The Glory of War; Why We Unschool; How We Were; Thunderheart; 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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"Much of the credit for this groundbreaking legislation belongs to council member Kathy Patterson, who doggedly pursued the investigation and stewarded the act through the council despite opposition by the mayor and police chief. The statute eliminates the permit requirement, replacing it with a 'notice system' for large-scale demonstrations where advance planning might be necessary. This might just be semantics, but the new wording suggests that groups don't need 'permission' to gather or march."
http://www.sptimes.com/2005/05/01/Columns/Striking_a_blow_for_d.shtml
"The question of 'active outreach' seems to be linked with publicity. It need not. But then again, we outreach to les/gay/bi/trans people, we outreach to the Hempies and victims of the Drugged War, to the Christian fundamentalists, the polyamorists, and all sorts of people with interesting, different affinities."
http://www.ncc-1776.com/tle2005/tle317-20050501-04.html
"Under the new law, Utah's homeschooling parents will be required only to sign affidavits stating their children will attend school for the same length of time as children in public schools; they will be free to choose all their own textbooks and teaching materials."
http://www.heartland.org/Article.cfm?artId=16885
"Medicalized behavior is behavior that government deems proper to control. If the food going into your mouth is an addiction or an epidemic, then your diet ceases to be a personal choice and becomes an issue of public safety. The lunch you pack for your children becomes a matter of public policy."
http://www.ifeminists.net/introduction/editorials/2005/0504.html
"Government assurances simply are not good enough in a free society. The overwhelming burden always must be placed on government to justify any new encroachment on our liberty. Now that the emotions of September 11th have cooled, the American people are less willing to blindly accept terrorism as an excuse for expanding federal surveillance powers."
http://www.thepriceofliberty.org/05/05/06/ronpaul.htm
"The passage of the stand your ground law is minimally laudable. The implication that the right of personal protection need first be granted by State decree is resentful and patrician. If the right to fight for one's continued existence must be granted by legislative fiat, isn't the right to exist at all in question until granted by the political class?"
http://www.strike-the-root.com/51/bryan/bryan5.html
"It is not good for Visa and other brands to appear to be associated with crooks or anything unpleasant to consumers. Thus the card companies have created their own system for pleasing consumers who have problems with credit transactions. This is called the chargeback. Under the card companies' chargeback procedures, a consumer can inform his card issuer of his dispute and the issuer will then help him settle things."
http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig3/huebert8.html
"There's little need for much comment on this story. Its outrageousness speaks volumes about the dangers of the state's power. For all the whining about corporate monopolies, the state has a real problem with competition. Dare to threaten state-sponsored corruption (alcohol, gambling, tobacco) and you run the risk of incurring their wrath."
http://www.strike-the-root.com/51/langr/langr2.html
"Even though some men are natural socialists, I'd still have to judge it mostly a feminine thing. And if socialism, or leftism, or whatever you want to call it, has any place in society, it's in the home, and the home only. In society, and politics, no."
http://www.thepriceofliberty.org/05/05/02/wallace.htm
"The reason the small incubator system works is because it doesn't place all the (salmon) eggs in one basket; many small and diverse locations ensure a higher survival rate of young fish. Hatcheries are an all-or-nothing bet that something won't go wrong. When it does, the state can lose a generation of fingerlings and years of public investment."
http://www.abetterearth.org/article.php/1027.html
"Utah has concluded that its state accountability system best serves students, and has decided to pay more attention to how well children learn than to how many government jobs get created. The Utah revolt may spread. Eight other legislatures, in Colorado, Connecticut, Idaho, Minnesota, Nebraska, North Dakota, Vermont and Virginia, are now considering similar legislation."
http://www.reason.com/hod/mg050605.shtml
"Americans seem incapable of grasping our enemies' concept of time. We are an impatient people; they are not. We want results fast; they please Allah by simply carrying on the struggle, leaving results in his hands. To Americans, 'oldies' are 10 years old; Osama bin Laden muses about the loss of Spain in the 15th century."
http://www.antiwar.com/lind/?articleid=5831
"Most liberals and conservatives in the United States wring their hands over the proliferation of WMD -- especially nuclear arms -- but rarely acknowledge that an aggressive U.S. foreign policy overseas is a major cause of the problem."
http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=1504
"An emergency funding measure earmarked for our fighting men and women overseas seems an odd place for a sweeping change to U.S. privacy policy. But that's just where House conservatives have tucked their proposal to impose federal requirements on state driver's licenses -- a proposal dubbed the Real ID Act."
http://www.villagevoice.com/blogs/powerplays/archives/000906.php
"How is such two-faced cynicism possible? It's easy: the Bushists don't regard the people of Darfur as human beings, unique individuals of infinite worth and intrinsic value. They're just counters in the game of greed and power, to be shifted or discarded as the need arises."
http://www.counterpunch.org/floyd05042005.html
"It is true that oil and gasoline prices are now historically high, even in real terms. But there are good reasons for this. For starters, it is spring, which always means an increase in retail gas prices. For another, some areas of the country require 'summer grades' of fuel, again adding to refining and other production costs. Political unrest and uncertainty -- hampering oil production and distribution -- in Venezuela and Iraq are also keeping supplies uncertain."
http://www.fee.org/vnews.php?nid=6863
"The United States has been throwing money at the welfare system for decades, only to increase the need for and dependency on the system. The expenditures for the 'war on poverty' have run to over $9 trillion (in 2003 dollars) over the last 40 years, but the greater cost has been the effect of a huge federal welfare system on society: the ballooning of welfare caseloads and out-of-wedlock births, the deterioration of two-parent families, and no noticeable decline in the poverty rate."
http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=3755
"At least when you get screwed by a prostitute, you get exactly what you paid for. By the standard of honesty, I think it might be better to get rid of all the politicians, along with several other professions I can think of, right off the top of my head, and make the prostitutes the leaders of society!"
http://www.ncc-1776.com/tle2005/tle317-20050501-03.html
"When we tell a child that he must learn spelling rather than whatever else he wants to do, we are telling him that our desires for him are more important that his desires for himself. A child does not reach 18 and suddenly start acting for himself when he has been trained to act for others until that point."
http://solohq.com/Articles/KReynolds/Why_We_Unschool.shtml
"Ascension's rainforest is evidence that nature is super resilient and that moving species around the globe is unlikely to cause wide-scale ecosystem collapses. Ecological puritans loathe the new Ascension Island rainforest as a pastiche and lupine and scotch broom in Patagonia as sinful aberrations."
http://www.abetterearth.org/article.php/1033.html
"When you understand that our desire for goods and services is unlimited, the fallacies are exposed. Labor will always be scarce relative to our wish for products. Whenever a surplus of labor appears, the culprit is the government, which has myriad ways of artificially raising the price of hiring workers, thereby creating involuntary unemployment. Free markets are the solution."
http://www.fff.org/comment/com0505b.asp
"Almost nothing proves a politician's fitness for office better than his ability to convince the public to fund a new sports stadium. You can doubt an elected official all you like, but any mayor or governor who can convince a majority of the electorate to hand over a quarter of a billion dollars to a bunch of gazillionaires ought to be given a goddamn medal." Of course, that is if anyone gave medals for thievery.
http://www.nypress.com/18/18/news&columns/taibbi.cfm
"Public schools are government-established, politician- and bureaucrat-controlled, fully politicized, taxpayer-supported, authoritarian socialist institutions. In fact, the public-school system is one of the purest examples of socialism existing in America."
http://www.fff.org/freedom/fd0501f.asp
"From the beginning, each time Social Security benefits increased, retirees enjoyed larger checks without having to pay higher taxes, and those near retirement paid more for only a few years. Someone else had to pick up the rest of their tab. The we who got the benefits was different from the we who paid the taxes."
http://www.fee.org/vnews.php?nid=6869
"Why the state goes to war is not a mystery -- at least the general reasons are not mysterious. War is an excuse for spending money on its friends. It can punish enemies that are not going with the program. It intimidates other states tempted to go their own way. It can pave the way for commercial interests linked to the state. The regime that makes and wins a war gets written up in the history books. So the reasons are the same now as in the ancient world: power, money, glory."
http://www.lewrockwell.com/rockwell/glory-of-war.html
"There was suspicion from the beginning that Roosevelt deliberately pushed the Japanese military leaders into attacking Pearl Harbor so that he could get the war he wanted: the war to expand government in spite of the economic failures of the increasingly unpopular New Deal. It isn't taught in public school histories, but people were getting tired of the permanent Depression by 1940."
http://www.strike-the-root.com/51/walker/walker9.html
"Its a stroke of brilliance, really. The present emergency is not over, and won't be any time soon. Remember what Dick Cheney said, it's a war that 'won't end in our lifetimes.' Assuming no major terror attacks happened between the introduction of the law and the expiration date, that's just proof how well it works. And if one had happened? Just proof they need even more Draconian new powers. They really can't lose either way."
http://www.anti-state.com/article.php?article_id=474
"The freedom we enjoyed would horrify today's worried delicates. We had guns but enough common sense not to think of them as weapons. … Country stores sold ammunition. You didn’t need to be any particular age to buy it. Why would there be such a law?" Change this story to a few years later, set it near "The Big River" in Wisconsin instead of tidewater Virginia and it comes very close to my early teen years.
http://www.fredoneverything.net/KGSummer.shtml
"Unfortunately those who want more health empowerment (to the horror of David Kessler and his ilk [at the FDA]) have no choice but have their options limited by nothing more than a drug-company front that destroys safe orange juice and injectable B vitamins while providing cover for a joint-pain treatment linked to sudden-cardiac death. The probability of meaningful reform is about nil. In terms of economic interests, the Republicans are owned lock, stock, and barrel by the drug cartel, health-insurance companies, and physician interests such as the American Medical Association."
http://www.mises.org/story/1805
"What Roosevelt had created, author Flynn brilliantly foresaw in 1948, was 'that kind of state-supported economic system that will continue to devour a little at a time the private system until it disappears altogether.' In a word: fascism. And to think that it all started with Roosevelt stealing the people's gold."
http://www.reviewjournal.com/lvrj_home/2005/May-01-Sun-2005/opinion/1248929.html
"That he may have to kill? That he may be captured, injured, or killed? That he could end up having experiences and memories that will haunt and depress him the whole rest of his life? He doesn't believe this is possible in his heart and never will until he discovers for himself what the reality of war is. However, then it will be too late."
http://www.strike-the-root.com/51/massoud/massoud9.html
"Just as no more Waco-style government massacres ultimately meant no more Oklahoma City-style terrorist attacks, no more U.S. government interventions in the Middle East could mean no more retaliatory terrorist attacks, such as those at the World Trade Center in 1993 and 2001."
http://www.fff.org/comment/com0505a.asp
"Hackworth died on Wednesday at the age of 74 from bladder cancer. He was the youngest full colonel in the Vietnam War, and was reputed to the model for the Col. Kurtz character played by Marlon Brando in the movie Apocalypse Now. He later decried the American military effort in Vietnam."
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4633522
"Mother Jones detested the middle-class reformers who sought to transfer household functions to the market or the state. She suspected that capitalists were scheming to force women into the paid labor force and children into daycare; the prospect did not please her...."
http://www.taemag.com/issues/articleid.17228/article_detail.asp
"[H]e developed the 'lubricating cup' for steam engines. The cup allowed for the continuous flow of oil on the gears doing away with the necessity of shutting down the machine. McCoy received a patent for his lubricating device in 1872. The lubricating cup was essential to industries throughout the world, and those in possession of the valuable cup were said to have 'the real McCoy'."
http://www.aaregistry.com/african_american_history/174/Elijah_McCoy_inventor_of_quality_products
"Benjamin Anderson is a rare example of an American economist who wrote in the Austrian tradition long before Ludwig von Mises emigrated to the U.S.. He was an indefatigable defender of market mechanisms, and was among the first to produce a systematic account of the economic causes of the Great Depression from a free-market perspective."
http://www.mises.org/content/benand.asp
"Thunderheart is a murder mystery, a movie about self-discovery, as well as an expose of the federal leviathan and its habitual treatment of those people it dominates. … When Ray and Frank [two FBI agents] tour the community in which the events take place they see the conditions that characterize many American Indian reservations in the United States: poverty, unemployment, federal management, cronyism, etc."
http://endervidualism.com/agora/thunderheart_1992.htm
"The funniest part of the film to me was just after the narrator talked about how terrible private property was and how good the commons works. The very next shot was of a factory spouting dirty smoke into the air! So much for how well the commons works."
http://www.anti-state.com/article.php?article_id=473
"Totalitarianism is a 'process of the annihilation of individuality, but, in more fundamental terms, it is the annihilation, first, of those social relationships within which individuality develops' (179). The role of intermediate associations in creating a sense of meaning for individuals is crucial to prevent against the ravaging effects of totalitarianism."
http://www.stanfordreview.org/Archive/Volume_XXXIV/Issue_7/conservatism/breview1.shtml
"Following the success of its 50 State Quarters program -- deemed one of the most popular commemorative-coin programs in American history -- the U.S. Mint announced its next ambitious project: releasing a unique penny for every county in the nation."
http://www.theonion.com/news/index.php?issue=4118&n=3
"When Walt Disney died, I somehow expected Mickey and Donald Duck and all the rest of the gang to attend the funeral, with Goofy delivering the eulogy and the Seven Dwarfs serving as pallbearers." Instead Paul Krassner's magazine The Realist published a classic satirical poster. This is a partial history of that poster. I'd love to have one of those posters in the carton he found.
http://www.nypress.com/18/18/news&columns/paulkrassner2.cfm
"According to an aide to Mr. Kim, the mercurial North Korean madman was 'furious' after U.S. newspapers and cable news channels virtually ignored his missile launch over the weekend to cover the 'runaway bride' story instead. 'Kim came to the conclusion that the only way he could get the news media to cover his missile tests was if he could somehow involve Michael Jackson in the story,' the aide said."
http://www.borowitzreport.com/archive_rpt.asp?rec=1126
"If there exists a solid case for government intervention today, will the objective factors upon which it rests change? They almost certainly will. When the case for intervention is no longer strong, or has a completely different structure, will the regulatory apparatus adapt appropriately, or go quietly into the night, or will it instead fight tooth and nail for the status quo and its legitimacy?"
http://www.mises.org/story/1806
"Of course, it is one of the fascinating as well as scary things about one's life that few things can be fully, accurately anticipated, apart from the next several moments, or perhaps a bit more, of one's future. Yet one point Norton, following Erickson, stressed is that this, too, is something that one must accept and embrace and then it will not be an obstacle to living properly and fruitfully."
http://www.desertdispatch.com/2005/111512573477669.html
"She very decidedly contradicts her own idea of voluntariness without alternatives, however, by laying down in several places that voluntariness hinges on the availability of acceptable alternatives; in her Conclusion she goes a little further and stipulates that everyone must 'face a sufficient range of options' ... for their choices to be voluntary."
http://www.econlib.org/library/Columns/y2005/JasayguiltyB.html
"The first thing to understand about all this is that the late Pope John Paul II and the new Pope Benedict XVI were ideological twins. In their own terms, they were fighting on the bright side of the Force. They both believed in exactly the same principles, and they both strove to uphold them in the face, not only of the Church's foes, but of hordes of weak-spined allies, who can do one far more damage than one's worst enemies, as I've been at pains to point out from time to time."
http://www.ncc-1776.com/tle2005/tle317-20050501-02.html
"According to Drs. Thomas Stanley and William Danko's research published in their book 'The Millionaire Next Door: The Surprising Secrets of America's Wealthy,' 80 percent of today's American millionaires are first-generation rich. Drs. Stanley and Danko listed other characteristics of these 8.2 million millionaire households. Fewer than 20 percent inherited 10 percent or more of their wealth. More than half never received as much as a dollar in inheritance."
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/walterwilliams/ww20050504.shtml
"The people complained that the Sheriff only protected the Council members and their friends, and the Sheriff said he couldn't protect everybody, and they all agreed he was right. So the merchants followed the farmers to the small communities. As Oz became more demoralized and less populated, the number of people who worked hard and saved their labor diminished and the number of people paid by the Council increased."
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