This is a surprise?

364 news agencies (as of 10:34 AM CST) apparently think it's "news" and therefore "surprising" that teens are increasingly turning to their parents' medicine cabinets to get high. I've known this for four years - and I haven't used any of them, either.

If the nation's drug warriors and educators were unaware of this phenomenon for so long, which apparently they were, what on earth makes them think they can prevent teens from using drugs? We've seen that making the drugs which psychonauts found before doctors did illegal only causes violence and forces those who search out psychoactive drugs to abuse legal ones.

One solution is to stop letting parents think the government will make their kids into good people and actually do their job. Another is the government's solution:

...apply the prevention tools that have apparently succeeded in combating illegal drug use to fight the abuse of legal medicines.

No, you idiots, "prevention tools" didn't stop teens from using illegal drugs, the realization that you could get high by chugging a bottle of cough syrup did. Nothing the government can do will do anything to stop teen drug abuse. Only good parenting can do that. Unfortunately, America's parents are afraid to tell their kids to do their homework, much less have a serious talk with them about drugs.

Why I like George Phillies

I've been trying to stay fairly neutral in the race for the 2008 Libertarian presidential nomination, simply because it's a long, long time until the 2008 convention, but I kinda suck at neutrality, and I've found myself pretty consistently favoring George Phillies. Here's why:

• He's respectable and electable. (I really wish those didn't rhyme, but they do.) His credentials would impress anyone - he's an MIT-educated physics professor at a high second-tier school (Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts) and is a constant and respected member of WPI's elected faculty committees.
• He's focusing on issues that average Americans - not just Libertarian Party members - care about: the war in Iraq, property rights, energy issues, etc. He has sensible Libertarian solutions to these answers without delving into weird Libertopia-style stuff.
• Most importantly - he's running for the Libertarian Party, not for George Phillies. He will help Libertarians get elected to many tiers of government while running a competent campaign for President. He's already shown he's serious about this - his campaign produced free radio commercials for Libertarian campaigns for the November 2006 elections.

I think Steve Kubby (the other major candidate for the LP nomination) is a good person and a good Libertarian, and would certainly be the best president since at least Calvin Coolidge if elected. But Kubby is known only for his sometimes flippant marijuana legalization activities - which, although I totally support them, will lead to his being marginalized as "the stoner candidate" no matter how much he cares and talks about other issues, as shown in this video (Kubby appears at 3:18). That's a hard image to shake, and Libertarian candidates have enough of a glass ceiling to break through already.

Dealing with something does not imply consent.

People often attempt to cut short my explanations that government is equivalent to coercion by saying "you're still here, so you've consented to the US government."

...Right. And slaves consented to slavery because they stuck around, not wanting to risk the other forms of repression they'd encounter elsewhere, even if they technically weren't slaves? Blacks in the American South before the Civil Rights Act consented to segregation and a government machine designed to repress them? The German Jews on the MS St. Louis consented to the Holocaust because nobody would allow them into their countries?

Even if some psychobeasts would answer "yes" to all of those, their argument still makes fails: rights cannot be taken away from somebody, even if they consent to their removal. North Koreans still have the right to free speech, even if their government punishes them for exercising it. We still have the right to our property, even if the government takes it by force. Simply because you aren't constantly fighting to maintain your rights doesn't mean you've given them up.

Big government: Like big corporations, but actually bad.

"Progressives" like to rail against big corporations, especially big oil companies as "exploitative". But when I think "exploitative", I don't think ExxonMobil. (Well, not in America, at least. Chad is another story.) I think OPEC - a multinational organization composed of governments - big ones. The governments of the OPEC nations don't just regulate their countries' oil industries, they are their countries' oil industries. Today, OPEC announced that it will make a cut in production. They did this not because they believe that's what's in the best interest of the "global community" (whatever that means), but rather because they "want to balance supply and demand". In other words, they want to maximize profit.

There's nothing expressly wrong with that, if you think of the OPEC governments as corporations. But if you think of them as governments just trying to do what's best for the little guy - which Hugo Chavez, a member, would certainly like you to - then it's reprehensible. And even the overtly for-profit nations spend oil money on weird stuff: financing Sudan's murderous Janjaweed militia (experts in ethnic cleansing and mass rape), funding other Muslim militias in the Sahel, and, in the case of Saudi Arabia, paying a huge annual stipend to tens of thousands of men who do no work but apparently are Saudi princes by birthright.

Either way, government control of the energy industry certainly doesn't help "the people". It helps some people, sure, but those people seem to have a talent for being scumbags.