Henry David Thoreau & "Civil Disobedience"; Interview: Mark Vande Pol; Acadia: Peaceful, Prosperous, Stateless; I, Robot; these articles have their titles and text in this color and are featured this week in -
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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"A common question I get from people disturbed by these kinds of cases ['outrages like those perpetrated against Ed Rosenthal and Richard Paey'] is, 'What can we do?' Well, here's one thing the average citizen can do: Serve when you're called to jury duty, and while there, refuse to enforce unjust laws."
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,163877,00.html
"It should be possible to offer candidates for election under the Libertarian label who make campaign promises that are both pragmatic and pure, by focusing on what a candidate could actually deliver if elected."
http://www.ncc-1776.com/tle2005/tle329-20050724-06.html
"Let it be proposed, therefore, that the citizens of this great nation return to their natural state. That is to say, eliminate the business suit in favor of the birthday suit. Nude in the air is tough on terror. Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can take off for your country. We have nothing to fear, but modesty itself."
http://worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=45428
"Here, in the home of the free, the land of the brave, and suchlike prattle, I encounter this: 'An 11-year-old girl who threw a stone at a group of boys pelting her with water balloons is being prosecuted on serious assault charges in California. Maribel Cuevas was arrested in April in a police operation which involved three police cars and a helicopter'."
http://fredoneverything.net/Maribel.shtml
"With America engaged in a quagmire in Iraq, at great cost in lives and money, the administration is simply unable to push its anti-drug agenda with the same intensity."
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/_/id/7504250?rnd=1122898925984
"The publicly funded William Paterson University in New Jersey reprimanded Jihad Daniel for discrimination and sexual harassment. The 63-year-old Daniel, who is both an employee and a student at the university, is now at the center of a free speech controversy."
http://www.ifeminists.net/introduction/editorials/2005/0727.html
"He ended his chronicle of prison, '[I] joined a huckleberry party, who were impatient to put themselves under my conduct; and in half an hour ... was in the midst of a huckleberry field, on one of our highest hills, two miles off, and then the State was nowhere to be seen.' Thus, Thoreau shed the experience of prison, but he could not shed the insight he had gained into his neighbors nor the questions that accompanied his new perspective."
http://www.fff.org/freedom/fd0503e.asp
"Composers are like everyone else -- fundamentally honest and decent. But when financial incentives are offered to an entire population, there will be takers; and when those incentives allow the mediocre to maintain and protect their livelihoods, the mediocre will move in and prevail. Government, as opposed to private, provision of higher education is the problem."
http://www.lewrockwell.com/edmonds/edmonds253.html
"This edition covers several recommended methods of defeating spyware." Joe Blow wrote a set of articles which were published at STR. There is a link to his STR archive containing all of them at the end of this article.
http://www.strike-the-root.com/52/blow/blow5.html
"In short, the Jeffersonian ideal of a highly decentralized state, where whatever state power exists is held largely at the state and local levels, is more likely to produce a process that will be more conducive to liberty and prosperity than will the centralized, monopolistic, Lincolnite state that Americans now slave under."
http://www.lewrockwell.com/dilorenzo/dilorenzo95.html
"Those Iraqis, who are armed about as well as Americans are, but are only less than 10% in number, are putting up a pretty stiff armed resistance to our government. Will they ultimately be successful? Who knows? But they seem willing to keep trying. To me, this is the answer to the debate about whether armed citizen resistance to tyranny is possible here. If the Iraqis can do it, so can we, if the need arises."
http://www.thepriceofliberty.org/05/07/27/james.htm
"A quick scan of the Internet yields the possibility of a sovereign Alaska and Hawaii. A new nation called 'Cascadia' could one day take command of the Pacific Northwest, including northern California, Oregon, Washington, and Western Canada. If that doesn't pan out, a new state called 'Jefferson' could one day combine northern California and southern Oregon. And I'd bet more time would yield even more revolutionary movements."
http://www.hibbingmn.com/placed/index.php?sect_rank=4&story_id=205757
"The autocratic principle cannot accept any institutional infringement on the Leader's arbitrary power -- not even a craven accommodation like McCain's measure. Yes, Congress may rubber-stamp the gulag ('a buy-in to Guantanamo'); that's allowed. And Congress may approve funding for the gulag. But the people's representatives must have no say whatsoever in the gulag's operations. To give way on this point would reintroduce the rule of law and genuine democracy to U.S. government. And the Bush militarists have gone too far, waded through too much blood, to return to such 'quaint' notions now."
http://context.themoscowtimes.com/stories/2005/07/29/120.html
"Two points leap out at the reader -- or, at least, this reader -- quite apart from the moral implications of dropping nukes on Iran. The first is the completely skewed logic: if Iran has nothing to do with 9/11-II, then why target Tehran? As in Iraq, it's all a pretext: only this time, the plan is to use nuclear weapons."
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=6734
"Under last week's agreement between President Bush and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, which must be blessed by Congress, the United States would share advanced conventional weaponry and sensitive nuclear technology that can be used for both civilian and military purposes with India."
http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=1541
"Almost on principle I had refused even to look at any of the news stories surrounding the Ohio vote; there is a part of me that did not want to be associated with any sore-loser hysteria of the political margins, and in particular with this story, the great conspiratorial Snuffleupagus of the defeated left."
http://www.nypress.com/18/30/news&columns/taibbi.cfm
"He [Salim Ahmed Hamdan] is being tried under a military tribunal system, established by President Bush for the express purpose of sending accused terrorists through a separate legal system. Hamdan's guilt or innocence was not the question before Roberts and ... the D.C. Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals. Rather, the question was whether President Bush had the authority to contravene the Geneva Conventions and establish an unreviewable regime of military tribunals to try detainees. Together, the three Republican-appointed judges issued a resounding 'yes'."
http://www.sptimes.com/2005/07/24/Columns/Roberts__rules_put_US.shtml
"We have run out of troops and money, the rest of the world has run out of patience with our stupidity, and the upper regions of the Bush administration may be crumbling under pressure of a prosecutor's investigations and eroding public support."
http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts07282005.html
“I'm just a guy who was working a normal hectic engineering job, raising two kids, and trying to take care of his land, who then got involved in the local environmental battle."
http://endervidualism.com/salon/intvw/vandepol.htm
"The fear-mongering must be confusing to Asians, who've been hectored by the West for two centuries about the ineffable beauty of free trade. Americans, for instance, don't think that Asians should feel in the least bit threatened because of Unocal's ownership of natural gas fields on their continent. That's just the market in action."
http://www.alternet.org/columnists/story/23726/
"Suddenly, the boundary between body and machine looks blurry."
http://www.reason.com/0507/artifact.shtml
"Government at all levels in America directly pays for 45 percent of health care spending, with Medicare paying one-third of all hospital fees and 20 percent of doctors' fees. The government also influences health care through malpractice tort law; complicated and deep regulation of hospitals, drug makers, the medical profession, and insurance companies; and tax policies that link medical coverage with jobs (resulting in 'insurance' that’s more like a discounted prepayment on predictable expenses than a safeguard against unexpected risk). The upshot is a system whose flaws can hardly be attributed to overreliance on free markets."
http://www.reason.com/0507/cr.bd.the.shtml
"Republicans in Congress are debating whether to make small cuts in the funding for public broadcasting. They're not thinking big enough. Here are the top ten reasons to cut off the taxpayer dollars flowing to National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting System."
http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=4002
"Mr. Tomlinson has clearly shown that 'political orthodoxy' is not the ideological monopoly of Michael Moore, MoveOn.org, George Soros or Al Franken. But those communicators do not have the heavy hand of government to police public speech in order to help strengthen their political goals."
http://www.jacksonvilleprogress.com/articles/2005/07/25/opinion/opinion02.txt
"The events of 9/11 -- whoever the responsible parties might have been -- satisfied the state's need for an enemy that would rationalize the continuing accumulation of power over Americans. Being in power, conservatives had no interest in the pursuit of inner-directed principles that might serve as an anchor to the ship-of-state."
http://www.lewrockwell.com/shaffer/shaffer114.html
"The War Party will be in the saddle, sweeping away all blame for having lied us into war in Iraq by generating a tidal wave of fear and jingoistic hysteria, wiping out what's left of our civil liberties with a spate of 'emergency' measures that won't be repealed for a generation, if ever."
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=6763
"[I]f, as Randolph Bourne famously remarked, 'war is the health of the state,' then the War on Capital is surely the most invigorating form of governmental violence in the Hegelian strategists' armory. Indeed, in the article under consideration, the state-worshipping Kaletsky took as his leitmotiv nothing other than the blatantly Machiavellian theme that individuals should be seduced into ruining themselves in order that a debauched and dropsical Leviathan could better balance its books."
http://www.mises.org/story/1866
"For one hundred years, the Acadians managed to live peacefully and to remain neutral in a disputed territory while Acadia remained stateless and became one of the most prosperous places in North America."
http://www.lewrockwell.com/saucier/saucier7.html
"Now you might be tempted to think, 'Hey, Padilla is just some poor Hispanic guy who got himself into trouble. So what? Why should I care?' You should care because the Padilla doctrine constitutes a watershed event in American constitutional history and arguably the gravest threat to our way of life in the history of our nation."
http://www.fff.org/freedom/fd0503a.asp
"The book sheds light on a question whose answer is too often assumed rather than examined: What was wrong with eugenics? Beyond its unsavory political ramifications, it was also based on shoddy science."
http://www.reason.com/0507/cr.ks.the.shtml
"What in heaven's name could be just about killing people you don't even know because some lying politician needs to improve the bottom line of his corporate cronies and campaign contributors. Wars should be initiated for defense of country and liberty only. ... The terrible truth is: the invader that Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee had to war with from 1861–1865, is the same invader the people in Iraq and Afghanistan are warring with today and the same invader the American Indian fought to protect their homes and property from during and after the War Between the States."
http://www.lewrockwell.com/gaddy/gaddy19.html
"The Dutch rebels adapted in a way the Spanish had never imagined: they based themselves where no Spanish troops could reach them, at sea. On April 1, 1572, the Sea Beggars, as the maritime rebels called themselves, seized the offshore port of Brill. On April 14, the prince of Orange called on the Dutch people to revolt against 'cruel, bloodthirsty, foreign oppressors,' and they did. The resulting war would last for 80 years and result in Dutch independence and Spanish ruin."
http://www.antiwar.com/lind/?articleid=6789
"Years of writing about public relations and propaganda has probably made me a bit jaded, but I was amazed nevertheless when I visited America's Army, an online video game website sponsored by the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD). In its quest to find recruits, the military has literally turned war into entertainment."
http://www.counterpunch.org/rampton07302005.html
"President Chirac acknowledged the racism that had existed, saying that a wrong had now been righted with Alexandre Dumas enshrined alongside fellow authors Victor Hugo and Voltaire. The honor recognized that although France has produced many great writers, none have been as widely read as Alexandre Dumas. His stories have been translated into almost a hundred languages, and has inspired more than 200 motion pictures."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandre_Dumas
"He achieved this result by means of a special technique involving several coats of oil and varnish applied to his paintings. It is impossible to categorize Parrish's work, since he was part of no traditional movement or school, and developed a truly original style." The Endervidualism web site has used several of Parrish's paintings. There's an example and a link to a fine online collection on this page.
http://www.parrish-house.com/index.html
"Emily Bronte's story of two childhood companions who are unable to remain together once they are adults is powerful and moving. It reminds each of us, no matter who we are, that we are often left alone in the world, and that we all long to be a part of something more than ourselves, but that it is only through love of ourselves that we can truly find love with others."
http://www.wc.pdx.edu/emilybronte/emilybronte.html
"I, Robot is a mystery story as well as being a science fiction thriller, but it is more than those, as was Blade Runner. It deals with the question of what it means to be 'human.' What is the nature of free will? With advancing complexity, how effective are rules? With the growth of machine 'intelligence' what might be some of the unintended consequences?"
http://endervidualism.com/agora/i_robot_2004.htm
"Hayek writes that true individualism believes in democracy yet not in the omnicompetence of majority decisions. Indeed, authorities often attempt to legitimise their actions by gaining the majority's approval, which often derives from people's blind faith in the authorities." [Editor's Note: The movie version of An Enemy of the People starring Steve McQueen is also excellent.]
http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig6/kim2.html
"What happened to Firefly? Babylon 5 fans will recognize the story. Apparently, the show was more 'adventure of the mind' than formulaic adventure. And why bother with fantasy when we can get our daily dose of reality via the cornucopia of reality tv shows?"
http://alina_stefanescu.typepad.com/totalitarianism_today/2005/07/so_what_finally.html
"The eight remaining justices of the Supreme Court met in chambers Monday to feast on the living flesh of retiring Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, enacting an ancient tradition that began when the first chief justice of the Supreme Court retired and was summarily consumed in 1795."
http://www.theonion.com/news/index.php?issue=4130
"While Mr. Cheney's speech to the group appeared to go smoothly, only later did scientists notice that debris from the vice president appeared to fall from him as he wrapped up his address."
http://www.borowitzreport.com/archive_rpt.asp?rec=1183&srch=
North Korea, the little nuclear state that could, returned to disarmament talks after a year hiatus and the new "Global Struggle Against Extremism." Video media
http://www.comedycentral.com/sitewide/media_player/play.jhtml?itemId=16668
"Beginning with the election of Republican congressional majorities in 1994 and the subsequent election of President George W. Bush in 2000, and culminating with the September 11th, 2001 attacks, so- called 'big government conservatives' heretofore an oxymoronic term in the culture of American politics came to the fore."
http://www.freeliberal.com/archives/001189.html
"I don't know that my mother will ever really understand -- and I'm sure that some people never will -- that rebels aren't necessarily bad. In fact, that they're rebels at all is sometimes completely unintentional. But if doing the right thing, if valuing freedom and honoring unalienable rights, is bad, then I'm a 'bad' girl again myself."
http://www.ladylibrty.com/our_view_archives/2005/oh-grow-up.html
"The distinctive American view of individualism, wherein it's the individual's actions that establish who someone is, not where someone comes from, what tribe one belongs to, is novel, unfamiliar. Even in America it is mostly a matter of the gut, not of the mind -- too many people are philosophical collectivists or communitarians, not individualists."
http://sun.yumasun.com/artman/publish/articles/story_18082.php
"The courtly fellow called Bob looked at me sadly, then asked, 'What has happened to the courage of the American people? Where is the outrage? Where is the fire for freedom? Where is the determination of a free people to remain free? Why do they persist in allowing the tyranny which exists today in our country?'"
http://www.ncc-1776.com/tle2005/tle329-20050724-07.html
"Want to pursue a (relatively) quick and engrossing study of the modern libertarian movement? Just browse through old issues of The Libertarian Forum, a newsletter edited and (in large part) written by Murray N. Rothbard between 1969 and 1984."
http://wconger.blogspot.com/2005/07/history-of-modern-libertarianism.html
"Let's remember that London is the most heavily monitored city in the world, with surveillance cameras recording virtually all public activity in the city center. British police officials are not hampered by our 4th amendment ... they can act without any constitutional restrictions, just as supporters of the Patriot Act want our own police to act. Despite this they were not able to prevent the bombings, proving that even a wholesale surveillance society cannot be made completely safe against determined terrorists. Congress misses the irony entirely. The London bombings don't prove the need for the Patriot Act, they prove the folly of it."
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