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Columns by Nicholas Strakon

Pseudoephedrine and Pseudofreedom
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Nicholas Strakon 2005-05-01 16:00
The Indiana legislature still hasn't passed the bill controlling the sale of cold medicines containing pseudoephedrine, and time is running out in the session. Lately -- praise Chronos! -- the lawfakers have been stemwinding over daylight-saving time. But they've done that deed now, and it seems likely that some cold-med bill will indeed pass.
Just Look What They"ve Made Us Do!
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Nicholas Strakon 2004-05-18 16:00
"He who fights monsters should beware lest he himself become a monster." -- Nietzsche CounterPunch has posted a piece by Robert Fisk of The Independent, "Racism & Torture as Entertainment: From Hollywood to Abu Ghraib," that I'm going to use as a hook for something I've been meaning to say. Fisk writes: "When the young woman involved in [the Iraqi-prisoner] torture expressed her surprise at...
Worse Than Nothing
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Nicholas Strakon 2004-04-27 16:00
Earthlings are fast turning into Martians, but in at least one respect I myself have felt like a Martian forever: I've always been puzzled by the fact that some professional sportsmen earn millions of dollars. But it's mostly a market result, even if those millions of market decisions by sports customers are crucially conditioned by an artificially distorted and degraded popular culture. And,...
That Makes Her a Heroine in My Book
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Nicholas Strakon 2004-03-09 17:00
A government court has convicted Martha Stewart of lying to the government. If she actually did it, good for her! And down with Them! As a libertarian writer, I've tried to popularize the traditional distinction between a =malum in se,= an act that is wrong in itself; and a =malum prohibitum,= an act that some political authority has prohibited for reasons of its own. The latter category--...
Another Strategic Theft, Another Strategic Defeat
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Nicholas Strakon 2004-03-08 17:00
In his recent essay "George Washington: The Dark Side," Henry Gallagher Fields writes of how thieving consolidationists obliged true federalists to resort to the term "Anti-Federalist," and he goes on to describe "the dismal American tradition whereby Lincoln could orate about defending self-determination while pulverizing its remnants in the Southern States; socialists could steal the term '...
They Owe Me!
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Nicholas Strakon 2004-02-29 17:00
"THEY =OWE= ME!" The American military has been described as the country's largest social-service agency, in light of the panoply of benefits accruing to military members and their dependents. But the garrison state promotes the welfare-rights mentality in a more-insidious way, and you can see evidence of that from time to time when Minitrue does an ordinary-folk interview during one of its "news...
The Daily Subversion
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Nicholas Strakon 2004-02-26 17:00
It's still sticking in my craw, so I'm going to write about it some more. In a previous "Stop and think" entry I related the travails that resulted from my misguided attempt to purchase a few cigars at a nearby Walgreen's drugstore. But as I banged away at the keyboard I found myself drifting unreachably far from the point I originally wanted to make, namely, that in displaying my outrage I had...
Crisis and Leviathan
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Nicholas Strakon 2004-02-22 17:00
In 1987, when Little George and his band of thugs were only an ugly speck on the horizon, Robert Higgs wound up his great book Crisis and Leviathan by writing, in part: ". . . Assuming that our luck holds and our society survives, we do know something -- at least abstractly -- about the future. We know that other great crises will come. Whether they will be occasioned by foreign wars, economic...
The Great Breast Sighting of 2004
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Nicholas Strakon 2004-02-05 17:00
As telescreen viewers may be aware, during a musical interlude in a recent football match a young white boy performing as "Justin Timberlake" (surely a made-up name) momentarily declothed part of the upper body of a black female singer who is apparently related, in some way, to the beloved celebrity Michael Jackson. In response, Authorities within Minitrue and also within the official regime are...