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War Made Easy reaches into the Orwellian memory hole to expose 50 years of government spin and media collusion that has dragged our country into one war after another from Vietnam to Iraq. With remarkable archival footage of official distortion and exaggeration from LBJ to George W. Bush, the documentary exposes how presidential administrations of both parties have relied on a combination of deception and media complicity to sell one war after another to the American people.

Giving special attention to parallels between Vietnam and Iraq, War Made Easy sets government spin and media collusion from the present alongside virtually identical patterns from the past, guided by Solomon’s meticulous research and tough-minded analysis. Rare footage of political leaders and journalists from the past includes Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and news correspondents Walter Cronkite and Morley Safer.

My cousin Aaron and I have recently started exchanging some unfettered thoughts, which I’ve very much enjoyed. I’m thrilled that I lucked out with regard to the family I have, both immediate and extended. Without them, I would have had no chance… no values, no foundation, nobody to look up to, etc… My parents and grandparents set one hell of an example, and I pity most of my generation for not having been so lucky.

Anyway, something Aaron said in his last message prompted me to do a little searching, and I rediscovered two great links on Mises’s website. One of the two links is Doug French’s review of the book, The Case Against Adolescence, which I’ve blatantly lifted below:

In his book, Democracy: The God that Failed, Hans Hoppe argues that democracy and government have made people less farsighted and not as concerned with providing for ever-more-distant goals. Thus, society is tending toward decivilization. As Hoppe describes, adults are being turned into children. Children have very high time preferences, living “day to day and from one immediate gratification to the next,” Hoppe explains. American society has essentially lengthened childhood by creating adolescence.

In a very provocative new book, The Case Against Adolescence: Rediscovering the Adult in Every Teen, psychologist Robert Epstein contends that when mammals reach puberty, they function as adults — except in America that is. Starting a hundred years ago, Americans gradually increased the age of adulthood to what many Americans now believe to be 26. You’ve heard, “30 is the new 20,” and “50 is the new 30.” Soon we will all be kids again.

Epstein argues effectively that American culture collaborates in artificially extending childhood through public schooling and labor laws. In most of human history, young people worked side by side with adults from their early teens with young women becoming wives and mothers. Early on, he fingers the labor unions as the culprits behind child labor laws. In 1881, the forerunner to the AFL-CIO made child labor a high priority: “We are in favor of the passage of laws in the several states forbidding the employment of children under fourteen in any capacity, under penalty of fine and imprisonment.”

Of course, unions didn’t want the competition from young workers who are likely smarter and more productive than older workers. Work by David Wechsler and J.C. Raven indicates that our highest mental age is in our midteens. According to Raven, “Apparently by the age of fourteen, a child’s trainability has reached its maximum, while after the age of thirty, a person’s ability to understand a new method of thinking, adopt new methods of working, and even to adapt a new environment, steadily decreases.”

Of course today’s teens don’t act like they have the most brainpower in society. How could they? They are isolated in government schools away from adults and given no responsibilities — they are infantilized. Infantilized by the many laws restricting young people: curfew laws, tougher driving laws, teen-wage laws, laws curtailing sexual activities, free-speech restrictions at school, censorship of educational activities, dress codes, smoking and drinking laws, ad infinitum.

But government and unions are not the only teen enemies. The author makes the case (sometimes effectively, sometimes not) that everyone works against teens being adults. The media portray teens as self-absorbed; business makes big bucks promoting teen culture; and even parents underestimate their teens’ abilities.

Epstein’s book is chock-full of examples of young people in history who have made tremendous contributions. Louis Braille, if he were a blind kid today, would be cooped up in special-needs classes. Fortunately, he lived in the early 1800s and had perfected the Braille system by the time he was 15 years old. Samuel Colt invented the multiround, revolving-head pistol when he was 16. Edgar Allen Poe had his first book published at 18, including poems he had written at age 12 and 13.

The fact is, creativity is at its peak in early childhood and the teen years. But as we enter adulthood, we learn to conform, which takes a toll on creativity. Public schooling was created to mold young people into compliant citizens, sapping their creativity. Teen ingenuity remains high, but given the need to rebel, lack of adult companionship, and laws prohibiting the signing of contracts, their creativity is rarely channeled into positive pursuits.

In a test for “adultness” cocreated by the author, the difference between how adults and how teens scored was statistically insignificant: “Age is simply not a reliable measure of adultness,” Epstein writes, “at least not once people are past puberty.”

So what should we do about all of this? Obviously abolishing the myriad of laws restricting teens would be a good first start. But, unfortunately, Epstein believes young (and old) people should be given rights only if they can pass competency tests. And one gets the feeling that government would be doing the administering of these tests — as if government bureaucrats should be trusted with the job.

As well done and interesting as Epstein’s book is, he doesn’t go far enough. As Murray Rothbard wrote in The Ethics of Liberty, a child has rights “when he leaves or ‘runs away’ from home.” Forget the tests; just set kids free.

See also: Education: Free and Compulsory, by Murray Rothbard

With that said, it’s often nice to get views of what’s going on in the world that aren’t directly influenced by the US government.

For that, there is Livestation.

It free, and it’s cross-platform. So, it works just fine on Windows, Mac, and Linux.

Livestation carries the following channels (among others), each which offer a new take on world events:

• Al Jazeera English
• RT
• Press TV
• BBC World Service
• France 24
• CNN International

It’s worth checking out. You should go download it.

There is an easy way to do this.

Simply drag this link into your bookmark toolbar:
Gmail Compose

Credit goes to hackaddict.net.

Gmail doesn’t support this natively, but a Firefox addon called Boomerang adds the functionality.

UPDATE: I’m not sure how long this will last, but here’s a direct download link so that you don’t have to wait for an invite code. Click here for Firefox and here for Chrome.

It does a lot of different things, but a big part of what makes it useful for me is that it allows you to mount any of your cloud storage services as a local part of your OS — even if you’re using Linux or OS X. That’s really, really useful.

In addition, there are mobile clients for Android, iPhone, and Blackberry.

You really need to see this.

TinyXP is XP with all of the wasteful crap stripped out.

For details, see this blog post.

To download, go here or here, depending on what you want.

To make new Firefox tabs open on the right, instead of the left, follow these instructions:
http://lifehacker.com/5456366/make-new-tabs-open-at-far-right-in-firefox-36

I forget how I installed, Flash, but you’ll probably want to do that, too. Feel free to leave a comment.

If you find this interesting, check out this LRC article by John Gatto.

Panasonic VIERA Skype

UPDATE: Be sure to read the Amazon reviews before you decide to buy this thing.

• Al Jazeera English 
• Feed URL
• Nationality: Qatari
• Description: One of the three largest English-language news channels worldwide.  It's a 24-hour English-language news and current affairs TV channel headquartered in Doha, Qatar.
• Russia Today
• Feed URL
• Nationality: Russian
• Description: Also known as RT, is a globally broadcast English-language news channel from Russia, and the first all-digital Russian TV channel.
• Press TV
• Feed URL
• Nationality: Iranian
• Description: An English language international television news channel, based in Tehran.  It has 26 international correspondents and more than 500 staff around the world.

These are just three out of about thirty content sources that I receive video from daily.  If you have one that you feel should be listed here, let me know.  Or, if you want to see my list of Technology or Libertarian content sources, let me know.

Part 1:

Part 2:

Click here and here if you can’t see the videos.

Click here if you can’t see the video.

Props to the MHD crew for getting such a great interview!

Click here for the article, and thanks to Jason C. for the link!

Drug-resistant bacteria kills, even in top hospitals. But now tough infections like staph and anthrax may be in for a surprise. Nobel-winning chemist Kary Mullis, who watched a friend die when powerful antibiotics failed, unveils a radical new cure that shows extraordinary promise.

Click here if you can’t see the video.

1. WhatTheFont – This site actually allows you to upload a sample graphic and then tries to do the matching automatically.  Very cool!  The only problem is that the sample needs to be at least 100 pixels in height for it to work with high accuracy.
2. Identifont – This site uses a completely different approach — the process of elimination.  If you don't have a high-resolution sample and don't mind answering a few questions, this is the way to go.

While we're on the subject, FontyPython is a really cool font manager for Linux that allows you to browse through tons of fonts before installing them.  This is really convenient if you happen to be pirating large font packs while looking for one of the fonts you identified using the sites listed above.  If you know of similar programs for Mac or Windows, feel free to leave a comment.

Sometimes I really enjoy watching financial news channels, but it’s not at all because they provide any valuable information. I’m just fascinated by how clueless the talking heads tend to be. If you know better, it’s really amazing to watch. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, just watch this YouTube clip for a perfect example. These guys on TV have no clue at all what’s going to happen in the future, because they have no understanding of what’s going on in the present. People like Tom Woods and Peter Schiff (the guy in the YouTube clip), on the other hand, are students of the Austrian school of economics and therefore have a fundamental understanding of current events that is extremely rare these days. My point is that Tom Woods is uniquely equipped to explain what’s currently going on, and you’re simply not going to find such accurate, insightful analysis anywhere else.

That’s why I’m so thrilled about this book. It’s the one book that has the power to enlighten the masses as to what’s really going on. Don’t be a babbling idiot like the talking heads in the YouTube clip. Pick up a copy of Meltdown and gain a crystal-clear understanding that even most economists don’t have.

But after about six months, I got an email. Someone was following me on Twitter, which puzzled me because I hadn’t ever posted a single tweet. I deleted the email and went on with life.

But a week later, I got another email. Delete. Move on.

Gradually, the frequency increased until I had accrued forty followers without posting a single Tweet!

Today I finally decided to give in and see what it was all about, and I must admit, it’s kind of fun.

Sure, it’s true that the functionality basically boils down to Facebook status updates without the rest of Facebook, but people use it a little differently.

I do like having the option of being able to post tiny updates from anywhere, using my cell phone, without having to commit to writing an entire blog post. Sure, I have an Android application on my G1 that let’s me blog remotely, but it’s still a pain in the ass to type several paragraphs on a mobile device, even with a nice QWERTY keyboard. I like that I can integrate my twitter updates with my existing blog. I also like that my “tweets” can show up as status updates on Facebook and as instant messaging status, even when I’m away from my computer.

It turns out that in practice, micro-blogging is a pretty fun. So, give in and join me!

If you have less than a year of your contract left, you’ll have to extend it to a full year. Since I just bought a G1, I had over a year left, so this didn’t effect me. Click here for the related HoFo thread.

Also, it’s possible to get 10% off your bill by joining the Freelancers Union, which is free. Click here for the related thread. I haven’t tried this yet, so leave a comment and let me know how it works for you.