Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr.'s Blog, page 2302

The Young and the Stupid

Oh, the virtue-signaling was hot and heavy as conservative and ostensibly “libertarian” media outlets competed to see who come up with the most self-righteously abusive rhetoric to describe North Korean Politburo member Kim Yo Yong, sister to Kim Jong Un. BuzzFeed grabbed the prize with “a garbage monster” – BuzzFeed being an expert when it comes to garbage. Reason’s Nick Gillespie could hardly contain his joy at the fusillade of hatred: “It was younger media outlets and personalities such as...

Public School Control Now!

The murder of 17 innocent high school students in Parkland, Florida reminds us that public schools are dangerous. Too dangerous for children.

Yet there are pro-public school ideologues who refuse to face the facts. They shut their eyes to reality. They spout their slogan: “Public schools don’t kill public students. Killers kill public school students.” We have heard this for 50 years. Yet the killers are always one of these: (1) enrolled public school students, (2) public school graduates, or...

One Trillion Stars

The nearest neighboring major galaxy to the Milky Way is the Andromeda Galaxy. The large galaxy is stunning in size and has around three times as many stars as the Milky Way does. It can easily be seen with the naked eye from Earth, and it is found in the constellation of Andromeda, from which its name originates.

Far from being just a pretty sight in the sky, the Andromeda Galaxy is an impressive, turbulent patch of the cosmos. It is even expected to collide with the Milky Way years down the...

The Ghosts of 1968

The hope of 1968 that public demonstrations can actually change the power structure has been lost.

1968 was a tumultuous year globally and domestically. The Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia–a very mild form of political and cultural liberalization within the Soviet bloc–was brutally crushed by the military forces of the Soviet Union.

The general strikes and student protests of May 1968 brought France to a standstill as demands for social and political change called the entire status quo into q...

Sign of a Dysfunctional Empire

President Donald Trump’s latest $4.4 trillion budget proposal calls for boosting military spending by nearly $200 billion over the next two years, and would balloon the national debt by more than $7 trillion over the next decade. Pundits proclaim it “dead on arrival.”

But the likely alternative, based on the recent congressional budget accord, will be an equally irresponsible combination of sky-high military spending and even more borrowing – signs of a dysfunctional empire unable to manage i...

Explaining the Doomsday Cult

Doomsday cults have existed since the dawn of time, and the global warming panic is the most widespread doomsday cult in existence today. People have been donning sackcloths, smothering their faces in ash, and heading out to the deserts to be swept away in a purge of cataclysmic fury that ultimately never came, since time immemorial. The big media houses like to showcase the small practitioners of the apocalyptic philosophy today, like the itinerant preacher with dozens of followers in Califo...

The Vindication of Joe McCarthy

Alright, there are some serious competitors for that title, even if we limit ourselves to books on the cold war era.  Notably, Witness by Whittaker Chambers is a more literary, though less learned, revelation.   Yet beyond the hyperbole (courtesy of Miss Coulter) there lies a kernel of truth, or at least an application of the marginal utility theorem.   Unless you have, Blacklisted by History: The untold story of Joe McCarthy is the most important book that you have not yet read on American p...

An Open Letter to Professor David Neumark

May 12, 2017

Prof. David Neumark
Economics Department
University of California
Irvine, CA
dneumark@uci.edu

Dear Prof. Neumark:

I have long been an adamant and bitter opponent of the minimum wage law, and a long-time admirer of your work on this pernicious legislation, see below for some few of your contributions to the literature debunking its false claims.

So, when I heard you were lecturing on the subject of poverty at next door Tulane University last week, I begot myself over there and lis...

MK Ultra: the Mind-Control Program

Over the past week, I’ve been watching the History Channel’s America’s War on Drugs mini docu-series. To my surprise, the History Channel was shockingly honest about the CIA’s involvement in the war on drugs and the massive political propaganda campaigns that went along with it. The series criminalized the CIA and the government, and rightly so, discussing their involvement in drug trafficking, production, and testing — on both volunteers and unwilling patients — and even murder.

Part of the...

Jordan Peterson and Human Action

When a psychology professor at the University of Toronto publicly rejected the forced use of a set of pronouns, it catapulted him into the news feeds and conversations of millions of people. Jordan Peterson’s enduring renown, however, has been sustained by the immense interest in what he has to say about the deepest questions.

His lectures on YouTube cover archetypal interpretations of the Bible, the meaning of life, human personality, and even five hours’ worth of dissecting Disney’s Pinocch...