An Agorist Manifesto in 95 Theses

From Fr33Agents / Kyle Bennett, a work of art "suitable for nailing to an appropriate door near you..."

agora (1) - n. A place of congregation, an ancient Greek marketplace.
agora (2) - n. A market free of forceable regulation, taxation, and government
(The) Agora - The aggregate of all such markets of any size.

95 Theses
1. Free, unregulated, untaxed, and unmonitored trade is the natural right of all human beings
2. In a voluntary trade, both parties receive more than they give up, otherwise neither would trade.
3. Nobody gets taken advantage of through mutually voluntary trade.
4. Taxation forces people to pay for things that aren't worth the cost
5. Government regulation forces people to abstain from trades they would otherwise voluntarily make.

6. Markets collect, organize, and distribute information more rapidly, accurately, fairly, and efficiently than any central authority could ever do, even with superior resources.
7. Prices are information.
8. Force distorts market information.
9. Governments' only means of action is force.
10. Governments operate blindly because they only see information distorted by force. The more information they gather, the less clear their vision becomes.
11. Aggression is a reaction to unpleasant or unwanted information. It's motto is "kill the messenger".
12. A market is smarter than any of it's participants. A government is stupider than most of it's participants.

13. Governments require markets for their survival; markets thrive in the absence of government.
14. The more efficient a government is, the more dangerous it is.
15. Markets improve the material well-being of all people. Governments improve the material well-being of some people at the expense of other people.
16. Markets are more powerful than governments.
17. Human survival and well-being require free markets.
18. Human survival and well-being require the absence of government.
19. The best humanitarian aid that can be brought to impoverished people is to allow them access to the Agora, usually by removing their governments.

20. Productivity is the application of intelligence to labor for creating something of value to someone.
21. Labor is equivalent to value in the same way crude oil is equivalent to a vacation.
22. The non-productive have always and will always try to live off the value created by the productive.
23. The productive will by right decide how much, if any, to allow it.
24. Charity is offered and received face-to-face, or it is no longer charity.

25. Wealth is the natural and honorable reward from trading value for value.
26. Wealth is a store of productivity, not a store of value.
27. In the Agora, the rich have already given back far more than they received. That's the only way to get rich in the Agora.
28. Those who get rich outside the Agora could never give back all they have taken.

29. Money laundering is an invented crime, the concept cannot exist in the Agora.
30. Price gouging is an invented crime, the concept cannot exist in the Agora.
31. Unfair competition is either not one, or not the other, or not in the Agora.

32. Market price is an observation of history.
33. Market price is related to value in the same way news photographs are related to current events.
34. "Intrinsic value" is a lie told by parasites to try to steal from producers.
35. Companies advertising their product as "an $XX value" are lying to you.

36. Fiat currency is theft by fraud.
37. Gold and silver are usually the bases for real money because they have properties that best serve that purpose.
38. Paper is the basis for fiat currency because it has properties that best serve that purpose.

39. Communication strengthens markets and undermines governments.
40. Markets are the way communities stay organized when they are too large for face-to-face interaction.

41. All resources are human. The term "human resources" is demeaning to the nature of both humans and resources.
42. Competition is not the purpose of a market, it is one of its methods.
43. Natural selection in the Agora is more Lamarckian than Darwinian.
44. Natural selection in the Agora does not destroy resources, it reallocates them.
45. Natural selection in the Agora does not kill people, it frees them to be more productive.
46. "Dog eat dog" is a feature of governments, not of markets.
47. Monopolies can only be created and sustained by governments.

48. Freedom to fail is every bit as important as freedom to succeed.
49. The Agora guarantees neither, and resists the perpetuation of both.
50. Markets don't have goals, values, or ambitions. Markets are a tool for human beings to pursue those things.
51. "Market Failure" is an oxymoron. People sometimes fail to use markets properly.

52. Innovation is an inherently Agorist activity, even when it happens outside the Agora.
53. A primary goal of government is to restrain innovation.

54. Raw materials in the ground are not resources until they are brought to market.
55. The owners of private property tend not to destroy it. Commons are routinely destroyed or exhaustively consumed.
56. Agorist exploitation of the environment increases resources, and protects the environment. Government "protection" of the environment reduces resources, and harms the environment.
57. No species is endangered when it is owned. The best way to keep a species from extinction is to allow it to be property in the Agora.

58. "Public property" is an oxymoron, and privatization of profits is not privatization.
59. Property is authority. It's not a market without private property and private authority.
60. Where there is private property authority, there is an agora..
61. Private property let open to the public is not a commons.

62. Shortages do not exist in the free market, government obfuscation of price information is the only way to acheive a general shortage.
63. Being unable to buy something at the price you want to pay is not a shortage.
64. Markets are, in part, a process of voluntary rationing.

65. Corporations are evil only to the extent they rely on government power. Corporations with a monopoly are branches of government.
66. Markets rely on trust. Markets rely on suspicion.
67. Individuals in the Agora expect suspicion and earn trust. Governments demand trust, and earn suspicion.
68. A government truly of the people, by the people, and for the people would have no powers whatsoever.
69. If the measure of virtue for a society is how it treats the least among it, then the Agora is the most virtuous society ever known to man.

70. Governments thrive on opposition, antagonism, provocation, confrontation, and defiance. What they cannot tolerate is to be ignored.
71. The central idea behind the Agora, and one of the things it does best, is to ignore governments.
72. The effectiveness of the Agora's self-regulation is proportional to the extent to which external regulation is absent.
73. The Agora cannot be managed, controlled, regulated, or destroyed. It can only be interfered with.
74. Voting is nothing more than an expression of the voter's preferred way to interfere with the Agora.
75. The Agora is a network, and like all networks, it routes around damage.
76. Government is damage.

77. Public education is an oxymoron.
78. One of government education's primary functions is to instill fear of the Agora.
79. The Agora is all around you. It's nothing to be afraid of.
80. The Agora is peaceful. Violence and war are results of failure to embrace the Agora.
81. Guns are often required to deal with people who operate outside the Agora, because guns are the primary way people outside the Agora operate.

82. The Agora does not require permission.
83. Anyone with the power and inclination to grant the Agora permission is a threat to all honest men.
84. Anyone offering the Agora permission will be ignored.
85. Most true heroes end up in prison or murdered. This is even more true for Agorist heroes.

86. The Agora ignores creed and color.
87. When it comes to markets, black is beautiful.
88. Wherever there are human beings, there is an agora. It may be hiding, but it is there.
89. The Agora is a select community - the strict qualification for membership is to want it. Most people don't.
90. The Agora does not recognize borders or artificial boundaries. It is everywhere, and it is no where.
91. The Agora welcomes you, but does not need you.
92. You need the Agora. Even if you oppose it, you benefit from it.
93. An Agorist movement is an oxymoron. Agorism is the natural state of humanity.
94. Practicing agorism is the only way to achieve agorism. Isolated networks will eventually find each other.

95. Governments are on notice the world over: your days are numbered.

Copenhagen Orgy

Copenhagen mayor tries to screw the city's sex workers.

By sending out fliers advising climate summit attendees not to screw with the city's sex workers.

Sex workers screw the mayor right back.

By offering free sex to anyone who produces one of the mayor's warnings.

Poetic. Screw government and anyone who would use government against other human beings.

Coconut-Crusted Salmon will be Served in the First Class Cabin

Amid the constant moaning and wailing, Joe Public may be forgiven for failing to notice the astounding changes he has seen in his standard of living over the last forty years. No, he doesn't have a yacht and the proletariat revolution has left him still working 40+ hours per week, but he has traded in his plaid pants and 8-track tapes for more comfortable digs.

Steven Horwitz has the numbers:

[L]ife for the average American is better today than 35 years ago, life for poor Americans is much better than it was 35 years ago, and poor Americans today largely live better than the average American did 35 years ago. Hard to square with a narrative of economic stagnation or decline.

Mark Perry took Horwitz's description of what has happened and started us down the path to explaining why that has happened. Using a similar basket of household appliances, Perry expressed their cost in terms of labor hours:

Now, cautions abound at jumping to conclusions that the data quality doesn't support. But, in terms of this selected basket of common household appliances coupled with the BLS wage statistics, saying nothing about the quality of the appliances listed, we can safely observe an astounding increase in average American worker productivity over the last 36 years.

This runs counter to the narratives describing Americans as fat and lazy, and declaring that “Americans don't make anything anymore.” However, the increase in productivity is absolutely unsurprising given the advances in technology, materials science, and industrial processes over the same period. In other words, with better capital goods and factors, workers (all workers, not just American) can make more in less time and with less effort.

But, it is not right to say that the increase in productivity and advances in production methods are a product of the last forty years. It is not correct to attribute exponential growth in human productivity to the last few seconds of human history, nor to the actions of any person, group, or even all humanity alive during that period.

Rather, the seeds that allowed that growth to happen were sowed thousands of years ago with a simple, evolutionary discovery that has led man on a path from precarious existence to jetting over the oceans at 45,000 feet as a matter of course.

Specialization
We don't know what day Ug and Ur made their discovery, nor do we know the circumstances that led to it, because they were too busy living another day to properly document it for us. But, we can be relatively sure it started with a few seconds of rest and relaxation. Since their cave is about as far as we can get from iPods and nanotechnology, please forgive me a few moments of poetic license in imagining how those few seconds of R&R led to millions of man hours of R&D.One day, Ug and Ur followed their normal routine of catching fish in the morning and foraging for coconuts in the afternoon. Ug noticed that he caught three fish faster than Ur. But, even with that extra time, he lagged behind Ur in coconut-finding. That night, with his head on a rock pillow, in the moments before falling asleep Ug hit upon a wild idea.

The next day, using a series of grunts and gestures, Ug convinced Ur to spend the entire day collecting coconuts while Ug spent the day catching fish. At the end of the day, he reasoned, they could share the fish and coconuts.

But, an amazing thing happened when they got back to the cave. Instead of the usual six fish and six coconuts, Ug and Ur counted seven fish and seven coconuts. That night, Ug and Ur feasted on their unexpected windfall.

They continued their pattern of specialization and feasting for a few days when Ur came up with a great idea of his own. Rather than eating the extra coconut, he would store it in the cave for the time of year when coconuts were scarce. After a few weeks, the cave was overflowing with coconuts and Ur had to limit the number of coconuts he brought back every day.

Ug was extremely jealous of Ur's new found leisure time, so he persuaded Ur to use that time to build a pen in the water so they could stockpile fish, too. When the pen was completed, Ur built himself a ladder to help his coconut collection. Once the pen was full, Ug used his leisure time to weave a net.

This trend continued for years. With each iteration, fishing and foraging consumed less time and took less effort, moving Ug and Ur further from living precariously on the day's labor and giving them more leisure time. In turn, they used some of their food savings and extra time to develop better and better capital goods, making their labor ever more productive.

At some point, Ug and Ur became so productive that they could feed the rest of the population. Freed from the necessity of hunting, fishing, and foraging, those people spent their time producing other capital and consumer goods like mud huts, clay pots, ovens, and forges. Over thousands of years, productivity increased to the point where some people's entire productive lives were spent producing R&D on better materials, processes, and products but never actually building anything.

And so, we can see that 747s are just a hop, skip, and a jump from an extra coconut per day.


Division of Labor
Tool use almost certainly preceded the regular division of labor, but it is impossible to get from stone hammers to today's tools without the division of labor. By specializing in the area of their comparative advantage, Ug, Ur, and early humans like them carved the foundations of human existence a few extra seconds at a time.

In the story above, Ug and Ur had absolute advantages in their respective specialties, but that is not necessary. As long as Ug and Ur do not have the exact same production capabilities, each specializing in the area of their comparative advantage results in greater total production than the sum of their individual efforts at being self-sufficient, even if Ur is less productive than Ug at both specialties.

And, then, Came the Non-Productive
It is worth noting that, in some parts of the world, existence today is more on the scale of Ug and Ur than the average (or even poorest) American household. One has to wonder why, if Ug's discovery of the division of labor is so incredible, all of humanity hasn't benefited from it equally (or at least similarly). The simple explanation is that one consequence of the wealth delivered by the division of labor is the ability of an unproductive class to exist that actively and violently prevents what should be a natural spread of wealth through human interaction.

Actually, to label this class unproductive is charitable as unproductive puts them on par with infants and the infirm. This class is negatively productive, destroying the production of other people in their day-to-day actions. For lack of a better term, we group this class under the name “government”.

In the tables created by Horwitz and Perry, we can see that the vast majority of American households choose to partake in the quality of life increases available to them. However, even those that choose a simpler lifestyle have a buffer between them and death due to famine, disease, or other disaster. This is because the negatively-productive government class has not enjoyed the same trust or commanded the same fear in the populations of Europe and the Americas as it has in some other parts of the world.

It is no coincidence that populations who have benefited least from the division of labor are the populations most plagued by the government class' negative productivity.

It would be a simple, and very economic, process to provide these workers with the latest capital goods and technology; as in America, the vast majority of them would intelligently cry, “exploit me! Please!” In fact, the only thing that could possibly stop the spread of wealth and productive capacity is physical violence. And, the only people with the time to violently restrict that spread are those living off the production of others: the government class.

It's a shame that Ug and Ur didn't use some of their leisure time to beat the snot out of the first person to come along (probably named Richard) and demand a portion of their labor at the point of a sharpened stick. Hopefully we can do that in the next human evolution.

Ignoring the State for Fun and Profit

Consider a normal, monetary transaction where you take a pair of pants to a dry-cleaner. In that transaction, you assume that the dry-cleaner will accept your government money in return for cleaning your pants. You also assume that the dry-cleaner will return your pants in serviceable condition, cleaner than when you dropped them off. Lastly, you assume that, if the dry-cleaning is not to your satisfaction, you will have a legal recourse in a government court, the mere threat of which should be sufficient to coerce the dry-cleaner into satisfying your demand for recompense.

In a Stateless transaction, you would not make those assumptions.

Rather than assuming recourse in government court, you would make specific allowance for examining the quality of work prior to acceptance and payment. Or, you may make allowance for third-party arbitration in the case of dispute. Rather than assuming any dry-cleaner will return your pants clean and serviceable, you would seek referrals and treasure the relationship once you found a good, quality dry-cleaner. Last, rather than using government money, you may negotiate the transaction in some other currency or barter, however, even a transaction that used government money could be Stateless as long as you both specifically agree to the use.

Functionally, the two transactions differ very little. However, the first transaction regards the State as an unseen third party with some interest in the transaction while the second totally disregards the State, making it an explicit two-party transaction.

With a little reflection, I'm sure you can identify transactions and relationships in your life that are conducted exactly like the hypothetical. In fact, you specifically delineate those relationships in normal speech; they are the relationships you refer to using a possessive pronoun.

When you use the words "my brother-in-law", "my friend", or "my mechanic" you are not intimating that you own that person, you are saying that you possess proprietary information about that person – that you have a defined relationship with that person. In the cases of "my mechanic", "my doctor", or "my dry-cleaner", you are describing an ongoing economic relationship that you cherish sufficiently to openly advertise that you have that relationship.

You already conduct those relationships without regard to the State – it's a short but profitable trip from there to conduct those transactions with specific disregard to the State.

One may be tempted to recognize, in the second transaction, a transaction cost greater than in the first: negotiating terms and recourse. However, just as the State is the unseen party to the first transaction, the cost it imposes on the transaction is also unseen.

That is not to say that the Stateless transaction cost will necessarily be less than the unseen cost imposed by the State. Rather, as a one-off transaction, it is likely the Stateless transaction cost will be much higher. However, once a relationship is established with a Stateless trading partner, the transaction cost is significantly reduced on all subsequent transactions.

Just as it would be inefficient to renegotiate the contract you have with your dry-cleaner every time you drop off a pair of pants, it is inefficient to pay the State-imposed cost on every transaction as if you were complete strangers. Rather, by specifically disregarding the state in everyday transactions, you lower the transaction costs, and the difference stays in your pocket where it belongs.

If you expand and extend your Stateless trading network, before long the cost savings will multiply. The savings will be invested by individuals in the trading network, expanding the types and quality of services offered by network partners, and lowering the costs of those services.

Of course, the State is involved in so many things it has no business in and in so many different ways, specific disregard doesn't eliminate the cost and presence of the State entirely, but it does significantly reduce its cost and influence on you, one pair of pants at a time.

The State of Perpetual Emergency

The standard government response to exigent circumstances takes one of two forms:

1) In order to prevent A, we must do A.
2) In order to accomplish B, we must do not-B.

Both responses are clearly contradictory, but go largely unchallenged. The seeming presumption is that, faced with an emergency, humans reject their uniquely-defining morals, ethics, subjective values, and, especially, deductive reasoning. Therefore, emergency government actions may also reject these human concepts and the contradictions become moot.

But, as these characteristics define a human and give his frail body a comparative advantage over the hostile environment of nature, the human response to emergency should be a magnification of the importance of these inputs to decision making, not rejection.

That is not to say that human reasoning is infallible and will always triumph against nature. The curse of reason is that we are born with very little innate knowledge. Without instruction or prior experience, a man's wits are his only protection in an unfamiliar environment. Also, charitably, humans are optimistic when it comes to judging risk and therefore tend to underestimate the benefits of emergency preparedness and planning.

The assumptions behind having government do anything in an emergency situation now lie naked before you:

A) People who underestimate preparedness and planning elect people to appoint people to undertake emergency preparedness and planning.

B) Those people do not underestimate preparedness and planning.

C) In an emergency, those people will retain reasoning behavior while everyone else reverts to animalism.

D) By virtue of their experience and instruction they have received, those people are qualified to supplant their morals, ethics, subjective values, and especially deductive reasoning for the unnamed populace.

No honest evaluation of assumptions A-C could possibly conclude that they could be true. The idea that there exist among us superhuman beings and that, as if by magic, they are all currently appointed or elected government emergency planners is ludicrous. However, a government emergency planner could be more experienced and/or learned in emergency planning and operations than, say, the owner of the corner gas station, so we must take a closer look at assumption D.

Imagine Government Emergency Evacuation Plan I, written, edited, vetted, and exercised in non-exigent circumstances. The goals of Plan I would be continuity of government, protection of human life, and protection of property, in that order. To those ends, Plan I would list the actions to be undertaken by various agencies and personnel upon plan activation.

As an emergency plan, Plan I would have, as one of its tenants, reliance on in-place stocks for initial operations. As an evacuation plan, one of the in-place stocks necessary to execution would be fuel for evacuating vehicles. Rather than stockpile millions of gallons of gasoline for every family truckster leaving the evacuation area, Plan I would, sensibly, rely on commercial gas stations and private stocks to fuel non-government vehicles.

Not surprisingly, with all the local families needing fuel for their minivans to leave the evacuation area, and fuel trucks prevented from entering the evacuation area, fuel is in high demand and supplies are limited. The basic law of supply and demand predicts an increase in fuel prices, therefore, also unsurprising. Invariably, government enacts response #1, preventing A by doing A.

To prevent Mr. Jones from undervaluing his dollars with respect to gasoline, in the name of preventing price gouging the government forces Mr. Smith to undervalue his gasoline with respect to dollars. With no incentive for Mr. Jones to conservatively purchase fuel, and no incentive for Mr. Smith to sell gasoline that will cost him more to replace, government response #1 guarantees a quick and lasting shortage of gasoline in the evacuation area.

By failing to properly account for the subjective valuations of Mr. Jones and Mr. Smith, Government Plan I fails in its reliance on in-place stocks. This failure is evident at the moment government response #1 is enacted.

Oh, but it's worse than that. As high demand and limited supply of gasoline are wholly unsurprising, Government Plan I likely includes, as one of its agency actions, government response #1 as part of its reliance on in-place stocks. In other words, to ensure the availability of gasoline, Plan I calls for an action ensuring a shortage of gasoline (government response #2).

Our not-so-imaginary Government Evacuation Plan I, developed in non-exigent circumstances by our supposed learned and/or experienced government emergency planners, is a plan to fail*. Since they cannot even plan reasonably, there is no reason to believe that, in an actual emergency, they will discover their senses and thus have some moral, ethical, reasoned superiority over other individuals responding to emergency conditions in their own way.

Emergencies Everywhere
Having taken that trip to demonstrate that a government effectively responding to an emergency fails on first principles, I must regretfully inform you that politicians and bureaucrats nevertheless insist on emergency authority. Shocking, isn't it?

What is shocking is that people grant and defer to that authority. It may be a herd mentality, or perhaps fear of being shot by someone who has declared their superiority; whatever it is, people are amazingly willing to surrender their humanity to any clown with an emergency services baseball cap. Someone yells, "I'm in charge here," and everyone around him immediately relaxes their normal intellectual standards.

Think of the awesome power of the person in charge of emergency response. There's no time to argue, it's an emergency. We can't wait for all the details, it's an emergency. Do as I say and we'll talk about it later. Desperate times call for desperate measures.

Don't think for a moment that emergency power isn't like an open flame to political and bureaucratic mothmen.


Sure we can torture; there's a ticking time bomb. We don't have time to debate this PATRIOT Act or that $787 billion bailout, we're responding to a crisis. We must have this emergency appropriation to continue this war into its eighth year. 12,000 deaths in two years is a small price to pay in this war on drugs. Emergency flu shots for everyone. My god man! Don't you realize we're in the middle of a GLOBAL ECONOMIC MELTDOWN?

The phenomenon of treating everything as an emergency is familiar and well understood. Many, many business organizations and government agencies have fallen into the trap of reacting to emergencies as a normal course of business. It is very destructive behavior, and easily recognized – from without.

Within the organization, perpetual crisis mode is alluring because of the perception of relaxed moral, ethical, and intellectual standards. But, it is very taxing on human and capital resources. Perpetual crisis mode is symptomatic of an actual crisis: a crisis of leadership. If the leaders do not recognize the problem and rigidly enforce intellectual standards, the organization will eventually self-destruct.

Your Emergency Plan
With government as a whole, the "leaders" who must recognize the destructive behavior are the individuals comprising the body politic. After all, it is their labor and resources that are being taxed. If these individuals wish to end the cycle of perpetual crisis, they must rigidly enforce moral, ethical, and intellectual standards, first within themselves.

It does absolutely no good to "vote the bastards out" if you retain the same relaxed standards you used to vote the bastards in.

At this point the pragmatist and realist are both busy rationalizing, "if I raise my standards and the majority of the electorate doesn't, I'll fall on my sword of principle!" That is why, as a second step to ending the perpetual crisis mode, you must also withhold your consent and your resources until such time as the government operates in accordance with your higher intellectual standards.

Or, you can keep doing as you have been, with one small data point in mind. The US Federal Government, which operated through most of the 20th century under declarations of national emergency, has been operating under a continuous declaration of national emergency by executive order since 1979.

----
* Could Plan I exist without government response #1 and #2? Sure. You just have to know the fuel levels of all family trucksters and corner gas stations at the time of the emergency with enough prior notice to have extra fuel delivered AND know the amount of cash all those families could bring to bear on filling the family truckster with fuel.

Or, you could allow the price system to ration fuel between consenting actors at the time they actually know that information. That negates a government emergency response, so I didn't take the time to explore it here.

Funniest Thing I've Heard All Day

Way back in my day, I could drive around on California roads, talking on a cellphone and smoking a vanilla cig. It’s just not the free country it was back in 2007. - Anthony Gregory

Aw, crap. Now I'm committed and have to explain what impresses me about Gregory. Basically, he's a prolific dynamo (I could be that prolific if I didn't have to spend all my time reading Anthony Gregory). And, to beat that, he actually knows what he's quacking about.

Here's a list that I'll add to as time goes by:

- Lew Rockwell archives
- Independent Institute Research Analyst (giggity)
- Mises Daily archive
- Berkley hippy personal website

I noticed that Scott Horton, who I consider a "good kid" signed off with Gregory the other day by calling him "kid".

When did age happen?

Nope. Not Here. Couldn't Happen.

Take my love, take my land, make me where I cannot stand. I don't care, I'm still free. You can't take the sky from m[SCREEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!]

A spokeswoman for the Washington headquarters of U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) says the drawing of weapons in the ramp inspection of an aircraft in Long Beach, Calif., last month was justified but not "normal." Kelly Ivahnenko also told AVweb that general aviation pilots can expect more ramp checks by CBP agents thanks to the newly-instituted Electronic Advance Passenger Information System (eAPIS).

...

In an interview and podcast with AVweb, Perry said he and his passengers were put in unnecessary peril by gun-wielding enforcement officials. Ivahnenko stressed Perry's experience is not what most pilots should expect if they're checked by the CBP. "This I would not classify as common or routine," she said. She said the Long Beach action was justified, even though the search turned up nothing illegal. "While the involvement of more than one law enforcement agency and the heightened alert of the situation were slightly unusual, it is within (CBP's) authority to inspect inbound and outbound travelers, vehicles, planes, cargo, etc.," she told AVweb. She also said that only the Long Beach police officers assisting the operation actually drew weapons and CBP agents kept theirs holstered, something Perry vehemently disputes. "Every one of them had their weapons out," Perry said. (via AVweb Flash)

Oh, man. This Perry guy must be one bad dude with a 10-foot rap sheet to have CBP and Long Beach Police violate 14 CFR 91.11.

Hmmm...maybe not. Check out AVweb's podcast with Perry.

Wait, these thugs just randomly pulled a tail number, executed a SWAT-style raid on an aircraft under operation, and sorted through the contents and passengers without even mere suspicion?

Wait, this was on an aircraft LEAVING the country?

I think my suspicions of who the real terrorists are have been confirmed.