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"...and Justice for All.";
Meaningless High School;
Confessions of a Vegetable Addict ;
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these articles have their titles
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Ender's Review of the Web
Web articles of likely interest to individualists found during the week of Dec. 5 - 11, 2004.
Table of Contents:
(Click on the name to go to
that section)
Political Liberty, Life in Amerika, Ordered Liberty without the State; Spreading Decentralism, The New World Hegemon, Politics by Other Means; Spontaneous Order, Nonspontaneous Disorder, War Is The Health Of The State; Bits of History, War and Peace, Great Individuals In History; Culcha', The lighter side, Deep Thought, Miscellany. Readers of the weekly issues of Ender's Review may be interested in knowing
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Political Liberty
Articles showing a
positive influence of political action on the cause of Liberty.
Paul Denounces National ID Card
by Congressman Ron Paul
from his Press Releases
"Nationalizing standards for drivers licenses and birth certificates,
and linking them together via a national database, creates a national
ID system pure and simple. Proponents of the national ID understand
that the public remains wary of the scheme, so they attempt to claim
they're merely creating new standards for existing state IDs."
The 'Stop Loss' Scam -- It's based on a lie
by Justin Raimondo
from Antiwar.com
"The CCR suit is an obstacle in the path of this Trojan horse
as it barges through the gates, trampling the Constitution and the rights of those pledged
to fight -- and die -- for our swiftly vanishing republic. It is a direct challenge not only
to the imperial presidency, but to the entire rationale for this war: that we're fighting
'the enemy' over in Iraq so that we don't have to fight them over here."
Alabama backs Calif. on medical marijuana law
by Phillip Rawls
from Chicago Sun Times
"'I could not disagree more with the public policy that underlies the California law.
I think it's flawed. I think it's bad public policy,' King said. 'But if somebody can go in and tell California
you can't regulate drugs the way you want to regulate them in California,
the next step is they could come to Alabama and tell us we can't do it'."
Life
in Amerika
Articles depicting the
negative impact of politics on the cause of Liberty.
Cloud Over the Constitution
by Nat Hentoff from The Village Voice
"Even the Democrats' attack dog [NB: a chihuahua?] on the Judiciary Committee, Charles Schumer,
has said he prefers Gonzales to John Ashcroft. That's like saying you prefer Torquemada to Attila the Hun.
Indeed, the ranking minority member on the committee, Patrick Leahy, has said that with Bush re-elected,
if he sent up Attila the Hun to replace Ashcroft, he'd get his way."
Can we vote our conscience?
by Vin Suprynowicz
from Las Vegas Review-Journal
"We live in a (budding?) police state. Good little citizens are
conscripted down to the courthouse under threat of arrest to go through the motions of
rubber-stamping and tying nice red ribbons around their atrocities against a generally peaceful people
-- atrocities which seem all the more normal because they indulge them daily."
Lessons in liberty from Ukraine
by Robyn E. Blumner
from St. Petersburg Times
"When a Miami Civilian Investigative Panel and the county's review panel requested
the police operations plan for the FTAA conference, police officials denied the public records request on the
grounds that Miami's deployment is the national state-of-the-art law enforcement model for controlling protests.
They said to release the plan would put at risk similar efforts across the nation."
Ordered Liberty without the State
Some people say it's
Anarchy, some say it's not possible. It is an interesting topic.
Meaningless High School
by Bob Wallace from Endervidualism
"The State does a lot of bad things to people. Taking away a true meaning
to their lives and replacing it with false one is one of the worst."
Inconstant Interests in Truth
by Butler Shaffer
from LewRockwell.com
"There is almost an inverse relationship here: the more state
functionaries lie to and deceive us, the more truthful we are expected to be toward them.
The less accountable the state is for its falsehoods, the greater the power it expects to
have over the factual details of our lives."
Does Freedom Mean Anarchy?
by Charles Murray,
David Friedman, David Boaz, and R.W. Bradford from Liberty
Friedman: ... "Lots of societies have norms that aren't created by governments.
So what happens is that when somebody does something to someone else that the someone else sees as a rights
violation, he could use force himself. But that gets pretty dangerous. So what he does instead is that he
goes to somebody in the community who has a lot of respect from his neighbors and says,
'Are you willing to arbitrate this dispute?' And the guy says yes."
Spreading Decentralism
Articles demonstrating
an increase in the dispersal of power.
Money--Funny, Scary, Paper Money
by Douglas Herman
from Strike The Root
"Since I wrote 'Silver: The Precious Metal That Spurred the Conquest of a Continent',
silver has climbed approximately $1.75 per ounce and has regained the luster that took it above $8 last April.
Meanwhile, the US dollar has been pounded by just about every other currency in the world.
As Bob Dylan said, 'You don't have to be a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing'."
Medical Marijuana Supporters Must Now Play the Waiting Game
from Drug Policy Alliance
"'Nobody ever expected this case to get this far,' says
Alliance executive director Ethan Nadelmann in today's 'Village Voice.'
'If we win this, it would be a very significant step forward. If we lose,
it's just a tiny step backward'."
Couple sees world by answering call of sea
by Carol Rose
from Palm Beach Post
"Sam says sailing the ocean gives one a true connection with nature.
The couple never had a crew. 'It was just the two of us,' he said. It was not an easy life.
The couple survived on their investments, Sam's writing (he wrote a book on underwater antiquities
and did freelance writing for magazines), and by keeping life simple. 'You take life and you strip
it down to nothing, it just keeps getting better and better,' says Sam."
The
New World Hegemon
Depictions of the
coming Imperial power
Uncle Sam has his own gulag
by Eric Margolis
from Toronto Sun
"According to a report leaked to the New York Times,
the Swiss-based International Red Cross has accused the Bush administration
for a second time of employing systematic, medically supervised torture against
suspects being held at Guantanamo Bay, and at U.S.-run prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan."
Bush's Posse Roundup
by James Bovard
from AlterNet
"Unfortunately for our democracy, in recent decades,
the restrictions on using the military at home have been eviscerated,
particularly under this sitting president. And because the Bush administration
is so intent on secrecy, and because the Congress during Bush's presidency has
almost totally defaulted on its duty to conduct oversight,
we have little idea of how often the Posse Comitatus law is now being violated."
People vs. Empire
by Arundhati Roy
from In These Times
"Empire has a range of calling cards. It uses different weapons to break open different markets.
There’s no country on God’s earth that isn’t caught in the crosshairs of the U.S. cruise missile and the IMF checkbook."
Although Roy castigates the "free market" what he is actually talking about is today's imperialistic mercantilism.
Politics by Other Means
War, rumors of war,
and politicians fomenting war.
Rumsfeld's Muddy Quagmire
by Ivan Eland
from The Independent Institute
"Ignoring the real possibility of post-invasion guerrilla war and attempting to
demonstrate his vision of future warfare -- which marginalized ground power and emphasized air power
and electronics -- Rumsfeld ridiculed the chief Army general's admonition that hundreds of thousands
of soldiers would be needed to successfully occupy and administer Iraq.
Sometimes politicos should follow the advice of experts."
Paranoia and Pre-emption --
Is the Bush Administration Certifiable?
by Paul Craig Roberts
from CounterPunch
"Bush would serve our country and the rest of the world far better by ceasing
his macho aggressive talk and working to create trust and good will. Bush is a very foolish man if
he thinks America will bear no consequences for his support for Israel's appalling treatment of the
Palestinians. Is Bush really as stupid as he sounds?"
Christian Compassion That Kills
by Doug Newman
from Strike The Root
"When they come for the medical marijuana patients, would those who purport
to be your Christian brothers and sisters say nothing because they are not medical marijuana patients?
'Compassionate conservatism' is merely a code phrase for a socialist police state,
whose grip will only grow tighter in the next four years."
Spontaneous Order
Articles showing
decentralized successes.
People Can Just Get Along
by Robert Murphy
from Ludwig von Mises Institute
"The classical case for free trade was based on simple arithmetic:
When the workers in each country specialize in those industries in which they have an advantage,
more total goods can be produced and (through trade) there is more for everyone to consume.
When a nation's advantage is absolute, this principle is obvious."
Gold Exposes the Dollar
by Dr. Ron Paul
from LewRockwell.com
"A trip to Europe costs more than it did a few years ago, but most Americans
still don't sense they are becoming poorer as the dollar falls. The long-term significance has not yet
begun to sink in. However, our relative wealth as a nation is measured in dollars,
and the steady erosion of the value of those dollars means we will all be poorer in the future."
The Shape of Things to Come
by David MacGregor
from Strike The Root
"The dollar will fall from grace--to be replaced by another currency, or something else.
If the US Dollar is knocked off its pedestal--then the USA will suffer serious economic and political consequences.
This currency 'shift' will cause a geopolitical seismic shift. The economic and political fortunes of nations will
undergo dramatic changes--mostly for the worse. Instability will rise and radical new ideas will be put forth to
cope with the crisis. It will be more than the end of the US Empire--and quite possibly the end of
nation-states as we know them."
Nonspontaneous Disorder
Articles showing
centrally planned disasters.
The FDA is Going to Kill Me
by Sunni Maravillosa
from The Price of Liberty
"The process has had far-reaching consequences, including: anointing one class
of health-care providers as The Chosen Ones, who wield the power to dispense potent nostrums even though
they very often have a poor understanding of what they're doing; making it extremely difficult for
consumers to obtain intelligible information, or to evaluate claims and counterclaims;
and sucking almost all power and dignity from an already-vulnerable individual,
using the guise of 'informed consent' as a disguise that few Americans seem to see through."
Save or Else
by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.
from Ludwig von Mises Institute
"What is actually being talked about is the creation of a new national program of forced savings,
complete with a guaranteed minimum income. It is to be created out of whole cloth using the revenue
that would usually be funneled to retirees. Not that anyone is going to be denied what they believe is theirs.
The money will continue to flow to older Americans but not come from present revenue. It will come from new funds.
And where are these funds going to come from? Among those who favor privatization,
there are two camps: the left-wing suggests more taxes and the right-wing suggests more debt."
Do We Need a New G.I. Bill -- Or Even the Original One?
by George C. Leef
from The Future of Freedom Foundation
"Rather than a tremendous boon to the nation, economics professor Thomas DiLorenzo
calls the G.I. Bill 'a budget-busting middle-class entitlement scheme that had destructive effects on higher education,
and set the stage for virtually all our current educational problems.' I think he's right."
War
Is The Health Of The State
War is the ultimate
State intervention in society.
Sixty-Three Years of Lies
by Anthony Gregory
from Strike The Root
"Of course, you can expect to hear the establishment media wax patriotic today,
drawing similarities between 12/7 and 9/11 as days that the United States was attacked without provocation or warning,
simply because ou[r] country's freedom and greatness enrage foreign aggressors and incite them to attack us.
Both historical events, say the hawkish American media and intelligentsia, demonstrate that the US government
must engage in active military campaigns overseas, and eschew the traditional US foreign policy
of military isolation prescribed by so many wise men of America's founding generation...."
Rebellion in the Ranks -- Facing down Rummy
by Justin Raimondo
from Antiwar.com
"But why should they settle down when they're being sacrificed on the altar
of an obscenely overweening ambition? How will they react when they begin to understand that they're
being used as pawns in a bigger game that has nothing whatsoever to do with hifalutin' notions of
'democracy' and 'human rights' -- and everything to do with making the world safe for Israel
and fattening the wallets of entrepreneurial policymakers such as Richard Perle and former CIA director James Woolsey?"
Pat Tillman and the Nihilistic Myths of the State
by Robert Kaercher
from Strike The Root
"This growing tendency to favor militarism and brute force over logic and reason,
to see the individual as simply a member of a collective or a cog in a machine dedicated to supposedly noble causes
'greater' than any one of us, is the path back to the Dark Ages. It is the ideology of barbarism."
Bits
of History
The Past seen with a
fresh look.
How Teddy Roosevelt Fathered the 'Bush Doctrine'
by William Marina, David T. Beito
from The Independent Institute
"During the next several decades, the U.S. intervened all over the Caribbean,
so that the Marines became known as the 'State Department troops.' In 1934, Marine General Smedley Butler
put it a bit more harshly, calling the Marines 'gangsters' for imperialism."
Scene of the Crime
by Paul Krassner
from New York Press
"To participate in the 40th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement,
I flew to Berkeley, the epicenter of political correctness. Ironically, a slogan that became
associated with the FSM -- 'Don't trust anyone over 30' -- would today be considered ageist."
Hippie Heaven
by Nick Gillespie from Reason
"There's little doubt that the hippie heyday helped usher in what the anthropologist
Grant McCracken has called an age of 'plenitude,' a 'quickening speciation of social groups.'
We live in a looser, less uptight America thanks to the antics of San Francisco's Diggers,
New York's Fugs, and every anonymous longhair in between."
War
and Peace
Articles showing the
nature of War.
Oh, What A Lucky Man, He Was....
by Mike (in Tokyo) Rogers
from LewRockwell.com
"Tony was an extremely handsome young man. Popular among his peers
and an outstanding athlete in high school, Tony had always wanted to stand proud in the country's uniform
and to be among its heroes. He got his wish."
Uncle Sam wants your kids ... now!
by David H. Hackworth
from WorldNetDaily.com
"Moms and dads are outraged about desperate Army recruiters on a relentless campaign
to sign up their teenagers. High-school kids are actually running away from recruiters like they were
George Romero's living dead."
Tillman's True Tragedy
by Alan Bock
from Antiwar.com
"But those who think of volunteering should be mindful that their sacrifices might
well be used by cynical or fearful higher-ups who will consider the good of the Army more important than
the bravery of the soldier or the truth that should be owed to the bereaved."
Great
Individuals In History
Some people stand out
from the crowd.
Poet - John Milton : Dec. 9, 1608
from Acton Institute
"He devoted his life, often to the scorn of his contemporaries, to the idea of a free
commonwealth wherein citizens could pursue knowledge and exercise the freedom given by God."
Filmaker - Fritz Lang : Dec. 5, 1890
From Wikipedia,
the free encyclopedia
"Although some consider Lang's work to be simple melodrama, he produced a coherent
oeuvre that helped to establish the characteristics of film noir,
with its recurring themes of psychological conflict, paranoia, fate and moral ambiguity."
Clown - Emmett Kelly, Sr.: Dec. 9, 1898
from Clown Ministry
"Emmett returned to … his white faced clown, until the Great Depression made the
appearance of tramps and hobos more acceptable to American audiences.
In 1933, Emmett Kelly appeared as the now-famous 'Weary Willy' as his standard clown character."
Culcha'
Books, Movies, TV,
Media, Music, poetry, etc.
"...and Justice for All."
by George Potter
from anti-state.com
"Benton, 10th richest man in the world, stood up after a moment, the tall,
thin frame impeccable in Armani that seemed to nevertheless lie uneasily on him,
as if he had never shed the burning steel of a childhood on the South Side of Chicago,
or the equally unyielding spirit born during the Second American Revolution,
which Benton had fought on the blasted streets of his city for a decade."
Carousel (1956)
Reviewed by Tom Ender
from Endervidualism
"'Carousel' has both wonderfully moving music and a story set
in an age when liberty was a matter of course for Americans. 'Carousel' isn't a political movie and therefore
shouldn't be described as 'libertarian.' However, if libertarianism were to regain its status as the way
things are done in America, we wouldn't spend all our days worrying about politics. We would be left to
pursue our happiness. That is what 'Carousel' is about. It is an inspiring story of American individualism:
a story about love and family, free will and making your way in the world,
responsibility, hope and redemption."
Libertarian Rabbits
by Bob Wallace
from Strike The Root
"I first read 'Watership Down' in my teens. I enjoyed it, but otherwise forgot about it.
Later, when I reread it, it was like experiencing it for the first time. It seemed a book I had never read before.
Why didn't I catch all this great stuff in it the first time around? ... I will say that when it came out in 1972,
ten days later it was on the best-seller list. I now understand why. We have in this book something very rare:
It's both entertaining and educating."
The
lighter side
Humor, satire,
cartoons, parodies, food, popular music and other things to amuse.
Home Cooking Outlawed for Child Safety
by Bob Wallace and Cat Farmer
from The Price of Liberty
"Dr. Nerdlinger admits that many children object to intravenous feedings at first,
but explains that they rapidly grow accustomed to a fluid lunch. 'A little Soma down the hatch when they get to school,
and they don't complain at all. Maybe they don't pay that much attention in class,
and sometimes we have to strap them in their chairs, but the benefits definitely outweigh the costs'."
Never reveal whether or not you're Samoan
by Dave Barry
from Houston Chronicle
"We must always remember that, as Americans, we all have a common enemy --
an enemy that is dangerous, powerful and relentless.
I refer, of course, to the federal government."
What Do You Think? - Americans Marrying Later
from The Onion
"Census Bureau figures for 2003 show that Americans are getting married later,
with the average age for a first marriage having risen to 26. What do you think?"
Deep
Thought
Scientific and
scholarly studies, philosophical essays, in-depth and longer articles
The Real Matrix
by Steven Yates
from NewsWithViews.com
"The Matrix ... may be seen an allegory for our present situation after the past hundred-plus years.
The allegory is about power and concealment. The 'real matrix' is then a world most of middle America takes for granted --
a world where 'they hate us because we are free,' and where the public schools educate. A world where we can trust
the federal government and believe Dan Rather. A world where the former obeys its founding document,
the U.S. Constitution. In other words, a fantasy world."
Government Should Fund Science? - It Just Ain't So!
by Sheldon Richman
from The Foundation for Economic Education (FEE)
"Boards full of unaccountable political appointees spending other people's money do not
inspire confidence. Innovation and bureaucracy are words rarely found together in affirmative sentences.
Knowledge is discovered through competition, but government centralization of research stifles competition.
The authorities are not interested in funding what they regard as outside the mainstream."
Big Reasons for Fat Skepticism
by Radley Balko
from Cato Institute
"The Centers for Disease Control announced recently that the often-mentioned figure
of 400,000 American deaths each year due to obesity is based on a study that's plagued by methodological errors. ...
The CDC's announcement represents a tidy anecdote for what's wrong with the fat debate. The problem, put simply,
is that hysteria sells. It sells research to grant writers, it sells executive summaries to media outlets,
and it sells newspapers to the public."
Miscellany
Articles not easily
classified
Confessions of a Vegetable Addict
by Cat Farmer from Endervidualism
"The difference between medicine and poison is often determined by dosage,
and often the difference between normal consumption and addiction to a substance seems determined by its
acceptance amongst myriad individuals comprising a society."
The Seen and the Unseen: On the Economics of Protecting Employment
by Anthony de Jasay
from econlib.org
"Once the state has moved into the economic sphere and taken responsibility
for propping up the wellbeing of its citizens with the money it takes from them,
it can hardly stop them running to it for help when their wellbeing needs propping up. "
Veteran radio talk show host David Brudnoy dies at 64
from Boston Herald
"Brudnoy's radio show touched on almost any topic, from politics, to current events,
to the arts. He was known for his intellectual thoughtfulness, his sense of humor and his easygoing manner with callers,
who came from all walks of life. His loyal listeners revolted in the early 1990s when he was taken off the air in favor
of cheaper syndicated talk programming. Listeners boycotted the station and advertisers and Brudnoy was back on the air
within weeks."
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