Last night’s Thinking Liberty was a fun show, even though nobody in the studio turned into a Super Saiyan.

This isn’t a scripted show or a lecture. We discuss things as we think of them, and we like the audience to think through them with us.

My latest news commentary is up at Center For A Stateless Society.

Olympic Games advertisements on Winnipeg bus shelters were recently subverted to read “RIOT 2010.” The saboteurs also glued on a person holding a brick and a short list of things to revolt against. Much could be said about this use of art and the merits or dangers of encouraging riots. But for now I’d like to examine a claim made in the saboteurs’ statement, which can be viewed with pictures of the action at flickr.com/photos/weweremadeforthis.

Their objections to the Olympics include the charge that “By presenting the games as a festival of international peace and friendship, the IOC [International Olympic Committee] allows the nations of the world to deny any internal conflict, pretending to represent their people as anything but discontented.” [read the rest.]

My longer feature article this month will discuss a soft transition to a stateless society, something that is difficult to squeeze into a news commentary.

I hate to have to say this, but the Thinking Liberty discussion with Roderick Long and Charles Johnson was not recorded due to an error in the recording program. I apologize for this, and it was a huge disappointment for me.

This week’s Thinking Liberty started 30 minutes late because of a computer problem that is hopefully fixed now. It should be available for download from Patriot Radio on Wednesday. We had a lively discussion about Liberty Forum, Center For a Stateless Society, Ryan Olander in Palestine, and government helping corporations poison the environment.

I’ve been meaning to post an update on my activities, but the issue has been forced. Some of you might be aware that I’ve recently become a news analyst at Center For a Stateless Society. This is an exciting opportunity, and my first post will be there by Monday. I’ll be doing a weekly column and a monthly feature article. Massive props to the generous folks who helped make this happen with their donation pledge (I’m not sure if they want to be anonymous; if not they can let me know. Either way I’ll be sure to help them out when I can). If you never go to the C4SS site, you should check out the great content there.

I plan to attend graduate school in September. I’m going to go for an MA in history, then a PhD. I hope to focus on 20th Century Eastern Europe, and examine underground and hidden movements and economies.

I still intend to have my novel Trade War finished this summer. I haven’t spent much time writing it recently, but I have a clear vision for it.

I plan to keep doing the Thinking Liberty podcast with my friends.

I also have a lot of reading and studying to do before September. Think montage.

There are only a few days until The 2009 Molinari Society Symposium. On Tuesday night, Roderick Long and Charles Johnson will join Thinking Liberty to discuss the Molinari Society, Alliance of the Libertarian Left, intellectual property, and whatever else the conversation leads to.

American activist Ryan Olander is currently being held at a deportation facility in Ramle. According to International Solidarity Movement,

Ryan was visiting the al-Kurds in the tent the Palestinian family built in their own backyard, after the recent setter take-over of a section of their house. At 1.15pm, on Friday 18 December, 6 Israeli police walked into the tent, where Ryan was talking to the family members and drinking tea, and took him for questioning at the Russian Compound police station in west Jerusalem…

Ryan was released without charges the following Saturday, 19 December, before the beginning of a trial with 26 Israeli activists arrested in Sheikh Jarrah, only to be illegally re-arrested by immigration police right outside of the same police station that told him he was free to go. Now Ryan is facing illegal deportation after being held in Israeli prisons for a week.

ISM asked supporters to contact the US Embassy in Tel Aviv, contact the Israeli Minister of Interior, or consider donating towards Ryan’s legal costs. (See this link.)

I know Ryan and he’s a great individual. I hope this goes the best way possible for him.

As if Immigrations and Customs Enforcement’s secretive detention system and Joe Arpaio’s personal Gestapo throwing Hispanics into a desert concentration camp weren’t bad enough, The Nation recently reported that ICE confines people in “186 unlisted and unmarked subfield offices”. ICE official James Pendergraph is quoted boasting that the agency can make people “disappear”.

National borders are the turf boundaries that powerful criminal gangs draw to designate who has control of which people. They are usually created by conquest, and force – even when it doesn’t involve the kind of oppression Americans would rightly criticize East Germany for – is the only way to uphold them. Border enforcement is purely authoritarian at every level. There is no possible way one can be libertarian while supporting the border politics of the most powerful empire on the planet.

Related:

How Borders Work
On Borders
Ant-Border Stencil
International Apartheid Pamphlet
Immigration Subversion Squares

LibertyActivism.info has the latest issue of ALLiance available for web viewing or downloading as a pdf. It includes a short essay by myself concerning elections. I look forward to reading the rest of the issue.

Kevin Carson’s Making the State Irrelevant commentary is another good read on the topic of political action.

Some cool folks are throwing a symposium this month in Manhattan.

Tuesday, 29 December 2009, 11:15 a.m.–1:15 p.m.
Molinari Society Symposium: “Intellectual Property: Is it Legitimate?”
New York Marriott Marquis, 1535 Broadway, Room TBA

I look forward to the panel and meeting Charles and Roderick Long again. Check Roderick’s Austro-Athenian Empire blog for the room assignment. It should be posted sometime around the 29th.

Last night’s Thinking Liberty is now archived at patriotradio.com.

Because I didn’t really elaborate on the statement that “my life is more important than anybody else’s to me” it’s easy to read it the wrong way. Everyone exists for the pursuit of their own lives and the meanings they attach to them. If we do not protect the things that give meaning to our lives – our values, our loves, people who would do the same for us – then we risk losing what is most precious.