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"Every American owes it to himself to closely examine the powers that President Bush and the Pentagon are now claiming, especially in the context of the Bill of Rights. … Ever since childhood, we have heard people ask, 'How could the German people have permitted Germany to slide into dictatorship?' Is it still so difficult to understand how? ... The ultimate answer lies with the citizenry themselves. If people will not fight to protect their rights and freedoms from governmental assault, government officials will enslave them, no matter how well-written a constitution or a bill of rights might be."
http://www.fff.org/freedom/fd0606a.asp
"When you really start to consider this issue, you start to wonder, though: Who's paranoid here? The stoners who brag about hemp's many uses? Or the people too frightened by visions of stoners to have this conversation? Hemp is a viable alternative fuel source. It's clean. It's renewable. And it can be used in place of many synthetic, oil-based materials. It's actually quite odd that we'd choose to import it rather than grow it--especially in light of our usual 'Made In America' mentality."
http://www.readjdm.com/main/jdm/more/347/
"It's the key to the whole tragedy, and five years later it's even more tragic that so few are even asking that question, let alone suggesting an answer. It's one of the five that journalists are trained to ask about every story they cover (What, When, Where, Who and Why), and while the other four were answered professionally within hours of the first WTC impact, this one was never mentioned on any major broadcast channel the whole day. And hardly ever, since."
http://www.strike-the-root.com/62/davies/davies3.html
"Many elements of post-9/11 law enforcement are supposed to be justified by a real, serious, ongoing threat of further domestic terror assaults. Without that threat, the ways 9/11 supposedly had to change law enforcement become meaningless--or sinister. So it pays, five years down the line, to recall some of the highlights of federal arrests and prosecutions of what were generally announced as domestic terror cells--organized groups in the U.S. who posed a serious, organized threat of committing terrorist acts, often in cahoots with overseas foes."
http://www.reason.com/9-11atfiveyears/bdoherty.shtml
"The Supreme Court ruled this June that evidence seized in an illegally performed 'no-knock' police raid can still be used against a defendant. Though disturbing in its own right, Hudson v. Michigan touched on only a small part of a larger problem -- the trend toward paramilitary tactics in domestic policing."
http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=6651
"I hand my voter registration card to a poll worker who asks me for a picture ID. She looks at them and asks me if I have a different address on my driver's license (remember: she's looking at it.). I simply reply, 'Yes,' and offer no further explanation. She summons her supervisor and inquires about my dual addresses. The supervisor carefully examines my documents and, after a few tense moments, finally rules in my favor. I am free to vote!"
http://www.strike-the-root.com/62/antunez/antunez2.html
"I want freedom and I want it now. I don't really care whether my neighbors get freedom too and I certainly don't feel I have a responsibility of liberating the whole world before I free myself. Counter-economics as a strategy simply means you move your resources and efforts from the taxed and regulated State-controlled market to the non-State controlled 'black' market. Through establishing networks of like-minded libertarians for the exchange of goods and services, one does not have to feed the beast."
http://www.strike-the-root.com/62/bylund/bylund2.html
"Heywood's pacifist position is more extreme than mine, however. My take on the Civil War is closer to Spooner's: no to forced Union, but yes to fomenting and abetting armed insurrection against slaveholders. Nevertheless, Heywood's analysis of the destructive effects of wars of liberation on liberators and liberated alike is still all too timely today."
http://praxeology.net/blog/2006/09/06/heywood-and-de-cleyre-texts-online/
"The State is organized violence, force, coercion. Power is the central motive of politics. Because of their financial and commercial power and their control of the media, corporations are the de-facto constituents of 'representative' democracy, not individual voters. Our world is ruled, therefore, by corporations which exercise their sovereignty through the 'Iron Triangle' of business-politics-military. The State is soulless and the corporations which control the State are soulless: nowhere is there personal accountability."
http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig6/knaebel4.html
"The progress of human consciousness has led to two contradictory beliefs. The first is a recognition of the worth and dignity of each individual person, that individuals should be treated as ends in themselves, and not as means only. That we should treat others as we would like to be treated. The second belief is that political means - laws, central planning, and military force - can make the world 'right'."
http://www.partialobserver.com/article.cfm?id=1942
"In Iowa, state law does not permit direct-entry midwifery, which means becoming a midwife without first being trained as a nurse. However, when she relocated to Milwaukee with her family, Tomaszek was happy to find that Wisconsin would allow her to become a midwife without having to be a nurse." Of course, midwifery was practiced for centuries with no state licensing, but with more midwives -- even the state regulated kind -- homebirth may become a more predominant option.
http://www.jsonline.com/story/index.aspx?id=491424
"The leader of the Kurdish region in northern Iraq threatened secession Sunday as a dispute over flying the Iraqi flag intensified. Massoud Barzani on Friday ordered the country's national flag to be replaced with the Kurdish one, sparking harsh words in Baghdad."
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060903/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq_kurds_flag
"Bin Laden and his fellow terrorists are monsters, surely, but they are not fascists -- a term that has a very specific meaning, one that hardly fits al-Qaeda. Yet there are fascists in this world."
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=9647
"It doesn't matter what he feels; the only thing that matters is what he does, whatever the reason. And what he is doing is attempting to [enshrine] in American law barbaric practices that make beasts of captor and captive alike. What he is doing is stripping away every human right, civil liberty, and judicial restraint that might impede his arbitrary exercise of raw power. "
http://www.chris-floyd.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=838&Itemid=135
"I spoke in a classy hotel ballroom in Vancouver to a gathering sponsored in part by the B.C. Marijuana Party. I dined with the president of that political party, Marc Emery, a gentle soul who runs a bookstore in that town and publishes an internationally circulated magazine called Cannabis Culture -- I like to think of it as High Times for people who can still read. The centerfolds, needless to say, feature voluptuous marijuana buds, provocatively dripping resin."
http://www.reviewjournal.com/lvrj_home/2006/Sep-03-Sun-2006/opinion/9221990.html
"The attack [on Rumsfeld] will work, because so many voters out there will see in it a reflection of their own animosity towards the hoary defense secretary, not thinking about the real underlying meaning of the Democrats' campaign. Because what Rumsfeld actually represents to the Democrats is a means of attacking the Republicans on the Iraq issue without having to explain their own vote in support of the invasion." Taibbi, in fine form, lambastes Biden and the Democrats.
Being the Party of Principle requires stating those principles, thus the suggested name change. "Why? The small band that orchestrated this coup confesses: they want the LP to gain power. They've admired the way the Republicans and Democrats have done it, and now they want to do it too. Gone is the posture of opposition, the radicalism, the edge, the braininess."
http://www.mises.org/story/2309
"Professor Claes Ryn, the noted conservative scholar and past president of the Philadelphia Society, calls them 'Jacobins,' after the French revolutionaries who sent so many of their enemies to the guillotine. The Jacobins sought the revolutionary transformation of society via a purifying violence, and their brief rule was a paroxysm of nihilistic carnage unprecedented in the history of European nations. The neoconservatives, with their self-proclaimed objective of 'creative destruction,' are playing a similarly sadistic game in the Middle East today."
http://antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=9669
"There is only one test for whether an arrangement of wealth and income is fair or not: is it the result of voluntary transactions? If so, there is no role for public policy, because that would mean forcible interference with people's peaceful exchanges. If not, then the proper remedy is abolition of privilege."
http://www.fff.org/comment/com0609b.asp
"Governments want to spend money and sooner or later, governments are going to want to spend money without taxing it and the only way to do that is to print money--to create inflation. Inflation is a form of taxation. How long will governments be able to resist the temptation? And particularly as people become adjusted to being in a world of stable inflation. They will be bigger suckers as it were. It will be easier to get a lot out of it. If everybody anticipated inflation, you couldn't get anywhere by inflating. "
http://www.econlib.org/library/Columns/y2006/Friedmantranscript.html
"The beauty of Chinese society today is its ability to represent virtually every epoch of society, every possible strata, all at once. Unlike the U.S., where virtually every creed and color finds a home or at least a struggle for one, in China peasants rub shoulders with avant-garde artists and nouveau-riche fat cats with little education and rent five-star hotel rooms next to multilingual Party secretaries with world-class degrees. America is a melting pot of cultures; China is a melting pot of classes."
http://www.antiwar.com/matuszak/?articleid=9633
"It's a very curious thing to me, that something explicitly designed by the state to minimize an author's benefit from his creative work(s) has become a system exalted by many creators as the only or best means for them to benefit--or probably more accurately, profit in a monetary sense. Maybe it's a case of dancing with the devil one knows, but from my perspective, it's still a devil in one's embrace, and it'll do what devils inevitably do."
http://www.sunnimaravillosa.com/archives/00000786.html
"The 'Therapeutic State' is justified in the name of protecting consumers, but it was motivated by economic concerns. In the early twentieth century organized medicine worried that in a free, competitive market, doctors' high incomes could not be assured. Social engineers, eager as always to reform other people's habits, joined the doctors in the politicization of medicine."
http://www.fee.org/in_brief/default.asp?id=758
"In a recent radio broadcast and newspaper column, Dr. Laura Schlessinger addressed the 'Take Back the Night' movement that protests violence against women. She accused it of deliberately ignoring data that suggests men may be more vulnerable to violence than women."
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,212298,00.html
"The president has inherent authority to do whatever he considers necessary to fight terrorism, regardless of what Congress or the courts might say. Even talking about anti-terrorism measures, let alone seeking permission for them, puts all of us at risk. Secrecy thus becomes its own justification, because if the administration refuses to talk about it, it must be crucial to national security, and if it's crucial to national security it must be legal."
http://www.reason.com/9-11atfiveyears/jsullum.shtml
"George W. Bush is our Mr. Waternoose (although the cartoon character looks more like Dick Cheney). He and the 'scarer' monsters in his administration have succeeded in strapping the American public to a scream machine and are extracting more screams to provide more power to the executive branch. Their latest ploy is the demonizing of Iran, the creation of yet another monster for further power enhancement."
http://www.fff.org/freedom/fd0606f.asp
"The fatal flaw in the 'war on terror' has always been its open-endedness. The president of the United States is never going to sit down on a battleship to sign a peace treaty with terrorism. So when we give the government special, allegedly temporary powers to fight terrorism, we're essentially handing over that power permanently."
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,212081,00.html
"Bolívar became a mythical revolutionary warrior as well as an outstanding intellectual who elaborated the ideals of national liberation. His undaunted soul and astonishing military prowess eventually put an end to Spanish rule in what are now the six republics of Venezuela, Colombia, Panama, Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia, the recently newsworthy country that bears his name."
http://www.econlib.org/library/Columns/y2006/MartinezBolivar.html
"I hear you called Saddam Hussein a 'Nazi.' Excuse me, were you not the Reagan Administration official who went to Baghdad in 1983 to offer Saddam military, financial and intelligence support in his war of aggression against Iran? Time for your memory pills, Rummy."
http://www.ericmargolis.com/archives/2006/09/dear_rummy.php
"The site was used as a toxic waste dump by Hooker, the city of Niagra, and the U.S. Army until the 1950s. According to the Love Canal story, Hooker Chemical failed to clean up the site and, what's more, failed to notify subsequent owners about the hazardous associated with the site. As Eric Zuesse, however, uncovered in the 1980s, much of the Love Canal story, which in turn gave rise to the EPA's Superfund program, turns out to be false or distorted."
http://www.abetterearth.org/blog/id.2720/news_detail.asp
"[I]f an action will inevitably kill innocent people, it is as immoral as a deliberate attack on civilians. And when you consider that the number of innocent people dying inevitably in '`accidental' events has been far, far greater than all the deaths deliberately caused by terrorists, one must reject war as a solution for terrorism."
http://www.palestinechronicle.com/story-090406103307.htm
"We need not here consider the vexed question of how many innocent deaths qualify as a proportionate side effect. For this defense of killing even to be considered, it must first be shown that one's original purpose is a just one. The United States cannot plead in excuse, 'We want to attack the Iraqi army, but this means that some civilians will suffer' unless the attack on the Iraqis was in the first place justifiable. And what Higgs has called to our attention is that there is no good 'humanitarian' argument to justify the original assault: we cannot know the consequences of intervention."
http://www.mises.org/story/2299
"Aggressive wars are themselves war crimes. To intentionally create a false basis for an aggressive war is an act of high treason. Alarmed by the neoconservative drive to start a war with Iran before the US can extricate itself from the Iraq catastrophe, the CIA firmly declared that any Iranian nuclear weapon is a decade away. This undermines the neoconservatives' urgency to attack Iran now."
http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts09042006.html
"Louis Sullivan was the first architect to find the right form for a steel high-rise. Louis Sullivan lived by the phrase 'form follows function'. The steel girder was the form for the steel high-rise. This new way of constructing buildings pushed them up rather than out."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Sullivan
"Throughout the 1940s his tough-guy roles filled theaters and he was one of the very few males whose cover photos sold movie magazines. In the 1950s he was performing in lucrative but unrewarding films (an exception being what many regard as his greatest role, Shane (1953))."
http://us.imdb.com/name/nm0000042/bio
"Catherine Beecher believed that there was a need for a school for girls that would challenge their intellectual abilities. Hartford, Connecticut did not have such a school and Catherine was determined to start one. She opened the Hartford Female Seminary in May 1823, and it remained an important institution for the education of women for more than sixty years."
http://newman.baruch.cuny.edu/digital/2001/beecher/catherine.htm
Mystery / drama stars Youki Kudoh, Ethan Hawke, Anne Suzuki, Reeve Carney, Rick Yune, Max von Sydow, James Cromwell; based on a novel by David Guterson, directed by Scott Hicks. "Director Scott Hicks has made a movie both visually striking and insightful about human nature in many of its aspects. Race prejudice occupies 'center stage,' but war and its many consequences also figure prominently."
http://endervidualism.com/agora/snow_cedars_1999.htm
"I believe that with a few simple editorial alterations, this book could be released 'new' right now and it'd be hailed as a 'breakthrough' science fiction novel. It's that contemporary in style and approach to its subject matter. Bester was a friggin' genius."
http://wconger.blogspot.com/2006/09/demolished-man-kicks-ninja-ass.html
"SciFi Channel has scheduled a Firefly marathon for their 'daytime rotation' block on September 18. This time around, they're starting with 'Serenity parts 1 & 2' and ending with 'War Stories.' The eleven episode marathon starts at 8am (eastern)."
http://whedonesque.com/?comments=11288
"'From the wreckage and ashes of the World Trade Center, we have created a recess in the ground befitting the American spirit,' said New York Governor George Pataki from a cinderblock-and-plastic-bucket-supported plywood platform near the Hole's precipice. 'This vast chasm, dug at the very spot where the gleaming Twin Towers once rose to the sky, is a symbol of what we can accomplish if we work together'."
http://www.theonion.com/content/node/52325
Animated flash cartoon -- video w/audio
http://www.markfiore.com/animation/phony.html
Sign That President's 'No Child Left Behind' Law May Not Be Working, Critics Say
http://www.borowitzreport.com/archive_rpt.asp?rec=6579
"If 'first use' is not the ultimate test for the 'objective link' in the case of body ownership, what is? It is the unique relationship between a person and 'his' body -- his direct and immediate control over the body, and the fact that, at least in some sense, a body is a given person and vice versa."
http://www.mises.org/story/2291
"Communist dictatorships are allegedly so entirely different from fascist dictatorships that our schoolchildren have long been indoctrinated to categorize communist gang leaders as being 'the left' as opposed to fascist gang leaders on 'the right.' But this left-right dichotomy describes only the rhetorical rationale for statism, not meaningful differences. Labels aside, it is about conquest and power. Those claiming to be dictators on behalf of 'The People' are called communist or socialist 'leaders' -- as in the 'Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea' or the 'Great Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya.' Those claiming to be dictators on behalf of 'The Nation' are called fascists. Yet Cuba, North Korea and Libya are as nationalistic and xenophobic as fascists."
http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=6644
"Copying the way butterflies create the extraordinary metallic colouring on their wings could lead to new kinds of dyes, cosmetics and even flat panel displays. Furthermore, the materials could be grown, potentially making them less expensive than manufactured alternatives."
http://www.newscientisttech.com/article/dn10006?DCMP=NLC-nletter&nsref=dn10006
"As we went through US customs and immigration pre-clearance while still in Aruba, I began to feel uneasy, as if I was entering a prison. That feeling remained when we landed at Newark Airport, even though we had already been 'cleared.' After spending one week in Aruba, I appreciate the advantages of being in a country that is not at war with anybody, that minds its own business, and whose government does not promote an environment of mistrust and fear of other people."
http://www.strike-the-root.com/62/bank/bank2.html
"Washington is an insider's town. There are layers of insiderness, which is constructed on the plan of an artichoke: The closer to the center, the softer the brains get. (I don't mean that artichokes have....) (Though maybe.) Anyway, there is the Washington that the press writes about. There is the Washington the press knows about. Then you have the Pentagon war room and, higher yet, the conclaves of the highest White House staff. These are all the outer rings, for hoi polloi. "
http://fredoneverything.net/PFO.shtml
"If you really want to see Microsoft scramble to patch a hole in its software, don't look to vulnerabilities that impact countless Internet Explorer users or give intruders control of thousands of Windows machines. Just crack Redmond's DRM [digital rights management]."
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/09/microsoft_and_f.html
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