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"Is the effort to roll back the power of the state doomed? Let's hope not. One way to find out is to reinvigorate the pitch for freedom and to make sure that young people encounter it. Our case has many parts, but one that deserves extra emphasis is the relationship between freedom and responsibility. To some people freedom is scary because responsibility is scary. Many more people might be for freedom if they could slough off any unpleasant consequences. But that's not how it works. A political environment that saves us from self-responsibility will necessarily save us from freedom too. As it used to be with love and marriage, freedom and responsibility go together like a horse and carriage. I can imagine circumstances where we have responsibility without freedom, but not the other way around. Better to have both than neither."
http://www.fee.org/in_brief/default.asp?id=490
"I do not care a hoot who invented it. For all we know, it fell out of a Pentagon DOD window, onto the head of a fifteen-year-old computer geek who ran with it. What I care about is what it has become: A free and open avenue of communication. What matters is that it is ours now: Ours, all of us with access to it. And even those who don’t use it own it. We made it, we use it -- and for what? Well, amongst other things we use it to exchange the truth, that's for what!"
http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig6/colmes6.html
"Michael Bilirakis (R-FL), the powerful ranking Republican member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee (having jurisdiction over the Food and Drug Administration) announced today that he has become one of twenty-two congressmen co-sponsoring H.R 4282, the Health Freedom Protection Act."
http://www.prweb.com/releases/2006/5/prweb387679.htm
"The point is this: A country laden with razor wire, checkpoints, sensors, soldiers, and snipers in ghillie suits -- a country whose citizens' movements can be tracked and controlled at will -- is a country that can keep subjects caged inside far more effectively than it can keep 'furriners' out. Yes indeedy. Let's all get so roused about the threat du jour that in our haste to demand a total security state we voluntarily surrender everything that makes America worth having. In the time-honored way of American governance, let's solve one genuine problem with 'solutions' that are genuinely worse."
http://www.backwoodshome.com/columns/wolfe060515.html
"For if we are observed in all matters, we are constantly under threat of correction, judgment, criticism, even plagiarism of our own uniqueness. We become children, fettered under watchful eyes, constantly fearful that -- either now or in the uncertain future -- patterns we leave behind will be brought back to implicate us, by whatever authority has now become focused upon our once-private and innocent acts. We lose our individuality, because everything we do is observable and recordable."
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/05/the_value_of_pr.html
"Americans have grown used to the Police State, and many think it's a good thing. They don't mind silly procedures like taking their shoes off at airports to prevent another shoe bomb. They watch movies and tv shows in which young men are often rounded up and searched for drugs by the 'good guy' cops. They applaud sending people like Martha Stewart to jail even when they've committed no crime. They either do not see that our free society is slipping away, or they simply do not want it."
http://www.partialobserver.com/article.cfm?id=1841
"Even the minimal, 'night watchman' state seen by many libertarians as the ideal political arrangement is in the business of handing out goodies to some of its citizens by coercing other citizens to help pay for them. As a result, it unavoidably generates a tendency for the expansion of state power, whatever the intentions of its founders. Empirical evidence for this thesis is provided by the history of the American Republic, which, despite the strenuous efforts undertaken to ensure it would remain within its constitutional bounds, was exercising powers well beyond those limits in a matter of a decade or two."
http://www.lewrockwell.com/callahan/callahan155.html
"But contempt for the law is the sure -- indeed really the only -- sign of a free people. People who respect the law simply on the grounds that it is law deserve every nasty little thing that happens to them after that. They ought to spend some time cultivating moral and intellectual autonomy."
http://www.creators.com/opinion_show.cfm?next=2&ColumnsName=csa
"The state is a monster that takes on a life of its own. How this monster (Leviathan) somehow mitigates the conditions of life established in their premise is never quite explained by state worshippers. Of course, elitists who issue dictates never feel compelled to explain their logic, as they believe their superiority to be self-evident to the enlightened, and the unenlightened are irrelevant. In the end, they believe that force is its own logic."
http://www.strike-the-root.com/61/davis/davis7.html
"But empire is never just about the emperor. The enablers of empire -- the big purple socialist hegemonic American state -- include not just a slavish and well-paid royal military, but also corporate interests, state-funded educational institutions, and an ever-devoted media. ... Thus, most of the major signs of empire in decline are already posted, and many have been up for a while. And connoisseurs of clues have taken note of yet another revealed just last week."
http://www.lewrockwell.com/kwiatkowski/kwiatkowski152.html
"A global effort to detect gravitational waves has received an unexpected boost after a volunteer improved the computer code used comb through data from ground-based detectors."
http://www.newscientisttech.com/article/dn9180-programmer-speeds-search-for-gravitational-waves.html
"All these low-voltage, LED devices can divorce lighting from a centralized power grid. Most can use energy from solar cells, wind systems, or batteries. Indeed, Kennedy says that the seminomadic Mexican people participating in the field test especially like this flexibility."
http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20060520/bob9.asp
"It has been widely reported, apparently without causing Americans any unease, that the Bush regime has awarded Halliburton $385 million to build concentration camps in the United States. Who are to be the inmates? Certainly not terrorists. The Bush regime has proven inept at catching terrorists.... Concentration camps epitomize the horrors and inhumanity of the Stalin and Nazi era. Why is the Bush regime building concentration camps in America? The Bush regime's war on terror is the equivalent to the Nazi regime's Reichstag fire. It serves to blind people to the real assault."
http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts05162006.html
"Under the Unitary Executive doctrine of the Bush Justice Department and many conservative legal theorists, the executive branch has enough implied and inherent powers during wartime to negate the checks and balances ordinarily provided by Congress and the courts. Considering that the Bush administration’s 'war on terror' is vague enough to last indefinitely and assumes a global battlefield, the Unitary Executive doctrine is a blueprint for despotism that Napoleon would have envied."
http://www.fff.org/comment/com0605f.asp
"Tenuous legal arguments are what we've come to expect from the Bush administration when it defends controversial measures aimed at fighting terrorism, including coercive interrogation techniques, improvised military tribunals, and the indefinite detention of unilaterally identified 'enemy combatants.' The arguments are weak partly because President Bush doesn't really think he needs them."
http://www.reason.com/sullum/051706.shtml
"Trust us, say the biggest liars since the boy who cried wolf. Scooter Libby really doesn't remember outing undercover CIA agent Valerie Plame, and Ahmed Chalabi really is a 'hero in error.' All the lying war propaganda vomited forth by this administration and its media toadies on the front page of the New York Times, then dutifully lapped up by administration talking heads on the Sunday morning talk show circuit, was just an honest mistake. They didn't mean to deceive us, you see, and this is supposed to make us feel better as well as let the War Party off the hook."
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=8992
"The nomination of Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the National Security Agency’s (NSA's) former director, to replace the disastrously incompetent Porter Goss as Director of the CIA, should be rejected on the grounds that Hayden subverted the U.S. Constitution."
http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=1724
"Like the proverbial frog in slowly boiling water, we have become inured to what goes on in the name of national security. Recent disclosures about increased government surveillance and illegal activities would be shocking, were it not for the prevailing outrage-fatigue brought on by a long train of abuses. But the heads of the civilian, democratically elected institutions that are supposed to be our bulwark against an encroaching police state, the ones who stand to lose their own power as well as their rights and the rights of all citizens, aren't interested in reining in the power of the intelligence establishment."
http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2006/05/16/bowing_to_the_police_state.php
"Linux and free software programmers often do not receive any financial compensation whatsoever. Indeed, the 'Free software community' is a group of people who voluntarily use their time and skills. But just because they donate time and labor it does not mean that this is communism. On the contrary, they freely direct their human action to the fulfillment of their ends, without any centralized imposition about what had to be done; people are exchanging their scarce resources (time and labor) to satisfy their ends. ... Presence of coercion over the means of production is what determines if a particular exchange really is free or not." Here "Capitalist" means free market, not mercantilist.
http://www.lewrockwell.com/lora/m.lora22.html
"Just as we don't have federal subsidies of religion, or public (i.e., government) churching, or state-licensed private churches, or state-approved home-religious education, there would be no more public schooling, no more state-licensed private schools, and no more state-approved home education. Education, like religion, would be left entirely to the free market, where families would have the same sovereignty and independence with respect to the education of their children as they have with respect to religion."
http://www.fff.org/freedom/fd0601aa.asp
"The whole history of ideas about society has been spent trying to come up with some system that serves the common man rather than just the elites, the rulers, and the powerful. When the market economy ... came into being, that institution was finally discovered. With the advent of economic science, we came to understand how this could be. We began to see how it is that billions of unplanned economic choices could conspire to create a beautiful global system of production and distribution that served everyone."
http://www.mises.org/story/2178
"The tragedy is that the most important factor in America's economic future - in raising everyone's standard of living - is not land, or money, or computers; it's human talent. And some part of the human talent at another of America's most dynamic companies is now being diverted from productive activity to protecting the company from political predation. The parasite economy has sucked in another productive enterprise."
http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=6393
"The truth is that most people don't come here because they are desperate to leave their family to live in the land of Eminem and Britney Spears. They come because the American taxpayer funds an oligarchy or dictatorship that makes it very difficult for them to make a living in their home country. Governments everywhere in the world are dependent on US taxpayer money. This money is what allows them to exist independent of economic reality. The 'Mexican' government is purely a creation of the US taxpayer, funded by periodic $50 billion bailouts. If you want Mexicans to be able to stay in Mexico, quit letting your politicians spend your money to support the parasitic Mexican political kleptocracy."
http://www.strike-the-root.com/61/walker/walker1.html
"Look, I don't like paying $60 to fill up my small car any more than anyone else. But we seem to have adopted the idea that we have a right to gas under $3 a gallon. No such right exists. Until the gas hits the tank in your car, someone else owns it. Asking the government to force a gas station to sell you gas at the price you want is like asking them to force the baker to sell you cheaper bread, or the vineyard cheaper wine."
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,195922,00.html
"The price of perpetual war is a police state, one in which a permanent state of 'emergency' -- the threat of a terrorist attack -- is utilized to break down institutional safeguards, the system of constitutional checks and balances, that protect us from dictatorship. A foreign policy driven by the imperial impulse is bound to have grave domestic consequences, none of them conducive to the American form of government. The Founders envisioned a republic, not an empire: they set up a system designed to govern the 13 former colonies, not the world."
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=9001
"Fear, of course, has been the coin of the realm for oppressive and dictatorial governments throughout history. Frighten the citizenry and they'll practically beg you to take away their freedom. That's in fact how Hitler convinced the German parliament to give him temporary dictatorial powers after terrorists firebombed the German parliament building. When Soviet communism, which had been used for decades to justify ever-increasing budgets for the Pentagon, the CIA, and the State Department, expired with the fall of the Berlin Wall, new official fears had to be found. And fast!"
http://www.fff.org/comment/com0605d.asp
A summary of Bush's immigration policy speech includes good points such as this: "Existing immigration policy is deeply flawed and in need of comprehensive, liberalizing reform. So our first priority should be to immediately increase the resources devoted to enforcing an admittedly unreasonable policy."
http://radgeek.com/gt/2006/05/17/quidditative_essence
"The Beat Generation launched a movement in the 1940s that has had a telling effect on our culture. This generation of young Americans, seeing the ovens of Auschwitz and what atomic bombs did, sought escape and enlightenment through sex, drugs, modern jazz, and Eastern mysticism[.] They also wrote books, most notably Howl and Other Poems by Allen Ginsberg, On the Road by Jack Kerouac, and The Naked Lunch by William Burroughs. "
http://www.lewrockwell.com/miller/miller19.html
"The Preamble to the United States Constitution is surely one of the most sublime paragraphs ever written. Before this dissection begins, let's prop it up and admire it in all its glory: We the People of the United States…."
http://www.strike-the-root.com/61/davies/davies6.html
"Of course you have heard of the Nazi Angel of Death, Dr. Josef Mengele, who became infamous for conducting grueling medical experiments on concentration camp inmates during WWII. Some of his victims were children. He tested unsafe drugs on them, injected them with lethal germs, removed their organs and limbs and performed sex change operations on them. His primary interest were identical twins. Thank goodness something like that could never happen here. Or could it?"
http://www.caseyresearch.com/displayArchiveArticleWwnk.php?id=209
"Let us imagine that tomorrow morning, when you flip on CNN, you see Wolf Blitzer being jostled by surging crowds. Everyone is running, staring at the sky in fear. 'Space aliens have landed in Luxembourg!' cries Wolf, wide-eyed and almost hysterical, 'and they have a message for all mankind!' There is a burst of static, and then you see a drooling, bulging-eyed monstrosity gripping prepared notes in its slimy sea-green tentacles."
http://www.lewrockwell.com/molyneux/molyneux20.html
"People ask how we got into our splendid mess in Iraq and why we can't get out. The question is a subset of a larger question: Why, since WWII, have so many first-world armies gotten into drawn-out guerrilla wars in bush-world countries, and lost? Examples abound: France in Vietnam, America in Vietnam, France in Algeria, Russia in Afghanistan, Israel in Lebanon, etc. Why don't they learn? The answer I think is that militaries are influenced by a kind of man--call him the Warrior--who by nature is unsuited for modern wars. He doesn't understand them, can't adapt to them."
http://www.fredoneverything.net/TheWarrior.shtml
"We were properly outraged by the attacks of innocents on American soil. But the pain inflicted by the U.S. government's armed and covert forces on people in other countries, not to mention that inflicted by U.S.-supported dictators, seems to have no effect on the American people whatsoever. When has there been a public outcry against explicit U.S. policies that can't help but kill, maim, and oppress innocent people?"
http://www.fff.org/comment/com0605e.asp
"The philosophy of Omar Khayyám was quite different from official Islamic dogmas. It is not clear whether he believed in the existence of God or not, but he objected to the notion that every particular event and phenomenon was the result of divine intervention; nor did he believe in any Judgment Day or rewards and punishments after life. Instead he supported the view that laws of nature explained all phenomena of observed life."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omar_Khayy%C3%A1m
"The future jungle wife of Tarzan and mother of Mia Farrow was a schooldays classmate of Vivien Leigh at the Convent of the Sacred Heart at Roehampton (London). At the age of nine she intended to become a pilot. After more school in Paris, back in Dublin, she met director Frank Borzage who was doing location filming for Fox and who invited her to Hollywood where she arrived, accompanied by her mother, in 1930."
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001577/bio
"'Mack the Knife' relied heavily on the stylized vocal inflections developed by Frank Sinatra. the song sold two million copies and topped the charts for months. 'Mack the Knife' won a Grammy Award as Record of the Year and Darin was voted Best New Artist. Brash, outspoken, and ambitious ( he said he wanted to be 'bigger than Sinatra'), Darin was a man in a hurry. He suggested the reason was he was certain he would die at an early age from a congenital heart defect."
http://www.history-of-rock.com/bobby_darin.htm
Political comedy stars Greta Garbo, Melvyn Douglas, Ina Claire; directed by Ernst Lubitsch. "Some who read this review might not recognize the name 'Greta Garbo,' but when this movie came out she contended for the title of greatest star in Hollywood. Garbo played serious roles, but this was her first and greatest comedy. Although not the first Brackett / Wilder collaboration, the story rates among their best by poking fun at Communism well before the Cold War."
http://endervidualism.com/agora/ninotchka_1939.htm
"Hollywood didn't cook up this movie to insult the great American mainstream. It made it because the great American mainstream had bought millions of copies of the book, making it a genuine grassroots hit even among people who don't ordinarily read at all. ... This isn't some edgy indie flick from Darren Aronofsky or a subversive genre exercise by the Wachowski brothers. It was made by one of L.A.'s most middle-of-the-road directors, Ron Howard....'
http://www.reason.com/links/links051806.shtml
"H. P. Lovecraft, J. R. R. Tolkien, Robert Bloch, Robert E. Howard, Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein, Larry Niven, Orson Scott Card, E.E. Smith. This small sampling of influential authors' work in the genres of science fiction, horror, and fantasy has laid the bedrock for some of the best videogames in the business. Rarely, however, will you find them mentioned or credited. That is hardly needed. Their work is so ingrained in Western pop culture, so influential, that saying something is 'Tolkien-esque' or 'Lovecraftian' is too obvious." I don't favor the XBox, but I thought this was a good article anyway. Edgar Rice Burroughs probably influenced many of the authors listed.
http://xbox.ign.com/articles/709/709150p1.html
"The National Security Agency reported a sharp increase in long distance telephone usage yesterday, causing high-ranking intelligence officers in the Bush administration to fear that al-Qaeda might be planning a terror plot to coincide with Mother's Day."
http://www.borowitzreport.com/archive_rpt.asp?rec=1392
"A subordinate clerk to an aid to an assistant quoted an undisclosed southwestern New England senator as saying, 'Some people, like Quakers and Liberal Peaceniks and those dadburned Libertarians just get all queasy when it comes to voting for ex post facto war that some loose cannon president already kicked off. So maybe we could rename "war" as "politics by other means" or something.' When his intern noted that Clausewitz already said something like that, he retorted, 'Who?' quickly followed by, 'Never mind'."
http://www.freecannon.com/EmbryoImbroglio.htm
"More than 1,000 majority shareholders and executive officers from the nation's largest oil companies gathered in the National Mall and marched to Capitol Hill Monday in a mass demonstration for petrochemical corporations' rights and, according to several of those who attended, 'to let our voices be heard at last'."
http://www.theonion.com/content/node/48458
"There's this tradition I call the eudaimonic tradition, from the Greek word for happiness or well-being, eudaimonia. ... [T]his is the view according to which there is an ultimate good, which usually gets called 'happiness' -- but that can be somewhat misleading, because it's not a pleasant feeling of satisfaction, although it may involve that -- but it's a state of your life objectively going well, your life being an objective success, something like your being successful at living a good human life: that's what eudaimonia is. That's the ultimate good. And morality is not just an instrumental means to that good; it's actually part of it."
http://www.mises.org/story/2103
"To call someone a liar should carry force because it's such a strong statement; however, the tremendous overuse of the word that we see nowadays has taken away much of the strength of what should be a powerful and legitimate rhetorical tool. The awful consequence is that when someone really is lying about an important issue -- for example, a high government official talking about the war -- those who are used to hearing the terms 'lying' and 'liar' used indiscriminately will not pay attention and will, therefore, miss out on important information."
http://antiwar.com/henderson/?articleid=8991
"In a free country -- a just country -- adult men and women treat each other as ends in themselves, not as unwilling tools, instruments or means to each other's ends. Just as I may not go over to my neighbor's home and conscript some unwilling individual to come and mow my lawn or even drive me to the hospital (but must ask for this and await willingly given help), so any service such as medical care must be obtained without coercion."
"Know-Nothingism is a perennial American pastime for several good reasons: - It gives us someone else to blame for our problems. - That someone else is usually easily identifiable by skin color, accent or other distinguishing characteristics. - That someone else, because of those distinguishing characteristics, arouses instinctive fear which can be bent to political purposes."
http://knappster.blogspot.com/2006/05/fence-post.html
"We are not contracting out our Homeland Security to James Bond here. It's more like Austin Powers, Inc. Besides the 97% error rate in finding Florida 'felons,' Illinois State Police fired the company after discovering ChoicePoint had produced test 'results' on rape case evidence ... that didn't exist. And ChoicePoint just got hit with the largest fine in Federal Trade Commission history for letting identity thieves purchase 145,000 credit card records."
http://www.strike-the-root.com/61/palast/palast1.html
"The escalating controversy over the National Security Agency's data mining program illustrates yet again how the Bush administration's intrusions on personal privacy based on a post-9/11 mantra of ''national security' directly threaten one of the enduring sources of that security: the Fourth Amendment 'right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures'."
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