Archives for June 2013

What if you spent your whole life trying to alert people to something you knew would upset them, but when they finally did hear the message, they shrugged and said, “So what?”

Surely that’s the way some libertarians are going to start feeling as they realize that the NSA snooping scandal isn’t actually a scandal to most people. Many libertarians I know have spent years of their lives dedicated to spreading the word that the government is abusing the rights of the people.

“If people only understand what the government is doing to us, they’ll join us and vote the statists out of office,” many of them believed.

It turns out that the majority of Americans approve of the NSA snooping. That’s right. Not only aren’t they ready to rise up against oppressive Big Brother, they’re rather happy — because they think Big Brother is keeping them safe.

According to a new poll done last week by Pew Research — after the NSA online and phone spying stories came out — 56 percent of Americans think it’s just fine and dandy for the feds to monitor the phone calls of millions of Americans. Almost half of people of people said it’s OK for the federal government to review our emails, too. That’s been consistent over the past decade, because 45 percent approved of it in 2012 and 45 percent approved of it in last week’s poll.

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I didn’t grow up knowing much about Muslims. If you grew up in the United States (or most places in the West), odds are very strong that you didn’t know much about Muslims, either. I’ve discovered that most Muslims know just as little about us as we know about them. That doesn’t stop many people on both sides from hating each other with a passion, though.

For many people who become active in terror groups today, a radical version of the Islamic faith is a motivating factor. Some of those people come to hate those of any other faith. They’re willing to kill other people in the name of destroying anyone who doesn’t bow before their version of God.

As a result, some people in the West — some who claim to be faithful Christians and others who are just nominally or culturally Christian — have decided that all Muslims are evil. This makes no more sense than being robbed by a red-haired man and deciding that all red-haired men must be evil.

On Facebook Saturday night, one of my “friends” posted the following:

Muslims can all go to hell. They are evil bastards. There are no good Muslims, just good dead Muslims. I am a white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant woman, and I have never flown a plane into a building or bombed anyone in my life.

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Have you heard about the Obama administration’s Christmas tree tax? It was all the rage to talk about it two years ago — and now it looks as though it’s back.

Some people say it’s not fair to call it a tax, but I think they’re arguing semantics. Let’s look at what’s really going on and why it matters.

The proposed fee right now is only 15 cents per tree. That doesn’t sound like an onerous amount to add to the price of a tree, but it’s another example of tiny increases that add up. Really, though, I’m bothered even more by what the fee is than by the thought of having to pay an extra nickel and dime per tree.

The federal government has set up various promotion boards over the years to be the advertising arm of a lot of industries, mostly agricultural groups. You know those ads you see for milk (“Got milk?”) that don’t promote any particular brand? That’s an example. You’ve probably also see ads for pork, beef, cotton and a dozen other things. Have you ever wondered who’s paying for those ads?

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