Individual Sovereignty

The movie Atlas Shrugged Part 1 is ideology.

It isn’t art. It isn’t cinema. It isn’t epic saga. It’s ideology.

Actually, it's Edgar's creator who wants your money.

A libertarian animator named Tomasz Kaye needs your voluntary donations so he can finish his short film of freedom in time for the 2012 Elections.

The video is Edgar the Exploiter, described as "An animation showing the hidden costs of government intervention."

Libertarians need to keep pounding on the fact that the Drug War is a government instituted race war.

Criminalizing drugs has always been a means of targeting and controlling racial, ethnic, and social minorities.

Libertarian News Examiner reader Jason Gonella reported, "There is a story circulating about a restaurant that refuses to serve anyone employed by the TSA. That's a good start."

Discrimination on the basis of race, religion, gender, and all the rest is disgusting but totally free choice.

And it's a matter of free choice for people – not "government" but people – to fight against it.

Quaint old ideas like freedom of assembly, freedom of association, freedom of speech and the right to peacefully petition government for redress of grievances used to be respected, but now apparently they're legal only in Wisconsin and only if you're a union member.

Among the many lessons that Bradley Manning has taught us (courage, honesty, integrity, commitment to truth and decency among other concepts cherished by libertarians) there is one other that every libertarian should take to heart.

REAL ID, of course, is the government's attempt to forcibly turn every state driver's license into a de facto internal passport, complete with electronic and biometric identifiers.

In "A Nation of Cringing Wretches. . .." Eric Peters wrote, "Soon, however, we may all be required to submit not merely to being fingerprinted – but perhaps also be forced to allow our retinas to be scanned, possibly our DNA itself catalogued.

He explained, "The federal Real ID Act is why" and then offered, "the Real ID Act is very real indeed."

LNE: Will the bureaucrats ever abandon their spy dreams?

DEAN: I'm not thinking they will. Not in the near future because the idea behind this is to be able to control populations from the seat of information and identity driven data. Identity data is becoming a secondary form of fiat currency. The computing age has made information byproducts abundant. The intent is to be able to manage segments of the population's access to resources, narrowing your undesirables to a market behavior or a demographic. I've discovered in my travels that all national identity systems have this trait in common. This is why security-based national identity systems and the constant demand for identity are red flags for totalitarian states, which historically lean towards internment or genocides of their own citizens. You can't sleep on this one.

Bureaucrats at every level of government are obsessed with our identities and stalk us like paparazzi.

But Sheila Dean has been stalking the stalkers since 2008 at BeatTheChip ("devoted to preserving US citizens from the progress of Real ID legislations") and at the 5-11 Campaign ("a grassroots effort against national identification and data surveillance").

"On January 11, 2011," veteran libertarian rights activist Julian Heicklen announced to his Tyranny Fighters email list, "I was notified by summons that I have been criminally charged with jury tampering."

"Can Jury Nullification End The War On Drugs?" – The Atlantic

When prospective jurors in Missoula, Montana, refused to be seated in a marijuana possession case the New York Times reported, "Marijuana fans are calling it the Mutiny in Montana."

If you thought the airport Opt Out Day demonstrations on the day before Thanksgiving was a one-shot showdown against abusive TSA tactics you thought wrong.

The We Won't Fly team of Jim Babb and George Donnelly has launched a follow-up protest – placing giant billboards outside America's airports.

"WikiLeaks presents a clear and present danger to the national security of the United States." – New York Republican Peter King, after Wikileaks.org released a large batch of classified documents --Dallas Morning News).

So who is threatened by the release of state secrets?

Leaking secrets only hurts lying, cheating, sneaking, backstabbing, double-dealing, two-timing hypocrites.

Apparently not a glimmer of individual freedom and self-responsibility exists within the gray matter of at least three of the big government-worshipping political correctness-idolizing denizens of ABC TV's morning gabfest fare, "The View."

Whoopi Goldberg, Joy Behar and Elisabeth Hasselbeck accused We Won't Fly founders Jim Babb and George Donnelly - by name - of planning "an act of terrorism" with their peaceful January 24 anti-TSA National Opt Out Day and added that their names should be placed on a watch list.

All this because Babb and Donnelly dared to question authority.

Sometimes when you see the word "libertarian" in print you instinctively know it doesn't mean the same thing to you that it may mean to others.

To members of the modern American freedom movement, intellectually fed by the likes of Rand, Rothbard, Mises and multiple like-minded minds, libertarian means individualism, property rights, free markets, and the right of sovereign human beings to do as they choose short of initiating force, intimidation, or fraud against others.

OpenMarket.org, "the blog of the Competitive Enterprise Institute," has been telling the tale of five friends in South Carolina who were arrested for getting together once a week to play a friendly game of Texas Hold ‘Em in the privacy of a private home.

Still awaiting their fate at the hands of the state since they were busted in 2006, the whole issue seems to hang on whether Texas Hold ‘Em is a game of chance or a game of skill.