A sixth-grader has been suspended for drawing an inappropriate picture. The drawing did not include any gun, but showed a checkpoint backed up by a SWAT team carrying flower pots while an unarmed drone hovered above. The suspended girl, whose name is kept secret at the request of her family, said she “just wanted to …

As much as I love technology, part of me hates being so dependent on a live wall plug wherever I go. You find yourself trapped in some setting without accessible wall plugs and your phone is dying. You charge from you laptop, but that is dying too. You take recourse to your tablet, but that …

Every year, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) adds to its short-term budget forecasts (10 years and 25 years) a long-term (75-year) outlook.The 2013 Long-term Budget Outlook was published earlier this week. The CBO, of course, admits that “the uncertainty of budget projections increases the farther the projections extend into the future.” Some would argue that …

It has now been nearly two centuries since French political scientist Alexis de Tocqueville visited America and compared American democracy to the French variety. The Martian asked his Earth correspondent to redo the comparison. The typical Frenchman thinks that Paris is the center of the universe, life without a baguette is not worth living, France …

Mobsters shake down, say, a restaurant owner. They drink all the booze and eat all they want and pay nothing. They rob the cash register. They even go out and borrow money against the place and spend it. When they’ve finally bled the thing dry and the business is about to collapse, they burn the …

A new assessment of state pension obligations suggests the problem is even worse than it already appears. How much worse? EMPTY COOKIE JAR: Pension liabilities are worse than many states’ official figures indicate. Using a more conservative method of accounting for financial gains in the marketplace, there is a $4.1 trillion gap between assets and …

I was at the Canadian border, headed toward the freedom that exists a few feet beyond the last security check. I was gently waved down a side corridor. Ninety minutes later, I was let go, but not before something truly alarming happened. I’m pretty sure that the Canadian government captured a mirrored version of my …

I have come to the point that I cannot believe a thing President Obama says. That’s not quite the same as saying I don’t believe anything he says. When he speaks he may be telling the truth, he may not be, or he may be parsing his words to mislead. But it’s impossible to know …

Our “Crash Alert” flag warns of a crash in U.S. stocks. Readers are advised to proceed with caution. But since the start of September, the news for stocks has not been bad. If you want to buy stocks, the financial press and Wall Street can give you plenty of reasons to do so. There is …

Fort Meade, MD – The United States, the least unfree country on Earth, is fighting a major invasion of the Blueshirts. The most visible Blueshirts constitute a 50,000-plus army that occupies all the airports in America. Recognizable by their blue shirts and their inquisitive eyes and hands, they search and humiliate all Americans trying to …

Sometimes, the news of the day causes me to say, “Huh?” The New York Times revelations last month about NSA programs and activities to enhance the agency’s ability to spy on ordinary citizens prompts today’s “Huh?” Who knew that our every phone call, Internet post and tweet is being recorded by the government? I have …

Apparently, global markets rallied overnight on hopes that a conflict may be avoided if Syria gives up its chemical weapons. If that’s the case, it’s a rally that will fade later in the week. That’s because the ongoing Syrian conflict has nothing to do with chemical weapons. It’s all about regime change, which is all …

I dreamed I saw Bernard von NotHaus, alive as you or me. Said I, “But Bernard, you’ve been jailed two years.” “I never was,” said he. Bernard has been the called the Rosa Parks of the alternative money movement. More than 10 years ago, he had this idea that he would make his own money …

U.S. and British intelligence agencies have successfully cracked much of the online encryption relied upon by hundreds of millions of people to protect the privacy of their personal data, online transactions and emails, according to top-secret documents revealed by former contractor Edward Snowden. The files show that the National Security Agency and its UK counterpart …

Following an extensive investigation, The Martian can reveal that it is neither Lawrence Summers nor Janet Yellen who will be the next chairman of the Federal Reserve System. Instead, President Obama is scheduled to announce that Davita Vance-Cooks will replace Ben Bernanke on Jan. 1. Like John Galt, Davita Vance-Cooks is not a household name. …

Writers sometimes worry if a day will come when they have nothing more to say. As long as Paul Krugman is around, I will never have that worry. Boston University professor, Lawrence Kotlikoff has suggested that Krugman return his Nobel Prize. I hope he doesn’t. As long as someone with Krugman’s professional status gets his …

Oh, how the media love a good strike. Look at these fast-food workers and peasants standing up to the owners of capital! They aren’t going to take the oppression anymore. The suits in the boardrooms had better shape up and stop hoarding all that money. They need to give it up to the men and …

Whether you agree or not that the U.S. ought to strike Syria, there is one reason it will: Because it has to. (Indeed, the bombing may already have started by the time you read this.) Perpetual war is one of the pillars of the US economy. According to the Mercatus Center, the U.S. spends more …

Like all great historical ideas, the project of licensing journalists so that they may benefit from the First Amendment was born in a very modest place. In fact, it began in the most modest of all places: the brain of Dianne Feinstein, U.S. senator from California. The new law, which was just adopted by Congress …

The position that there need be a state is too often taken for granted. The main body of Sartwell’s book Against the State is dedicated to destroying the arguments for a state from the likes of Hobbes, Rousseau and Hegel. In fact, one thing that becomes crystal clear in reading Sartwell’s book is how bad …

Crispin Sartwell is someone you should know. He is doing important work in recovering forgotten greats in America’s anti-authoritarian tradition. Among other works, he’s put forward a lean and powerful book titled Against the State. In what follows, you’ll see why he’s my favorite living philosopher. Sartwell will take you on an intellectual tour de …

In the last several days, I’ve had three phone conversations with friends — completely normal people who have their wits about them — during which they have declined to say something for fear of government surveillance. They will be talking normally and suddenly catch themselves and divert the conversation. The topics we were discussing were …

From the moment Barack Obama, the president of the United States, arrived at this plush resort community for a family vacation after another year of hard labor for the American people, it was obvious that security was not a detail. Seventy hotel rooms had been booked for the president’s secret police (not counting those for …

Today, like most days, I fired up my computer. I read freely available information on the latest developments in technology that would, in the not too distant past, have required a drive to a library to flip through journals too numerous for me to afford. I read the latest national and global news without having …