This is an informational graphic from Intel showing some of the things that happen in a single minute of internet time. I was honestly surprised that some figures were as low as they were. Only 20 identities stolen? Those aren’t the Nigerian scammers I know! Not included on the list: 80,000 moms forward spam emails, 30 dudes sign into Chatroulette with the intention of showing their dongs, my roommate maxes out our bandwidth downloading porn and brings my internet connection to a crawl, enough Viagra to pop a 1,000-year boner is purchased, and like five million people read Geekologie. “Five-million, really?” You heard me, five-million — like a five with two zeros.

What Happens in an Internet Minute? [intel]

Thanks to Patty, who heard every four minutes on the internet a man signs up for a dating website as a woman with the sole purpose of seducing himself through his regular profile. Wow, that…sounds strangely erotic.

Source: Geekologie.

*Written by Rob Rimes.

Today is a great day for liberty. As I write this it is January 18^th, 2012 and the Internet is ablaze with anger towards SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (Protect IP Act). Not only was The Swash down in protest of these dastardly bills but Internet giants Wikipedia and Reddit were down as well. Shit, even Google participated in this blackout with a unique graphic on their page that lead to information about these two horrible laws and what you can do to fight them.

I was more than ecstatic today when I signed into my Facebook account and was overwhelmed by all the people who blacked out their own photos and had status updates and links protesting SOPA and PIPA plastered all over the home page. The impact of this protest is literally reaching further than any other online protest I’ve ever witnessed or been a part of. In fact, in just a few short hours, the tide has turned and the pimps pushing this law are now starting to run like the two-faced pandering bastards they are. I guess when you shine a little light the cockroaches scatter.

One of my favorite punching bags, Marco Rubio – the Republican senator form my home state of Florida, was a co-sponsor on one of these evil bills but he has now come out against it. This is because Rubio is a dickbag, a panderer and a wolf in Tea Party clothing. This “noble” act doesn’t excuse the fact that he co-sponsored PIPA and was also a champion for the insanely tyrannical NDAA bill, which just passed recently. Don’t get excited and let Rubio fool you, when this dies down, he’ll help reintroduce the bill with a few modifications and continue on his fascist path.

Conservative darling Paul Ryan just wrote this status update on his Facebook:

The Internet is one of the most magnificent expressions of freedom and free enterprise in history. It should stay that way. While H.R. 3261, the Stop Online Piracy Act, attempts to address a legitimate problem, I believe it creates the precedent and possibility for undue regulation, censorship and legal abuse. I do not support H.R. 3261 in its current form and will oppose the legislation should it come before the full House.

While that sounds all fine and dandy, Mr. Ryan doesn’t fully oppose the idea of the bill and chances are, if it was tweaked and the opposition towards it died down, he may just very well vote for it.

Senators Jim DeMint, Robert Menendez and others have come out against this tyranny. Another co-sponsor, Arizona congressman Ben Quayle has withdrawn his support. Freedom fighter and libertarian leaning Michigan congressman Justin Amash continues to speak out against this, as does Kentucky senator Rand Paul and his father, Texas congressman and presidential candidate Ron Paul.

The opposition to these bills has grown so quickly in the last several hours that six Republican senators wrote a letter to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. The letter states:

We have increasingly heard from a large number of constituents and other stakeholders with vocal concerns about possible unintended consequences of the proposed legislation, including breaches in cybersecurity, damaging the integrity of the Internet, costly and burdensome litigation, and dilution of First Amendment rights.

For those of you who have been in the dark, I’ll break down what these bills are. In a nutshell, what they are supposed to do is to protect copyrighted material and eliminate piracy. What they actually do is a different story.

Basically, these bills give the entertainment industry the power to censor the Internet and breed a whole new type of crony capitalism while forcing us into a digital police state. You see, private corporations want to be able to choose what can and cannot be censored on the Internet. These corporations are trying to protect their property, which is understandable, and since the Internet is a bastion for downloading music and movies, they want to be able to tighten their grip and control how the whole system works. Considering that many of the sources for this copyrighted material exists outside of United States jurisdiction, these laws are being put in place to give the government and their corporate buddies an easier way at stopping copyright infringement. Again, that is understandable but the methods about doing this are just awful.

The first thing that this does is it gives the power to United States based ISPs (Internet Service Providers) to have special access at blocking infringing domain names. This also gives companies the power to sue websites, bloggers or whoever until they remove links or information directing Internet users to anything that they deem as infringed upon property.

Secondly, the government and their corporate pals would also be given the power to cut off funds to any websites that they believe are infringing on copyrights. Essentially, they can forcibly cancel infringing websites accounts with financial services and advertisers.

Now even though this all may seem somewhat proactive, one has to look at what actually constitutes copyright infringement. The description that they provide is so broad that if you technically upload a video to YouTube and there happens to be a piece of a song playing in the background, even if it’s just on the radio while you’re talking to the camera unaware of it, you have just infringed on copyrighted material and could face some serious penalties. This is just a small example but think of all the things you come across on the Internet on a daily basis that could technically be considered as copyright infringement. Violations are pretty much fucking everywhere! Hell, the whole Internet is a violation!

Besides all that, if there is a will there is a way. These laws won’t stop Internet users from finding music and movies to download illegally. In fact, even if a URL is blocked, an Internet user can still access the site via its IP address. Hell, this might start a revolution in web browsing and millions of digital pirates will be navigating the Net with IPs as opposed to typical URLs.

Another thing to mention is that these laws are incredibly bad for business. Essentially, they will cripple and stifle startups as corporations will have the power to sue any company that they feel isn’t properly protecting their interests. In a classic case of crony capitalism or corporatism, this allows the giants to stay on top, where they can look down and crush any growing company that may become a viable competitor for their business. Basically, these bills will create and perpetuate monopolies. When large corporations have the power to bankrupt new search engines and social networking sites, there really isn’t room for growth or innovation. We might as well just go back to the days of dark dingy uninspiring chat rooms.

The scariest thing that these laws will do is tamper with the Internet as a whole from the backend. By messing around with the Internet’s vast registry of domain names we could very well end up with a World Wide Web that is less stable and less secure. At the end of the day, these laws won’t stop piracy, as they claim and they will just create an environment for a new type of corporatism while leaving the Internet less secure and less reliable than it has ever been.

The Internet has already become a playground for government and corporate meddling. Hell, they already have laws in place to protect copyright infringement yet they want to push the envelope as far as they can. As of right now, the government and corporations already have the power to block any site just off of one infringing link. Social media giants like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, YouTube and others are now forced to censor their users because if they don’t, they become liable for the material their users upload and could be forced to shut down. On top of that, an ordinary Internet user could already be sentenced to prison for up to five years just for posting any copyrighted material – this includes someone like Tay Zonday who became an Internet sensation for singing pop song covers.

This situation is incredibly fucked up and it is just one more battle in a long line or tyrannous laws that the government is trying to impose on us. Just add this ingredient to the same bowl of tyranny punch that already consists of the PATRIOT Act, NDAA, indefinite detention, Homeland Security, the TSA, previous Internet censorship, FEMA, etc. The list goes on and on and hopefully people’s distrust in government has grown to the point that all future legislation the tyrants bring forth will be scrutinized and passionately opposed as much as SOPA and PIPA.

In the end, we’ve got to chain these bastards’ feet to the grill and turn up the fire until they do what we say because frankly, that’s their damn job.

It’s on — at least partially: Reddit has announced that it will be going dark for 12 hours to protest the Stop Online Piracy Act, and Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has said that he hopes to coordinate with the site so that Wikipedia does the same. Will other sites join in? Should we prepare for the Great Internet Strike of 2012?

Writing that it’s “not taking this action lightly,” Reddit announced on Tuesday that it will blackout its site on Wednesday, January 18 for 12 hours, starting at 8:00 a.m. Eastern time. During that period, the site’s content will be replaced with “a simple message about how the PIPA/SOPA legislation would shut down sites like reddit, link to resources to learn more, and suggest ways to take action.” The company will also run a live video stream of that day’s House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform hearing on Internet security, intellectual property and economic growth.

On the site’s blog, the Reddit team admitted that “We’re as addicted to reddit as the rest of you,” but explained that “We wouldn’t do this if we didn’t believe this legislation and the forces behind it were a serious threat to reddit and the Internet as we know it. Blacking out reddit is a hard choice, but we feel focusing on a day of action is the best way we can amplify the voice of the community.” The company admits that support for a blackout isn’t unanimous among the Reddit community and it’s asking for the community’s input as it decides what to do next.

(MORE: At the Top of Congress’ New Year Agenda? Regulate the Net)

If support isn’t unanimous within Reddit’s community, it’ll be interesting to see how things go for Wikipedia if that site follows suit. Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales writes ”it would be great if we could act quickly to coordinate with Reddit,” thought adding the community needs a “thumbs up/thumbs down vote” on whether or not to participate, and “we don’t have the luxury of time that we usually have, in terms of negotiating with each other for weeks about what’s exactly the best possible thing to do.” I suspect the ratio of those in favor of a blackout to those opposed would be greater for a more activist site like Reddit than one that’s more mainstream (and let’s be honest, passive) like Wikipedia.

Something I appreciate about Reddit’s announcement is that they’ve factored in the importance of educating would-be visitors to the site about why they’ve decided to go dark, what SOPA is and why it’s so important. I can only assume Wikipedia would do the same thing, should the site community decide to go dark on the same day. After all, protests only work when people understand why they’re happening.

That said, now that we have a date for a potential shutdown, the question becomes “Who else will join in?” Google, Twitter and Facebook have all been rumored as contenders, in part because of comments made by NetCoalition’s Markham Erickson (when I asked, Google and Twitter declined to comment on their support for an Internet blackout). But with a real strike looming and despite attempts to push the issue onto agendas, support for this kind of action may be shifting in favor of alternative methods. Finding other ways to protest may be ineluctable — after all, we’re talking about the Internet’s most popular sites going dark for 24 hours.

Sure, there may be some disappointment that we’re not days from Temporary Internet Apocalypse To Prove a Point, but I suspect there’s relief as well. The idea of a multi-pronged attack on pro-SOPA arguments — of different flavors of activism and discussion for different people — feels like the more mature response on behalf of tech companies (who after all may not agree on what’s wrong with SOPA as it stands). Let Wikipedia close for the day and generate headlines, while others like Google and Facebook pursue alternative forms of protest that engage their respective audiences. In the end, the more people paying attention, the better.

MORE: SOPA: What if Google, Facebook and Twitter Went Offline in Protest?
Source: Tech Land.

My Two Cents: I can’t take any piundit seriously who tries to continually defend Palin flubs likes this. *cough* Rush. *cough* Levin. End Two Cents.
*Taken from the Huffington Post.

Last week, Sarah Palin told a local news station in Boston that Paul Revere “warned the British that they weren’t gonna be takin’ away our arms.” As the news media rushed to point out that Revere was, in fact, warning the American colonists, not the British, Palin’s supporters apparently attempted to update the Wikipedia entry on Revere in order to make the facts conform to Palin’s version of history.

According to the revision history on the Wikipedia page, Palin supports attempted to add the line in italics below:

CONTINUED..

*Written by Rob Rimes.

*This article is broken into five parts with each being released a few days apart. This is due to the size of the article. Here is PART I, PART II & PART III.

5. Stage Four – Lyndon B. Johnson and the Great Society:

“I am concerned about the whole man. I am concerned about what the people, using their government as an instrument and a tool, can do toward building the whole man, which will mean a better society and a better world.” – Lyndon Baines Johnson

Lyndon B. Johnson became the 36th President of the United States of America after tragedy struck and President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas. LBJ was a progressive leader that wanted to deliver just as much “change” to the United States as his predecessors, FDR and Woodrow Wilson did. Just like the last major progressive in the office before him, LBJ wanted to significantly change the landscape in America with a monster set of programs like the New Deal. LBJ called his monster the Great Society.

The Great Society was not only the second coming of the New Deal, it also borrowed many ideas from JFK’s New Frontier, which was never really implemented on a large scale due to his death just a few years into his first term. The basic make-up of the Great Society consisted of civil rights and the war on poverty, as well as programs for education, health care, the arts, transportation, consumer protection and the environment.

The first of these factors I want to look at is civil rights. To be clear, I am definitely in favor of civil rights in theory. Everyone deserves equality and no one should be discriminated against due to race, color, creed, etc. Civil rights and women’s rights were huge victories in their day. However, apart from all the fanfare and all the glory, there is a lot of tyrannical and evil bullshit. The thing I am talking about specifically is the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Now this bill was written by Republicans and most of the GOP supported it, while the Democrats were strongly opposed to it. In fact, I talk about this in greater detail in my article “Republicans: The Party of Racism?“. Essentially, the Republicans were all for civil rights, while the Democrats, today’s race baiters and favorite party of most minorities, were against them. Interesting, eh?

One Democrat seemingly saw the light however and that was Lyndon B. Johnson. LBJ adopted the Civil Rights Act as a part of the Great Society. Even though it was drafted by the opposition, LBJ wanted desperately to make sure that blacks and other races had the same rights as whites. While this is quite noble and admirable, his efforts have grown to become counterproductive. Now the liberals will sneer at that and think it is some form of right-wing propaganda that I am trying to push off but I am only concerned with the facts. The facts clearly show, that in some aspects, parts of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 have violated the Constitution and have also given a lot of minorities a sense of dependency on the federal government.

One way that it goes against the Constitution, is that it forces business owners to have to comply with a set of laws that makes it so they have to service everyone, no matter what the color of their skin is. Sure, this sounds good but if someone doesn’t like a certain group of people, should they be forced to do business with them? That goes against their individual rights and if it is their business, it goes against their property rights. I’m not turning a blind eye to bigotry, but that person, no matter how they feel, should be able to do business however they see fit. Now, that doesn’t mean that he won’t be negatively effected by his bigotry. He’d most likely loose business as word quickly spreads that he refuses to service a race that isn’t his. The government doesn’t need to regulate this, people can figure these things out for themselves. This was Barry Goldwater’s argument against the Civil Rights Act and by taking that stance, he lost the presidential election against LBJ. Nowadays, the Democrats like to paint him out as a bigot when, in reality, it was the Democrats who were the bigots of the day.

Also, as far as the unconstitutionality of the Civil rights Act goes, there is no power given to Congress that allows them to regulate employee and employer relations. This would fall under the 10th Amendment where the ability to make such laws would fall into the hands of the states themselves. Essentially, the Civil Rights Act is a violation against state’s rights in addition to the Constitution. Revisiting FDR, as governor of New York, he stated:

“..as the conduct of public utilities, of banks, of insurance, of business, of agriculture, of education, of social welfare and of a dozen other important features. In these, Washington must not be encouraged to interfere.”

If only FDR practiced as president, what he preached as governor. Too bad LBJ didn’t listen either.

Now, let’s look at the fact that the Civil Rights Act had counterproductive results. It was Congressman Ron Paul who said on the House floor:

“..contrary to the claims of the supporters of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the sponsors of HR 676, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 did not improve race relations or enhance freedom. Instead, the forced integration dictated by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 increased racial tensions while diminishing individual liberty.”

So, how did it do that?

Well, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 gave the federal government a huge surge in power. Their reach could literally go further than it ever had before in regards to the regulation of business at the employment management level. The government now had power of the hiring process, employee relations and customer service. In regards to this, Ron Paul said:

“The result was a massive violation of the rights of private property and contract, which are the bedrocks of free society. The federal government has no legitimate authority to infringe on the rights of private property owners to use their property as they please and to form (or not form) contracts with terms mutually agreeable to all parties. The rights of all private property owners, even those whose actions decent people find abhorrent, must be respected if we are to maintain a free society.

This expansion of federal power was based on an erroneous interpretation of the congressional power to regulate interstate commerce. The framers of the Constitution intended the interstate commerce clause to create a free trade zone among the states, not to give the federal government regulatory power over every business that has any connection with interstate commerce.”

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 did not accomplish its goals of creating racial harmony and promoting equality. You cannot regulate what is in a man’s mind. If he is a racist, you cannot legislate it out of him. If anything, this sort of action will create strong resistance, which in many cases is what has happened. People generally are good, but you can’t force them into being good. It has to be something that they are by their own accord.

Forcing employers to hire based on a racial quota is ridiculous. If you are giving minorities an extra edge then that certainly isn’t equal. Affirmative action in all its forms is racist in itself and a giant oxymoron. Ron Paul also had something to say about this aspect:

“Racial quotas have not contributed to racial harmony or advanced the goal of a color-blind society. Instead, these quotas encouraged racial balkanization, and fostered racial strife.

Of course, America has made great strides in race relations over the past forty years. However, this progress is due to changes in public attitudes and private efforts. Relations between the races have improved despite, not because of, the 1964 Civil Rights Act.”

I keep quoting Dr. Paul here because he has a way with words that eloquently portrays the reality of this controversial subject. Well, “controversial” if you seemingly oppose it.

Trying to put a price tag on the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is impossible. However, the vast majority of the programs under the umbrella of this bill have been incredibly costly over the years. The biggest cost however, has been the cost of individual liberty. If we all just got behind individual liberty and respected it, laws like this one wouldn’t even be necessary.

According to Wikipedia, “The most ambitious and controversial part of the Great Society was..” the War on Poverty. Man, seems like we’re always at “war” with someone or something, doesn’t it? I don’t want to go to war with the poor! Apparently, this wasn’t a war against the poor, it was a war to “help” the poor. Funny, how can you help the poor when wars are expensive? No one ever helped the poor with wasteful spending. Hell, wasteful spending is why many people are poor. So apart from the obvious, how was this a costly, counterproductive, horrible idea from the minds of progressives?

Well, the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 was comprised of a laundry list of programs guaran-damn-teed to end poverty in the United States. It didn’t matter to LBJ that the experts of the day were stating that poverty was on a sharp decline in America. No, no, no! LBJ had to try and meddle with it and force the turnaround quicker. Don’t these tyrants ever learn from the “good intentions” of their predecessors? No, they don’t. They don’t concern themselves with facts and data, they concern themselves with guilt and ego. In fact Johnson championed in what progressives before him had done when he declared:

“The Act does not merely expand old programs or improve what is already being done. It charts a new course. It strikes at the causes, not just the consequences of poverty. It can be a milestone in our one-hundred eighty year search for a better life for our people.”

LBJ claimed that the Economic Opportunity Act would accomplish five goals. They first goal would provide half a million underprivileged young Americans with the opportunity to develop skills, continue education, and find useful work. The second goal would give every American community the opportunity to develop a comprehensive plan to fight its own poverty—and help them to carry out their plans. The third goal would allow Americans to enlist in helping fight the War on Poverty. It was voluntary however. The fourth goal would destroy the barriers holding back workers and farmers. The final goal was the creation of the the Office of Economic Opportunity, a federal HQ for the War on Poverty. Man, all that shit sounds expensive! Why not just give the money to the people charitably, as opposed to forcibly taking it via taxpayers’ dollars and distributing it into these expensive and expansive programs? I guess having a gun to one’s head to force their charity is more romantic.

LBJ and the newly refurbished Magical Progressive Problem Solving Machine created the Welfare State. In a typical case of “unintended consequences”, the welfare system has failed miserably and created a society that is further dependent on government handouts, whether through the abuse of food stamps or unemployment benefits. Just look at how out of control unemployment is now. The government now allows people to collect unemployment checks for 99 weeks! That’s a month shy of two years! I know unemployment is bad in this country right now, but my-fucking-god, is it really going to take two years to find a job? I’ve never in my entire life been unemployed for a quarter of that time. When I was, I was too proud to take unemployment benefits. Maybe that was a mistake on my part but I still went from being homeless and penniless to making a pretty good salary and holding a pretty sweet job. If there is a will there is a way! I’ve said it again and again. However, the government takes that will away.

You se, the length of unemployment benefits allows people to be overly selective with the jobs they choose. People turn down menial hard-working jobs for little pay because they are getting little pay to sit at home to browse TMZ and play Farmville between casually scanning Monster, Craigslist and CareerBuilder. Yes, I realize the unemployment benefits are small and near impossible to make a living off of, but with all the other entitlements and handouts added in on top of that, one can live pretty phat for an unemployed person. People can debate this to death but I have seen this in action with my own eyes throughout my life. This IS what motivated me to not become one of those people. Guess who’s gotten further in life between those people and I? I did, and I was even worse off than most of them when at my lowest. We have created a nation of lazy entitled whiners because of these progressive programs. If you think I am an asshole for stating that, you are a blind idiot for not understanding the concept of “cause and effect”. Truth is, the Great Society created the Weak Society.

Another part of the Great Society was education. LBJ dropped a few new laws on us with the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, the Higher Education Act and the Bilingual Education Act. With these acts came some unintended consequences born out of good intentions like every goddamned progressive invention. With the Elementary and Secondary Education Act came the Head Start program. With the Higher Education Act came the Teacher Corps.With the Bilingual Education Act came special federal aid to schools that had students with limited English speaking ability.

This bilingual idiocy has led us to a country that is overly sensitive to the needs of non-English speakers. Instead of promoting our national language, we force our citizens to conform to the needs of those who aren’t even citizens. It makes it so that immigrants to America don’t have to learn the national language. We are the only country in the world promoting such nonsense. If you, as an American, move to a foreign land and refuse to learn their language, not only will you be laughed at, but you will fall behind immensely. It is not a nation’s job to adapt to an outsider, it is an outsiders job to adapt to the nation. Maybe it is just me but that’s common sense. Our political correctness has made us a nation of pacifist pussies always trying to belittle, demoralize and demonize ourselves and our culture for the sake of those escaping their situations for the American life. Hell, we’re cheating them as much as we’re cheating ourselves here.

The Great Society also created the medical monsters Medicare and Medicaid. Just like with FDR’s Social Security plan, one doesn’t have to look too far to see how these entitlements are ruining our economy still to this day. In fact, the combination of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid took up 43 percent of our national budget in 2010! Nearly half of our federal budget goes to just these three pieces of progressive legislation! It’s fucking insanity! Problem is, even the fiscal conservatives, for the most part, refuse to give up these entitlements. What these programs are, in layman’s terms, is welfare for the senior citizen crowd. Medicare and Medicaid also opened the door to socialized health care and eventually, Obamacare. I’ll cover that in the next section of this article.

LBJ’s Great Society also thought it was necessary for the federal government to involve itself in the arts and broadcasting. Why the hell government needs to be involved in art or broadcasting is beyond me. Many liberals have tried to explain this to me but their explanations continually fall short. First of all, art is open to interpretation and what some sees as art, someone else might not. Art is subjective. So who the hell is the government to think that they can funnel tax dollars to a subjective thing? How do you quantify that even? This is why we end up with our tax dollars paying for museum exhibits of ant-covered Christs. I plan to write an article about government and art in the near future.

As far as broadcasting goes, the federal government has given us PBS and NPR. To some, mainly the lefties, this is a great thing. To those on the right or in the middle even, this is ridiculous. First of all, it would be great if government funded broadcasting was non-partisan or even bi-partisan. It is neither of these. NPR for instance, is a hardcore leftist entity. Why should someone who is opposed to that ideology have to pay for it? Hell, NPR themselves have been on record saying that they would actually do much better without government funding. Okay assholes, then why are you stealing from us then? Give us back our money and go private. As long as you’re public and taking my money, you have no right to shove socialist and progressive bullshit down my throat. Now you can argue that I don’t have to listen to it. Good point, and I don’t. But I DO have to pay for it, and that is the problem. PBS is leftist too and I don’t feel like I should have to pay for them either.

Idiot shitcock Ralph Nader wrote a stupid ass book called “Unsafe at Any Speed”. Because of that stupid ass book, the LBJ administration added some transportation legislation to the Great Society. The biggest of these progressive programs was the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act. What this law did was it empowered the federal government to establish safety standards for motor vehicles, as well as overseeing traffic safety. Once again, the progressives thought that they could do something more efficiently than the private sector. There are already several agencies that test countless things with motor vehicles and other items. Nader’s big stink against the Corvair, which was a focal point of his book, ended up being complete bullshit. The car was considered “unsafe to drive” and was pulled off the market. A few years later, the vehicle was tested to see if these claims were valid, and they weren’t. All this was created on a lie. Nader’s attack was complete bullshit and used as a catalyst to get the people to believe that we need government to protect us from those evil automakers. On this topic Milton Friedman said:

“Nowadays there are Corvair fan clubs throughout the country. Corvairs have become collectors’ items. Consumers have given their verdict on Ralph Nader and the government regulations.”

The last area of the Great Society I want to talk about is the environmental portion. Where the two Roosevelts and Wilson wanted to protect existing resources and promote conservation, LBJ took it even further. During his time in the Oval Office, he signed several environmental bills into law. These bills were the Clear Air, Water Quality and Clean Water Restoration Acts and Amendments, the Wilderness Act, the Endangered Species Preservation Act, the National Trails System Act, the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act, the Land and Water Conservation Act, the Solid Waste Disposal Act, the Motor Vehicle Air Pollution Control Act, the National Historic Preservation Act, the Aircraft Noise Abatement Act and the National Environmental Policy Act. All of these bills come with their own forms of tyranny built in. Most of them have created some ridiculous laws that negatively impact economic growth. By putting the rights of a single endangered bird over the rights of thousands upon thousands of people to go into a Wal-Mart and buy their necessities is pretty fucking ludicrous. Analyzing each of these in full detail would take up a whole book. What I can say here though, is that with each of these programs comes a heavy price tag which we are still paying today. With each also comes a loss of liberty, especially individual and property rights.

There are several other aspects of the Great Society that I haven’t mentioned, but I am sure you get the idea. This being the fourth huge section in my giant article about the roots of progressivism should probably prepare you for the fact that the fifth and final part will also not have a positive ending.

Looking back at LBJ here, it is pretty apparent that his performance as POTUS was greatly influenced by the progressive masterminds before him. Because of that, LBJ’s legacy was just as tyrannical and maddening as the legacies of his predecessors. When you dump the Great Society on top of the New Deal, Wilsonian policy and Teddy Roosevelt’s programs, you are left with a giant beast risen from the ashes of liberty. The Great Society, the New Deal and all the other progressive bullshit programs did not empower people like they promised, instead they stripped great Americans of their already existing power, their resourcefulness, their drive, their pride and their self-reliance. All that was replaced with apathy, complacency and dependence on the State.

No need to worry though, there was another progressive who rose from the ashes promising “hope” and “change”. He is the subject of the fifth and final part of this article.

6. Stage Five – Barack H. Obama, Hope, Change & Health Care:

“This is the moment when we must build on the wealth that open markets have created, and share its benefits more equitably. Trade has been a cornerstone of our growth and global development. But we will not be able to sustain this growth if it favors the few, and not the many.” – Barack Hussein Obama

This article will be continued in PART V

*Written by Tho Bishop, who deserves a serious “pat on the back” for getting this very article published and featured on the Ludwig von Mises Institute’s website. See for yourself here.

As a single, 21-year-old guy living in north Florida, I have found it hard to pick up girls by talking about economics. Perhaps it was an overdose of supply-and-demand charts in high school, but any mention of the E-word typically brings with it glassy eyes and the need to answer a phone that never rang. This is unfortunate. Everyone uses economics on a daily basis, and not just at the store or when you write a check. Our understanding of economics influences every aspect of our lives, whether we realize it or not. Valentine’s Day gives me an excuse to demonstrate this truth in regard to romance.

When asked to define economics, I say it is the application of philosophy to the social issue of finite resources. One resource that is both finite and common to all people is time. Any action we take equates to a personal investment of the capital of time. Though time is often overlooked in economic calculation, it has always been a point of emphasis for economists of the Austrian School. It is not surprising that the economics of romance lends itself to Austrian interpretation. In fact an “Austrian romance cycle” would be very similar to the Austrian business cycle.

Romance starts with a first move. Just as Austrians understand that it is the role of the entrepreneur to shoulder the risk of capital investment in order to potentially achieve profit, we can understand that it is the role of an instigator to take the risk in the hope of finding romantic success. Without an entrepreneur, economic growth is unobtainable; without someone making a first move, romantic growth is unobtainable.

So lets take a guy, Adam, who walks into a party looking to find the girl of his dreams. Adam finds a girl, Betty, and instigates a conversation. If Adam has invested enough time in pursuing Betty that she is already interested in him, like an investor who has the money up front to start a business, Adam needs no credit to close the deal. But what if Adam hardly knows Betty? Like an investor using his business plan to earn a bank loan, Adam must now convince Betty that he is worth the risk of everything involved in matters of the heart.

If Adam behaves according to the philosophy of liberalism, if he represents himself honestly and allows his success or failure with Betty to come organically, then he may or may not connect with her, but his romantic life will be (relatively) drama-free; and when he does find a girl interested in him, the interest will be genuine.

But Adam has become frustrated by romantic failure. Fed up with his lack of success in romance, Adam begins to tell every girl who will listen that he saved orphans from the rampaging cannibals of Rojinda, climbed Mount Everest, and once out debated Ron Paul on the House floor. Adam has decided to manipulate his “interest rate.”

All of a sudden Adam finds himself as the center of attention. Betty and Chelsea are fighting to get with him; Eve even starts trying to stake her claim when she hears that Adam grew up next to Justin Bieber! Adam finds himself in a romantic boom. As long as Adam can keep spitting out lies, and as long as people believe them, Adam’s romantic success will continue.

At some point, however, Adam is going to have to pay the piper. Justin Bieber doesn’t accept his Facebook request. No one can find the C-SPAN clip of him and Ron Paul. Wikipedia shows no island of Rojinda. Chelsea’s brother was at church camp with Adam the summer he was suppose to be climbing Mount Everest. Adam’s bubble has burst.

Betty slaps Adam. Chelsea tells all the girls at school, ruining his chances with all of them. Perhaps worst of all is that Eve, for whom Adam has since developed real feelings, and with whom he actually has a lot in common, never talks to him again. Adam’s short-term gain has created long-term consequences far greater than he would have ever encountered by being honest in the first place.

Beyond simply demonstrating the natural fallacies of arbitrary manipulation of interest, economics also allows us to best manage our romantic life. I see firsthand the number of relationships that are based less on love and more on comfort — people staying together not because of how they feel about each other but because they dislike the feeling of being alone. This is once again an issue of long-term consequences for short-term gain. It is also an economic issue.

Time is finite. So every day spent in a relationship of comfort is another day lost that could have been spent in a relationship of love — there are opportunity costs here. In NBC’s sit-com The Office, Pam spends the first two seasons engaged to her long-time and incompatible fiancé, Roy, rather than accepting the advances of her best work friend, Jim. Pam’s refusal to risk the comfort of her passionless relationship with Roy doesn’t change the fact that the two aren’t meant for each other. A willingness to settle isn’t the same as love. Pam eventually breaks up with Roy and later marries Jim in season six. While Pam and Jim may spend the rest of their fictional lives happily ever after, that happy life lost four years in the process.

Every action we take represents an economic decision. The old phrase “time is money” takes on a new meaning when you start applying economics to all aspects of life. It is also only an Austrian perspective of economics that is consistent with these out-of-the-box applications. And it is this realization that has made me an evangelical Austrian.

Happy Valentine’s Day. Use it efficiently.

*Taken from the Ludwig von Mises Institute.

What follows is a short article on the Austrian rationale behind both Wikipedia and the new Mises Wiki. This article introduces some important concepts, explains the virtues of Wikipedia, and then illustrates the key differences between it and Mises Wiki. This is not so much an exposition of Mises Wiki as it is a Misesian and Hayekian interpretation of the project.

Economics is a science revolving around human individuals and the relationships developed between them, each intending to satisfy his own predetermined desires and demands. The crowning achievement of both the individual and society as a whole — or the aggregate of all individuals in a society — is the division of labor. It is by no coincidence that the concept of the division of labor occupies a considerable portion of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, for it is the basis of all advanced production.[1] It is the division of labor that allows the individual to produce economic goods that themselves would fall short of meeting his desires but at the same time gives the individual access to a bevy of goods that ultimately allow him happiness beyond the point of sustenance.

The question of how millions of individuals are able to coordinate and create the “harmony of interests” the capitalist system affords society through the division of labor (coordinated by the price mechanism) was beyond the economics profession until the 1930s and 1940s. While a debate had long existed over the viability of central planning, intensifying during the 1920s with Ludwig von Mises’s publication of “Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth“[2] and Socialism,[3]economics lacked a precise and tenable explanation of the mechanism behind the price system.[4]

This task fell to Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek. Human Action represents Mises’s synthesis of his criticism of socialist “calculation” and his explanation of the working of the capitalist price mechanism.[5] For Mises, the price system was a product of individual persons acting within a division of labor, coordinating their individual valuations.[6] It was upon this idea that Hayek wrote “The Use of Knowledge in Society” in late 1945.[7]

In that essay, Hayek explained how a being that held all scientific knowledge would still be incapable of efficiently distributing resources in lieu of a decentralized price mechanism. In surprisingly Misesian fashion, Hayek underscored the all-important notion that resource economization is not a product of objective fact but the result of individuals subjectively and rationally evaluating their choices of actions within a division of labor. Most important, while acting individuals hold only partial knowledge, that knowledge is derived in such a way that only the individual himself can interpret it. Thus, economic knowledge is far more than the sum of all objective facts; it is also the sum of all subjective valuation.

The price mechanism is the artery by which information is spread throughout the division of labor. It is the phenomenon which allows economic coordination to take place between individuals who themselves do not realize the full scale of the harmonization involved. In a nutshell, the price mechanism is what allows a person to enjoy the satisfaction of the most basic products available to him, without even being aware of the existence of the producers of all of the capital goods that went into the production of those products.

Inspired by Hayek’s 1945 essay, entrepreneur Jimmy Wales recruited Larry Sanger and founded Wikipedia, the online, collaborative encyclopedia, in 2001. Since then, Wikipedia has exploded. What is amazing is that it did so, not under the guidance of any particular person, but as a result of collaboration and arbitration between the thousands of editors who make up the Wikipedia community. It was not a top-down effort; the founders did not subcontract to one group of individuals, who then subcontracted to another, who then subcontracted to another, so on and so forth. It was a bottom-up genesis, in which it was the users who created the varying levels of management and job specialization. One could be tempted, in fact, to consider Wikipedia almost a test-lab recreation of a division of labor virtually from scratch.

The Misesian question is clear: can a community of thousands of editors, with no central direction except that which they voluntarily organize for themselves, provide a better representation of the sum of all human knowledge than can a handful of paid academics? And the Hayekian question is this: can the sum of all of Wikipedia’s editors’ knowledge, each with their own subjective perspectives and valuations, ultimately be more accurate than that of a few academics restating generally recognized objective facts?

So far, the verdict is clearly in Wikipedia’s favor. Sure, a professional encyclopedia can probably flaunt the fact that most of its entries are reviewed, generally accurate, and noncontroversial.[8]However, no encyclopedia enjoys Wikipedia’s broad range of topics. More importantly, articles thatare of high quality have gone through an extensive process of review, and the more popular the topic, the greater the number of editors involved in the review process.[9] Like anything else, however, Wikipedia is a work in progress, in much the same way that the market is a process. Here, the advantage is unmistakably Wikipedia’s, since it enjoys a large community constantly working to improve the encyclopedia’s content.

The beauty of Wikipedia is not only what it offers us today but also what it can offer us tomorrow. Its nature, similar to that of the market, means that it is bounded only by the creativity of its community of users. When all of Wikipedia’s separate projects are taken into account, one realizes that it is much more than just an encyclopedia (in dozens of languages). It is also a repository of documents, images, and other files. No less, the Wikipedia community has become another facet of the recent revolution in private education, capable of providing textbooks to those who otherwise could never afford them. It is constrained only by the ever-expanding walls of the human mind — better said, the human minds of tens of thousands of individuals. This is its most decisive Misesian and Hayekian quality.

This is what the Mises Institute has in mind when unveiling the new “Mises Wiki” — an online repository of Austrian knowledge, limited in scope only by the sum of the creativity of its users. Imagine a database of Austrian knowledge not only meant to distribute information but also designed to allow the reader the ability to engage and ultimately add to it.

The best part? Like Wikipedia, Mises Wiki will have to be built from the ground up. This gives an opportunity for Misesians to design it in a way congruent with their personal philosophy, voluntarily interacting with each other in their own self-interests. Since there is no enforced social organization (i.e., government), there is room for competing structures of association. The result is far from chaotic. Leading by example, Wikipedia has shown that a cohesive, yet competitive, structure of organization can be created without the use of a monopoly on force. There is no reason results should be different with Mises Wiki. This is not to say that any form of organization will be agreeable to all, but given the philosophical similarities the user base will likely have, it would not be farfetched to reckon that whatever system is developed will be in accordance with the majority of the community.

In the free market, a firm develops in a similar way to Wikipedia, insofar as it leads to the creation of relatively rigid structures of management. People voluntarily enter into these relationships because they feel that doing so will push them toward their desired ends more so than any alternative choice of action. The market, if defined as a network of voluntary interaction, does not do away with such things as rules, management, and oversight. Rather, it allows (or more accurately, cannot disallow) there to be competing forms of rules, management, and oversight. Mises Wiki is founded on the same concept; it is an exercise in market competition — it aims to provide an alternative form of management, as created by the community that is more conducive toward Austrian scholarship. Concisely, it is a wiki for the Austrian, and that is what sets it apart from Wikipedia.

All considered, Mises Wiki provides an exciting outlet for young Austrian scholarship. Emphasis should be placed on the ability for a wiki encyclopedia to grow beyond what it was originally intended to be, its growth limited only by the vision of its community. The future is here, and you are invited to take part in its unfolding.

Hayek opened his 1945 essay “The Use of Knowledge in Society” by asking, “what is the problem we wish to solve when we try to construct a rational economic order?”

Purposefully or inadvertently, Jimmy Wales and all those responsible for Wikipedia have answered Hayek’s question more eloquently and intuitively than Hayek did. The only problem that needs to be solved is whatever problem concerns the limiting of the human mind. Wikipedia excels because it reduces barriers to and even facilitates the application of rational creativity. It is only fitting that this model now be applied to a truly Misesian project, the Mises Wiki. For those with vision, now the task is not only continuing application, but expanding the idea to realms previously unexplored.

Often times, I find myself in arguments with liberal peons and sometimes with blind hardcore conservative nuts. As far as the conservatives go, I pretty much disregard any “fact” (based on faith) that the religious contingent tries to throw my way. As far as the liberals go, I find myself having a hard time just accepting the “facts” that they use as the foundation of their arguments. The reason for my disregarding liberal “facts” is because more often than not, they come from their favorite go-to website, FactCheck.org. That’s cool and all but who the fuck are they? Who has made them the authority? Who the fuck funds them? And most importantly, who the fuck is checking their facts? It’s a fucking website, you may as well just take everything you read on Wikipedia as gospel. Hell, maybe every tweet you read is a short psalm of fact based liberal logic. Maybe every status update on Facebook is an agenda-less piece of liberal law as widely regarded and factual as anything that comes out of the mouths of liberal deities Al Gore and Barack Obama.

On several occasions, I have double checked FactCheck.org after their “facts” have been blindly used by liberals in debates I’ve been a part of. Many of them that I have double checked have been skewed, misrepresented or completely false. Keith Olbermann, probably the biggest douchebag on the planet, has often times referenced information from FactCheck.org and has been found to be wrong. Of course, he’ll deny that and say it’s anti-liberal smear and attack squads that are singling him out and discrediting “facts” because if you don’t agree with his widely distorted and fucked up views, than you are an idiot and a horrible person. Well, not only is Olbermann sucking the FactCheck cock, but so is MSNBC as a whole, well except for Rachel Maddow: she doesn’t like cock (she is a lesbian if you didn’t know, which you probably didn’t because her show gets such shitty ratings).

So what’s the real story behind FactCheck and it’s liberal bias? Who owns it? Well, the answer to that question is the now liberal group, the Annenberg Foundation. The Annenberg Foundation was founded by Walter H. Annenberg, who was at one point a loyal Reagan conservative and diehard Republican. However, Old Walter’s family have changed their tune. Now, the family has close ties to Barack Obama, Bill Ayers and the liberal front in general.

For those who don’t know who Bill Ayers is, do a google search. However, in a nutshell, he led a group of extreme leftists called the Weather Underground (or Weathermen) during the Vietnam War era. His group took credit for bombing the Pentagon, the Capital Building, and the New York City Metro Police Department, as well as over thirty other bombings. Basically, he’s a leftist nutcase psycho fucksack and he’s not in prison.

So how is Obama tied to Ayers and tied to the Annenbergs and thus FactCheck.org?

To start, Ayers was the key founder of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, which was a Chicago public school reform project from 1995 to 2001. Upon its start in 1995, Obama was appointed Board Chairman and President of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge. Geesh, that alone connects all three. Well, it branches out even more from there.

Ayers co-chaired the organization’s Collaborative, which set the education policies of the Challenge. Oddly enough, Obama was the one who was authorized to delegate to the Collaborative in regards to its programs and projects. In addition to that, Obama often times had to seek advice and assistance from the Ayer’s led Collaborative in regards to the programmatic aspects of grant proposals. Ayers even sat on the same board as Obama as an “ex officio member”. They both also sat together on the board of the CAC’s Governance Committee. Obama and Ayers were two parts of a group of four who were instructed to draft the bylaws that would govern the CAC. Keep in mind that the “A” in CAC is for Annenberg, the owners of FactCheck.org. The funding for Ayer’s projects and those of his cronies was approved by Board Chair, Barack Obama. Together, Ayers and Obama guided money to ACORN. Everyone in America should be familiar with the ACORN bullshit, well unless you’re on Olbermann’s cock or you’re off titty-fucking Chris Matthews.

When analyzing the source of FactCheck.org, one has to also take into account that the Annenberg owned site is ran through the Annenberg School for Communication which is a part of the University of Pennsylvania. UPenn, which I am calling it for abbreviation sake, is a liberally biased institution that has had its fair share of controversies in the past. In recent years, they have had several free speech issues, even though they were awarded the highest possible free speech rating by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education.

So, doesn’t all this make FactCheck.org, the Annenberg owned company, at least a little bit biased towards the left? When the issue of Obama’s birth certificate came up, FactCheck.org nipped it in the bud before it had the chance to truly become a scandal. They denied that the birth certificate was even an issue and Obama turned to them to “prove” that his birth certificate was legitimate. Clueless Americans and biased media outlets accepted the “proof” because, well.. it came from a website that no one knows much about. I’ve heard of faith in God, faith in man, faith in one’s self but never have I heard of faith in a mysterious website. I guess people just need something to believe in and Kool-Aid is tasty.

Now I am not a so-called “birther” but I do not trust FactCheck.org’s findings and facts to be authentic. The birth certificate issue is just the tip of the iceberg. Their bias towards the left and especially Obama is obvious to anyone with half a brain cell. They demonize Republican politicians much more so than the Democratic ones. Every questionable thing Obama does is seemingly justified and logical if you reference FactCheck. While the often times common sense approach of libertarians and some in the GOP is stripped down and made to look like pipe dreams and idiotic wishful and naive thinking.

So when it comes down to it, FactCheck.org’s power and legitimacy comes from “We the People”. Perception is king and if you perceive their “facts” to be facts, well then, in you’re mind, they are facts. Unfortunately, the internet has made people lazy. People no longer question things and look for the answers and the facts for themselves. They just do a google search and take either the first thing that pops up or they take the version that best suits their needs or what they already believe or perceive. But anyway, who the fuck am I? This could all be complete bullshit. You’ll never know though unless you look into it for yourself. In the end, depending upon where you stand, the truth could be anything or it could be nothing. I just tell myself that it’s all lies.

So who is fact checking FactCheck.org?