Dec. 10 — 16, 2006

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Ender's Review
of the Web

Web articles of likely interest to individualists found during the preceding week.
 

Note about next week's issue: Since Christmas Day falls on a Monday this year, the next issue of Ender's Review will come out later in the week than usual, probably late Tuesday or early Wednesday.

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Pursuing Liberty

Articles showing the positive influence of action in the pursuit of Liberty.

The Choir Is the Key

      By Jacob G. Hornberger from The Future of Freedom Foundation

"Why not simply throw in the towel and walk away? Or why not acknowledge that we’ll never see a libertarian society and simply devote ourselves to reforming and improving the status quo? The reason? Because we can never know how close we are to achieving our goal of restoring a free society to our country, despite political trends in the opposite direction. In fact, I suspect that, despite the fact that things have been moving progressively in the wrong direction for more than 50 years, the past half-century of advancing libertarianism has brought us closer to the restoration of libertarianism than we can ever imagine." {The essay resides below the FFF fund-raising appeal at the top of the page.]

http://www.fff.org/freedom/fd0612a.asp

Nominations for Freedom Fighter of the Year

       from Strike The Root

Nominees: Keith Olbermann, Stefan Molyneux, Lauren Canario [winner, named in Dec. 13th's STR]; nominations in the article.

http://www.strike-the-root.com/62/ffoty.html

Medical Refugees Flee to India

      By Scott Carney from Wired News

"Kathleen Schneiderwind is one patient who was desperate to get rid of the lightning bolts of pain shooting through her spinal cord. … 'We began to look at places outside the United States and traded e-mails with doctors in Turkey and India. It turns out that the doctors in Bombay were both more experienced in this particular surgery and would only charge a fraction of what we were going to have to pay at home,' said Barry Schneiderwind.... Not only has the treatment been first-rate, they say, they have been able to pay for their plane tickets and even get some dental work and a vacation in Goa...."

http://www.wired.com/news/technology/medtech/0,72213-0.html?tw=wn_index_1

Inhumane penalty

      By Robyn E. Blumner from St. Petersburg Times

"[F]indings left Gov. Jeb Bush with little choice Friday but to temporarily suspend all executions. There will be more studies and recommendations, but the only permanent answer to the fundamental problems with the death penalty is to abolish it."

http://www.sptimes.com/2006/12/16/News/Inhumane_penalty.shtml

Life in Amerika

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

Take 32 Grams of Tylenol and Call Me in 25 Years

      By Jacob Sullum from Reason

"The prosecutors have suggested Paey's real crime was not prescription fraud but his stubbornness in turning down plea bargains. 'He made his own bed here as far as I'm concerned,' said Bernie McCabe, Pasco County's state attorney, after the appeals court ruling. Even assuming defendants should be punished for insisting on their right to a trial, does 25 years seem like a fair penalty?"

http://www.reason.com/news/show/117222.html

America's Injustice System is Criminal

      By Paul Craig Roberts from CounterPunch

"According to the International Center for Prison Studies at King's College in London, the US has 700,000 more of its citizens incarcerated than China, a country with a population four to five times larger than that of the US, and 1,330,000 more people in prison than crime-ridden Russia."

http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts12122006.html

Border Fence Firm Snared for Hiring Illegal Workers

      By Scott Horsley from NPR

"A fence-building company in Southern California agrees to pay nearly $5 million in fines for hiring illegal immigrants. Two executives from the company may also serve jail time. The Golden State Fence Company's work includes some of the border fence between San Diego and Mexico."

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6626823

More Cheer for the Holiday Travel Season

      By Ivan Eland from The Independent Institute

"Invariably, some of the traveling public that I chat with in airport security lines will say that if you have done nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear from the government’s intrusive measures. That dubious line of reasoning, however, makes the Herculean assumption that government usually gets things right."

http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=1867

Ordered Liberty without the State

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

A Healthy Dose of Anarchy

      By Neille Ilel from Reason

"Their organizers, as well as their volunteers, have little experience with relief work. They live in tents or sleep on cots in repurposed churches and community centers. Volunteers run the gamut from hippie dropouts to middle-class students on spring break, and the outposts they’ve built are filled with things you’d never expect to see anywhere near a relief effort: free acupuncture, vegetarian cooking, cross-dressing volunteers, a giant geodesic dome. Despite their inexperience and occasional outlandishness, they are organizing and delivering some of the most effective relief work in the area."

http://www.reason.com/news/show/116789.html

Worst. Meeting. Ever!

      By Stefan Molyneux from Strike The Root

"In my role as a business consultant, I am often asked to provide solutions to highly complex problems. Recently, a large, politically well-connected agricultural business paid me a fortune to provide them with a five-year plan on how to best allocate their assets, capital and human resources in order to maximize profitability. The complexity of the business challenges involved were overwhelming, and I almost despaired of being able to provide them with a solution."

http://www.strike-the-root.com/62/molyneux/molyneux3.html

libertarianism's north star

      By B.K. Marcus from lowercase liberty

"Baldy Harper, Leonard Read's first associate at FEE and later founder of the Institute for Humane Studies, looked at it in a way that I find attractive. He had no more idea than the man in the moon whether we or our descendants will ever actually see a 'total alternative,' as he put it, to political, tax-supported government. But he pointed out the importance of holding the ideal clearly in mind as a heuristic device and a compass to help us keep moving always in the direction of freedom."

http://www.bkmarcus.com/blog/2006/12/libertarianisms-north-star.html

"How Much Does the State Weigh?"

      By William N. Grigg from Pro Libertate

"But Judge Seals is making a category error here by assuming that the purpose of the law in proto-Soviet America is to punish crimes against persons and property. An armed robber behaving as Seals describes, after all, would not be defying the power of the State. This is why the State wouldn't deposit the entire weight of its coercive apparatus on the back of that criminal, as it did in dealing with Richard Paey."

http://freedominourtime.blogspot.com/2006/12/how-much-does-state-weigh.html

Spreading Decentralism

Articles demonstrating an increase in the dispersal of power.

An obvious addition to camping equipment checklist

      By Vin Suprynowicz from Las Vegas Review-Journal

"Some may argue that a gun on your hip won't save you against a determined assailant. I say it gives you a fighting chance, and more important it vastly improves the odds that any would-be assailant will pass you by, in the first place."

http://www.reviewjournal.com/lvrj_home/2006/Dec-10-Sun-2006/opinion/11283561.html

The Coup: Militia Mystery

      By Claire Wolfe from Backwoods Home Magazine

"They hired cops. Cops. Real ones. Not like our pair of old mostly harmless deputies. Spit, polish, and swagger cops. Paid for by ... "

http://www.backwoodshome.com/columns/wolfe061215.html

RFID Personal Firewall

      By Bruce Schneier from Schneier on Security

"Absolutely fascinating paper: 'A Platform for RFID Security and Privacy Administration.' The basic idea is that you carry a personalized device that jams the signals from all the RFID tags on your person until you authorize otherwise."

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/12/rfid_personal_f.html

Azerbaijan region backs secession

      By staff from Al Jazeera English

"Armenians in the Nagorno-Karabakh region of Azerbaijan have overwhelmingly approved a new pro-independence constitution in a referendum. According to official preliminary figures released on Monday, 98.6 per cent of voters approved the constitution, which describes Karabakh as a sovereign state. Turnout was 87.2 per cent."

http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/1991DB18-35E6-497B-804C-F93BB220AFAE.htm

The New World Hegemon

Depictions of the coming Imperial power

An Extreme Threat to Liberty – Centrism

      By Anthony Gregory from LewRockwell.com

"Bush does not suffer from an overzealous devotion to cutting government and taxes, despite what much of the left would like to believe. Nor does Hillary Clinton or any other top Democratic politician suffer from a rabid, New Left opposition to warfare, despite what much of the right would like to believe. The difference in actual policy we could expect from a Bush administration to a Clinton administration to another Bush administration to a second Clinton administration is hardly enough to excite a libertarian. One administration might mean a few more US-government-funded hospitals in America. The other might mean a few more US-government-funded hospitals in Iraq. Even this distinction is not as large as it might seem, since Clinton and Bush both support foreign and domestic intervention in principle."

http://www.lewrockwell.com/gregory/gregory126.html

At Guantanamo, America's own show trials

      By Robyn E. Blumner from St. Petersburg Times

"In 96 percent of cases, the detainee, who had no lawyer, had to present a defense without hearing any facts upon which his enemy combatant designation was based, beyond a conclusory summary. These men must have thought they were in Stalin's Russia or Mao's re-education camps rather than an American judicial proceeding. Defending yourself without being allowed to see the evidence against you is a neat trick."

http://www.sptimes.com/2006/12/10/News/At_Guantanamo__Americ.shtml

Routine and systematic torture is at the heart of America's war on terror

      By George Monbiot from The Guardian

"People who went in bad and dangerous come out mad as well. The only two studies conducted so far - in Texas and Washington state - both show that the recidivism rates for prisoners held in solitary confinement are worse than for those who were allowed to mix with other prisoners. If we were to judge the US by its penal policies, we would perceive a strange beast: a Christian society that believes in neither forgiveness nor redemption."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,1970086,00.html

Snapshots of a Demented Regime

      By William N. Grigg from Pro Libertate

"One difference between a genuinely totalitarian ruling elite and criminal cliques of the sort that run more ordinary governments is this: Totalitarians display a thoroughgoing ignorance of basic human nature coupled with a demented belief in the State's ability to re-arrange reality by decree."

http://freedominourtime.blogspot.com/2006/12/snapshots-of-demented-regime-updated.html

Politics by Other Means

War, rumors of war, and politicians fomenting war.

Is James Baker a Match for AIPAC?

      By Paul Craig Roberts from Antiwar.com

"If news reports are correct (see, for example, this), former Secretary of State James Baker has proposed a Middle East peace conference without Israeli participation. According to an official quoted by Insight magazine, 'As Baker sees this, the conference would provide a unique opportunity for the United States to strike a deal without Jewish pressure. This has become the hottest proposal examined by the foreign policy people over the last month'."

http://www.antiwar.com/roberts/?articleid=10160

Blue-State Fascism

      By James Leroy Wilson from The Partial Observer

"And so it goes with any movement. Once movement leaders and intellectuals conclude that the ends justify the means, the original ends disappear. When illegitimate power becomes the means, illegitimate power becomes the end. But power and its corresponding corruption leads to bad policy. Sooner or later the voters will tire of it and throw the bums out. But who will replace the Red-State fascists? Blue-State fascists?"

http://www.partialobserver.com/article.cfm?id=2023

THE LOW POST: An Undeniable Embarrassment

      By Matt Taibbi from Rolling Stone

"Conceived as a blow to the heart of Islamic extremism, Bush's insane pursuit of the Iraqi democratic mirage has instead forced the United States into the role of a formal appeaser of some of the vilest state ideology seen on earth since Hitler's time. And it couldn't have worked out any better for Ahmadinejad, who in just four years has not only seen the United States take out his most dangerous military enemy in Saddam Hussein, but has seen the conditions laid for both a Shiite resurgence in Iraq and the dealing of a crippling blow to American geopolitical ambitions in the Middle East."

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/12811595/

Presidential Tyranny Untamed by Election Defeat

      By Chris Floyd from Empire Burlesque

"The hope of a return to at least a semblance of Constitutional government rests on the Democrats' newly-acquired majority. It is perhaps a mark of how very desperate the nation's condition has become that this particular group of national Democratic leaders could actually inspire hopes for substantial change. "

http://www.chris-floyd.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=960&Itemid=135

Spontaneous Order

Articles showing decentralized successes.

Trading Places: William T. Bogart on dynamic cities and unaccountable planners

      Interviewed by Jesse Walker from Reason

"Borrowing models from the study of international trade, Bogart views metropolitan regions as dynamic systems; he rejects any approach that confuses a static snapshot of a region with the region itself. By no means a libertarian purist -- he is willing, for example, to consider certain subsidies to urban downtowns -- he is nonetheless skeptical of centralized planning and of reformers who would rather impose their will on the landscape than 'use the existing momentum but...deflect it in a better direction.' He is also a clever writer, always willing to leaven a dry economic passage with a joke or an allusion to speculative fiction."

http://www.reason.com/news/show/117217.html

Spontaneous order & law

      By Donald J. Boudreaux from Pittsburgh Tribune-Review

"Our simple, familiar actions in crowded parking lots are an example of spontaneous law. Such laws emerge unplanned, yet because they are widely obeyed they help to minimize frictions among us. Some people will object to applying a label as lofty as 'law' to something so workaday as being polite in parking lots. But this label is appropriate. Fair and just laws are those that give each of us great room to pursue our own goals while at the same time they keep us as much as possible from interfering with each other. "

http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/opinion/columnists/boudreaux/s_484013.html

Losing It

      By Patrick J. Michaels from Cato Institute

"It's easy to show that the warming of the last three decades presages a very modest warming for the technologically foreseeable future, and that no policy will do anything to alter the warming trajectory we are on enough to measure its effect in a lifetime."

http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=6861

How the Global Boom Might End

      By Sean Corrigan from Ludwig von Mises Institute

"Human aspiration, guided and served by entrepreneurial insight, can cure a multitude of self-inflicted economic ills and we should realize that realizable aspirations have perhaps never been higher, nor the population of potential entrepreneurs larger than they stand today."

http://www.mises.org/story/2411

Nonspontaneous Disorder

Articles showing centrally planned disasters.

Socialized Medicine in a Wealthy Country

      By Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. from LewRockwell.com

"It's time that we change our expectations concerning what socialism will look like in our future, though we have it partially now. The key problem with socialism is that it misallocates resources, and when applied to the U.S. medical sector, this means a vast overconsumption of medical services as well as artificially high prices. The system is carefully structured in a mercantilist way to socialize losses and privatize profits. In this way, the largest players in the market benefit and a small group of semi-private cartels are insured against financial failure."

http://www.lewrockwell.com/rockwell/socialized-medicine.html

True Patriots Must Have Clogged Noses

      By Jeffrey Tucker from Ludwig von Mises Institute

"Where did the legislation that makes it so difficult for me to unclog my nose come from in the first place? The intrigue continues. It was passed on March 6, 2006 — as an amendment to the Patriot Act! It was this that required the drug store to collect information from my driver's license so that the government can have a complete database of all Americans with clogged noses."

http://www.mises.org/story/2420

Trans-Fattened Government

      By Sheldon Richman from Foundation for Economic Education

"I don't know what, if anything, trans fats will do to you. I am not a physician or a nutritionist. Maybe they are as bad as the most vocal health 'experts' say. ... Whatever the truth is, this ... shouldn't be a political issue. People are perfectly capable of keeping up with the latest dizzying news on what's good for you and what's not without the government banning things."

http://www.fee.org/in_brief/default.asp?id=984&year=2006&month=12

A truly loony idea: $10 billion a year for a moon base

      By J.H. Huebert from The Baltimore Sun

"Americans have long ignored the space program, only to have their interest momentarily reawakened by occasional news of yet another colossal failure, or announcements of grandiose plans to send people beyond Earth's orbit. The latter, playing upon Star Trek-fueled fantasies, inevitably come when NASA wants more money. Thus, NASA announced this month that it needs at least $10 billion per year of your tax dollars, this time to put a base on the moon by 2024."

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/oped/bal-op.moon13dec13,0,1854732.story?coll=bal-oped-headlines

War Is The Health Of The State

War is the ultimate State intervention in society.

America's Shame: Brought Low By a Gang of Cretins

      By Chris Floyd from Empire Burlesque

"The reality of the situation is almost unimaginable, almost unendurable: that the most powerful nation in the history of the world has thrown itself, deliberately, for no compelling reason whatsoever beyond the selfish interests of a few elitist cliques, into a cauldron of mass murder and moral ruin, whose financial, political and spiritual costs will be felt, with deep suffering, for generations. "

http://www.chris-floyd.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=956&Itemid=135

Libertarian Warmongers?

      By Doug Bandow from Antiwar.com

"When the issue is in doubt, however, the bias always should be against military action. War inherently conflicts with libertarian goals: promoting human life and dignity, individual liberty, economic prosperity, limited government, constitutional stability, and republican government. As social commentator Randolph Bourne pointed out, and Robert Higgs documented so well in Crisis and Leviathan, war is the health of the state. War is the most important excuse used by politicians to restrict civil liberties, punish free speech, limit public disclosure, raise taxes, expand government spending, regulate economic activity, undercut democratic debate, and deform the Constitution."

http://www.antiwar.com/bandow/?articleid=10163

Hey -- Take Your Time

      By William N. Grigg from Pro Libertate

"George W. Bush has been insulated from accountability his entire life. He is a stranger in the house of responsibility. Sacrifice is a concept utterly alien to him. On the available evidence – I'm not referring to staged photo-ops, or faith-promoting stories forwarded to e-mail lists -- he is clinically indifferent to the suffering of other people, particularly those on the receiving end of his imperial whims."

http://freedominourtime.blogspot.com/2006/12/hey-take-your-time.html

Jose, victim of a sinister new America

      By Andrew Sullivan from The Sunday Times

"So habeas corpus is over in America. The president can now detain any citizen he so designates, remove him from the judicial system and subject him to a military commission, with much weaker rules than a civilian court. Torture is formally banned, but torture techniques such as waterboarding are still at the president’s discretion. More than two centuries after the construction of the US constitution, almost eight centuries since Magna Carta, Americans are at the mercy of a new king, who can jail without charges and torture at will. The rationale? A war that has no definable end."

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2092-2496005,00.html

Bits of History

The Past seen with a fresh look.

The Anti-Imperialist League and the Battle Against Empire

      By Thomas E. Woods, Jr. from Ludwig von Mises Institute

"In April 1898 the United States went to war with Spain for the stated purpose of liberating Cuba from Spanish control. Several months later, when the war had ended, Cuba had been transformed into an American protectorate, and Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines had become American possessions. When the US government decided not to grant independence to the Philippines, Filipino rebels led by Emilio Aguinaldo determined to resist American occupying forces. The result was a brutal guerrilla war that stretched on for years."

http://www.mises.org/story/2408

About that Famous Tea Party

      By Becky Akers from Foundation for Economic Education

"The legendary Tea Party strikes us as quaint, almost childish: men disguising themselves as Indians, like kids on Halloween, then stealing out one night to destroy a shipment of tea. And all over a tax so tiny we smile. (Or so we think.) Oh, for problems as simple as our forefathers'! But we actually confront the same problem. The issue was not taxation, with or without representation. The evil that sparked the Boston Tea Party stalks us today: the alliance of money, power, and weapons that subjugates the many for the benefit of the few."

http://www.fee.org/in_brief/default.asp?id=981

Bid to crush a Beatle

      By Philip French from The Observer via Guardian Unlimited

"The movie is concerned neither with his private life, which was confused and chaotic, nor with his art other than in the way it expressed his beliefs and influenced his vast following. Equally his marriage to Yoko Ono is significant here only as far as she helped shape his public behaviour. Lennon is viewed from the outside largely as a social and political being, and he emerges as more significant, sympathetic and exemplary than I had previously supposed."

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,1967881,00.html

Lessons from Pinochet

      By Alvaro Vargas Llosa from The Independent Institute

"The Augusto Pinochet saga is probably far from over—Latin American politics is one big room filled with ghosts from the past—but the death of the Chilean dictator at least gives us a chance to recapitulate the most important lessons from his country’s recent history."

http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=1871

War and Peace

Articles showing the nature of War.

Tears of Rage; Tears of Grief

      By Chris Floyd from t r u t h o u t

"There will likely be no Pentagon investigation of the latest mass killing in Ishaqi. Certainly there will never be an independent probe that could establish the truth of what really happened in that midnight hour. If it involved ordinary troops and not Bush's shadowy death squads and hired guns, it was probably not, technically speaking, an atrocity, not a planned murder of civilians, but a simple skirmish with hostile forces in the dark - terrorists, insurgents, militiamen, gangsters - or with innocent homeowners defending their property, or maybe an inextricable mix of the two. It was just another night in Iraq, another raid, another blood-letting, another outcry of anguish."

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/121406A.shtml

Death by Consensus

      By Sheldon Richman from The Future of Freedom Foundation

"When John Kerry came back from fighting in Vietnam, he famously inquired, How do you ask a man to be the last to die for a mistake? Regarding the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group (ISG), a lot of people would like to know, How do you ask a man to be the last to die for a bipartisan compromise? Just when you think Washington has hit the rock bottom of cynicism, it finds even lower rungs to descend. "

http://fff.org/comment/com0612d.asp

Knocking Opportunity

      By William S. Lind from CounterPunch

"Last week, the Iraq Study Group Report burst upon a breathless world, and proved to be an empty piñata. None of its recommendations has the slightest chance of reversing the course of the war in Iraq. Only those who just got into town on the last truckload of turnips expected anything more. All Washington 'Blue Ribbon Commissions' are part of the kabuki, intended to fool the rubes back home into thinking something real is happening, when it isn't."

http://www.counterpunch.org/lind12122006.html

Regional nuclear war could devastate global climate

      By staff from EurekAlert!

"Even a small-scale, regional nuclear war could produce as many direct fatalities as all of World War II and disrupt the global climate for a decade or more, with environmental effects that could be devastating for everyone on Earth, university researchers have found."

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2006-12/rtsu-rnw120706.php

Great Individuals In History

Some people stand out from the crowd.

Mathematician/Physicist -- Max Born : Dec. 11, 1882

       From The Nobel Foundation

"During the years 1925 and 1926 he published, with Heisenberg and Jordan, investigations on the principles of quantum mechanics (matrix mechanics) and soon after this, his own studies on the statistical interpretation of quantum mechanics."

http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1954/born-bio.html

Actor/Dancer -- Sammy Davis, Sr. : Dec. 12, 1900

       From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"Sammy Davis, Sr. and his wife Elvera Sanchez were both vaudeville dancers. They split up when their son Sammy, Jr. was three. Davis, Sr. obtained custody of his son and took the child with him on tour."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sammy_Davis,_Sr.

Actress -- Una Merkel : Dec. 10, 1903

       from IMDb

"She mostly played supporting roles as the heroine's no-nonsense friend, but with her broad Southern accent and her peroxide blond hair, she gave one of the best performances of a wise-cracking but not-so-bright chorus girl in '42nd Street'." From the bio page which can be linked from the main page below.

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0580916/

Musician/Comedian -- Spike Jones : December 14, 1911

      By Comedy Guide from BBC

"Jones and his crazy gang first rose to prominence with the 1942 wartime propaganda song 'Der Fuhrer's Face', which became a huge hit. Subsequent successes assured them of lasting fame, and the visual style they invented to mirror the aural debacle led them to make a series of short music films ('soundies') and pursue a career in 'legit' movies."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/comedy/guide/articles/s/spikejonesshowth_7775940.shtml

Culcha'

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

Harvey (1950)

      Reviewed by Tom Ender from Endervidualism

Dramatic fantasy stars James Stewart, Josephine Hull, Charles Drake, Peggy Dow, Cecil Kellaway, Victoria Horne, Jesse White, William Lynn, Wallace Ford; based on a play by Mary Chase who also wrote the screenplay, directed by Henry Koster. “Although set somewhere in the early post-WWII American heartland (probably not too far from Akron), this film harbors universal truths which apply beyond any particular time or place. The wonderful story in Mary Chase’s masterful screenplay along with legendary actors giving some of the best performances of their careers make this movie a true classic.”

http://endervidualism.com/agora/harvey_1950.htm

UWA #13: The War Prayer

      By Warren Bluhm from Uncle Warren's Attic

"Then let's gather around for a reading of Mark Twain's famous story 'The War Prayer,' written in 1905 but not printed until 1923." [and much more….]

http://unclewarrensattic.libsyn.com/index.php?post_id=160011

FOX Plans Midseason 'Firefly' Reunion

      By staff from Zap2it.com

"Sorry, Browncoats. FOX isn't planning the kind of 'Firefly' reunion you were hoping for. The network is, however, reuniting 'Firefly' star Nathan Fillion with 'Firefly' executive producer Tim Minear on the midseason drama 'Drive'."

http://www.zap2it.com/tv/news/zap-filliondrivecasting,0,6488360.story?coll=zap-tv-headlines

Interview: Mel Gibson

      Interviewed by Todd Gilchrist from IGN » Entertainment » Movies

"Even in a year in which general celebrity gossip seemed to reach an all-time high, Mel Gibson dominated headlines more than almost any other actor or director in Hollywood. But now that his latest film Apocalypto is released in theaters - and further, taking the top slot on the box office charts - there's a legitimate reason to want to read about his exploits."

http://movies.ign.com/articles/751/751225p1.html

The lighter side

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

Casualty of War

      By Stephen Colbert from The Colbert Report

"Stephen's not telling the government to lie, he's telling them to report the facts less."

http://www.comedycentral.com/sitewide/media_player/play.jhtml?itemId=79410

Dictator Slays Millions In Last-Minute Push To Be Time's Man Of The Year

       from The Onion

"If honored by Time, Than Shwe, who has reportedly already set aside a special frame and a spot on his desk for the magazine cover, will follow in the footsteps of other notable dictators such as Adolf Hitler, Deng Xiaoping, and Joseph Stalin, who appeared on the cover twice. 'In the back of his head, is he thinking about Stalin? Yes,' Nyein said. 'But he is well aware that Stalin killed 62 million people, while Myanmar only has a population of about 50 million. Genocide is a percentages game'."

http://www.theonion.com/content/node/56424

Iraq Study Group Report to be Filmed as Sequel to ‘Dumb and Dumber’

      By Andy Borowitz from Borowitz Report

"The report, which indicates that the situation in Iraq is grave and deteriorating, did not seem at first glance to be the raw material for a Hollywood comedy blockbuster, but in announcing the new movie, tentatively titled 'Dumberer and Dumberest,' executives at New Line begged to differ."

http://www.borowitzreport.com/archive_rpt.asp?rec=6650

Man bites dog: straight man outed

      By Garry Reed from Loose Cannon Libertarian

"This follows a general journalistic principal: Dog Bites Man is not news; Man Bites Dog is news. Thus, at least one libertarian keyboard-pounder has deemed it funworthy to imagine the response had the gate swung in the opposite direction: World-renowned lingerie and handbag designer Ignacio Octavo Ulysses (known to his legion of fans and trademark attorneys simply as Iggy) stunned the global gay community by announcing that he is straight."

http://www.freecannon.com/StraightManOuted.htm

Deep Thought

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

The Fantasy World of the Savior and the Scapegoat

      By Bob Wallace from Endervidualism

“Whenever any country idealizes itself as the Savior of the world -- a problem that now afflicts the United States -- there must be another country, or countries, that is scapegoated. ... This is why Bush, in all seriousness, refers to the United States being attacked for its goodness. He’s completely ignoring the 50 years of attacks the United States has inflicted on the Islamic world.”

http://endervidualism.com/bwallace/savior_and_scapegoat.htm

Anti-Life Ethics in Iraq

      By Jacob G. Hornberger from The Future of Freedom Foundation

"As the debacle of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq continues to spiral downward, sucking countless more people into its death throes, some of those whose philosophy contributed to the fiasco remain steadfastly unrepentant for the death and destruction they have wrought."

http://www.fff.org/comment/com0612e.asp

Real-World Passwords

      By Bruce Schneier from Schneier on Security

"How good are the passwords people are choosing to protect their computers and online accounts? It's a hard question to answer because data is scarce. But recently, a colleague sent me some spoils from a MySpace phishing attack: 34,000 actual user names and passwords."

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/12/realworld_passw.html

Three American Ideas

      By Vache Folle from St George Blog

"HLM [Mencken] remarked that much of what passes for intellectual discourse in America consists of variations on three ideas: (1) democracy; (2) that it is a sin to be wealthy; and (3) that other folks' enjoyment is intolerable. I think HL was on to something and that this observation still holds up today."

http://emergencybackupdog.blogspot.com/2006/12/three-american-ideas.html

Miscellany

Articles not easily classified

Why lovers give dud presents

      By Jacquie van Santen from News in Science of Australian Broadcasting Corporation

"The researchers conclude that knowing a lot about your partner can actually get in the way of choosing the perfect gift. Not only do people become overconfident that they know what their partner will like, but their tendency to assume their tastes are very similar mean they often miss the cue that they're getting it wrong."

http://www.abc.net.au/science/news/stories/2006/1807351.htm

Humans Migrated Out of Africa, Then Some Went Back, Study Says

      By Stefan Lovgren from National Geographic News

"The study shows that a small group of early humans returned to Africa after migrating to the Middle East. In addition, the research suggests that the humans' return occurred around the same time that another group of humans left the Middle East and moved into Europe. "

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/12/061214-humans-africa.html

When I Was Your Age, All The Kids Wanted Hoverboards

      By Jonathan David Morris from The Free Liberal

"When I was 11, Robert Zemeckis released the second installment of one of the most important movie trilogies ever: Back to the Future, Part II. It starred Michael J. Fox, Michael J. Fox, Michael J. Fox, and Christopher Lloyd. It also starred a flying DeLorean. But most importantly, it starred a freaking hoverboard. Everyone I knew wanted a hoverboard that Christmas. We didn’t get one that year. Or any year after that." [I'm older than JDM. I wanted the flying car. When I was 12 I thought I'd have a flying car someday. I think I got bloated government instead.]

http://www.freeliberal.com/archives/002480.html

The Last Thing America Needs Is Another President

      By Randall Everson from The Onion

"They say that doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result is the definition of insanity. Sounds an awful lot like what we're doing choosing presidents to serve out terms of office, run the federal government, and act as commander-in-chief of the armed forces, over and over and over and over again. We're just going through this charade because we think we have to, but we really don't. Last time I checked, my garbage was getting picked up every Tuesday and Thursday, I had fresh running water, and my telephone was working perfectly, all without the highest elected official in the land even raising a finger. This country practically runs itself!" Many a truth is said in jest. In this case a deep truth has been pitched as humor.

http://www.theonion.com/content/node/56423

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