Table of Contents:
If you encounter any difficulty using this document please let me know as soon as you notice. Contact information is at the bottom of this page.
I am happy to receive addresses of potential readers of Ender's Review who might like to receive a few trial issues and/or an invitation to subscribe. Or, if you prefer, please, send a link to this page or the index (which also has comprehensive source site links) to those you think might be interested.
Find all RSS feeds & e-mail lists on the Sign Up page –
or use this RSS feed for Ender's Review
"If you believe that forbidding Americans to hire Mexicans will help our economy, then surely it would help to forbid the people of New Hampshire from hiring immigrants seeking tax asylum from Taxachussets. Refugees from New Orleans should be forbidden to work or live in Houston. In fact, everyone should just stay in their father’s village and follow his trade." Humorous and insightful !
http://www.lewrockwell.com/walker/walker19.html
"The depth and steadfastness of the reporting by Nicholas Kristof, Dana Priest, James Risen, Eric Lichtblau and the other newspaper journalists honored with Pulitzers this year -- let alone the many others who disinfect, with sunlight, corruption and inhumanity in towns and cities throughout this country -- take a lot of time, and support from publishers and editors."
"The film starts with some fairly good historical background about the Federal Reserve Board -- which, we are informed in suitably breathless tones, is a private corporation owned by private bankers who make up fiat money out of thin air and loan it to the U.S. government at interest, with the inflationary result that (while the dollar held its value and even appreciated from 1789 to 1932) a dollar today buys what four pennies would have bought in 1930."
http://www.reviewjournal.com/lvrj_home/2006/Apr-30-Sun-2006/opinion/6704537.html
"This brings me to my own modest proposal for 'immigration reform.' Rather than petition the state and the political classes to 'sort it all out' for the rest of us, how about they just butt out of the issue altogether? Furthermore, how about they butt out of everything altogether?"
http://www.strike-the-root.com/61/kaercher/kaercher4.html
"It was Colbert's crowning moment. His imitation of the quintessential GOP talking head -- Bill O'Reilly meets Scott McClellan -- uncovered the inner workings of the ever-cheapening discourse that passes for political debate. He reversed and flattened the meaning of the words he spoke." One ad viewing gives a daily pass access to the site for non-Salon subscribers.
http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2006/05/01/colbert/index.html
"Practically from the start, the oil industry has been coddled, cartelized, and subsidized by state and federal governments. Taxes and regulations tend to favor incumbent firms over challengers. Road and interstate-highway construction financed by the politicized gasoline tax rather than by market transactions, and built with eminent domain, have externalized costs and perhaps subsidized users of gasoline-powered vehicles."
http://www.fff.org/comment/com0605a.asp
"Bush also suggested that putting National Guard troops under federal, rather than state, control might be one part of a response to the 'catastrophe' of an avian influenza outbreak. The president raised the same idea after Hurricane Katrina, suggesting that he is considering a greater role for the military in natural disasters."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/04/AR2005100400681.html
"To more fully understand the absurdity of this system, imagine for a moment that well-intentioned government authorities want to make sure that every child has enough to eat, that no child gets 'left behind' when it comes to food. To insure this goal, local governments across the country take control of all supermarkets and grocery stores in your town."
http://www.newswithviews.com/Turtel/joel14.htm
"Because of its inherently coercive nature, the state will always function, in fact, as the principal, whose paramount interests preempt those for whom it pretends to function as an agent. But to constantly remind the statists of the lie upon which they presume their authority, may serve -- like private gun ownership -- to remind both rulers and the ruled of latent powers within men and women, that may reach a critical mass should the state over-extend itself."
http://www.lewrockwell.com/shaffer/shaffer136.html
"I began to think of the state in these terms as a social construct used to control people, or more interestingly used to convince people to control themselves. If I wanted to control people by brute force, I need not trouble with the fiction of the state, but if I wanted to reduce my costs and increase voluntary compliance, the more 'legitimacy' I can muster by use of the concept of the state, the better for me."
http://emergencybackupdog.blogspot.com/2006/05/recipe-for-making-anarchist-one-part.html
"We would all do well to possess at least a small measure of anarchism. Leo Tolstoy, Mohandas Gandhi, Watchman Nee, George Orwell, Dwight Macdonald, and Dorothy Day can teach us something valuable. This is not to say that we should never enlist in political campaigns at whatever level. But when working within either major party, we should be realistic about our hopes."
http://www.counterpunch.org/taylor05062006.html
"Libertarians ... understand that the State should not be trusted with our guns, our money, our children to educate them, our speech ... yet the State suddenly becomes a benevolent granter of all that is holy when it comes to dealing with Illegal Immigration?"
http://enemy-of-the-state.blogspot.com/2006/04/state-engages-in-legalized-kidnapping.html
"Lying on the ground in April. In shirt sleeves. ... But here in the Desert Hermitage the ground is deliciously warm and dry. I watched a whisp of cloud drift overhead then dissipate. I thought about Profound Things -- thoughts that escaped my mind the instant they'd been thought, drifting and dissipating like a lonely little desert cloud."
http://www.backwoodshome.com/columns/wolfe060501.html
"I found it encouraging to note in the Washington Times that just as their predecessors did not shirk from providing children with an academic option, modern homeschoolers are beginning to work together to offer their children sporting options as well...."
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=49995
"It's better to force the smoking nazis to work community by community, state by state, then to allow them to launch a national War on Tobacco. I'd rather see busybodies harass one church in a small town, then see them run for Congress and use their power to harass the rest of us as well. It's better to have one village ban pit bulls for no particular reason, than to allow the federal government to tell us what we can or can't have as pets."
http://www.partialobserver.com/article.cfm?id=1830
"We create zones of uncertainty and let people wander within them freely, letting people take their own path. The hope is that they will imagine the store's food as their own, and then make that come true. The olive bar is a case in point: it not only lives on the fence; by being so beautifully displayed, it suggests a home environment, and has thus spawned antipasto parties all over town."
http://www.lewrockwell.com/tucker/tucker66.html
"In five and a half years he has vetoed no bills. Yet he claims the power to ignore any and all provisions of bills passed by Congress, thus giving himself, de facto, the line-item veto, but without an opportunity for Congress to override it. In several cases he has negotiated compromises in a bill in order win passage, only to say later in a 'signing letter' that he has no intention of enforcing those sections."
http://sheldonfreeassociation.blogspot.com/2006/05/frightening-unitary-executive-doctrine.html
"Pints of beer, currently spared from this process, will sooner or later suffer the same fate, and the words 'litre and half-litre, that’s all we serve' will eventually be heard in the proletarian alehouses of England. Those who thought this episode was trivial were like those who do not connect clouds with rain. For in the years that have followed, it has become clear that a deep and worrying change is taking place in the laws and police forces of England."
http://amconmag.com/2006/2006_05_08/article.html
"The Pentagon says the prisoners to be released no longer represent a threat to the U.S. and have no further intelligence value. But critics of the George W. Bush administration's detention policies assert that the military does not have enough evidence on these people to try them, even before its own tribunals, which have a much lower threshold of evidence than U.S. courts. "
http://www.antiwar.com/ips/fisher.php?articleid=8933
"He doesn't know why he was brought to Guantanamo Bay. He had hoped he would be freed at his military hearing in December 2004. Instead, he was accused of associating with the Taliban and of funneling money to anti-coalition insurgents. When he asked for evidence, he was told it was classified. And so he sits in prison, far from his wife and three children."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/29/AR2006042900145_pf.html
"An effort to pull off a self-styled 'denim revolution' in Belarus failed miserably, in part on account of the disunity (and sheer dizziness) of the 'democratic' opposition, but mostly because Eastern Europeans are wising up to the Americans' game. Having only just recently left one Warsaw Pact, they are no longer quite so eager to join another."
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=8942
"My heart skipped a beat at the USA Today headline: '"Abolish" FEMA, says bipartisan Senate panel.' Yes! But I should have remembered that this is the Senate, after all. Leviathan is hardly altruistic enough to advise amputating its limbs, and the story's finer print revealed the truth. The Senate merely wants to replace FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) with -- no surprise here -- 'a powerful new organization'."
http://www.fee.org/in_brief/default.asp?id=445
"We are law abiding citizens in an outlaw nation. For three years now we have taken to the streets to protest the war and the occupation. Yet our protests have become steadily smaller, less focused, more anemic and ineffectual. Hence, one could not be faulted for wondering whether they are organized by the Bush administration to allow us to blow off steam."
http://www.counterpunch.org/cantor05062006.html
"Mexico's president, Vicente Fox, has succumbed to pressure from Washington and refused to sign the reform measure on illegal drugs that the Mexican congress had passed. That legislation would have decriminalized the possession of small quantities of illegal drugs. Mexico seemed poised to join the ranks of the Netherlands and a few other countries that have abandoned the zero-tolerance model embraced by the United States."
http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=6386
"Skating on the floor of the roller rink is an example of what Friedrich Hayek called spontaneous order. The process is beneficial and orderly, but also spontaneous. No one plans or directs the overall order. Decision making is left to the individual skater. It is decentralized."
http://www.econlib.org/library/Columns/y2006/Kleinorder.html
"Jacobs believed the most organic and healthy communities are diverse, messy and arise out of spontaneous order, not from a scheme that tries to dictate how people should live and how neighborhoods should look."
http://www.opinionjournal.com/la/?id=110008319
"I am using the remaining months I have on the school board to try to make a change. No, I am not expecting improvements in the current system, none have happened thus far. Instead I am working for a revolutionary change, one that takes us back to the private system of education that was the primary education-delivery structure at the time of the Revolution; revolutionary indeed."
http://www.mises.org/story/2126
"About 90% of Americans think organ donation is a good thing, but only about 40% are registered organ donors. Why does this big gap exist? It's because we've been asking people to agree to have their bodies cut into pieces when they die -- not a pleasant thing to think about -- without giving them anything in return. Federal law prohibits using money to motivate organ donation, but there are other ways to reward organ donors without using money. We can reduce the organ shortage by putting registered organ donors at the front of the transplant waiting list."
http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/viewArticle.asp?articleID=9006
"If you eliminate the tax, and consumers start to see the difference, it can be very difficult to boost those taxes once again. The politicians might find themselves in a position of having to keep the tax low in perpetuity. This is why government has a principle: never ever, under any circumstances, abolish a tax unless your life depends on it. You might find that you can never get it back again."
http://www.mises.org/story/2169
"Though it may be given with the best intentions, government agencies simply cannot do the kind of job that private charities do in actually helping people in need. Government-to-government assistance seldom helps those really in need. First, because it comes from governments, it usually has political strings attached to it, and as such is really a cover for political interventionism."
http://www.antiwar.com/paul/?articleid=8926
"How do we know which scientists, studies, and organizations we should trust to tell us what should and shouldn't be taxed? The scientific community has been notoriously schizophrenic about its dietary recommendations, pretty much for as long as there has been a 'scientific community.' Many Americans trust government agencies like NIH, the USDA, or the CDC to sift through the data and come to the right conclusions. But government agencies are beset by competing interests, public choice failings, poor incentives, and internal politics."
http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=050506F
"Republicans used to bill themselves as the party of limited government. No one takes that claim seriously anymore. If the party has lost its compass, then what is guiding the GOP? It's an answer that only a Democrat could love. Grassley's efforts to shut down specialty hospitals undermine market competition. But that works out for the big hospitals that would otherwise lose business."
http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=6380
"A coalition of liberal internationalists, opportunistic politicians of both parties, and the usual neocon suspects have banded together to lure us into yet another quagmire, this one in Africa. This new crusade is so imbued with the aura of humanitarian uplift that anyone who questions the wisdom of intervening in a complicated and obscure civil war will be denounced as a 'racist' who doesn't give a hoot about Africa. ... It is a recipe for endless trouble, increasing expenditures, and eventual bankruptcy, moral as well as financial. Because, in the end, we'll discover that the whole thing was cooked up by disparate interests with hidden agendas, in order to profit financially or politically. The truth will come out: it always does."
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=8922
"Perhaps most ominously, the plan makes copious preparations for expanding the range of the war on terror even further. The trigger for these new actions is another terrorist strike on U.S. soil. Oddly enough, the Bush faction views such an unspeakable horror as an 'opportunity,' Pentagon officials told the Post; it would provide a 'justification,' they said, for hitting already-targeted individuals, groups and states that for various political reasons have not yet been subjected to what Bush likes to call, in his bloodthirsty parlance, 'the path of action'."
http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig7/floyd2.html
"As the madness of Bush's plan becomes more apparent to more people, none of us have the power or guts or assumed authority to swing at him on a rope and kick him off his pedestal, as per Nightwing in Infinite Crisis. If we have a long post-Bush future, he'll live in it, and no matter how hated he is by how many in 2009, past experience with ex-presidents shows he'll be warmly embraced and meet an eventual demise followed by heaps of honors, some sincere, some not."
http://www.reason.com/links/links050506.shtml
"Once Saddam had been captured in December of '03, some months after 'major combat operations had ended,' as announced by Dubya on the flight deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln, a new villain had to be created when the insurgency refused to roll over and play dead for the conquering hero. Materializing out of nowhere to head the insurgency and cut off a few heads was none other than, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi."
http://www.thepriceofliberty.org/06/05/01/gaddy.htm
"The problem with American conservatism is that it hates the left more than the state, loves the past more than liberty, feels a greater attachment to nationalism than to the idea of self-determination, believes brute force is the answer to all social problems, and thinks it is better to impose truth rather than risk losing one's soul to heresy. It has never understood the idea of freedom as a self-ordering principle of society. It has never seen the state as the enemy of what conservatives purport to favor."
http://www.mises.org/story/2143
"Ms. Jacobs was an advocate for cities, for restoring the life to them and making them into vibrant, livable places. But she was primarily an advocate for the ability of individuals rather than central planners to make decisions about their own lives. Great cities do not come from above, but are built at the street level, by the people who live in the neighborhoods."
"The decisive military defeat of Germany, however, made possible the vindictive Treaty of Versailles in 1919. Wilson evidently thought that he would be able to achieve his vision of a democratic world free from warfare. Instead, the Treaty, with its harsh terms, led to seething discontent in Germany and virtually guaranteed the rise of a demagogic leader. Adolf Hitler filled that role perfectly. Even though Woodrow Wilson was long dead, we might well conclude that World War II was actually his war."
http://www.fff.org/freedom/fd0601g.asp
"Americans are now, as we were then, split to the core on matters of war and peace, life and death, and cultural values. The President's Commission concluded it was 'the most divisive time in American history since the civil war'."
"What follows is a brief look at eight controversies; each brief look could easily be expanded to a major column, but time does not permit. How does any of this relate to issues of war and peace? Read on."
http://www.antiwar.com/henderson/?articleid=8919
"Although the Reagan administration spawned the current Bushites, or 'neo-cons,' the pattern was set earlier. In Vietnam, death squads trained, armed and directed by the CIA murdered up to 50,000 people in Operation Phoenix. In the mid-1960s, in Indonesia, CIA officers compiled 'death lists' for General Suharto's killing spree during his seizure of power. After the 2003 invasion, it was only a matter of time before this venerable 'policy' was applied in Iraq."
http://www.lewrockwell.com/pilger/pilger41.html
"Nuclear powers, such as the United States and Israel, are hypocritical in denying other countries this ultimate guarantor of national security. Besides, the United States, with thousands of nuclear warheads, could easily deter an Iranian nuclear attack with only a few warheads. The United States deterred other radical rogue regimes when they obtained nuclear weapons, including the Soviet Union in the late 1940s and Maoist China in the mid-1960s."
http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=1713
"Managing China's arrival as the world's second superpower will demand consummate diplomatic skills. The United States must devise ways of living with China's economic competition, surging demand for resources, and inevitable growing geopolitical influence in Asia and the western Pacific while avoiding confrontation. Two highly nationalistic, muscular, and assertive great powers must somehow learn to co-exist."
http://www.ericmargolis.com/archives/2006/05/bull_in_a_china.php
"Sometimes known as 'the prince of mathematicians', Gauss had a remarkable influence in many fields of mathematics and science and is ranked beside Euler, Newton and Archimedes as one of history's greatest mathematicians."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Friedrich_Gauss
"His swashbuckler roles were among some of the best, and he is most closely identified by them -- Mark of Zorro, The Black Swan, Prince of Foxes, The Black Rose, and Captain from Castile."
http://www.tyrone-power.com/biography_ty.html
"During 1936 while in college, Williams kept lowering his track times and reached his peak at the NCAA championships, setting a world 400-meter record of 46.1. His time was set in the preliminaries and he also prevailed in the final for a 47.0 victory. He followed that up with a first in the Olympic Trials, then went to Berlin and won the Olympic gold medal in the 400." Along with Jesse Owens (and others too), Mr. Williams helped to deflate Hitler's "aryan supremacy" at the 1936 Berlin Olympics.
http://www.aaregistry.com/african_american_history/1712/Athlete_and_educator_Archie_Williams
"For Jacobs, change was the very essence of city life. One cannot seek through public policy to 'freeze conditions and uses as they stand. That would be death,' she wrote in Death and Life. Indeed, her great trilogy of works on cities--The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), The Economy of Cities (1969) and Cities and the Wealth of Nations (1984)--are a plea for us to understand the dynamism, crucial to human progress, that arises in cities relatively unfettered by government."
http://www.city-journal.org/html/eon2006-04-27hh.html
Marionette based action/adventure parody written by Trey Parker and Matt Stone; and directed Trey Parker. "Some people often encapsulate this movie by summing it up as 'puppet sex.' Well, yes, it does have that. ... However, the movie offers so much more. Team America qualifies as a full blown political intrigue action adventure film, with one caveat: no actual ‘name’ actors. All the action involves marionettes operated by a large crew of puppeteers, with the character’s voices provided mainly by Parker and Stone." -- New Movie Review look/format
http://endervidualism.com/agora/team_america_2004.htm
"Watching Colbert, I thought about how H L Mencken must have felt at the Scopes Monkey Trial where he narrowly escaped a mob-lynching at the hands of those fundamentalists he ridiculed so scathingly. Mencken, who posted Scopes' bail and shaped the legal strategy in his living room, acknowledged that their defeat to whom he called 'evangelist mountebanks' was 'a tragedy in a way but I might add it was not a tragedy to me I enjoyed it tremendously.' Colbert knows better than anybody the tragedy he satirizes so eerily well. But because he enjoys it so tremendously, he helps us find some joy in it, too." I think more highly of Jon Stewart than this writer from my area, but it's still a good piece about a major American cultural event.
http://www.counterpunch.org/dols05042006.html
"Our original object was simply to have a little pointless fun that we could eventually share with readers. Gradually, however, because of the sort of twisted, demented, perverted individuals we are, a Theme began to struggle up out of the primordial muck, much like early life arising on the planet, despite our most strenuous efforts to prevent it. It is simply this: while each and every one of us is responsible for his or her own life, and you cannot properly blame whatever personal shortcomings you may have on the society around you, it's undeniably easier to be a decent human being if you live in a decent society. "
http://www.ncc-1776.org/tle2006/tle365-20060430-02.html
"Testing .. Testing ... Is this on? Oh! Hello - Here is a little four-minute preview of what lies ahead in B.W. Richardson's 'The Imaginary Bomb.' Watch this space for more teasers and, starting May 15, our first podcast novel together!."
http://imaginarybomb.libsyn.com/index.php?post_id=85645
Even if you don't care for Stephen Colbert's usual comedy you should still see this. If you like Stephen Colbert, I believe his performance here may be some of his best work so far. Great stuff! The Colbert Report at Comedy Central offers the "press secretary audition tape." If you'd rather read the entire talk, which had this video embedded in the middle, here's a transcript of Colbert's portion. Google video has the entire dinner (more than an hour and a half) which was broadcast on C-Span. Colbert was the last to speak. The link below from Google Video and C-Span offers only Stephen Colbert's portion of the event (a bit less than 25 minutes).
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-869183917758574879
Parody: Follies Student Comedy Revue ! (music video)
http://www0.gsb.columbia.edu/everybreath/
"As gas supply goes down and demand goes up, the two factors combine to go up your a**." Werewolves? Could be.
http://www.comedycentral.com/sitewide/media_player/play.jhtml?itemId=63667
"Officials at the Kennedy Space Center announced Tuesday that they have set Aug. 6 as the date for launching $700 million from the Denarius IV spacecraft, the largest and most expensive mission to date in NASA's unmanned monetary-ejection program."
http://www.theonion.com/content/node/47977
"There are all sorts of interests vying for control of your computer. There are media companies that want to control what you can do with the music and videos they sell you. There are companies that use software as a conduit to collect marketing information, deliver advertising or do whatever it is their real owners require. And there are software companies that are trying to make money by pleasing not only their customers, but other companies they ally themselves with. All these companies want to own your computer."
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/05/who_owns_your_c.html
"One of the best things about my mom is that she wasn't always serious with me. Whenever she was suitably inspired, she'd just get silly and would answer my questions with the most ridiculous assertions or explanations. That taught me to carefully evaluate pretty much everything someone told me."
http://www.sunnimaravillosa.com/archives/00000702.html
"At best, democracy means that government has popular support. But popular support is no guarantee that government will protect your freedom. In a democracy, if most voters support freedom of speech, press, religion, association, and enterprise, their elected government will probably respect such freedoms. But if voters prefer that governments impose a welfare state and confiscatory taxes, ban unapproved drugs, impose censorship, imprison critics, seize the property of unpopular groups, torture prisoners, and draft the young, a democratic government will probably grant those wishes also."
http://www.fff.org/freedom/fd0601e.asp
"The paternalist takes the view that social insurance must be compulsory, for workers would otherwise not insure themselves. This is a vast topic that offers no simple answers except possibly the moral one that it is wrong to deprive workers of the freedom to spend their wages as they choose."
http://www.econlib.org/library/Columns/y2006/Jasaypaternalism.html
"The happiest people in the word are those who are doing what they enjoy. ... Once a simple lifestyle is chosen, a budget can be constructed. The possibilities leap out at you once you realize that a large nest egg is not required. The key is simply having sufficient cash flow to support your chosen lifestyle. How you achieve this is up to you. ... Some people handle retirement much better than others, but timely preparation can ease the transition. Those who wait until the last minute to determine what they will do after retiring often do not fare very well."
http://www.strike-the-root.com/61/blow/blow17.html
"I am not an authority on Mexican education and cannot say whether hers is typical of urban Mexican schools. Nor do I know enough about American middle schools in general to make comparisons. The following are scans of pages from her texts of mathematics and biology accompanied by a few observations. I found them interesting. The translations are mine. Please excuse the sloppy scans and slow loads."
http://www.fredoneverything.net/MexText.shtml
"[T]he rate of false reports is roughly between 20 (if DNA excludes an accused) to 40 percent (if inconclusive DNA is added). The relatively low estimate of 25 to 26 percent is probably accurate, especially since it is supported by other sources."
http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=1719
"'My Pa's smarter'n your Pa.' 'Oh yeah, prove it.' 'You say Bigfoot don't exist? Prove it!' We've all heard arguments like these. The first one places the burden of proof on the one who makes the assertion. It's called Logic 101. Western jurisprudence is based on the premise that a person is innocent unless someone can prove him guilty. The second is an argument from irrationality, which demands that a person perform the logical impossibility of proving a negative. The second argument is winning."
Find all RSS feeds & e-mail lists on the Sign Up page –
or use this RSS feed for Ender's Review
Each week immediately after Ender's Review is posted at Endervidualism a small plain text note (~5K) containing a few links to the web edition is sent to ERevNote subscribers.
If you know of prospective readers, please send them a link to this page, or alternately if you don't wish to e-mail them yourself, you can e-mail their addresses to me at this address: Tom@Endervidualism.com and I will send them a message with a link to the latest issue and invite them to subscribe.
Comments suggestions and discussion on the content and structure of this review are welcome at the ERevD: EnderReviewDiscussion Yahoo group. Feel free to jump in there at any time.
Alternately, you may elect to receive a copy of an HTML e-mail object (50 - 90K). Archives of the HTML e-mail are available to EnderReview members. You may join that group or subscribe to its mailing list.