June 5 - 11, 2005

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The radical writ; The Democratic Delusion; The life of Mary Frohman; Ferris Bueller's Day Off; 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 June 5 - 11, 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.

Berkeley Defiant After Marijuana Ruling

      by Jane Yang from The Daily Californian

"State and city officials said medicinal marijuana users would remain protected under California law, despite the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling Monday that gave authority to the federal government to prosecute medical marijuana patients."

http://www.dailycal.org/article.php?id=18835

Light 'Em Up

      by James Ridgeway from The Village Voice

"Congress is now considering two bills that could legalize it at the federal level. One House bill, sponsored by New York Democrat Maurice Hinchey and California Republican Dana Rohrabacher, would keep the federal government from prosecuting people who are in compliance with their state marijuana laws. Another bill, sponsored by Hinchey and Rohrabacher along with Democrat Barney Frank, libertarian-minded Texas congressman Ron Paul, and Democrat Sam Farr, from California, has 31 co-sponsors. It would allow doctors to prescribe marijuana to their patients."

http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0523,webmondo1,64694,6.html

A nation of assimilated immigrants

      by Thomas M. Sipos from RationalReview.com

"American culture continues to assimilate everything so it belongs to everyone. Chinese take-out and Italian pizza are not evidence of our multiculturalism, but things we've all come to know and share in. We speak a common language, we increasingly vote and marry outside our ethnicities, and we have at least a passing familiarity with most elements in our common culture."

http://www.rationalreview.com/guest/sipos061005.shtml

Life in Amerika

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

A Continent Of Clowns

      by Fred Reed from FredOnEverything

"A kid brings his lunch wrapped in a newspaper so the school goes crazy and puts snipers on the roofs. I love this stuff. It's better than The Simpsons. Do you suppose they do that in Tokyo? The Mad Burrito Assassin isn't unusual. Little boys often get suspended or led out in handcuffs by cops for things like pointing and saying 'Bang,' because heavily womanized schools can't maintain order."

http://fredoneverything.net/Clowns.shtml

How Schools Cheat

      by Lisa Snell from Reason

"The underreporting of dangerous schools is only a subset of a larger problem. The amount of information about schools presented to the general public is at an all-time high, but the information isn’t always useful or accurate."

http://www.reason.com/0506/fe.ls.how.shtml

The Trouble With 'Cracking Down on Immigration'

      by Anthony Gregory from LewRockwell.com

"If there’s ever a national crisis that would justify, in the eyes of Washington DC, a total crackdown on emigration, the remaining question will be how capable is the infrastructure for doing this. To the extent that the borders can keep people out, they can keep people in."

http://www.lewrockwell.com/gregory/gregory79.html

Ordered Liberty without the State

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

The radical writ

      by Thomas L. Knapp from Knappster

"It's not like anarchists are asking people to give up something that's been successful in favor of something that hasn't been tested. The whole point of anarchism is that the state hasn't succeeded in addressing human problems and that it has often been the cause, or at least a cause, of those problems."

http://knappster.blogspot.com/2005/06/radical-writ.html

Democrazies

      by Butler Shaffer from LewRockwell.com

"If the voters should approve a referendum that is contrary to the interests of their political overlords, the courts may simply declare the outcome violative of some arcane interpretation of an abstract constitutional principle. This was seen, the other day, in the United States Supreme Court ruling that the use of marijuana for treating medical maladies was still illegal under federal law – despite having received widespread voter approval in various state referenda."

http://www.lewrockwell.com/shaffer/shaffer107.html

Freedom and Privacy: R.I.P.

      by Joe Blow from Strike The Root

"I recently decided what I want to be when I grow up. ... I am going to be a retired, invisible pirate. This may appear as an odd assortment of things to be, but in fact, these three traits fit very well together, when properly defined, understood, and implemented."

http://www.strike-the-root.com/51/blow/blow1.html

Spreading Decentralism

Articles demonstrating an increase in the dispersal of power.

Question Authorities

      by Gary Wolf from Wired

"We know that US borders are porous, that major targets are largely undefended, and that the multicolor threat alert scheme known affectionately as 'the rainbow of doom' is a national joke. Anybody who has been paying attention probably suspects that if we rely on orders from above to protect us, we'll be in terrible shape."

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.06/start.html?pg=3

Striking Back at the Empire

      by William S. Lind from Antiwar.com

"The Western political elites began to transfer their allegiance away from the state after World War I.... They expected that in time, the common people -- the plebs, the narod, the riah -- would follow the wise example of their betters and give their loyalty too to Brave New World."

http://www.antiwar.com/lind/?articleid=6266

Private Land is Social Injustice

      by Derry Brownfield from NewsWithViews.com

"The United States was founded by people who wanted to own property and were willing to risk their lives in order to live in a country where that was possible."

http://www.newswithviews.com/brownfield/brownfield53.htm

The New World Hegemon

Depictions of the coming Imperial power

Iraq and Moral Corruption

      by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. from LewRockwell.com

"Americans need to face the reality that most of the world sees our nation as the new evil empire, and many people in the Gulf region are dedicated to making sure that the Iraq War is the last hurrah for American militarism. How tragic to admit that the analogy is not entirely implausible."

http://www.lewrockwell.com/rockwell/iraq-moral-corruption.html

Orchestrating Terrorism -- Federal Bureau of Entrapment

      by Paul Craig Roberts from CounterPunch

"All that happened was that two productive American citizens were deceived by government agents for no other purpose than those agents having to show 'results' in the 'war on terror.' How does it make us safer to put a medical doctor and a jazz musician in prison? Why did the FBI spend two years entrapping these two American citizens?"

http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts06062005.html

Legalize Now!

      by Toby Muse from Reason

"The cornerstone of Colombia's U.S.-funded anti-drug effort is aerial fumigation. … The U.S. and Colombian governments insist the fumigations, which use the herbicide glyphosate, are safe. Farmers living in fumigated areas complain of myriad sicknesses, including skin problems and birth defects."

http://www.reason.com/0506/fe.tm.legalize.shtml

Politics by Other Means

War, rumors of war, and politicians fomenting war.

Confessions of a Right-Wing Liberal

      by Murray N. Rothbard from Ludwig von Mises Institute

"It is obvious that something is very wrong with the old labels, with the categories of 'left' and 'right,' and with the ways in which we customarily apply these categories to American political life. My personal odyssey is unimportant; the important point is that if I can move from 'extreme right' to 'extreme left' merely by standing in one place, drastic though unrecognized changes must have taken place throughout the American political spectrum over the last generation."

http://www.mises.org/story/1842

The Courage to Talk Withdrawal

      by Daniel Ellsberg from Antiwar.com

"I would say that many, I could say thousands, but it's really hundreds of thousands, and when we include the Vietnamese, millions, have died in the last century because American politicians were unwilling to be called names. They were unwilling to face, however invalid, however ridiculous, the charge that they were weak, unmanly, cowardly, defeatist, losers, and whatnot."

http://www.antiwar.com/orig/ellsberg.php?articleid=6264

CAFTA: More Bureaucracy, Less Free Trade

      by Ron Paul from The Free Liberal

"When we grant quasi-governmental international bodies the power to make decisions about American trade rules, we lose sovereignty plain and simple. I can assure you first hand that Congress has changed American tax laws for the sole reason that the World Trade Organization decided our rules unfairly impacted the European Union."

http://www.freeliberal.com/archives/001118.html

Spontaneous Order

Articles showing decentralized successes.

The Real Intelligent Designers

      by James Pinkerton from Tech Central Station

"Darwin was nothing like Marx or Freud. Indeed, biological Darwinism spawned 'Social Darwinism,' an extreme form of libertarianism. As TCS's own Nick Schulz, a certified non-leftist free marketer, observes, 'There's plenty of room for God in a Darwinian universe. Darwin operates on different plane altogether from theology.' Provocatively, Schulz compares Darwin to Friedrich Hayek, the legendary opponent of central planning and proponent of free markets."

http://www.techcentralstation.com/060905B.html

Fear Not China

      by Sheldon Richman from The Future of Freedom Foundation

"A highly advanced economy always is -- and always should be -- losing some jobs. They are replaced by technology in some cases, by cheaper lower-skilled foreign labor in others. This is progress, because new and higher-paying jobs take their place."

http://www.fff.org/comment/com0506b.asp

Economics More Vital than Politics for Lasting Russian Freedom

      by Ivan Eland from The Independent Institute

"Often, nations successfully transitioning from autocracies to liberal democracies -- for example, Chile, Taiwan, and South Korea -- have instituted economic reforms before gradually and peacefully undertaking political reforms."

http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=1520

Nonspontaneous Disorder

Articles showing centrally planned disasters.

Fed Up With FedEx...

      by Mary Starrett from NewsWithViews.com

"On any given day 6 million packages are shipped around the globe by the FedEx Corporation. My guess is the folks sending all those packages don't have a clue that the shipping giant's selling more than delivery of boxes and cardboard envelopes. FedEx is also selling out its customers’ privacy."

http://www.newswithviews.com/Mary/starrett62.htm

Stop The Mercantilists

      by Steve H. Hanke from Cato Institute

"Washington's modern-day mercantilists believe trade deficits can be managed by altering exchange rates. Therefore it's not surprising that China's currency, the yuan, is in the crosshairs. ... To level the playing field, the managed traders recommend an upward revaluation of the yuan. ... The Bush Administration wants it, the China Currency Coalition wants it, and Senators Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) want it."

http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=3794

Social Security with the mask off

      by Douglas Olson from The Last Ditch

"The latest plan to 'save' Social Security -- the world's largest and most successful pyramid scheme -- is extremely welcome because it finally rips away the pompous 'insurance program' mask and acknowledges Social Security for the welfare boondoggle it has always been."

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

War Is The Health Of The State

War is the ultimate State intervention in society.

The Democratic Delusion

      by Justin Raimondo from Antiwar.com

"The great paradox of American power is that the more we exercise it, the greater our chances of losing that which makes it possible: our system of constitutionally limited government and a legal system based on the primacy of individual rights, including the right to property. The reasons for this boomerang effect are built into the costs of such an ambitious enterprise."

http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=6289

War: Realities and Myths

      by Chris Hedges from LewRockwell.com

"The vanquished know war. They see through the empty jingoism of those who use the abstract words of glory, honor, and patriotism to mask the cries of the wounded, the senseless killing, war profiteering, and chest-pounding grief. "

http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig4/hedges2.html

Lying: The Government's Drug -- How Raich helps us delude ourselves

      by Matt Welch from Reason

"First comes the nervous exaggeration, then the covering-up of various misdemeanors... and by the time those lies start sounding true, the main barrier to destructive behavior is access to the poison itself. Well, the Supreme Court just gave the Drug War addicts in Congress and the White House the constitutional equivalent of a lifetime supply." In this case, the Drug War is the health of the State.

http://www.reason.com/links/links060805.shtml

Bits of History

The Past seen with a fresh look.

American Anarchist -- The life of Mary Frohman

      by Jesse Walker from Reason

"She wasn't exactly a libertarian -- not the capitalist kind, anyway -- but she had the same unwillingness to fit into any ordinary political pigeonhole. Discuss the family or the workplace, and she'd stake out a position well to the left of even Ann Arbor's mainstream. But if the talk turned to taxes or guns, she wouldn't be out of place at a militia meeting."

http://www.reason.com/links/links060905.shtml

US Government Versus Amnesty International: A Short History

      by Stephen Zunes from Antiwar.com

"With the Democrats demonstrating their willingness to team up with Republicans to try to discredit Amnesty International when it criticizes human rights abuses by the armed forces of key U.S. allies, it is not surprising that the Bush administration and its supporters now feel that they can get away with such brazen attacks against the Nobel Peace Prize-winning organization when it criticizes U.S. forces."

http://www.antiwar.com/orig/zunes.php?articleid=6268

Abbie, Absolved

      by Paul Krassner from New York Press

"The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General Richard Myers, joined the parade.... He was wearing a shirt emblazoned with the American flag. Oh, if only Abbie Hoffman could have witnessed that."

http://www.nypress.com/18/23/news&columns/paulkrassner2.cfm

War and Peace

Articles showing the nature of War.

The Forgotten Spirit of the Magna Carta

      by Andrew Young from Antiwar.com

"President Bush, like King John, has waged a war of choice against a country that posed little or no threat. However, President Bush and John differ in one important respect. America, unlike John's England, finances its wars by borrowing. King John, in contrast, simply levied taxes."

http://www.antiwar.com/orig/young.php?articleid=6232

Parents Are Right to Protect their Children from the Military

      by Jacob G. Hornberger from The Future of Freedom Foundation

"Obviously, the biggest reason for parents' opposition to the military's recruitment efforts would be to protect their children from losing their lives and limbs for no valid purpose. After all, ask yourself: What parents would place a higher value on the installation of an Islamic Shi'ite regime in Iraq, even a democratically elected one, than they would on the life or limbs of their own child?"

http://www.fff.org/comment/com0506a.asp

A Libertarian View of the Worst Catastrophe

      by Jim Powell from LewRockwell.com

"World War I was one of the worst catastrophes in human history, and everything about it underscores the folly of the neocon view that smart guys can make wars turn out as intended, and that war can be a controlled, rational basis for American foreign policy." Very long but also quite comprehensive.

http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig4/powell-jim6.html

Great Individuals In History

Some people stand out from the crowd.

Editor/writer - John W. Campbell : June 8, 1910

      From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"[He] was the editor from 1938 until his death in 1971 of the science fiction magazine Astounding Science Fiction, renamed Analog Science Fiction in 1960. During his editorship, he published the first stories of Robert A. Heinlein, A. E. van Vogt, L. Sprague de Camp and others, and strongly encouraged Isaac Asimov. He also edited the fantasy magazine Unknown (later Unknown Worlds) from 1939 to 1943."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_W._Campbell

Bluesman - Howlin' Wolf : June 10, 1910

      from howlinwolf.com

"Despite his wild antics onstage, Wolf was a responsible, middle-class family man offstage -- honest, hardworking, and upstanding to a fault. He hunted and fished, owned farmland in Arkansas…."

http://www.howlinwolf.com/articles/bio_1.htm

Entertainer - Judy Garland : June 10, 1922

      from Judy Garland Database

"In 1960, she renewed her film career, appearing in another series of films including Judgement at Nuremberg for which she received another Academy Award nomination."

http://www.jgdb.com/bio.htm

Culcha'

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

Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1986)

      Reviewed by Tom Ender from Endervidualism

"Ferris Bueller (Matthew Broderick, in one of his best roles) is a high school senior. However, he isn't like most high school seniors in at least one respect: not only doesn't he willingly submit to the mind-numbing high school tedium, he doesn't submit at all."

http://endervidualism.com/agora/fb_day_off_1986.htm

The Culture's Animating Values

      by Robert A. Sirico from Acton Institute

"One of the much-anticipated Disney releases for later this year is the first installment of C. S. Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Lewis was one of the most popular Christian theologians and apologists of the 20th century, and his fiction books are imbued with a deep sense of Christian morality. This kind of religiously informed storytelling, along with J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, has the potential not only to be enormously profitable but also to be morally salutary."

http://www.acton.org/ppolicy/comment/article.php?article=271

What Is Your Favorite Movie?

      by Per Bylund from Strike The Root

"When someone asks me about my favorite movie I usually reply Enemy of the State, where Will Smith is the target of a full-scale NSA hunting operation. Or I could say I really like The Forgotten, where Julianne Moore is the victim of an alien experiment sanctioned by the State. Why do I like these movies? Because they are realistic in the sense that they picture the State as it really is -- no illusions."

http://www.strike-the-root.com/51/bylund/bylund3.html

The lighter side

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

Disassemblin' them goolags with Dubya and the goof-doctors

      by Henry Gallagher Fields from The Last Ditch

"Anyhow, Dubya, bright boy that he is, Yale gradge-ee-it and all, hastened to offer the breathless reporters a definition of 'disassemble.' It 'means not tell the truth,' quoth Dubya, beaming as broadly as the lad who spelled 'katt' in Miss Plunkett's first-grade class."

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

Quit Smoking Weed and Take Viagra!

      by Mark Fiore from The Village Voice

"Pain Man" flash animated cartoon

http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0523,fiore,64868,9.html

What Do You Think? -- Deep Throat Revealed

      from The Onion

"Last week, former FBI agent Mark Felt revealed that he was Deep Throat, the anonymous source that helped break the Watergate scandal. What do you think?"

http://www.theonion.com/wdyt/index.php?issue=4123

Deep Thought

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

Scientism Standing in the Way of Science: An Historical Precedent to Austrian Economics

      by Gene Callahan from Ludwig von Mises Institute

"The mechanical philosophy lost its hold on the scientific imagination during the 18thcentury, due both to the unsatisfactory nature of many of the explanations it offered, and to the stellar success of Newton's distinctly non-mechanical theory of gravity. It is worth noting that in many cases, science advanced by going 'backwards' to concepts that had been rejected by the mechanical philosophers as 'unscientific'."

http://www.mises.org/story/1835

Happiness, Progress and the "Vanity of the Philosopher"

      by Sandra J. Peart, David M. Levy from Library of Economics and Liberty

"One area where the tension between these differing views on whether everyday people can manage their lives comes to the fore is population growth and the state's role in contraception and reproductive policy. Smith and Thomas Robert Malthus believed that individuals had foresight and were aware of the consequences of their actions for the future."

http://www.econlib.org/library/Columns/y2005/PeartLevymalthus.html

Success in treating autism?

      by Vin Suprynowicz from Las Vegas Review-Journal

"Mercury lodges in the cells of the brain and other organs and can lead to central nervous system damage and crippling neurological disorders. Workers who used to rub mercury into the felt to create the rounded rims and crowns of men's hats often retired at a fairly early age with debilitating tremors and psychiatric symptoms, leading to the familiar phrase "mad as a hatter."

http://www.reviewjournal.com/lvrj_home/2005/Jun-05-Sun-2005/opinion/1971363.html

Miscellany

Articles not easily classified

People of Faith

      by Ron Beatty from The Libertarian Enterprise

"Perhaps the point of all this is that we face too many trials in the coming years. We simply cannot afford to factionalize ourselves into political impotency. ... While they will not agree with each other on specifics, they even basically have the same guiding precept, the Golden Rule. Wiccans call this the Rede, and both basically say the same thing, don't do anything to others that you don't want them to do to you. This same concept has been taught by almost every major religion or religious leader: Moses, Zoroaster, Mithras, Buddha, Yeshua, Mohammed, even Confucius!"

http://www.ncc-1776.com/tle2005/tle322-20050605-04.html

On the Dictatorship of Relativism

      by Fred Foldvary from The Progress Report

"No peaceful and honest act is held to be inherently evil; people are free to have their own subjective views as to what is agreeable or disagreeable to them, without imposing such views on other peaceful persons. If a society bases its laws on the universal ethic, there can be no dictatorship of relativism, because no person is forced to live under the subjective values of others. But no country today has perfect liberty."

http://www.progress.org/2005/fold403.htm

Privacy: Throwing Babies Out with Bath Water

      by Wendy McElroy from ifeminists.com

"A theme runs through the following two news items: privacy rights are under attack. A 'good' reason is offered for the chipping away of privacies such as the confidentiality of medical records. Moreover, the cases are so legally tangled that analysis becomes blurred and 'bad law' based on judicial activism becomes more possible."

http://www.ifeminists.net/introduction/editorials/2005/0608.html

 

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