BK Marcus is up in the Freeman this morning, explaining why it’s so hard to get weak weed these days.
Check out “Why Rhett Butler’s Weed is So Strong.”
Prohibition has driven the development of ever-stronger drugs, where a free market would see a proliferation of lighter options.
Filed under Austrian Economics
Although we love Chicago Style, just following it slavishly on every detail can produce some ugly results in your digital text.
In general, style guides are stuck in the print era. We have to adapt them for the realities of digital text in general and ebooks in particular. This need to adapt is most obvious in how Chicago treats two commonly overlooked characters: the ellipsis (…) and the em dash (—).
Filed under Ebooks
On the anniversary of the shooting of Abraham Lincoln, BK Marcus muses on the assassins of Caesar and their place at the very bottom of Dante’s Inferno:
If a modern Dante — someone with the same religious and political beliefs, but with an updated knowledge of history — were to write the Inferno today, he would replace Cassius in satanic mouth #3 with John Wilkes Booth, the man who shot Abraham Lincoln 148 years ago today, April 14, 1865.
Lincoln may not have shared Dante’s faith, but he knew how to use the rhetoric of the Bible to stoke the fervor of 19th-century Christian pietists; and after his assassination, the pietists returned the favor by enshrining Father Abraham in the language of Christian martyrdom.
As John Wilkes Booth shot the Union’s president, he shouted, “Sic semper tyrannis!” — thus always to tyrants, a phrase attributed to Brutus as he stabbed the dying Caesar. It’s also the state motto of Virginia, where I live.
Today’s civic religion requires us to canonize Lincoln, to see his life as a crusade for ever-greater freedom and his violent death as the American equivalent of crucifixion.
One of the many things we’ve lost track of in this sanctioned interpretation is an understanding of the tradition that produced John Wilkes Booth. We are only allowed to perceive the evil of chattel slavery at the center of the Civil War; we are censured if we ever emphasize an older historical struggle between liberty and power.
But the liberals of that era did see that there was more than one liberal principle at stake and that not all the angels aligned themselves with only one side in that bloody struggle.
We don’t have to support political violence (or any violence) to recognize that the same ideological tradition that informed Booth’s name, his most famous words, and his most infamous act is the same tradition that produced Western liberalism and the American Revolution. Sic semper…
For the real story of the tyrant himself, in his own words, check out Joseph Fallon’s ebook Lincoln Uncensored.
The Future of Freedom Foundation’s most popular book of all time, the award-winning, best-selling, myth-smashing book Separating School and State is now up for sale as a beautiful, convenient ebook. It’s ready to read on your iPad, your Kindle, or even your desktop.
Here’s what FFF’s Jacob Hornberger had to say:
We recently converted FFF’s book Separating School & State: How to Liberate America’s Families by Sheldon Richman into eBook format. It is available for ordering here in Kindle, iTunes, and Nook. This is a great book! It is FFF’s all-time best-seller. I can’t recommend it too highly.…
It would be difficult to find a better example of a socialistic program than public schooling. The state gets its “customers” through mandate. If parents don’t subject their children to the system, the parents are fined or jailed. If they remain recalcitrant, the state takes away their children. The curriculum is set by the state. The schoolteachers are government employees. The system is funded by taxation.
The results, as most everyone realizes, are abysmal.
At Invisible Order, we’re prouder than a whole pride of lions to be a part of FFF’s new digital releases. The epublishing revolution sets great books flying free — and makes it easier every day to break out of the state’s program of educational imprisonment.
Filed under Ebooks
Tom Woods writes about a documentary he tried to watch, but had to turn off after it opened with a fake quote (what we here at Invisible Order call a zombie quote) from Benjamin Franklin and a fake quote from Rothschild.
Here’s the supposed Franklin line:
The refusal of King George the Third to allow the colonies to operate an honest money system which freed the ordinary man from the clutches of the money manipulators was probably the prime cause of the revolution.
It sounds great! The quote says exactly what you want it to say (if you’re the conspiracy theorist making a documentary entitled All Wars Are Bankers’ Wars) and it even uses modern phrasing: “An honest money system,” and “money manipulators.”
Filed under Tips and Tricks
Barnes & Noble is pulling back on its investment in the Nook, its line of tablets and ereader devices.
Throughout 2012, B&N pushed hard to get readers of books hooked on the Nook. But now it looks like it’s conceding that fight. B&N has announced it is going to put the company’s focus on acquiring content (i.e., ebooks) and on signing deals with Microsoft and Samsung for distributing that content. (Note that they don’t mention working with Amazon.)
This is the latest twist in the ongoing battle over who will control the reading habits of the world’s expanding population of avid book consumers. Ereader devices and tablets in the book business have generally been a losing proposition. Even Amazon, the leader in the field, actually makes no profit selling its Kindle hardware. It sells Kindles cheap in order to undercut its competitors and get the public to buy ebooks, where the real money is.
The transition from paper to pixels has been hard on the big publishing companies, but their vicious struggle to outdo one another is an ongoing boon for us: readers, writers, and independent publishers.
Filed under Ebooks, Publishing
“Now comes Joseph Fallon … with his new e-book, Lincoln Uncensored. Fallon’s book examines 10 volumes of collected writings and speeches of Lincoln’s, which include passages on slavery, secession, equality of blacks and emancipation. We don’t have to rely upon anyone’s interpretation. Just read his words to see what you make of them.”
Read Walter Williams’s full review.
Buy Lincoln Uncensored from Amazon.com or get it free with subscription to the Laissez Faire Club.
Right now in Canada, thousands of indigenous people and their supporters are rising in protest against a long train of government abuses. The latest insult is a new federal law that many see as being designed to help crony capitalists rob the indigenous people of their remaining land.
The protest movement is called Idle No More, and it reflects longstanding aboriginal traditions of limiting centralized authority, and relying instead on voluntaryism and polycentrism as organizing principles.
Filed under News and Commentary, Nonaggression Anthropology
Our latest ebook creation is hitting stores just in time for the holidays: Reason magazine’s collection of their greatest-ever interviews, vol. 1.
This first volume has fascinating conversations with Ronald Reagan, F.A. Hayek, Thomas Szasz, Timothy Leary (yes, the drug visionary), and Christopher Hitchens, complete with illustrations and covers from the original magazine articles.
It’s a beautiful gift for anyone who appreciates a good dialogue. Just follow this link and you can be reading it in minutes.
Merry Christmas!
Filed under Ebooks
Charlotte Bowen-Gauthier
Daniel Coleman
B.K. Marcus
Nathalie Marcus
Mike Reid
The Stateless Man
I (Mike) will be on the Stateless Man radio show on the Overseas Radio Network Monday at 1:30 pm EST to talk about Idle No More, the huge indigenous protest movement here in Canada, from a libertarian point of view.
If you haven’t checked out the Stateless Man with Fergus Hodgson yet, I suggest you give it a try. Fergus is a libertarian writer and adventurer with fascinating guests every week — including, this week, an Icelandic girl whose name was outlawed by her own government. You can listen in tomorrow via the Overseas Radio Network’s online player.
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Filed under News and Commentary, Nonaggression Anthropology