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If the Spy Briefing Club is about anything, it’s about the freedom of thought. Most of us take the freedom to think what we want for granted. We shouldn’t. The thinking reader should study the history of thought to fully appreciate our freedoms and be on the lookout for those who wish to take them …
The first round of negotiations over a new trade agreement between the U.S. and the European Union is scheduled to start this week, but it may be doomed before it even begins. EU officials are demanding answers and threatening to call off the negotiations in light of the latest NSA revelations released last week showing …
I was daydreaming over the weekend. The subject: notable intellectual epiphanies I’ve experienced in the course of my life. These are moments when someone reveals something to you that shakes you up. It runs contrary to everything you ever thought possible. You resist it at first, but can’t come up with a proof to the …
The race issue in America never seems to go away. We were reminded again last week when celebrity Southern chef Paula Deen was raked over the coals for using a racial epithet sometime in her past. Her tearful plea for those of us without sin to “cast the first stone” may have resonated with average …
Hanging out in Rome, surrounded by ruins of all ages, you can’t help but have big thoughts about the state of the world. Here are a few of mine. No generation during the long fall of the Roman Empire was really aware of it. Each generation accepted the conditions they inherited and worked to survive …
My passport is festooned with patriotic blather about freedom and democracy. It didn’t used to be this way. The less freedom we have, the more government has to convince us that it exists. But none of it rings true anymore. One page of the passport quotes Lincoln: “that government of the people, by the people, …
When volatility prevails in the gold market, I love seeing so many different opinions because it promotes critical thinking and healthy markets. But because gold is unlike any other commodity, many perspectives can be extreme, such as “goldenfreudes” who take pleasure in gold bugs’ pain. I continue to persuade readers to take a balanced and …
Years ago, it was virtually unheard-of for someone to give up his/her U.S. citizenship. Then, one by one, a handful of famous cases surfaced… like Sir John Templeton, who renounced his U.S. citizenship in 1964 and moved to the Bahamas. At the time, Templeton was able to save $100 million that he would have otherwise …
A new meme is spreading in financial markets: The Fed is about to turn off the monetary spigot. U.S. Printmaster General Ben Bernanke announced that he might start reducing the monthly debt monetization program called “quantitative easing” (QE) as early as autumn 2013, and maybe stop it entirely by the middle of next year. He …
Many opponents of gun control support the war on drugs, and many critics and reformers of America’s drug laws tend to believe in gun control. Conservatives tend to fall into the first category and liberals into the second. In reality, these two issues are more similar than many people might think. In both cases — …