The Jewish Libertarian Blog

Cops and Soldiers are Not People to Look Up To

rafifarber The Jewish Libertarian Blog

When the average indoctrinated government curriculum (private or public school educated) person thinks of cops or or other government-trained human weapons, he immediately thinks of “public service”. I have no doubt that many people become government-trained killers because they think it is noble. No doubt some of what they do, minus the thievery in order to do it, is noble. Many cops protect people. Many soldiers protect people. But all cops and all soldiers without exception are sworn to serve politicians, because they are sworn to uphold the laws that these politicians pass, whether they are good laws or horrible laws. Most government trained armies think they are fulfilling some kind of duty by upholding evil laws.

Let’s keep in mind that the murderer of the cops in Dallas was a government-trained killer. When you send people to war for a cause that is not 100% obviously defensively just, it causes people to lose their minds. Let us also never forget that the amount of suicides among Vietnam veterans is higher than the actual death toll of US soldiers in Vietnam.

Send people out to murder other human beings and they will kill themselves. And sometimes others before they kill themselves, as is the case with this Dallas shooter.

No doubt if the government monopolized the food sector and forbade anyone from supplying food privately, as is the case in Canada regarding healthcare and as it almost was in the US had Hillarycare passed in the mid 90’s, then government food suppliers would think of themselves as feeding the hungry and fulfilling their “civic duty”. When in truth, all they are doing is forcing themselves on an entire sector and causing many to starve. The fact that they exist means that private security forces cannot. If government monopolized food, millions would die. This is exactly what happened in China under Mao Zedung’s reign, and 45 million people died in unutterably horrible ways. Thank God the government only monopolizes police and army and lets the food sector be dealt with through the free market (minus farm subsidies and various government food regulations).

Government monopolizes domestic security through police forces, and monopolizes foreign security through its army of trained killers. Every so often these people who make up these monopoly forces save lives. But most of the time they are simply out harassing people and making everyone’s lives miserable. Marijuana possession, selling narcotics, setting up a business without a license, tax evasion, whatever non-crime it happens to be, they will be there to draw a gun and kill you if they have to.

Concession statement: One should always pay taxes l’chumra and only set up businesses with a license and never deal drugs if they care about what little freedom they have and their very lives. Doing any of these things can get you killed by the police. 

We are taught that it is wrong to judge government-trained killers because they are simply “enforcers”. In Israel we have government-trained killers expelling Jews and Arabs from their homes and anyone who fights back is called suicidal. Antiwar people are accused of not “supporting the troops” when it is specifically the antiwar people who support the troops because we don’t want any of them killing or being killed. The war hawks care little about human life so long as their amorphous goals are achieved. What those are, they war hawks themselves couldn’t even tell you beyond “end terror”. Good luck with that.

I lend my moral support to Black Lives Matter only insofar as they attempt to disrupt police activity without destroying private property or hurting private citizens or even hurting government agents who are not an immediate danger to them. Killing cops or soldiers is morally outrageous so long as the cop or soldier poses no immediate physical threat to your life.

The problem is, this Black Lives Matter movement is fueled by anger with no reason behind it. They think the problem is white people. If they were in charge, they’d go on a white murder spree, so keep your distance from them. But still I want to let them know that I understand what has set them off, as shallow and unreasoned as they are.

There is no war of white against black. There is no war of rich against poor. There are two classes of people, and two classes only. There are the tax payers, and the tax receivers. The war is always between those two classes.

White lives matter too. All lives matter. Even the lives of government-trained killers. If Black Lives Matter wants to be relevant, they need to adopt nonviolent measures immediately. Set a citizen’s siege of police headquarters. Surround it on all sides, old school war style. Do not actively resist arrest. Have replacements come and fill in for those arrested. Overwhelm the prison system until there is nowhere else they can put you. Do not fight back unless your life is in immediate danger.

Bring lots of food and water for staying power. If tanks come, treat them like Tank Man in Tianenman Square. The US government has still not sunk to the depths of firing on unarmed civilian protests, thank God.

Notice that whenever riots break out, the police do nothing to protect private property, as is their supposed job. They only protect their own buildings and leave everyone else to the dogs.

Everyone’s lives matter. Its us vs government, and all we need to do is fight it nonviolently and we will win. Because the taxpayers vastly outnumber the tax receivers. The minute that tax receivers outnumber taxpayers, and that day is fast approaching, society collapses.

I dream of the day when it becomes shameful to join the police or the army. It should be embarrassing, like going on welfare. When the truth is that going on welfare is more honorable than becoming a government policemen or soldier, because at least welfare recipients don’t actively harass you. They only collect their loot.

Every parent in Israel whose 18 year old is kidnapped into the army should feel shame, not pride. The only exception is if the 18 year old joins the army and swears to himself never to uphold any unjust law or war, even at the expense of prison.

I will personally do everything in my power to discourage my kids from joining the army or doing national service, what they call שירות לאומי here. God forbid my kids should ever be government agents.

I recently and proudly exclaimed to people close to me that I refuse to serve in Miluim, the Israeli army reserve. I was almost taken for a week of wasted time but it was cancelled two days before I was to be taken. I proudly said that I would have gone to prison rather than followed orders from people forcing me out of the honorable routine of MY life, to serve the routine of detestable politicians.

What I got was boos.

But the joke is on them. If I stop working and stop making money, there would be no money to support the army they love. Perhaps I should be honored for refusing, because that way I will make more money and more resources will go to the army that supposedly protects everyone from everything.

At Long Last, A Defense of Israel Against Rothbard

rafifarber Jewish State, The Jewish Libertarian Blog , , , ,

Back in 1967, in response to the outbreak of the Six Day War, Dr. Murray Rothbard penned an article entitled “War Guilt in the Middle East“. In the article, Rothbard denies Israel’s right to exist and accuses it of starting an unjust war. We, obviously, disagree.

Now, 50 years later, we his students have written a rebuttal, just published in The Indonesian Journal of International & Comparative Law. It is coauthored by Alan Futerman, Dr. Walter Block, and me.

Here it is. Click the link below and it will download the PDF.

The Legal Status of the State of Israel, A Libertarian Approach

Gold Spikes Yet Again, Silver Breaks Through $21, Italian Banks in Freefall

rafifarber Gold and Silver, Stock Trading, The Jewish Libertarian Blog , ,

Our model portfolio (just a game for legal reasons) is flying high. We will exit leveraged positions some time tomorrow on what looks to be something like an 80% gain in 3 weeks. I plan to convert it to unleveraged metals positions to catch any additional move but I expect the metals to go down for a few days next week. If they don’t we’ll still have regular positions in this fictional game.

There may be a big spike tomorrow morning at the bell since US traders are out of the picture today and had to watch from the sidelines. Futures traders can trade metals wherever they want 24 hours a day, but US equities traders who focus on gold stocks and ETF’s will have their first say tomorrow morning. Judging by comments I’ve read and the fact that gold is now the Yahoo Finance front feature article, it looks like retail dumb-money traders will pile in on Tuesday morning.

We will be selling right to them (in our fictional game for legal reasons), and hopefully pick our (game) leveraged positions back up when the retailers get too scared of the temporary draw down.

This is what I’ll be doing personally. Anyone who wants to follow, I do not recommend it and you do it at your own risk.

Italian banks are crashing today. The rickety financial fiat superstructure of the planet is shaking under the weight of its own printed paper.

On Elie Wiesel, Idolatry, and the State

rafifarber Foreign Policy, The Jewish Libertarian Blog , ,

Elie Wiesel died. I’m sad about it. I liked certain things about Wiesel, and I disliked other things. I see the word going around now that some guy named Max Blumenthal who is the son of some of other Clinton-sniffer named Sidney Blumenthal, who are both Jewish…Max does not like Elie Wiesel and tweeted that at the end of his life he supported those who commit war crimes. He’s referring to Jewish “ethnic cleansing” and “settlers” and whatnot, and all the other trifling nonsense that equates homesteading vacant land with “war crimes”. But nevermind that. That’s nonsense, but I still appreciate Max for cutting through the worship of supposedly infallible people.

Now, I’m no fan of Max Blumenthal or virtually anyone who has any dealings with the sleazy Clintons. From the little I read about him he’s your average shallow thinking stereotypical left winger. But I still consider his comments heroic because deifying any person to the point where he can do no wrong and anything he says is right, is very dangerous and the essence of Avoda Zara, or idol worship.

I read some of Wiesel’s books when I was a kid. I definitely remember reading Night. He was a good writer and his works will live on. But unlike most Jews who base their Jewish identity on the Holocaust, I don’t consider him a role model at all. Wiesel was knee deep in the State infrastructure, and served as part of its intellectual guard, most notably justifying the various wars of the US government against the world, including the invasion of Iraq, which is now ISIS and the next excuse to invade the next country in the “war on terror”. He took pictures with president this and that, visited with a whole bunch of state leaders all the time, and generally approved of what they do as long as they were Western.

Wiesel was a good writer and a good speaker who did not understand that the source of the holocaust was not anti Semitism. Anti Semitism was only the excuse. The cause was the institution of the State which keeps a monopoly on violence.

The danger of deifying a person is that all of his positions come in packages. To criticize is illegitimate. To say he was wrong about some things takes you out of the realm of discussion. Max Blumenthal may be an idiot, but at least he has the courage to criticize a person that everybody else refuses to touch.

Lots of people say things like “Let’s not speak ill of the dead.” I don’t hold by that. When everyone is saying the same thing nobody is thinking. The truth is, there were good things about Wiesel and bad things about Wiesel. He did, in a sense, support the war crimes that he was a victim of. Not because he supported the “ethnic cleansing” of East Jerusalem which basically means supporting Jewish purchase of Arab property, which is absolutely legitimate, but he did support unjust wars against innocent people. Are the atrocities in Iraq on the same quantitative level as the holocaust? No. But add in Vietnam and the nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the Korean War and Granada and the Philippines and every other place that the US government has invaded in the last century and a half or so, the numbers get pretty close.

It is especially important to criticize when everyone else is praising, just to help people remember that nobody should emulate anybody entirely. If you are an aspiring writer, you can learn from Wiesel. If you want to learn how to deal with tragedy and loss, his life is an example.

If you want to learn how to stop the next holocaust, Wiesel is not your man. He had good and bad, and to a degree, Max is right, but for mostly the wrong reasons.

May the good parts of his life be for a blessing, and his mistakes pointed out so they will not be repeated.

 

 

Model Portfolio Home Run and Gold Update

rafifarber Gold and Silver, Stock Trading

I took the model portfolio to 10% leveraged positions on June 16 in gold and silver. They paid off this week. We will sell on the next big up day and put the money back into unleveraged positions and very battered very cheap post Brexit European bankster banks.

NUGT, the 3x leveraged gold miners fund, is up 31.5% since we bought it.

USLV, the 3x leveraged silver fund, is up 40%.

These funds are dangerous and shouldn’t be held for too long.

Disclosure for legal purposes: I own NUGT and USLV. And I am not recommending anyone do anything since the government says I am not a financial adviser.

As for gold, it has, for the first time since crashing in April 2013, broken through the 200 week moving average, and inflation isn’t even high yet. When inflation exceeds 5%, you will see the metals go up faster than you can imagine. Once inflation becomes obvious, we’ll see a quick trek to $5,000 or more, probably before 2020.

Edward Snowden Defies Exile and the FBI can do Nothing About it

rafifarber The Jewish Libertarian Blog

He’s got a robot. God bless this man for exposing government spying and rubbing exile in the face of the Feds. There’s nothing they can do. Maybe they can pass a law against robots with the consciousness of Edward Snowden. Maybe the Democrats and Republicans will both have a sit down eating donuts until the bill passes and it becomes mandatory to shoot all Snowden-bots on site, after background checks and not with an assault rifle because that would lead to gun violence.

Check this out.

Now It’s Time for States to Secede from Washington DC

rafifarber Eurozone Crisis, The Jewish Libertarian Blog , ,

There are two economic dangers from leaving a political union. The first is trade dislocation. Political unions are not necessary for free trade. In fact that hinder it. The EU is basically one big bribery ring where member countries pay off politicians and bureaucrats in Brussels not to harass member countries. It’s like a labor union where the fatcats get all the fees in exchange for forcing out competitors by labor legislation.

The first economic danger is that EU bureaucrats will be ‘butthurt’ as they say and exact trade punishment on the UK by erecting tariffs and embargoes and bans and quotas and whatever else. This is not necessary, but it could happen.

The second economic danger, and this is the major one, is a dissolution of currencies. If a Euro country were to leave the EU, the Euro would fall apart, robbing everyone’s savings in the Eurozone as would happen eventually anyway but a dissolution would hasten it.

The Euro, the Dollar, they will all fall by sheer weight of printing exhaustion. The sooner the better because the sooner the less catastrophic. It’s not the dissolution of the Euro that is is the problem, but a fiat currency controlled by bureaucrats itself that is the problem. The minute it was introduced it was destined for collapse because it is not free market money, but political force money.

Now that Texas wants to secede from the Union, which would be great, the danger to Texas is again trade barriers and the death of the dollar. If dollars are no longer the currency in seceded states, the dollar falls, which again would happen anyway eventually but this would hasten it. I’m all for hastening the inevitable so we can get on with our lives.

Of course, no president would ever allow any state to secede from the Union. They would sooner annihilate every Texan than allow secession. If Texas votes to secede, Trump or Clinton or whoever is head of the army would invade and kill, just like Lincoln did.

But it would indeed be sweet if states just started seceding. How about we make the European Union voluntary, and the American Union voluntary. Those who want to pay taxes to Brussels in Europe are free to do so. Those who don’t want to don’t have to. Those who want to send a federal tax return to Washington can certainly do so. Those of us who don’t, shouldn’t have to. That would be fine.

But of course, political unions depend on forcing those unwilling to contribute.

Brexit is a beautiful thing. I would rather have trade barriers than bribe bureaucrats to lower them with ever bigger unions and bribery fees.

On Sociological Pseudoscience and Good vs Bad Academics

rafifarber Libertarian Halacha, The Jewish Libertarian Blog , , , ,

The shooting in Orlando has brought out political opinions from areas that I don’t normally see them. Someone referred me to a video of Obama responding to a question about the murder rate in Chicago. The point being that the murder rate in Chicago is very high despite very tough gun control laws, with background checks and all that. Obama did not answer the question, but went into an unrelated invective against the NRA and how they have successfully lobbied to forbid the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta to study gun violence.

First of all, I would support any effort to prevent the CDC from doing anything, and even existing for that matter. They should be disbanded and their efforts left up to private industry. Second of all, what the CDC has to do with gun violence I have no idea, and why they should spend my money studying it is beyond me. They are supposed to study diseases, not gun violence. So why we should be outraged that the CDC cannot study gun violence is something I don’t understand.

But anyway, I was referred to a study done apparently supporting the idea that gun violence is lessened when gun control laws are passed. Nevermind the recent Paris attacks, which took place in a gun free zone, or the murder of that British MP over the weekend, also in a gun free zone, or the shooting in Orlando in a gay club that was also a gun free zone. The logic of gun free zones being open targets just doesn’t register when sociological studies can be linked to.

There is no problem with being a sociologist or anthropologist or economist for that matter. It is a noble activity to conduct privately funded studies to try to find out things, whether they are in the past or present. The problem with sociologists is that they tend to come to government, or their works tend to be forwarded to government, to justify certain policy positions that have affect people’s lives on the basis of “science” with standards that would shock a physicist or biologist.

If we take the FDA for example, or NASA, two organizations which should be privatized but that’s a different issue, if the FDA approved a drug based on the pseudoscientific methods conducted in sociological surveys and studies, they would be putting the lives of people at risk and many would die. The amount of exactitude necessary for a phase 3 study to gain FDA approval is extremely high. Every piece of data has to checked and rechecked with placebo controls in most cases and everything else, with confirmatory studies to follow, and if there’s even a shred of doubt that a new medicine may be causing harm it will be pulled off the shelves. Phase 3’s often negate positive evidence of Phase 2’s and so forth. The example of a placebo arm in a trial is particularly important because the FDA does not normally accept something known as “historical control” where you compare people on a drug with past data from people who were not.

One example I’ve dealt with recently is Sarepta Therapeutics, which tested Duchenne muscular dystrophy drug Eteplirsen versus historical control from other DMD patients who were not involved in the study. This is a problem because the endpoint in the study is the 6 minute walk test, basically how far a DMD patient can walk in six minutes on the drug, compared to how far other DMD patients can walk without it in the past, the so-called historical control. But the problem is the patients on the drug are more motivated to walk as far as they can in order to get the drug approved, while the historical control was not motivated at all because they were not involved in trialing any drug. This inflates numbers towards Eteplirsen, which is one of the big reasons why the FDA has not approved the drug yet.

The historical control model is similar to sociological study methods, but not as bad. With studies about gun control laws, there are so, so many variables that enter the equation that it cannot be controlled. You can maybe make some guesses, but nothing more than that, and they won’t be very good ones.

If NASA or SpaceX were to build their hardware based on the methods in sociological studies, everyone who ever blasted off in a rocket would be dead. No hard scientist would ever risk anyone’s life on the basis of a study conducted via the methods of sociology.

But when “social scientists” with certain political opinion conduct studies on minimum wage, gun control, or whatever other political issue and then these studies are presented to politicians who make laws based on them, then logic is thrown out the window and laws are passed. People literally become lab rats, testing the policies of the political elite with their lives. This is incredibly immoral.

Based on pseudoscientific minimum wage studies, low skilled workers will lose their jobs. Based on gun control studies, it will become more difficult for nonviolent people to buy and carry guns. Nevermind the a priori logic that higher minimum wage means a labor surplus AKA unemployment, and never mind the a priori logic that criminals do not follow gun control laws.

Let’s say a bunch of academics study which gun control laws correlated with the lowest gun violence. This could be done, but proves nothing of a causal link. Let’s then say they piece together the “perfect gun control legislation” they have pieced together from their correlative hunt based on what they think are the best aspects of each “successful” gun control law. Then they give it to the politicians and they pass it into law.

That would be like putting astronauts on a rocket engineered by sociologists who conducted studies of rockets that have worked in the past but have no idea why because they are not physicists, and combined what they think are the best features into a new rocket, and then test  it for the very first time when it’s fully loaded with people on the thing.

The Challenger exploded and people died in 1986 because it took off on a cool day and that made the O-rings less elastic. This was discovered by physicist Richard Feynman. It was not proven because there were no trials, but the point is, one tiny oversight based on the temperature of the day the Challenger took off took the lives of everyone on board. Here’s Feynman on that:

Now, here’s Feynman on social sciences:

Now, there is nothing wrong with being an academic. If you study the past, say the bible and try to prove who wrote it or where it came from or whatever, go for it. But don’t try to get a law passed forbidding kosher slaughter because you think שחיטה is a myth. If you’re a sociologist studying the evolution of human behavior, have fun. Publish studies, but don’t advocate for a law mandating human behavior based on your observations. Have the humility to recognize that the methods you use cannot lead to anything close to the certainty of hard science like physics or biology, and that you have no right to force your conclusions on anybody, regardless of any good intention. All your work can do is increase the amount of hypotheses we have regarding any particular question. If social academics stopped at that, I’d have no problem.

I follow Judaism (maybe). But I don’t fool myself into believing my version of it is proven scientifically. Therefore I would absolutely oppose a law that would force anyone to do anything based on what I believe about God, because I understand that my belief could be wrong. Sometimes I might try to convince someone of the truth of what I believe about X, but if they don’t believe me, it doesn’t particularly bother me.

I speculate about the future. It’s what I do for a living. Sometimes I’m right, sometimes I’m wrong. I try to convince people to buy gold based on what I see as the truth, but I have done no experiments and cannot predict exactly when it will go up to $10,000, which I believe soon that it will. If I’m wrong, I lose my own money, not other people’s money.

But the academics that try to get laws passed based on the pseudoscientific studies that they conduct, those are the ones that really piss me off. I do not want to be anyone’s guinea pig. It’s immoral and disgusting and infuriating. When someone wants a law passed preventing me from getting a gun because of some study they read, I can’t stand it. I can forgive those who defer to so-called academic authority, but not the academics themselves who advocate for laws based on their gun control studies. Or increasing minimum wage because of a study they read, it drives me up a wall.

Or raising or lowering interest rates based on a study, it scares me.

On that score, it is a very good thing that the CDC is forbidden from conducting studies on gun violence. Because those studies will be biased by political opinions and then brought to Congress to pass laws. No government body should conduct a single study about anything whatsoever. Studies should be private initiatives.

No hard scientist that values human life would ever force people to participate in a study that might harm them without each and every individual’s expressed written consent. But when sociologists advocate for policy based on these studies, they are essentially forcing all of us to participate in a study extension without our consent so they can see how many of us get killed and whether it will be more or less than something else.

I am not a lab rat. Gun control based on studies is immoral. So is minimum wage or any other policy of force, whether it is based on nothing but feeling or peer reviewed study by the most recognized PhD’s in the universe, it’s all the same garbage.

And of the lot, economists are the absolute worst in terms of turning us all into murine models in their human experiments.

Model Portfolio Change, Watch CPI Numbers Today

rafifarber Gold and Silver, Stock Trading, The Jewish Libertarian Blog , , , ,

The Fed is holding off on another rate hike, and that could be very embarrassing if the consumer price index rises faster than anticipated. The numbers will be released at 8:30am eastern, 3;30pm here. Analysts are anticipating a 0.2% rise in core CPI which is the index minus food and energy. If it rises by 0.4% or more, gold is going to go much higher quickly. I wrote about this at 247 Wall St. yesterday.

Here is the article.

I have always maintained that once inflation gets obvious, the Fed will have to start chasing inflation with higher and higher interest rates regardless of economic conditions. This is what happened in 1980 when Volcker jacked up the effective fed funds rate to 22%. That is impossible today because it would force a hard default on US Treasuries. That would be a bona fide bankruptcy. So instead the Fed will simply let inflation run away into hyperinflation because there is no other choice.

That is when gold will move higher than anyone has ever seen, faster than it did in 1980.

This will happen, guaranteed. Eventually. I don’t know if it will start tomorrow or 5 years from now, but I’m willing to risk 10% of the model portfolio on it. It’s time to use some leverage.

I’m adding a $5,000 position in the 3x leveraged gold miners fund NUGT, and $5,000 position in the 3x silver fund USLV.

I’m also adding another $500 on shorting the bond market with puts on TLT.

This is risky and could make me look like an idiot. We’ll see what happens. For legal reasons because Congress has made a law imposing on the freedom of speech, this is a game and I am not a financial adviser, and I am making no recommendations to anyone.

Check the model portfolio page at the menu bar for updated positions.