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"Hirsi Ali has been called many things, among them a right-wing fanatic. To suggest that making the defense of women’s rights one’s life cause and refusing to apply double standards when judging cultures makes one a right-wing fanatic can only mean that her critics have lost their moral compass." [Stephen Colbert interviewed her this week. I found that discussion fascinating and perhaps the best interview he has done to date.]
http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=1940
"The Lynn and Erin Compassionate Use Act would allow qualified patients suffering from certain serious illnesses such as cancer, HIV/AIDS and epilepsy to use marijuana for relief from their symptoms."
http://www.drugpolicy.org/news/031407nm.cfm
"Young’s book was involved because an Amicas brief filed in the court by the gun-rights advocacy group The Second Amendment Foundation quoted several pages of a history Young wrote. That brief got some of the judges on the Fifth Circuit Court interested in 'The Origin of the Second Amendment.' They cited the book 118 times, by Young’s estimation, in their decision. That decision was later cited by the judges in the D.C. gun law case. The D.C. decision includes, by way of its citations of Emerson, includes at least three references to materials in Young’s book."
http://www.mininggazette.com/stories/articles.asp?articleID=6213
"The right to keep and bear arms, guaranteed by the Second Amendment to the Constitution, includes the right to protect your property and your life. No government should be allowed to take that right away."
http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=8126
"Before the current administration, it had always been easy to condemn the 'good Germans' who did nothing while Jews, Gypsies and others were rounded up for extermination. One likes to believe that one will be different, will harbour Anne Frank in one's secret annex, smuggle people across the border, defy the authorities who do evil. Those we scornfully call good Germans merely did little while the mouth of hell opened up."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,2033238,00.html?gusrc=rss&feed=27
"Here is the true-life adventure of my herculean efforts to do something admittedly radical: get a new cell phone after losing my old one. The following is not for the weak of heart or stomach. But I share it with you to put the lie to the general perception that outsourcing is always efficient or economical." [See also Kevin Carson's article below which addresses some of the same concerns.]
http://www.sptimes.com/2007/03/11/News/Your_call_is_importan.shtml
"[W]e have descended to a point where the government has determined it's better that sick, crippled, suffering people (a) die, and (b) die in pain, than to give those dirty hippies the smallest of victories…."
http://www.theagitator.com/archives/027590.php#027590
"The ATF engaged in institutionalized perjury to boost its conviction rate of gun owners. The ATF’s National Firearms Branch keeps the National Firearms Registration and Transfer Records - the records of all the owners of machine guns, short-barreled rifles and shotguns, and other destructive devices. Anyone found in possession of a machine gun or other prohibited device who is not listed as the owner in the official records faces ten years in prison. ... The Treasury Department Inspector General investigated ATF’s record system and concluded that ATF employees had intentionally destroyed records of machine gun and other registrations."
http://jimbovard.com/blog/2007/03/12/feds-shaft-historic-gun-maker/
"[W]hat should be celebrated on the Ides of March is not the tyrannicide as a strategy, but rather tyrannicide as a moral fact. Putting a diadem on your head and wrapping yourself in the blood-dyed robes of the State confers neither the virtue, the knowledge, nor the right to rule over anyone, anywhere, for even one second, any more than you had naked and alone. Tyranny is nothing more and nothing less than organized crime executed with a pompous sense of entitlement and a specious justification; the right to self-defense applies every bit as much against the person of some self-proclaimed sovereign as it does against any other two-bit punk who might attack you on the street."
http://radgeek.com/gt/2007/03/15/tyrannicide_day/
"Whereas the market is a state of harmony and constant creation of prosperity, the state means nothing but destruction, violence, and hostility where none was ever present. Jealousy naturally becomes native in people’s relations: the state-made losers get jealous of the privileged few, and so the formerly harmonic market society becomes split in rivaling collectives, all of which have different aims for the state after its powers have been seized."
http://www.strike-the-root.com/71/bylund/bylund2.html
"When democracies and other monopolistic states come knocking at our door, demanding that we pay 'taxes due,' we must understand what is happening. What is happening is that a 'crime family with a flag' is demanding protection money by 'making us an offer we can't refuse.' We are physically coerced into paying for measures we disapprove of. We are physically prevented from spending our own money as we see fit. ... The fact that democracies extort taxes from 'taxpayers' in precisely the same manner that criminal gangs extort protection money from shopkeepers gives new meaning to the well-known characterization of democracy as mob rule."
http://thechinadesk.blogspot.com/2007/03/economic-selections-not-democratic.html
"The entire process of resolving dilemmas at the university is done in a timely and efficient manner, because universities are competing for students. A university does not want to make the process too protracted or unpleasant, because it would ultimately lead to a lowering of quality of the total service provided by the school. Despite the alleged impossibility of a functional private judicial system, it is apparent that at the local level of a university campus, such private systems do exist."
http://www.mises.org/story/2497
"In fact, as the court's 58-page opinion shows, gun controllers are the ones who have reinterpreted the Second Amendment, finding hidden meaninglessness. They insist that 'the right of the people to keep and bear Arms' guaranteed by the Second Amendment, unlike the rights of 'the people' mentioned in the First, Fourth, Ninth, and 10th amendments, is not a right that belongs to people."
http://www.reason.com/news/show/119106.html
"True passion for a cause - for Generation Y - is personal. It goes beyond the labels that set old against young, culture against counterculture. In a paradoxical way, the unifying cultural preference of our generation is to reject the need for a unifying culture. In the age of the Internet, of YouTube and MySpace, how could it be otherwise? ... When there isn't a clear cultural 'establishment,' there's no need for a counterculture to resist it. "
"The United States has too much coast line and too much border to make control practicable. Beefing up patrols and building a wall here or there will only force migrants to use their ingenuity to make the appropriate adjustments. But they will continue to come."
http://www.fee.org/in_brief/default.asp?id=1174&year=2007&month=3
"Somehow, the pond became stagnant over time, mucked up with greed, laziness, contempt and excess. People got bored with music. Then, someone threw a rock into the middle of it called the Internet, and nothing will ever be the same."
http://news.com.com/Where+did+the+music+industry+go+so+wrong/2010-1027_3-6167346.html
"Any honest analysis of history reveals one sober axiom: All statist political systems exist primarily to perpetuate the power and privilege of the elites who control the system. This axiom is true even for those systems that claim to oppose class-based privilege."
http://www.lewrockwell.com/latulippe/latulippe77.html
"If the notion has departed that the highest political offices in the land are supposed to be occupied by people who are honest and faithful to their oath to the Constitution, then we are far advanced on the road to tyranny."
http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts03162007.html
"In a burst of journalistic dutifulness, I asked various Mexicans whether they hated France. No. Europe? No. How about that abstraction, The West? No. The question puzzled them. Most of the world detests the United States, yes, for reasons that you can accept or not according to your politics. It isn’t for our cultural or political superiority. Often it is an objection to being bombed."
http://www.fredoneverything.net/DavyCrockett.shtml
"Things are getting bad when an autocracy chastises a republic for its human rights abuses and the criticism has merit. The Chinese condemned U.S. practices of kidnapping, torture, and indefinite detention without the opportunity for legal challenge. They also pinged the U.S. government for increased spying on American citizens. Of course, these are the same abuses that the U.S. government has criticized the Chinese government of perpetrating."
http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=1939
"There will be a mandate for change, but the change will be seen as personal more than ideological. With the exit of Bush, there will be less resistance, at least for a while, to governmental insanity and atrocity. Hillary with a Democratic Congress — or Giuliani with either party in Congress — would likely keep intact everything evil and destructive that Bush has fastened onto our country, and then ram through whatever programs they want. They both support gun control, opportunistic government spending, the police state and the war on terror."
http://www.lewrockwell.com/gregory/gregory130.html
"If there was anything remaining of the Bush regime not already discredited, Mohammed's confession removed any reputation left. The most important part of the Mohammed story is yet to make the headlines. Despite having held and tortured hundreds of detainees for years in Gitmo, and we don't know how many more in secret prisons around the world, the US government has come up with only 14 'high value detainees'."
http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts03172007.html
"Telling gay men and women that they had to hide who they were in order to earn the privilege of getting shot at for our idiot military adventures was almost worse than open bigotry. It essentially institutionalized the Closet. "
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/13826774/
"People's views on religion and politics are confused and incoherent. They want to make a distinction, but they can't. Nor should they, because what it all really comes down to is conscience. People can't help but desire their own sense of right and wrong to be reflected in the society and world they live in. Dualism is impossible because separating conscience from judgment is impossible. "
http://partialobserver.com/article.cfm?id=2131
"[T]he idea of paying enterprises to use Windows Live Search smacks more of desperation on Microsoft's part. Despite many efforts to improve Live Search's market share—such as the recently announced bundling deal with Lenovo—the search engine held as low as a 6.76 percent share in January, compared to Google's 60.9 percent. Google achieved this dominance not by paying people to use their search engine—although more recently the company has struck deals with Dell and Firefox to bundle the Google Toolbar—but by providing a measurably superior search tool compared to what was available at the time."
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070316-microsoft-paying-businesses-to-use-live-search.html
"Humans are laughing by the age of four months and then progress from tickling to the Three Stooges to more sophisticated triggers for laughter. Laughter can be used cruelly to reinforce a group's solidarity and pride by mocking deviants and insulting outsiders, but mainly it's a subtle social lubricant. It is a way to make friends and also make clear who belongs where in the status hierarchy."
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/03/14/healthscience/snlaugh.php
"A severely brain damaged woman has shown dramatic improvement in mental function after taking an insomnia drug, doctors say. The result may offer hope to millions of people living with serious brain damage."
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11373?DCMP=NLC-nletter&nsref=dn11373
"Saito said infants respond so well to baby talk that 'they form a bond by recognizing a caring person. Also, because it is easy to hear IDS [infant-directed speech], it promotes language development.' Augustyn said the bottom line from this study is that parents need to know 'it's important to talk to babies. Your babies are listening. What's important is that they hear your voice; it's not necessarily the content of what you say'."
http://www.healthday.com/Article.asp?AID=602610
"[S]enior management may be handsomely rewarded for running a corporation into the ground, so long as they are perceived to be doing everything right according to the norms of corporate culture. … "
http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2007/03/economic-calculation-in-corporate.html
"The Solar/Cosmic Ray Theory says that cosmic rays make clouds. ... They do this by knocking electrons off atoms and molecules in the air, and these liberated electrons seed the formation 'cloud condensation nuclei.' Water vapor in the atmosphere condenses on these specks to form cloud water droplets. The wet clouds thus formed block sunlight and reflect its rays back into space, which has a cooling effect."
http://www.lewrockwell.com/miller/miller21.html
"It is surreal to think that the U.S. government rushed to fly hundreds of tons of cash to a country where its Army could not stop people looting arsenals, banks, museums, and hospitals, a country not yet pacified. As Waxman put it, 'Who in their right mind would send 363 tons of cash into a war zone?' War is not a board game; it is deadly serious business. Even more surreal is the fact that no plan existed for what to do with so much money." [At least no well documented plan has been discovered yet.]
http://www.antiwar.com/orig/napoleoni.php?articleid=10655
"In the name of defending competition, all that a ban on price maintenance really does is to violate producers’ freedom of contract. It prevents them from trying a higher service-higher price strategy when they believe customers will prefer it, which is no different in kind from any other offer of higher quality goods at higher prices, by making illegal any attempt to enforce that strategy on free-riding retailers."
http://www.fee.org/in_brief/default.asp?id=1171&year=2007&month=3
"The Military Commissions Act became law in 'the land of the free' in 2006. The Act strips detainees of protections provided by the Geneva Conventions. The Act declares that no person 'subject to trial by military commission under this chapter may invoke the Geneva Conventions as a source of rights.' The Act also denies detainees the protections of the US Constitution and Bill of Rights: 'No court, justice, or judge shall have jurisdiction to hear or consider an application for a writ of habeas corpus filed by or on behalf of' a detainee."
http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts03122007.html
"When the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Empire disintegrated, the U.S. military, the military-industrial complex, and American conservatives were caught flat-footed. What would they do now? For some 50 years, they had used communism to justify their enormous worldwide military empire."
http://www.fff.org/comment/com0703f.asp
"Finally, the neoconservatives left Bush with the overarching instruction -- namely, the only thing that he should concern himself with, the only thing that really matters, is Iran. Forget every other issue -- the welfare of the American people, every other region around the world -- except the one that matters most...."
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2007/03/14/roberts_luncheon/index.html
"They too believe that America has the right to overthrow nations at will, support terrorist attacks in foreign countries, fund and arm criminal extremists, and spread murder, corruption, terror and chaos around the globe in order to make the rich and powerful elite – i.e., themselves – richer and more powerful. They too share the Bush Regime's visceral disdain for 'recalcitrant tribes' and the lower orders of humanity: the dark, the different, the poor, the 'losers'."
http://www.chris-floyd.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1072&Itemid=135
"With its cross-referenced sources and attention to detail, Rebellion offers a compelling case for Web documentaries as a significant new medium for the writing, dissemination, and revision of history. Bird originally conceived of his project as a film, and he still is pursuing that goal, but the Rebellion site is an impressive accomplishment in itself. The site's interactive structure and varied contents are useful to scholars and educators as well as interested laypeople."
http://reason.com/news/show/119079.html
"'This Cold War-era cartoon uses humor to tout the dangers of Communism and the benefits of capitalism.' 1948. Cartoon in Public Domain and available to download at Internet Archive. Google video made my day."
http://alina_stefanescu.typepad.com/totalitarianism_today/2007/03/make_mine_freed.html
"Did you know that in New York City through 1969 virtually all the public high schools had riflery teams? Thousands of students carried their rifles on subways, buses and streets on their way to school, when they went to practice in the afternoon and on their way home. And until 1963, all commercial pilots were required to carry guns and were allowed to carry guns until 1987. Gun laws have certainly changed over time. "
"To say that Franklin seriously proposed the institution of daylight saving time is rather like saying that Jonathan Swift seriously proposed, in his 'Modest Proposal,' that poor Irishwomen should sell their babies to rich Englishmen, to be eaten in place of roast suckling pig. The letter is really an example of American satire at its finest – it might have been written by Mark Twain 100 years later, or H. L. Mencken 50 years after that. "
http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig7/montalbano2.html
"The causative issue is militarism. Imperialism, by definition, requires military force. It requires huge standing armies. It requires a large military-industrial complex. It requires the willingness to use force regularly. Imperialism is a pure form of tyranny. It never rules through consent, any more than we do in Iraq today. "
http://www.buzzflash.com/articles/interviews/056
"Although many Americans regard this enormous sum [$583 billion] as excessive, hardly anyone appreciates that the total amount of all defense-related spending greatly exceeds the amount budgeted for the Department of Defense. Indeed, it is roughly almost twice as large."
http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=1941
"While Doherty’s book was in the pipeline, the issue of the war was settled, not only in libertarian circles, but in the political culture at large, and the verdict is: it was a mistake, and a very bad one. While more than a few neocons have come in from the cold and recanted, I have yet to hear a single member of the 'libertarian' contingent of the War Party confess their sins and seek absolution. And I’m not going to hold my breath, either. Some people, in any event, are beyond redemption."
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=10682
"As of 1999, the U.S. military had troops in 132 countries. The budget for the U.S. military is larger than those of the next 20 largest militaries combined. Since 1950, the military has been deployed 71 times to 42 countries and U.S. soldiers have died in 17 operations in 16 countries with more than 98,000 U.S. dead and more than 279,000 wounded. All of this has occurred without a declaration of war. This is hardly the leashed military and small defensive army that the Founders envisioned."
http://www.fff.org/freedom/fd0612d.asp
"His aim was, as he put it, to find chemical substances which have special affinities for pathogenic organisms, to which they would go, as antitoxins go to the toxins to which they are specifically related, and would be, as Ehrlich expressed it, «magic bullets» which would go straight to the organisms at which they were aimed." [Edward G. Robinson played him in the classic film: Dr Ehrlich's Magic Bullet (1940).]
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/1908/ehrlich-bio.html
"But when old 638 was within a hundred feet of the end of the siding the horrified eyes of Casey Jones and Sim Webb beheld through the gloom the looming shape of several boxcars in motion, swinging across from the main line to the side-track. In a flash both knew there way no earthly way of preventing a smashup."
http://taco.com/roots/caseyjones.html
"Walsh’s cinema is not presentational like Griffith’s, or self-reflexive like Godard’s. It is interactive. In half a dozen movies, characters actually turn and speak to us, the audience, and in The Strawberry Blonde (1941) there are sing-along song boards. Far from liberating us from naive faith in movies’ storybook realism, Walsh makes us complicit. These adventures become almost vicariously our own. "
http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/directors/02/walsh.html
"A true team leader, Puckett led the Twins to a pair of World Series titles in 1987 and 1991. The six-time Gold Glove winner was named to 10 consecutive All-Star teams from 1986 to 1995. Puckett finished among the top 10 in MVP voting seven times…."
http://www.baseballhalloffame.org/hofers_and_honorees/hofer_bios/Puckett_Kirby.htm
"'And on a lighter note,' chirped the chipper news-reader to her onscreen partner, 'You remember that high-school boy who raised such a fuss about taking a school test? Well, now his mother has made the news, too; she says her daughter can't have a vaccination that would protect her against cancer. And she says she's willing to go to jail to prevent it.' The co-anchor shook his blow-dried head ruefully."
http://www.backwoodshome.com/columns/wolfe070312.html
"I don't know at what point I stopped seeing it as comic book fluff, like how the Spartans have the most conveniently placed bottomless pit ever (classic comic book gold), but I'm sure it was probably after the first time Leonidas (King of Sparta) bloviated about 'logic' and 'reason.' While the graphics never went downhill, the script proceeded to practically nosedive into a redux of Bush's 'freedom and liberty' Inauguration speech whenever Leonidas opened his mouth." [You might think this reviewer exagerates, but after seeing 300 I don't.]
http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig8/engle1.html
"I read a postcard last week on PostSecret, since removed, from a child being held at Guantanamo Bay. My mind raced between its paradoxical rainbow-colored lines to the child in the cellar at the end of 'The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,' the 1975 short story by Ursula K. Le Guin. "
http://www.thesimon.com/magazine/articles/between_the_covers/01346_walking_away_guantanamo.html
"After a montage of great movie moments, Dennis Day sets the stage with his celebration of a jolly Irish hooligan, 'Clancy Lowered the Boom'."
http://unclewarrensattic.libsyn.com/index.php?post_id=192503
"Polls showed that immediately following her speech, Clinton's approval numbers skyrocketed all across the South, wide swaths of the Midwest, scattered pockets of the Northeast, and in California, Alaska, Nevada, North Dakota, South Dakota, Hawaii, and Ohio."
http://www.theonion.com/content/node/59586
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed planned 9/11? He seems more like the Horatio Sanz of jihad.
http://www.comedycentral.com/motherload/?lnk=v&ml_video=83814
Esteban Colberto reports from Mexico about the President's recent visit.
http://www.comedycentral.com/motherload/?lnk=v&ml_video=83812
Flash animation video w/audio
http://www.markfiore.com/animation/gonzo.html
"As anarchists, we believe in the non-initiation of force principle. I find that I need to take it one step further and not only avoid the temptation to initiate force, psychological or otherwise, but also refuse to push back when someone else is attempting to use psychological force against me. It’s a choice that reaps amazing results when done skillfully and intentionally."
http://www.strike-the-root.com/71/fontana/fontana8.html
"Everyone has their poison pill issue. For one, it might be borderline or openly-racist rhetoric. For another, it might be religious and moral intolerance. For me, it is the pro-war position. Anyone who is 'good' on the other 80, 90, 0r 95% of the issues might as well be a KKK member if he supports the war in Iraq and wants war on Iran."
http://independentcountry.blogspot.com/2007/03/poison-pill.html
"One thing the United States can do affirmatively is to drop all remaining trade barriers unilaterally. Trade agreements with Latin America get a lot of attention, and they are helpful in some ways. But they always contain special-interest exceptions and other anti-trade elements. Far better would be the unconditional opening of markets here. Anyone from anywhere should be welcome to sell their goods in the United States."
http://www.fff.org/comment/com0703e.asp
"Imagine a vigilante group created in the Old West to hunt down and hang horse thieves. We’ll call it the Cowboys Against Horse Thieves. The group was widely supported and grew very large and rich, but then something terrible happened: they started running out of horse thieves to hang. So they decided they would change what the public perceived to be a horse thief. "
http://www.drunkard.com/issues/08_02/08_02_fighting_madd.htm
From Garry's e-mail intro: "A consensus of scientists tells us that humans are responsible for global warming. Of course, a consensus of scientists told us that the Earth is flat, it’s supported by four elephants standing on a giant turtle, and that the Earth is the center of the universe while the sun and moon and all the stars revolve around it. Then we’re told by a consensus of people who write schmaltzy emails that when God closes one door He opens another. From this we can draw a consensus that for every ten bad things about global warming there must be Ten Reasons to Love Global Warming. Why doesn’t a consensus of global warm-mongers tell us about this last consensus? Could it be because real science is based on verifiable facts rather than consensus?"
http://www.freecannon.com/LoveGolbalWarming.htm
"[E]very human being is an integral whole, owning his or her own person. And because any premise other than self-ownership would mean that humans are owned by others, no alternative is possible; hence the premise is an axiom. So our starting point is axiomatic: Each human is his own self-owner. "
http://www.strike-the-root.com/71/davies/davies8.html
"Nancy Wilson made her fame with the rock group Heart. Beginning as early as the Dreamboat Annie album I liked Heart's music and enjoyed watching the band perform."
http://tonova.typepad.com/thesuddencurve/2007/03/music_video_bab.html
"Someday, we may all again march under the (non-registered trademark) MLL banner. Who can say? But in the meantime, I give A3 two agorist fists thrust into the air. May the black flag under which it marches forever wave."
http://wconger.blogspot.com/2007/03/maintaining-principles-changing-banners.html
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