Oregon approves recreational marijuana sales

Oregon governor OKs early sales of recreational-use marijuana | Reuters - Shelby Sebens:

July 29, 2015 - "Oregon residents will be able to buy marijuana for recreational use starting in October, about a year earlier than originally expected, under a new law backers hope will help curb the black market, state officials said on Wednesday.

"The law, signed Monday by Democratic Governor Kate Brown, will effectively let adults visit existing medical-use marijuana dispensaries in the state to buy certain strains just to get stoned.

"Possessing and growing pot became legal in July after voter approval in a November referendum, and the state expects to start accepting applications in January for recreational pot retail stores likely to open by the fall.

"'The bill ... passed with significant bipartisan support in both chambers after a great deal of work by an implementation working group,' said Brown's spokeswoman Kristen Grainger.

"In November, Oregon and Alaska sanctioned the use of marijuana for recreational purposes in state-regulated schemes that will usher in retail pot shops similar to those already operating in Washington state and Colorado....  The new Oregon law lets adults 21 and up buy marijuana for recreational use at medical dispensaries that choose to sell it starting on Oct. 1, said state representative Ann Lininger, a Democrat and sponsor of the bill....

"State Senator Floyd Prozanski, a Democrat and another bill sponsor, said the state will keep the medical and recreational marijuana markets separate once the recreational shops are up and running.

"The law contains a provision that ends the sale of weed to recreational users at medical dispensaries on Dec. 31, 2016.

"The purchases will be tax-free until January 2016."

Read more: http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/07/30/us-usa-marijuana-oregon-idUSKCN0Q404520150730
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Israeli gov't OK's medical marijuana in pharmacies

Medical marijuana – coming soon to an Israeli pharmacy near you - Health & Fitness - - Haaretz Daily Newspaper | Israel News - Jonathan Lis & Ido Efrati:

July 28, 2015 - "Deputy Health Minister Yaakov Litzman announced Monday that medical marijuana will eventually be available at pharmacies for patients with a doctor’s prescription.

"Speaking to the Knesset Committee on Drug Abuse Monday morning, the Health Ministry’s Prof. Boaz Lev added that the agency also intended to increase the number of physicians who are authorized to prescribe cannabis to patients....

"Regarding the concern that the drug will end up diverted to the open market, Litzman said, “The moment it will be in pharmacies by prescription, we will make sure to wage an aggressive battle not to let it leak out. The growers will also be strengthened. The moment we issue a tender [for growers], it will become subject to a doctor’s prescription, and I’m sure it’ll be accepted.”

"Litzman noted there was a petition pending before the High Court of Justice filed by farmers seeking to grow marijuana. He said he hoped the High Court would allow the ministry to issue a tender.

"Committee chairwoman MK Tamar Zandberg (Meretz) welcomed the decision. 'The field had been exhausted and reached a dead end,' she said. 'People were desperately awaiting this kind of news.'

"Around 22,000 Israelis are currently eligible for medical marijuana, but the number who could potentially qualify has sharply increased. The Health Ministry unit that issues permits to patients has become overwhelmed by applications, with people often having to wait months for approval.

"The Health Ministry’s plan is to exempt patients from having to be approved by the ministry’s medical cannabis unit; instead, it plans to certify more physicians to give permits without having to go through the ministry. 'We plan to train a list of senior physicians, as well as patients, so they will become familiar with all the risks. We want to see [the prescribing of marijuana] become as similar as possible to the process of prescribing any other narcotic,' Lev said.

"The Pharmaceutical Society of Israel, representing the country’s pharmacists, supports the move, stressing that the current procedure – in which patients with permits get their cannabis directly from the handful of authorized growers – can be unsafe."

Read more: http://www.haaretz.com/life/health-fitness/.premium-1.668099
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Standoff in Liberland

Inside ‘Liberland,’ the Place of No Taxes Where Crowdfunding Rules - Bloomberg Business - Ed Kiernan:

July 21, 2015 - "Liberland, or the Free Republic of Liberland to give it its full title, is a would-be sovereign state founded April 13 by Vit Jedlicka and two fellow libertarians. Its total area of approximately seven square kilometers would make it the third smallest sovereign state in the world, after the Vatican and Monaco.

"It's sandwiched between Croatia and Serbia on the western bank of the Danube River. On some maps, this area is referred to as “Gornja Siga'.... When the former Yugoslavia was split into new countries this small patch of land was forgotten about. Neither Croatia nor Serbia claimed it, making it a terra nullius or no man’s land.....

”According to the founders the objective is to build a country where honest people can prosper with minimal interference from a centralized government. 'We need more countries like Hong Kong, Singapore and Monaco, especially in Europe,' Jedlicka says. 'We really needed another tax heaven, not tax haven'.... All taxes will be voluntary, and the nation’s services - such as power, healthcare and waste disposal - will be run either by private enterprises or through crowdfunding campaigns....

"According to Jedlicka, Liberland has established embassies in several countries including the U.S., the U.K., France and the Czech Republic. He plans to open embassies in 'a hundred more countries by the end of the year.'

"Liberland is attempting to use the homestead principle, which states that unclaimed and undeveloped land can be legally claimed by any group willing to develop it. But some legal experts have stated that even though the land may appear unclaimed, it is most probably already part of Serbia....

"Croatian border police are arresting anyone who sets foot in Liberland. However, this has not deterred members of the Liberland Settlers Association, which attempts to reach it on a daily basis and often clashes with local police in the process.

"The Liberland Settlement Association (LSA) is an NGO based in Serbia, funded by the Liberland Settlement Corp. It is made up primarily of volunteers who attempt to maintain an active presence on Liberland to help it become a recognized country.... According to CEO Niklas Nikolassen, the Liberland Settlement Corp. (LSC) “is a group of liberty-minded investors who are funding the LSA.” The corporation, based in Switzerland, has a claim on 80,000 square meters of Liberland and is hoping that the actions of the LSA will help Liberland achieve recognition as a sovereign state and thus make the land valuable."

"Liberland has already received almost 400,000 applications for citizenship, however only around 45,000 of these are considered to be serious. According to Jedlicka there will probably be a total of 30,000-40,000 Liberlandians, not all of whom will actually live in Liberland."

Read more: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-07-21/inside-liberland-the-place-of-no-taxes-where-crowdfunding-rules
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Super PACs raise $6 Million for Rand Paul

Libertarian Donors Put up $6 Million for Rand Paul GOP Bid - ABC News - Julie Bykowicz, Associated Press:

July 27, 2015 - "Deep-pocketed libertarians are giving big to help Rand Paul win the Republican presidential primary.

"Three super PACS supporting the libertarian-leaning Kentucky senator said they raised a combined $6 million through June 30. That's on top of the nearly $7 million that Paul's campaign reported pulling in between his April announcement and the end of last month.

"'There are some very wealthy libertarians out there, and they're all going to be hearing from me,' said Ed Crane, president of one of the pro-Paul super PACs, called Purple PAC. 'It's a strong potential base for Rand.'

"Paul's top backer so far is Jeff Yass, managing director of high-frequency trading firm Susquehanna International Group, who split a $2 million contribution last month between Purple PAC and another pro-Paul super PAC, America's Liberty.

"Yass and Crane know each other through the Cato Institute, a free market think tank in Washington that began in the 1970s with the backing of billionaire energy executives Charles and David Koch. Crane is a co-founder, and Yass is a board member.

"Joining Yass in the $1 million donor club is George Macricostas, head of a data center company called RagingWire. Those two accounted for most of America's Liberty's $3.1 million in fundraising so far this year.

"A third super PAC, Concerned American Voters, has not yet filed a fundraising report, but its leaders said they've raised $1.9 million. Scott Banister, a tech investor in Silicon Valley, is among the donors....

"Paul is one of an expected 17 Republican presidential candidates, and he's in the top half of the class for fundraising."

Read more: http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory/libertarian-donors-put-million-rand-paul-gop-bid-32717080
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Trump tried to seize widow's home for parking lot (video)

Remember When Donald Trump Tried to Bulldoze an Elderly Widow's Home to Build a Limo Parking Lot? : Anything Peaceful : Foundation for Economic Education:

July 20, 2015 - "Donald Trump is leading the GOP primary polls with 24 percent. Trump, as Reason's Matt Welch put it, may be a 'vulgar anti-intellect who cannot string a coherent paragraph together.' But he's also a consummate bully and crony capitalist who has never been shy about using government to coerce people who get in his way.

"In 1994, Trump got Atlantic City to condemn Vera Coking's home so that he could build limo parking for his Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino. The Institute for Justice took on Trump in one of its first big eminent domain cases....

"Thanks to IJ, she was able to beat Trump and the city government and win the right to keep her property.

"Coking moved to a retirement home in 2010, having lived almost 50 years in her Atlantic City home. Coking's grandson finally sold the house in July 2014; less than two months later, the Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino closed for lack of business."

Read more: http://fee.org/anythingpeaceful/detail/remember-when-donald-trump-tried-to-bulldoze-an-elderly-widows-home-to-build-a-limo-parking-lot
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True Detective: The most libertarian show on TV?

‘True Detective’: The Most Libertarian Show on TV - The Daily Beast - Nick Gillespie:

July 19, 2015 - "Is there any TV show more flat-out libertarian than Season Two of True Detective? For that matter, is there any TV network airing more flat-out libertarian agitprop than HBO? There you find hour after hour of spectacular, balls-out displays of the inherent incompetence, greed, and corruption of government — especially when it joins forces with crony capitalists....

"Indeed, the True Detective world, filled as it is with crooked cops and perverts in high places and massive, state-funded land grabs and billion-dollar high-speed rail boondoggles, seems ripped right from Ron Paul’s nightmares.

"The characters and the actors are incredible, especially Rachel McAdams as Ani — short for Antigone, the first great libertarian heroine who disobeyed the state in accordance with higher law — Bezzerides, the sexually haunted daughter of a creepy guru and sister to a webcam performer (whose studio is mistaken for a whorehouse by the vice squad in Episode 1). Colin Farrell is a classic crooked cop, Ray Velcoro, who abuses his power for personal reasons but also to line his pockets with graft.

"But the key character is Velcoro’s paymaster, Frank Semyon, whose dirty fingers have been in every racket a town can offer, from drugs to gambling to booze — all of which flourish under the watchful eye and greased palms of law enforcement. (That Frank is played expertly by Vince Vaughn is kind of the cherry on top of all this. Best-known for comedies such as Old School and Dodgeball, Vaughn is an unapologetic libertarian who introduces Ron Paul to adoring crowds, praises Edward Snowden, and stumps for Second Amendment rights like nobody’s business)....

"But here’s the real genius part of True Detective: The corruption on display in True Detective is bigger than Frank, Cesere, Velcoro, or any single individual and is thus uncontainable. It’s systemic and inevitable in a world where politicians, gangsters, and businessmen form a sort of human centipede that’s impossible to disentangle or rein in. When the government controls who gets to build what where and what sorts of permission is needed to run a bar or a restaurant — not to mention a whorehouse — you end up building graft and corruption into everything. That’s the deepest libertarian insight of the show and it infuses every frame."

Read more: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/07/19/the-most-libertarian-network-on-tv.html
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Libertarians and the U.S. Civil War

What Should Libertarians Think About the Civil War? - Philip Magness, Newsweek:

July 18, 2015 - "The current national debate over the display and meaning of the Confederate battle flag has reopened a number of longstanding arguments about the meaning of the American Civil War, including within libertarian and classical liberal circles.... Unfortunately, bad history often accompanies this politicization, and libertarians are by no means immune from this tendency.

"The first and perhaps best known 'libertarian' approach to the Civil War attempts to find sympathy with the defeated Confederacy because of its resistance to the federal government and northern military authority or its professed cause of free trade and political self-determination.

"Some aspects of this position have intuitive appeal that produces sympathy for the Confederate cause: It professes outrage against a Union that is said to have conquered by force, trampled on the rights of states and individuals, unleashed a military invasion, suspended civil liberties, denied government by consent, elevated Lincoln to a 'dictator' and effected a lasting centralization of federal power....

"This interpretation falters in what it neglects: slavery....  A continuum of classical liberal thinkers from Adam Smith to John Stuart Mill and J.E. Cairnes forged the main intellectual case against the slave system.... [P]ro-Confederate libertarians ... abandon what is perhaps the single most important and beneficial contribution that classical liberalism has made to the human condition: the abolition of slavery.

"[L]ibertarian defenders of the North are keenly aware of both the centrality of slavery to the conflict as well as the importance of the abolitionist cause to the liberal intellectual tradition.... This view recognizes slavery and celebrates its abolition, but it tends to neglect or even rationalize the war’s uglier features and consequences: a dramatic weakening of the constitutional federalism laid out in 1787, a rapid acceleration of the scope and power of the federal government, a precedent-setting assault on habeas corpus and expansion of presidential war powers that persists to the present day — and the horrendous destruction itself....

"In place of both views, and in recognition of their deficiencies, libertarians might develop a better appreciation for the Civil War’s complexity by turning their analysis to the nature of the ruinous agency of the conflict itself.

"War, whether waged to hold human beings in bondage or subjugate a political rebellion, is a consciously coercive action of the political state in its most expansive and direct form. And armed warfare, as both the Union and Confederacy came to discover across four destructive years, is horrifically messy, unpredictable and destructive of human life and human liberty."

Read more: http://www.newsweek.com/what-should-libertarians-think-about-civil-war-354946
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