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Liberty and Power



  • Uneasy Stalemate at USM

    by Liberty and Power

    At the University of Southern Mississippi an uneasy stalemate now prevails, as just a few days remain until the next meeting of the Mississippi College Board. On May 19th and 20th the Board is slated to review the performance of President Shelby Thames.

    Thames has sustained a series of losses over the past two and a half weeks:

    • The Board, via retired Judge Reuben Anderson, required him to accept a settlement that prevented him from firing Professors Frank Glamser and Gary

  • Imperialism Loses, Again!

    by Liberty and Power

    Yesterday in the Preakness,"Smarty Jones" blew away the field winning by 11 and a half lengths, a new record."Imperialism" finished out of the money.

    Now the Question of the Day is, did Bush, Rummy, Wolfie, Condi & all the Neocon tooters for Empire bet on their nag Imperialism, or even go out to Maryland to see him run?


  • More Kristof, More Iran

    by Liberty and Power

    As a follow-up to my posts on important changes in Iran, take a look at Nicholas Kristof's ongoing series in today's NY Times. In"Velvet Hand, Iron Glove," Kristof inadvertently makes a Hayekian-friendly point about how the radical dispersal of knowledge and information is contributing to the unraveling of a


  • TOC's Hudgins Gets it Right

    by Liberty and Power

    As many of my L&P readers know, I have been extremely critical of a number of Randian commentators who have not shown enough sensitivity to the enormously complex issue of bringing"freedom" to the Islamic-dominated countries of the Middle East.

    So it is only fair that I highlight an essay with which I do agree, in large measure. Edward Hudgins of The Objectivist Center has written an insightful essay that asks the following questi


  • Thomas Sowell Now One of the Anointed

    by Liberty and Power

    Apparently, one of the casualties of the war in Iraq has been the intellect of Thomas Sowell. On Thursday the Washington Times published a column by Sowell which argued that the messenger deserved the blame for the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. He wrote, “What the media did, irresponsibly, was send inflammatory photographs around the world.”

    Sowell goes on to suggest that it would have been better to wait until af


  • "Exterminate All the Brutes"

    by Liberty and Power

    Apropos of the war-and-human-nature discussion going on these past weeks, here's the Toledo Blade's four-part series on war crimes by"Tiger Force," an elite U.S. Army unit in the Vietnam War. (The series earned the Blade a Pulitzer this year). Links to the whole thing can be found here. There's so

  • They're Coming for Your Beer

    by Liberty and Power

    Here comes the first big wave of lawsuits:
    Consumers' attorneys across the nation have begun to target the alcoholic beverage industry, filing lawsuits that claim that some leading brewers and distillers are using slick advertising to sell products to underage drinkers.

    Lawsuits filed since November in Ohio, California, North Carolina, Colorado and Washington, D.C., appear modeled after cases that wer


  • Nick Berg

    by Liberty and Power

    The Nick Berg story gets weirder by the minute. 9/11 connections, his parents are members of ANSWER, and his father apparently said he was a"friend" of al-Qaeda and Iraq.

    Read here, here, here, and


  • Secondhand Blowback

    by Liberty and Power

    Since 9/11, any mention of violence against Americans as"blowback" from our foreign policy has triggered cries from the conservative crowd of treachery. Merely suggesting that we ought not needlessly provoke militant Muslims into further wanting to killing us has always been met with words like"appeasement,"" capitulation," and"kowtowing."

    Funny how attitudes change when the provocation comes from the news media instead of Republican foreign policy.

    The latest meme from the pro-wa


  • Not the First Time

    by Liberty and Power

    Lest we forget our history this is not the first time that the U.S. government has made indefensible moral decisions under some half-baked rationalization to defend American interests. As bad as beating and abusing Iraqi prisoners is, it's nothing compared to the choices U.S. intelligence made after World War II when we knowingly allowed Nazi war criminals to emigrate to the U.S. Of course we've known some of this for a while, but a new collection entitled

  • This Month's Reason

    by Liberty and Power

    Just a brief note to mention the brilliant cover of this month's Reason magazine. The cover of my issue says "STEVE HORWITZ: They know where you are!" above that is a satellite shot of Canton with my street circled in red. You can pick out my house. Inside the front cover is a customized intro letter from Nick with all kinds of data about Canton. They did this for all 40,000 subscribers as part of a feature on databases and privacy etc.. It is

  • The Siege

    by Liberty and Power

    I saw the 1998 movie "The Siege" on USA network last night. Pre-9/11, it's just another"Peacemaker" or"Sum of All Fears"--distinguished principally by the filmmakers' politically incorrect decision to cast terrorists that aren't some variety of Slav. Post-9/11, it's as close to prescient as Hollywood gets.

    * Terrorism that's mostly low-tech, yet nonetheless terrifying; bus bombings, buildings levelled (in


  • Shameless Self-Promotion

    by Liberty and Power

    As W. S. Gilbert put it in Ruddigore:

    If you wish in the world to advance,
    Your merits you're bound to enhance,
    You must stir it and stump it,
    And blow your own trumpet,
    Or, trust me, you haven't a chance!

    So here goes: A page of links to my writings on psychiatric and medical issues has been added to the Thomas S. Szasz Cyberc


  • Dear Warhawks

    by Liberty and Power

    I know these have been an extraordinarily difficult couple of weeks for you, and I'm very sorry about that. The unending fighting in Iraq after we've been there for over a year, the accelerating race to the June 30 deadline -- even though we don't seem to have the slightest idea who or what it is we're going to be turning"sovereignty" over to or what the hell that"sovereignty" might consist of, the inability of our