Another vlog on this week's announcements from the Paul Campaign -- this time from Free Hollywood's Jon Arden.

New vlog from Free Hollywood's Stanton Cruse!

We saw Ron Paul speak Tuesday night at a campaign fundraiser in Manhattan Beach. He was introduced by Nassim Taleb. Taleb is not just any Ron Paul supporter, but author of The Black Swan ("One of the twelve most influential books since World War II" - Sunday Times). The 2007 book explores the concept of events that, when they first occur, are unexpected by people in general, because they would be perceived as improbable at the time. This mismatch between perception and reality stems from various human habits and tendencies such as inductive reasoning, belief in experts and authorities, and fitting historical events into logical narratives that downplay their unexpectedness. Most notably, almost all major events in history have been unexpected.

After Taleb’s introduction, Ron Paul proceed to deliver a charming and entertaining talk. Afterward, during Q&A, an audience member asked Ron point-blank if he thought we could force a second round of voting at the Republican National Convention. For those not already familiar, if Romney fails to get the majority of delegate votes on the first round, it could open the door for a takeover by Ron Paul delegates. Without hesitation, Ron answered "No." He explained (as I have always maintained) that if it appears that following the rules will lead to a second round of voting, the establishment Republican shills in charge will simply change the rules on the spot, to disallow it. Many in the audience may have reacted with discouragement. However, optimist that I am, I must mention that the future is yet unknown, despite what may seem probable or inevitable right now. Perhaps the appearance of Taleb at the event is itself some sort of omen along these lines! It is interesting to consider a few other of Ron's remarks that evening. He recounted the story that when he first ran for congress, he did not believe there was any chance of him getting elected. Of course, eventually he was elected. A bit later he recounted how after he won that first election, he believed that it was essentially a fluke, and that as a result of how he would conduct himself in Congress - standing for principle, setting an exemplary voting record - he would not be re-elected. Of course, he went on to be re-elected 11 times. A bit later again, he recounted how upon winning that first election, he believed that his brief congressional term would have no real effect, and would be relegated to total obscurity, perhaps only to be mentioned years later in some historical footnote. Of course, we know how that expectation worked out: Ron is now the leader, inspiration, and icon of a new world-wide movement for peace and liberty that is ushering in the demise of the old political orders. I don't know of anyone who foresaw this turn of events - including Ron.

Ron is driving a relentless, breakneck-paced schedule of campaign events in Texas and California. After Q&A, people approached him from all sides and surrounded him for pictures, autographs, handshakes, or a few words of gratitude or encouragement. He was constantly turning around to greet fans. Eventually, every person had who wanted to, had their turn with him, and for a moment he was standing alone, with an envelope of still air around him, like an Aikido master.

This week Youtube has begun to show signs of what the Post-CISPA internet might look like. Many of the videos we produce for our Youtube channel get mirrored by other channels. You may recall our grassroots Ron Paul ad "Imagine America Restored." I recently discovered a mirrored version of it with over 50,000 page views! To track the numbers, I started a playlist of our mirrored videos. This morning I discovered that the video is now gone with hundreds if not thousands of other uploads made by the most subscribed to Ron Paul channel on Youtube ever, RonPaul2008dotcom.



RonPaul2008dotcom was a user generated channel with over 300,000 subscribers. I have been following its uploads since 2008. RonPaul2008dotcom was a channel that uploaded some of those early viral Ron Paul videos during the previous campaign. Whoever hosted the channel has tirelessly uploaded content promoting the cause of Liberty for years. We have not been nearly as active with our channel as RonPaul2008dotcom was, and we have put thousands of hours into our channel. I can only image the sense of loss the channel's host must feel over this.


http://www.youtube.com/user/RonPaul2008dotcom

Furthermore, Ron Paul's official 2008 channel, 'ronpaul2008', was also shut down this week. It housed the original 2008 Ron Paul campaign ads that boasted "He's catching on!" CISPA is not even law and the free internet we love is already disappearing before our eyes.

Perhaps you also noticed this at the bottom of Google searches this week:



DCMA, SOPA, CISPA whatever they call it, these bills are not only an attack on our Liberties, they are being used to fundamentally change the way the internet works, and how we view our relationship to the web.

The internet is quickly becoming a paranoid place for users where it feels like big brother is looking back at us from our computer screens in a very real sense.

Regardless of what laws they pass, I will continue to participate in the culture of sharing that I have grown to enjoy.

A bit of good news, the CISPA video we posted last week finally got traction with a mirrored version of it. Reposted by Alexandra Gaudios (https://twitter.com/#!/aligaudiosi) on her Youtube channel UsAmericansWakeUp. Her channel features hand-selected liberty videos reposted from a variety of sources, renamed with attention getting titles like:

"The internet is being destroyed! CISPA has passed! MEDIA BLACKOUT"


It received over 15,000 views in the first 24 hours and now shows over 18,000 views on day 2! I'm glad it finally found an audience, but more importantly, that people are waking up to the serious danger these laws pose for our Liberties. We received this comment from Youtube user "ramazone2" this morning.

"If they take 1 Ron Paul channel down, we should put up 10."

I think that would be a good thing to do. I have grown into the habit of downloading my favorite Youtube videos. I use the "Easy Youtube Downloader" add on for Firefox.


https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/easy-youtube-video-downl-10137/?src=ss

In fact, I think I'll begin mirroring our own videos on an alternative channel with a few of my favorites that I once downloaded from RonPaul2008dotcom. Hopefully with time, this proves to be little more than the types of programming bugs we have seen before, as Youtube is once again undergoing massive format changes. Perhaps it will become an friendlier, more convenient Youtube for the user, rather than a tool for the bureaucrats attempting to pass CISPA.

Power is all about growing your network of people that you can rely on, and who can rely on each other, so as to be able to stand against those who wish to steal from you. This image illustrates this idea well. As everyone knows, if I threaten someone with violent force so that they surrender their property (property is merely the result of an individuals labor), it's theft, but when the IRS does this, it's called taxation. How do we deal with this dichotomy, and accept that if a person wears a government badge, they can literally get away with murder? We deal with this as the National Socialists did, with nationalism. "I'm a good American, I pay my taxes", how often have you heard this on television and in the movies, the two phrases are virtually synonymous in American culture.

It took me quite a while to break down this programming that I have been emotionally committed to as far back as I can remember, the blind belief that our country is a righteous crusader in a dark world of evil, spreading our ideas of freedom and protecting us from those who wish to steal our freedoms from us. It's always been obvious to even the casual observer that there are those within government who wish to abuse the power they have and exert their ideas on us with their liberty stealing legislation, ie: violent force. We rationalize this dicotomy with the idea that the "other team" is trying to keep me down, not my team, well, some times my team, but those are just the bad apples. Most of my life I believed that, in general, my taxes were contributing to that which is good in this world, well, most of it, except for the waste, corruption, the programs that I didn't agree with....

It seems amazing to me now, how many things I had disagreed with, that government does, but none the less, I would defend it's necessity with a passionately engaged debate. I no longer wear rose colored glasses. I no longer believe in the American utopia we are taught about in our State mandated compulsory schooling institutions. Once you take the red pill, you can't unsee the truth that you've been exposed to.

A good friend of mine came to most of the same conclusions I came to, he understood that he needed to build his network, and that the strength of our network is our greatest opportunity to achieve safty from those who would wish to steal from you, and in his effort to build his network, he launched SoLE, the Society of Libertarian Entrepreneurs which has grown to an international Society of people who want to enrich themselves by being entrepreneurs, and grow their network of people who are also are not looking to the State as their safety net.

There are many paths to liberty, but I would encourage all who are reading this, to consider putting some time and effort into growing your power base network, and to organize.

Rick Santorum apparently got the memo (or a promise of the VP spot) yesterday and suspended his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination. The obvious issue arising from this for Ron Paul supporters is what happens to Santorum's delegates. According to most of the mainstream media, the end of Santorum's campaign means that Mitt Romney has essentially clinched the nomination. However, this video from a reporter at the local Fox station in Cincinnati presents an alternative perspective -- that the race for the Republican nomination is far from over.

Personally, I think Mitt Romney will be the Republican nominee and I hope Ron Paul will make a 3rd party run for president. The handful of polls that examine an Obama-Romney-Paul race show Paul at 17%. But that's an issue for another day -- for now, it's worth spending some time pondering Republican delegate math and coming to an educated opinion as to whether Paul has a realistic route to an effective presence at the GOP convention this August.

It is only the first week of April, but the American Spring is in full bloom.

You could feel it in the energy of the 7000+ people who gathered at a stadium on the UCLA campus a few nights ago to see a candidate for president who offers a radical, yet timeless vision of a society based on peaceful, voluntary interaction, rather than coercion and force. At 76, Ron Paul has become a hero to a generation of college students, and at rallies like this one you can almost see his ideas rushing forward - like his vast crowd of supporters pouring in through the stadium doors - to a philosophical tipping point that might be closer than we realize.

Not that you would know it from the Republican/Democrat establishment or the dinosaurs of the old network and cable media. Lately, their voices have been united in a call for the primary race to wrap up so we can get down to making the crucial choice between Obamacare and Romneycare. Whose version of the individual mandate will win? Can anyone really tell the difference anyway?

While most of the old media stayed away from the UCLA rally, there was at least one exception. Wandering through the crowd, perhaps bewildered by scenes that didn't fit his network's narrative of the American political climate, an unassuming man carried an oversized camera with a Fox News logo towards a cluster of trees. Suddenly, it became clear that well over a thousand people remained outside the stadium, unable to enter the 5,800 seat venue that was filled to capacity. Dozens of them had climbed into the trees with hopes of catching a glimpse of their hero, barely discernible in the distance. Clearly, this contradicted the Fox News story from the same day that declared “the Ron Paul 'revolution' has suddenly gotten very quiet.”



Far from becoming “very quiet,” Ron Paul has spoken before larger and larger crowds in recent weeks. The night before his UCLA appearance, he drew over 6,000 people to Cal State Chico. In Los Angeles, volunteers pack the LA Liberty Headquarters on Abbot Kinney Boulevard every day, making hundreds of calls each to potential voters. Reports are trickling out of caucus states, where battles for delegates continue to rage long after CNN and Fox went home; large numbers of Ron Paul supporters are winning election to delegate slates, putting them in position to be a powerful force in Tampa if there is a brokered convention this August.

Hope is a powerful motivator, and the crowd at UCLA was filled with it, despite the bleak economic reality of the present. Students feel this bleak economic reality through tuition rates that soar year after year in an ugly example of inflation. Paul's UCLA speech brought home the principle that more and more people are coming to realize – that rising prices are what happen when the Federal Reserve lowers the value of money by creating enormous amounts of it out of thin air. This idea, a cornerstone of the Austrian School of economic theory, was distilled by the thousands in attendance into the hope-inspiring chant common at Paul rallies: “End the Fed! End the Fed! End the Fed!”



But ending the Federal Reserve, the wars abroad, and the war on civil liberties at home, while important issues in their own right, are all expressions of an underlying philosophy of liberty. In his speech, Ron Paul noted the power of ideas, delivering the radical paraphrasing of Victor Hugo that “an idea whose time has come cannot be stopped by any army or any government.”

When packed stadiums of thousands of people passionately cheer ideas that just five short years ago were relegated to a handful of libertarian writers and a think tank or two, it seems like liberty is finally an idea whose time has come. Goosebumps travel up and down my arms, caused not by the cool night air, but by the eruption of this enormous, uninhibited crowd. It escalates, the “End the Fed!” chant growing louder, followed by one of “President Paul! President Paul!” In this moment, the awesome power of the liberty movement becomes clear. The old guard of both major political parties, with their cruel bipartisan love of war, bailouts of rich bank executives, and disregard for life, liberty, and property in the name of “security,” has been put on notice; a swiftly growing number of people are not sitting idly by, and are building a movement to take back their rights.

Soviet founder V.I. Lenin made what was perhaps the most honest statement about the nature of government when in 1920 he described it as "unlimited power based on force." In contrast, the rapid growth of the Ron Paul movement provides hope that a different type of society is possible; a society that eschews a powerful central government and its beneficiaries at the top of a hierarchy; a society based on voluntary interaction rather than force.

While there is a lot of reason for optimism that the ideas of liberty are winning the philosophical battle, we have not quite reached the tipping point yet. As we educate ourselves, there comes a point when, as Ludwig von Mises said , it is our responsibility to “thrust [ourselves] vigorously into the intellectual battle.” There were a few anti-Paul protesters at the UCLA rally, and some in the crowd chose to engage them and introduce them to the axiom of non-aggression that underlies libertarian political theory and practice. When it comes to our opponents, if we engage them with the gentle meekness and deep respect that Ron Paul displays, but positively engage them nevertheless, we will make a difference.

At this moment, we can start to catch a glimpse of how old authoritarian assumptions can be washed away by the rising tide of new ideas, sometimes seemingly overnight. Taken-for-granted dogmas and institutions of power no longer have the answers to deeply entrenched problems, and suddenly a voice crying in the wilderness for decades reaches a new generation and inspires it with a vision of what a free society could look like. Here at the dawn of the American Spring, let's continue to be inspired by the world we know is possible, inspire other people with our vision, and make that vision of peace, prosperity, and liberty the center of debate until the day it becomes a reality.

I am headlong into campaigning for Ron Paul and anything can happen. I'm in it for the long haul. Looking ahead, how do we that have been so awakened by Ron Paul move forward toward the ideals of liberty he champions? Stefan Molyneux was asked this by a group of activists based out of Oklahoma that call themselves "Liberty Minded".

Free Hollywood and other LA area liberty lovers gathered outside the NBC studios in Burbank to welcome Ron Paul to the Tonight Show last week!

Another recent video of ours designed to appeal to Republican primary voters. This is an update of the famous "Morning in America" ad from Reagan's 1984 re-election campaign.

This is a video we made a month ago in an effort to promote Ron Paul's campaign for presidency in the Republican primaries. There has been a lot of discussion lately within the Free Hollywood community about who our audience is and how to reach out to it -- should we focus on the ideological right, left, or apolitical people? In this video, we attempted to focus our message on the tea party constituency. A lot of people in libertarian circles see the tea party movement as dead as a grassroots force -- co-opted by the Republican Party and its allied institutions within beltway conservatism. However, if we correctly identified the target audience for this video, there seems to be reason for hope within the tea party rank and file. Our most successful video to date, it was reposted by several other youtube channels and has received approximately 100,000 views between the various repostings and the original. While it's hard to say who those 100,000 viewers are, if we were right about our target audience then it seems that there is still a hunger for limited government ideas among people to whom tea party imagery appeals.

Free-Hollywood encounters The WANTED after the Tonight show as we waited for Ron Paul to come out. They did a spontaneous rooftop performance of "Lose My Mind" for their fans! What cool guys to do that. I asked band member Nathan if he like's Ron Paul.

The Power of Nightmares shows top CIA officials openly admit that Al-qaeda is a total and complete fabrication, never having existed at any time. It's a 3 part BBC documentary film series, written, produced and narrated by Adam Curtis over mostly an archive footage montage, first broadcast in the UK in late 2004. The Bush administration needed a reason that complied with the laws so they could go after “the bad guy of their choice” -- namely laws that had been set in place to protect us from mobs and “criminal organizations” such as the Mafia. They paid Jamal al Fadl hundreds of thousands of dollars to back the U.S. Government’s story of Al-qaeda, a “group” or criminal organization they could “legally” go after. Here's all three parts to the documentary:


The Power of Nightmares Part 1-Baby it's Cold Outside


The Power of Nightmares Part 2 - The Phantom Victory


The Power of Nightmares Part 3 - The Shadows in the Cave


The films compare the rise of the Neo-Conservative movement in the United States and the radical Islamist movement, making comparisons on their origins and claiming similarities between the two. More controversially, it argues that the threat of radical Islamism as a massive, sinister organized force of destruction, specifically in the form of Al-Qaeda, is a myth perpetrated by politicians in many countries—and particularly American Neo-Conservatives—in an attempt to unite and inspire their people following the failure of earlier, more utopian ideologies.

Part 2: The Phantom Victory:
In the second episode, Islamist factions, rapidly falling under the more radical influence of Zawahiri and his rich Saudi acolyte Osama bin Laden, join the Neo-Conservative-influenced Reagan Administration to combat the Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan. When the Soviets eventually pull out and when the Eastern Bloc begins to collapse in the late 1980s, both groups believe they are the primary architects of the "Evil Empire's" defeat. Curtis argues that the Soviets were on their last legs anyway, and were doomed to collapse without intervention.

However, the Islamists see it quite differently, and in their triumph believe that they had the power to create 'pure' Islamic states in Egypt and Algeria. However, attempts to create perpetual Islamic states are blocked by force. The Islamists then try to create revolutions in Egypt and Algeria by the use of terrorism to scare the people into rising up. However, the people were terrified by the violence and the Algerian government uses their fear as a way to maintain power. In the end, the Islamists declare the entire populations of the countries as inherently contaminated by western values, and finally in Algeria turn on each other, each believing that other terrorist groups are not pure enough Muslims either.

In America, the Neo-Conservatives' aspirations to use the United States military power for further destruction of evil are thrown off track by the ascent of George H. W. Bush to the presidency, followed by the 1992 election of Bill Clinton leaving them out of power. The Neo-Conservatives, with their conservative Christian allies, attempt to demonize Clinton throughout his presidency with various real and fabricated stories of corruption and immorality. To their disappointment, however, the American people do not turn against Clinton. The Islamist attempts at revolution end in massive bloodshed, leaving the Islamists without popular support. Zawahiri and bin Laden flee to the sufficiently safe Afghanistan and declare a new strategy; to fight Western-inspired moral decay they must deal a blow to its source: the United States.

I talked with Grandma the other day, and the first thing she says is "I heard Ron Paul is going to be Romney's VP!", and then today my brother told me the same thing. I do not get my information from mainstream news sources, but I too saw this rumor on Drudge! It's such a ridiculous notion that at first I dismissed it, but after hearing it from multiple sources, this seems to be yet another not-so-subtle attack by the establishment against Ron Paul. In the past they would call him "unelectable", but not so anymore. Now they label him "king-maker" or "power broker" to diminish his chances of winning in your mind. With "Vice President," they make him out to be Romney's "sidekick" as if Ron Paul has any interest in that!

Regardless of what you're seeing or hearing in the mainstream, the reality on the ground is much different! The momentum for the Paul campaign is accelerating right now at an unprecedented rate. Packed houses everywhere he speaks while other GOP candidates are having difficulty filling their events. Make no mistake about it, Ron Paul is in this for the Presidency.


Contrast the attendance at Romney's latest speech in Michigan

against Ron Paul's latest event:

RON PAUL CAN WIN

I just read this quote on Daily Paul, something I've read many times before, but it some how resonated with me in a new way at this point in time: "All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent." -- Thomas Jefferson

It was included in an article related to the recent cancellation of the Judge's show, Freedom Watch. I believe the Judge on Freedom Watch was the best effort and delivery of libertarian principles the mainstream media has ever seen, and now it's off the air. The only knowledge that saves me from the disparity of the silencing of these ideas is that webcasting is the new newscasting, and more people watch YouTube during prime time than all the three major networks combined, but there are still a lot of people exclusively jacked into matrix television.

Reading that article about the cancellation of Freedom Watch reminded me of one of the first Ron Paul videos I ever heard, which ultimately changed my life, I can't seem to find it, but many months later, when I discovered the Judge, I realized that video was set to narration of the audio of Andrew Napolitano speaking of Ron Paul at the Future of Freedom Foundation, June 3, 2007. This is what he said about Ron Paul:
".... in his heart, and in his head, in his character, and in his intellect, in what he has done, and in what he will become, the Thomas Jefferson of our day, Ron Paul is one of us."

Here's the actual footage of him speaking:


In trying to find the original audio, I just found a great Judge quote wrapping up that same speach: "when the people fear the government, that is tyranny, when the government fears the people, that is liberty".

I'm torn between believing this is an opportunity that couldn't have come at a better time, or believing this is one of those dark moments when the lamp light of liberty has been extinguished. I am leaning towards the former. The Judge has that power in his speaking that is the Yin to Ron Paul's Yang and could be an unstoppable force if he chooses to join up with the Paul campaign's speaking tours. I can't wait to see how this develops.

I'm glad my friends and I never even began to plan a trip this year, I can't believe it's already been another year, but this was the year of all years to miss CPAC.

I am constantly impressed by the decisions that RP's campaign is making, first not taking the interview request after Fox's first debate, not joining the "debate" Donald Trump planned to host just to watch everyone else back out (what leadership on his part!) then not attending CPAC! He just made CPAC irrelevant, completely thumbed his nose at them, C4L didn't go, and neither did the youth.

This should reeeeeally show the strength, no the POWER, of Ron Paul and his campaign of ideas.

But they're still scared that he'll win, the American Conservative Union and CPAC are moving from paper ballots to electronic voting machines. After such changes, Al Cardenas, the new ACU president, said he wasn't "Worried" that Paul would win the straw poll for a third year in a row.

My friends and I barely even mentioned the fact that CPAC was coming up, we didn't really care, looks like Ron Paul's campaign manager is feeling the same way, "we're not participating in this year's event," Jesse Benton told HuffPost. He said he wasn't sure if Paul's name would be on the ballot. "We haven't paid attention."

I don't know the campaign's reasons for Ron Paul not speaking at CPAC, but it's clear that the organization was disappointed in his two years in a row victories. I imagine they weighed cost vs benefit and concluded it wasn't worth it, just as did I.

Yen Jingchang was one of the signers of the secret document.

In 1978, the farmers in a small Chinese village called Xiaogang gathered in a mud hut to sign a secret contract. They thought it might get them executed. Instead, it wound up transforming China's economy in ways that are still reverberating today.

The contract was so risky — and such a big deal — because it was created at the height of communism in China. Everyone worked on the village's collective farm; there was no personal property.

"Back then, even one straw belonged to the group," says Yen Jingchang, who was a farmer in Xiaogang in 1978. "No one owned anything."

At one meeting with communist party officials, a farmer asked: "What about the teeth in my head? Do I own those?" Answer: No. Your teeth belong to the collective.


In theory, the government would take what the collective grew, and would also distribute food to each family. There was no incentive to work hard — to go out to the fields early, to put in extra effort, Yen Jingchang says.

"Work hard, don't work hard — everyone gets the same," he says. "So people don't want to work."

In Xiaogang there was never enough food, and the farmers often had to go to other villages to beg. Their children were going hungry. They were desperate.

So, in the winter of 1978, after another terrible harvest, they came up with an idea: Rather than farm as a collective, each family would get to farm its own plot of land. If a family grew a lot of food, that family could keep some of the harvest.

This is an old idea, of course. But in communist China of 1978, it was so dangerous that the farmers had to gather in secret to discuss it.

One evening, they snuck in one by one to a farmer's home. Like all of the houses in the village, it had dirt floors, mud walls and a straw roof. No plumbing, no electricity.

"Most people said 'Yes, we want do it,' " says Yen Hongchang, another farmer who was there. "But there were others who said 'I dont think this will work — this is like high voltage wire.' Back then, farmers had never seen electricity, but they'd heard about it. They knew if you touched it, you would die."

Despite the risks, they decided they had to try this experiment — and to write it down as a formal contract, so everyone would be bound to it. By the light of an oil lamp, Yen Hongchang wrote out the contract.

The farmers agreed to divide up the land among the families. Each family agreed to turn over some of what they grew to the government, and to the collective. And, crucially, the farmers agreed that families that grew enough food would get to keep some for themselves.

The contract also recognized the risks the farmers were taking. If any of the farmers were sent to prison or executed, it said, the others in the group would care for their children until age 18.

The farmers tried to keep the contract secret — Yen Hongchang hid it inside a piece of bamboo in the roof of his house — but when they returned to the fields, everything was different.

Before the contract, the farmers would drag themselves out into the field only when the village whistle blew, marking the start of the work day. After the contract, the families went out before dawn.

"We all secretly competed," says Yen Jingchang. "Everyone wanted to produce more than the next person."

It was the same land, the same tools and the same people. Yet just by changing the economic rules — by saying, you get to keep some of what you grow — everything changed.

At the end of the season, they had an enormous harvest: more, Yen Hongchang says, than in the previous five years combined...

Within a few years, farms all over China adopted the principles in that secret document. People could own what they grew... China's economy started to grow like crazy. Since 1978, something like 500 million people have risen out of poverty in China.

Today, the Chinese government is clearly proud of what happened in Xiaogang. That contract is now in a museum. And the village has become this origin story that kids in China learn about in school.

For the full story:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/01/20/145360447/the-secret-document-that-transformed-china?ft=1&f=1001

Peter Thiel, the man who wanted to change the way we trade with each other, lowered the barriers of electronic exchange by creating the online payment method PayPal. The founders sold the business for $1.5 billion and his next big venture in 2004 was as the first outside investor in The Facebook. Later he decided he wanted to end death & taxes so he found a software engineer who had boiled down aging to seven diseases, Aubrey De Grey. Aubrey De Grey was having a rough time trying to get medical professionals to try to begin solving each of these diseases, so Thiel funded the project.


Later in 2008 he pledged $500k to Patri Friedman's venture, The Seasteading Institute, whose mission it is to build mobile ocean islands for permanent living, experimentation and innovation with social, political and legal systems, which would bring competition back to land based governments, and force their hand to better serve those they rule over.


This long time libertarian gets interviewed shortly after the "Social Network":

Today he's announced his donation to the Ron Paul centric Endorse Liberty Super PAC. "Too often in this country we learn things the hard way ... With its unsustainable deficits, government spending is heading down the same path. Men and women who want freedom and growth should take action. A good place to start is voting for Ron Paul," Thiel said in a statement.

An economics professor at a local college made a statement that he had never failed a single student before, but had recently failed an entire class. That class had insisted that Obama's socialism worked and that no one would be poor and no one would be rich, a great equalizer.
The professor then said, "OK, we will have an experiment in this class on Obama's plan". All grades will be averaged and everyone will receive the same grade so no one will fail and no one will receive an A.... (substituting grades for dollars - something closer to home and more readily understood by all).
After the first test, the grades were averaged and everyone got a B. The students who studied hard were upset and the students who studied little were happy. As the second test rolled around, the students who studied little had studied even less and the ones who studied hard decided they wanted a free ride too so they studied little..
The second test average was a D! No one was happy. When the 3rd test rolled around, the average was an F. As the tests proceeded, the scores never increased as bickering, blame and name-calling all resulted in hard feelings and no one would study for the benefit of anyone else. To their great surprise, ALL FAILED and the professor told them that socialism would also ultimately fail because when the reward is great, the effort to succeed is great, but when government takes all the reward away, no one will try or want to succeed. It could not be any simpler than that.
Remember, there IS a test coming up. The 2012 elections.

These are possibly the 5 best sentences you'll ever read and all applicable to this experiment:
1. You cannot legislate the poor into prosperity by legislating the wealthy out of prosperity.
2. What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving.
3. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else.
4. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it!
5. When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that is the beginning of the end of any nation.

By: Ed Will with Bill Essmann

I found the above post on a friends FB wall, I wanted to share it but there was no share link, so I copied the text here, then clicked the image and realized it has 58,643 shares so far. I believe this so perfectly summarizes socialism, just as Maybury's article on LRC has shown that this very same experiment happened at the beginning of our country:
http://free-hollywood.com/blog.php?s=165

The NDAA is passed by the House, Senate and signed by the President:

Just days ago, this was shot at a nearby railroad stop:

And one radio news station, KFI, reported that Joint military training exercises will be held evenings in downtown Los Angeles through Thursday, their exercises are closed to the public, and are designed to ensure the military's ability to operate in urban environments according to the Los Angeles Police Department:

http://www.kfiam640.com/pages/NEWS.html?article=9653697

These are older armored personnel carriers. If they were being upgraded or stored stateside, they wouldn't be shipped with logistic support and the tankers to fuel them. How strange the coincidence that the military would happen to be doing this kind of training exercise, all right after NDAA was passed.

Question: I was asked what circumstances I thought would cause the military to apply NDAA in the foreseeable future?

Answer: A solar flare or EMP that wipes out our power grid, some unexplained phenomenon, the next and last right still protected by our constitution, a national gun ban. Whatever it is, it will be "for our protection." Power taken is never unused -- like our first atom bomb, we couldn't wait to use it.

Whatever my speculation, and outside the report by the LA police that this is a training exercise designed to be used overseas, logic would dictate that the military is wanting to carry military personnel in an area that is likely to be under fire. During WWII, Japan's Military Commander realized he could not defeat us, because he said "there would be a rifle behind every blade of grass." I really have no idea what the reason is for transporting so many armored personnel carriers and logistic support vehicles, but to me the three things that have happened in the last few weeks are a cause for concern.