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"I am 'Left' because I believe that historically the 'Left' first referred to our classical liberal forebears, that it has most often meant 'anti-establishment' and 'opposition.' I am 'Left' because my political ancestors included H.L. Mencken, Albert Jay Nock, John T. Flynn, Randolph Bourne, and George Orwell, all Men of the Left. I am 'Left' because more contemporary Men of the Left have included the likes of Paul Goodman, Edward Abbey, Wendell Berry, and Alexander Cockburn."
http://wconger.blogspot.com/2005/08/defining-left-libertarianism.html
"Countless academic studies show that kids learn better in private schools or in public schools that manage to remain independent of central bureaucracies. While there are exceptions, universities are more decentralized, more innovative, and less constrained by mindless rules and regulations like teacher certification requirements and class-size restrictions."
http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=4549
"There are indications that Chinese demand is pushing up prices of commodities. Since 1989 (the median year when Chinese runaway growth is supposed to have started), copper and lead prices are up about one-third, nickel by 13%, and steel prices have shot up (until a few months ago). Yet, there is no reason to worry about the arrival of the fifth of mankind on world markets."
http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=1560
"Though the official publication of the design requirements is still some months off, DHS is expected to make an internal decision on one of those requirements, regarding 'machine-readable technology' standards, by early fall. And there is a lot of pressure on DHS from the surveillance-technology industry to make radio-frequency identification (RFID) microchips the required machine-readable technology."
http://www.fee.org/vnews.php?nid=7149
"Bush is powerless to control what is about to happen to this nation. While he still thinks that he can manufacture his own reality, he is about to receive another object lesson in humility. Reality therapy, isn't it great! The 9-11 anniversary is less than two weeks away. Stand by for a crisis. All indications suggest nothing but more bad news for September and October."
http://www.strike-the-root.com/52/blow/blow10.html
"In the coming weeks, observers expect Martin to act upon between 30 and 50 outstanding indecency complaints, the first step in clearing a backlog of hundreds of allegedly inappropriate broadcasts on television and radio. He has promised to remake the indecency process, speeding FCC responses and establishing a clearer precedent of what constitutes indecent programming. "
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2005/08/30/fcc_indecency/index_np.html
"For 50 years now, government has taken over the role of head of the family. This more than anything else has created a culture that breeds lawlessness, disrespect for private property, and disrespect for other people. This is the context in which we should view the disheartening events in New Orleans, which has been known for a high crime rate for many years anyway.."
http://www.lewrockwell.com/edmonds/edmonds262.html
"I recommend that all thoughtful Libertarian Leftists reflect on James' nine points of difference between radicals and revolutionaries. I can't argue with his reasoning. But I do quibble with his seeming dismissal of the term revolutionary."
http://wconger.blogspot.com/2005/08/in-defense-of-revolutionaries.html
"In a free society, in which all participants take their own financial risks under clear and explicit contracts, I propose that [the New Orleans flood] could not happen. The watchfulness mentioned above, by parties with their own interests at stake, would prevent it. Once an insurer fingered the levee owner for inadequate maintenance, that owner would shape up or go broke--and someone would rapidly take over his business and fix the problem. But this is not a free society. It is a society infested by government, bemused by the fiction that money grows on a government tree, that 'someone else' will be responsible."
http://www.strike-the-root.com/52/davies/davies2.html
"When people tell me they are for gun control this is the case I always bring up. ... Criminals are not only stupid, they also cowards. Even if they had shot the leader - who almost always has the biggest mouth - the rest would have run."
http://www.thepriceofliberty.org/05/09/01/wallace.htm
"I can't say what anybody else should have in their bags. I can definitely tell you that there are things I'd like to have in my bag that I don't have because of cost. Or space. Or because I can't see quite enough likely need to justify the purchase. Here's what I do have, for good or ill...."
http://www.backwoodshome.com/columns/wolfe050901.html
"Alberta and Saskatchewan marked their 100th anniversary as Canadian provinces last Thursday, precisely two months after a poll found that 41 percent of Albertans and 31.9 percent of Saskatchewanites thought that 'Western Canadians should begin to explore the idea of forming their own country'."
http://worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=46120
"National Guard troops don't belong in Iraq. They should be rescuing and protecting in Louisiana and Mississippi, not patrolling and killing in a country that was invaded on the basis of presidential deception. They should be fighting the effects of flood waters at home -- helping people in the communities they know best -- not battling Iraqi people who want them to go away."
http://www.counterpunch.org/solomon08312005.html
"Our country is filled with anonymity. Instead of horizontal relationships within communities, who maintain their own security and emergency measures, where many people are involved and know what to do because they have prepared themselves to do it, because they share common knowledge and bonds, we depend on vertical relationships. We pass the buck to nameless unknown and official authorities. We numbly rely on them to help us when we need help, and we do not even know who they are or what plans they have or have not made."
http://www.lewrockwell.com/rozeff/rozeff19.html
"Even after the 9/11 attacks made it clear that the FBI's stultified atmosphere had to change, the agency would rather get rid of its internal critics than address its shortfalls. Potentially vital intelligence was not being swiftly or properly translated, so it fires the messenger. Even today, the agency is backlogged. According to a July inspector general's audit, the amount of untranslated counterterrorism audio has increased by thousands of hours since the end of 2003."
http://www.sptimes.com/2005/08/28/Columns/The_dangers_of_keepin.shtml
"The destruction of New Orleans is the responsibility of the most incompetent government in American history and perhaps in all history. Americans are rapidly learning that they were deceived by the superpower hubris. The powerful US military cannot successfully occupy Baghdad or control the road to the airport--and this against an insurgency based in only 20% of the Iraqi population."
http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts09032005.html
"The latest case in point is a still-developing flap in North Carolina over allowing Muslim witnesses in state courts to be sworn in on a copy of the Koran rather than on a Holy Bible. After the state's Administrative Office of the Courts issued a preliminary opinion that the substitution was permissible, Guilford County (Greensboro) judges refused to allow the practice in their courtrooms. 'An oath on the Koran is not a lawful oath under our law,' declared Senior Resident Judge W. Douglas Albright, who sets policy for the county's courts. State law mandates laying a hand on the 'Holy Scriptures' -- which Albright limits to the Bible. 'Everybody understands what the holy scriptures are,' he contends. 'If they don't, we're in a mess'." I don't agree with Mr. Olson on everything in the essay, but his major point is very sound.
http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/olson_koran.htm
"Freiman warns us: '[Roberts's] willingness to erase the word "Treaties" from our Constitution and laws might mark [him and his two colleagues] not just as jurists [willing] to depart from the plain meaning of legal texts, but also as legal isolationists, turning away from the treaties that bind this nation to the civilized world.' (Emphasis added.)"
http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0536,hentoff,67495,6.html
"It is critically important that the management of the whole of the nation's infrastructure be turned over to private management and ownership. Only in private hands can there be a possibility of a match between expenditure and performance, between risk and responsibility, between the job that needs to be done and the means to accomplish it."
http://www.mises.org/story/1902
"The fact is, the cost of sending goods into a disaster area is dramatically increased because of the damage. Trucks now take longer to reach their destination -- time is money after all -- the likelihood of driver and rig being trapped within the affected area is another increased cost, and the prospect of looters seizing merchants' goods has also increased. All of these and other factors have the effect of discouraging shipments at the old ... price; the supplier could do just as well in any other area. The increased price resulting from the misnamed price gouging should be harnessed to encourage the needed supply -- it is one bit of salvation disaster victims can scarcely afford to do without."
http://www.bkmarcus.com/blog/2005/09/concise-guide-to-price-gouging.html
"The power of the people is already being heard in the millions of daily transactions that create economic order. $2.60 gasoline sends powerful signals to greedy, profit seeking entrepreneurs to boost the quantity of oil supplied (and its alternatives) and to self-interested, economizing consumers to reduce the quantity of oil demanded. "
http://www.amnews.com/public_html/?module=displaystory&story_id=15772&format=html
"This is what governments do. They misallocate resources. Setting aside any sinister motives and high corruption, even supposedly well-intentioned governments fail to do their job. As the Austrian School of Economics has long held, government planners do not have enough information to establish priorities."
http://www.partialobserver.com/article.cfm?id=1599
"The same state and local slothfulness [which was at work in New Orleans] is being encouraged in homeland security efforts against terrorist attacks. Federal efforts are displacing and distorting what could be more effective state and local actions. The Department of Homeland Security, of which FEMA is now a part, is doling out federal funds -- essentially overlaying a distorted set of federal priorities on the unique emergency management needs of local areas."
http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=1562
"In these circumstances, House Speaker Dennis Hastert's (R-Ill.) hastily retracted claim that rebuilding New Orleans doesn't 'make sense' sounds less like hardheaded realism than political necessity. The feds don't have the money to put up a toolshed, let alone a 'fantastic Gulf Coast.' But hold on a minute. Just this month, the federal government managed to find $286.4 billion for a highway bill that provides countless Washington D.C. giveaways to states that don't need the help."
http://www.reason.com/links/links090205.shtml
"The creation of the Islamic Republic of Iraq under U.S. auspices is by no means the last act in what promises to be a long, drawn-out drama: it is only a matter of time before we are told that our own creature, midwifed by ourselves, is itself a great danger, or perhaps a manifestation of an even greater danger headquartered in Tehran. "
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=7114
"Muslims might consume themselves in their internal hatreds while the US builds its bases to control the oil. That's been the tried and true practice of Western colonialists since the fall of the Turkish empire after World War I. Can it work this time? US ambitions are too much of a threat to other countries which are well positioned to cause us grief. Will the world be able to resist the opportunities to undermine an over-extended and self-righteous United States?"
http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts08292005.html
"Will the reality of Katrina resonate with Southerners coping without food or shelter because of budget cutbacks? I hope so. The list of malfeasance and improper spending by Bush is enormous, but as with Cindy Sheehan, the struggle is a lot more personal when you attach it to the face of someone destroyed by a political agenda."
http://www.thesimon.com/magazine/articles/canon_fodder/0944_hurricane_katrina_storm_front.html
"[M]any supporters of the president's war in Iraq have been defending the constitutional process there, despite its setbacks, by comparing Iraq's difficulties to those faced by the nascent United States. And indeed, they are correct that some similarities exist. Like the U.S. Constitutional Convention, the Iraqis have been plagued by sectional divisions, economic animosity, and self-interested politicians who are ready to sacrifice justice for political expediency."
http://www.antiwar.com/orig/pnewman.php?articleid=7118
"The historical analogy game is as irresistible as it is tricky, so here goes. The Sheehan vigils are reminiscent of a moment in the fall of 1969 when the anti-Vietnam-war Moratorium organized thousands of events across the country. There were big demonstrations in the usual locations, but the striking thing was the turnout in small and medium locales and places not noted for hippies or cosmopolitanism."
http://www.tompaine.com/articles/20050830/antiwar_america.php
"William Niskanen, the chairman of the libertarian Cato Institute, is not so gloomy. He admits that while the ideas and policy proposals of idea shops like his have not brought us a libertarian Nirvana, they've made a significant difference. Since the Korean War, he says, the federal government's relative intrusion into our lives, whether measured in terms of spending our taxes or in regulations, has actually stayed about the same. We've merely substituted a modern welfare state for the national security state we had in the 1950s."
http://pittsburghlive.com/x/tribune-review/opinion/columnists/steigerwald/s_367432.html
"[A]rticles in the New Orleans Times-Picayune and public statements by emergency management chiefs in New Orleans make it clear that the Bush administration slashed the funding for the Corp of Engineers' projects to strengthen and raise the New Orleans levees and diverted the money to the Iraq war."
http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts09012005.html
"The longer the United States stays in Iraq, the more trained Islamic jihadists will be let loose on the world. In the Islamic faith, Muslims are required to repel any 'infidel' invader from Muslim lands. Islamist fighters from all over the world came to help fuel the fierce resistance to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the Russian incursions into Chechnya."
http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=1558
"The constitutional process is foundering -- as if anyone could seriously believe that a liberal constitution could emerge in a cut-and-paste country that has not undergone the requisite liberal cultural evolution. The White House is reduced to saying that democracy can take many forms. That looks like a blank check."
http://www.fff.org/comment/com0508q.asp
"Johann Wolfgang Goethe is widely recognized as the greatest writer of the German tradition. The Romantic period in Germany (the late eighteenth and early nineteengh centuries) is known as the age of Goethe, and Goethe embodies the concerns of the generation defined by the legacies of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanual Kant, and the French Revolution." Comprehensive biography by Jane K. Brown, with pictures.
http://worldroots.com/brigitte/goethe1.htm
"Edgar Rice Burroughs was sitting in his rented office and waiting for his crack pencil sharpener salesmen to report in, supposedly their pockets bulging with orders. Besides waiting, one of Burroughs' duties was to verify the placement of advertisements for his sharpeners in various magazines. These were all-fiction 'pulp' magazines, a prime source of escapist reading material for the rapidly expanding middle class. Verifying the pencil sharpener ads didn't exactly take much time. The pencil sharpener salesmen never showed up, so Burroughs spent his idle time reading those pulp magazines. And an idea was born."
http://www.tarzan.org/official_biography_part1.html
"In THE OFFICE WIFE (1930), she would steal the scenes when she was dressing for work. Tame by today's standards, it was an erotic shot in the 30's. While Warner Brothers made Cagney a star, Joan never rose to that level. She generally played gold-diggers and happy-go-lucky girlfriends."
http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Hills/2440/blondell.html
"This movie is based on a true story. The names have been changed, etc. The film shows the positive role which the news media can play in even a partially free society. The movie was filmed as much as possible on location at actual settings in which the story occurred. Call Northside 777 has great acting, excellent direction, a good sound track and an uplifting, as well as true, story. "
http://endervidualism.com/agora/call_nside777_1948.htm
"This summer the Jamie Kane game, aimed at telling a story and attracting public attention, came into conflict with the Wikipedia game, theoretically aimed at presenting truths rather than fictions; it also laid bare a tension within the BBC game, which has departments devoted both to news and to entertainment. "
http://www.reason.com/links/links082905.shtml
"Other series expected to pull in high ratings on Adult Swim this fall include Fullmetal Alchemist and Neon Genesis Evangelion. The latter -- a dramatic series long adored by hard-core anime fans -- has been a hit on DVD for some time, but is only now heading to TV. "
http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,68665,00.html
"Taibbi is perhaps best known for covering the Kerry campaign dressed as a monkey, interviewing the former head of the Office of National Drug Policy in a Viking hat while on acid, and going undercover in the Bush 2004 campaign machine in Florida, where he became so immersed in the mobilization that he was practically running the Orlando office after a month."
http://toiletpaperonline.typepad.com/the_blog/2005/08/an_exclusive_in.html
"'We're supposed to be over there showing the Iraqis how to get it done, not acting just as dumb as they are with all their stupid dying,' Bush added. 'I tell you, it feels like every other month since I started this job, somebody gets himself killed just to mess up my holiday'."
http://www.theonion.com/content/node/40081
"Automakers started installing the stealth stoolies in 1996, ostensibly to research crashworthiness. Some people have howled privacy invasion. Others like tracking their teenager's whereabouts and, perhaps in the process, inuring them to our pandemic police state. Data readouts from wrecks have already been used in courtrooms to both convict and acquit alleged driving offenders."
http://www.freecannon.com/SnooperChips.htm
"Supporting the local economy doesn't just mean whatever it takes to create as many jobs as possible, but to ensure that the profits at the top of the economic chain also stay in town - that the owners are local residents."
http://independentcountry.blogspot.com/2005/08/self-interest-cooperation-and-common.html
"He claims, e.g., that the 'absoluteness of mathematical "truth" was disproved by Gödel's famous theorem in 1931' (p. 63). Not at all! The two theorems in Gödel's great paper do not show that mathematical truth is relative. They deal with consistency within a formal system adequate for arithmetic and with statements that can be neither proved nor disproved within such a system. Lukacs makes matters even worse when he refers to 'Gödel's revolutionary theorem about the inevitability of human preconceptions in mathematics.' (p. 75). In point of fact, Gödel was a Platonist about mathematical truth, though this view neither entails nor is entailed by his theorems."
http://www.mises.org/story/1900
"John Ioannidis, an epidemiologist at the University of Ioannina School of Medicine in Greece, says that small sample sizes, poor study design, researcher bias, and selective reporting and other problems combine to make most research findings false. But even large, well-designed studies are not always right, meaning that scientists and the public have to be wary of reported findings." Of course, this seems awfully similar to the liar's paradox. Skepticism of new findings is the nugget to carry away.
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7915
"The ideological argument for women-only shelters -- as opposed to the practical argument that, sometimes, such shelters just make sense -- is class guilt. The guilty class is 'male.' Class guilt does not allow an individual male to demonstrate his innocence because, simply by being a member of a class, he is guilty by definition."
http://www.ifeminists.net/introduction/editorials/2005/0831.html
"Whenever there's voluntary exchange, the only clear conclusion that a third party can make is that both parties, in their opinion, perceived themselves as better off as a result of the exchange; otherwise, they wouldn't have exchanged."
http://www.fff.org/freedom/fd0505e.asp
"[O]n the laundry list of insulting remarks is the accusation that practitioners offering these non-establishment therapies are unethically praying on the fears and desperation of sick patients and seducing them away from 'valid' treatments. To seasoned health freedom activists, this barrage of insults is nothing more than a way for 'Cancer Incorporated' to avoid talking about the failure of their industry to actually cure cancer, due, in part, to its out-and-out prejudice against any therapy that doesn’t burn, cut or poison, and, most of all, can't be patented."
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