"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." ~ H.L. Mencken
Civil Disobedience
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"Foreign sales accounted for 10 percent of all existing home sales by dollar volume and 5 percent by number of properties. In total, foreign buyers purchased 284,455 homes, up 32 percent from the previous year. Half of all foreign sales were in just three states: Florida, California and Texas."
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"Privacy advocates suffered a stinging defeat by a federal appeals court which ruled in favor of the FBI’s nondisclosure surveillance requests enforced on social media and tech companies. A three-judge panel of the Ninth US Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco reached a unanimous decision and ruled against privacy advocates while agreeing with a lower court ruling that the FBI, using gag orders, may issue secret national security letters requesting customer data."
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"You may remember this case, actually, because I wrote about it in August 2015. This is the case in which police raided a medical-marijuana shop in southern California (though medical marijuana is legal here, of course), carefully went around smashing or stealing all the shop’s surveillance equipment, then did things they should not have done, only to later complain because those things were recorded by the backup surveillance system they missed. In fact, they later sued the city they worked...
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"The UK government announced Tuesday it will outlaw advertisements that feature gender stereotypes after it received complaints on ads portraying housewives cleaning and children playing with gendered toys. The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) said ads reinforcing gender roles or making fun of those who do not uphold them have “costs for individuals, the economy and society,” according to the BBC, which detailed ads previously found problematic by viewers. The ASA performs a regulatory...
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"Walk into almost any market in Iraq and the shelves are filled with goods from Iran — milk, yogurt, chicken. Turn on the television and channel after channel broadcasts programs sympathetic to Iran. A new building goes up? It is likely that the cement and bricks came from Iran. And when bored young Iraqi men take pills to get high, the illicit drugs are likely to have been smuggled across the porous Iranian border. And that’s not even the half of it."
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"North Korea does not have the ability to strike the United States with "any degree of accuracy" and while its missiles have the range, they lack the necessary guidance capability, the vice chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff said on Tuesday."
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"Because the top cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin and Ethereum are open source, any one can create their own cryptocurrencies. While the proliferation of cryptocurrencies has central banks concerened, another more insidious and perhaps greater threat to central banks’ monopoly on money creation is the issuance of scriptural euros by citizens."
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"Just a day after reports emerged that the FBI had seized a number of "smashed hard drives" and other computer equipment from the residence Imran Awan, the IT aide of Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, we learn that Awan has been captured at the Dulles airport while attempted to flee the country. According to Fox News, Awan has been charged with bank fraud."
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"There are security f*ck-ups and there are legendary security f*ck-ups. This one clearly falls into the latter category. Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Lofven confirmed at a press conference on Monday that his administration potentially exposed the personal information of millions of Sweden’s citizens."
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"The US House of Representatives has overwhelmingly passed a new round of sanctions on Iran, Russia, and North Korea. The bill also limits the president’s ability to unliaterally lift sanctions, forcing him to seek Congressional approval. The bill passed quickly, with no deliberation. The final vote was 419-3 in favor of the sanctions."
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"Moving on, Townsend took the conversation in a direction that he said might be outside of Malmgren’s comfort zone: The rise of cryptocurrency’s like bitcoin. Contrary to his expectations, Malmgren said she’s been closely following the increasing use of cryptocurrencies, adding that they will likely play a role in determining who dominates the global economy, and therefore determines the monetary framework, after precipitating the next big paradigm shift, which will lead the world away from the...
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"Newsflash! Uruguay has fashioned a marijuana legalization program that is smart and graceful, yet does not turn the little South American nation into a tourist Mecca like Amsterdam. Legalization only applies to citizens. It may be the best decriminalization model yet."
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"Recently, a stolen police helicopter attacked the Venezuelan Supreme Court with grenades and automatic weapons. While no one was hurt, the incident should serve as a wake-up call for the entire Western Hemisphere, including the United States. The attack demonstrates a quantum escalation of the hunger-fueled conflict that has consumed the country for close to a year."
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"More than 60 Islamic leaders and imams -- from France, Belgium, Britain, Tunisia, and of different Islamic faiths -- in a move that may be unprecedented, are touring Europe to denounce Islamic terrorism and to pay homage to the victims of terror in Europe by visiting many of the sites of terror attacks. It is ironic that while the "liberal" world has been busy in Canada lavishing millions on the "Foreign Terrorist Fighter" Omar Khadr, and in the US pampering extremists such as Linda Sarsour...
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"A statistically significant poll of the American adult Internet population reveals that 52.4% believe the US government would mislead them "about a foreign government’s use of chemical weapons in order to justify US military action." 45.7% responded that they did not believe the US government would mislead them, while the remainder (1.9%) provided other responses."
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