Liberty University to Sponsor William Byrons JRM Late Model

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Mooresville, NC (PRWEB) March 29, 2014

Liberty University has signed with William Byron to sponsor the No. 9 Late Model Stock car he is driving for JR Motorsports.

The school will receive primary branding on the No. 9 late model as Byron competes regionally in the NASCAR Whelen Series for JR Motorsports this season.

We welcome this opportunity to partner with William Byron, a young man who possesses the skills and values to become a champion, not only on the racetrack, but personally and professionally as well, said Jerry Falwell, President of Liberty University.

Byron is in his first season with JR Motorsports. He joined the late model program in January after a 2013 U.S. Legends Cars debut that featured 33 wins and a Young Lions Division national championship. So far this year, the 16-year-old sophomore at Charlotte (N.C.) Country Day School has finished second in two late model races at Hickory (N.C.) Speedway.

I am proud to represent such a fine university, said Byron. Liberty University provides a number of opportunities both on campus and online to accommodate those seeking a higher education. I understand the importance of balancing my education and passion for racing, thats why this is a perfect partnership. In addition to representing Liberty on the track in my JR Motorsports car, I look forward to enrolling in an online class this summer.

Byron, an avid iRacing simulation racer, didnt start driving actual race cars full time until 2013, although his instant success made it hard to tell. Byron competed in 69 Legends Cars races across the United States, posting 59 top-five and 64 top-10 finishes. He turned Pro in Legends in January and promptly won the 2014 Charlotte Winter Heat Series U.S. Legends Pro Championship. He was also crowned the Pro Legends Champion at Winter Nationals in Auburndale, Fla., after winning six of six races.

William, like so many of Libertys students, has applied skills developed and refined through virtual educational technologies to achieve practical success, said Falwell. Liberty is honored to spread the word about its unique educational opportunities while partnering with this rising star of racing.

The JR Motorsports late model program is in its 13th year competing at tracks across the southeast. Byrons teammate, Josh Berry, won the company its first championship in 2012 with the track title at Motor Mile Speedway in Radford, Va. Berry and Byron gave JRM a 1-2 finish last Saturday at Hickory (N.C.) Motor Speedway.

The JRM late models will be back in action at Hickory on Saturday, March 29.

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Liberty University to Sponsor William Byrons JRM Late Model

Ron Paul, Richard Cobden, and the Risks of Opposing War

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Since at least as early as the eighteen century, classical liberalism, and its modern variant libertarianism, have opposed warfare except in cases of obvious self-defense. We see this anti-war position clearly among the anti-federalists of eighteenth-century America (who opposed all standing armies) and more famously within George Washingtons Farewell Address. Thomas Jefferson frequently inveighed against war, although in moves typical for Jefferson, he acted against his own professed ideology on a number of occasions.

On the other side of the Atlantic, liberalism finally made significant gains in Britain with the rise of the Anti-Corn Law League in the late 1830s. The head of the league, a radical liberal named Richard Cobden, rose to prominence throughout the 1840s and is notable today for his active defense of laissez-faire capitalism as a member of the House of Commons, and also for his staunch anti-interventionism in foreign affairs.

For a time, his political star rose quickly, but by the time the Crimean War ended, Cobden, had been cast aside by both a ruling class and a public enthusiastic for both empire and war.

Prior to the war Cobden traveled Europe as an honored guest at international peace conferences while advocating for free markets, civil liberties, and libertarianism everywhere he traveled. But in the end, as has been so often the case, his political career was ended by his opposition to war, and his refusal to buy into nationalistic propaganda.

Like the Crimean crisis of today, the Crimean crises of the early 1850s were caused by little more than the efforts of various so-called great powers to tip the global balance of power in their favor. Foremost among those grasping for global power was the British Empire.

But even as early as the 1830s, the British were seized by a series of national hysterias whipped up by a variety of anti-Russian pundits who were obsessed with increasing British military spending and strength in the name of defense from the Russians.

As is so often the case in securing the case for war, the pro-militarist argument among the Brits rested on perpetuating and augmenting the publics nationalistic feelings that the Russians were uncommonly aggressive and sinister. Cobden, obviously far better informed on the matter than the typical Brit, published a pamphlet on Russia in 1836 actually considering the facts of Russian foreign policy, which he often compared favorably to the hyper-aggressive foreign policy employed by the British Empire.

Cobden began by comparing Russian expansion to British expansion, noting that during the last hundred years, England has, for every square league of territory annexed to Russia, by force, violence, or fraud, appropriated to herself three. And that among the self-professed opponents of conquest, the British failed to recognize that If the English writer calls down indignation upon the conquerors of the Ukraine, Finland, and the Crimea, may not Russian historians conjure up equally painful reminiscences upon the subjects of Gibraltar, the Cape, and Hindostan?

In an interesting parallel to the modern Crimean crisis, much of the opposition to the Russian among British militarists was based on the assertion that the Russians had annexed portions of Poland in aggressive moves that were deemed by the British as completely unwarranted. Cobden, however, understanding the history of the region to be much more murky than the neat little scenarios painted by militarists, recognized that neither side was angelic and blameless and that many of the annexed territories were in fact populated by Russians that had earlier been conquered and annexed by the Poles.

The Russians, while themselves no doubt hostile toward neighbors, were surrounded by hostile neighbors themselves, with the origins of conflicts going back decades or even centuries. The puerile and simplistic arguments of the British militarists, who advocated for what would become a global, despotic, and racist British Empire, added little of value to any actual public knowledge of the realities in Eastern Europe.

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Ron Paul, Richard Cobden, and the Risks of Opposing War