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Category: Practical Freedom

A broad category of things we can do, or things others are doing, to increase personal freedom

Do I feel another book coming on?

After several years in which I believed I wasn’t likely to write another freedom book this side of the grave … I sorta kinda feel a book coming on. Not promising anything, mind you. Right now the feeling is like the one you get when a sneeze is coming on — but may or may not actually emerge. If I do this thing, though, I already have a working subtitle picked out: “Everything you need to know.” Yeah, I know. No freedom book can deliver that. But trust me, I’ll use that phrase to ironic effect. I’ve already made some…

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When the ship begins to sink

Via lrc.com comes an excellent bit of tax-day snark: “What Do We Do If the Rich Start to Leave?” Good beginning of a good question. The writer, Bill Frezza, says, “500 American citizens and green card holders in the last quarter of 2009 said goodbye to America forever. Not many, but double the number of expatriations in all of 2008. Good riddance, other millionaires will take their place.” He’s not real clear on what he means by the rich, or whether those 500 surrendered their citizenship or just slipped away, PT-fashion, to friendlier climes.* But it’s the thought that counts.…

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10 Rules for dealing with police

Tip o’ hat to Radley Balko, the Flex Your Rights video 10 Rules for Dealing with Police is now on YouTube in four 10-minute segments. I haven’t yet seen this and I understand it’s directed primarily at urban minorities who so often find themselves profiled and stopped on flimsy pretexts. But the earlier Flex Your Rights video, Busted: A Citizen’s Guide to Surviving Police Encounters, is excellent and we all need to know the things FYR teaches. How to: Deal with traffic stops, street stops & police at your door Know your rights & maintain your cool Avoid common police…

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Arizona about to go to Vermont carry

Quietly, very quietly … with even most gun-bloggers not noticing as the bill moved through the legislature, Arizona is about to become the third state to go to Vermont carry. Everybody expects the gov to sign the bill. That’s huge. Huge. And I wouldn’t even have known, except that Joel has been tracking the news. ADDED: Normally, I would not even think about doing this. But thanks to a comment by gun-rights activist AlanR, I found this link asking Arizona residents to contact Governor Jan Brewer to urge her to sign the bill. Normally, I think of that sort of…

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Linux: This time, it really IS time

Every once in a while, I beat the drum for Linux. I swear it’s not just for geeks any more. After all, I’m no geek and I’ve been using Linux — and watching it get better and better — for 12 years. Windows users usually ignore me when I bang my Linux drum. Ah well; so it goes. But a couple of things happened recently that convinced me Linux has finally, truly, really, no-kidding gone beyond being a contender against Windows for the average desktop user. It has become clearly superior to Windows for the average desktop user. So, you…

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Panama

Panama. That’s where I was for most of the last month, as several people astutely guessed. I went because it’s freezing here and warm there. That was nice. I went to recharge my batteries, as Kevin Wilmeth put it. I went to play tourist. I went … just to go. And I went to answer the question, “Can I be more free outside the U.S.?” A lot of Americans have expatriated or retired to Panama, including a few I know. Some have urged me to head down that way and have a look, saying they found the place much freer,…

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More on free-market medicine

Travlin’ … Sorry for the “lite” posting the last few days. I will have more soon. But fact is that lazing, shopping, and basking in the sun don’t make exciting blog material, alas. Neither does routine traveling (even when you’re wedged into a strange little jumpseat next to a lavatory that has no water and whose door keeps flopping open every time the bus hits a bump). Ah well. In the meantime, I see that James Dunlap has an article on LewRockwell.com about free-market medicine outside the U.S. His piece is different from, but reflects the same values as, my…

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More un-American acts

Lorri, my traveling companion, speaks scarcely a word of the local Furrin. But this morning she was able to walk into a pharmacy, raise her glasses, display an allergy-swollen eye, and walk out with a cream that would have required an $80 doctor visit in the U.S. Testing the system, I went into two pharmacies and showed a card on which I had written (courtesy of FreeTranslation.com) a request for a certain other pharmaceutical. I gave its generic name and all the brand names I could find online. In both cases, women behind the counter identified the drug by its…

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Does anybody know …?

I’m going to be traveling soon (more about that in the coming weeks) and will be spending time in places where you Don’t Drink the Water. Or else. I already know about some common pitfalls and mistakes. I know, for instance, that you also Don’t Use the Ice Cubes. And Don’t Eat Fruit unless you’ve peeled it yourself. Ditto on not eating raw veggies, which may have been washed in the Dreaded Water. (Which pretty much blows my whole nutritional plan. Ah well.) I’ll brush my teeth only with bottled stuff. But I can’t figure this: Can you wash dishes…

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New level of search privacy

Dr. Katherine Albrecht — who is as beautiful as she is intelligent and (I can personally testify) as kind as she is gorgeous* announces via YouTube a new level of search-engine privacy to debut this [now LAST] Thursday. The search engine she represents, StartPage (aka IXQuick in Europe), already bills itself as the world’s most privacy-respecting. This week it adds a proxy service to, “… revolutionize the way people surf the web by allowing completely anonymous access to virtually any page on the web. … We are upping the ante by allowing users to privately visit the websites they find…

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