Dial back to October, 1982.  A brash, four-term State Representative from Fairbanks was seeking the governorship of Alaska, Dick Randolph.  In a State renowned for political characters, Dick Randolph held a first and only and still does: He was the Alaska statewide candidate who offered a full-fledged liberty agenda to the Alaska people.  Some opinion polls had Randolph ahead of the Republican and closing on the Democrat. 

Randolph’s message was consistent from the time he first started campaigning for office in 1970.  Let others lead their lives as they choose, practice tolerance if not approval.  Keep the government out of the economy almost entirely.  Move away from the State monopoly in education.  Keep a firm lid on the powers and revenues for the State government and for localities.  Allow the people, not the government, to own Alaska’s natural resources.

Randolph was also the first person elected to high office in the United States to proudly carry the Libertarian Party label.  Dick Randolph put the National Libertarian Party, founded in 1972, on the map for the first time.  His journey though was not a straight line.

Frustrated as a Republican, Randolph quit the Legislature in 1974 after two terms saying there were virtually no important differences in the big government agendas of the two major parties.  In 1978 he returned to his legislative seat to try to lead a revolution in freedom in Alaska largely on his own.  He famously claimed the Libertarian caucus in the Alaska House met in a phone booth.  FULL STORY

Bradley Manning, the Army intelligence analyst accused of leaking a massive trove of classified material to WikiLeaks, has been imprisoned since May 2010. The treatment to which he has been subjected, including protracted isolation, systematic humiliations and routine sleep deprivation, got more extreme last week when the commander of the brig at Quantico, Virginia, imposed on him a regime of forced nakedness at night and during an inspection of his cell every morning until his clothing is returned.

These types of abusive tactics were authorized by the Bush administration for use on foreign detainees captured in the war on terror, on the theory that causing "debilitation, disorientation and dread" would produce "learned helplessness" and make them more susceptible and responsive to interrogators' questioning.  FULL STORY

IT IS not hard, if you really try, to find good things to say about America’s tea-partiers. They are not French, for a start. France’s new revolutionaries, those who have been raising Cain over Nicolas Sarkozy’s modest proposal to raise the age of retirement by two years, appear to believe that public money is printed in heaven and will rain down for ever like manna to pay for pensions, welfare, medical care and impenetrable avant-garde movies. America’s tea-partiers are the opposite: they exhale fiscal probity through every pore. In their waking hours, and in bed at night, they are wracked by anxiety. How is a profligate America to cut borrowing, balance the budget and ensure that its billowing deficit will not place an unbearable burden on future generations?  FULL STORY

END OF THE CITY OF GODS:

A Fictional Account of the Last Priest of Teotihuacan

The Teotihuacan Empire (100 B.C. to 700 A.D.) was in the southwest edge of North America, generally near modern day Mexico City stretching south to the northern portion of Central America at its largest.   The City of Teotihuacan itself had about 100,000 inhabitants at its peak, one of the largest and one of the richest cities in the world at the time.  In 500 A.D. as Teotihuacan prospered Europe had squandered the technical and institutional progress made during the Western Roman Empire.  For another seven hundred years Europe was trapped in a despotic cycle of repression and mysticism now known as the Dark Ages.  FULL STORY