Being a Good Carrier; In the Year 2084; Orcs, elves, and government; JFK (1991); 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 Sept.12-18, 2004.

 
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Political Liberty

Articles showing a positive influence of political action on the cause of Liberty.
 
National Security Experts Demand to Be Heard
        by Sibel Edmonds from Antiwar.com
"[W]e the undersigned wish to bring to the attention of the Congress and the people of the United States what we believe are serious shortcomings in the [National Commission on Terrorist Attacks] report and its recommendations. We thus call upon Congress to refrain from narrow political considerations and to apply brakes to the race to implement ... recommendations."
 
Bob Barr vs. the FBI
        by Nat Hentoff from The Village Voice
"Last year, I became the only writer in Voice history to appear at the American Conservative Union's annual Political Action Conference. The ACU is the largest configuration of conservatives in the country. I was assigned to a panel on the Patriot Act, and joining me in attacking John Ashcroft's bypassing of the Bill of Rights was conservative libertarian Bob Barr."
 
Picking Neither of Two Evils, Part II
        by Bob Murphy from LewRockwell.com
"Yes, the two major parties are awful, and yes, no third-party candidate is ever going to win in the near future. (And when it gets to the point where such a candidate could win, he or she will have sold out to the Establishment.) ... [A]t a cocktail party, when someone asks me, 'Who are you voting for?' it will be better to say 'the Libertarian candidate' ..."
 
Life in Amerika
Articles depicting the negative impact of politics on Liberty.
 
Mandatory Mental Health Screening Threatens Privacy, Parental Rights
        by Wendy McElroy from ifeminists.net
"Will children who resist medication be expelled from a school that is supported by their parents' taxes? If so, the government seems to be telling parents that education is a privilege for which parents must not only pay but for which they must also surrender medical control over their children."
 

Radicalism in an Era of War and Terrorism

        by Anthony Gregory from Strike The Root
"During Lincoln's war, dissidents were locked up and even deported. During Wilson's war, they were held in prisons. What can we expect will soon befall the radical dissident, as the stakes grow higher, and the US war machine and anti-US terrorism ascend together, causing many Americans to relinquish the remaining sanity that has survived these last three years?"
 
Dental fillings and mercury exposure
        by Vin Suprynowicz from Las Vegas Review-Journal
"The epidemic of Mad Child Disease started at the same time as the mandated vaccine program in 1982-1985, Dr. Haley says. The first case of autism, for a time a uniquely American disease, was described in 1941. Thimerosal had been patented in 1928 and was added to various American drugs in the 1930s."
 
Ordered Liberty without the State
Some people say it's Anarchy, some say it's not possible. It is an interesting topic.
 
Primary Day in the Trash
        by Jim Davies from Strike The Root
"Here in New Hampshire, anyway, September 14th was the day good political zombies were supposed to turn out and cast a vote. And the previous day at my Town Dump (what better locale?) a lady approached to remind me of that fact. I thanked her for her reminder, but said that I didn't believe in government."
 
Democracy, Antidote to Terrorism?
        by Jeff Snyder from LewRockwell.com
"Herbert's key insight is that, because government rests on power, all claims to govern are simply contests of strength. Since government rests not on right but on power, government by its very nature invites contests of strength. Even the phrases, 'will of the majority,' or 'majority rule' indicate that the essence of the thing is simply a contest of wills, a battle over who will have their way in the empire of desire."
 
A Revolution by Other Means
        by Max Orhai from Liberty Magazine
"The fraction of people who value freedom over obedience to arbitrary authority, or the illusion of safety, or the opinions of their neighbors, may -- or may not -- be small, but we are powerful regardless. We don't recognize each other in the street. We mostly don't think of ourselves as belonging to a 'movement,' or if we do we don't think we belong to the same movement. In fact, we don't: we are individuals. And we have communities, too." Dated June, but new to the  web.
 
Spreading Decentralism
Articles demonstrating an increase in the dispersal of power.
 
Your Vote Counts!
        by Robert Klassen from LewRockwell.com
"Political government consists of force and fraud, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure that out. Two-thirds of our population do not approve and do not vote. That's secession. When the same two-thirds discover a way to hide their money from political government, we may learn just how much our vote -- in the marketplace -- really does count."
 
A news revolution
        by Bruce Bartlett from Townhall.com
"[T]oday there is cable news, C-SPAN, talk radio and the Internet to raise questions and disseminate raw material to millions of people who are no longer bound by the quasi-monopoly of three television networks and one-newspaper towns. They can now get news that otherwise would be suppressed or ignored, check original sources for themselves and draw their own conclusions."
 
Terrorism and the Decline of the Democratic Nation State
        by David MacGregor from Strike The Root
"Let me emphasise here, I'm not discussing the morality of terrorist acts per se (usually defined as violence against unarmed civilians), but rather their utility as a strategy for achieving certain political objectives. For you have to remember, terrorism--as a tactic--is resorted to when there is no political means of resolution, as in when some group wants to secede, or to drive some 'foreign' power out of their country. Unfortunately, the use of violence often works."
 
The New World Hegemon
Depictions of the coming Imperial power
 
Global Eye -- Blurred Vision
        by Chris Floyd from TheMoscowTimes.com
"The Bushist toadies couldn't simply mark the solemn occasion with a few appropriate words of common grief and resolve. Instead, they turned the resolution into a tribute to the Dear Leader, larding it with praise for Bush's 'reorganizing' of the United States (that old Constitutional malarkey had to go) 'in order to more effectively wage the Global War on Terrorism' -- including, of course, the 'destruction' of the 'terrorist regime' in Iraq."
 
The Myth of the 'Old Republic'
        by James Leroy Wilson from LewRockwell.com
"Not only is the Old Republic gone, it, realistically, never really existed in the first place. It is, more or less, an idea of Constitutional restraint. Maybe, at one time, it worked better than it does now. But since its inception, the Constitution and its Bill of Rights have been slipping more and more from our grasp. There isn't any point in our history, not pre-2000, pre-1932, not pre-1913, not pre-1898, not pre-1860, or even before that, in which the USA ever had an ideal, federated Union."
 
Top 10 Signs You Might Not Get a Fair Trial at Gitmo
        by Connie Rice from NPR
"#10 - Your lawyer's boss is the prosecutor."
 
Politics by Other Means
War, rumors of war, and politicians fomenting war.
 
Have 1,000 American Souls Died for Oil?
        by Ivan Eland from The Independent Institute
"Attempting to justify the march to war, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz implicitly argued that a U.S. invasion of Iraq could lower America's target profile from attacks by Islamist terrorists by allowing the removal of the U.S. military presence from the holy land of Saudi Arabia. Persian Gulf oil could be guarded from new military bases in Iraq, which are now being built."
 
Lie and You Thrive
        by James Bovard from AlterNet
"There are no harmless political lies about a war. The more such lies citizens tolerate, the more wars they are likely to get. Every lie that is tolerated about one war becomes an engraved invitation to launch another war. Because Americans acquiesced to Bush's blarney about his invasion of Afghanistan, Bush faced less resistance to invading Iraq. And every Bush lie about Iraq that is now tolerated by the American people increases the odds of Bush going to war against Iran if he were re-elected."
 
The Unknown Kerry
        by Nat Hentoff from The Village Voice
"How many Americans know that John O'Neill [principal author of 'Unfit for Command'], the purported Republican operative, voted for Hubert Humphrey and Al Gore for president, and that his favorite candidate for the presidency this year was John Edwards?"
 
Spontaneous Order
Articles showing decentralized successes.
 
The Economics of Happy Feet
        by Jeffrey Tucker from Ludwig von Mises Institute
"How interesting, how marvelous, that the coordinating powers of the free market grant us comfortable, healthy, pain-reducing shoes in the very time when we are living long and longer and thereby require even more sophisticated ways of forestalling or otherwise dealing with bodily decay. It is conventional to credit medicines and hospitals for long lives but we should also give due regard to such conventional consumer products as shoes that make life past the age of 40 worth living at all."
 
Education for All
        by Harry Browne from HarryBrowne.org
"[C]hildren don't have to go to school to learn how to read, write, and add. Realize that there were no government schools until the mid-1800s, and yet people learned to read and write -- from their parents, in one-room school houses, or even on their own. John Taylor Gatto has pointed out that, prior to government schools in America, the literacy rate among non-slaves was close to 100%."
 
Che Go Home -- We don’t need a revolution. We need a clue.
        by Matt Taibbi from New York Press
"Once you have the mechanism down, then, far in the future, you can start making policy demands. You can demand that companies open their books up to the public, that they stop investing their profits in mansions for executives and start investing in schools and hospitals, that they stop contributing money to political causes, that they give up their 14th Amendment rights as individuals."
 
Nonspontaneous Disorder
Articles showing centrally planned disasters.
 
The Necessity Of Road Privatization
        by Gennady Stolyarov II from Le Québécois Libre
"Yet, while engineering has progressed, government has not. This is crucial to note, since it is the government of the City of Chicago that wields absolute control over its roads. The government creates them and has the responsibility for maintaining them, but it also has a few construction companies in its constituency. In a welfare state, where the parties supporting a politician's campaign can expect a slice of the economic 'pie' in return, maintaining the ability to distribute the taxpayers’ wealth to any favored special interest lobby, and retaining a veneer of legitimacy while doing so, is critical for any politician who seeks to remain in office."
 
Go Ahead, Leave the Door Open
        by Brian Doherty from Reason
"As with the Drug War, most of the truly heinous results of our immigration laws, and the flouting of them, are because of the attempt to ban something that by its inherent nature isn't a bad thing at all: migrating to find work."
 
Illiterate in L.A.
        by Vox Day from WorldNetDaily.com
"The truth is that it is extremely simple to teach any normal child to read. All it requires is a consistent 15 minutes a day between the ages of three and five. If a child is capable of rote memorization, he is capable of learning the alphabet and the basic phonics, and reading will follow within months."
 
War Is The Health Of The State
War is the ultimate State intervention in society.
 
Loving Our Children
        by Butler Shaffer from LewRockwell.com
"In a word, far too many of us seem to love the nation-state more than we do our children, and are prepared to offer their lives in sacrifice to political interests. How else can one explain the sense of shame expressed by so many World War II and Korean War veterans when their sons refused to serve in Vietnam? What other meaning is to be attributed to the proud words of so many parents of modern soldiers stationed -- or killed -- in Iraq?"
 
What Does 'Support the Troops' Mean?
        by weebies from Strike The Root
"What people need to understand is that the state does not have the right to murder and steal. The state encourages a false 'patriotism' where murdering and stealing for the state is considered legal. Soldiers are just hit men for the state. Some can handle this. Most realize that what they are doing is wrong, and this leads to mental problems."
 
The Most Important Terrorism Is 'Ours'
        by John Pilger from ZNet
"Last May, the US Marines used battle tanks and helicopter gunships to attack the slums of Fallujah. They admitted killing 600 people, a figure far greater than the total number of civilians killed by the 'insurgents' during the past year. The generals were candid; this futile slaughter was an act of revenge for the killing of three American mercenaries. Sixty years earlier, the SS Das Reich division killed 600 French civilians at Oradour-sur-Glane as revenge for the kidnapping of a German officer by the resistance. Is there a difference?"
 
Bits of History
The Past seen with a fresh look.
 
Wilson, Churchill, Roosevelt and Bush: The Banality of Betrayal
        by Morgan Reynolds from LewRockwell.com
"Poke holes in the government's ludicrous account of what happened on 9/11 and mention the possibility (likelihood) of it being an inside job, and the first reply is likely to be, 'No, that's impossible because there would be too many people involved.' ... But an excursion back in time reveals evidence for small, mid-size and large conspiracies at the top. U.S. entry into the misnamed Great War, for example, was aided by 'black ops'."
 
What Napoleon and Bismarck Teach Us About Preventive War
        by Stanley Kober from Cato Institute
"Initially, the war justified Napoleon's confidence. He crushed the Russian army in the battle of Borodino, and his army proceeded to occupy Moscow. The tsar, however, did not surrender. Worse, the Russian people did not respond to Napoleon's promise of liberation but instead resisted the foreign occupation; the people of Moscow even burned their own city."
 
Freedom, Hope, and Fear: The Paradox of Vietnam
        by Rosalind Lacy MacLennan from The Future of Freedom Foundation
"Starting with the time period after World War II and continuing through the American War, Americans and their leaders failed to see beyond Communist labels to the Vietnamese nationalism, the passion for identity that expels foreign invaders, especially political rule from China."
 
War and Peace
Articles showing the nature of War.
 
Jefferson on the Evils of War
        by Laurence M. Vance from LewRockwell.com
"The Jeffersonian principles of peace, commerce, honest friendship with all nations, and entangling alliances with none, as annunciated in Jefferson’s first inaugural address, are no where more evident than in his opinion of war."
 
When the Rabbits Get a Gun
        by William Rivers Pitt  from  t r u t h o u t
"Osama bin Laden learned something else besides the art of killing while he was working as an ally of the United States. He learned that given enough time, enough money, enough violence, enough perseverance, and enough fellow warriors, a superpower can be brought to its knees and erased from the book of history."
 
The Punishment of Fallujah -- US Precision Strikes...on Ambulances
        by Patrick Cockburn from CounterPunch
"On Sunday US helicopters fired rockets into a crowd in Haifa Street in central Baghdad killing 13 people including an Al-Arabiya television correspondent killed as he was reporting."
 
Great Individuals In History
Some people stand out from the crowd.
 
Historian - James J. Martin : Sept. 18, 1916
        by Jeff Riggenbach from Antiwar.com
"The noted revisionist historian James J. Martin ... was the author of 'Men Against the State: The Expositors of Individualist Anarchism in America, 1827-1908' (1953),' American Liberalism and World Politics, 1931-1941' (1963), the collections 'Revisionist Viewpoints: Essays in a Dissident Historical Tradition' (1971) and 'The Saga of Hog Island and Other Essays in Inconvenient History' (1977), as well as dozens upon dozens of as yet uncollected essays, articles, book reviews, introductions, and prefaces."
 
Writer - Agatha Christie : Sept. 15, 1890
        from AgathaChristie.com
"Christie's first novel, 'The Mysterious Affair at Styles' (1920), was also the first to feature her eccentric Belgian detective Hercule Poirot. Surely one of the most famous fictional creations of all time, Poirot's 'little grey cells' triumphed over devious criminals in 33 novels and many dozens of short stories."
 
Athlete - Jesse Owens : Sept. 12, 1913
        from JesseOwens.com
"At the Big Ten meet in Ann Arbor on May 25, 1935, Jesse set three world records and tied a fourth, all in a span of about 45 minutes."
 
Culcha'
Books, Movies, TV, Media, Music, poetry, etc.
 
Orcs, elves, and government
        by Malcolm Reynolds from The Last Ditch
"Misunderstanding of Tolkien's work in a postmodern context is not new. Many have mistaken 'The Lord of the Rings' for an allegory of World War Two, since it was published in the 1950s. However, Tolkien himself categorically rejected any such allegorical interpretations. By the time it was published, 'The Lord of the Rings' was already an anachronism, a remnant of old days in a decidedly postmodern time."
 
JFK (1991)
        Reviewed by Tom Ender from Endervidualism
"This movie is filled with great insights, but one of my favorites occurs during Garrison's conversation in Washington DC with the black ops specialist X ('I could give you a false name, but I won't. Just call me "X".'). When explaining how events unfold X tells Garrison: 'The organizing principle of any society, Mr. Garrison, is the war. The authority of the State over its people resides in its war powers'."
 
David Simon Says (The creator of HBO’s 'The Wire' talks with Reason)
        Interviewed by Jesse Walker from Reason
"On September 19 an often-overlooked gem will return to HBO. 'The Wire,' entering its third season, is sometimes described as a Baltimore-based crime show, but that’s a little misleading. … It sometimes feels like one of Shakespeare's history plays, if there is a history play that looks without flinching at the bankruptcy of the drug war, the intersection between crime and politics, and the day-to-day deprivations of inner-city poverty."
 
The lighter side
Humor, satire, cartoons, parodies, food, popular music and other things to amuse.
 
In the Year 2084 
        by Bob Wallace from Endervidualism
"The year: 2084. The place: any city in the USA. Characters: Father, Daughter, Baby, Fido and a Few Shadowy Characters."
 
Letter from Bill Stone / Bush is a Nazi
        by Bill Stone from The Libertarian Enterprise
"Enclosed, please find a document that I recently found in a box that was left to my ex-wife's late mother by President Bush's college roommate's sister's boyfriend's mother's bridge partner's lesbian lover."
 
Cheney Returns To Camp Crystal Lake
        from The Onion
"Reports of a shadowy figure in the woods and heavy breathing heard in the night, coupled with a recent series of grisly murders, have generated rumors that U.S. Vice-President Dick Cheney has returned to terrorize the counselors at Camp Crystal Lake, sources reported Friday."
 
Deep Thought
Scientific and scholarly studies, philosophical essays, in-depth and longer articles.
 
Being a Good Carrier
        by Claire Wolfe from Backwoods Home Magazine
"One aspect of being a good carrier, I'm discovering, is thinking only in terms of what I'm going to achieve this day. In the next two hours, even. 'I will cover 16 feet of trail with gravel. I'll trim that berry bramble back three feet. I'll haul just two more loads and then I'll have earned a break.' ... What I discover as I go is predictable to anybody who's done his share of Carrying. It turns out not to be hard. Not daunting."
 
Sir Isaac Newton and the Coming Invasion of Iran
        by Mike (in Tokyo) Rogers from LewRockwell.com
"All actions are 'forces,' so this undisputable law says every force has an equal and opposite force. For every action, there is a reaction. For every behavior, there is a consequence. Like the rock thrown into the pond, the ripples radiate out, eventually hitting the shore, and then again returning to its center. For every act, a consequence. One might take issue with my interpretation of how Ying and Yang and Newton's Third Law of Motion are, ultimately, the exact same thing. But I think anyone could see where there is a correlation."
 
Aaron Director on the Market for Goods and Ideas
        by Richard M. Ebeling from The Foundation for Economic Education 
"Aaron Director was one of a handful of careful and serious thinkers at the time who clearly understood that securing personal freedom was inseparable from the preservation of economic liberty in a free, competitive market. He made this case in a paper delivered at a conference on Freedom and the Law at the University of Chicago Law School in 1953."
 
Miscellany
Articles not easily classified.
 
Not the End of the Game
        by Bob Wallace from The Price of Liberty
"One of the reasons these wars are continuing is because of the influence of Christian Zionists, not only in the administration, but also in the public who are pressuring them to support Israel at all costs because they believe the Bible has foretold the End Times, which are supposed to be right around the corner. Israel is supposed to regain the territory it supposedly held thousands of years ago, Jesus will return, and the game is over."
 
Research Shows False Accusations Of Rape Common
        by Marc E. Angelucci and Glenn Sacks from NewsWithViews.com
"Some of these changes [law reform initiatives] have been fair, and have led to greater protections for rape victims. However, others have made it more difficult for men to defend themselves, with at times horrifying consequences for the accused."
 
House Husbandry
        by B.K. Marcus from LewRockwell.com
"When my beloved first met me I was a successful dot-com professional -- of the dress-down-eat-out-and-tip-well variety. ... Then I took the soul-deadening corporate cube-jockey position so we could budget and pay bills while she finished her dissertation. And now that we're in the dawn of her professorial career, I'm a househusband. A househusband who hadn't made a bed in 20 years."
 
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