I am leaving everything that is published here to be found. There are some good ideas here even if they aren’t well described.

However, this just means I’ve been making my case in shorter messages on social networks that I frequent. I’m convinced some people have blocked my updates on their Facebook feeds. I have been unfriended and blocked on Twitter for bashing the Federal Reserve and the Obama administration.

But, I will not give into terrorists! The message of Liberty is too important. Besides, those who block and unfriend me are obviously not real friends. So there is the unintended benefit of weeding out the fakes.

Of the five latest blog posts that show up here, one of them is about the right to be naked. It is entirely coincidental that I am again writing about that six months later. This time, I am prompted by a tweet from one of my favorite–and real–friends. The NY Times ran a story about a nude window display in Greenwich Village, NYC.

Reading Right to be Naked will explain why laws disallowing nudity violate Liberty so I won’t go into that.

The question that we need to answer is not which opinion we have is the right one. They are both right. Whether you believe people should be allowed to walk around naked or not is not the issue. We cannot make laws for an entire population based on the whims of a majority or minority in any given time period. The question to answer is whether or not we are a free people.

I will quote a paragraph from the article and then smash it to pieces:

“If you’re walking down a street in New York City and someone is naked in the window — and so children and whoever can see it — you’re depriving people of their choice,” said Daniel S. Connolly, a managing partner at the law firm Bracewell & Giuliani, and a former lawyer for the city who handled public nudity cases. “That’s where you butt up against other people’s rights.”

This sounds good and reasonable. We obviously shouldn’t deprive people of their right to free choice. Afterall, if we do that, we are violating another’s rights and that is a problem. I have no qualms with that idea: it is the fundamental principle of Liberty. The problem is the way this is framed.

It is completely rubbish.

Which right is being deprived when there is a naked person on the street? Is it the right to see people naked or clothed? That is not a right. We don’t have a right to see people clothed or naked. If we did, that would mean we can demand someone take off their clothes at any time. This is ridiculous and no one would agree to it.

For argument’s sake, let’s replace naked people with clowns. Some people have a fear of clowns or, for whatever reason, do not like clowns. So a clown walks down the street and there are people around who do not want to see a clown. By the logic of Connolly at Bracewell & Giuliani, we should disallow clowns from walking down the street because it deprives people of their choice. How ludicrous is this?

Replace clowns with anything you want and it is all equally insane. No one is harmed, has their property stolen, or forced to do anything against their will. The choice we have is to walk away or look away. To demand that every clown or naked person be removed from the street because you have a problem with it is depriving people of their choice; not the other way around.

On a side note, the article continuously framed the right to be nude as something that is or is not protected by the first amendment. This is not a first amendment issue. This is an issue of property rights. Without property rights, every other right is moot. The right to free speech only makes sense if you have a right to yourself. You are the property of yourself.

Trying to make the case that the right to have your own body nude is not protected under the first amendment is meaningless. It is protected under property rights which underlies all other rights.

Unbeknownst to me, women were marching topless in Central Park on Sunday, August 23rd, 2009. I support their cause because this is an issue of Liberty. I like breasts as much as the next guy and I hardly believe any man would be too opposed to women walking around topless. Now, not all women are equal and there are breasts that we want to look at that those that we’d rather not. Different people like different things. But, the point isn’t whether men like breasts or not.

This is an issue of Liberty.

Because of that, it doesn’t matter if your breasts or young and perky or old and saggy. There should be no reason why women or men should not be allowed to walk around topless or even bare naked. As long one is out in a public place, there is no legitimate reason to disallow anyone from presenting themselves in any way they wish.

If one is on private property and the owner of the property doesn’t want it, they can ask that you be clothed and in the same light, if they allow you to be naked, you can be naked within their property.

There are some who believe this is wrong as the Daily News article quoted:

“This is extreme liberalism and why America’s in decline,” shouted one woman, who said she was a doctor but declined to give her name. “It’s degrading to women to tell them to expose their breasts publicly.”

America is in decline for many reasons–none of which is due to excess Liberty. The women’s opinion is as valid as anyone else’s opinion. Other women might say its degrading to tell them to hide their breasts in public! Is there something wrong with breasts? Why should women be forced to hide them? All such opinions are valid. The beauty of Liberty is that nothing is judged on opinions. It is a matter of property rights. We own our bodies and if we want to put clothes on it, we can; if not, we should also be allowed to do so.

The opinions of the majority change with the times. Natural rights do not.

France has a law that specifically states women are allowed to be topless. While I agree with the idea of the law, I do not support having a law that tells us what we can do. A system of governance that starts writing laws for what we are allowed to do is a bad precedence. We should be allowed to do whatever we want as long as no one else’s Liberty is violated.

While I have no intention of telling my mother, sister, cousins, girlfriend, or friends to go walk around topless–nor do I want to see all of that, it doesn’t give me the right to tell them they can’t do it. Whether I like it or not is irrelevant. We have no right to control another person’s Liberty.

That’s what this issue should be about. It isn’t about whether women should bare their breasts in public or not. It is about whether we live in a nation founded on Liberty or not.

As was expected, this end of the Iraq war is more of a show. We are still going to be occupying Iraq. We are going to continue to antagonize the people in the Middle East by being an occupying force. That is the reason why they hate us and continue to plot ways to attack us.

“I think the plan is significantly different than the plan Obama had during the campaign,” said McCain, referring to Obama’s campaign pledge to pull combat troops out of Iraq within 16 months of taking office if possible.

What’s new? Politicians are liars.

“The last of the U.S. troops are to be out of Iraq no later than Dec. 31, 2011. That’s the deadline set under an agreement the two countries sealed during George W. Bush’s presidency. Obama has no plans to extend that date or pursue any permanent troop presence in Iraq.”

As Obama decides to escalate the conflict in Afghanistan, it will be more and more likely that we will find reasons to keep bases in Iraq. We need to leave Iraq completely immediately. The terrorists are not attacking us for our Freedoms. They are attacking us because we are meddling in their affairs.

It is not our business to tell them how to live. Democracy cannot be spread by the barrel of a gun–not so sure we want to even be spreading Democracy. Liberty and Freedom can absolutely not be spread by killing and violating the very principles they stand for.

Obama’s plan to cut the deficit by 50% to about $533 billion in 2013 is becoming less and less believable. Not only is the budget for 2010 ridiculous but, Obama intends to increase spending to $3.94 trillion for this year. All of this is bad for the economy. Increases in government spending is a decrease in productive spending in the private sector.

“The deficit would remain near $1 trillion over the next two years before dropping to $581 billion in 2012 and $533 billion in 2013, the year that Obama has pledged to cut the deficit he inherited in half.”

The first thing you do to get yourself out of a hole is to stop digging. Obama believes that you should dig at an even faster rate. We are now going to sink faster and deeper.

In order for Obama’s budget plan to work, he is assuming that the economy “will come roaring back with economic growth of 3.2 percent next year and 4 percent-plus rates in the following three years”. Right. His stimulus bill is going to make things worse so this highly optimistic idea of economic growth is wishful thinking.

These massive budget deficits planned for the next 4 years is going to skyrocket the national debt. We are talking about adding over $4 trillion to the national debt. The national debt is currently about $11 trillion. If we add another $4 trillion to that, our national debt will be greater than our GDP.

The financial and economic side of the Obama administration is clearly out of their minds. It is going to be difficult for the dollar to survive this and for the American economy to thrive with these massive burdens. It is important to remember that governments cannot create prosperity.

I want everyone to be able to afford health care. The problem is not that the free market doesn’t work in health care–it can work just fine. The problem is that government keeps regulating and subsidizing poor health care models. Car insurance doesn’t cover tune-ups and oil checks, why does health insurance cover regular check-ups? This will only drive up the price of health care.

The big question right now is not about whether we should have universal health care or not. The question is how are we going to pay for this? If Obama is planning to cut the budget deficit by 50% in 2013, he is not going in the right direction.

The stimulus bill was a bad idea and history will show that it will be money thrown into a black hole. We are still maintaining out military empire all over the world–that alone costs almost $1 trillion. We are going to expand the war in Afghanistan–that will cost money. The economy is shrinking.

So how are we going to pay for this? Taxes? The American people can’t afford to give more in taxes–we need to tax less. Borrowing? That is just another means of taxation–future taxation. Printing presses? That is also a tax–a hidden one where our money loses purchasing power.

Obama is not change. He is doing exactly what Bush did. Spend the country into oblivion–except Bush spent slower.

I don’t know how long it takes to close down an illegal detention facility. I have never run one. I did not and do not expect real change from Obama. He has been doing more of the same since he stepped into the White House.

Now that Attorney General Holder says that closing Gitmo will be difficult, I’m even more skeptical of its closure. The executive order to close Gitmo feels more like a dog and pony show than anything real.

Holder called Guantanamo “a well-run, professional facility”. I’m pretty sure treating people as criminals without due process and without any evidence makes it poorly run and unprofessional. Unless we are talking about a well run internment camp used for the torturing of human beings.

I made a bet with a German fellow about Gitmo. He said Obama would close it down in his first week. I said, no way. So who is right? We bet a beer–I want the beer.

I wasn’t sure that I was going to blog about this at almost 3AM on the East coast but, then I heard this statement from his address:

“Tonight I want every American to know this: We will rebuild, we will recover, and the United States of America will emerge stronger than before.”

Of course he did not go on to explain how this will happen. He just says it will. As if he can command the forces of economics to do his bidding if he just signs it into law. Let’s not be ridiculous. You can no more change the laws of economics as you can change the law of gravity.

“Because we cannot consign our nation to an open-ended recession,” Obama had urged Congress to do whatever proves necessary. What does that even mean? Completely vague and useless as is most of Obama’s fantasticly spoken speeches. It all sounds great, it just doesn’t mean anything.

The recession was never “open-ended”. It would end as soon as the bad debt was liquidated from the system. A lot of pain and suffering would have occured but, the recession would not turn into a depression. The almost $800 billion stimulus bill will make a recession that would have lasted a couple of years in the worse case scenario to something that is now open-ended.

No one knows how long this will last. You cannot solve the problem of too much credit and spending with more credit and spending. The idea that you need to fill the “gap” left behind by a decrease in consumer spending with government spending is idiotic.

Firstly, the government does not have any money. How can you spend if you don’t have money?! They have to take it from the citizens in taxes. It doesn’t matter if you inflate the money supply, tax directly, or borrow and then tax later. The fact of the matter is, the citizens will be taxed. Borrowing money has the unseen consequence of removing capital from the market for entreprenuers to use to create real productive jobs.

The government cannot create real productive jobs. There is no mechanism to tell the government whether it is doing a good job or not. The market has what is known as profits. Companies that make profits are satisfying the consumer. The government can run a business in the red forever–it’ll just make the budget for that department bigger.

Obama did some bashing of the Bush administration–and they deserved it–by saying that “we have lived through an era where too often, short-term gains were prized over long-term prosperity, where we failed to look beyond the next payment, the next quarter or the next election.” The irony is that all his economic policy decisions since entering the Oval Office has been short-sighted.

This is a president who has been in office for little over a month and has already spent into the trillions. I don’t call that long-term thinking. That is some of the shortest term thinking I can imagine. He wants to duct tape a broken economy together with freshly printed dollar bills. The affects and unseen consequences of all this spending are going to catastrophic.

Not only will the United States not emerge from this crisis “stronger”, we will be poorer for years to come.

Obama says that his American Recovery and Reinvestment Act will “build a new foundation for lasting prosperity”. In reality, he is actually hoping Elmers Glue can hold the current economic foundation riddled with termites together. There is no new foundation being built. The market is trying to create a new foundation and the government is trying to stop it. You need to clear the bad investments and let those who made bad decisions take losses.

Only then can we have a new foundation for lasting and real prosperity.

The most you can say about Obama’s address was that he was charasmatic and hopeful. He is very good at that–portraying hope. Unfortunately, being able to make everyone feel good doesn’t solve the actual problem. Everyone is going to feel a lot worse in a year when the stimulus bill has worked its way into the system and worsened the problem.

Almost the same thing we do in Iraq: blow up all their infrastructure so that we can rebuild it. Great idea! In a time when we our economy is getting worse by the day, where did we get $900 million for Gaza? Did we cut spending somewhere? The government has no savings. How are we funding this?

“Administration officials said Monday, according to The New York Times, that the aid would not be given to Hamas, which controls Gaza, but would go through nongovernmental organziations.”

I’m also unsure how this is going to happen. If Hamas controls Gaza and you give money to organizations in Gaza, how do you make sure Hamas doesn’t get a hold of some of it?

I didn’t read what the racistness was about before I looked at this cartoon and I must say, I didn’t see the racism–I often don’t see racism. I interpreted the cartoon as mocking the stimulus bill for its stupidity–as if it was written by a Congress full of monkeys.

I didn’t support the stimulus under Bush and I didn’t support this new one under Obama. I understand economics and we cannot spend our way out of a problem caused by too much spending.

I’m not ignorant to the use of chimps or other primates as a racial slur. I just didn’t see much of a correlation between this monkey and Obama. Why not have the chimp in the Oval Office if it was trying to depict Obama? Maybe a banner for “change”?

If you look hard enough at anything, you’ll find what you are looking for. Whether it really exists or not.