‘Dennis Behreandt’ Archives
Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s Constitution
BY DENNIS BEHREANDT Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg recently traveled to Egypt where she gave advice to that nation’s new leaders regarding the adoption of a new constitution. Alarmingly, she told Egyptian television that they should not model their new national charter on the U.S. Constitution. "I would not look to the U.S. [...]
The American Panopticon
By Dennis Behreandt In 1787, philosopher and economist Jeremy Bentham proposed a new plan for a jail that would allow a very few officials to continuously monitor the inmates. He called his plan the panopticon. "The essence of it consists, then, in the centrality of the inspector's situation, combined with the well-known and most effectual [...]
Heroic Sailor May Not Return Home, Cites Fear of Government
BY DENNIS BEHREANDT Sixteen-year-old Laura Dekker has skillfully and fearlessly conquered the world’s vast oceans, but there is one force that strikes fear into her: the power of government. The young sailor was only 14 when she departed the Netherlands aboard her sailboat, Guppy, for her epic journey around the world. Yet she did so [...]
Four Cardinal Errors & the Decline of the American Republic
By Dennis Behreandt Steven Yates, Four Cardinal Errors: Reasons for the Decline of the American Republic. Drayton, S.C.: Brushfire Press International, 2011; 314 pages. There are some disturbing trends to modern life that are becoming more and more noticeable. Some of them are big, as in the decline in middle class incomes, alarming [...]
US Embassy Warns of Terror Threat in Bangkok
WAR ON TERROR, DENNIS BEHREANDT The U.S. Embassy in Bangkok is warning American citizens and other tourists visiting the city to be aware that foreign terrorists may be planning attacks there. An alert posted to the Embassy’s Website warns: “This message alerts U.S. citizens in Thailand that foreign terrorists may be currently looking [...]
This Day in History: Edison Demonstrates the Light Bulb
By Dennis Behreandt The now notorious ban of incandescent light bulbs, mandated by the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007, is about to make 100-watt traditional incandescent bulbs a thing of the past with the ban taking effect beginning January 1, 2012. Ironically, it was on December 31, 1879 that inventor Thomas Edison gave the [...]
Why Conservatives Should Support Ron Paul
By Dennis Behreandt As Ron Paul has surged over recent weeks becoming a front-runner for the Republican nomination despite mainstream attempts to derail his growing popularity, among some conservatives, concern is growing. Specifically, among those conservatives most concerned with foreign policy, Ron Paul is viewed with skepticism, if not [...]
State Department, Romania, Hail Missile Defense Agreement
DENNIS BEHREANDT, FOREIGN AFFAIRS The U.S. State Department and the government of Romania have announced that the “the Ballistic Missile Defense Agreement on deployment of the U.S. ballistic missile defense system in Romania has entered into force, effective December 23, 2011.” The missile defense agreement with Romania is part of a [...]
Why Blue Collar Workers Should Support Ron Paul
By Dennis Behreandt Blue collar workers, the foundation of the middle class in America, have long belonged, heart and soul, to the Democratic Party. I should know, I come from a solid blue collar family. Growing up, my dad worked in the local mills. He spent decades, until his retirement, in one in particular, running heavy equipment and [...]
Appeals Court Upholds $37.6 Million Fine Against Trudeau
By Dennis Behreandt A federal appeals court has upheld a $37.6 million fine leveled against infomercial kingpin Kevin Trudeau, author of numerous “self-help” books including The Weight Loss Cure “They” Don’t Want You To Know About. According to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), the case resulted when “Mr. Trudeau violated the [...]
Quantum Computing Breakthrough in the UK
By Dennis Behreandt Researchers in the UK have made what they say is a significant breakthrough in building computer chips for use in quantum computers. Unlike computers in wide use today, the promise of quantum computers is that they will be able to carry out computations using effects described by quantum physics, the physics that [...]
Defense Authorization Bill Still Savages the Constitution
By Dennis Behreandt Despite a tremendous, last-minute outcry from both sides of the political aisle, the U.S. Senate passed the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012 by a vote of 93 to 7 on December 1. Civil libertarians on both the left and the right opposed passage because the measure contained language allowing the [...]
Defense Authorization Bill To Allow Indefinite Military Detentions for Americans?
By Dennis Behreandt Update: The Senate has passed the defense authorization bill by a vote of 93-7. According to CNN, as passed the measure includes language that supposedly clarifies the bill's intent with regard to indefinite detention of American citizens. "Senators ultimately reached an agreement to amend the bill to make clear it's not the [...]
NASA Mission to Mars Underway
By Dennis Behreandt NASA has successfully launched the Mars Science Laboratory mission to Mars. According to the space agency, “liftoff came right on time on the first opportunity at 10:02 a.m. EST, Nov. 26, 2011.” The mission carries NASA’s latest martian rover, named Curiosity. According to NASA, the rover measures over 9 feet in [...]
German Official Chastises Britain Over Financial Transaction Tax
By Dennis Behreandt A German official has criticized the UK over its reluctance to accept a tax on financial transactions in order to prop up the Euro. The criticism over British reluctance to agree to the tax came from Volker Kauder, the “parliamentary leader of the Christian Democratic Union,” the London Telegraph reported. According [...]
What George Washington REALLY Thought About the Constitution
By Dennis Behreandt Visitors to The Atlantic’s Website on November 1 were likely enticed by the prospect of learning from “Murrow Award winning legal analyst and commentator” Andrew Cohen what George Washington, the nation’s first president and most well-known Founding Father, “thought about the Constitution.” Darkly, Cohen warned [...]
Steve Jobs and Al Davis: A Commitment To Excellence
By Dennis Behreandt In the past week the world lost two great leaders and visionaries in Steve Jobs and Al Davis. At first blush, there doesn’t seem to be a link between the two other than the fact that they both led successful organizations for years. But there was a link, and it underscores the success the two organizations had over many [...]
Dennis Behreandt: In Praise of Gridlock
By Dennis Behreandt According to conventional wisdom, the U.S. government’s legislative process is broken. What’s more, this opinion is held on both sides of the aisle and by the media. If there is anything anyone in America can agree on about politics it’s that the U.S. government is hopelessly botched. Helpfully making the media’s [...]
If You Sweat Too Much You Might Be a Terrorist
By Dennis Behreandt The New York Nightlife Association, in cooperation with the New York City Police Department, has issued the second edition of its Best Practices for Nightlife Establishments . The guide covers the normally expected topics for a publication about best practices for nightclubs. Subjects like how to handle age verification and [...]
A Decade Later: Now What?
By Dennis Behreandt Everyone who can has been pontificating on the meaning of 9/11 during the last week. Establishment types, led by the likes of John Yoo, have been claiming that the Bush years were amazingly successful. We beat back the barbarian terrorists without sacrificing our open society too much, they claim. “easonable [...]
Should Catholics Be Socialists?
By Dennis Behreandt Texas Governor Rick Perry’s entry into the ranks of Republican presidential contenders has raised questions about both his religious beliefs and, more broadly, about the political and economic consequences of Christianity. Writing for the Atlantic, former Maryland lieutenant governor Kathleen Kennedy Townsend raised the [...]
The Riots Are About the Failure of Socialism
By Dennis Behreandt When riots broke out in London the overall narrative was that dissolute “youths” were engaging in an orgy of thievery and violence for no particular reason. Supposedly, it was chaos for the sake of chaos. As in many things, although this is an exaggeration, there is likely a component of truth here. Some thugs just [...]
Creator of Video Game Doom Says Video Games Not Responsible for Violence
By Dennis Behreandt Deranged mass murderer Anders Breivik claimed to enjoy violent video games and wrote in his manifesto that playing those games was a good way to train for real world violence. His statements seem to some to verify a link between violence and video games that critics of the popular software titles have long alleged. [...]
Congressman Paul Ryan Sips Wine, Liberals Are Outraged
By Dennis Behreandt A liberal economist, dining out with her husband to celebrate her birthday recently at an upscale Washington, D.C. restaurant, spied Wisconsin Representative Paul Ryan at the same restaurant drinking wine with two other men. The problem for the liberal economist? The wine was $350 per bottle and Ryan and his friends had two [...]
Space Shuttle Era At End, NASA’s Future in Doubt
By Dennis Behreandt As the shuttle Atlantis makes its final orbits, NASA too may be making its last orbits, potentially circling down the drain. America’s space agency has a storied history. Though the Soviet Union beat America to space with both Sputnik and Yuri Gagarin, it was NASA’s team of bright, young engineers, scientists and test [...]
U.S. House: American Manufacturing At Risk from NAT GAS Act
By Dennis Behreandt The basic utilitarian idea underlying the concept of free market economics is that through the action of individual actors buying and selling goods and services, the market will distribute those goods and services efficiently and prices will come to rest at points where supply and demand find an equilibrium. Left well [...]
Ten-year Study Finds California Current an Oceanic Serengeti Plain
By Dennis Behreandt After ten years of tagging and tracking 23 of the Pacific Ocean’s top predators, the Census of Marine Life Tagging of Pacific Predators project (TOPP) has found that some areas of the Pacific teem with so much life that they are like oceanic equivalents of Africa’s famed Serengeti Plain. The results of the study, [...]
U.S. Hits Debt Limit, Big Government at the Crossroads
By Dennis Behreandt Keynesians everywhere issued a collective gasp on May 16, 2011 as the United States government hit its debt limit. In a letter to Congress, Treasury Secretary Geithner said that the government would have to stop funding some obligations because it could no longer borrow money. Addressed to “The Honorable Harry [...]
Population or Bust: Two Views of the Future
By Dennis Behreandt Two diametrically opposed reports on the state of the world's resources have recently been published. One suggests that paradigm shift is occurring right now, and that it is not the type of paradigm shift anyone should want. Prepared by privately held global investment management firm, it warns, in a spookily Malthusian [...]
Cambodia and Thailand Battle, A World At War?
By Dennis Behreandt Violence continues to spread across the world, with the latest fighting breaking out between Thailand and Cambodia. The Singapore Straits Times reported on Sunday that fighting at the Thai-Cambodia border had continued into a third day. “Cambodian and Thai troops exchanged heavy weapons fire for the third straight [...]
Obama and the Imperial Presidency
By Dennis Behreandt The Democrat faithful, buttressed by ardent and vociferous proselytizing by hardcore socialists, bamboozled the American people in 2008 to put President Obama in the White House. It wasn’t really a hard sell, as a majority of Americans, on the right, the left and among independents, had soured on a Bush Presidency that [...]
What’s Next for Shuttle Discovery?
By Dennis Behreandt The space shuttle Discovery touched down for the last time on March 9 after completing its final flight to the International Space Station. The shuttle's last mission involved delivering a final pressurized module to the U.S. side of the space station, something NASA called “a large closet of sorts called the Permanent [...]
The Economic Crimes of Government: Behreandt
By Dennis Behreandt There are many ways in which governments can become dangerous to, or even the enemy of, the people. Some of them are quite overt and easy to identify. Others are a bit more circumspect. One of these is economic in nature: undermining the independence of the bulk of a nation’s people by using either fiscal or monetary [...]
Government and the Black Plague of the 20th Century
By Dennis Behreandt People seem infatuated with the “miracle” of government, and their infatuation grows if their government calls itself a “democracy.” As a result of their infatuation, people far too often believe romantic notions about its benevolence. In the United States, the last two years have seen high-profile examples of [...]
Coercive Character of Wisconsin Unions on Display
Liberty Letters, Dennis Behreandt When state workers in the form of organized labor collectively bargain for higher rates of pay and benefits what is really happening is that a privileged group is attempting to use the coercive power of the state to transfer property from the majority of taxpayers to a favored minority — themselves. In [...]
Wisconsin Labor Unions and the Marxist Fallacy of Surplus Value: Behreandt
By Dennis Behreandt Tens of thousands of state employees gathered at the Wisconsin capitol in Madison in mid-February to protest budget cuts and restrictions on collective bargaining “rights” in a bill proposed by Republican Governor Scott Walker and supported by Republican lawmakers holding an elected majority in both the state Assembly [...]
Report: Government Healthcare Fails Elderly in UK
By Dennis Behreandt Critics of government-run health care allege that such schemes amount to health care rationing that puts the elderly at risk. In England, where the government run health care system is administered by the National Health Service, a new report suggests that elderly people are being denied care in what one family member of a [...]
When Society Accepts Murder, Expect More of It
By Dennis Behreandt In the United States today, murder is accepted as normal, and legal, if carried out under state-approved circumstances. It’s shocking but true, and the fine dividing line drawn by the law between legal killing and murder is on display in a recent and horrific case from Philadelphia. There, a “doctor” has been accused [...]
Libertarian or Conservative?
By Dennis Behreandt The question has been raised, is American Daily Herald a libertarian or conservative publication? The answer: it is both libertarian and conservative. How can this be? Is this not a contradiction in terms? Today it is in many ways, and this is exactly why American Daily Herald was created in the first place. Consider the [...]
Behreandt: New Asian Cold War
By Dennis Behreandt In September, a Chinese fishing boat collided with two Japanese Coast Guard vessels near the Senkaku Islands. Those islands are administered by Japan, but are claimed by China. The incident set off a war of words between the two nations after Japan arrested fishing boat captain Zhan Qixiong. At the time China warned of [...]
Enabling Law to Grant Chavez Dictatorial Power
By Dennis Behreandt Venezuela is set to approve an Enabling Law that will grant President Hugo Chavez sweeping new dictatorial powers. Officially, the purpose of the law is to give Chavez the capability to assist Venezuelans whose homes were destroyed by storms and flooding. As written, however, the law appears to give Chavez the power to [...]
Tyranny Then … And Now
By Dennis Behreandt Wikileaks has raised some troubling questions about the state of the United States. It has raised these questions not because of the contents of the documents it has released to the public, but because of the response of the government and media to the release of the documents. Listening to the government and elements of the [...]
The Time to Stop North Korea Is Now
By Dennis Behreandt If recent events in Korea prove anything, its that the world is a dangerous place. And it appears also to be a place where dangerous aggressors are allowed to shell innocent civilians with impunity. South Korea had little more than a tepid response to the shelling of YeonpYeong Island, and South Korean Defense Minister Kim [...]
To Fix the Economy, Let’s Give the Constitution a Try
By Dennis Behreandt After two years of economic turmoil it seems that the message that governments are spending too much money is finally getting out. In fact, the crisis today is solely caused by government spending far too much, and doing so while pretending, Keynesian style, that the spending will actually fix the economy. David Stockman, [...]
Never Try
By Dennis Behreandt It’s one of the most penetrating statements ever uttered in the modern age, so insightful that in 2007 it was added to the Oxford Dictionary of Modern Quotations. What marvel of philosophical brilliance is this, you ask? It’s nothing less than the timeless advice given to children by their father: “Kids, you tried your [...]
The McDonald Decision and the Second Amendment — Behreandt
by Dennis Behreandt The Supreme Court has issued its ruling in the case of McDonald v. City of Chicago. The court found, in a 5-4 vote, that local and state authorities could not effectively ban handgun ownership. The ruling prompted Democratic Senator Diane Feinstein to exclaim that she is "extremely dismayed" because as a result of the [...]
The Dark Side of Jacques Cousteau — Dennis Behreandt
by Dennis Behreandt June 11 marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of explorer, scientist, and environmentalist Jacques Cousteau. Born in 1910, he served in the French Navy before and during World War II, and went on to invent the "Aqua-Lung" which revolutionized underwater diving and exploration. He became famous with the production of his [...]
Eminent Domain and the Rights of Property — Dennis Behreandt
By Dennis Behreandt In China, one man has had enough. Yang Youde, who lives near the city of Wuhan, has had to begin defending his property rights with homemade artillery. He's not fighting off who you might think. There are no roving gangs of thugs, no sneaky, shifty criminals eager to invade his home. No, privatized criminals like these [...]
Elena Kagan and the First Amendment — Dennis Behreandt
by Dennis Behreandt The Obama administration and the Democrats are openly hostile to the First Amendment. On that issue, here is the scoreboard so far: 1. In remarks to graduates of Hampton University on May 9, the President said that the free flow of information enabled by new technologies like the iPad "is putting pressure on our country and [...]
Icebound: The Story of Shackleton’s Antarctic Voyage
by Dennis Behreandt Frank Worsley, his muscles tensed and his face etched in grim determination, tossed uncomfortably in his sleep. In his mind surreal images tormented him. Giant blocks of ice tinged with a primordial blue jostled and bucked their way down Burlington Street, which was, in the dream, weirdly flooded. The monstrous floes of [...]
