellion “dead name”) carries the meanings of morning star, brightness, and light-bringing.
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Feb 18, 2025 | 
imd.org | John Weeks |Francesca Mereu
a) A stock-picking strategy of looking for loss-making companies that are undervalued by the market. b) The tendency to empathize more with people who are suffering misfortune. c) The tendency to be affected more strongly by negative events than positive ones. Answer: (c). Negativity bias is a strong human tendency. Typically, it takes four positive experiences to equal the impact we feel from a single negative one.
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Jan 27, 2025 | 
libertarianinstitute.org | John Weeks
The November 2023 issue of Texas Monthly contains an article that deploys the archetypes of our great anti-capitalist, government-supremacist, domestic imperialist passion play so deftly it could be a Hollywood movie: “Black-Owned Land Is Under Siege in the Brazos Valley.”A siege is an act of war. Who is waging war on black Texans and how are they doing it?
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Jan 15, 2025 | 
libertarianinstitute.org | John Weeks
Washington DC is an imperial city. It masks as Athenian democracy housed within Roman republicanism and underpinned by Judeo-Christian values. But behind the mask is a cold monster: the “interagency.” And the monster is committed to global domination. The imperial agenda has met with great resistance, most stunningly in Ukraine, where Russia has been degrading Washington’s proxy forces with extreme lethality.
