There are many themed iterations of a specific famous real estate baron board game, but very few of them involve the horrors of the Lovecraftian mythos descending upon South Jersey and destroying the boardwalk. Behold The Doom That Came To Atlantic City, a satire by artist Lee Moyer, designer Keith Baker, and sculptor Paul Komoda (who worked on The Thing and Cabin in the Woods).

This fun-for-all-ages destruction of reality — which has been in the works for two decades — was “inspired by [Moyer's] love of the Cthulhu Mythos and disdain for a certain board game that shall not be named.”

Even though it bears a superficial resemblance to a certain Parker Brothers land grab, The Doom That Came To Atlantic City is more about destroying the dirty jewel of the Garden State using cultists and eldritch powers. As Baker explains in the rules rundown:

You begin with a happy community filled with houses, and then you and your friends arrive. Each of you is playing one of HP Lovecraft’s Great Old Ones, and your goal is to smash houses, open gates, and destroy the world. But you each want to destroy it in your own special way. As Cthulhu, you want to make sure that pesky Shub-Niggurath doesn’t sneak in and destroy it first!

The idea of Azathoth the Blind Idiot God trashing Park Place is pretty fantastic. If you’ve always hankered to combine Yog Sothoth and seaside fun in the sun, you can pitch in at their Kickstarter campaign.

[Via Coilhouse]

Source: io9. Hi-res images and video at link.

Specific Reforms Required

The growth of the American government in the late 19th and 20th centuries is reflected in its increasing presence and finally monopolization of the monetary system. Any attempt at restoring monetary freedom must be part of a comprehensive plan to roll back government and once again confine it within the limits of the Constitution. That comprehensive plan may be divided into four sections: monetary legislation, the budget, taxation, and regulation. We shall begin with monetary reforms, and conclude with a word about international cooperation and agreement.

Monetary Legislation

Legal-Tender Laws

As we have seen, the Constitution forbids the states to make anything but gold and silver coin a tender in payment of debt, nor does it permit the federal government to make anything a legal tender. One of the most important pieces of legislation that could be enacted would be the repeal of all federal legal-tender laws. Such laws, which have the effect of forcing creditors to accept something in payment for the debts due them that they do not wish to accept, are one of the most tyrannical devices of the present monetary authorities.

Not only does the Federal Reserve have a coercive monopoly in issuing “money,” but every American is forced to accept it. Each Federal Reserve note bears the words, “This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private.” The freedom to conduct business in something else — such as gold and silver coin — cannot exist so long as the government forces everyone to accept its paper notes. Monetary freedom ends where legal-tender laws begin.

The United States had no such laws until 1862, when the Congress — in violation of the Constitution — enacted them in order to ensure the acceptance of the Lincoln greenbacks, the paper notes printed by the US Treasury during the wartime emergency. That “emergency” has now lasted for 120 years; it is time that this unconstitutional action by the Congress be repealed. Freedom of contract — and the right to have such contracts enforced, not abrogated, by the government — is one of the fundamental pillars of a free society.

CONTINUED at the Ludwig von Mises Institute. Written by Ron Paul.

Face it: Google runs your life. The search giant turned web ecosystem owns your email, calendar, and even your voicemails. Your most important data lives on Google’s servers. What you may not realize is that, despite the quality of Google’s products, someone else is doing it better—and placing all your eggs in Google’s basket isn’t necessarily the best thing. Here’s a look at alternative services you can use in place of Google’s webapps.

Photo remixed from originals by Jan Kranendonk (Shutterstock) and Alfonso de Tomas (Shutterstock).

You might want to move away from Google entirely, whether you’re tired of things like the Google Plus-ification of your search results or the fact that Google’s mining ridiculous amounts of data and selling you to advertisers, or maybe you’re just plain tired of Google creating services it doesn’t actually improve over time. You may scoff at the idea of using Bing or other less popular competitors, but they’re quite good—sometimes even better—than Google. We’ve just become too entrenched to notice.

If you want to take a serious look at the alternatives, we did some digging and a lot of experimentation to find the best alternatives to Google’s most popular services (and we alsoasked you guys to share your favorites). Most of these services are still from big companies, like Microsoft or Yahoo!, but we’ve tried to include a few services off the beaten path as well. The fact of the matter is just that the highest quality services around are going to be from the companies with the most resources. Below, we’ve listed the best Google alternatives in each category, as well as a few runners-up we think are worth checking out.

CONTINUED at Lifehacker.

I readily admit that I am a sucker for glam (or hair) metal to supplement my voluminous consumption of heavy metal. Unfortunately, the heyday of glam metal is long gone and what remains of this proud musical genre is the occasional but temporary reunion of long-since-retired band members for another last gig or tour. While the genre saw something of a revival (or nostalgia) in the past decade, whatever was accomplished is far from the good old days.

Yet this is not the impression one gets from visiting online stores such as Amazon.com. I recently did so in a quest to increase my collection of glam-metal albums on my hard drive, and what I found was a strange phenomenon: many of the great old albums sell at very high prices. Not only that, but they sell at substantially higher prices if one chooses to download the files than if one orders the physical CDs.

For instance, Warrant’s well-known album Dirty Rotten Filthy Stinking Rich (1984), with smash hits like “Heaven,” sells for $10.99 for download and $8.99 for CD. And Skid Row’s self-entitled album (1989), with a bunch of smash hits including “18 and Life” and “I Remember You,” costs $9.99 to download and $5.86 for the CD — and the CD comes with a $1.00 credit for future music downloads! These are only a couple of examples, but clicking through Amazon’s website reveals plenty more. In fact, this seems to be a pretty “normal” pricing scheme.

Of course, as Austrians we realize that the cost of production means nothing for the price at which products are offered to consumers. It is the other way around: the value to consumers decides the possible prices at which entrepreneurs can sell products — and this in turn decides what costs can be assumed in order to produce them. So maybe consumers value MP3 downloads much higher than having the physical CD delivered (even though they can instantly rip the CD). And to producers, the cost of producing the CDs is sunk and should mean little to nothing to their pricing strategies. What does matter, however, is the cost of storage, which is pretty much nothing for downloadable music.

So perhaps the pricing strategies are not as far off as they seem?

No. Comparing the prices of music produced in the 1980s and early 1990s with more recent music reveals a pricing mystery. Take the music by a modern phenomenon like Lady Gaga as an example. Physical Lady Gaga CDs sell for about as much as the same music downloadable. Sometimes the CDs are a little more costly. And a downloadable Lady Gaga album generally sells for as much as a downloadable Warrant or Skid Row album.

What is wrong with this picture? It is hardly the case that there is collector’s value to purchasing a Warrant CD (which by the way is remastered — it was originally released on vinyl!) as may be the case for vintage wine or old automobiles. (And I refuse to think that Lady Gaga is somehow better music than glam rock — that’s just a preposterous thought!)

There is, I believe, a fundamental error in making this comparison. We are treating postmarket sales of Warrant and Skid Row albums as if they are substitutes for the newly produced easy pop of Lady Gaga. But the fact is that they are hardly substitutes, even if we disregard that they are different types of music.

CONTINUED at the Ludwig von Mises Institute. Written by Per Bylund.

*Written by Rob Rimes.

Gordon Gekko affected me as a child. When I first saw the film ‘Wall Street’, I was around nine or ten-years-old. I remember my father watching it on HBO or Showtime. I certainly didn’t understand the film at that time but I do remember my first impression of Gordon Gekko and knowing, even at that young age, that the film misrepresented him and made him the villain when in reality, he was the hero.. or at least, the anti-hero. I didn’t know why he was the hero at the time, I just remember being somewhat afraid of him but also respecting him and seeing him as sort of a mentor. Granted he was a mentor to Bud Fox in the film but I saw him as a mentor to the film’s audience. Something about that character stuck with me and became a weird obsession. I didn’t know what he meant with his “greed”speech but I knew it was important and the most pivotal point in the film. It was ‘Wall Street’ and Michael Douglas as Gordon Gekko that really got me into being a huge fan of film on a more intimate level. ‘Indiana Jones’, Hammer Horror, Back to the Future and ‘Predator’ mixed with Oliver Stone’s masterpiece ‘Wall Street’ made me want to be a filmmaker.

I never became a filmmaker, unless you count videos of me chugging vodka and shooting bottle rockets from my mouth on YouTube as real cinema, but I did become a writer. Often times I would write outlines and even scripts for films that I wanted to make. At 15, I started to write a script called ‘Gekko’ which was a sequel to ‘Wall Street’ that had a time traveling twist to it. Essentially, the film ended with Gordon Gekko, as a member of the “Greed Party” defeating FDR and Herbert Hoover in the presidential race of 1932. Yeah, it was a fucking horrible idea and I think I used the script as scrap paper for another project I started writing; I think that one was about vampires and the Culper Ring during the Revolutionary War. Anyway, Gekko obviously affected me and influenced some of my creative endeavors during high school.

As I got older, I was more of a liberal shit. Still, something about Gekko continued to resonate with me. At that point in my life, I had more of a mentality like Bud Fox and his father but deep down, I knew they were wrong. I mean, Bud Fox was a snitch and a bitch in the end and with that, he lost any street cred he could’ve potentially had. As I educated myself, learned the ways of the world and experienced things, I became a libertarian. In many ways I have also become an objectivist. Having that stance and knowing what I know, I truly understand why Gordon Gekko was the hero of the story in ‘Wall Street’, contrary to what the director himself tried to convey.

CONTINUED at Original Post.

*Written by Cody Bennett.

What we now know as the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) began as an act by President Lincoln and Congress in 1862. It created the position of the commissioner of Internal Revenue and enacted an income tax to pay for the expenses of the Civil War (Revenue Act of 1862). Initial rates were around 3% for incomes exceeding $800, which allowed for the majority of the working populace to be exempt. However, by 1864, rates had risen to 5% for low-income families, and up to 10% for anyone making $10,000 or more. By the end of the war, more than 10% of Union families were paying some sort of federal income tax.

In 1872, Congress allowed the temporary wartime tax to expire and federal income taxes didn’t become an issue again until 1894. The case of Pollock v. Farmer’s Loan & Trust Co. was a five-to-four landmark decision by the Supreme Court that the Income Tax Act of 1894 was unconstitutional on the grounds that it was a direct tax. Under the Constitution at that time, direct taxes must be apportioned among the states based on population. Since the act allowed for Congress to distribute the funds without apportionment, it was deemed unconstitutional.

Early in the 20th century, there was a populist movement for tax reform that climaxed on February 3, 1913 with the ratification of the Sixteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution:

The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration.

This is one of the worst blemishes on the United States Constitution. It holds no regard for individual liberty and exists only to further the existence of the State, by whatever means necessary. It fundamentally changed the entire nation, nullifying a very important part of the Constitution. Forty-two states ratified the amendment. I can happily say that Florida didn’t even consider the issue.
The Bureau of Internal Revenue was founded once again. In the first year of its new existence, the BIR doubled its workforce, creating a whole new system of collection and organization. The newly revitalized institution was slowly becoming a standing army of tax collectors.

The first Form 1040 appeared that same year after Congress levied a 1% tax on net incomes above $6,000, and a 6%-10% progressive tax on incomes exceeding $500,000. However, five years later, the top bracket was being taxed up to 77% in order to finance our efforts in WWI. Percentages dropped sharply during the 1920’s, and remained low until the Great Depression.

In less than a century, what was basically a tax revolution seems commonplace to most Americans. Filing an annual income tax return has become an accepted must do. And you should file for a return, not because the IRS will get you, but because that money belongs to you anyway. The problem is that it shouldn’t have been taken from you in the first place.

I have a buddy who lives in Brooklyn, New York. He paid $2700 total in NY State and NYC income taxes for the fiscal year 2010. He only got $135 on his return. If he were investing $2700 into private stocks and received the same sort of return, I can bet he would fire his broker, withdraw his assets, and invest elsewhere.

The problem, though, is that you can’t fire the federal government, and you can’t opt out of paying taxes, either. The money Congress appropriates each year for its budget is your money. For too long they’ve been making mal-investments resulting in bad returns. The Chicago Climate Exchange is a good example of this. It was supposed to be a $10 trillion a year industry. Now it’s bankrupt.

In the 1950’s the BIR changed its name to the “Internal Revenue Service” to emphasize the “service aspect of their work”, even though its essential function remained the same. This is propaganda at its finest.

One of my heroes, Karl Hess, practically had his life ruined by the Internal Revenue Service in the 1960’s. He was the principle speechwriter for Barry Goldwater in the ’64 presidential election. Goldwater lost to Lyndon B. Johnson by a landslide. Shortly thereafter, Johnson had the IRS audit Hess. They charged him with tax resistance, confiscated nearly all of his property, and placed a 100% lien on all of his future earnings. You call that “service”?

When Hess questioned an IRS collector about a certain deduction that didn’t seem right, the agent told him, “it doesn’t matter if it’s right, what matters is the law.”

Feeling that the IRS would have a good sense of what is right and what is law, Hess sent them a copy of the Declaration of Independence with a letter attached telling them he would never pay taxes again. The IRS responded by revoking his ability to use American money. When he told them that he wouldn’t be able to feed himself if he couldn’t use money, they replied, “That’s not our problem.”

Hess became a heavy-duty welder, using only cash and bartering for food and supplies. He went on to become a prominent practitioner of “appropriate technology” and has been a major influence on libertarian thought over the last fifty years. He died in 1994…an anarchist.

If 10 million Americans had joined Hess in his anti-tax crusade, it would have transformed, perhaps even abolished the way we handle taxes in this country. I suggest we do exactly that.

Abolish the Internal Revenue Service.

The IRS is the single-most authoritarian institution in the country. In 1998, under Clinton’s watch, the Taxpayer Bill of Rights III was passed. It’s hardly a step toward more liberty, though. This law shifts the “burden of proof” from the taxpayer to the IRS. This means the IRS can legally seize assets and enforce liens without obtaining judgment in court. It allows for those in power to silence their political enemies by physical coercion. THIS IS TYRANNY.

Economist Murray Rothbard defines a State as two things: a) an entity that acquires its revenue from the general population by physical coercion, and b) an entity who has a monopoly on the provisions for defense and protection.
The IRS is the physical arm of the state—the hand in your pocket—that takes what does not belong to it, and turns it over to congress for appropriation without apportionment among the many states. And if you don’t allow their hands in your pockets, they’ll be around your neck.

We are at a critical point in history. Our children and grandchildren will ask us, decades from now, where we were and what we did. Will we be the silent observers? Or will we lead a charge for independence? Will we be able to tell them stories of how we actually dismantled the system, and that we did it without throwing bricks or turning over police vehicles, that we killed the beast from within, using its weaknesses against it, that the revolution was not a lie?

*Taken from the Ludwig von Mises Institute. Written by Hans-Hermann Hoppe.

The previous chapters have demonstrated that neither an economic nor a moral case for socialism can be made. Socialism is economically and morally inferior to capitalism. The last chapter examined why socialism is nonetheless a viable social system, and analyzed the socio-psychological characteristics of the state — the institution embodying socialism. Its existence, stability, and growth rest on aggression and on public support of this aggression which the state manages to effect.

This it does, for one thing, through a policy of popular discrimination — a policy, that is, of bribing some people into tolerating and supporting the continual exploitation of others by granting them favors — and secondly, through a policy of popular participation in the making of policy, i.e., by corrupting the public and persuading it to play the game of aggression by giving prospective power wielders the consoling opportunity to enact their particular exploitative schemes at one of the subsequent policy changes.

CONTINUED..

Capitalism: it is a word that for some means freedom, prosperity and the answer to all of our economic woes. To others, probably most in the media and in the Capital Beltway, it is a dirty word. See, capitalism is one of the most misunderstood words in the English language. We can blame sloppy cuntpickles like Michael Moore and Karl Marx for pimping their bullshit view of it to the feeble masses. Granted, it is also those feeble masses that grasp onto that skewed misrepresentation of capitalism without fact checking and looking into it for themselves. People, especially liberals and college aged hipster-hippie hybrids, view capitalism as the supreme force of oppression in the world.

Via TheSwash.com