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Grumpy Cat is not a fan of Obamacare.

If anyone still doesn't understand why NSA's spying is a bad thing, http://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2013/nov/26/nsa-gchq-surveillance... may help.

Every Thanksgiving, the Wall Street Journal gives over its Editorial space to an essay called And the Fair Land. I expect it will be seen again this Thursday.
 
T-Day actually has a rather disreputable history. Allegedly the Plymouth Colony pilgrims celebrated their first harvest and invited their native American neighbors to share the feast, and so they may have; but the first was a thin feast and in later years native Americans were made subject to systematic government genocide.
 
Harvests dramatically improved after 1623, when the communist structure of the settlement gave way to the private ownership of land. Even Governor Bradford had to admit that “This had very good success”.
 
The designation of the annual, National holiday was fixed by Abraham Lincoln, who in the middle of his war to prevent secession declared in 1863 "Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens". Hypocrisy seems to know no limit, and I wonder how far the victims of his army's savagery shared his pretended piety.
 
We shall know that the Government Era is over when the WSJ, or its successor, scraps that romantic editorial and substitutes Murray Rothbard's What really Happened at Plymouth.
 

When it comes to the TSA, justice is an anomaly.

Libertarians advocate jury nullification.

The FDA is an anti-innovation organization.

Church and State collusion, at least philosophically, continues to thrive in academia.

It's fifty years ago today since you-know-what, and although generally I'm slow to assume a conspiracy (I'm still awaiting a credible and reasonably coherent MIHOP theory for 9/11 for example) I do join the 61% who still think Oswald didn't act alone.
 
The mainstream media (MSM) have been busy this month trying to convince this 61% to change our minds, and that makes me wonder: why bother?
 
Suppose arguendo that they are right; that Lee Oswald was a low-life with big ideas and small talent, who wanted to gain immortality by doing an historic thing. Jacob Hornberger has an interesting take on that, by the way, here on FFF. If it were so, the killing would be a tragedy like all deaths, but not much more. Why the fuss? - methinks the MSM doth protest too much.
 
Cui bono? - a long list; LBJ gained the Presidency, and by re-activating the Vietnam war he gained a fortune from his holdings in military contractor firms. The whole Military Industrial Complex likewise gained huge business. The CIA was pulled back from the very brink of JFK-planned extinction. The Mafia gained vengeance on the power behind RFK, who had double crossed it by waging war on it after it had favored his brother by getting out the graveyard vote in Cook County as a favor to their old bootlegger buddy Joseph, the brothers' pa.
 
And who were best placed to choreograph the assassination? - the very same list.
 
Now, if the great American public formed a fixed opinion that a President, his intelligence staff, his friends in industry, and some of the most distinguished godfathers in American crime had all systematically conspired to commit murder, frame a patsy, and fool us all for half a century, the tatters of confidence in the established order would be swept away.
 
So, they worry :-)

The State loves to link the ownership of weapons to "insanity".  

My favorite author on another site is Fred Reed. If I see his name on its daily menu of new articles, I click on it first. He is highly articulate, irreverent, accurate and funny. More than once, I've used his email link to tell him, Thanks.
 
But once in a while, he blows it; and he never blew it worse than this week, here.
 
He's written against evolution before, but this attempt is long, ridiculous and ill-reasoned. The very first sentence is grammatically suspect, and it goes down hill from there; since when was “ardent” a noun? Presumably, he was trying to say – incorrectly – that “the intent of this essay is not to debate with those ardent for evolutionism...” He then proceeds for over five thousand words to try to do precisely that, and fails.
 
Darwin is my favorite scientist, in large part because of his honesty in following the rational, scientific method even as it was leading him away from his pre-formed world-view. He was a theist, yet his findings told him that the natural world probably had no creator, or that if it does, that creator is cruel. His theory, abundantly confirmed since, is that species mutate and that mutants survive and reproduce if suited to their environment as well as or better than their progenitors, or die off if not – usually from starvation.
 
Now here cometh Reed, and sayeth that he can better believe in a self-assembling A-380 than in a self-assembling baby, and his mastery of prose is matched only by his ignorance of DNA “instructions.” His resounding conclusion is that “There is Something Else involved. I do not know what.” Well, whoopy-do. Bottom line (literally): he knows of no alternative. His is the Unknown God. Irrational, to the power of N.
 
Just prior to the essay's long-needed end, Reed offers this swipe: “Suppose a Darwinist found out that my hobby was using a blow torch to torture to death children with severe congenital retardation—vegetables, in the unkind vernacular. He would be horrified. 'Why?' I would ask.”
 
Very clever. Evolution is cruel – true, and sad. So he tries to smear, as also cruel, those who recognize that  the evolutionary theory is one of the best-supported in all science. What he misses is the really wonderful fact that an inherently cruel process has produced one species (at least) with moral sense far superior to that of the designer of the process if there was one – Reed's Unknown God.
 
So the answer to his nasty question “Why?” is that humans have developed rational ethics. Morality “needs” a supernatural morality teacher no more than the development of life needs a supernatural life-inventor.