Breaking Bad toys Being Pulled by Toys R Us.

A story popped up last week where a Florida mother was concerned about a product she had seen on the shelves of Toys R Us while shopping with her children. The subjectively offensive products were figurines of characters in AMC's hit TV show Breaking Bad. From the Newspaper U-T San Diego's website,"Susan Schrivjer of Fort Myers was not happy when she found the meth-making mastermind Walter White doll alongside the partner-in-crime Jesse Pinkman doll on toy store shelves not far from Barbies and Disney characters."  

Now while this may seem like a pretty easy case for people to hash against Toys R Us, what it shows to me is that a consumer driven market economy is in effect working as it should.
Let me explain, when businesses get word that their customers are upset about a product or service or even a remark made by an employee or CEO they let that company know by differing means, that company, when made aware of these feelings or demands can choose whether or not to cave to pressure or stand by their decision. Toys R Us decided to cave to the demands of the petition signers. This is the markets way of self regulation and also of effective competition breeding. When one store will take down a product or get rid of a service, a competitor can move in to offer them.

I think this whole story has been blown way out of proportion and a real look at the market effectiveness we can see that it can be a good indication that consumer driven markets are working as they should.

Now I'm off to buy some Breaking Bad collectible figurines... Not really... I don't like the show.

The Epidemic of Fear by Captain Paul Watson

The Epidemic of Fear in America
Commentary by Captain Paul Watson

“So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is...fear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror, which paralyzes needed efforts …” 
- President Franklin D. Roosevelt

There is an epidemic in America, but it is not Ebola.

It is an insidious epidemic that began just after September 11th, 2001 and has grown more serious each and every year after.

It is not a physical affliction but rather a mental condition.

It’s called fear and it is completely unreasonable behavior, fabricated by politicians and the military, and disseminated by the corporate media in an effort to deny us basic rights and freedoms and to distract us from real issues and real threats.

Terrorism and disease are the two usual suspects to be paraded through the media to keep citizens scared and manipulated.

The latest is this thing called Ebola. It has millions of people literally trembling with fear and yet it is in reality completely and utterly insignificant.

All we need to do is look at the numbers.

Between 1976 when the first person (A Belgian nun in the Congo) was diagnosed with Ebola and last year there have been a total of 6,964 cases of Ebola resulting in a total of 3,964 deaths.

This year there have been 8,400 cases (4,656 laboratory confirmed cases) cases with 4,033 deaths. This could increase to 1,000 new cases per week.

Surely that sounds a little ominous.

Yet most frightening for Americans is that exactly one of those deaths was in the United States.

Yet last year alone between 300 and 500 million people were infected with malaria and one million of them died. The most common age of death was 4 years old and every 30 seconds a child dies of malaria. Thats 3,000 children each and every day. Two days of malaria deaths equals 40 years of Ebola deaths.

Even if the Ebola cases grow to 1,000 per week as some predict, that is still far short of 21,000 deaths from malaria each week.

40% of the world’s populations is at risk from malaria now but few seem concerned.
Now let’s take a look at tuberculosis. In 2012, 8.6 million people were infected with tuberculosis and 1.3 million died. 

Over 95% of TB deaths occur in low- and middle-income countries, and it is among the top three causes of death for women aged 15 to 44.

Millions die each year from HIV, cancer, heart disease, respiratory disease, measeles etc.

So why the incredible fear about Ebola?

First because it is being treated by some media like a terrorist threat, an invasion out of Africa into America and Europe. Secondly because it is easily exploited as yet another means for government to strip away rights and freedoms and to justify further military expansion. Thirdly death by Ebola is horrific and swift with a very high casualty rate.

And fourtly and most importantly there is this little nugget of a fact. The vaccine being developed could be soon ordered into use with “emergency” clearance by the FDA in the United States with a compulsory vaccination program. And the patent on this “vaccine” is held by TEKMIRA, the same company that Monsanto has just invested in and Monsanto is the company that is now immune from being sued by any citizen by order of the President of the United States.

TEKMIRA Pharmaceuticals, a company working on an anti-Ebola drug, just received a large investment by Monsanto. From their media release: “Tekmira Pharmaceuticals Corporation is a biopharmaceutical company focused on advancing novel RNAi therapeutics and providing its leading lipid nanoparticle (LNP) delivery technology to pharmaceutical partners."

The money from Monsanto is reportedly related to the company's development of RNAi technology used in agriculture. The deal is valued at up to $86.2 million, according to the Wall Street Journal. 

TEKMIRA has a $140 million contract with the U.S. military for Ebola treatment drugs:

Media Release from TEKMIRA: TKM-Ebola, an anti-Ebola virus RNAi therapeutic, is being developed under a $140 million contract with the U.S. Department of Defense's Medical Countermeasure Systems BioDefense Therapeutics (MCS-BDTX) Joint Product Management Office.

This certainly caught my attention that Monsanto just now decided to invest in a company leading the effort to develop an Ebola vaccine or cure and they did so in the midst of the media circus now revolving around Ebola.

Monsanto is the industrial blood-hound for profits. They have this ability to sniff out and exploit basic fears based on media hype and hysteria and of course they contribute to the these fears by releasing scare campaigns either directly or indirectly.

The potential for a huge market is rapidly developing and the collusion of the U.S. military has alarm bells going off in my head.

The history of medical research has shown that drug companies, the CDC and the World Health Organization have time and time again hyped the severity of potential pandemics in order to promote sales of promising miracle cures or preventive vaccines.

It is always suspicious when profits surge as hysteria over some new disease is hyped. Vaccine manufacturers made billions off the overly-exaggerated swine flu “epidemic” that did not happen and tens of millions of dollars in stockpiled swine flu vaccines that had to be destroyed by governments that panicked and purchased them with the taxpayers loss, being the pharmaceutical companies gain.

If completed, will a fast-tracked TEKMIRA vaccine work? It may be impossible to tell because with only two cases reported in America the chances of other Americans being infected are extremely low and if they are infected, or worse, if the vaccine itself has a side effect including death, Monsanto and possibly TEKMIRA because of its link to Monsanto may well be immune from responsibility,

Prior to 2014 Ebola it was just another relatively unknown disease killing black people in Africa just like malaria and tuberculosis, which most Americans and Europeans care little about primarily because poor Africans don’t have the money to cough up for drugs despite the fact that anti-malarial drugs sometimes take up half the income of some African residents. The problem is that half their income is still the price of a dinner for two and a movie, to most Americans or Europeans.

However concern about malaria that is rapidly changing as climate change is expanding the range of the Anopheline mosquito at the same time that the Pasmodium parasite, spread by the mosquito, is developing a resistance to the drugs used to combat it.

Every year about 2,000 cases are reported in the United States and the mosquito that transmits malaria can be found in California, Texas, Michigan and around New York City. 

There were an estimated 207 million cases of malaria in 2012 (uncertainty range: 135 – 287 million) and an estimated 627 000 deaths (uncertainty range: 473 000 – 789 000). 90% of all malaria deaths occur in sub-Saharan Africa. - WHO, 2013.

Right now African nations and the international community are responding to the Ebola virus just as they respond to terrorism. When a suicide bomber strikes a crowded market and a few dozen people die, panic dictates the response with drastic measures infringing on human and civil rights as governments vow to hunt down the person or persons responsible. Yet malaria kills steadily at a pace of two victims per minute, 120 victims every hour, and it is scarcely noticed. 

Lyme disease, Dengue fever and a revival of measles and whooping cough should be of more concern than Ebola.

Influenza kills a half a million people a year and since the first outbreak of Ebola in 1976, influenza has killed nineteen million people.

The same situation with terrorism. The average American, especially the average Black American has a greater chance of being shot and killed by an American police officer than by a Middle Eastern Terrorist. 

The two easiest ways of sowing and spreading fear are through the threats of terrorism and pestilence. Thus it is relatively easy to manufacture a program of fear through sensationalizing both terrorism and disease, especially terrorism linked to an alien religion and culture, or a disease linked to dark fears out of Africa and images of zombies. 

Real threats like climate change and mass extinction of species are being denied, diseases like malaria and tuberculosis are being ignored just as radiation leaks are being ignored. Just a brief note about Fukushima, remember Fukushima? Well it’s still leaking and tons of radioactive sea-water is being dumped into the ocean each and every day. Not that anyone is actually noticing. 

Ebola is a serious concern in West Africa although it still remains a minor cause of death relative to malaria and tuberculosis. It is not however the great harbinger of doomsday that many in government and media would like us to believe.

Ebola does present us with a warning that there are viruses being hosted by other species that will be jumping to another species if their particular host species are being diminished or driven to extinction. Unfortunately for us, human beings represent a very large alternative host species.

We do know that Ebola is connected with the bush-meat trade. In1997 in Gabon, 37 people died of Ebola. A chimpanzee found dead in the forest was eaten by people hunting for food. All nineteen people who were involved in the butchery of the animal became ill, the others infected were all family members of the poachers.

Ebola has been found in bats, chimps, monkeys and pigs.

I am not dismissing the potential for Ebola and other viral infections from increasing their impact humanity but I seriously doubt that Ebola will surpass or even come close to the death tolls tallied up each year by malaria and tuberculosis or most of the other deadly viral or bacterial diseases.

Unless it can be found that the Ebola virus can be airborne or even worse, spread by mosquitos, the disease can be easily contained. So far the virus has not been found to be spread by any other means than by direct contact with bodily fluids.

Walking through a room of Ebola patients equates to an extremely small chance of contracting the disease whereas walking thorough a room of influenza patients presents a very high probability of contracting the flu. And we must not forget that the influenza pandemic of 1918 killed we

Florida Politics still not hitting adulthood.

Last night’s debate between Incumbent Governor Rick Scott and Former Florida Governor Charlie Crist started a bit late. The issue wasn’t over anything major, Rick Scott was citing a rule in the debate guidelines that states no electronic devices will be present at the speaker’s podium or lectern. Charlie Crist insisted on having a fan under his lectern and refused to give way to the demands of the Scott Campaign.


Besides adult behavior, also missing from this debate were other candidates in the race to become Florida’s next governor. Adrian Wyllie of the Libertarian Party had been denied inclusion into this debate. Citing other rules of the debate forum CNN, who hosted the debate, did not included Wyllie or two other candidates who are running independent of political party affiliation. Supporters for Wyllie were present at the location of the debate as well as on scene as Wyllie gave his own responses to the debate questions in a nearby hotel.

Rothbard on Self-Defense and War - David Gordon - Mises Daily

Recently the classical liberal legal scholar Richard Epstein criticized “hard-core libertarians.” These extremists want to keep out of “foreign entanglements.” If, as the extremists propose, we act only when there is a direct threat to the United States, “it may be too late.” We should strike immediately against the “forces of death and destruction” such as ISIS. We must spread liberty throughout the world in general, and the Middle East in particular.

Murray Rothbard certainly qualifies as a “hard-core libertarian.” Did he turn a blind eye to threats, owing to a commitment to unrealistic principles? By no means: but he differed from contemporary warmongers about the nature of these threats.

To grasp his ideas, it is best to put international relations aside for a moment and begin with an individual’s right to defense. Unlike Robert LeFevre, Rothbard was not a pacifist. To the contrary, he tells us in The Ethics of Liberty,

Absolute pacifists who also assert their belief in property rights ... are caught in an inescapable inner contradiction: for if a man owns property and yet is denied the right to defend it against attack, then it is clear that a very important aspect of that ownership is being denied to him.[1]

We have, then, the right to defend by violence our person and property; but, even if we are threatened, we cannot do anything we like in the name of “defense.” For one thing, there must be “an actual or directly threatened invasion of one’s property.” A mere intimation that someone might in future act in a hostile way against you does not suffice. “It would clearly be grotesque and criminally invasive to shoot a man across the street because his angry look seemed to you to portend an invasion.”[2]

Further, a response to invasion must be proportional. You cannot kill someone just for stepping uninvited onto your property. Rothbard altogether repudiates the view that any rights violator shows himself to be an outlaw who forfeits all rights. “On what basis must we hold that a minuscule invasion of another’s property lays one forfeit to the total loss of one’s own? I propose another fundamental rule regarding crime: the criminal, or invader, loses his own right to the extent that he has deprived another man of his.”[3]

The exercise of the right to self-defense is subject to another restriction; and this, we shall see, is of crucial importance once we turn to foreign relations. You cannot, while defending yourself, violate the rights of innocents. You cannot shoot an innocent bystander because he blocks the way to your otherwise justified response to an aggressor.

Suppose that, in this world, Jones finds that he or his property is being aggressed against by Smith. It is legitimate, as we have seen, for Jones to repel this invasion by the use of defensive violence. But, now we must ask: is it within the right of Jones to commit aggressive violence against innocent third parties in the course of his legitimate defense against Smith? Clearly the answer must be “No.” For the rule prohibiting violence against the persons or property of innocent men is absolute; it holds regardless of the subjective motives for the aggression. It is wrong, and criminal, to violate the property or person of another, even if one is a Robin Hood, or is starving, or is defending oneself against a third man’s attack.[4]

Rothbard subjects nations to the same limits, and the last of these limits is especially important. Modern warfare of necessity involves assaults on the innocent, and this Rothbard refuses to sanction. “All of the consequences of inter-territorial war make it almost inevitable that inter-State war will involve aggression by each side against the innocent civilians — the private individuals — of the other.”[5]

In seeking to restrict the conduct of war, Rothbard looked to traditional just war theory. Rothbard cites in this connection Vitoria, Suarez, Grotius, and their successors in later centuries, who carefully specified the limits a state must follow in warfare.

The classical international lawyers developed two ideas, which they were broadly successful in getting nations to adopt: Above all, don't target civilians. If you must fight, let the rulers and their loyal or hired retainers slug it out, but keep civilians on both sides out of it, as much as possible ... [and] Preserve the rights of neutral states and nations. ... In a theory which tried to limit war, neutrality was considered not only justifiable but a positive virtue[6]

Rothbard followed the great figures in the just war tradition, but he radically extended their view. For him, the state was not merely subject to limits comparable to those restricting an individual trying to defend himself. Far from it: the state is a predatory organization. Its growth and seizure of new powers, inevitable in war, must be combated.

All State wars, therefore, involve increased aggression against the State’s own taxpayers, and almost all State wars (all, in modern warfare) involve the maximum aggression (murder) against the innocent civilians ruled by the enemy State.[7]

Given the manifest dangers of the predatory state, we should oppose the involvement of our own state in any foreign disputes. In the guise of spreading liberty abroad, America’s foreign interventions serve rather to extend tyranny at home.

But what of the claim that a non-interventionist policy ignores potential dangers that could inflict massive damage on our population? It is rather late in the day to make this claim. “Regime change” in Iraq was needed to protect us from “weapons of mass destruction.” These weapons did not exist, but the fiasco has not stopped the propagandists for war. Now we are told that ISIS, a small group that holds territory in Iraq and Syria, poses a threat to America: only “extremists” deny this. The claim follows a familiar pattern. It is a twice-told tale that, one hopes, will not again fool the American public.

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David Gordon is a Senior Fellow at the Mises Institute. He is author of Resurrecting Marx and An Introduction to Economic Reasoning and editor of numerous books including The Essential Rothbard, available in the Mises Store. Send him mail. See David Gordon's article archives.

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Rothbard on Self-Defense and War - David Gordon - Mises Daily

More "Security" Without The State?

Down with the Police State! No More Police! Things like this get thrown out a lot by social libertarians and anarchists alike, even getting the attention and involvement of a few Republicans and Democrats who see the brutality of the police without noticing the monopoly of force they impose on the regular. There is however an aspect of ridding ourselves of this compulsory reactionary force of police missed by a majority of people; the fact that without the police of today, the ones who are paid for through compulsory and mandatory taxation, without recourse or ability to address grievances, we COULD have more security personnel.

Crazy aspect right? Not really. Many of the advocates of ending the Police State and the obligatory manner in which they are funded and operate are also proponents of private property and the rights of the owners. Under this idea the owners of every property, whether commercial or residential COULD have the possibility to hire their own private security services. Under this model every store you walk into in a mall type setting could have their own security officers, from different service providers. Also, in the residential sense, each home COULD have their own services being provided, not much unlike security systems installed in their homes already, but enlarged or advanced to include property security, investigations in the instance of property violations, and preventative security measures to reduce or preclude any attempt violations of property.

Local story of an prior law enforcement officer starting a private security firm. Click Here.

As the police today are for the most part becoming an aggressive force, one that needs to be checked by the people. Market provided services and funded by voluntary means COULD provided a service of security while ridding the public of compulsory funded, hyper-aggressive and increasingly militarized agents of the government. I stress the word COULD in this because without a doubt, this is only in theory but I feel should be at least recognized and investigated as an alternative. It is also only a COULD because as security is a personal value assessed by individuals, it is up to the owners of each property to make the choice to have security or not.

This Is What Happens When You Call The Cops by Rob Hustle

Stats on Afghanistan since 2001

Since October 7th 2001 the US military has occupied Afghanistan. That is 13 years. 4735 days.

Billions of dollars have been used, wasted. The estimate for the cost of deploying one U.S. soldier in Afghanistan is over US$1 million a year. The total cost from inception to the fiscal year 2011 was expected to be $468 billion.

US service member deaths are 3749 estimated 30000 wounded.

Afghanistan deaths, both military and civilian, have been estimated at 35-50 thousand.

On Wage Slavery

I think "Wage Slavery" is a false term.

Wages are what employees gain from their service and labor to their employer. It is an act of voluntary exchange on the part of both parties. If wages were not gained by this service then slavery would exist, in the presence of wages though it is merely employment by mutual terms.

Slavery, historically, is the position of a person who through compulsion is held against their will and forced (by threat of violence)to work for the gain of the "slaveholder or slave master".

Using the word wages in conjunction with the word slavery does two things. One it lowers the definition of wages to the negative connotation of being forced to work for the benefit of another without ANY reimbursement. Secondly it tends to negate the real horrors of real slavery that has happened and is still happening around the world.  

The term "wage slavery" defined deals with those wages that are so low that a person who is employed relies on them just for basic survival. Of course wages should be used in the pursuit of survival and any wants left to be pursued, if that is the want of the wage earner. One cannot force a person to use their own property in any other way that they do not wish. 

Hereto we must interject on the reverse side of this issue. Mandatory wage and Minimum wage laws handed down from government bureaus and departments. These laws force businesses and businesses owners to provide wages beyond that of market value or personal labor value. These laws almost always lead to higher prices in market goods as the mandatory minimum wages are offset in the businessman's pursuit to maintain certain levels of profit. 

Wage Slavery is a false point being made by those that wish to direct the affairs of businesses that do not affect them in the personal way.

Government according to P.J. Proudhon

To be governed is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so.

To be governed is be at every operation, at every transaction noted, registered, counted, taxed, stamped,measured, numbered, assessed,licensed, authorized, admonished,prevented, forbidden, reformed,corrected, punished.

It is, under pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, be placed under contribution,drilled, fleeced, exploited, monopolized, extorted from, squeezed, hoaxed, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, funded, vilified harassed, hunted down, abused, clubbed, disarmed, bound, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned,shot deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, derided, outraged, dishonored.

That is government; that is its justice, that is its morality

P.J. Proudhon 1923