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Do You Love Liberty?
If so, and if you like the content you find here on TheRootsOfLiberty.com, you can help the cause in many ways. First, don't hesitate to share any articles you like, anywhere you wish. Seeds of liberty can be planted in many different fields, and it can be pleasantly...
Gun Rights Lessons – A Series
The debate over gun rights and gun control stretches back decades, to at least the early part of the 20th century. It should, then, come as no surprise that there are quite a few recurring and oft-argued themes and positions in this long-running debate. Seasoned...
Hydrogen Trumps Lithium
Back in my college days, a good friend and I would theorize endlessly about how the world would change when "cheap fusion" finally gets figured out. Of course, as I sit here, four decades later, cheap fusion is still "just a couple decades away," but some of its...
No Social. No Justice. No Warriors.
"Left" political ideology has more regard for utility than principles. That utility is found in its language. George Orwell, this blog's spiritual father, is the most important teacher of how politics uses the tools of language to serve it, rather than the language's...
A Lousy Nit To Pick
We now have a new national holiday. "Juneteenth," a celebration of the emancipation of slaves in America that has been celebrated informally or at the state/local level since 1866 , was formalized by the government a few days ago, and we just celebrated the first...
Slaves To The State
If you dabble in political sandboxes, you are likely familiar with the term "intelligentsia." It's been around a couple centuries, if Wikipedia is to be trusted for that datum, and it speaks to both a category of people and to disdain for them. Or, at least, disdain...
Why So Twitter?
Twitter is an interesting place. It is a conduit for the id, where people routinely convert their in-the-moment gut reactions into permanent records (the bogeyman of countless school kids of generations past), far too often with regrets and apologia. Despite...
Liberty, Schools, and Critical Race Theory
We are witnessing a growing battle over public education curricula, with parents decrying the adoption of the 1619 Project, Critical Race Theory (CRT), and the cultural Marxism that has become de mode in academia and amongst woke-pedagogues, revolts against and...
Conclusion Institutions
Postmodernist "thinking" and metaphysical obstinacy aside, there are such things as facts. A hydrogen atom has one proton. Gravity varies in an inverse-square fashion. The sky is blue and water is wet (and if you want to argue about those two points, just... stop)....
The Woke Rackets
Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business and eventually degenerates into a racket. Thus wrote* social philosopher Eric Hoffer in 1967. Its truth could not be more timely, no matter that it was written half a century ago. Regular readers know I've...
The Great Firewall
The Ascendancy of China in American Culture Few people would disagree that the last two years have changed American society more than any entire generation in our country's history. In my opinion, that includes the decades of the Great Depression and World War II,...
Criminal Delusion
The other day, US Marshals attempted to apprehend a man who had a warrant out for being a felon in possession of a firearm. According to reports, the man refused to surrender, and either brandished or actually fired a firearm at the marshals, who shot him dead. While...
Curated Outrage
Hamas, a terrorist organization committed to the end of Israel as a nation, started shooting rockets into Israel a few weeks ago. Israel responded. After a few thousand rockets and a death toll that, depending on who's reporting, numbers from dozens to hundreds, a...
Rights And Their Burdens
A pastor I know of has had to abandon an important sermon, "everything is accepted, while nothing is forgiven". It wasn't because the Deacons found the subject matter too challenging or inappropriate. This does happen, by the way. My dad, who grew up in Virginia in...
Property Wars
Our current cultural clash, the conflict between the progressives (see: moving forward) who see our society as so fractured it has to be torn down en-toto (in favor of... wait for it... a century-old idea that killed a hundred million people) and the incrementalists...
Knowing IS The Problem
Editor's Note: This is a follow-up to Death By Procedure, which explored the adverse impact of our tortious culture on the pandemic response, and Incentives Matter, wherein we see that the pandemic was subordinate to political gamesmanship. New York Governor Andrew...
Gaslighting Capitalists
Our economy is recovering from the pandemic, thanks to human innovation (see: vaccines developed in months, not a decade), and without the need for massive, debt-fueled government "stimulus." Indeed, and as is so often the case, much that government does and has done...
COVID, Candy, Cigarettes, and Choice
Sixteen months ago, the World Health Organization announced a 'Mysterious Coronavirus-Related Pneumonia in Wuhan, China.' We all know what happened next. And by that I mean chaos, confusion, conflicting information, tendentious reporting (in multiple directions),...
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Opinion
Four Decades of Failure
Congressman Thomas Massie (R-KY) recently reintroduced HR899, a bill that stated, in its entirety: This bill terminates the Department of Education on December 31, 2020. He's updated the year to 2022, but otherwise left it as-is. Of course, the Internet had its...
Policy and Experts
Back when he was writing a column for the Wall Street Journal's editorial page (Best of the Web Today) instead of editing it, James Taranto had a daily feature called "What Would We Do Without Experts?" It, clearly, mocked absurd expert opinions, and reminded us that...
Menthol Madness
It didn't take America very long to figure out that alcohol prohibition was a bad idea. The Volstead Act, which took effect in 1920 to enforce the Eighteenth Amendment, was repealed, via the Twenty-First Amendment, in 1933. Prohibitionists being who and what they are,...
We Don’t Need Another Hero
The Wall Street Journal recently ran a story on Jordan Peterson, the Canadian clinical psychologist, Youtube phenom, and lightning rod for the woke-Left. In it, Peterson suggests that the attractiveness of the various movements that draw young activists (left and...
“Everything Is Allowed, While Nothing Is Forgiven”
This was said by a pastor I know of, who will remain nameless. Why nameless, when he might claim credit for such elegant words of wisdom? Because even he is worried about race-denouncement, social media canceling, hounding, banishment from his social support circle,...
How Dare You!?…
...leave the plantation???!!! Tim Scott, US Senator, was given this message (in spirit if not in specific language) by the woke-Left for having the temerity to give the rebuttal speech following Biden's first address to Congress. You see, Scott is a black man who has...
Why Pack The Court?
The Democrats, stinking drunk with power despite an election outcome that very much warns them off excesses, are running full-steam-ahead with a progressive agenda, and that includes an effort to "pack" the Supreme court i.e. add several seats (which they will fill)...
Bringing Down The House
The American Rescue Plan: $1,900,000,000,000. The American Jobs Plan: $2,300,000,000,000. The American Families Plan: $1,800,000,000,000. One hundred days. Six trillion dollars. Biden promised big things, and boy, has he delivered. Not one, but three colossal...
Death By Procedure
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo made a now-notorious decision to concentrate COVID patients in nursing homes. This produced America's worst losses of the pandemic. I worked as a paramedic in New York City throughout, and have had conversations with a number of senior...
The New Marxism
Just about a century ago, Vladimir Lenin, held captive by the Germans during their war against Russia, was sent back to his motherland. The Germans didn't do this out of kindness or humanity, but instead saw "in this obscure fanatic one more bacillus to let loose in...
Standing on Principle
Derek Chauvin got the book thrown at him yesterday, for killing George Floyd. Good. By accounts, he was a bad cop, with a bad track record, and he spent nine minutes suffocating to death someone he sought to arrest. The Left's behavior and reaction to this all has...
The Pitfalls of Language Arrogance
EDITOR'S NOTE: This article is a follow-up to We Expect Less Of You, wherein I opine on a university's decision to de-emphasize good grammar and spelling. My father had an employee, decades back, who worked crazy hours at his restaurant. The man, whose name escapes...
Do You Love Liberty?
If so, and if you like the content you find here on TheRootsOfLiberty.com, you can help the cause in many ways. First, don't hesitate to share any articles you like, anywhere you wish. Seeds of liberty can be planted in many different fields, and it can be pleasantly...
We Expect Less Of You
The University of Hull, a school on the north-central eastern shore of England, raised a bit of a kerfuffle with a policy declaration that "[s]tudents studying at the University of Hull will not be marked down for poor spelling, grammar and punctuation in exams...
Inviting The Backlash
A few months ago, the New York Post ran a series of stories about Hunter Biden's laptop and its contents. Twitter decided that this was not to be shared across its platform, and suspended the Post's account. Only a rank partisan would imagine that Twitter did this out...
COVID-Eternal
The Babylon Bee, where snark flourishes, has offered us a commemoration: Nation Prepares To Celebrate 1st Anniversary Of Two Weeks To Flatten The Curve The humor-impaired and virus-aggressive will bristle at this joke, as much because of the truths it rests upon as...
The Only Judge That Matters
Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius, last of Machiavelli's Five Good Emperors and adherent of Stoicism, (purportedly) offered up a bit of advice regarding life and religious beliefs: Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout...
Poles of the Pandemic
The pandemic has gone on long enough to draw some broad historical lessons. The first is that America's management was not fitting for the leader of the free world. Compared to our achievements in the Second World War, it is hard to escape the conclusion that we...
Has Woke Jumped The Shark?
Georgia and Texas enacted voting reforms in the wake of the mess that was the 2020 election. Quick as you can say "woke," the states' legislators and governors were denounced by the Democratic leadership and by those of a "woke" persuasion, with concomitant...
Break Before You Buy
Millions of Americans recently saw their bank accounts grow by $1400 or some multiple thereof. They have been told that these shekels are part of what it's going to take to help America recover from the economic ravages of the COVID-19 pandemic. That many of these...
Platform Games
Trump (whom I briefly tagged with the "him who shall no longer be named' sobriquet... read on) is no longer residing in the White House, but he certainly continues to occupy the brain pans of countless leftists, wholly rent free. Given the attitudes the Left has...
Free Riders
America has a free rider problem. Except when she doesn't. Except when she does. Except when she doesn't. Depending on who you talk to, progressive taxation combined with various forms of welfare are either a justified "redistribution" of wealth by the government (I...
Take On Taking
Civics 101 taught me that a "Taking" of property by the government requires compensation. This is a continuation of an English precedent going back centuries, so it's not surprising that a court overturned, as a Taking, the eviction moratorium, in response to the...
Pants On Fire
Let us contemplate, as the Biden administration rushes to cripple the American economy with brute-force carbon reduction measures as part of its "green"/global warming agenda, that nothing America does will make one whit's worth of difference to global temperature...
How Cuomo Might Have Killed Me
As regular readers know, I have worked as a paramedic in New York City for over 25 years. Covid was the hardest challenge of my career, by far. It was the challenge of the century to our healthcare system (and our society). Controversy rages around Governor Cuomo's...
“Their” Truth
Information regarding the Atlanta massage parlor shooter continues to issue forth, and as the picture resolves more finely, we will get a better sense of why he murdered all those people. The earliest reporting (not reports, reporting, as in pundits interlacing their...
The Trotsky Treatment
Students of history know that the original "cancel culture" was the Soviet Union in the 1930s, when Stalin and his apparatchiks sent millions to forced labor camps, often based on nothing more than suspicion of unfavored political views (and often not even that). This...
The Peril of Identithink
This past Tuesday evening, an individual murdered eight people in three Atlanta area "spas" (i.e. massage parlors). Six of the eight were Asian women. A suspect, a 21 year old white man, was promptly arrested, and at this juncture it appears pretty certain that the...
Racists and Murderers
"The school can ask you to leave for any reason," said one mother at Brentwood, another Los Angeles prep school. "Then you'll be blacklisted from all the private schools and you'll be known as a racist, which is worse than being called a murderer. Thus spake a Los...
Grabby Hands And Dead Grannies
Three weeks ago, NY Governor Andrew Cuomo's top aide, secretary to the governor Melissa DeRosa, had an "oops" moment, wherein she confessed to something that many of us already knew: that there were not only thousands of deaths attributable to a colossally stupid...
GameStop’s Crapitalist Vigilantes
An astonishing story is unfolding, with this aspect of the story getting astonishingly blasé coverage: it seems a vigilante movement developed on Reddit to revenge itself on "Wall Street" for their role in melting down the global economy in 2008 (which went...
BLM and OPM
Where is all that money going? Thus spake Michael Brown, Sr. after he learned that BLM (the organization) had raised $90M by exploiting BLM (the movement) for financial gain. And, thus, the seedy underbelly of all things political emerges once again. It's always about...
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