State Expands & Weakens; Just Smart Robots?; Purification; The People Vs. Larry Flynt; these articles have their titles and text in this color and are featured this week in -
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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;
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"On April 19, the Canadian government delivered what should be the final blow to the U.S. government's irrational prohibition against the medical use of marijuana. It approved prescription sale of a natural marijuana extract -- for all practical purposes, liquid marijuana -- to treat pain and other symptoms caused by multiple sclerosis."
http://www.alternet.org/drugreporter/21818/
"In a 2002 case that foreshadowed Uniao do Vegetal's fight for the right to drink ayahuasca, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit suggested that RFRA might protect possession (but not distribution) of marijuana by Rastafarians. No doubt that possibility gives drug warriors nightmares in which everyone arrested on marijuana charges claims to consider the plant a sacrament."
http://www.reason.com/sullum/042205.shtml
"LEAP is an association of current and retired police officers who believe that America can best solve its national drug-crime problem by ending drug prohibition, much as it solved its very first national crime problem by ending alcohol prohibition. Howard's usual way of putting it is to say he believes that the most productive way to address drug use is through doctors and clinics, not judges and prisons."
http://www.ncc-1776.com/tle2005/tle315-20050417-02.html
"Thanks to overzealous drug war crusaders, I can't freely buy over-the-counter medications when I want to, and certainly not in any quantity. Thanks to overzealous terror war crusaders, I can't mail books to my elderly mother without enduring a hopelessly serious game of 'twenty questions.' By definition, a police state is one in which the police can arrest you at virtually any time. Thanks to a virtual labyrinth of tax laws, any of us could be subject to detention at any time...." for breaking laws "
http://www.thepriceofliberty.org/05/04/19/ladylib.htm
"While my focusing on all possible threats wouldn't be smart, it would make me a prime candidate to become a Transportation Security Administration (TSA) official. Their vision of airport security is to focus on the possible as well as the probable."
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/walterwilliams/ww20050420.shtml
"It is interesting to note that this has all come to pass on the tenth anniversary of the Republican election victory of 1994, with its much ballyhooed Contract with America campaign. You remember that little document, don't you? It was a short declaration of principles by the GOP, among which was this one: 'We will work to restore the bonds of trust between the people and their elected representatives' and to 'end government that is too big, too intrusive, and too easy with the public's money'."
http://www.strike-the-root.com/51/massoud/massoud7.html
"I'm often asked what an average person can to do to further liberty. I say that the first and most important step is intellectual. We all need to begin to say no to the state on an intellectual level. When you are asked what you would like the government to do for you, we need to be prepared to reply: nothing."
http://www.lewrockwell.com/rockwell/empire-shrinks.html
"Once the use of force is initiated, order has already broken down. The use force is thus self-defeating for even nobler goals than greed and envy. This is why the state at its core is immoral, and those who use politics to get what they want are immoral people. The politicalization of a society provides a breeding ground for immoral people to thrive."
http://www.strike-the-root.com/51/davis/davis7.html
"We are now beginning to recapture the once-great tradition of an objectively grounded rights of the individual. In philosophy, in economics, in social analysis, we are beginning to see that the tossing aside of moral rights was not the brave new world it once seemed -- but rather a long and disastrous detour in political philosophy that is now fortunately drawing to a close."
http://www.voluntaryist.com/spooner/roth_intro.php
"In time, Granville Hicks became a citizen. Grafton became his town. He was part of its daily life. He donated books that became the core of the Grafton Free Library. He edited a biweekly town newsletter. He helped establish the Grafton Fire Company and Grafton Elementary School. He served as a school-district trustee. He organized harvest dances, for which he also wrote skits. His wife was president of the PTA. He was not slumming or playing at quaintness; he came to belong to Grafton."
http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/Chronicles/2005/April2005/0405Kauffman.html
"China has ruled Taiwan for just a few years over the last century. Japan seized control of what was then known as Formosa in 1895; the Chinese civil war severed the relationship between mainland and the island reestablished only in 1945. Juridically, Beijing has a claim to Taiwan. But native Taiwanese always chafed under mainland rule. Over the last half century they have created an independent nation. More important, they have created a democratic state and market economy. What sane Taiwan resident would want to submit to rule by the PRC?"
http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=3743
"By granting legal and moral recognition to the right to keep and bear arms in the federal Constitution -- 'the law of the land' -- the Americans made concrete in practice that every single free citizen would remain the final repository of political power."
http://www.fff.org/freedom/fd0502d.asp
"When Bush I became president, he clasped Saddam even closer, sending him billions in U.S.-backed 'agricultural credits' through BNL, an Italian bank tied up with BCCI -- the international 'financial consortium' that was actually 'one of the largest criminal enterprises in history,' according to the U.S. Senate. BCCI laundered money and financed arms dealing, terrorism, smuggling and prostitution, while corrupting government officials worldwide with bribes and extortion. As Bush well knew, Saddam was using the BNL cash for arms, not food; indeed, that was the point of the exercise."
http://www.counterpunch.org/floyd04232005.html
"She was hired by the FBI in the hectic aftermath of 9-11 to translate various top-secret materials collected by the bureau from wire taps, surveillance reports, interviews with agents, etc. In that capacity she began observing the bureau's bizarre, even surreal practices, including such things as sending people to Guantanamo to translate statements by prisoners who spoke Farsi. Only trouble was the translators weren't speakers of Farsi, but were instead Kurds speaking a Turkish dialect."
http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0517,webmondo1,63324,6.html
"That the world is 'a carnival of buncombe,' as H. L. Mencken put it, is an idea that is proved every day -- nay, every hour -- as the news of our leaders' cluelessness unfolds, but this past week must have had the old iconoclast shaking the earth over his coffin with waves of seismic laughter."
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=5586
"Rather than governing the State, the politicians seek to govern us. Instead of controlling and directing the minimal agencies necessary to accomplish their tasks, the politicians want to control and direct us. In lieu of guiding and shepherding the police and soldiers, the politicians tell us they must guide and shepherd us."
http://www.fee.org/vnews.php?nid=6834
"Another roadblock to better intelligence is the sheer size of the Homeland Security bureaucracy. The department was cobbled together from 22 federal agencies, all with different cultures and methods of operation. Parallel to the government's 15-agency intelligence community -- of which Homeland Security is a part -- the department is just too large and has too many parts to share and integrate intelligence information adequately."
http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=1497
"During her recent trips abroad, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice emphasized the need to strengthen U.S. alliances. That policy is not unique to the Bush administration; previous administrations have also stressed the need to preserve and strengthen our alliances, even as opposing Cold War alliances disintegrated. But is this emphasis on alliances wise?"
http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=3739
"It is fairly well known that this now ubiquitous device came along with the first popular Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs), Apple's Macintosh (1984) and subsequently Microsoft's Windows. What is not well known is that the mouse had been sitting in a lab for a couple decades before it became available to the general public."
http://www.mises.org/story/1786
"Usually, Open Source Software (OSS) products are free of charge and many different individuals alter the code. For instance, the Firefox browser ... is an open source product. But while OS is open and available for all to see, there's money to be made through service and support packages, as well as through some OS licenses that allow complimentary propriety products to be created and sold."
http://www.techcentralstation.com/041805C.html
"Benedict XVI argues that freedom, coupled with consciousness and love, comprise the essence of being. With freedom comes an incalculability -- and thus the world can never be reduced to mathematical logic. In his view, where the particular is more important than the universal, 'the person, the unique and unrepeatable, is at the same time the ultimate and highest thing. In such view of the world, the person is not just an individual; a reproduction arising from the diffusion of the idea into matter, but rather, precisely, a 'person'."
http://www.acton.org/ppolicy/comment/article.php?id=262
"It's easy for television news to interview a laid-off American worker or to show a closed factory that used to compete with foreign products. It is harder to point to the new products and job opportunities that have emerged because consumers had more money left in their pockets after buying cheaper foreign goods."
http://www.fff.org/comment/com0504g.asp
"Poor service abounds, but I'm usually pleased at the way the marketplace handles it. Businesses that abuse their customers usually don't last long. Businesses that treat their customers with respect thrive. But with government, you have no choice, and there are no repercussions for bad customer service. You're forced to deal with them, particularly if they've stolen more than their legal quota or if they want to steal more from you."
http://www.strike-the-root.com/51/langr/langr1.html
"Pelosi assumes that political elites like herself have the right to use government force to 'take from the rich and give to the poor' and since it is the government doing the taking, these transactions are truly at gunpoint. By contrast, in a free, peaceful society, individuals create and voluntary exchange goods and services with one another; the most productive become the wealthiest and the least productive benefit from the efforts of those super-producers."
http://www.objectivistcenter.org/mediacenter/articles/ehudgins_rff-estate-tax.asp
"Waco and Iraq -- in both instances, we're talking about the slaughter of the innocents, in the case of the latter as many as 100,000 innocent civilians. These twin atrocities were engineered by agenda-driven U.S. government officials and covered up by a campaign of lies, government propaganda, and a complacent media -- all of it finally culminating in an orgy of destruction and mass murder."
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=5611
"Ludwig von Mises concluded his 1944 book Omnipotent Government: The Rise of the Total State and Total War with a similar warning. 'The establishment,' he said, 'of an international body for foreign trade planning will end in hyperprotectionism.' These two great free marketeers understood how government uses the period immediately following a war as it does the war itself for state power and special-interest rewards."
http://www.mises.org/story/1799
"Keeping fuel distribution in the hands of a government-controlled few gives the Iraqi government more power. That government knows that it exists more or less at the pleasure of its American occupiers. If the US pulled out, the civilian government would be totally unable to handle the growing insurgency. So ultimately keeping Iraq's private industry at a bare minimum is the best way of keeping the Iraqi individual at the mercy of not only their own state, but by extension, the occupation forces."
http://www.anti-state.com/article.php?article_id=470
"Whatever one thinks of David Koresh and the Branch Davidians, they had committed no capital crimes. Neither could the charges of child abuse, illegal weapons, or illegal drug activity (charges that were used by the feds to justify their ghastly attack) be substantiated. Furthermore, it is unconscionable (not to mention a violation of U.S. law as prescribed in the Posse Comitatus Act) that tanks and other military equipment would be used against mostly women and children within our own country."
http://www.newswithviews.com/baldwin/baldwin231.htm
"Professor Marcus is teaching a French civ course this semester. She asked me to throw something together on politics, the Left, the Right, the forgotten French liberal tradition, etc. Here's what I came up with. Most of it is from Wikipedia. The middle section is by me."
http://www.bkmarcus.com/blog/2005/04/libert-egalit.html
"The left-liberal establishment, along with most of the Republican politicians, did not want to think of Oklahoma as somewhat explainable -- even if in no way excusable -- in the context of the criminal acts of the U.S. government. To say that State violence paved the way to terrorist violence was condemned as making excuses for the latter."
http://www.lewrockwell.com/gregory/gregory71.html
"Both giants are vying to secure oil supplies from the Persian Gulf and East Indies. Both nations are determined to eventually exclude the U.S. Navy from their waters. While wise heads in Delhi and Beijing work to stabilize relations and reduce frictions, U.S. President George W. Bush's administration is rushing to cement the growing military entente with India designed as a strategic counterweight to China, which neocon Republicans now have targeted as a future enemy."
http://www.canoe.ca/NewsStand/Columnists/Toronto/Eric_Margolis/2005/04/17/1000802-sun.html
"While Americans and Iraqis continue to die by the day in Iraq, the Bush administration is now unashamedly focusing the same accusations against Iran. In eerily similar rhetoric, the United States, still the only nation to have ever actually launched a nuclear attack on an enemy, insists that Iran is manufacturing nuclear weapons. At this point, there is no hard evidence to back this up, and Iran, a signatory of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, maintains that its nuclear program is peaceful and for energy purposes only."
http://www.freeliberal.com/archives/001018.html
"Conventional wisdom holds that WW-II was an unfortunate necessity, in which the Good Guys took on and beat the Bad Guys who had started it. I was brought up on the belief that the German government, not the British, French or American one, had opened hostilities. It was quite disconcerting, the first time I heard and actually thought about the somber tones of Neville Chamberlain on September 3rd, 1939, reporting that his government had declared war on Hitler's. That's right; in case nobody told you, it was the Brits who started WW-II."
http://www.strike-the-root.com/51/davies/davies10.html
"In Jane Eyre Charlotte used her experiences at the Evangelical school and as governess. The novel severely criticized the limited options open to educated but impoverished women. The title character from Shirley was an attempted ideal portrait of Emily. . Shirley was one of the first fully developed independent, brave, outspoken heroines in English literature."
http://www.online-literature.com/brontec/
"He published his autobiography Shadow and Light in 1902, which contains an introduction written by his friend and colleague Booker T. Washington. All during his diverse career, he advocated the creation of a strong skilled African-American middle class through acquisition of property and independent control of agriculture and industry."
http://www.aaregistry.com/african_american_history/829/Mifflin_Gibbs_businessman_and_abolitionist
"Of seminal importance in the history of individualist ideas, Tucker's periodical also served as the main conduit of Stirnerite egoism and of radical Spencerian thought from Europe to America. As such, Liberty was both an innovator in individualist theory and a mainstay of that tradition."
http://www.zetetics.com/mac/tir1.htm
"It is these [legal] conflicts that lend an aura of the heroic to Larry Flynt and Alan Isaacman. Without Flynt's publishing 'empire' he would not have had the money or opportunity to take such a case [as the one against Jerry Falwell] to the Supreme Court to set precedents favoring the freedom of speech in the USA."
http://endervidualism.com/agora/larry_flynt_1996.htm
(Fiction, 19,000 words.) (Sequel to "Rain on Rocks" and "Conscripts.") The Ratters wanted only to do business. Becoming ensnared in a civil war hardly suited their plans… "We face that kind of ignorance wherever we travel. Doesn't matter how much we help our customers improve their lives, we're constantly maligned. Leaders constantly tell everyone who'll listen that we Ratters will only be able to justify our existence by actions other than peaceful exchange."
http://home.earthlink.net/~rdmadden/webdocs/Purification.html
"Ray Harryhausen helped originate what is presently known as the special effects industry. Crafting stop-motion animated projects for several years, Harryhausen is a master of patience, and is perhaps the most disciplined individual when it comes to truly understanding the capabilities of the animated medium."
http://www.animationinsider.net/article.php?articleID=712
"Thomas Friedman in possession of 500 pages of ruminations on the metaphorical theme of flatness would be a very dangerous thing indeed. It would be like letting a chimpanzee loose in the NORAD control room; even the best-case scenario is an image that could keep you awake well into your 50s."
http://www.nypress.com/18/16/news&columns/taibbi.cfm
"Most security personnel defend the use of Tasers, but Amnesty International said that there have been more than 100 Taser-related deaths since 2001. What do you think?"
http://www.theonion.com/wdyt/index.php?issue=4116
Economic cartoon
http://www.reason.com/hod/cartoon.ss042205.shtml
"In making decisions, the brain would draw upon the unpredictable behavior of its constituent particles. But wouldn't such freedom consist of mere randomness? Searle argues that this objection involves a fallacy of composition, confusing the properties of a system with those of its parts. Our pervasive experience of free will, he acknowledges, may be an illusion. But if so, it is a strange illusion, one that requires vast biological resources to maintain yet somehow survived evolution's travails."
http://www.reason.com/0504/cr.ks.are.shtml
"The German experience included: the free towns of the Middle Ages; scholasticism and the doctrine of natural law taught in the universities; the Renaissance and the Reformation; the rise of modern science; and an outstanding role in the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century. The twelve-year experience of National Socialism, with all its atrocities, was terrible. But it should not lead us to forget that for a thousand years before Hitler, Germany was an integral part of western civilization." Long, but worth the time investment.
http://www.mises.org/story/1787
"We again live in times of new hope, similar to the ones that gave birth to the liberal vision of the 19th century. This is a vision that was warmly embraced by John Paul II, and we can expect a full continuity with that vision under Benedict XVI. The very name of the latter gives us hope that the bloodshed between World War I and the fall of the Berlin Wall need not be our common destiny. Certainly Cardinal Ratzinger has not contradicted John Paul II's liberal teachings on economics, which found great merit in the market economy and even condemned European-style welfare states."
http://www.acton.org/ppolicy/comment/article.php?id=263
"We haven't progressed much on physician-assisted suicide because it is one of those culture-war issues that defies rational debate. Many of those against it profess that it violates their religious beliefs. (To which I say, then you don't have to choose it, but for some reason that never seems to fly.)"
http://www.sptimes.com/2005/04/17/Columns/To_live__and_die__in_.shtml
"What really is the psychology of all of this? My best explanation: Most of our behavior, especially reproductive behavior, is heavily influenced by human nature (or, equivalently, by instinct). A man's instinct is to take care of a woman -- to protect her, feed her, and so on. A woman's instinct is to be taken care of while she looks after the children."
http://fredoneverything.net/MexicanasII.shtml
"Instead of publicizing sexual violence against women, Nall has spotlighted the problem of false accusations against men. Her case also raises the question of whether NOW-style feminists encourage false accusations when they flatly insist that women must be believed."
http://www.ifeminists.net/introduction/editorials/2005/0420.html
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