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Harry Browne's Journal This Journal
provides random thoughts on news items and other issues.
There won't be new postings every day, but most weeks there should be one
to four new entries.
This isn't an interactive blog where you can post your thoughts. However, you can
email me — and if your
email seems to be of general interest, I might respond in this Journal. I can't provide a personal answer,
because I don't
have the time to do many things I'd like to do. Steroids For example, when the head of the baseball players' union proposed a
testing program in which a player would be banished The obvious answer, of course, was: "Sir, we are not talking about my
children or your children. We're talking about grown men who are responsible
for their own lives. If you want to transform them into children, that's
your business. But it isn't mine." And of course no one mentioned the tremendous evil that the Drug War has
inflicted upon society. Why anyone would want to extend that evil to
professional sports is beyond me. If you want a perfect example of how far Congress has strayed from the
Constitution of the United States, you need only look at the ridiculous
example of Congressmen threatening to pass laws governing the rules of
professional sports. Love letter:
I recently the following email: I appreciate
your columns. But your genius stops short from this obvious question: Don’t
the Israelis’ fellow Jews in America run the print and electronic media
here, and thus — based on their ethnic and racial interests — censor the
question of why the U.S. government never criticizes Israel, but always
attacks Israel’s enemies? On this obvious
point of Jewish dominance (and destruction) of the U.S., you yourself are
just as hypocritical as the media you criticize — and evidently more
cowardly. What a "libertarian"! You are very
compromised morally, Harry. And totally ineffective — if you won’t even name
the enemy of liberty and peace.
If you'll provide some of what you consider evidence that the American media
are owned by Jewish interests, or that there is "Jewish dominance (and
destruction) of the U.S.," I'll be glad to respond. But since I know of no
such evidence, there's no way I can comment on it now.
Wouldn't your time be better spent trying to reduce government to its
absolute minimum — so that no one could use it to dominate America?
Apology #27:
Once again I must apologize for a
long lapse in entries in this Journal. I have been traveling quite a bit
lately, and I don’t write very well when I’m on the road. Fortunately, I
will be home for most of the next month or two. The most important exception
to that will be a vacation(!) June 4-11. It will be my first non-working
vacation in several years, and Pamela and I are looking forward to it. How government works:
In 2002-2003, the Army’s National Ground Intelligence Center (NGIC) told the
Bush administration that aluminum tubes the Iraqis were using were suitable
only for nuclear weapons. However, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) had published a
report in 1996 showing that the tubes were the type used for rocket-motor
cases — not for nuclear weapons — and the U.S. Department of Energy
published a similar report in 2001. The NGIC experts simply didn’t bother to
look for any available evidence; they just pronounced that the tubes were
proof that Iraq was developing nuclear weapons. If you’re thinking that the NGIC experts have probably been fired by now,
think again. They received Pentagon job performance awards for 2002, 2003,
and 2004. The whole story is in
today’s Washington Post. Work for the government, mess up an investigation, cause the deaths of
thousands of people, get a performance award. You got a problem with that? Who government programs
A good example comes to us from Arizona, where a state law allows a
special Is making such a money transfer proof that you're a criminal? No, of course not. And, according to a state spokeswoman, if you're
innocent you can get your own money
back
Is this a great country — or what?
But you might want to keep this in mind when you think the government can do
something you want. At worst, you just might wind up in jail — or, at best,
begging to get your own money back.
Couldn't happen to you?
Read the article about the way the Arizona law has been administered.
All-purpose agitation:
Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty (U.S. government agencies) have
published an aerial photo showing an actual Iranian nuclear facility. As it
happens, however, the same photo was used to show that North Korea had a
nuclear facility. And, as though that weren't embarrassing enough, the file
name on the photo was
Brad Friedman discovered this example of the reliability of information you
get from the U.S. government, and
he published his
findings on his blog.
The interesting aspect of all this is very simple: Government officials
misled us about Iraq, they publish questionable photos, they categorically
deny that U.S. military torture is authorized by the government and say they
would never send prisoners to other countries to be tortured, only to be
refuted by new evidence coming to light. And yet those who are champing at
the bit to go after Iran, Syria, or other countries will cite facts about
the "enemy" that justify aggressive action — "facts" that come from the same
source, the U.S. government, that has been proven wrong so many times.
The next time someone recites all the dangers from Iran, North Korea, Syria,
or some other presumed enemy, just remember where all the information about
that country has come from.
Irregular entries
In addition to all that, I'm involved in several deals with ex-finance
ministers from African nations, getting ready to split up enormous profits
in hidden government funds. Any day now.
I don't want to abandon this Journal. It gives me a chance to unload my
thoughts without putting each of them into a formal article. But the writing
probably will continue to come in large spurts — such as with the number of
entries today.
I hope you'll be patient with me.
• It would hurt the economy because it would be an
incentive for people not to buy new products, but to buy used items instead (garage
sales etc.) to avoid the huge tax.
• Immediate criminal element in all retailing. Can you
say "black markets"?!
• Endless companies lobbying for their product to be
tax exempt or at a reduced tax because it is environmentally friendly or is
produced by a minority owned company, etc. In short, we would end up with a
complicated sales tax code similar to the income tax mess.
• We might end up having to carry "tax I.D. cards" because sooner
or later the politicians would decide that poor people should pay at a lower
rate and maybe rich people would pay at a higher rate.
• Government regulations would be overwhelming. The
government would be prying into inventory books, as well as tracking all
goods to make sure the tax is paid. TVs and other high dollar items might
have to include microchips to track them to make sure the tax gets paid.
The more you think about it the more problems you can imagine, and the
bottom line is that we will still have to pay too much, special interests
will still get exemptions, and government will still be collecting the bulk
of our earnings to make war and force expensive political schemes on us.
Amen, Brother Bryan.
I think that, to him, the word freedom means, among other things:
• The ability to go anywhere you want in the world —
all expenses paid — with an enormous security guard, worth tens of millions
of dollars per year;
• The opportunity to speak before cheering crowds that
include not a single dissenter; and
• The resources to send troops into a foreign country,
devastate it, and then declare it liberated.
Unfortunately, for the rest of us peons the "freedom" George Bush is
proclaiming includes much more mundane things, such as:
No wonder George Bush smirks and we cringe.
Fair & balanced bashing
Watching it, the
The show glorifies the preemptive attack made by Israel in bombing an Iraqi
nuclear reactor in 1981 (Iraq denied that the reactor was used for
bomb-making, but doubting Israel's assertions is like doubting that George
Bush is a good Christian), and cheers on the idea that either Israel or the
U.S. will attack the Iranian nuclear facilities. One expert said there's a
50% to 70% chance the U.S. will attack Iran — pointing out that it can be
done with air strikes, so no U.S. troops need to be diverted from Iraq. How many times have we heard it said that "Democracies don’t make war"?
But in the past 3˝ years the "democratic" U.S. has made war against two
countries and is gearing up for a third. And Americans wonder why someone would want to attack us.
If you don't want to sit through it, you can get a sense of it by reading
a Fox article.
Speaking of Iran However, the treaty also calls for the five countries who had nuclear
weapons in 1970 — the U.S., Britain, France, Russia, and China — to begin
reducing their stockpiles and eventually eliminate them entirely. To the
best of my knowledge, not one of the five countries has intentionally
destroyed a single nuclear weapon. So are we going to have to attack
Britain, France, Russia, China, and the United States as well? Neither Pakistan, India, nor Israel signed the pact, and each of them
developed nuclear weapons. But the U.S. government is only harassing Iran
who, by the terms of the treaty, has allowed international inspectors into
its country to see what it’s doing. And so far, the inspectors have found
nothing. Since the United States is not only dishonoring the treaty by not
reducing its weapons, but in fact has been developing new nuclear weapons,
non-nuclear nations are condemning the U.S. for violating the treaty while
trying to impose it upon other nations. George Bush has responded to these condemnations by saying that — you
guessed it — 9/11 changed everything. If we take his words literally, he’s
saying that the U.S. can develop new nuclear weapons and use them to bomb
terrorists. But that would certainly mean the murder of enormous numbers of
innocent civilians. No one has answered — or until now, even asked — the obvious question:
Why is it that the United States can have a nuclear arsenal far larger than
that of every other country in the world combined, but that Iran can’t have
even a single nuclear bomb — especially when Israel, Pakistan, and India
have nuclear weapons?
Speaking of TV news
Boy, does that seem like a fantasy today!
As an example of how being the rulers of the world has turned Americans into
frightened, whimpering, simpering, sniveling scaredy-cats, consider
this story from Missoula, Montana. A 12-year old boy found a broken BB
gun on the way to school. The gun's handle contained a pipe for smoking
drugs. He put the gun in his backpack and took it to school with him. When
the authorities became aware of this, the boy was expelled from school for
one year, ordered to undergo regular urine testing, and required to
attend anger management classes!
Not only that, because of the the federal Gun-Free Schools Act, he is
forbidden for one year from attending any government school in America. (I
didn't say it was all bad.) I remember the politicians' assuring us in the
1960s that the newly enacted federal aid to education law would never mean
federal control of education. But any school district that doesn't respect
the 12-month expulsion provision will lose its federal funding.
(I also remember that the original Medicare bill said nothing in the bill
should be construed to affect the way a doctor or hospital treats a
patient.)
The Missoula story isn't the only recent example of the way America has
become an armed state with unarmed citizens. In
Clovis, New Mexico,
the police were called, snipers were placed on school rooftops, nearby
streets were closed, and a school was in panic.
Why? Because an eighth-grade student brought a strange package, 30 inches
long, to school.
It turned out to be a super-duper-sized burrito — created as part of a
school project.
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