OK. Just for a moment, ignore the odds and assume that Ron Paul is prez. What could he actually DO ? Well, first off, the margin to get virtually any new legislation through would jump to 67%, in order to get past Paul's vetos. Only legislation that reduced illegitimate government (from a limited state libertarian point of view, not necessarily the same as my anarchist position) would make it without a two-thirds majority. So, every bill would probably come in as a trade-off, ...

Update: 08/29/09 The Tustin libary just opened its new branch last week, with something on the order of 75 computers for adult use, plus the wifi.  The head manager of the library had assured me, several months prior, that bandwidth and access would not be a problem anymore.  (ROFL) I predicted that within two months the bandwidth problem would be back and they would have lines waiting for access, and I stated the argument for that prediction. It didn'...

See a previous discussion: Now it seems that a lot of people who otherwise qualified for assistance from FEMA in the Katrina disaster cannot get it, or have already lost their chance, simply because they weren't using Windose and IE6. I heard a long interview on NPR with a woman whose home, business, vehicles were all destroyed, so she found out about a limited time offer of a $2,000 debit card to families such as hers. Problem is, her only computer was her husband's Mac portable, with...

In Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged" (which came in right after the Bible as the book that most influenced American's lives, when the Book of the Month Club did a survey in 1991 - not bad for a 1958 novel, which still sells quite briskly in 2005), there is a classic scene in which two of the good guys are facing a crew of state sleezebags who are utterly certain that they have them under their thumb. The baddies have succeeded in having passed a whole set of draconian laws which nobody could foll...

So, with just the lucky chance of my noticing from my mailing from the Orange County Peace Coalition that the IPC was meeting locally, I drove up to Anaheim after dealing with the gang once again at my storage unit (see my article Life Goes On... .).It took a while for the IPC quorum to arrive, and there was Rafael Ranteria, with yet another resolution to create racial/ethnic quotas for programming at KPFK. He literally wanted percentages for every group in the universe, and a rule that ...

I think if was back in the late '60's that the Reader's Digest published a little economic analysis showing what percentage of the costs of everyday items was taken up by taxes, tariffs, sudsidies, etc., as opposed to the full and complete costs of manufacturing, marketing and delivery to the store shelf. At that time, a loaf of premium bread would typically be on sale at the supermarket for $.25, or 4 for a dollar, which was about half or so of the typical retail price. According to the ...

OK, I've had it with so-called "intellectual property." It's a great idea in principle, but in practice it frankly sucks big time. Please see my "Virtually Real" article for more details. The bottom line is that, far from encouraging innovation by protecting intellectual property, the way our legal system and today's patent office works is that if you are a big corporation, then you can get and protect patents and you can pretty well ignore patents owned by anyone else who doesn't ha...

The other day, I attended a meeting of young Democrats - as in, early-teen - in order to hear one of the local adult candidates speak. There were actually only a couple of kids present, both resident children of the hosts, and they were right out of Harry Potter. They actually looked the parts - the boy, with his long black wizard cloak, could easilly have done Harry, with some glasses - and the girl had that distracted eatherial quality, not to mention being quite beautiful, and was wear...

I was asked to write up my experiences as a homeless person recently for use in a possible dramatic presentation. I haven't really qualified for the title for over a decade, so much of my knowledge may be out of date, but here goes: When I moved to California in early '76 to start the revolution, I had about $1,000 total in cash, plus a large camper pickup truck full of my junk. At that time, $1,000 was five or six months rent for a decent-sized apartment or a small house in Long Beach. ...

In the early '80's I ran into an interesting guy who was not a libertarian, to my surprise, especially as we met at a party hosted by Anthony L. Hargis & Co., a gold depository service. Hargis had started his gold depository in the mid-'70's, offering a way for people to reduce exposure to inflation by accounts denominated in either gold or dollars. Hargis' main focus was on capital preservation, although the feds have recently alleged that some of his customers may have been using his se...

When we find a product artificially undervalued, then we also expect to find a run on that product, and subsequent lines or ques. Recently at the local Orange County, California public libraries, for example, for about a year, printing from the internet computers was free. The Costa Mesa Technical branch, in particular, which features about 30 fast computers with LCD screens, also started out with a couple of very nice Kodak wax transfer hi-res color printers, which can provide a nearly mag...

1> Israel Feuer - because he DESERVES it, and we NEED a sane benevolent voice of real experience, and no one else comes close to Israel. 2> Me - Phil Osborn. (and I really dithered over this one, believe me...) 3> Raul Castillo. Because he's young - the youngest candidate, actually - and smart, and has a following, and will do a lot of work for us, and he listens well, and I think he's a good guy who won't sell out, who will become a major asset to the station. 4> B. Hall. Because she'...

Update November 23th, 2004: Well, my 1-minute statement finally went up this week, after many snafus, including repeated appointments with Fernando in which he didn't show, The station is going to play it an additional 8 times to try to make up for the several weeks in which either it was not played at all, except someone's translation of a previous statement into Spanish - played during English programming, and then a week or so during which an uninteligable version was played. So, fina...

I posted this to Nalini's KPFKChat.org last night. (Minor editing here for clarification.) "When confronted with a choice between two evils, I always like to try the one I haven't tried before." Mae West. Phil Osborn Divisiveness uber alles - as usual Mon Jan 26 2004 10:36:41 pm 206.40.223.100 So, now I've been to three LSB events as a candidate (for the KPFK Local Station Board). At Long Beach, the 13 or so candidates waited for two hours to speak for two minutes to two people -...

_ The Future of KPFK _ This is the first article of a series I intend to write on the emergence of new media and how it will remake information dissemination. Starting first draft: I'm running for the KPFK Station Board. For those readers who don't have a clue as to KPFK or Pacifica, please go to the KPFK website . As I stated in my 500 word candidate statement posted there: "Let's bring Pacifica into the 21st Century. Today, KPFK treats the internet as an important, yet s...