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Hi, I'm an independent author and researcher from the UK. My book The Declaration of the Self: On the Abolition of the State is due to be released on 06/28/2018. It is divided into three parts. The first part outlines the basic prime principles underpinning a stateless society (such as self-ownership, property rights and the NAP). The second part is devoted to the 'application' of these principles to the provision of 'public goods' such as 'national' defence, law, money and roads (among others). The third part contains the 'declaration' of the title, while exploring how a free society might be established. If you're interested, I can arrange a free kindle copy for review (via voucher) on the day of release (on a first come first serve basis, of course). Please let me know. Cheers. Adam Clarke *** Website: www.clarkead.co.uk Book link: https://www.amazon.com/Declaration-Self-Abolition-State-ebook/dp/B07BTLS9QC/ref=sr_1_7?ie=UTF8&qid=1524810104&sr=8-7&keywords=declaration+of+the+self The Declaration book cover.pdf

Lately I've been reviewing books that would make you feel optimistic and happy about the world so I figured a review one that will make you really think that it's all FUBAR (great acronym "fucked up beyond any recognition"). The book shows how journalism has died in the digital age because of how the economics of the Internet reward the worst behavior from journalists and news websites Videoblog of this book review The subtitle of the book is Confessions of a Media Manipulator, the author is a PR consultant who would cleverly orchestrate the media to do his bidding and draw millions of eyeballs. He says Conning the conmen is one of life’s most satisfying pleasures. (p. 39) In the first chapter of the book he describes dressing all in black in the dead of night to go vandalize his own billboards, just to create a click bait worthy scandal. Which just sounds fun to me! In the book he describes the trading up 'media hack', I’d start with using HARO to get quoted on a blog that didn’t care much about credentials, then use that piece as a marker of authority to justify inclusion in a more reputable publication. (p. 56) How to go viral “the most powerful predictor of virality is how much anger an article evokes” (p. 63) I made it my strategy to manufacture chatter by exploiting emotions of high valence: arousal and indignation. (p. 66) On Fact Checking The link economy encourages blogs to point their readers to other bloggers who are saying crazy things, to borrow from each other without verification, and to take more or less completed stories from other sites, add a layer of commentary, and turn it into something they call their own. (p. 150) On trust He talks about how for some reason we assume that since something is written down it must be more legitimate than just something somebody says... Studies have shown that the brain experiences reading and listening in profoundly different ways; they activate different hemispheres for the exact same content. We place an inordinate amount of trust in things that have been written down. (p. 185) On snarkiness To be called a douche is to be branded with all the characteristics of what society deigns to hate but can’t define. It’s a way to dismiss someone entirely without doing any of the work or providing any of the reasons. (p. 204) On fake news The process is simple: Create a pseudo-event, trade it up the chain, elicit real responses and action, and you have altered reality itself. (p. 220) From here we get the defining feature of our world today: a blurred line between what is real and what is fake; what actually happens and what is staged; (p. 220) For example 2002, Vice President Dick Cheney leaked bogus information to an attention-hungry reporter for the New York Times, and then mentioned his own leak on Meet the Press to help convince us to invade Iraq. (p. 221) Probably like yourself, I almost never watch the mainstream media; Fox, CBS, CNN, NBC, BBC but there's a couple of what they call alternative media channels and personalities I do follow and have some degree of trust in because they are more antiestablishmentarian. Their news programs are not interrupted every 10 minutes with an advertisement from Pfizer or Ford. Unfortunately, after reading this book, I have even less trust in the alternative media sources I follow because I see that they are also subject to the unfortunate economics of the Internet that reward quantity over quality and scandal over veracity. How to combat fake news... This books confirms what I recommend in the High Leverage Information Diet which is to spend more time reading more books and less time reading articles. Book's are just so much more likely to contain truthful information because anyone writing a book has to spend at least $900 to have that book edited; they are going to take their fact checking a whole lot more seriously than that journalist or blogger who must bang out 3 articles a day. Anyone writing a book knows that their reputation and public persona is going to be permanently tied back to whatever they say in that book. Whereas a blogger or a "online journalist" has so much less moral responsibility for what they write. I'll encourage you to not read the news and if you do read the news because there's a story that you just have to inform yourself about read the stories and analysis that come out a couple of days or (ideally) weeks or months after the fact. These are so much more likely to present an accurate and holistic picture than the breaking news is.Thanks to the current US elections we are perhaps living in era where more eyeballs than ever before are transfixed by the breaking news. We have this epic showdown between this iconic egotistical billionaire and this Machiavellian, double faced super politician. I bet you that in a few years books will be written about this election that reveal things that are completely contrary to what the news is telling us right now. Get your information from online sources that are not economically compromised. The more ads you see surrounding the news you are reading the higher the likelihood that the veracity of news has been compromised by factors described in this book. This is a big part of the reason why I've never had ads on my website or Youtube channel that paid me per view. I've always made my money as a blogger or Youtuber via affiliate commissions. So my economic incentive is to make the most trustworthy recommendations of the very best products to my audience, so that they will keep buying them. I've always known that as soon as I installed ads on my site I would become a slave to the page view. Now a days we see some alternative media sources that serve the news and they make money by selling supplements, asking for donations or selling books. These seem like an imperfect but definitely more honest economic models of journalism than being paid tiny fractions of a cent per pageview. Some examples of this would be Infowars.com, Free Domain Radio or Mike Cernovich of Danger & Play. I'll add a silver lining to the pessimistic conclusions presented here; now a days whenever any type of news worthy event happens what do you almost always see around the periphery of the event? Everybody holding their smart phones out recording the event. It looks pretty funny actually, as opposed to enjoying the event or making an effort to keep their whits about them to stay safe, everybody is just transfixed on documenting it with their little rectangular devices. While it's a weirdly narcissistic behavior, it's great for the overall veracity of news and online discourse. There's been all sorts of instances where a scandalous news story broke and the public shaming and hysteria began but then a grainy video of what actually happened surfaced and everyone learned the truth. Eventually when we live in a world where almost everything that happens is recorded will "fake news" still be so prevalent? Maybe not...

This book is a hybrid between a manifesto and a memoir of this young Texan who invented the 3D printed gun. I liked this book because it really lays bare the unique American philosophy, this review will comment on that philosophy and make it concrete in context of a politically tectonic level recent event, the site of which I'm not far from at the moment. America is the one country wherein citizens are obligated to overthrow the government if it gets too out of hand. Every other country is set up to protect the cartel of the powerful elite. America is unique in that our constitution provides... A concrete legal protection of a citizen’s right to violently abolish the law. The author Cody Wilson feels this experiment of a philosophically rigorous country is flat lined and needs to be re-animated The best I could say then was that America was a failed but worthwhile experiment. A miracle from the finest moment of liberal thought. Proof that foolish political experiments, be they compound republics or plastic guns, still had their fruits in the animating contest of liberty. Cody has significant disdain for politicians that would constrict our rights The force of her famous distemper for the popular ownership of arms seemed matched only by her muscular defense of our warfare-surveillance state. Cody's way of fighting back against that is to publish... Universal access to arms. ...in the same way that way open source software publishers distribute their products. Power can no longer be centralized in a world empowered by the Internet. He writes that the greatest mistake [the United States Government] ever made: not licensing the personal computer!” On Dangerous Freedom At the heart of the American philosophy we embrace a dangerous degree of freedom. We especially believe in freedom of speech to an extreme degree; America is the one country that allows Draw Muhammad contests, Neo-Nazi rallies, God Hates Fags preachers and art exhibits of cannibalism and crucifixes submerged in urine, we produce the most depraved porn and snuff films. All just a few clicks away from you now. So Cody asked... What if guns were becoming speech? And then instead of asking for permission he made it so by publishing and releasing to the Internet (that never forgets) the CAD files to 3D print firearms. Science fiction coming soon to a garage near you. “It’s like stealing something from the future. Something that’s not yet supposed to be here.” On Bitcoin The digital currency is - unsurprisingly - mentioned frequently Taaki was hoping to do with currency what I believed was possible with weapons— namely, to place them outside state structures. It would be terrible if bitcoiners were to just sleepwalk into letting the bureaucrats license their firms and activities. My favorite line of the book is And any man worth knowing is a man at war with himself. I think I first saw this guy in a viral Vice documentary; the first thing that really struck me about him is his extraordinary verbal ability. Politicians, TV personalities, professional commentators, pick up artists and sales people take public speaking and improv classes for years to become as verbally dexterous as this guy is. As a truly talented political pontificator he ranks up there with some of my favorite podcasters like Sam Harris, Stefan Molynuex or Gad Saad. It's remarkable that given the amount of money this guy could be making with his million dollar mouthpiece he has chosen the business he is in. Checkout this ReasonTV interview. Time will tell if this guy is too rebellious for his own good; I hope he doesn't end up in jail. However; the very fact that someone can do something as disruptive as release to the world downloadable guns is a reassuring sign that perhaps the American experiment with freedom yet draws breath. How the Printed Gun may change Revolutions The other night I watched this incredibly compelling Netflix documentary about the Maidan Revolution in Kiev, Ukraine. The film viscerally portrays the violence of the state. As I watched it in my flat in Kiev not that far from the stately European sites which were transformed into war zones in the events shown in the film I kept thinking how the prospect of printed guns could have radically changed how the Maidan revolution played out. In Winter on Fire the image that you'll see over and over again is of a bunch of government thugs in riot gear beating up protesters. I lived in the Ukraine and I have heard a bunch of different perspectives on the Maidan revolution. I know it's a complicated event that I would do a real disservice to if I tried to meta analyze it but just imagine how much shorter it could have been if Cody's guns were available to the revolutionaries... Just imagine how many lives could have been saved if the government thugs feared their adversaries... How much violence could have been avoided if the protesters could have brought something more menacing than rocks and sticks to a rubber bullet and steel baton fight? In my mind a printed gun or a multiplicity of them is much more powerful as a psychological weapon than it is.practically. Tactically I just can't imagine it being that much more dangerous as a weapon than a knife (or a truck!); nobody is going to slay dozens of victims in a mass murder spree in a mall or school with this thing. The hordes of hundreds of government thugs wouldn't have been nearly so aggressive if they knew there was a chance of being shot back at. Battling a crowd throwing rocks and sticks while fully armored in riot gear is probably just a little more risky than playing football with friends after a few beers and - let's be honest - probably a lot of fun! But what if one out of every hundred protesters had a gun? Even a crappy gun; it becomes an infinitely less appealing activity. How many of the riot cops would have transformed from cruel brawlers into assertive yet courteous peace keepers? How many of them would have flat refused to participate? The film is a 90 minute crescendo of escalation of force. A small group college students start to protest. Some riot police beat them up. A social media outrage ensues. Thousands rally to protest the police beatings of peaceful protesters. Some angry people advance on government buildings to protest. Larger scale melees occur with the police. The outrage grows and the protest becomes a revolution. The protesters organize a militia that can more capably combat the riot police. The government resorts to bringing in military professionals; snipers begin using real bullets to kill protesters on the front lines of the stand off. The revolutionary leader gives the President an ultimatum and the militia members promise to lay down their lives. Finally, given the prospect of presiding over a true massacre, the Ukrainian President resigns and hides. If the government faced a pervasive lethal threat amongst the protesters would they have had to be more reasonable at any early stage of the Maidan revolution? Would have so much blood ran on the icy streets of Kiev in 2014? I suspect not. If only I sold time travel devices instead of smart drugs I could make a bloody fortune by selling one to the dictator in the 2020's who is about to be overthrown by revolutionaries wielding plastic guns. Just imagine what such a dictator would pay to have Cody Wilson assassinated in 2013 before he opened this Pandora's box... Now that guns can be printed every despotic government around the world has a real reason to think twice about abusing their own citizenry.