Musings of a Libertarian

  Last week former PM Johnson took to X to say: "I firmly believe Covid was caused by a lab leak. The Chinese owe us proper answers and our Government should start demanding them." Interesting timing, given the fact that only the day before it was revealed that a classified dossier compiled by Sir Richard Dearlove, the former head of MI6, was passed to then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson at the start of the outbreak in March 2020 which stated: ‘It is now beyond reasonable doubt that Covid-19 was engineered in the WIV’.” (Wuhan Institute of Virology) It appears then that Johnson is trying to cover his back, and have us conveniently forget how his CCP-inspired lockdown butchered our liberties and livelihoods. Go away Boris.

  In an interview on the weekend with Tucker Carlson (the "journalist" who provided a platform for Putin's ahistorical rant on the eve of the 2022 invasion of Ukraine), Trump's de facto envoy to Russia, Steve Witkoff, shared that he doesn't regard Putin as a "bad guy" and that he is "super smart." Witkoff has scored some notable successes through pandering to the ego of the dictator in The Kremlin - such as negotiating a prisoner exchange with The Kremlin last week. Arguably forgiveable then. What was more concerning was his direct alignment with virtually all of the Kremlin's demands in negotiations, including over the regions of Kherson and Zaporizhia, which, unlike Crimea, are home to an overwhelming pro-Kyiv population and which are only partially occupied by Russian forces. Witkoff suggested that "the majority of people in these regions voted to be under Russian rule."  The "referendum" in which the occupied portion...

 

Depending on who you ask, drugs kill anywhere between 150,000 - 600,000 people globally a year.  Traffic accidents kill at least 1.2 million, and alcohol 2.6 million. Interesting then that the least dangerous of these activities is the most vilified by States and social conservatives worldwide. While it is possible that decriminalisation may lead to an uptick in usage, the evidence suggests otherwise. In 2019, almost a decade after decriminalisation, Portugal logged a grand total of 74 drug deaths, working out to approximately 6 per million of population, compared to 284 per million in Scotland. For Libertarians however, such morbid statistical discussion is largely an irrelevance - the individual is sovereign, and that should be the basis of all policy. As long as the taxpayer is not forced to fund drug treatment, it is quite frankly nobody else's business what people choose to put into their own bodies. Mention the word "drugs" and many on the right seize up and abandon...