Yesterday CNN’s Candy Crowley interviewed Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin about, among other things, the current push to increase the minimum wage. He kept saying that the minimum wage should not be “artificially increased.” The implication, obviously, is that increasing the minimum wage messes with free markets.

It is true that the minimum wage prevents employers from paying as little to workers as they would like to: nothing. Slavery is the highest state of capitalism.

What is interesting to me is that a right-winger like Gov. Walker only uses the artificiality meme to refer to an increase in the minimum wage. This implies that the minimum wage it’s self is inherent, perhaps set by God?

Of course, perhaps he actually believes that, many conservatives do. But he can’t say that because the minimum wage itself is so popular among both liberals and conservatives. Which forces him into an unfortunate, embarrassing rhetorical box.

Furthermore, interference with free-market forces have impacts on the high-end of the labor-management scale as well. For example, Gov. Walker recently and controversially pushed through a prohibition on the right of state workers to go on strike and bargain collectively. Shortly this is also an artificial interference with the natural state of affairs. Even in a totally free-market, anarchistic economy, workers have the ability and the right to withhold their labor in order to pressure their employers for higher wages and better working conditions.

In other words, “artificiality” only applies to upward pressure on wages for the 99%.

Several years ago, I drew a cartoon facetiously suggesting that children terrorists would be the next big threat. After all, they like playing on those jungle gyms; you know, like the ones in those pre-9/11 training videos? And of course, children under the age of 12 don’t have to even present ID in order to board a plane.

Today comes the news that Afghan authorities arrested an eight-year-old girl as she fumbled with the detonator on her suicide vest in Afghanistan.

It all goes to show, whatever you can think of, no matter how outlandish, someone will actually do.

Not that I’m suggesting that children are the next battleground in the war on terror.

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio wants to raise taxes on New Yorkers earning over $500,000 a year. A nice start. But New York could solve all of its problems with a $50 per transaction stock tax on the New York Stock Exchange. Take that money and use it to modernize the schools, infrastructure, public housing.

Senator Rand Paul says Edward J. Snowden does not deserve the death penalty or life in prison for exposing NSA abuses, but that James Clapper should face trial and prison time for lying to Congress. Meanwhile, scumbag Democrat Chuck Schumer urges Snowden to turn himself in, and lies (his claim that NSA info would come out at trial is patently ridiculous as it would be deemed “classified.”)

The authoritarian government of Cambodia is currently cracking down on dissidents. They have suspended the right to assemble in public, rounded up political leaders that opposed the current government, in other words, the usual grab bag of repression.

I wish that people who don’t worry about the NSA, drones, indefinite detention, legalize torture, Guantánamo, and so on would consider how the Cambodian experience supplies to them.

It is, after all, only a matter of time before the US government faces some sort of challenge to its authority. Nobody knows how or when, but the fact is, civilians need the right to challenge or even change their government from time to time. Without that right, there is no freedom, and the government does not represent them in the least.

Even if you believe that the Obama administration or the next president or the one after that would never use tools like the NSA or drones or indefinite detention against American citizens – even though, in fact, they already have – what about the future?

The only way that we can protect our children and grandchildren’s generations from the kind of crackdown that we are seeing in Cambodia – amped up by awesome technology – is to make sure that that technology isn’t available to the government now.

As we are seeing currently in Cambodia, and have seen countless times before and will many times in the future, fighting back against a repressive regime is hard enough.

The last thing the revolutionaries and political dissidents of the future need are killer flying robots blowing them up with missiles as they march down the street. Or a government able to track them down with ruthless efficiency with the push of a button.

As an unwavering left of center supporter of Americans’ right to bear arms, I nevertheless am disgusted by Guns and Ammo magazine’s censorship of their columnist. I’ve been there: this guy had his column approved by his editors, and then, after the shit hit the fan, the editors backed away. Also, this is brazen caving into major advertisers. Better that a magazine should go out of business man to let its advertisers dictate its editorial content. Again, I disagree with what these so-called moderate supporters of the Second Amendment wrote. But they should have had the right to their freedom of speech without being crushed by well-heeled advertisers and cowardly editors and publishers. If Americans are in danger because of threats to the Second Amendment, they are also in danger due to these threats to the First Amendment.(Yes, I know that the First Amendment does not apply legally here. But it does in spirit.)

“the bloodshed that has engulfed Iraq, Lebanon and Syria in the past two weeks exposes something new and destabilizing: the emergence of a post-American Middle East in which no broker has the power, or the will, to contain the region’s sectarian hatreds. Amid this vacuum, fanatical Islamists have flourished in both Iraq and Syria under the banner of Al Qaeda”

Get ready for more analysis like this. The irony is self-evident: the mainstream media is implying that American power is a force for good. That these countries are falling apart in the absence of a strong American political and military presence. What they leave out, of course, is that all of these countries were radically destabilized by American foreign policy: invasions, propping up corrupt, unpopular dictatorships, funneling arms in civil conflicts, sometimes to both sides, and so on.

This narrative is interestingly analogous to the rise of the Nazis in Germany during the late 1920s and early 1930s. Nazis would brawl in the streets, disturbing the public order. Then they would tell the authorities that only they could restore peace in the streets. The peace that they themselves had destroyed.

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