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"From Valley Forge to the Fall of Saigon, from the early British and Russian invasions of Afghanistan to the later Russian and American invasions of Afghanistan (talk about inability to learn from history), from the American invasion of Iraq to its coming invasion of Iran, one thing is clear: all the technology in the world, all the organization, sacrifice, and self-discipline, are nothing compared to one guy with mud on his boots and a sharpened stick in his hands, defending his own territory."
http://www.ncc-1776.org/tle2006/tle378-20060730-02.html
"The recent movement for more 'pragmatism' in the US Libertarian Party reeks of the same sorts of power politics the commies used to backstab the anarchists. I think the 'means' do matter and where you arrive at depends on what road you take to get there."
http://alisvoice.blogspot.com/2006/08/pragmatic-will-to-power-vs-winning-in.html
"Brad Spangler has announced the start of MLL Online, a website for the Movement of the Libertarian Left."
http://sheldonfreeassociation.blogspot.com/2006/08/mll-online.html
"The main purpose of the existence of government schools is to train young people to tolerate boredom, repeat other people's answers to rote questions, spy on their parents, absorb 'groupthink,' follow orders and most of all, to become good citizens and, through peer pressure, to conform. This is what's wrong with government schools, and NCLBA does nothing to rectify any of it. Even if it were possible to fix anything so intrinsically flawed, in good 'ole government slight-of-hand manipulation, NCLBA was never intended to right any real wrongs. ... Once teachers successfully desensitize unsuspecting children into following orders without thinking, they are ready to be used for the ultimate state purpose -- cannon fodder. Military recruiters won't have to wonder how to find them, thanks to NCLBA. "
http://www.strike-the-root.com/62/fontana/fontana3.html
"One big reason paramilitary tactics have become so common in domestic policing is that Congress has made surplus military equipment available to civilian police departments, which they then use to form a SWAT team. Civilian police officers shouldn't be outfitted with equipment designed for war. The use of tanks, armored personnel carriers and other military equipment on civilians creates scenes more appropriate for police states and military juntas, not free societies."
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,206719,00.html
"The managed care of the past few decades is a form of cost containment that all but eliminated the doctor-patient relationship. Evidence-based medical training has been replaced with drug dispensing protocols based on numbers on paper and the behavior of cells in a test tube. This disconnected approach kills over 100,000 Americans per year and injures millions of others. This is not a problem when a nation's healthcare policy is based on eugenics. It is completely fine if many thousands of the weakest are killed."
http://www.newswithviews.com/Richards/byron5.htm
"Most people desire some sort of professional protection from thieves, fires, and access to some type of professional dispute resolution service. Holmes and Sunstein never ask the most important question: Is it necessary that these services be provided by a coercive and monopolistic government? The answer is, No, and there are clear historical cases - when and where governments were not present to provide these services - that we find such services being provided on a competitive and voluntary basis."
http://www.voluntaryist.com/forthcoming/whylibertytaxes.php
"I certainly am not a philosophical brainiac on anarchism or anything else. I do know this though: I am against states; I am opposed to violence and coercion; I am opposed to the physical or economic exploitation of others."
http://alisvoice.blogspot.com/2006/08/on-anarchist-philosophy-and-pc-issue.html
"The reason power is so dissatisfying really has nothing to do with the state of the nation, or even with the utopia politicians with power are trying to create. It has everything to do with the impossibility of creating something good with means that are not. One cannot create freedom using coercive means -- it is impossible."
http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig6/bylund9.html
"I told you I was going to write about Sustainable Freedom. Then I wrote one column about why we aren't more free and another theorizing about paradigms. ... Well, to be frank, you and I both know that nobody can prescribe freedom like a doctor prescribes medicine. But the people of the western world are due, and overdue, to shift their paradigm about the proper function of government."
http://www.backwoodshome.com/columns/wolfe060801.html
"The occupying soldier's main incentive is to get back home in one piece; the militia fighter is already home and ready to die. The best training in the world can't even up such a mismatch of priorities. Plus, the homegrown fighters are able to hide, and to get moral and material support from the people. And, they do not have to report to a military's bureaucracy. Yes, winning the war of public opinion is important, but they are not driven by partisan political calculations."
http://www.partialobserver.com/article.cfm?id=1907
"The Bush people keep talking about getting rid of Hezbollah as if it were some foreign entity occupying Lebanon. It is a Lebanese organization. It is the Lebanese people in that area. It has members elected to parliament, and some serving as ministers in the Lebanese government. It operates an extensive welfare/education/medical services network. You can't 'throw' Hezbollah out of Lebanon unless, of course, you intend to exterminate or expel 40 percent of the population."
http://www.antiwar.com/reese/?articleid=9448
"Like a gang of twitchy hit men afraid they've botched the job, the Bush Regime is creeping back to the scene of the crime: the Congressional backrooms where they thought they'd put the kibosh on the American Republic once and for all. … Bush wants the 'unitary executive' autocracy he created in secret to be restored -- in public -- by Congress. "
http://www.chris-floyd.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=780&Itemid=135
"Their goal in all this is not the stated one of 'spreading democracy' at the point of a gun--a clearly ridiculous notion in any case. Rather, the goal is destroying democracy here at home, in order to establish a one-party dictatorship."
http://www.counterpunch.org/lindorff08012006.html
"George W. Bush has apparently given up any aspiration of receiving an honorary award from the American Civil Liberties Union. His administration is responding to the Supreme Court ruling striking down his military tribunals with a legislative proposal that would place far more Americans in peril of having their rights nullified."
http://jimbovard.com/blog/2006/08/02/freedom-via-military-dictatorship/
"Most of the money given by the US foreign military financing programme - in common with all US aid disbursements - is spent in the United States. Israel uses it to obtain F-15 and F-16 jets; Apache, Cobra and Blackhawk helicopters; AGM, AIM and Patriot missiles, M-16 rifles, M-204 grenade launchers and M-2 machine guns. As the Prestwick scandal revealed, laser-guided bombs, even now, are being sent to Israel from the United States. Many of these weapons have been used to kill Palestinian civilians and are being used in Lebanon today. "
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,1834553,00.html
"Hezbollah organized to resist that illegal [Israeli] occupation. This is legitimate under international law, not to mention moral law. Not every Hezbollah action has been defensible, but most people would say the same about Israel. We should not lose sight of the context or the fact that the U.S. government assisted Israel in virtually every respect, especially by the provision of money and weapons."
http://www.fff.org/comment/com0608b.asp
"Despite growing world outrage, the Bush administration's continued backing of Israel's over-the-top military action in Lebanon can only help Hezbollah and its patron Iran. The administration's foreign policy could not be more pro-Iranian if the White House had become infested with Iranian agents."
http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=1779
"After nearly 120 years of Socialist Electricity in America, it's time to kick the government out of the electricity business. Open the market to anybody that wants to produce and sell electricity. And let the marketplace decide who the vendors are and the prices that are charged."
http://www.strike-the-root.com/62/hull/hull1.html
"The principles of the free market apply to economic goods across the board. Baseball tickets, accounting services, milk, automobiles, grass seed, electricity, parks, et cetera, are all better supplied by the market rather than by a government agency. As long as property rights are defined for any given object, the free market will produce it and distribute it best. There is no reason this should not apply to the labor market as well."
http://www.fff.org/comment/com0607f.asp
"The idea might seem obvious, but previous theories of why brains evolve to be bigger have centred on the advantages either being more sociable or better at cracking ecological problems, like finding food. 'The results are very intuitive, but nobody has actually looked for this before,' said Dr Susanne Shultz, from the University of Liverpool, 'I actually think there are quite profound implications for human brain size evolution.' The idea is that stupid animals get eaten first because they can't outwit their hungry enemies."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/story/0,,1835615,00.html
"It's a mistake to focus only on the wrong-doing of politicians in these eminent-domain cases. Throughout the country land developers and retail giants stand by the politicians' sides waiting for the booty. This should disturb defenders of economic freedom, since government/business partnerships are the opposite of laissez faire. True, Wal-Mart, Target, and Crate & Barrel didn't write the eminent-domain laws, but they don't have to take advantage of them. When they do, they deserve all the flak they get from the anticorporate activists. Libertarians should revise their attitude toward retailers that collude with government in land theft and other forms of corporate welfare."
http://www.fee.org/in_brief/default.asp?id=674
"The answer is government compulsion. In private schools, if the school does a bad job educating children, parents will soon take their child out of that school. If enough parents take their kids out of the school, that school and its owner will go bankrupt. A private school depends on the voluntary consent and tuition payments of its parent-customers to stay in business. Unlike private schools, public schools are a government-controlled education system that stays in business through naked compulsion. ... Unlike private schools, public schools rarely go out of business, no matter how bad they are, because they get their 'customers' (our children) and their money (taxes) by force. In effect, public schools are an education tyranny."
http://www.newswithviews.com/Turtel/joel23.htm
"Forced government wage increases are supported when people forget that the money used to cover the increase does not magically materialize. It must come from somewhere. Since Americans love the best products for the lowest prices, businesses will not likely pass the cost of the wage increase on to consumers in the form of higher prices. They will, instead, reduce their costs by laying off workers with the lowest skills, relocating the jobs (or the entire business) to another country, or skirting the law altogether by paying employees 'under the table' or by hiring illegal immigrants."
http://www.acton.org/ppolicy/comment/article.php?article=336
"Who or what taught the Iraqi people that crime pays, that violence is a tolerable mode of behavior, that rules of social engagement are bunk, that human life has no inherent value? It began with ten years of cruel trade sanctions designed to drive the whole population into sickness and grinding poverty, and then culminated in the 'shock and awe' war that rained mass destruction on their cities and large population centers. It was war that unleashed Hell."
http://www.lewrockwell.com/rockwell/immorality-inc.html
"Of course, the birthing process for democratic nations is somewhat different from that employed by human beings. It employs bombs, missiles, mortars, and bullets to bring the new 'democracy baby' into existence. Unlike the birth of a human baby, the birth of a democracy baby involves chaos and the death, destruction, and maiming of hundreds or even thousands of other people. And whereas most human babies are born alive, democracy babies always seem to be stillborn."
http://www.fff.org/comment/com0608a.asp
"Behind the democratic façade, of course, is sheer and simple greed: the desire to maximize profit for the American weapons industry, by fueling a regional arms race. America is now using the specter of Israeli might to scare the hell out of its neighbors. Racketeering on an epic scale, disguised by the occasional recourse to diplomacy, is the ugly reality behind America's Middle East policy."
http://www.antiwar.com/deliso/?articleid=9466
"Wilkes helped lay the foundation for some of the most basic rights taken for granted in the United States and Great Britain: freedom of the press, the right to privacy, religious liberty. Most often Wilkes did this--at considerable risk to himself--by goading the government into overreaction and then suing the king's ministers and agents. ... By the time he was through, the courts had declared general warrants illegal and limited the power of government to search and seize papers and other effects, establishing in law the principle that a man's home is his castle."
http://www.reason.com/0607/cr.dm.in.shtml
"The Bretton Woods system ultimately collapsed as the US default option by 'closing the gold window', that is, suspending its redemption commitment. The convertibility rule that might have provided some kind of a check on US inflation was gone. The world was on a dollar standard, but the dollar itself was a floating abstraction with convertibility only to itself. To call the resulting international monetary arrangement a Frankenstein monster would be a great injustice to monsters."
http://www.mises.org/story/2257
"Who suffers most from such medical bias and political lust? Sure, the alternative practitioners suffer, but so do countless Americans who are kept in the dark about natural, effective, safe treatments for diseases traditional practitioners treat with toxic chemotherapy and radiation -- which seem to kill the patients more often than save them. What's worse, the U.S. medical establishment seems to have convinced much of the country that its poisonous cancer 'treatments' are the only option, and anyone who does not subject themselves or their children to it are criminals who must be punished."
http://www.newstarget.com/019852.html
"Why did this happen? Why did Truman persist in refusing to clarify what unconditional surrender meant? Alperovitz speculates, with evidence that some will find convincing and others won't, that the reason was to send a signal to Joseph Stalin that the U.S. government was willing to use some pretty vicious methods to dominate in the postwar world."
http://www.antiwar.com/henderson/?articleid=9443
"An Israeli air strike killed almost 60 civilians in the Lebanese village of Qana on Sunday. Israeli leaders stress that their primary objective is to degrade Hezbollah's ability to launch rocket attacks against northern Israel, but they also mention another motive: forcing the Lebanese people to understand that supporting Hezbollah will bring them nothing but grief. With that realization, so the reasoning goes, most Lebanese will turn against the terrorist organization. Logic suggests that the more likely reaction will be greater Lebanese hatred of Israel and, hence, more support for Hezbollah."
http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=6558
"Now that we live in the nuclear age and there are enough nuclear weapons spread around the world to destroy civilization, we need to face the fact that America is the only country to have used this awful weapon and that it was unnecessary to have done so. "
http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig2/denson7.html
"Soon Singleton began to encourage African-Americans in Tennessee to move to Kansas, where with his partner Columbus Johnson Singleton he had found a location for a Black community. He helped orchestrate this because of his vision for a society in which African-Americans owned their own land."
http://www.aaregistry.com/african_american_history/1722/A_believer_in_ownership_Pap_Singleton
"Show Boat is one of Morgan's best-known appearances. As Julie La Verne she sang Bill (lyrics by P.G. Wodehouse and Oscar Hammerstein) and Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man in two stage runs and two film productions over a span of 11 years. ... Morgan was played by Ann Blyth in a 1957 biographical film, titled The Helen Morgan Story...."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_Morgan
"He is … famous for his satire of bureaucratic institutions, notably his Parkinson's Law and other studies. This is a collection of short studies explaining the inevitability of bureaucratic expansion…."
http://www.reference.com/browse/wiki/C._Northcote_Parkinson
Movie Review of The Island (2005) by Tom Ender. Science fiction action / adventure stars Ewan McGregor, Scarlett Johansson, Sean Bean, Djimon Hounsou, Steve Buscemi; directed by Michael Bay. "Like many movies made in the last decade ... one of this film's themes proposes that things ... [are not as they appear]. ... Although as science fiction it may seem a bit strained at times ..., it should ... appeal to SF/Sci-Fi aficionados as well as anti-establishment individualists."
http://endervidualism.com/agora/island_2005.htm
"I've never seen Glory Road listed next to the immortal Heinlein books like The Moon is a Harsh Mistress or Stranger in a Strange Land - never heard of it, in fact, until I blundered into it one day..... And no, this book is not as wildly memorable as the most well-known Heinlein books, but it is wildly memorable, and it contains a healthy dose of Heinlein's famous cheerfully anarcho-libertarian attitude."
http://bwrmontag.blogspot.com/2006/07/bws-book-report-glory-road.html
"This evolution of political comedy has everything to do with the collapse of public trust in our truth-telling institutions, hastened by the right's sustained attack on what one GOP insider dismissed as the 'reality-based community.' ('Reality,' quips Colbert in full conservative drag, 'has a well-known liberal bias.') ... Stewart and Colbert are busy making the news good again. They mock the Republicans plenty, but they're capturing larger audiences precisely because they're not just bashing Bush. Instead, they're tapping into the growing public realization that mainstream journalism has become a joke."
http://www.inthesetimes.com/site/main/article/2745/
"The Presidential Empowerment Act, which the president hand-drafted on his own Oval Office stationery and promptly signed into law, provides Bush with full authority to permit himself to authorize increased jurisdiction over the three branches of the federal government, provided that the president considers it in his best interest to do so."
http://www.theonion.com/content/node/51140
"Former Speaker of the House Rich Newtgringe proclaimed that the USSA is actively engaged in fighting World War III and that President Bush should just publicly say so. 'There's a lot of cool stuff we can do,' the former Republican Congresscrat from Georgiabama mused, 'if we simply declare World War III, or IV, or V against … against … whoever. We can ration tires, force people to rip up their backyard decks and plant victory gardens, inflict big government's coercive powers onto every aspect of American life, at least on the last little bits of it that still languish beyond Washington's enlightened supervision, and draft everybody's kids into the Cannon Fodder Corps'."
http://www.freecannon.com/NewtDeclaresWWIII.htm
"A look at Ten F#@king Years worth of Florida correspondent pieces from lap dancers to plastic grass." I particularly liked the piece about Satan and the town resolution to ban him.
http://www.comedycentral.com/sitewide/media_player/play.jhtml?itemId=72487
"I've been a voracious reader all my life. I remember getting a stack of books for my tenth birthday--they were piled outside my room about two feet high."
http://endervidualism.com/salon/intvw/monsen.htm
"[A] person cannot properly be held personally, morally responsible for an action he takes if that action is coerced; the immorality and blame belong to the coercer, not the person coerced. This holds regardless of the action involved. While someone might properly decide to die rather than do the coerced action, he cannot be held morally culpable if decides to live and does what he is forced to do. Nor is he guilty if he decides the price he would pay for resistance outweighs any possible good he might achieve, i.e., the odds of success are miniscule. Again, it is the coercer who is worthy of condemnation, not the victim."
http://www.russellmadden.com/Principles_for_Living.html
"Harris hypothesizes that three systems in the brain play a part in personality development, each of which is necessary for a child to become a human being capable of living with other human beings. "
http://www.biorationalinstitute.com/shownews.php?nid=1304
"What would you do if a lawyer threatened, 'Give me a million dollars or my client and I will publicly brand you as a rapist and destroy your life?' On July 27, the California Supreme Court expanded the range of choices possible to one man who was presented with that threat."
http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=1782
"The current concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is about 380 parts per million. Before we industrialized -- back when life expectancy was in the 40s -- the concentration was about 280. Fewer than 100 million years ago, or 400 million years after corals first arose, the carbon dioxide concentration was a bit less than 3,000 ppm. Around 175 million years ago it was pushing 6,000. If there was that much more carbon dioxide around, the oceans would have been that much more acidic, which would have killed the corals. And yet they lived."
http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=6563
"It was a different country then, and the South was a differenter part, warts and all. Nobody much watched us. You could sensible things, like line shotgun shells up on a board and shoot at the primers from fifty feet away with the BB guns. Contrary to what a Yankee might think, this didn't produce much of a bang because the shell wasn't confined in a barrel, but it was better than nothing. I guess things were kind of unsupervised. You couldn't do it today. You'd need a Caring Adult to be in charge, meaning some tiresome school marm who didn't think you should make black powder and blow things up. What's black powder for, then? Tell me that."
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