Table of Contents:
If you encounter any difficulty using this document please let me know as soon as you notice. Contact information is at the bottom of this page.
I am happy to receive addresses of potential readers of Ender's Review who might like to receive a few trial issues and/or an invitation to subscribe. Or, if you prefer, please, send a link to this page or the index (which also has comprehensive source site links) to those you think might be interested.
Find all RSS feeds & e-mail lists on the Sign Up page –
or use this RSS feed for Ender's Review
"Just as no one else can make you free, no one else can make you happy. Sovereign individuals are completely responsible for their experience of life. We voluntarily exchange with one another to our mutual benefit, but no one else can make you happy. "
http://www.strike-the-root.com/71/fontana/fontana5.html
"Senator Steven's staff worker in the Fairbanks office assured the nine peace activists occupying the office that their efforts were worthless. 'The Senator's aide told us that our action wouldn't do any good,' said Rob Mulford, 'but when we were locked up I knew we'd done something good because a woman jailer spotted us in our cells and she said, "Oh! You guys are my heroes!" ' "
http://www.counterpunch.org/kelly02232007.html
"Radical libertarians would be more effective urging the small ranchers about to be squeezed out of business by this manifestation of statist monopoly capitalism to prepare to covertly defy the NAIS system, study the libertarian philosophical basis for understanding why such acts would be ethical and develop tools and strategies for doing so profitably — the counter-economic approach of revolutionary agorism."
http://www.bradspangler.com/blog/archives/514
"Paul's presence in the race is important because he'll put issues on the table that would otherwise be completely ignored. His presence in the primary debates alone will make them far more substantive and interesting than they've been in a generation. One example is the continuing disaster that is the drug war, which Paul rightly believes to be both immoral and unconstitutional. Paul also opposed the war in Iraq from its inception. Those two issues alone will differentiate him from every other candidate on the stage."
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,252847,00.html
"The government take-over of schooling is simply wrong, not only on its face. Government by nature is destructive and serves only to grow itself; human casualties are utterly irrelevant. It matters not that they are but children. Government is a parasite...."
http://endervidualism.com/retta/ban_gov_school.htm
"As the biggest cigarette maker and the one that has been pushing and preparing for FDA regulation, Philip Morris is also best positioned to comply with the federal government's reporting requirements, manufacturing standards, and approval process for new products. Those demands will weigh more heavily on smaller companies, especially upstart competitors."
http://www.reason.com/news/show/118773.html
"The prisons of the America are already filled with people jailed on manufactured and manipulated evidence, false testimony, strongarmed confessions and other hugger-mugger by officials. Are we now to give legal sanction to these rogue practices? Well, why not? After all, in JebWorld, in GeorgeWorld -- just as in AdolfWorld and JosefWorld -- 'If you are innocent, you have nothing to fear.' Right? Right?"
http://www.chris-floyd.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1044&Itemid=135
"Britney Spears was an idiot last Thursday, an idiot on Friday and an idiot on both Saturday and Sunday. She was, shockingly, also an idiot on Monday. It will be news when she stops being an idiot, and we'll know when that happens, because she'll have disappeared for the good of the planet."
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/13545365/
"We wish to govern ourselves, and ourselves alone. If we wave a flag, it is black--for we owe no allegiance to any colored, gaudy, irrational collective. We seek no subjects, and reject all rulers. We see the realization of self ownership and self responsibility and the pursuit of self-interest by all as the only hope for the human race. But there I go, using a phrase like 'we anarchists' with the first person plural!"
http://www.strike-the-root.com/71/davies/davies4.html
"[A] left libertarian analysis, points to the role of the state in artificially concentrating capital in the hands of state-allied big business — giving statist plutocrats far more bargaining power in the labor market than is their natural due. Injustice happens to play out in the marketplace, but the cause is the state."
http://www.bradspangler.com/blog/archives/520
"It has also been my experience that cleverness/stupidity and goodness/evil are independent variables. Accordingly, you can be evil and smart or evil and stupid or good and smart or good and stupid. Now, the proportion of the population that is very good and very smart will be very small indeed, and they would be just the kind of folks that would make a good ruling elite."
http://emergencybackupdog.blogspot.com/2007/02/solution-is-to-disqualify-evil-and.html
"The Founding Fathers probably weren't thinking about health when they declared the pursuit of happiness to be an inalienable right, but when it comes to understanding the importance of a stress-free life, they may have been ahead of their time."
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/02/070218134333.htm
"It is easy to see why a diversity of cultures should confront power with a problem. If culture is about plurality, power is about unity. How can it sell itself simultaneously to a whole range of life forms without being fatally diluted? Multiculturalism is not a threat because it might breed suicide bombers. It is a threat because the kind of political state we have depends upon a tight cultural consensus in order to implant its materially divisive policies."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,2017657,00.html?gusrc=rss&feed=27
"Now, with a cloud over the de facto industry standard, companies that rely on MP3 may finally have sufficient motivation to move on. And that raises some tantalizing possibilities, including a real long shot: Open-source, royalty-free formats win."
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/music/0,72785-0.html?tw=wn_index_9
"'By enabling us to perceive noxious chemicals in potential foods -- especially toxins used by plants to defend themselves against herbivores -- bitter taste probably helped our early ancestors avoid poisoning,' he said. If that is the case, then why are both tasters and nontasters still present in the human population? Based on the rules of natural selection, shouldn't all of the nontasters have died off early in our evolution? The answer is complex, Dr. Wooding said, noting that some things that taste bitter are used as medicine, such as compounds in certain tree barks that help protect against malaria."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,2017657,00.html?gusrc=rss&feed=27
"We should shun president-worship by going in the opposite direction. Let’s remove the presidents from the money. We should do what Switzerland does with its Swiss franc coin. The U.S. mint could depict the eagle, statue of liberty, American Indians, natural features such as the Grand Canyon, and prominent Americans such as Benjamin Franklin and Frederick Douglass. But no presidents or pictures of the White House or the Capitol, please."
http://www.freeliberal.com/archives/002622.html
"Empire doesn’t mean only foreign affairs. It also has a domestic counterpart: the constant encroachment of the national government on our private lives. When these people talk about using government power in behalf of education, health, prosperity, and the like, you are listening to imperialists who want to maintain the government’s conquest of you."
http://fff.org/comment/com0702h.asp
"Although Donald Rumsfeld once claimed that the United States is not imperialistic and doesn’t seek empires, what else are you going to call this global presence in 159 regions of the world? Do all these countries want U.S. troops on their soil? "
http://www.lewrockwell.com/vance/vance103.html
"For months now, Ugandan army troops have been garrisoned in the northeast part of the country under orders to disarm the local populace—pastoral, cattle-herding tribes known as the Karamojong. The army is attempting, and failing, to quash an uprising which was caused by a prior attempt to disarm the same tribes."
http://www.reason.com/news/show/118708.html
"Finally, about five months too late, some 'respectable' people are beginning to understand the implications of what happened on October 17, when Bush doodled his signature onto two measures that effectively destroyed our republic."
http://freedominourtime.blogspot.com/2007/02/slouching-toward-martial-law.html
"The display of Nazi-style jingoism has been nearly unbearable. The flag is worshipped as a holy object, the national anthem is treated as a sacred hymn, every character in a military costume is canonized, and the president himself is exalted as a godhead incarnate. Now we know – because we are living through it – the stuff of which fascism is made."
http://www.lewrockwell.com/rockwell/reps-doomed.html
"Can you think of any presidents who are called 'great' but who neither got the United States involved in a major war nor carried out a major bloodbath in a war they inherited? I can't."
http://www.antiwar.com/henderson/?articleid=10545
"As President Bush continues his Nixonesque policy of 'exiting' Iraq by escalation and intimidation, both Republican and Democratic politicians are also imitating the Vietnam-era rhetoric of blaming the citizens of the chaotic country and their neighbors for the mess. In fact, the politicians are blaming everyone but themselves for this monumental policy failure."
http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=1915
"It would have been acutely embarrassing for the Bush administration to sign any assurances that we do not kidnap or otherwise 'disappear' terrorism suspects. At this very moment, German prosecutors are pursing arrest warrants for 13 CIA agents charged with kidnapping a German citizen, Khaled el-Masri, and sending him to Afghanistan where he was sexually abused and beaten for five months."
"But if free trade (read: division of labor) is good, then the bigger the free-trade area the better. Globalization should be the worldwide removal of all barriers to the exchange of goods and services -- rather than trade managed through state capitalism and multinational bureaucracies. Unilateral, unconditional free trade is the smartest policy."
http://www.fee.org/in_brief/default.asp?id=1129
"Neuroscientists at Auckland (N.Z.) University and the Carlsson Institute for Neuroscience in Sweden have found a cell pathway providing new evidence that the brain may be able to repair itself, according to the results of an eight-year study. The research may yield new information for fighting Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's and preventing strokes."
http://www.newstarget.com/021630.html
"Humans have been made phobic about sunlight exposure, fearful of skin cancer and the deadly malignant melanoma. But it is interesting to note that mortality rates for melanoma rose steeply after sunscreens came into common use, not before."
http://www.lewrockwell.com/sardi/sardi70.html
"Giving organs first to organ donors will convince more people to register as organ donors. It will also make the organ allocation system fairer. People who aren’t willing to share the gift of life should go to the back of the waiting list as long as there is a shortage of organs."
http://www.couleenews.com/articles/2007/02/21/opinion/03letter.txt
"So who's campaigning to compel the shots? Mostly it's Merck, which -- surprise! -- manufactures the vaccine. In addition to its direct lobbying, the pharmaceutical giant donates money to Women in Government, an organization of female state legislators that has embraced the mandates. (Also, for whatever it's worth, Texas Gov. Perry's former chief of staff now works for Merck.) The company is also pushing for laws requiring insurers to pay for the shots."
http://www.reason.com/news/show/118758.html
"Many so-called 'private companies' are not merely state-allied in the class analysis sense of agorist class theory, but literally state-owned in varying degrees, often quite substantial."
http://www.bradspangler.com/blog/archives/519
"People and organizations respond to incentives. We can't expect the Boston police, the TSA, the guy who runs security for the Oscars, or local public officials to balance their own security needs against the security of the nation. They're all going to respond to the particular incentives imposed from above."
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/02/cya_security_1.html
"Experts can be and frequently are wrong. An expert working for the government is no less susceptible to bias or ill motivation as one working for a corporation. Which is why it's foolhardy to rely on their expertise when making top-down policies that affect everyone. In fact, the main difference between the two is that when a private corporation's experts are wrong, the consequences are generally limited to the corporation, its employees, and its investors (there are hard cases, of course. Pollution comes to mind. But hard cases make for bad policy.). When the government's experts are wrong, we all get to suffer the consequences. Which is a good reason to have government making as few one-size-fits-all policies as possible."
http://www.theagitator.com/archives/027531.php#027531
"Attacking Iran will put American civilians in the terrorist crosshairs, with little or no federal Kevlar to protect them. The key question is not whether terrorists will attack but how the American people will likely respond and how politicians could exploit the situation."
http://jimbovard.com/blog/2007/02/24/liberating-iran-enslaving-america/
"Since the end of World War II the U.S. power elite have pursued a program of world dominance based on the doctrine that only America’s leaders were enlightened enough to bring order to the benighted masses — by force if necessary. Not coincidentally, this program was also good for major corporate interests. President Eisenhower called the arrangement the military-industrial complex. It has not been good for the world. Nor has it been good for Americans, since it has put them at risk from the people their government has wronged."
http://fff.org/comment/com0702g.asp
"Coercive government – the State as we have known it – has historically been by far the greatest enemy of freedom, and thus the greatest destroyer of love. This remains true today, as any newspaper will amply confirm: war; torture; death camps; unjust laws and imprisonment including vast gulags; needless poverty and even famine – all of these are the results of government action, and the extremely widespread emotional damage caused by such horrors perpetuates the worst elements of the human condition. "
http://www.strike-the-root.com/71/allport/allport8.html
"One of the most curious, and ominous, aspects of life in the Bush gang's Babylonian satrapy has been the continual, unrelenting and clearly deliberate targeting of Iraq's academics, intellectuals, technicians – basically, anyone who might be capable of independent thought and action, transcending the sectarian, ethnic and tribal cliques empowered by Bush's aggression, and outside the control of the occupiers and their sycophants as well."
http://www.chris-floyd.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1041&Itemid=135
"Any president who craves a high place in the annals of history should hasten to thrust the American people into an orgy of death and destruction. It does not matter how ill-conceived the war may be. Lincoln achieved his presidential immortality by quite unnecessarily plunging America into its greatest bloodbath--ostensibly to maintain the boundaries of an existing federal union, as if those boundaries possessed some sacred status. Wilson, on his own initiative and against the preference of a clear majority of the American people, propelled the country into a grotesquely senseless, shockingly barbarous clash of European dynasties in which the United States had no substantial national interest. On such savage and foolish foundations is presidential greatness constructed."
http://www.mises.org/story/2491#
"The story really begins in Britain, where an unlikely Member of Parliament, William Wilberforce, courageously took up the cause of human emancipation, despite virtually universal opposition. The son of a wealthy merchant, young Wilberforce led the hedonistic lifestyle of a college student at Cambridge."
http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=1929
"Under the new agreement, Pyongyang promises to shut down the Yongbyon reactor within 60 days, in exchange for 50,000 tons of fuel oil. During that period, North Korea must readmit the international inspectors it expelled in 2002, and talks will commence between Washington and Pyongyang on normalizing diplomatic relations. This last provision echoes the 1994 'agreed framework,' which included promises of such talks but never led to meaningful negotiations. The deal is only marginally better than the framework, which froze North Korea's nuclear program by shutting down its reactor at Yongbyon in exchange for energy aid from the United States and its allies. North Korea never fully complied last time, and the agreement broke down altogether in late 2002."
http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=7947
"Less than two months after Romania joined the EU, edicts from Brussels are threatening to destroy its way of life. The young are leaving for better-paid jobs in Western Europe. And just over the crest of the hill above Matau, bulldozers are churning up the meadows to create a ski run and holiday resort."
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article1413086.ece
"Support our troops? Hell no. Anyone who 'supports the troops' is an accomplice to their deeds. The evidence shows clearly that these are not innocent babes in the woods: they are wolves, predators, killers, deeply, profoundly implicated in what will go down in history as a horrific war of aggression. ... There will be no easy end to this war because it is merely a symptom of our own inner rot. We've come a long way from the American of Jefferson's time to the neo-barbarians of the Late Imperial era – and it's been downhill all the way."
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=10546
"The president has focused on two negative consequences: a loss of U.S. credibility and the prospect that withdrawal would precipitate a sort of reverse domino effect, propping up the authoritarian governments that Bush's Iraq policy was intended to undermine. These claims bear a strong resemblance to the arguments of Lyndon Johnson, who argued against cutting our losses in Vietnam."
http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=7973
"This is your war, you followers of Bush. This is your war, you timorous Democrats who won't even consider a measure to cut off funding for Bush's crime. This is your war, you Beltway pundits, you 'serious reporters' serving as unfiltered pipelines for the lies and manipulations of the brutal thugs in power. This is your war -- but the bloodsoaked consequences will belong to us all, and to our children, and to their children, a dark acrid smoke trailing down through the generations."
http://www.chris-floyd.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1042&Itemid=135
"Not surprisingly, many of those who have been through the system Ani describes have fled Iraq, but intend to return to join the guerrilla campaign against the U.S. Occupation. 'The United States through its actions made people hate the Americans much more than before,' observed Ani, who doesn't express any interest in becoming a Jihadi."
http://freedominourtime.blogspot.com/2007/02/iraqi-justice-shape-of-things-to-come.html
"Her film career began with small roles in the early 1930s. But with the death of her husband in 1935, Main threw herself into her work. She never remarried and had no children."
http://www.briansdriveintheater.com/marjoriemain.html
"Adams's technical mastery was the stuff of legend. More than any creative photographer, before or since, he reveled in the theory and practice of the medium."
http://www.anseladams.com/content/ansel_info/anseladams_biography2.html
"Gorey belongs on the short list of canonical 20th century artists. The problem is, he seems to be in a canon of one. This isn't his problem: It's the problem of all the rest of us who seem unable to fit 'visual artist' and 'writer' in the same breath, much less the same person. But the question Gorey raises is why we make such distinctions in the first place."
http://archive.salon.com/people/bc/2000/02/15/gorey/
"The Manchurian Candidate (based on the 1959 novel of the same title by Richard Condon) is the director's best known work and was recently named as one of the top 100 films of all time. It was pulled from circulation due to the death of President Kennedy, but was re-released to great acclaim in 1988. Frankenheimer directed Seven Days in May in 1964 and The Train in 1965 that were also well received along with Grand Prix, and Seconds, both in 1966, and The Fixer in 1968."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Frankenheimer
"Is he going to be expelled from school for good? Will he flunk? Will he end up serving a sentence? And all over some pointless stubbornness! It makes no sense at all. He should just do what the school tells him. They're experts. They know more than some 17-year-old boy."
http://www.backwoodshome.com/columns/wolfe070219.html
"Warner Bros. is so excited about 300, Snyder's adaptation of Frank Miller's Greek-history-as-superhero tale, that they handed him the keys to Alan Moore's Watchmen, another sacred text for comics fans. 300 opens nationally March 9; Watchmen is scheduled for a 2008 release."
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,72775-0.html?tw=wn_index_8
"It's also about the way taxation, 'safety', 'health', and other regulation, and—100 extra points for Jim!—professional licensure destroy what others have striven with all their might to build. It's about a new Renaissance that will result if all that can be done away with. The whole story is seen from the viewpoint, spoken in the voice, of an individual at once authentically young—I promised myself I would always remember how I thought and felt at that age, so I know—and at the same time every bit as sophisticated as kids that age can be."
http://www.ncc-1776.org/tle2007/tle406-20070218-02.html
"The plot is beyond complicated, but it basically comes down to this: Omigod, 23! Omigod, 23!! Omigod, 23!!!" [I haven't seen the film, but I enjoyed this review. Fnord!]
http://www.villagevoice.com/film/0708,lee,75854,20.html
"The guidelines, titled 'Boundless Imagination, Boundless Hazards: Ways To Keep Your Kids Safe From A World Of Wonder,' are posted on the HHS website, and will also be available in brochure form in pediatricians' offices across the country."
http://www.theonion.com/content/news/child_safety_experts_call_for
The counter terrorist unit detonates Steve's bomb and everyone gets a full face of it. [In the spirit of the Boston: Aquateen Hunger Force farce.]
http://www.comedycentral.com/motherload/player.jhtml?ml_video=82214
"Mr. Bush’s popularity has taken some serious hits in recent months, but the new survey marks the first time that over fifty percent of respondents indicated that they wished the president was a figment of their imagination."
http://www.borowitzreport.com/archive_rpt.asp?rec=6698
Flash animated cartoon video w/audio
http://www.markfiore.com/animation/recap.html
"When men stick to conscience and reason, allowing a natural tradition of respect to suffice for the foundation of community, society can heal from the removal of the state parasite. The codification of tradition leads to subjugation of individual conscience by enforcement institutions made up of men with very little conscience. Society will survive this cycle again. These so-called 'Dark Ages' are a natural outgrowth of failed attempts to re-impose order from the top down, yet they are also the foundations for ensuing renaissances. "
http://www.strike-the-root.com/71/davis/davis1.html
"[T]heoretical physicists rely heavily on financial support from just a handful of federal agencies, with some private foundation money thrown into the mix. These limited funding options provide further incentives for conventional thinking. Observing that such incentives are not limited to physics, Smolin warns that intellectual sclerosis could be developing throughout the sciences."
http://www.reason.com/news/show/118524.html
"There are two major values of public schooling, from the perspective of government officials. One, this institution provides the means by which government officials can slowly but surely, over a period of 12 years, mold the mindsets of children into one of conformity and obedience to authority. Second, public schooling enables government officials to fill children’s minds with officially approved political, historical, and economic doctrine."
http://www.fff.org/freedom/fd0611a.asp
"In the either/or style of American discourse, to oppose affirmative action makes one a racist, to be concerned about immigration makes one anti-Mexican, to say the the U.S.A. doesn't owe Israel anything makes one anti-Semitic, and reserving the right to criticize the Commander-in-Chief in a time of war makes one unpatriotic.( And four years ago, to oppose the war could make one both 'anti-Semitic' and 'unpatriotic.') And we can add to the list: to have questions about 9/11 makes one a 'conspiracy theorist.' Americans don't need to be officially censored if they can be effectively smeared and shouted down."
http://partialobserver.com/article.cfm?id=2103
"While Denver police refused to speculate on whether the killing was related to Gorman's legal medical marijuana grow, fellow activists had little doubt that he died in an attempted robbery. 'It's pretty amazing that this guy worked his entire life trying to make marijuana legal and in the end, the fact that marijuana is illegal is what led to his death,' Mason Tvert, executive director of SAFER, an organization dedicated to legalizing small amounts of recreational marijuana, told the Denver Daily News."
http://stopthedrugwar.org/chronicle/474/colorado_marijuana_activist_ken_gorman_killed
"Public distrust of the Bush Administration in particular and government in general dwarfs the cynical peaks of Watergate. A Scripps Howard/Ohio University poll finds that 36 percent of Americans believe that federal officials took part in 9/11 or sat on their hands, deliberately allowing the attacks to occur 'because they wanted the United States to go to war in the Middle East.' One out of six, 16 percent, think the Twin Towers were brought down by planted government bombs, not hijacked passenger jets."
http://www.commondreams.org/views07/0221-26.htm
"Those who believe they are among the 'chosen few' with the right beliefs, ideas, and talents to lead the country won't be interested in logic. They're not in politics because they 'have faith in Democracy' or the Constitution or whatever, they're in politics because they believe they have the right to rule."
http://independentcountry.blogspot.com/2007/02/why-elites-still-believe-in-government.html
"Vista will turn out to be the worst black eye for Microsoft, ever. It will be the turning point, when we look back in the future…."
http://www.stoweboyd.com/message/2007/02/ballmer_on_vist.html
Find all RSS feeds & e-mail lists on the Sign Up page –
or use this RSS feed for Ender's Review
Each week immediately after Ender's Review is posted at Endervidualism a small plain text note (~5K) containing a few links to the web edition is sent to ERevNote subscribers.
If you know of prospective readers, please send them a link to this page, or alternately if you don't wish to e-mail them yourself, you can e-mail their addresses to me at this address: Tom@Endervidualism.com and I will send them a message with a link to the latest issue and invite them to subscribe.
Comments suggestions and discussion on the content and structure of this review are welcome at the ERevD: EnderReviewDiscussion Yahoo group. Feel free to jump in there at any time.
Alternately, you may elect to receive a copy of an HTML e-mail object (50 - 90K). Archives of the HTML e-mail are available to EnderReview members. You may join that group or subscribe to its mailing list.