Sept. 4 - 10, 2005

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Ender's Review
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Web articles of likely interest to individualists found during the preceding week.
 

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Political Liberty

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

A Time for Action: Focus on Sept. 24-26 days of protest

      by Justin Raimondo from Antiwar.com

"We are all familiar enough with our Republican war-birds, whose cries of 'invade!' and 'bombs away!' are heard on Fox News and the right-wing radio circuit on a daily basis. But there is another, and in many ways more formidable, branch office of the War Party embedded deep inside the Democratic Party, which lays claim to the mantle of liberalism (in the 20th century sense, not the 19th) and yet regularly worships at the temple of Ares, sitting in the pews right next to Rush Limbaugh and Bill Kristol."

http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=7202

Gun Rights Group Outraged that New Orleans Officials Confiscated Guns

      by Melanie Hunter from CNSNews.com

"A gun rights group is calling a decision by New Orleans officials to confiscate guns from law-abiding citizens 'simply outrageous.' Gun Owners of America challenged the mayor's authority to order the confiscations."

http://www.cnsnews.com/news/viewstory.asp?Page=%5CCulture%5Carchive%5C200509%5CCUL20050909b.html

Democracy can get noisy, unless you're at BayWalk

      by Robyn E. Blumner from St. Petersburg Times

"The night the Lightning won the Stanley Cup in 2004, downtown Tampa erupted in a cacophony of enthusiastic horn-blowing. Police were everywhere directing pedestrians, guiding cars, but not one officer I passed had any objection to the celebratory noise being made by fans leaning on their horns. Contrast that to the tickets given drivers who tap their car horns in support of the antiwar protesters at BayWalk in St. Petersburg."

http://www.sptimes.com/2005/09/04/Columns/Democracy_can_get_noi.shtml

Life in Amerika

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

Trapped in New Orleans -- First By the Floods, Then By Martial Law

      by Larry Bradshaw and Lorrie Beth Slonsky from CounterPunch

"In the pandemonium of having our camp raided and destroyed, we scattered once again. Reduced to a small group of eight people, in the dark, we sought refuge in an abandoned school bus, under the freeway on Cilo Street. We were hiding from possible criminal elements, but equally and definitely, we were hiding from the police and sheriffs with their martial law, curfew and shoot-to-kill policies." There are also stories about mutual aid in this article.

http://www.counterpunch.org/bradshaw09062005.html

Katrina and the End of Illusions: The storm passes -- or has it only just begun?

      by Justin Raimondo from Antiwar.com

"People are mad as hell, far too mad to take seriously the liberal -- and neoconservative -- guff about how Katrina shows we need more government, symbolized by a strong Giuliani-esque leader who can restore 'faith' in our 'institutions.' The age of faith in government -- and leaders -- is over, and a new era of skepticism is well underway. ... After dutifully wearing American flag lapel buttons during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, and serving as the government's megaphone since 9/11, the American media is rebelling -- and, as usual, they are reacting to a general sense of alienation from authority bubbling just beneath of the surface of American society."

http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=7173

Defenseless On the Bayou -- New Orleans gun confiscation is foolish and illegal

      by Dave Kopel from Reason

"The good gun-owning citizens of New Orleans and the surrounding areas ought to be thanked for helping to save some of their city after Mayor Nagin, incoherent and weeping, had fled to Baton Rouge. Yet instead these citizens are being victimized by a new round of home invasions and looting, these ones government-organized, for the purpose of firearms confiscation."

http://www.reason.com/hod/dk091005.shtml

Ordered Liberty without the State

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

Anarchism

      by Bill Kauffman from the New Pantagruel

"Yet echoes of native anarchism may be heard throughout American history: in the warnings of the Anti-Federalists about the centralizing thrust of the new Constitution; in the Garrisonian abolitionists who reviled any government that countenanced slavery; in the Populists of the 1890s, with their attacks on chartered corporations and paper wealth; in the Old Right of the 1930s, which saw the New Deal as potentially totalitarian; in the New Left of the 1960s, which denounced the military, the university, and the corporation as dehumanizing; and among contemporary libertarians, especially those influenced by the economist and anti-imperialist Murray N. Rothbard."

http://www.newpantagruel.com/issues/2.3/anarchism.php

Defining Anarchy

      by Mark Davis from Strike The Root

"Government failure is not anarchy. Anarchy is a society that functions without government control, a free society. Society can continue to function somewhat with limited government control, but that doesn't mean government control is required to have a society. "

http://www.strike-the-root.com/52/davis/davis4.html

Death From Government

      by Ron Beatty from The Libertarian Enterprise

"In my opinion, human survival demands that the state be curtailed, reduced, eliminated. Anything that exerts control in the manner which has been exhibited in the response to the current disaster is contra-survival, and in the long run, will cause more harm than good."

http://www.ncc-1776.com/tle2005/tle335-20050904-03.html

Spreading Decentralism

Articles demonstrating an increase in the dispersal of power.

A do-it-ourselves shelter shines

      by Kelly Brewington from ChicagoTribune.com

"All the while, they listened to radio reports of the calamity at the Superdome and the Convention Center. They heard that evacuees were dying and left to rot. There were reports of looting, gunshots, rapes, and no food or water. 'There was no way we were going down there, to be treated like that,' said Sarge. Life at the school seemed far more civilized."

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/bal-te.community07sep07,0,1220349,print.story

Command and control

      by Jesse Walker from The Perpetual Three-Dot Column

"The notion that at a time of a major disaster, someone could be at the top and straighten things out doesn't make a lot of sense, because one of the things lacking at a time of disaster is information. A lot of decentralized things need to be going on. In terms of prior planning and managing, you have to think of how lower levels will be involved."

http://jessewalker.blogspot.com/2005_09_04_jessewalker_archive.html#112610484485779381

The folly of empire

      by Vox Day from WorldNetDaily.com

"A few advocates of empire cite oil as a justification for establishing a new world order, but the very argument is a monstrous ethical transgression. The oil of the Middle East does not belong to us and no matter how much we might like to believe that cheap gasoline is a national birthright, it is not."

http://worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=46144

The New World Hegemon

Depictions of the coming Imperial power

U.S. the new Saddam

      by Eric Margolis from TorontoSun.com

"Mobile U.S. ground intervention forces will remain at the four major 'Fort Apache' bases guarding Iraq's major oil fields. These bases will be 'ceded' to the U.S. by a compliant Iraqi regime. The U.S. Air Force will police the Pax Americana with its precision-guided munitions and armed drones."

http://www.torontosun.com/News/Columnists/Margolis_Eric/2005/09/04/1201356.html

The Failure of States

      by Alvaro Vargas Llosa from The Independent Institute

"Foreign Policy is right to warn that '2 billion people live in insecure states'. However, it make's one's hair stand on end to hear the statement that world leaders, who once worried about who was amassing power, now worry 'about the absence of it'."

http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=1564

"Good Mornin' America, How Are Ya?"

      by L. Neil Smith from The Libertarian Enterprise

"FEMA is, in fact, the crown jewel and supreme exemplar for a management state mindset that regards human beings as mere dumb chattel, to be numbered, branded, and shuffled around like livestock. As I have said before, this mindset feels threatened at the slightest manifestation of individuality -- let alone of individualism -- around it."

http://www.ncc-1776.com/tle2005/tle335-20050904-02.html

Politics by Other Means

War, rumors of war, and politicians fomenting war.

Military Occupation in America and the Prospects for Liberty

      by Anthony Gregory from LewRockwell.com

"America is indeed at a crossroads. We do not yet know whether this disaster will lead to a revival in collectivist thinking or a new widespread disillusionment with the state. Somewhat ironically, our chances of surviving as a nation with any freedoms intact now rely on converting much of the left to our suspicion of government power at home as well as abroad. For the moment, the partisan elements on the right appear far too preoccupied with covering up the federal crimes in New Orleans and Iraq and calling for new ones to be terribly bothered by the quaint notion of individual liberty."

http://www.lewrockwell.com/gregory/gregory90.html

Nightmare in New Orleans

      by Jesse Walker from Reason

"There was one additional factor in Katrina that wasn't present in the other cases: what Quarantelli calls 'the worst mishandled disaster I've ever seen in my life, and I've been studying disasters since 1949.' The full story of what went wrong has yet to be uncovered, but it seems more and more clear that, far from working closely with volunteers and local authorities, the Department of Homeland Security -- the giant new bureaucracy that absorbed the Federal Emergency Management Agency in 2003 -- adopted a command-and-control approach that at times worked actively against the other responses."

http://www.reason.com/links/links090705.shtml

Katrina and 9/11: Criminal Incompetence

      by Alan Bock from Antiwar.com

"We are ruled by a perpetual adolescent, the second in a row answering that description to be president, fully as daft and divorced from reality as any of the crazy late Roman emperors. None of the departments tasked with doing what most Americans think government actually ought to do, like protecting the people from disasters foreign and domestic, is the least bit serious about what is supposed to be its job. They are all, whether in the Homeland Security sham or the 'intelligence community,' more interested in turf battles, protecting their secrets, and playing politics than in doing anything remotely serious."

http://www.antiwar.com/bock/?articleid=7210

Spontaneous Order

Articles showing decentralized successes.

The Reality of Markets

      by Russell Roberts from Library of Economics and Liberty

"Understanding the emergent phenomena economists call a market is the essence of the economic way of thinking. In contrast, the human brain seems more accustomed to what might be called the engineering way of thinking where human action and human design work together. "

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

Net beats Feds in hurricane response

      by Declan McCullagh from ZDNet

"The Internet is a modern-day example of spontaneous order--not centrally planned but arising impulsively, effectively built site-by-site, protocol-by-protocol by its own users. And it was the Internet, ham radio networks and other forums that let individuals spontaneously join together in the last week to help flood victims."

http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9588_22-5855081.html

Economic lunacy

      by Walter E. Williams from Townhall.com

"Would there have been even greater economic growth and job creation for our nation had Hurricane Katrina not only destroyed New Orleans, Mobile and Gulfport, but other major metropolitan areas along its path, like Cincinnati and Pittsburgh, as well? Would we consider it a godsend, in terms of jobs and economic growth, if a few more category 4 hurricanes hit our shores? Only a lunatic would answer these questions in the affirmative."

http://www.townhall.com/columnists/walterwilliams/ww20050907.shtml

Nonspontaneous Disorder

Articles showing centrally planned disasters.

No Thanks, Leviathan

      by Becky Akers from The Foundation for Economic Education (FEE)

"Anonymously arrogant bureaucrats had decided that the city was best evacuated. Providing food and water to people whose homes had been destroyed, who were searching for lost loved ones, who could not or did not want to leave would enable them to stay. We are not rational adults, capable of choosing our fates. That's why Leviathan does our thinking for us. And if some of its minions have determined our homes should be abandoned, it will prevent sustenance from reaching us, even though we good little citizens followed the orders of other minions."

http://www.fee.org/vnews.php?nid=7176

When the Catastrophe Is Government

      by Radley Balko from FOXNews.com

"[O]ne can only hope that the negligent politicians will be punished at the ballot box. But more fundamentally, we need to recognize that this is not so much a failure of individuals as it was a fundamental failure of government -- at its most basic and important responsibility, no less. The last time government failed on so large a scale, we reinvigorated our trust in that same government to protect us. We do so again at our peril."

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,168732,00.html

America's Underclass

      by Jim Davies from Strike The Root

"A lack of self-sufficiency is clearly the key. ... Apparently, its [the underclass] members didn't think to ask; the need to take care of themselves had been drowned out too long ago, by the government-induced culture of dependency and welfare. That process has a long history. Here is how it happened, and how it's continuing today."

http://www.strike-the-root.com/52/davies/davies3.html

War Is The Health Of The State

War is the ultimate State intervention in society.

Establishment Liberalism, the War Urge and the Hunched Figure of Randolph Bourne

      by Stephen Bender from LewRockwell.com

"As long as the effective managers, the 'big men' in the staple industries remain loyal, nobody need care what the millions of little human cogs who had to earn their living felt or thought... The government of a modern organized plutocracy does not have to ask whether the people want to fight or understand what they are fighting for, but only whether they will tolerate fighting. America does not cooperate with the President's designs. She rather feebly acquiesces. But that feeble acquiescence is the all-important factor. We are learning that war doesn't need enthusiasm, doesn't need conviction, doesn't need hope, to sustain it. Once maneuvered, it takes care of itself, provided only that our industrial rulers see that the end of the war will leave American capital in a strategic position for world-enterprise."

http://www.lewrockwell.com/bender/bender16.html

Lady Katrina, Bearer of Hard Truths

      by Szechuan Death from Strike The Root

"Lady Katrina--hateful, murderous bitch though she was--has given us many truths in her passage. Those truths are ugly. They were also expensive. Make damn sure, then, that every time you speak on this subject, those truths are driven home, not wasted. Do not permit the facts surrounding this disaster to be spun into a State triumph or 'disappeared' into the Memory Hole, as has happened with so many other State failures of our time."

http://www.strike-the-root.com/52/death/death2.html

Bush Cronies to Mop Up Katrina

      from Wired News

"Companies with ties to the Bush White House and the former head of FEMA are clinching some of the administration's first disaster relief and reconstruction contracts in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. At least two major corporate clients of lobbyist Joe Allbaugh, President George W. Bush's former campaign manager and a former head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, have already been tapped to start recovery work along the battered Gulf Coast. One is Shaw Group and the other is Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown and Root. Vice President Dick Cheney is a former head of Halliburton."

http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,68829,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_2

Bits of History

The Past seen with a fresh look.

Mises the Revolutionary

      by Ralph Raico from Ludwig von Mises Institute

"Decade after decade he fought militarism, protectionism, inflationism, every variety of socialism, and every policy of the interventionist state, and through most of that time he stood alone, or close to it. The totality and enduring intensity of Mises's battle could only be fueled from a profound inner sense of the truth and supreme value of the ideas for which he was struggling."

http://www.mises.org/story/1896

Meet the Wobblies

      by Wally Conger from out of step

"There's no better time than Labor Day to take an educational field trip to the website of the Industrial Workers of the World."

http://wconger.blogspot.com/2005/09/meet-wobblies.html

Native ingenuity

      by Charles C. Mann from The Boston Globe

"A few years before Pizarro arrived, smallpox--introduced from Europe via Mexico--swept the Inca realm, killing the emperor, his chosen heir, much of the court and the military leadership, and as many as one out of three inhabitants of the empire. The vacancy at the top led to a ruinous, multi-year civil war that killed thousands more. ... Germs, not guns or steel, conquered the Inca."

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2005/09/04/native_ingenuity/?page=full

War and Peace

Articles showing the nature of War.

Spear Led to Era of Early-Human Peace, Expert Says

      by Hillary Mayell from National Geographic News

"The ability to kill from a distance and the use of ambush tactics significantly affected border interactions. The size of a group was no longer a guarantee of success, and the potential of being seriously wounded or killed increased. Kelly believes the change in circumstances forced early humans to come up with new ways to resolve conflicts and to maintain friendly relations. ... [T]oday's guerrilla wars and terrorism -- as opposed to 'traditional' wars such as World War II -- are 'a return to "normal human behavior".' "

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/09/0906_050906_spears.html

The Tipping Point On Iraq

      by Robert Dreyfuss from TomPaine.com

"With the last shreds of Bush's credibility as president blown away by Katrina, expect momentum against the president to grow with each further U.S. casualty in Iraq and with piece of bad news about the faltering political process there. During September, the newly muscled anti-war movement will stage rallies, lobby days, and demonstrations in Washington...."

http://www.tompaine.com/articles/20050906/the_tipping_point_on_iraq.php

Labored Relations

      by Matt Hutaff from The Simon

"We celebrate it by taking labor back for the average American. Demand the billions wasted frivolously on Iraq put back into this country. In New Orleans, workers actively trying to preserve a city with a rich cultural heritage were flat-out refused public funds to keep storms like Katrina from the destruction we are witnessing today. Those funds were subsequently used to wage war abroad."

http://www.thesimon.com/magazine/articles/canon_fodder/0951_labored_relations.html

Great Individuals In History

Some people stand out from the crowd.

Anarchist thinker - Paul Goodman : Sept. 9, 1911

      by John Fitzgerald from Anarchy Archives (of Pitzer College)

"Soon the rest of society began to catch up to him as young people began to rebel against the excessive conventionality of the fifties. He was well placed to address the anti-institutional critique which emerged at this time and led to massive change in the years to come. By the mid-sixties he was adopted as sort of an uncle of the youth/student movement, wrote a book a year, and made almost constant campus appearances. His contribution was scholarly yet personal, classical yet revolutionary, and thoroughly natural and anti-institutional." There is a new entry in the Classics section for Paul Goodman.

http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/bright/goodman/goodman-bio.html

Singer - Patsy Cline : Sept. 8, 1932

      From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"Though she began her career recording rockabilly, it became clear that Cline's voice was best suited for pop/country crossover tunes. Some signature songs are 'Crazy' (written by Willie Nelson but forever linked to Cline), 'She's Got You,' 'I Fall To Pieces', and Don Gibson's, 'Sweet Dreams'."

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

Singer/songwriter/businessman Otis Redding, Jr. : Sept. 9, 1941

      from OtisRedding.com

"It was his international songs, all composed, written, and arranged by Redding, that lead to his commercial success. Three of his compositions alone accounted for over three and one half million record sales. Today, his songs are being recorded by persons in various fields of music, including country, jazz, and pop."

http://www.otisredding.com/biography.html

Culcha'

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

The Story of Louis Pasteur (1936)

      Reviewed by Tom Ender from Endervidualism

"There still are important inventors, medical researchers, scientists and other innovators in today's world, but seldom are movies made about them. In the thirties through the fifties such films were much more common. This is one of the best of that genre."

http://endervidualism.com/agora/louis_pasteur_1936.htm

TSHTF

      by Scott Bieser from The Time Sink

Two frame cartoon, not humor

http://thetimesink.blogspot.com/2005/09/tshtf.html

This Old Porn Is New Again

      by Regina Lynn from Wired News

"These women have breasts, bellies and hips. They have body hair. Some are skinny, some are fat, most are somewhere in between. And they're beautiful. They pose nude or in skivvies, alone and in groups, as pinups and in hard-core activities that prove the internet generation didn't invent kink -- our great-grandparents did." Adult topic with marked links to adult material.

http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,68790,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_3

The lighter side

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

God Outdoes Terrorists Yet Again

      from The Onion

"Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld … noted that it would take months to transfer any equipment from Iraq to New Orleans, saying, 'You fight a national disaster with the equipment you have'."

http://www.theonion.com/content/node/40305/1

Daily Show: Headlines - Hurricane Aftermath

      by Jon Stewart from The Daily Show

Cheney visits New Orleans and samples public response ("bleeped"). (link is to media player video with audio)

http://www.comedycentral.com/sitewide/media_player/play.jhtml?itemId=17929

The War on Weather

      by Tom Tomorrow from The Village Voice

"You're either with us--or you're with the weather."

http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0536,tomorrow,67637,9.html

Deep Thought

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

Insanity, the Job Culture, and Freedom

      by Claire Wolfe from Loompanics Unlimited

"This is not the way human beings evolved to live. This is a new and artificial lifestyle gradually imposed over the last couple of centuries -- imposed for the sake of institutions, rather than individuals. We've gotten so used to it that we take it for granted. Then we wonder why we're so stressed, so plagued by low-level health complaints, and why the non-job parts of our life tend to suffer so much." Excellent !!!

http://www.loompanics.com/Articles/insanityjobculture.html

The Deadly Legacy of the Welfare State Lies in New Orleans

      by Jacob G. Hornberger from The Future of Freedom Foundation

"Leftists have it wrong and, for that matter, so do conservatives. The answer to what happened to poverty-stricken African Americans in New Orleans is not to expand the welfare state or, as conservatives maintain, to reform it. What this country needs is a good political revolution, one in which the poor people of this nation demand -- yes, demand -- the abolition of all welfare-state programs and the taxes that fund them."

http://www.fff.org/comment/com0509a.asp

The Economics of Self-Ownership

      by Michael S. Rozeff from Ludwig von Mises Institute

"To have self-ownership is to be able to make one's own choices in all spheres of one's life. Self-ownership amounts to an undiluted right to one's life and the liberty to pursue one's happiness. If one has complete self-ownership, then one is not being aggressed upon. And if one (or one's property) is not being aggressed upon, then one is free to pursue one's own interests and one owns oneself."

http://www.mises.org/story/1895

Miscellany

Articles not easily classified

Paternity Case Marks Progress for Defrauded Fathers

      by Wendy McElroy from ifeminists.com

"The plaintiff discovered he was not the biological father of his eldest 'son', now in his 30s. The court affirmed the duped dad's legal right to sue the natural father for the cost of raising the 'child' and removed some limitations imposed by a lower court."

http://www.ifeminists.net/introduction/editorials/2005/0907.html

Blame

      by Elizabeth C. Gyllensvard from LewRockwell.com

"I look at the devastation of Katrina as a natural disaster the effects of which were exacerbated by poverty, human error, concentration of money & power in DC and the US Army Corps of Engineers. Yes, indeed, the well-meaning, tax payer-funded and property developer-serving Corps.... I do not 'blame' George W. Bush as he is a hapless fool. Bush may not be 'blamable.' But, sure as heck, Bush is the one who must be held accountable."

http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig6/gyllensvard1.html

Epilogue

      by Matthew Bryan from Freedom Is Free

"Those people who couldn't get out were there for a reason. Because they were subsidized for being there. It's as much their fault as the government's. That doesn't mean I don't feel compassion for them. Especially those who were trying to help themselves and were not allowed to leave, so the authorities could delude themselves with their visions of 'order'."

http://freefreedomtoldhere.blogspot.com/2005/09/epilogue.html

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