Blood of Victory; Ronnie and Ray; Rob Roy; This won't hurt much; these articles have their titles and text in this color and are featured this week in -
 
Ender's Review of the Web
 

Web articles of likely interest to individualists found during the week of June 13-19, 2004.

 
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Political Liberty
Articles showing a positive influence of political action on the cause of Liberty.
 
Declarations of Independence
        by Nat Hentoff from The Village Voice
"In Massachusetts, Marilyn Levin, who is working on a state Bill of Rights Defense Resolution, told a reporter for the Littleton Independent that these resolutions across the country are 'a great vehicle for raising consciousness and awareness. . . . Even though a resolution in itself can't overturn federal laws, what it can do is express public opinion and put pressure on our congressional representatives who do have the power to change the laws'."
 
Let enterprise boldly go into space
        by Jeff Jacoby from Townhall.com
"Private enterprise belongs in space: Clearly, this is an idea whose time as come.  And now a high-level panel -- the President's Commission on Moon, Mars, and Beyond -- is saying so explicitly."
 
Kick Your Victim Addiction - 12 Steps to Restoring Courage and Freedom
        by Aaron Zelman and Claire Wolfe from JPFO
"No matter what happens in the outside world, we must never allow victim disarmers to win in our hearts. Despite any law, rule, regulation, executive order, presidential directive, or any amount of propaganda or media opposition, you have a right to stop anyone who comes to try to kill you. You have the right to stop anyone who comes to take your freedom."
 
Life in Amerika
Articles depicting the negative impact of politics on Liberty.
 
Welcome To Amerika! Tell The Truth, Go To Prison
        by Joe Blow from Ether Zone
"Let me be perfectly clear: I received an FBI letter. Am I worried? Of course not, because it’s not true, so I have nothing to fear. When your day comes and you actually do receive an FBI letter, you will fully understand."
 

Fair-Weather Friends

        by Matt Welch from Reason
"When one of the West Coast's most respected media organizations cites fear of a shutdown as the reason to fire a 42-year-old mother of two who was in the midst of a five-part series on knitting, the justification is either an example of the chilling effect that government regulation has on speech or an inflammatory excuse to get rid of an unwanted employee."
 
Ambushed Athletes Make Great News
        by Radley Balko from FOX News
"The irony in all of this is that sports is the last pure meritocracy left in America. Every athlete on the basketball court, the baseball diamond or the football field has his job solely because of his ability. Not one player makes it to the pro leagues because of who his father was, what neighborhood he was born into or the color of his skin."
 
Ordered Liberty without the State
Some people say it's Anarchy, some say it's not possible. It is an interesting topic.
 
Mandatory Tooth Brushing
        by Sofreh-ye Pretta Aghd from LewRockwell.com
"Whether concerning cigarettes, guns, or seatbelts, the best way to an American's heart is now through a billy club or the threat of it. Fear is the engine of America's entrenched and growing tradition for servile conformity, while all 'round come shouts, 'Let Freedom Ring!'"
 
No Special Features; No Alternate Ending
        by Ronald Neff from Strike The Root and The Last Ditch
"Anyone who imagines that this monster is to be fought with the political weapons it itself grants us, who dreams that political action will unseat it, who indulges the fancy that participating in its rites will overthrow it has simply failed even to discern the outline of this great enemy."
 
Let's Hear It For Democracy!
        by Paul Hein from LewRockwell.com
"And is voting something to be desired, when the choice is between Tweedledum and Tweedledee? ... The trend toward ever larger, more tyrannical government proceeds smoothly, regardless of elections. And why should that be surprising? Government is a big business, probably the biggest. Is it going to throw up for grabs its important executive positions every few years? Does any business operate that way?"
 
Spreading Decentralism
Articles demonstrating an increase in the dispersal of power.
 
The Way It Should Have Been
        by Bob Wallace from The Price of Liberty
"Hijacker: This is a hijacking! I have a boxcutter!
Grandma: I have a .45! Now reach for the sky, or I'll put a hole in that diaper-hat on top of your pointy little head!"
 
Dispatches from a Libertarian Localist
        by James Ostrowski from LewRockwell.com
"Bill Kauffman is a leading voice for libertarian decentralism, localism, or as he calls it, 'placeism.' There is another important difference between Kauffman and the pro-Union, inside the beltway, elitist libertarian centralists: a fabulous sense of humor. How does Kauffman compare with the neocons? They think locally and act globally; he thinks locally and acts locally...."
 
Of Bullwinkle and Beheadings
        by Rodger Jacobs from Strike The Root
"'When I was a child,' she thundered, 'we understood that different people have different cultures. My father used to read 1001 Arabian Nights to me. Do you remember that? "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves"? Beheading is part of the Muslim culture'."
 
The New World Hegemon
Depictions of the coming Imperial power
 
Why They Lie -- and Get Away With It
        by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. from LewRockwell.com
"The crucial difference is that they are lying on behalf of power. And not just any power. We are talking about the greatest centralized power on the globe, the world's largest, most well-armed, and most dangerous government, the only government to have ever used nuclear weapons against civilians and the government that has invaded more countries than any other in modern times."
 
U.S. honour ambushed
        by Eric Margolis from The Toronto Sun
"History shows once a regime authorizes torture, it comes to be widely used against all sorts of suspects -- criminal as well as political. Recall up to 90% of all those arrested by the U.S. as 'terrorism suspects' turned out to be completely innocent."
 
The Nightmare Comes True
        by Uri Avnery from Strike The Root
"Every Palestinian town - Jenin, Nablus, Tulkarm, Kalkilia, Bethlehem, Hebron and others - will become the 'capital' of a tiny enclave, cut off from all the others, from their 'hinterland' and villages, except by tortuous roundabout routes. Fifty-five percent of the West Bank will be Israeli, the Palestinian enclaves will amount to 45% (about 10% of historical Palestine)."
 
Politics by Other Means
War, rumors of war, and politicians fomenting war.
 
Our Elective Monarchy
        by Sheldon Richman from The Future of Freedom Foundation
"One of the myths Americans live by is that they rejected monarchy when the British left involuntarily in the late 18th century. Had a Martian been visiting the United States last week, he never would have believed it. Witnessing the state funeral and worshipful wall-to-wall cable-television coverage, our Martian would have sworn that Ronald Reagan had been the king of America."
 
Bringing the War Back Home
        by Brian Doherty from Reason
"And so long as there are 50 people with a grudge against the U.S. and some spending cash, we can never realistically say the war on terror is won, can we? No amount of Americans with Disabilities Acts in Syria and court decisions in favor of gay marriage in Saudi Arabia will really end the threat of terror anyway. The scenario ... is one that truly guarantees eternal war-crisis footing."
 
The Bush-Kerry Conundrum -- The Only Choice is the War Party
        by Kurt Nimmo from CounterPunch
"So, in November, you can vote for a Republican warmonger or a Democrat warmonger. Oh, you can vote for Ralph Nader on principle, or not vote at all, but the forgone conclusion is that the War Party will be in the White House -- either Republican or Democrat flavor, no difference -- for another four years."
 
Spontaneous Order
Articles showing decentralized successes.
 
What Is the Free Market, and Who Cares?
        by Butler Shaffer from LewRockwell.com
""The growing popularity of 'farmers markets,' along with independently owned meat markets, demonstrates how small businesses - though they may be at a disadvantage in matters of price - can effectively compete with large supermarkets regarding personalized service and the quality of their produce."
 
Choice Is Bad for Us? It Just Ain't So!
        by James R. Otteson from The Freeman
"By contrast, if an individual makes a bad decision, its consequences redound essentially to that individual himself. Even if they also affect his close family or friends, that is a significantly smaller problem than the catastrophe of one distant expert’s making a bad decision for everyone."
 
Objections to These Unions
        by Jonathan Rauch from Reason
"To rule out a moral and emotional claim as powerful as the right to marry for love, saying that bad things might happen is not enough. ... People predicted that bad things would happen if contraception became legal and widespread, and indeed bad things did happen, but that did not make legalizing contraception the wrong thing to do; and, in any case, good things happened too."
 
Nonspontaneous Disorder
Articles showing centrally planned disasters.
 
Milwaukee's Mess
        by Christopher Westley from Ludwig von Mises Institute
"The likelihood of anyone being held criminally responsible currently seems quite low. No one has been fired. More tellingly, lawyers have not exactly been lining up at the trial bar to file cases against the perpetrators of this crime like they did shortly after the oil spill of the Exxon Valdez in the 1980s."
 
Offshoring Which Jobs?
        by Alan Reynolds from Cato Institute
"Since the alleged offshoring of high-paying computer-related jobs is an obvious hoax, the outsourcing agitators have lately switched to fretting about low-paying, non-technical jobs at call centers."
 
Free market is the answer
        by Michael F. Cannon  from USA TODAY
"Most of America's health care is private, so many assume it operates as a free market. In truth, it is dominated by the government, resulting in high costs and stifling bureaucracy."
 
War Is The Health Of The State
War is the ultimate State intervention in society.
 
Global Eye -- Blood of Victory
        by Chris Floyd from TheMoscowTimes.com
"Not only has their already incalculable wealth been vastly augmented (with any potential losses indemnified by U.S. taxpayers), but their deeply entrenched sway over American society has also increased by several magnitudes. No matter who controls the government, the militarization of America is so far gone now it's impossible to imagine any major rollback in the gargantuan U.S. war machine...."
 
The Story of the Fed Is a Story of a Crime
        by George F. Smith from Strike The Root
"With Morgan-controlled newspapers beating the drums for American participation, Wilson finally got his war on April 16, 1917. Eight days later, Congress extended $1 billion in credit to the Allies. The British took their initial advance of $200 million and paid it to Morgan. When they ran up an overdraft of $400 million three months later, Morgan turned to the U.S. Treasury for help. Treasury Secretary William McAdoo stalled until Benjamin Strong, the Fed's main man, came to his rescue and paid Morgan piecemeal during 1917 - 1918. Where did Strong get the money? He simply created it."
 
Honor Reagan's Promise and Abolish the Selective Service
        by Anthony Gregory from The Independent Institute
"In December of 2001, with little attention from the media, Bush signed a 'smart borders' agreement with Canada to allow the U.S. government to extradite American draftees in Canada back to the United States. If Bush says there is 'not a chance' a draft will come to America, why did he think it necessary to make such an unprecedented agreement with Canada?"
 
Bits of History
The Past seen with a fresh look.
 
A big fat compliment
        by Ronald N. Neff from The Last Ditch
"Government took in more money; and if government is richer, it, like any honest citizen, can do more things. But the ability to do more things is precisely the definition of being more powerful. Our argument, then, should run: Reagan decreased tax rates. Tax revenues increased. Government got richer. Therefore, government got more powerful."
 
IN MEMORIAM -You need to be really special to get the big funeral
        by Matt Taibbi from New York Press
"We celebrated Ronald Reagan's death for a week because we believe in covering our asses to protect our careers, naming names if we have to. We gorged ourselves on this elaborate military funeral because we just love being a country that laughs at the Savios and Berrigans of the world for their embarrassing quality of standing up for peace."
 
Indians Should Know Better
        by Michael Gaddy from The Price of Liberty
"The State at one time even declared the Indian incapable of rearing their own children and placed many in boarding schools where their hair was cut short and they could not speak their own language or discuss their own culture. This, my friends, is State sponsored 'sovereignty'!"
 
War and Peace
Articles showing the nature of War.
 
The Canon
        by William S. Lind from LewRockwell.com
"The last column laid out the basic framework of the Four Generations of modern war. Here, we pick up with a discussion of 'the canon,' the seven books which, read in the order given, will take the reader from the First Generation through the Second, the Third and on into the Fourth."
 
The Economics of Sitting Ducks
        by Alan R. Weiss from The Libertarian Enterprise
"All these people demanding war, let them shoulder an M16 and stand a post. If that were the case, Americans would quickly find a different way to prosecute the war on terror. All these people who insist 'we' must 'fight this war', do so by proxy with soldiers underpaid and clearly undertrained. Those soldiers are not only victims of bad policy, they're economic victims, too."
 
Deep Denial Remains
        by Alan Bock from Antiwar.com
"There is some evidence of disaffection among conservatives ... over how badly the Iraq aftermath is going, but for some people the impulse to stay loyal to the Bush administration is apparently invincible. Apparently this impulse includes misremembering what the administration actually said during the run-up to the war."
 
Great Individuals In History
Some people stand out from the crowd.
 
Historian - Harry Elmer Barnes : June 15, 1889
        by Joseph R. Stromberg from Antiwar.com
"Like John T. Flynn, H.L. Mencken, Albert Jay Nock, and Charles Beard, Barnes was regarded as a leading spokesman for good causes until he failed to sign up with the foreign policy of Franklin D. Roosevelt. For this sin, these 'liberal' thinkers vanished into outer darkness, redefined as 'right-wing' troglodytes."
 
Mathematician/Philosopher - Blaise Pascal : June 19, 1623
        from Wikipedia
"In 1654, prompted by a friend interested in gambling problems, he corresponded with Fermat on the subject, and of that collaboration was born the mathematical theory of probabilities."
 
Singer - Elaine 'Spanky' McFarlane : June 19, 1942
        from TuneFan
"Blue sky, sunshine, what a day to take a walk in the park. Ice cream, day dream till the sky becomes a blanket of stars. What a day for pick-in' daisies, and lots of red balloons. And what a day for hold-in' hands and be-in' with you."
 
Culcha'
Books, Movies, TV, Media, Music, poetry, etc.
 
Rob Roy (1995)
        by Tom Ender from Endervidualism
"All the parts in this film are brilliantly played, with the major characters Rob Roy: the 'noble' commoner ... and Archie Cunningham: the fallen and debauched 'aristocrat'.... One is as bright as the other is dark. ... Neeson's hero is well executed, as should be expected from such a fine actor. However, Roth's Archie is one of the truly great villains of film." Rob Roy is being shown on Showtime channels.
 
Deadwood
        by Brad Edmonds from LewRockwell.com
"Deadwood is compelling for many reasons, not the least of which is that for a time, the historical Deadwood, South Dakota was without forcible government. There was forcible governance, but there was no agency that claimed a moral right to a monopoly of the use of force, as every government does."
 
A Hoax to Raise Our Consciousness
        by Art Carden from Ludwig von Mises Institute
"And yet Emmerich's 'The Day After Tomorrow' has generated a lot of publicity and a lot of 'dialogue' by positing a doomsday scenario that is only slightly more realistic than the alien invasion scenario that was the centerpiece of 'Independence Day' (or the giant nuclear lizard that wreaked havoc in Emmerich's update of 'Godzilla')."
 
The lighter side
Humor, satire, cartoons, parodies, food, popular music and other things to amuse.
 
This won't hurt much
        by Terry Jones from The Guardian
"For some time now, I've been trying to find out where my son goes after choir practice. He simply refuses to tell me. He says it's no business of mine where he goes after choir practice and it's a free country."
 
9/11 Commission Could Have Been Prevented
        from The Onion
"According to key members of the Bush Administration, the tragic proceedings of the 9/11 commission, which devastated the political lives of numerous government officials, could have been averted with preventive action in 2002 and 2003."
 
The Torture Team
        by Mark Fiore from The Village Voice
Action that's above the law!
 
Deep Thought
Scientific and scholarly studies, philosophical essays, in-depth and longer articles.
 
Ronnie and Ray - A Comparison of Legacies
        by Roger Young from Strike The Root
"Reagan built his political legacy using the hammer of The State. This creates an inhospitable climate to initiate positive change, particularly in the area of human freedom. Ray Charles' talents could only have prospered in an environment favoring artistic creativity and peaceful persuasion."
 
I Am Not Responsible
        by Russell Madden from Atlas Magazine
"On television. In newspapers and magazines. Across the Internet. Wherever I go, I hear the same message. I am not responsible. Truly, such a proclamation rattles the foundations of my weltanschauung. The most important things in which I believed have been turned topsy-turvy. I need only examine a few areas of life to realize the sweeping nature of this transformation that the politicians and their supporters are creating."
 
Ludwig Von Mises: From Historicist To Praxeologist
        by Edward W.Younkins from Le Québécois Libre
"Mises makes a distinction between understanding and conception. His description of understanding was based upon Henri Bergson’s idea of intuition. ... The substance of an action is disclosed by the a posteriori insights of understanding and the form of action is revealed via the a priori logic of what Mises called praxeology."
 
Miscellany
Articles not easily classified.
 
America's Last Chance: Congressional Oversight and "Torture-gate"
        by Brigid O’Neil from The Independent Institute
"Now that the executive has abdicated any responsibility for the scandal, Congress needs to pick up the reins and fulfill its constitutional mandate as a check against unbridled executive power. Congress has repeatedly invoked the U.S. Constitution in its criticism of the administration. Now it has a chance to set the example by holding the administration accountable under constitutional and international law."
 
Mad Scientists, Traps & Tortures, and Skull Island
        by Bob Wallace from Strike The Root
"The State is a horror story!  Bureaucracy run amok like the Blob, engulfing everything in is path!  Mad Scientists trying to rule everyone through the perversion of science and technology!  Nearly every time you deal with the State, you run into Traps & Tortures!  Every time the State grows, it's just Skull Island getting bigger and bigger!"
 
Mourn the Man's Death but also His Legacy
        by Ivan Eland from Antiwar.com
"In the wake of Vietnam, Watergate, double-digit inflation and unemployment, and the Iranian hostage crisis, Ronald Reagan rode to the nation's top office on the American public's disillusion with government. Yet upon taking office, in an Orwellian bait-and-switch, he gave us more of the same under the veil of folksy rhetoric about getting the government off the backs of the people."
 
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