Apr. 29 — May 5, 2007

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Ender's Review
of the Web

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

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Pursuing Liberty

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

Energy…and flavors of freedom

      By Taran Jordan from The Freedom Outlaw

"If the government isn’t obligated to protect us from 'criminals,' then the criminals are free to do what they choose until and unless they’re caught. And since government gets to decide who’s a criminal…it could be anyone, or not. It could be me or you. In fact, it IS you and me. That’s the way government wants it. That’s why they pass more laws than anyone could possibly ever memorize, let alone obey. Which to me means…I’m free to do whatever I choose (until and unless I get caught by government). Government has admitted it doesn’t have to try and stop me, nor is it required to try to protect those who might be affected by what I do."

http://taranjordan.wordpress.com/2007/05/05/energy/

Taking the Revolt Against REAL ID to a Whole New Level

      By James Leroy Wilson from Independent Country

"What Congress has done, Congress can undo, and we're in the process of proving it. Gone are the days when an issue is settled for all time just because Congress votes it into law. Now, and in the future, citizens will be joining together to force the repeal of bad laws. A case in point is the online gambling ban. A bill to repeal it has just been introduced. But an even better example is the REAL ID Act. REAL ID is on the ropes, and today is the day when we take the national revolt against REAL ID to a whole new level."

http://independentcountry.blogspot.com/2007/05/taking-revolt-against-real-id-to-whole.html

Supreme Court Ruling Could Save Vonage

      By Timothy B. Lee from Cato Institute

"A more fundamental reform would be for Congress to amend patent law to clearly state that software is not eligible for patent protection. The de facto patentability of software is a recent judicial innovation, and there's growing evidence that it's been bad for the software industry. Congress should put an end to this ill-considered experiment by reinstating the rule that software is not eligible for patent protection."

http://www.cato.org/tech/tk/070501-tk.html

Medical Marijuana: Minnesota Bill Passes Senate, House Version Moving Too

      By staff from Drug War Chronicle

"The Minnesota Senate Tuesday gave final approval to a medical marijuana bill, passing SF 345 on a narrow 33-31 vote. The vote marks the first time a medical marijuana bill has been approved by a full vote in either House in Minnesota."

http://stopthedrugwar.org/chronicle/484/minnesota_medical_marijuana_bill_passes_senate

Life in Amerika

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

The Default Setting is "Overkill"

      By William N. Grigg from Pro Libertate

"Lewis was arrested and initially charged with kidnapping, despite the fact that he was simply trying to leave the hospital with their own child – and his wife didn't object. That charge was dropped, but he now confronts a charge of child endangerment because the police officer who tazed him caused him to drop the infant."

http://freedominourtime.blogspot.com/2007/05/default-setting-is-overkill.html

Good Cop, Bad Doctor

      By Jacob Sullum from Reason

"By prosecuting Hurwitz for drug trafficking because some of his patients abused or sold painkillers he prescribed, the Justice Department reminded physicians throughout the country that they are expected to be cops as well as doctors. If they fail to reconcile these irreconcilable roles, if they do not treat their patients like criminals as well as customers, they can be convicted of felonies punishable by decades in prison, as Hurwitz was last week."

http://www.reason.com/news/show/119963.html

TSA and Tyranny: Connecting the Dots

      By Becky Akers from Foundation for Economic Education

"As with most bureaucracies, what the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) claims to accomplish and what it actually does accomplish are entirely different things. The excuse it offers for patting us down and rifling our belongings at airport checkpoints is that these shenanigans protect us -- from terrorists, if not from sexual predators and thieves. In reality, the TSA exists to control us. Theory tells us that, and so do the facts when we connect several recent but isolated events."

http://www.fee.org/in_brief/default.asp?id=1278&year=2007&month=5

Atlanta Police Nearly Killed 80-Year-Old Woman--Two Months Before Kathryn Johnston

      By Radley Balko from TheAgitator.com

"You have to wonder, at what point should Atlanta's judges start to question these officers' competence? More support for my recommendation that every large police department in the country keep a searchable database of every warrant applied for, issued, and executed. Mistakes need to be documented. And if the same judges continue to issue warrants to bad cops, they need to be held accountable, too. Ditto for prosecutors. "

http://www.theagitator.com/archives/027781.php#027781

Ordered Liberty without the State

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

Gun Control, Crisis and the State

      By Angelo Mike from Strike The Root

"Why, when we can all see that this tragedy serves to increase the state’s power to compel and coerce ... do most people not recognize that the state is acting as a predator? That, as happened on Virginia Tech’s campus where firearms were already banned, when it bans weapons, doesn’t it only disarm the people who would hope that the state would protect them when left to its own devices?"

http://www.strike-the-root.com/71/mike/mike12.html

Organized Capital vs. Organized Labor

      By Kevin Carson from Mutualist Blog: Free Market Anti-Capitalism

"I've said before, if we're simply choosing between forms of statism, I prefer the form of statism that is least onerous to me. … So, employers, when you're ready to eliminate statism from labor relations altogether, come back and we'll talk. "

http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2007/05/organized-capital-vs-organized-labor.html

Civilization in Free-Fall

      By Butler Shaffer from LewRockwell.com

"All political systems are defined by their use of violence – whether actual or threatened – to compel people to do what they do not otherwise choose to do. Life is a spontaneous, self-directed process; and to forcibly intervene in human action is to make life become or do what it does not choose to be or do. Because uncoerced people will always act for the purpose of achieving their desired outcomes, governmental action will, of necessity, produce lesser degrees of well-being."

http://www.lewrockwell.com/shaffer/shaffer154.html

The rise of black market security firms

      By Brad Spangler from BradSpangler.com

"Agorists should, of course, be careful not to portray as heroic every illegal enterprise. Any one group can, in this nascent state of security market development, morph unpredictably into criminal (under libertarian law theory, rather than just statist legislation) red market protection rackets, bandits or even outright death squads. Still, they should be pointed to for now, at least, as an indication that the counter-economy wants to provide services where states fail to deliver them."

http://www.bradspangler.com/blog/archives/615

Spreading Decentralism

Articles demonstrating an increase in the dispersal of power.

Vigilante squads impose their form of peace in Brazil

      By Peter Muello from Houston Chronicle

"Startling transformations like Roquete Pinto's are increasingly visible across Rio, as for-profit 'militias' made up of active and former police officers, private security guards, off-duty prison guards and firefighters evict drug gangs from slums where violence used to be out of control."

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/headline/world/4759077.html

No debate: Obama, Edwards, GOP bloggers support free access to footage

      By Nate Anderson from Ars Technica

"The two parties have yet to support the requests, though the growing pressure may soon make this inevitable. While the letters have so far targeted the political parties, they might just as well be directed at the networks [who] were making the contract requests in the first place."

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070504-no-debate-obama-edwards-gop-bloggers-support-free-access-to-footage.html

Spread this number

      By Rudd-O from Rudd-O.com

"The movie industry is threatening Spooky Action at a Distance for publishing that number, specifically with copyright infringement. I had no idea a number could be copyrighted. Anyhow, what is it? From the site: It’s the HD-DVD Processing Key for most movies released so far."

http://rudd-o.com/archives/2007/04/30/spread-this-number/

One Man, One Gun

      By Bevin Chu from The China Desk

"China, including the Taiwan region of China, has never acknowledged the right of ordinary citizens to keep and bear arms. Many societies, as divergent as Afghanistan and Switzerland, have cultural traditions that acknowledge this natural right of individual human beings. China, it pains me to say, has not been among them. Pai however, has become very wise indeed. Not only has she forsaken Pan Green ideology, she now explicitly champions the right to keep and bear arms."

http://thechinadesk.blogspot.com/2007/05/one-man-one-gun.html

The New World Hegemon

Depictions of the coming Imperial power

Blueprint for Dictatorship

      By Justin Raimondo from Antiwar.com

"This use of the military to enforce domestic order is a new development in American history, one that augurs a turning point not only in terms of law, but also in our evolving political culture. Such a measure would once have provoked an outcry – on both sides of the aisle. When the measure passed, there was hardly a ripple of protest: the Senate approved it unanimously, and there were only thirty-something dissenting votes in the House. Added to the Military Commissions Act, this new brick in the wall of domestic repression creates the structure of a new imperial system on the ruins of the old constitutional order. George W. Bush and his hard-core neoconservative henchmen may have lost the war in Iraq, but they have won a virtually uncontested victory at home: the conquest of the old republic by an emerging imperial order. "

http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=10895

The Sham of the Padilla Trial

      By Jacob G. Hornberger from The Future of Freedom Foundation

"Obviously, the government would prefer that Padilla be convicted by the jury because then the citizenry can simply assume that the federal system is operating normally. No alarm bells would go off, as they would if U.S. military officials carted Padilla out of federal court after a jury announced a verdict of 'not guilty'."

http://www.fff.org/comment/com0704p.asp

In Defense of Lawless Order: Mansfield's Paean to Fascism

      By William N. Grigg from Pro Libertate

"What the Founders understood, and the Idiot King's war in Iraq demonstrates beyond dispute, is that a lawless executive is the public official most likely to induce and capitalize on 'temporary delusions of the people.' The strength and energy the executive is supposed to exercise consists of holding fast against transient democratic pressures to aggrandize the central government; it is not his role to use whatever powers he can arrogate to himself to overcome public opposition to expensive and freedom-devouring central government undertakings."

http://freedominourtime.blogspot.com/2007/05/in-defense-of-lawless-order-mansfields.html

The "No Mercy" Doctrine Strikes Again in Afghanistan

      By Chris Floyd from Empire Burlesque

"This week, we saw yet another example of the uncompromising aggression ordered by the Bush Administration in the supposedly liberated land: dozens of civilians killed in an American air attack on three rural villages in Herat province. The bodies of at least 45 civilians -- including a large number of women and children under 10 -- have already been recovered, with more to come, say officials of the Bush-backed Afghan government."

http://www.chris-floyd.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1134&Itemid=135

Politics by Other Means

War, rumors of war, and politicians fomenting war.

THE LOW POST: Observations About the First Democratic Debate

      By Matt Taibbi from Rolling Stone

"[T]here was something obviously perverse and obnoxious about these terminal ambition cases hogging the airwaves already, pushing us to get on board with their insane power-fantasies a full fifteen months before most of us should even start thinking about the next election. ... There must be something to it -- it must be beneficial to the American power apparatus somehow to demean the individuals who seek to occupy its highest offices."

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/14363433/

Trying to Catch Up with the Voters -- Only Mike Gravel and Ron Paul Get It

      By Alexander Cockburn from CounterPunch

"Both Democratic and Republican politicians are becoming uncomfortably aware that they may have seriously miscalculated just how unpopular the war in Iraq is with a very large number of American voters. … "

http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn05052007.html

Foreign policy challenge: see world as it really is

      By Robert Robb from Tucson Citizen

"The practical limitations on the ability of the United States to direct the destiny of other peoples and cultures, and the cost of such ambitions, have been exposed. Nevertheless, the three leading Republican candidates for president in 2008 - Rudy Giuliani, John McCain and Mitt Romney - cling to some version of the neoconservative vision. This gives Democrats the chance to forge a new direction and consensus on foreign policy. However, if Barack Obama's speech last week to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs is illustrative, and it probably is, they aren't really up to the task."

http://www.tucsoncitizen.com/daily/opinion/49815.php

Bush's farewell tantrum

      By Paul Campos from Rocky Mountain News

"The Republicans lost 30 Congressional seats in last fall's election, while the Democrats lost none, largely because the American people were voting against the war. Every opinion poll shows that, by large majorities, Americans support the efforts of Democrats to force President Bush to begin withdrawing our troops. That pressure will only grow. As increasingly panicky Republicans are all too aware...."

http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/opinion_columnists/article/0,2777,DRMN_23972_5513967,00.html

Spontaneous Order

Articles showing decentralized successes.

A Question of Control

      By David Calderwood from LewRockwell.com

"As predicted by anyone who knows anything about software, the encryption code used by HD-DVD and Blue-ray DVD discs was cracked, and the enterprising folks who did it disseminated the numeric key. In no time at all the key turned up on site after site, and those sites were apparently submitted to the website digg, which serves as a sort of popularity meter for Internet content. ... Thus are the battle lines drawn between the old way, typified by the MPAA and RIAA who defend their sand castles of old with the fist of the state by bludgeoning their very own customers, and the new way, where producers of content rely on an atmosphere of mutual respect and cooperation with their customers to protect their investment of time and talent."

http://www.lewrockwell.com/calderwood/calderwood14.html

Should We Ban Luxury Condos?

      By Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. from Ludwig von Mises Institute

"Ten years ago, Auburn, Alabama, was the home of retail commerce and student housing, while our neighboring community of Opelika was a place of family residency with a falling rate of growth. Then retailers discovered a use for the vast land, low prices, and low taxes in Opelika, and began to build huge commercial centers. Opelika now thrives, and what has happened to Auburn? The retailers and low-priced student apartments close to campus are being displaced by luxury condos. ... It happened because the resources found new and more economically efficient uses, as a reflection of the decisions made by entrepreneurs over which consumers stand in judgment every day in their buying decisions. "

http://www.mises.org/story/2566

Book Review: Mating Minds -- How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature

      By David L. Brooks from The Bio-Rational Institute

"Miller's book is a startling and wide-ranging account just how much we owe to sexual selection. Miller takes us on a tour through sexual selection, showing how it explains details of our bodies--penises, breasts, buttocks, beards, head hair, and full lips--just as it explains the peacock's tail or the lark's song. But it is when he turns his attention to those behaviors we cherish as definitively human that it gets interesting."

http://www.biorationalinstitute.com/shownews.php?nid=2254

Best Hope Lies in Privately Funded Stem Cell Research

      By Sigrid Fry-Revere from Cato Institute

"The great advantage of private funding is that it allows research to proceed even -- especially -- when it is politically touchy. When the federal government refused to fund in-vitro fertilization research in the mid-1970s, critics cried that the U.S. would fall behind, that there would be a brain drain, and that infertile couples would suffer. None of these dire predictions came true. Instead, the research proceeded privately and today reproductive technologies -- IVF and related technologies for humans and animals -- represent a $16 billion a year industry in the U.S. alone."

http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=8205

Nonspontaneous Disorder

Articles showing centrally planned disasters.

The FCC's Not Our Mommy or Daddy

      By Nick Gillespie from Reason

"Despite its sober tone, the study rests on the demonstrably false idea that violent TV breeds violence in reality, and it also fails to take seriously the vast increase in child-friendly programming and parent-empowering viewing tools. The result is a list of recommendations to Congress that seems as comically and absurdly detached from contemporary America as an episode of 'SpongeBob SquarePants'."

http://www.reason.com/news/show/119992.html

Give Bees a Chance

      By Matt Hutaff from The Simon Magazine

"The current blight has spread across the country rapidly, leaving abandoned hives full of uneaten food and unhatched larvae. Natural predators brave enough to enter behave erratically, 'acting in a way you normally don’t expect them to act,' says beekeeper Julianne Wooten. And whereas naturally abandoned hives are infested by other insects within a short period of time, hives affected by what is tentatively labeled colony collapse disorder (CCD) are avoided."

http://www.thesimon.com/magazine/articles/canon_fodder/01375_give_bees_chance.html

I'd Buy That For A Dollar: Approaching “RoboCop” World

      By William N. Grigg from Pro Libertate

"In that system, the risks are subsidized, the losses are socialized, and the profits are privatized. In the current example, these investors are buying (with capital provided through Fed inflation) infrastructure that was created and maintained with tax dollars. As Business Week observes, infrastructure investments create 'captive customers,' so 'the cash flows are virtually guaranteed.' If the deals still don't work out, state and municipal governments (or, more likely, Washington) will step in and buy back the infrastructure concessions – or the Fed might find other investors, which is pretty much the same thing. "

http://freedominourtime.blogspot.com/2007/04/id-buy-that-for-dollar-approaching.html

New laws create second-hand woes for CD retailers

      By Ed Christman from Reuters

"Independent merchants selling and buying used CDs across the United States say they are alarmed by stepped-up pawn-broker-related laws recently enacted in Florida and Utah and pending in Rhode Island and Wisconsin."

http://www.reuters.com/article/technologyNews/idUSN0448721120070505

War Is The Health Of The State

War is the ultimate State intervention in society.

The War the Government Cannot Win

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

"The worst lie is the big one: that government can accomplish wonderful things if we give it enough power, money, and discretion. No matter how many times we hear it, or in what context, it is always and everywhere a lie. A leader who says this is the equivalent of the snake in the garden who promises that glorious knowledge comes with just one bite of fruit. And yet we as a people keep being lured into accepting it."

http://www.lewrockwell.com/rockwell/war-govt-nowin.html

No Humans Were Harmed in the Making of This War

      By Glen Allport from Strike The Root

"Coercion is always wrong; in human terms, coercion is a crime (except when used in defense). The harm of government coercion is hugely amplified when governments move from spending their coerced incomes on roads and courts and other "basic government functions" and begin spending tax money on wars or social crusades."

http://www.strike-the-root.com/71/allport/allport16.html

Tenet and His Masters

      By Paul Craig Roberts from CounterPunch

"Billions of dollars in 'aid' are missing. The stench of corruption is heavy in the air. There are myriad investigations of Bush administration and contractor corruption. Who can keep up with them all? Cheney's Halliburton, the greatest hog at the trough, has not been indicted. The missing suitcases of cash have not been recovered."

http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts04302007.html

Missile Defense Obsession Lessens U.S. Security

      By Ivan Eland from The Independent Institute

"The problem with even a working missile defense has always been that an adversary can more cheaply build decoys and other countermeasures, or even additional missiles, to overcome or defeat an expensive and limited defense system. Faced with such defenses, Russia and Iran could both adopt some or all of these responses, triggering a new arms race."

http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=1961

Bits of History

The Past seen with a fresh look.

Censors for Free Speech: Jack Valenti's legacy

      By Jesse Walker from Reason

"On Christmas Eve, 1908, New York Mayor George McClellan, Jr., the son of the Civil War general, shut down all the city's movie theaters. Theoretically this was a public health measure—the venues were denounced as dirty and cramped—but the real reason for the command was pressure from anti-movie moralists, from nativists who distrusted the theaters' immigrant audiences, and from vaudeville houses and other institutions that didn't like the competition."

http://reason.com/news/show/119948.html

Why Economists Tend to Oppose Gun Control Laws

      By Scott A. Kjar from Ludwig von Mises Institute

"However horrendous we might find the mass shootings at Columbine, Virginia Tech, and other places, the fact is that when disaffected people start planning mass mayhem, the lack of a gun will not stop them. The 1927 Bath Township School bombing, in which 45 people were killed by a school board member, shows that guns are neither necessary nor sufficient for the commission of mass murder at schools."

http://www.mises.org/story/2562

Not the worst US massacre….

      By Lila Rajiva from The Mind-Body Politic

"I think it’s fair enough to point out the sensationalism involved in the coverage of V-Tech. But, it’s also fair to say that people really do find crimes committed by identifiably psychotic or evil individuals more interesting, psychologically, than political or social confrontations between groups. The media plays on that bias and lets something like V- Tech distract us from bigger issues, while also handing the state another excuse for imposing more security laws."

http://lilarajiva.wordpress.com/2007/05/03/not-the-worst-us-massacreby-a-long-shot/

The Panic of 1907

      By Fred Foldvary from The Free Liberal

"The Panic of 1907 shook confidence in the U.S. financial system, but the people and the government officials learned the wrong lessons. The problem with the banking system was the federal control of the money supply, and the effective remedy would have been free market banking, where the banks and other private firms would issue private currency backed by gold. With competitive banking, the private bank notes and deposited funds would expand flexibly in accord with the demand for money and borrowing, while the redemption into gold would prevent inflation. That is how the Scottish free banking system worked previously."

http://www.freeliberal.com/archives/002739.html

War and Peace

Articles showing the nature of War.

George and Richard

      By Charley Reese from Antiwar.com

"Nixon succeeded not in winning the war in Vietnam, but in prolonging it until 21,000 more young Americans died in the jungles and rice paddies. Then we withdrew, and none of Nixon's predictions came true. To draw further parallel, we got into the Vietnam War because the people who put us there: (1) didn't know the history; (2) didn't speak the language; (3) didn't understand the culture; and (4) arrogantly assumed that American firepower and technology could overcome any and all obstacles. "

http://www.antiwar.com/reese/?articleid=10886

Fear Factor: Press Plays 9/11 Card to Justify Somalia Slaughter

      By Chris Floyd from Empire Burlesque

"The Terror War is about securing even more loot and power for elite factions in the American Establishment (and selected foreign cronies). Somalia's oil and its strategic location make it a prime target for the Terror Warriors; hence the invasion and the blood-soaked occupation. But these truths must remain forever hidden from the American people. And here Tomlinson's story has been marvelously effective. "

http://www.chris-floyd.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1131&Itemid=135

Bush War Policy Comes Crashing Down

      By Sheldon Richman from The Future of Freedom Foundation

"It’s been a rough several weeks for President Bush and the war party. … No, not a good several weeks for the president and his men and women. In fact, it could be an understatement to say that the whole war-policy edifice is crashing down. "

http://www.fff.org/comment/com0705a.asp

Happy “Mission Accomplished” Anniversary

      By James Bovard from BOVARD

"Today (May 1) is the fourth anniversary of one of the most dishonest propaganda speeches in modern American history. President Bush did his flight suit strut on the deck of the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln in front of a banner proclaiming 'Mission Accomplished.' Bush proclaimed, 'With new tactics and precision weapons, we can achieve military objectives without directing violence against civilians.' Tell that to Haditha - tell that to all the Iraqi families who have had kinfolk killed at US checkpoints - tell that to the people of Fallujah."

http://jimbovard.com/blog/2007/04/30/happy-mission-accomplished-anniversary/

Great Individuals In History

Some people stand out from the crowd.

Scout/Cowgirl -- Calamity Jane : May 1, 1853

       from Cowgirl's Dream

"This hard drinking woman wore men's clothing, used their bawdy language, chewed tobacco and was handy with a gun. She traveled from Arizona through the Dakota territories during her rough life. At her death, the 'White Devil of the Yellowstone' was remembered as a saint by the citizens of Deadwood, where she helped nurse the sick during a smallpox plague."

http://www.cowgirls.com/dream/cowgals/calamity.htm

Mathematician/Physicist/Philosopher -- Henri Poincaré : Apr. 29, 1854

      By J J O'Connor and E F Robertson from School of Mathematics and Statistics, University of St Andrews, Scotland

"Poincaré ... is often described as the last universalist in mathematics. He made contributions to numerous branches of mathematics, celestial mechanics, fluid mechanics, the special theory of relativity and the philosophy of science. Much of his research involved interactions between different mathematical topics and his broad understanding of the whole spectrum of knowledge allowed him to attack problems from many different angles. ... He is acknowledged as a co-discoverer, with Albert Einstein and Hendrik Lorentz, of the special theory of relativity."

http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Biographies/Poincare.html

Filmmaker -- Fred Zinnemann : Apr. 29, 1907

       Quote from mini-bio by Chris Ulrich taken from IMDb Bio page from IMDb

"[H]e became increasingly interested in American film and decided that was what he wanted to do." [Directing credits include: A Man for All Seasons (1966), Oklahoma! (1955), High Noon (1952) and The Seventh Cross (1944) along with many other movies.]

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0003593/

Anarchist/Actor -- "Grandpa" Al Lewis : Apr. 30, 1910

       from Al Lewis Home Page Website

"Never underestimate your opponent. They'll tell you that if you're a fighter. Never underestimate. You can poke fun at 'em, you can do satire, but they work 24 hours a day. It's like Lord Acton said: 'Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely.' I say that power works 24 hours to remain in power. Throughout history. Go back to kings, feudal times. ... Their fucking machine works 24 hours a day, man. It grinds, it grinds. Otherwise they don't stay in power, they topple. "

http://www.pscelebrities.com/al.html

Culcha'

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

Superhuman Imagination: Vernor Vinge on science fiction, the Singularity, and the state

      Interviewed by Mike Godwin from Reason

"Vinge: I think that if the Singularity can happen, it will. There are lots of very bad things that could happen in this century. The Technological Singularity may be the most likely of the noncatastrophes. Except for their power to blow up the world, I think governments would have a very hard time blocking the Singularity. "

http://www.reason.com/news/show/119237.html

Under Siege Part V: Beneath the Wheel

      By Claire Wolfe from Backwoods Home Magazine

"The Big Man knew there was no way he could send employees of A Nameless Federal Agency (ANFA) to investigate this Hardyville berg on his agency food-chain authority. No, he dare not tip his hand. He had to keep knowledge of these 3600 unplucked square miles as close to his shirt as a handful of aces. "

http://www.backwoodshome.com/columns/wolfe070430.html

SPIDEY 3 passes "the test"

      Reviewed by Wally Conger from out of step

"Spider-Man 3 is the perfect summer film, especially for Spidey geeks like me who started reading and collecting the comics, well, longer ago than we might like to admit. Sure, it’s chock full."

http://wconger.blogspot.com/2007/05/spidey-3-passes-test.html

Shooter, you might like it, I did.

      Reviewed by Tom Ender from Sunni and the Conspirators

"The film does begin with events in the Horn of Africa, The USSA's newest 'war theater.' In any case, the movie's protagonist, well-played by Mark Wahlberg, makes it clear that he does not simply align with the political factions of Mordor on the Potomac."

http://www.sunnimaravillosa.com/node/1108

The lighter side

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

Pubic Service

      By Jon Stewart and Jason Jones from The Daily Show

"Jason Jones understands the tension that builds up in the balls of power. "

http://www.comedycentral.com/motherload/?lnk=v&ml_video=86243

Bush Has One Of Those Days Where He Feels Like 68 Percent Of People Hate Him

      By staff from The Onion

"In an East Room press conference Tuesday, President Bush told reporters that he had the 'sneaking feeling' that 68 percent of the U.S. population hated his guts that day."

http://www.theonion.com/content/news_briefs/bush_has_one_of_those_days

The Moneycrats of Crock

      By Garry Reed from Loose Cannon Libertarian

"Paperpushers and Agencycrats from all over Crock gathered in their natural habitat, a gray, boring, unimaginative federal building in the nation's capital, to read the article aloud. 'President Bush has proposed a significant jump in funding for an anti-drug advertising campaign that government-funded research shows is at best useless and at worst has increased drug use among some teens'."

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

Paris Hilton sentenced to death

      By Toby Maller from TheSpoof.com

"The 26-year-old apologised for her behaviour during the hearing, saying: 'I'm sorry and I did not do it on purpose.' However, in a move that both stunned and delighted even the prosecution, Judge Michael Sauer sentenced Ms Hilton to death by lethal injection, in strict adherence to the state's controversial '3 strikes and you're dead' rule."

http://www.thespoof.com/news/spoof.cfm?headline=s1i18350

Deep Thought

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

Boxer’s Confusion about Ownership

      By Tibor R. Machan from The Future of Freedom Foundation

"If the American people need to be allowed to make certain kinds of use of the lands Senator Boxer’s bill makes public property, they aren’t the owners of such property. So Senator Boxer knows that the American people will not own those lands, since the American people will only be allowed, by the real owners, namely, the government, to carry out certain activities on those lands."

http://www.fff.org/comment/com0705c.asp

Brains, If Any: Probably More Trouble than They're Worth

      By Fred Reed from Fred On Everything

"I don’t get it. Explain it to me. Intelligence, I mean. Everybody who talks about it seems to be slightly nuts. They get political about it, and then ideological, and stubborn, and unglued from reality. To start with, some people insist that intelligence doesn’t exist; they are, I suspect, the best evidence for their case. Some people and some groups are obviously smarter than others. It’s daily experience."

http://fredoneverything.net/BrainsIfAny.shtml

The Goal Is Freedom: De Jasay on Limiting Power

      By Sheldon Richman from Foundation for Economic Education

"The tendency of this government to grow comes from the fact that the marginal cost to an individual of additional government services is 'zero or subjectively seen as zero': 'Hence the net benefit he expects to derive from increased public provision of the goods he may want to consume is, subjectively and ex ante, always positive.' Meaning: the demand for more government will not be constrained in the way the demand for goods in the market is."

http://www.fee.org/in_brief/default.asp?id=1281

The Mechanisms and Benefits of Road Privatization

      By Gennady Stolyarov II from Le Québécois Libre

"The road entrepreneur might organize towing services for cars that have malfunctioned; he might also own trucks which refuel cars that have run out of gas. Customers' waiting times for service will not be as long under a private system as it is in the status quo – because every immobilized car is a great inconvenience to road users and a possible hindrance to traffic. To improve both customer satisfaction and efficiency of traffic flow, the road owner will have every incentive to address the problem as soon as possible."

http://www.quebecoislibre.org/07/070429-3.htm

Miscellany

Articles not easily classified

Ron Paul in the Debate

      By Roderick T. Long from Austro-Athenian Empire

"Those of my readers who didn’t catch tonight’s Republican candidates’ debate may be wondering what Ron Paul said. I imagine there’ll be a transcript online soon, but in the meantime here’s a quick summary. "

http://praxeology.net/blog/2007/05/03/ron-paul-in-the-debate/

Bush administration proposes retroactive immunity for phone companies

      By Nate Anderson from Ars Technica

"Retroactive immunity from prosecution is a beautiful thing if you're a major telecommunications provider in the US, and phone companies are about to receive it if the Bush administration gets its way. The administration's new appropriations request for intelligence agencies was recently disclosed at a hearing of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, and it includes a massive gift to the phone companies who have been (can we drop the 'allegedly' at this point?) helping the NSA and other agencies."

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070504-bush-administration-proposes-retroactive-immunity-for-phone-companies.html

Socialism vs. Regulation

      By James Leroy Wilson from The Partial Observer

"The right to exist, the right to survive, the right to self-defense - these are different ways of saying the right to 'life.' This right not only entitles one to defend oneself from aggression, but also to engage in labor and/or trade one deems necessary to exist in a satisfactory condition. It also means one has the right to make one's own decisions regarding health and safety, because transferring that judgment to someone else is to allow them to take away one's very right to life."

http://partialobserver.com/article.cfm?id=2222

When Critical Updates kill

      By Robert X. Cringely from InfoWorld

"What was this 'critical update,' exactly? The Microsoft Knowledge Base describes it thusly: 'On non-English versions of Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP, some text in the print dialog box unexpectedly appears in English after you install the .NET Framework 3.0.' Ay Carumba! Another global disaster narrowly averted. The entire non-English speaking world must be incontinent with gratitude."

http://weblog.infoworld.com/robertxcringely/archives/2007/04/when_automatic.html

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