Apr. 24 - 30, 2005

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The Unconquered Remnant; You Can Write It Down; The Tribal Gene; Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome; 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 Apr. 24 - 30, 2005.

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. 

 

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Political Liberty

Articles showing a positive influence of political action on the cause of Liberty.

What Is To Be Done? -- Burning Questions for our Movement

      by Bill Walker from LewRockwell.com

"And even in the age of DSL lines, there is something to be said for just going into the educational gulags and talking to the zeks. As an unpolished and unprepossessing Libertarian candidate a few years ago, I spoke to many high school government classes and a few assemblies. The reaction was always very enthusiastic; I was the most interesting thing the students (and teachers) had seen in school for months."

http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig5/walker8.html

Ephedra Buzz

      by Jacob Sullum from Reason

"On April 14, in response to a lawsuit brought by Nutraceutical Corp. and its Solaray susidiary, U.S. District Judge Tena Campbell ruled that the ephedra ban violated the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act (DSHEA)."

http://www.reason.com/sullum/042905.shtml

In the Name of Sibel Edmonds

      by James Ridgeway from The Village Voice

"The employee's mental health is questioned. In certain instances, agencies actually try to entrap the employee. For example, Sibel Edmonds tells the story of how she was accused by her FBI superiors of carrying classified materials to Congress. How did the bureau know that?"

http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0518,Ridgeway-edmonds,63557,6.html

Life in Amerika

Articles depicting the negative impact of politics on the cause of Liberty.

Then They Came for the Children -- Feds Arrest Girls for Teen Snottiness

      by Ted Rall from uExpress

"Like many rebellious teens, I fought with my mother. Local police, called to my home during at least one particularly impressive clash of wills and voices, talked us back into the land of the calmly reasonable. Then they left. ... A quarter century later, my mom and I are best friends and I haven't done anything the Secret Service ought to worry about. Right now, however, two girls from New York City are rotting in a HomeSec prison in Pennsylvania for doing nothing more than I did--one for fighting with her parents and writing an essay, the other accused of being her friend."

http://www.uexpress.com/tedrall/?uc_full_date=20050426

Transparency Crucial For Accountability

      by Wendy McElroy from ifeminists.com

"Transparency is the key to dissolving criticism, but transparency is precisely what has been lacking. Perhaps because disclosure is a slippery slope into accountability. On Feb. 29, 2004, The New York Post ran an expose entitled 'AIDS Tots Used as "Guinea Pigs."' It claimed that about 50 wards of ACS had been used to test multiple combinations of AIDS medication."

http://www.ifeminists.net/introduction/editorials/2005/0427.html

The productive vs. the unproductive

      by Walter E. Williams from Townhall.com

"The talkers who attack the doers are glib and can turn clever phrases and thereby trick the gullible and uninformed, whether it's the general public through the mass media or judges and juries. "

http://www.townhall.com/columnists/walterwilliams/ww20050427.shtml

Ordered Liberty without the State

Some people say it's Anarchy, some say it's not possible. It is an interesting topic.

You Can Write It Down...

      by Thomas L. Knapp from Strike The Root

"We got screwed. It's just that simple. A successful revolution was followed by a successful counter-revolution . . . and the counter-revolutionaries conveniently forgot to let us know. They were content, and still are, to humor the serfs. After all, a man who thinks he's free hasn't much incentive to rebel for his freedom, does he? ... It's easy to sympathize, even to empathize, with them. But what they're missing, what they fail to understand, is that the cult of the state is not about truth . . . it's about power. And possession, as they say, is nine tenths of the law."

http://www.strike-the-root.com/51/knapp/knapp2.html

Rights Do Not Exist

      by Johan R:son Sjöberg from anti-state.com

"First, the fact that man does not have rights does not mean that he should obey the State. Actually, it can just as well mean the opposite. For the State is dressed in legality, derived from the rights of its citizens; the State is Locke's sovereign, against who no uprisings are allowed."

http://www.anti-state.com/article.php?article_id=472

Do You Hate the State?

      by Murray N. Rothbard from LewRockwell.com

"[T]he radical regards the State as our mortal enemy, which must be hacked away at wherever and whenever we can. To the radical libertarian, we must take any and every opportunity to chop away at the State, whether it's to reduce or abolish a tax, a budget appropriation, or a regulatory power. And the radical libertarian is insatiable in this appetite until the State has been abolished, or -- for minarchists -- dwindled down to a tiny, laissez-faire role."

http://www.lewrockwell.com/rothbard/rothbard75.html

Spreading Decentralism

Articles demonstrating an increase in the dispersal of power.

Living the outlaw life: Finding your own freedom

      by Claire Wolfe from Backwoods Home Magazine

"If you don't think and act like a free person, then you'll be unfree wherever you go. If you do think and act like a free person, you'll always find a degree of personal empowerment even if your home is a prison cell. Being free means not only taking responsibility for our own choices. It means taking initiative so that we have choices."

http://www.backwoodshome.com/articles2/wolfe93.html

More on Gangs and Guerrillas vs. the State

      by William S. Lind from Antiwar.com

"Meanwhile, drug smugglers and guerilla forces like the FARC work together more easily than states do. The state system is old, creaky, formalistic, and slow. Drug-dealing and guerilla warfare represent a free market, where deals happen fast."

http://www.antiwar.com/lind/?articleid=5768

Who Benefits from an Ownership Society? It Depends on What You Own

      by Ali Massoud from The Free Liberal

"Another political benefit of private property ownership is that it diffuses power. When the government owns all property, individuals have little protection from the whims of politicians. The institution of private property gives many individuals a place to call their own, a place where they are safe from depredation by others and by the state. This aspect of private property is captured in the axiom: 'A man's home is his castle'."

http://www.freeliberal.com/archives/001027.html

The New World Hegemon

Depictions of the coming Imperial power

Fascism, State Capitalism and Outsourcing

      by weebies from Strike The Root

"'War alone brings up to its highest tension all human energy and puts the stamp of nobility upon the peoples who have courage to meet it.' This is almost exactly identical to the current neo-CON and US policy of perpetual war for perpetual peace. Il Duce also writes, 'For Fascism, the growth of empire, that is to say the expansion of the nation, is an essential manifestation of vitality, and its opposite a sign of decadence'."

http://www.strike-the-root.com/51/weebies/weebies12.html

Evidence that the U.S. May Be Losing the Global War on Terror

      by Ivan Eland from The Independent Institute

"According to Larry Johnson, a former CIA analyst and State Department terrorism expert who still has many sources within the intelligence community, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's office is suppressing data showing that the number of major terrorist attacks worldwide exploded from 175 in 2003 to 625 in 2004, the highest number since the Cold War began to wane in 1985."

http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=1501

Bush's imperative category -- What is a WMD?

      by Joseph Audie from The Last Ditch

"In what follows we will avoid a pitfall that commonly plagues investigations of presidential malfeasance: an obsession with providing an ironclad case for prevarication. ... Rather, we will seek a simple and elegant line of inquiry to highlight possible presidential misconduct with respect to the WMD question and leave it to the intelligent reader to draw whatever moral lesson or inference appears warranted."

http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/audie_wmd.htm

Politics by Other Means

War, rumors of war, and politicians fomenting war.

Broken Party, Broke Voters -- Behind scenes of faux Democratic outrage, a bankruptcy bill.

      by Matt Taibbi from New York Press

"But my absolute favorite is the amendment, proposed by Bill Nelson of Florida, to exempt from means testing individuals whose debts were incurred as a result of identity fraud. It would be hard to imagine any legitimate objection to this amendment. The only rational objection to this amendment would be that your tongue is so far up the ass of MBNA that you can't possibly vote for it. Which says something about the Senate; the amendment was crushed, 61-37."

http://nypress.com/18/17/news&columns/taibbi.cfm

The Bad Boy On the Bus: An Interview With Matt Taibbi

      by Janelle Nanos from Mother Jones

"[W]hat’s wrong with American politics has a lot to more to do with the media and the sort of amorphous, invisible qualities in the presidential election today. It was really difficult for me to find the bad guy in that picture. There wasn't a clear cut 'us vs. them' kind of thing."

http://www.motherjones.com/news/qa/2005/04/taibbi.html

The National Democrats

      by Vox Day from WorldNetDaily.com

"At this point, it is primarily the nominal Republican opposition to the United Nations and an openness to the use of military force in what can at least theoretically pass for being in America's national interest that really separates the two parties. The Democrats have been roundly defeated at the polls, only to be replaced by George Bush and what should more rightly be termed his party of National Democrats."

http://worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=43965

Spontaneous Order

Articles showing decentralized successes.

A Cancer Patient Faces the Chaos of the American Health-Care System

      by Rosalind Lacy MacLennan from The Future of Freedom Foundation

"No government body, state or federal legislature, politician or bureaucrat is wise enough or has the omniscient knowledge to strong-arm a decision about an individual person’s health care. An insidious trickster like cancer requires the invisible hand of the marketplace that serves the patient first."

http://www.fff.org/comment/com0504i.asp

Bringing the Consumer Revolution to the FDA

      by Alexander Tabarrok from The Independent Institute

"It may seem odd, but if the FDA had fewer powers over the industry it could be more independent. Consumer Reports, for example, has no power over the industries that it monitors and because of that fact it can answer to consumers alone."

http://independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=1500

Forget about idea of having free lunch

      by Howard J. Blitz from Yuma Sun

"Every individual acts in his own self-interest and each human's action in a free market is controlled by the actions of others following their self-interest. Self-interest means individuals attempt voluntarily to accomplish tasks with a minimum of expense and a maximum of outcome (revenue)."

http://sun.yumasun.com/artman/publish/articles/story_16162.php

Nonspontaneous Disorder

Articles showing centrally planned disasters.

Yes, Virginia, There is a Social Security Trust Fund

      by John McGinnis from The Foundation for Economic Education

"We think of business assets such as plant, equipment, patents, and goodwill as capital goods because they generate cash flows over time. Your teacher sees no such assets set aside at present to support Social Security, but there are indeed assets the government owns and has set aside: you, me, and everyone else who tries to earn a living."

http://www.fee.org/vnews.php?nid=6843

Bon Appetit!

      by Sandy Szwarc from Tech Central Station

"With tremendous media fanfare last year, Julie Gerberding, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson announced that overweight and obesity had killed 400,000 Americans in 2000. ... But it has finally been exposed for what it is: a grossly exaggerated and fabricated scare campaign."

http://www.techcentralstation.com/042505D.html

Equal Rights for the Disabled, Indeed

      by Scott McPherson from The Future of Freedom Foundation

"Obviously no decent person could fail to empathize with someone with a physical or mental handicap. But this doesn't address a more fundamental issue, which neither Thornburgh nor Reich, nor the United Nations, nor even the U.S. government cares to discuss: what right does one person have, simply by virtue of any impairment, to lay claim, enforceable by law, over the life, property, and conscience of another?"

http://www.fff.org/freedom/fd0501d.asp

War Is The Health Of The State

War is the ultimate State intervention in society.

The Tribal Gene of Love and War

      by David MacGregor from Strike The Root

"The state is the magnification of the desires of the majority who comprise it. And war is the ultimate consequence. War between individuals within such a state, and war between states themselves. War is the HEALTH of the state. The state operates on an anti-morality that, if consistently practised by all individuals, would bring society to its knees."

http://www.strike-the-root.com/51/macgregor/macgregor6.html

Call Me Unaccountable: Woodrow Wilson and George Bush

      by Paul Craig Roberts from LewRockwell.com

"Powell shows how this insane treaty brought Hitler to power and how Wilson's bribe to the Russian government to continue in the war produced the Bolshevik Revolution, Stalin, and the Cold War. One hundred million deaths resulted from Wilson's decision to turn the stalemated European conflict into World War I."

http://www.lewrockwell.com/roberts/roberts100.html

Intervention Spin Cycle

      by Norman Solomon from Guerrilla News Network

"Most American politicians and media commentators readily accepted the official line, along with the reported death toll of 31 U.S. troops and 3,000 Dominicans, many of them civilians. Four decades later, the invasion is scarcely remembered in the United States. Yet there's a familiar ring to its story line, featuring a disingenuous administration and a deferential press corps selling the public on the dire need for an invasion. Key facts were lost in the kind of exculpatory fog that often prettifies the nation's view of its own military actions."

http://www.gnn.tv/articles/1344/Intervention_Spin_Cycle

Bits of History

The Past seen with a fresh look.

The Unconquered Remnant: The Hopis and Voluntaryism

      by Peter Spotswood Dillard from voluntaryist.com

"Throughout the years, traditionalist Hopi leaders have issued eloquent pleas for self-determination to U.S. presidents and other government officials. When Yuikuma met President Taft in 1911, the message he delivered was that 'all he wanted was that he and his people be left alone.' [Miller, 112] Forty years later, Dan Katchongva, a son of Yukiuma, was still delivering the same message...."

http://www.voluntaryist.com/forthcoming/unconquered.php

Rock and Roll Entrepreneur

      by Nick Gillespie from Reason

"The first Mothers of Invention record, considered by many the first double LP and concept album, Freak Out!, challenged listeners with its length, exotic rhythms and lyrics, and album sleeve exhortations to cast 'off outmoded and restricting standards of thinking, dress and social etiquette'."

http://www.reason.com/0504/cr.ng.rock.shtml

Don't Forget Roosevelt's Attack on the Judiciary

      by Jacob G. Hornberger from The Future of Freedom Foundation

"Republican attacks on the judiciary bring to mind what unquestionably was the fiercest attack on the independence of the federal judiciary in American history -- the infamous 'court-packing scheme' of Democrat President Franklin D. Roosevelt."

http://www.fff.org/comment/com0504h.asp

War and Peace

Articles showing the nature of War.

The Thirty Years War -- Vietnam -- we're still fighting over it

      by Justin Raimondo from Antiwar.com

"Shrouded in secrecy and reveling in privilege, our governing elites go on about their business of world-saving with only the most tenuous connection to the body politic: a gerrymandered Congress dominated by foreign interests is prostrate before presidential power. A permanent national security bureaucracy -- which has fastened itself on American foreign policy and usurped the Constitution -- lies us into war and is never held accountable."

http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=5770

Lesson from a Total Defeat for the US -- The End of the Vietnam War, 30 Years Ago

      by Gabriel Kolko from CounterPunch

"The Americans and Communists alike shared a common myopia regarding wars. What happens in the political, social, and economic spheres are far more decisive than military equations. That was true in China in the late 1940s, in Vietnam in 1975, and it is also the case in Iraq today."

http://www.counterpunch.org/kolko04292005.html

'Collateral Damage' as Euphemism for Mass Murder

      by Anthony Gregory from LewRockwell.com

"'Collateral damage' is a euphemism for mass murder. It is perfectly moral to protect innocents against aggressors. It is not moral, nor has it ever been necessary, to blow up cities filled with innocent people. When a State drops bombs on another country and predictably kills innocents, it cannot be exempted from ethical culpability simply because it didn't want to kill innocents."

http://www.lewrockwell.com/gregory/gregory72.html

Great Individuals In History

Some people stand out from the crowd.

Historian - Edward Gibbon : April 27, 1737

      From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"[F]ew seem to have appreciated more keenly than he did, the human advantages of political liberty and the freedom of an Englishman. In short, the criterion by which Gibbon judged civilization and progress was the measure in which the happiness of men is secured, and of that happiness, he considered political freedom to be an essential precondition."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Gibbon

American Woodsman/Artist - John James Audubon : Apr. 26, 1785

      from artelino.com

"Audubon had never stopped following his great passion - birds and drawings. By 1820 he began to make watercolors of American birds. He first tried to find a publisher in Philadelphia. But his strange ways to dress and his undiplomatic bluntness made him many enemies. In 1826 Audubon went to England with a folder filled with watercolors and drawings to find backing in Europe and to have his watercolors turned into aquatint engravings."

http://www.artelino.com/articles/audubon_prints.asp

Jazz Singer - Ella Fitzgerald : April 25, 1918

      from EllaFitzgerald.com

"Her voice was flexible, wide-ranging, accurate and ageless. She could sing sultry ballads, sweet jazz and imitate every instrument in an orchestra. She worked with all the jazz greats, from Duke Ellington, Count Basie and Nat King Cole, to Frank Sinatra, Dizzy Gillespie and Benny Goodman."

http://www.ellafitzgerald.com/about/bio/index.html

Culcha'

Books, Movies, TV, Media, Music, poetry, etc.

Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985)

      by Tom Ender from Endervidualism

"There are some great action sequences in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome and plenty of other appealing aspects too. Post-apocalyptic movies were more common during the cold war era as the possibility of a collapse of civilization after a nuclear holocaust seemed a very real possibility. The genre seems less flush with new offerings lately."

http://endervidualism.com/agora/mad_max_bt_1985.htm

"The Black Arrow" By Vin Suprynowicz --Fiction Or Prophesy?

      by Susan Callaway from The Price of Liberty

"Too many people try to make comparisons between writers, which I find a waste of time. It isn't Heinlein, and doesn't pretend to be. It isn't a text for a revolution, and it's not a guidebook for a future free society. It is a most remarkable transition for the author from stern journalism to action packed fiction, with marvelous blending of many beloved legends and stories of American and Celtic origin woven into the characters and their actions."

http://www.thepriceofliberty.org/05/04/29/editor.htm

Pictures at a Web Exhibition

      by Fred E. Foldvary from The Progress Report

"If you are reading this in a public place, I suggest you attach earphones to the computer, because this article is audio-visual. We about to enter another world, an art gallery. When we visit an art gallery, we leave the ordinary world and are placed in world of imagination."

http://www.progress.org/2005/fold399.htm

The lighter side

Humor, satire, cartoons, parodies, food, popular music and other things to amuse.

The Genius of Rube Goldberg

      by Jeffrey Tucker from LewRockwell.com

"Goldberg's art exhibits a disdain for supposed experts who have an inflated sense of their own mastery. The class that presumes to rob people for their own good comes under special scrutiny. Thus did Goldberg not spare the state and its minions. Taxes in particular, low by the standards of our own time, came in for hard knocks under his pen."

http://www.lewrockwell.com/tucker/tucker52.html

What Do You Think? -- The New Food Pyramid

      from The Onion

"Last week, the federal government released a new food pyramid, but many citizens say the nutrition guidelines are too complicated. What do you think?"

http://www.theonion.com/wdyt/index.php?issue=4117

Separation Of Church and State Vanishes, Replaced By New Entity Called Sturch

      by Andy Borowitz from Borowitz Report

"While the exact shape and dimensions of the new church-state entity, sturch, remain to be determined, President Bush today installed as its official leader the Reverend Bill Frist (R-Tenn), the star player in this week's 'Justice Sunday' broadcast."

http://www.borowitzreport.com/archive_rpt.asp?rec=1118

Deep Thought

Scientific and scholarly studies, philosophical essays, in-depth and longer articles

What Made the Next Depression Worse

      by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. from Ludwig von Mises Institute

"'The Austrian theoretical framework seems to be the only tool at hand. And when all you have is a hammer. . .' I always imagine what Mises would say if he heard these words, nearly 100 years after he first came up with his explanation for the business cycle. How such knowledge would have brought him solace in those difficult years of total Keynesian dominance. It goes to show you that if you are willing to wait and be patient, the truth will win out in the end. Mises believed in this principle. We should too."

http://www.mises.org/story/1802

Being Among the Few Who are Right

      by Tibor R. Machan from The Independent Institute

"[W]hen back in the early 60s I ran across the ideas that I found to be closest to the truth as far as I could tell from my own explorations and, later, my studies, there were very few folks who took them seriously, which is no longer the case. Still, in terms of percentages, those convinced of the truth of individual rights and the justice of a regime grounded on them are still too few."

http://independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=1502

Nuclear Brinksmanship

      by Gene Healy from Cato Institute

"Bringing the Senate to a crashing halt will hardly scare those of us who believe that no man's property is safe while Congress is in session. In fact, there would be something perversely entertaining about C-SPAN programming dominated by the monotonous recitation of 700-page agriculture bills. If only the senators could be forced to sit and listen."

http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=3749

Miscellany

Articles not easily classified

In For A Dime, In For A Dollar

      by Stephanie R. Murphy from LewRockwell.com

"Amtrak has displayed an abysmal track record (pardon the pun) since its inception more than three decades ago. The 'government corporation' constantly faces derailments, mechanical failures, and financial problems. But politicians cry out, 'Amtrak is essential, and we've already worked so hard to build such a wonderful train system! Its problems are only because it doesn't have enough funding! We can't just start denying it much-needed finances now!' Then people nod their heads in agreement."

http://www.lewrockwell.com/murphy-s/murphy-s7.html

Do Women Really Want a Male Birth Control Pill?

      by Glenn Sacks from NewsWithViews.com

"[M]ost men realize that it's difficult to remain a part of their children's lives once the relationship with the children's mother has broken down, particularly if the children were born outside of marriage. The pill will help ensure that men only have children in the context that's best for men--a stable marriage."

http://www.newswithviews.com/Sacks/glenn21.htm

Learning from the Insane

      by Bob Wallace from Strike The Root

"In a sense, these great but bad men are practitioners of Black Magic, who cast spells, through the use of words, to charm the susceptible masses into believing Bad is Good -- into believing it is acceptable, indeed necessary, for governments to eternally engage in force and fraud, otherwise evil will overwhelm them."

http://www.strike-the-root.com/51/wallace/wallace18.html

 

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