How Anti-Tobacco Activists Are Very Likely Killing People

by Ronald Bailey.  Last week, my colleague Jacob Sullum questioned a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine purporting to show that vaping is more dangerous than smoking actual cigarettes. The reason? Because vaping at high voltage produces high levels of the carcinogen formaldehyde. The New England Journal of Medicine even   ... MORE

Justice Department Working On Car-Tracking Database

To combat drug trafficking, of course.     The Justice Department has acknowledged constructing a database to track the movements of millions of vehicles across the U.S. in real time. The program, whose existence was first reported by The Wall Street Journal, is primarily overseen by the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) to combat    ... MORE

VIDEO: John Stossel - Privatize Everything

Andrew Napolitano: Shooting Itself In The Foot

Bumbling idiots at work.  Ali Saleh al-Marri is a convicted conspirator who entered the United States before 9/11 in order to create a dreaded sleeper cell here that might someday launch an attack on Americans similar to what we witnessed earlier this month in Paris. When the feds woke from their slumber on 9/11, they wisely began to search   ... MORE

Federal Bill Would Make Americans More Defenseless

by Dan Cannon.  Making self protection a felony.  Democratic members of Congress apparently aren’t going to be satisfied until American citizens are completely and utterly defenseless. Representative Mike Honda (D-CA) has introduced a bill for consideration of the new Congress which would prohibit the ownership of certain types of body armor for      ... MORE

VIDEO: Ayn Rand On The Pursuit Of Happiness

Lew Rockwell: The Libertarian Principle Of Secession

Break it up!     For a century and a half, the idea of secession has been systematically demonized among the American public. The government schools spin fairy tales about the “indivisible Union” and the wise statesmen who fought to preserve it. Decentralization is portrayed as unsophisticated and backward, while nationalism and      ... MORE

DUI Checkpoints Could Be A Thing Of The Past In N.D.

by Nicole Johnson.    If only the Fourth Amendment protected us from warrantless searches. DUI checkpoints in North Dakota could soon be a thing of the past. Sobriety checkpoints are used in North Dakota by police to deter drunk driving. But, lawmakers in Bismarck are talking about getting rid of them, saying there needs to be a reason to     ... MORE

10 Ways Cops Enriched Themselves From The Drug Trade

by Aaron Cantu.     The drug trade is a great place to make tons of money fast. In 2003, the UN estimated the total worth of the global drug trade at $320 billion, a figure that has certainly grown in the last 12 years. So it’s not surprising that some police officers, who interact frequently with the narco-world, decide to go crooked. But what makes   ... MORE

Steven Pinker: Why Free Speech Is Fundamental

Ideas matter.      More than two centuries after freedom of speech was enshrined in the First Amendment to the Constitution, that right is very much in the news. Campus speech codes, disinvited commencement speakers, jailed performance artists, exiled leakers, a blogger condemned to a thousand lashes by one of our closest allies, and the      ... MORE

VIDEO: Harry Browne's Social Security Solution

Greg Gutfeld: New E-Cig Study Goes Up In Smoke

E-Cig attack vaporizes.    The New England Journal of Medicine ran a letter linking e-cigs to cancer and the panicky media gobbled it up like a pot brownie. But how sturdy is this research? What might happen if you tapped lightly on their findings? Yes, under closer scrutiny, this blockbuster collapsed faster than Michael Moore in a spin class. According to  ... MORE

Thorin Klosowski: Carl Sagan's Best Productivity Tricks

How to seek out the truth.   Carl Sagan is a well known astronomer, cosmologist, author, and most obviously, science communicator and host of the show Cosmos. His views on science and general living are simultaneously inspirational and galvanizing. Let's take a look at just a few of his ideas that are useful for all of us. Sagan was first and       ... MORE

VIDEO: Glorious Death of America's Worst School System

Masked SWAT Team Raids Poker Game, Terrorizes Players

by Tom Jackman.        Militarized cops seek to protect society from gamblers. On a quiet weeknight among the stately manors of Great Falls, ten men sat around a table in the basement of a private home last November playing high stakes poker. Suddenly, masked and heavily armed SWAT team officers from the Fairfax County Police Department   ... MORE

John Stossel - Owning Ideas

Thinking about copyrights.   For most of history, people suffered in miserable poverty. Then, in a few hundred years, some new ideas made life hugely better for billions of us — things like running water, the printing press, the steam engine, electricity, the Internet. We want people to keep coming up with new and better ideas. But there's a problem:   ... MORE

John W. Whitehead: Handcuffs, Leg Shackles and Tasers: The New Face of Punishment in the Public Schools

The police state at school. Roughly 1500 kids are tied up or locked down every day by school officials in the United States. At least 500 students are locked up in some form of solitary confinement every day, whether it be a padded room, a closet or a duffel bag. In many cases, parents are rarely notified when such methods are used. On any  ... MORE

David Martosko: Obamacare Program Costs Taxpayers $50,000 For Every American Who Gets Health Insurance

So says the Congressional Budget Office.   It will cost the federal government – taxpayers, that is – $50,000 for every person who gets health insurance under the Obamacare law, the Congressional Budget Office revealed on Monday. The number comes from figures buried in a 15-page section of the nonpartisan organization's new ten-year budget   ... MORE

VIDEO: FOX NEWS - Government Spying On Our Cars

Obama's Massive Land Grab Has Alaska Furious

by Michael Bastasch.  'We will fight back' President Obama announced Sunday that his administration plans to lock up the oil-rich 1.5 million acre Arctic National Wildlife Refuge coastal plain and offshore areas in Alaska from oil and gas exploration. Obama is asking Congress to designate 12 million acres of ANWR as a “wilderness” to keep it off-limits to   ... MORE

Home Appliances Could Soon Be Controlled By Government

by Daniel Barker.        Increasingly, our freedom and autonomy are threatened by those who seek to monitor and control every aspect of our daily lives. George Orwell’s “Big Brother” from the novel 1984 is a pale threat in comparison to the dystopian reality our leaders which have created for us since that book was published more than six      ... MORE

VIDEO: Who's Afraid Of The NSA?

ND Legislator Calls For End Of Sobriety Checkpoints

by Karee Magee.  Warrantless searches are an inefficient infringement. A bill that would eliminate sobriety checkpoints in North Dakota will appear before the Judiciary Committee Monday. House Bill 1084 says law enforcement would need reasonable suspicion before halting a vehicle. Sponsor, Rep. Rick Becker, R-Bismarck, said the bill questions    ... MORE

Thomas Sowell: Random Thoughts On The Passing Scene

The observations of a genius.     Who says President Obama doesn't promote bipartisanship? His complicity in Iran's moving toward nuclear bombs has alarmed some top Senate Democrats enough to get them to join Republicans in opposition to the Obama administration's potentially suicidal foreign policy. Before the current measles outbreak,     ... MORE

NH Bill Would Promote Jury Nullification Defense

The power to stand up to tyranny.    A bill in the New Hampshire State House would make it illegal for a judge to stop a defendant from telling the jurors about their ability to nullify unjust or immoral laws. House Bill 246 (HB246) would make it “an act of maladministration for a judge to deny or limit the right of the accused to inform the    ... MORE

Police Union: Don't Mess With No-Knock Warrants

by Bernard Watson. Carrie Mills is a retired Atlanta Police officer with 30 years on the job - primarily in APD's drug unit. Mills is now a union rep for the International Brotherhood of Police Officers. She considers herself an expert on search warrants, particularly no knock warrants, which allows officers to enter a structure without knocking first. Mills says  ... MORE

VIDEO: John Stossel - Convert To Reason

Ted Cruz Details Path To Victory With "Miracle Of America"

Let freedom ring.    In an exclusive interview with Breitbart News backstage at the Iowa Freedom Summit, potential 2016 GOP presidential candidate Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) detailed the pathway to victory for Republicans in 2016—and he explained a new phrase he started using in his speech minutes earlier. Cruz introduced a new major theme,   ... MORE

Walter E Williams: Defense Against Demagogues

Economic ignorance used as a political tool. When gasoline sold at record prices, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., said, "I think it's time to say to these people, 'Stop ripping off the American people.'" When the average price of regular gas was close to $4 a gallon, Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., called for Congress to look into breaking up giant oil companies. ... MORE

VIDEO: Utah Bill Would Turn Off Water To NSA Data Center


Standing up to unconstitutional federal surveillance.

End Obamacare And People Could Die -- That’s Okay

by Michael R. Strain.   We make such trade-offs all of the time. Say conservatives have their way with Obamacare, and the Supreme Court deals it a death blow or a Republican president repeals it in 2017. Some people who got health insurance as a result of the Affordable Care Act may lose it. In which case, liberals like to say, some of      ... MORE

Jeffrey Rogers Hummel: How The Fed Got Huge

Financial crisis changed the nature of central banking. Before he became chair of the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke agreed with the free market economist Milton Friedman that central bank policy played a key role in making the Great Depression the most severe in U.S. history. But the two parted ways on the reason why. And that          ... MORE

America's Frightening "Policing For Profit" Nightmare

by Roger Pilon.     In a move to check certain abuses inherent in the nation’s asset forfeiture law, Attorney General Eric Holder announced last Friday that the Justice Department would limit its practice of “adopting” state and local law-enforcement seizures of property for subsequent forfeiture to the government. Under the practice, to circumvent ... MORE

Libertarians: Looking For Results Or Self-Congratulation?

by Sheldon Richman.     When I was researching my recent article on Nathaniel Branden, who died last month, I came across an audio file of a talk Branden gave at the 1979 Libertarian Party national convention in Los Angeles. I was at the convention, but I don't remember attending the talk. I might have been busy with other things; on the other hand, I    ... MORE

VIDEO: Economic Liberty In South Korea

Peter Suderman: Meet The New Mitt, Same As The Old Mitt

An alternative to integrity.     Mother Jones’ David Corn has found a new "progressive champion" in a somewhat surprising candidate: Mitt Romney. Corn is not exactly a committed Romney booster: He helped tank Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential ambitions by publishing Romney’s infamous 47 percent remarks, in what was probably the biggest  ... MORE

Rapper Faces Long Prison Stretch Over Unpopular Speech

by Emma Lacey-Bordeaux.      If only there was a First Amendment. Song lyrics that glorify violence are hardly uncommon. But a prosecutor in California says one rapper's violent lyrics go beyond creative license to conspiracy. San Diego-based rapper Tiny Doo has already spent eight months in prison, and faces 25 years to life in prison if convicted ... MORE

VIDEO: Ending The Classroom Factory Model


How technology will personalize education. 

Dondi Tiples: Why Edward Snowden Won’t Use iPhones

Beware of Apple secret spyware.       NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden is adamant about not coming within 10 feet of an iPhone because he claims Apple has installed some nasty secret spyware on their products. Apple may be the world’s leader in smart phones, but NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden is steering clear of the popular  ... MORE

Richard Pollock: IRS Has Active Contract For MILLIONS With The Same Bunch Of Nitwits That Botched Healthcare.gov

More prudence with tax dollars.       Seven months after federal officials fired CGI Federal for its botched work on Obamacare website Healthcare.gov, the IRS awarded the same company a $4.5 million IT contract for its new Obamacare tax program. CGI is a $10.5 billion Montreal-based company that has forever been etched into     ... MORE