June 24 — 30, 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.

Hans F. Sennholz, 1922-2007

      By Richard M. Ebeling from Foundation for Economic Education

"For more than half a century Austrian-school economist Hans F. Sennholz demonstrated that learning about the free market was not an exercise in the 'dismal science.' An extremely popular public speaker and immensely prolific writer, Hans educated and persuaded thousands of people about the virtues of the free society and the benefits of economic liberty. His passing on Saturday at age 85 leaves a great void in the cause of freedom."

http://www.fee.org/in_brief/default.asp?id=1392&year=2007&month=6

City of Liberty

      By Brian Doherty from Reason

"The leaders of libertarianism all had their own reasons for adoring the city. But what was most important about New York in the spread of libertarianism was that it's the sort of city that attracts the people needed to learn the ideas of a Rand, a Mises, and a Rothbard, and build an activist movement out of them."

http://www.reason.com/news/show/121135.html

Free-staters find common ground at Gunstock get-together

      By Victoria Guay from Citizen Online

"As a weeklong get-together of free-staters, dubbed PorcFest 2007, winds to a close, hundreds of people have networked, learned from each other and enjoyed their personal freedoms."

http://www.citizen.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070624/CITIZEN_01/106240325/-1/CITIZEN

Did Real ID help derail immigration bill?

      By Nate Anderson from Ars Technica

"Tucked into the omnibus bill was a provision that would have required all employers to use a Real ID-compliant card to verify all workers before hiring. This provision proved controversial, and an amendment (the Tester-Baucus amendment) was introduced that would have stripped it from the bill. During debate on the amendment this week, senators that supported the Real ID provision were unable to muster the votes needed to kill off the amendment. The next day, the omnibus bill died."

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070629-did-real-id-help-derail-immigration-bill.html

Life in Amerika

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

Blinded by the Law

      By Radley Balko from Reason

"Baker explained that he would appeal the judge's decision, not because he thought Wilson's sentence was just but because the girl was under the age of consent of 16, and, 'It is my responsibility to follow the laws of Georgia as they are written, not how some may wish they were written.' In other words, as the Charles Dickens character Mr. Bumble famously proclaimed in 'Oliver Twist,' 'the law is a ass.' And it's Thurbert Baker's job to slavishly follow that ass wherever it may lead. That, unfortunately, is an increasingly common sentiment among many prosecutors-'I don't make the laws, I just enforce them.' It's also not entirely honest."

http://www.reason.com/news/show/121112.html

"You won't go bankrupt. You'll always produce"

      By Vin Suprynowicz from Las Vegas Review-Journal

"I'm a writer. I'll be out of work when people can no longer read and comprehend anything beyond microwave instructions, a process already well under way. It's the mandatory government youth camps that are depriving me of readers, creating wave after wave of young people schooled to hate learning so much that they vow 'never to read another book again once I get out of this damned place'."

http://www.lvrj.com/opinion/8154052.html

The Goal Is Freedom: Last Taxpayer Standing

      By Sheldon Richman from Foundation for Economic Education

"Let's be clear about this: the Court did not say there was no merit to the plaintiff's constitutional argument. Rather, it said that simply being a taxpayer does not qualify a person to make that argument in a court of law. Why not? Because no mere taxpayer can claim he specifically has been damaged by government spending."

http://www.fee.org/in_brief/default.asp?id=1404

Public-Access TV: Fascism in Action

      By Scott McPherson from The Future of Freedom Foundation

"In virtually every city in the country a cable company negotiates with the local government — in exchange for monopoly status — to offer its service to the people in that community. There’s so much wrong with this relationship that it’s hard to know where to begin. "

http://www.fff.org/freedom/fd0703f.asp

Ordered Liberty without the State

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

The Enterprise of Customary Law

      By Bruce L. Benson from Ludwig von Mises Institute

"In fact, our modern reliance on government to make law and establish order is not the historical norm. Public police forces were not imposed on the populace until the middle of the nineteenth century in the United States and Great Britain, for instance, and then only in the face of considerable citizen resistance. Crime victims played the prosecutors' role in England until almost the turn of the century, and they did not yield to public prosecution without a struggle. The foundation of commercial law was developed by the European merchant community and enforced through merchant courts."

http://www.mises.org/story/2542

Anarchy for the USA: A Conversation with Josh Wolf

      Interviewed by RU Sirius from 10 Zen Monkeys

"My political philosophy is that the best society would be one where the precepts that we followed were formed through consensus. But we don't live in that society. We live in a system of laws made by people who claim to represent us, but so often don't. For instance, on the night Nancy Pelosi was elected, her own constituents passed a law saying that they want the President impeached. And Pelosi immediately made a statement that impeachment was off the table. So clearly, these people don't represent us. But at the same time, they still make the laws that we live under."

http://www.10zenmonkeys.com/2007/06/26/anarchy-for-the-usa-a-conversation-with-josh-wolf/

The Biggest Obstacle to Freedom

      By Bevin Chu from The China Desk

"Genuine freedom, not the slavery passing for freedom that we know under democracy and other forms of dictatorship, elective and non-elective, is quite literally unimaginable to us. Voter/taxpayers in 'advanced democracies' are little different from the prison inmates in The Shawshank Redemption. ... The solution is to choose free market anarchism. But that requires that we overcome the biggest obstacle to freedom, fear."

http://thechinadesk.blogspot.com/2007/06/biggest-obstacle-to-freedom.html

The Worst Way to Do Anything

      By Glen Allport from Strike The Root

"Coercive government always proves to be the worst way to do anything peaceful and civilized; the combination of coercion and top-down central planning ensures this. Furthermore, everyone knows that government is the worst way to do things, even though most people don't seem to realize that they know it."

http://www.strike-the-root.com/71/allport/allport22.html

Spreading Decentralism

Articles demonstrating an increase in the dispersal of power.

Bye, Bye, Miss American Empire

      By Bill Kauffman from Orion magazine

"Secession is the next radical idea poised to enter mainstream discourse—or at least the realm of the conceivable. You can’t bloat a modest republic into a crapulent empire without sparking one hell of a centrifugal reaction. And the prospect of breaking away from a union once consecrated to liberty and justice but now degenerating into imperial putrefaction will only grow in appeal as we go marching with our Patriot Acts and National Security Strategies through Iraq, Iran, and all the frightful signposts on our road to nowhere."

http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/311

Speaking of Immigration…

      By Jonathan David Morris from The Free Liberal

"Immigration didn’t ditch the gold standard. Immigration didn’t get us addicted to foreign oil. Immigration didn’t set up Social Security, turn elections into spectacles, or wage wars in the Middle East that we didn’t need and couldn’t afford."

http://www.freeliberal.com/archives/002828.html

Ron Paul: How a Fringe Politician Took Over the Web

      By Brendan Spiegel from Wired

"During the 2004 election, a web-savvy campaign staff helped turn Howard Dean's anti-war candidacy into the first online political phenomenon. But the Ron Paul frenzy seems to have sprung from the internet itself. Paul's libertarian message – he is against big government, the war, and pretty much anything that costs taxpayers money – has attracted a group of anti-establishment, tech-savvy supporters who have taken everyone by surprise."

http://www.wired.com/politics/onlinerights/news/2007/06/ron_paul

Dissolve the US!

      By Vache Folle from St George Blog

"The world would be a lot safer if the United States were abolished. When the Soviet Union broke up, most folks thought it was a good thing. Let’s follow their example and break up the United States. Let the states be independent countries."

http://emergencybackupdog.blogspot.com/2007/06/dissolve-us.html

The New World Hegemon

Depictions of the coming Imperial power

The 'Family Jewels' -- The CIA: still evil after all these years…

      By Justin Raimondo from Antiwar.com

"The uncovering of the CIA's 'family jewels' – a catalog of the Agency's crimes committed at home and abroad in the 1970s – underscores my principal objection to the trite post-9/11 conventional wisdom, 'Everything's changed.' Because, of course, nothing has changed, not really, at least not where the unmitigated evil of the U.S. government is concerned. ... What's different today is merely a question of scale: yet the general outlines of the neocon program of warmongering, waterboarding, and the waylaying of innocents took shape long ago."

http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=11216

Old Europe ... Is Getting Older

      By Alvaro Vargas Llosa from The Independent Institute

"If they had a choice, many of those who have been expressing anger at the EU would probably replace it with far more retrograde institutions designed to reflect their fears of the modern period. But that’s not the point. Behaving precisely in the way that, according to many polls, makes half the population of the EU resentful of their institutions will not restore the 'Eurocracy’s' sex appeal. Window-dressing the European constitution is the symptom of a deeper problem—the lack of vision regarding the role the continent should play in today’s increasingly open world."

http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=1991

Why They Hate Us

      By Sheldon Richman from The Future of Freedom Foundation

"The last century-plus of U.S. foreign policy has largely been a story of aggression and empire-building. American presidents have intervened and interfered in every region of the world, not in self-defense, but in the name of U.S. 'national interest,' which in reality means the interest of well-connected corporations and their ambitious political agents who felt appointed to bring order to the world. ... How many Americans have any inkling of the crimes — yes, crimes — their government has committed against foreign peoples in their name over the last century?"

http://www.fff.org/comment/com0706f.asp

Nothing's Either Good or Bad -- Unless the State Says So (Pt. 1)

      By William N. Grigg from Pro Libertate

"The United States, nominally a constitutional republic, has a population of roughly 300 million people. That figure represents a rounding error in trying to calculate the population of China, which is a nominally Communist nation. Yet the US has a larger prison population than China. Granted, in China one can find himself thrown in prison for various ideological crimes that don't involve offenses against persons and property. But the same is true of the United States, as well, even if the specific list of such 'offenses' is different."

http://freedominourtime.blogspot.com/2007/06/nothings-either-good-or-bad-unless.html

Politics by Other Means

War, rumors of war, and politicians fomenting war.

Justice in Alabama

      By Scott Horton from Harper's Magazine

"If those in power have political enemies, they can throw the enemies out of power or banish them. But this carries with it some risk. The enemies may gain public sympathy over their treatment, and they may regroup and then in the future present a serious threat. The solution ... is to use the criminal justice system to vilify political adversaries – they will be branded criminals, stigmatized, driven from all office and power. And people will be afraid to associate with them in any way. The 'crime' is in the end of the day irrelevant. The process is critical, and indeed, the process must be a public one and the humiliation complete."

http://harpers.org/archive/2007/06/hbc-90000351

Legitimizing Voting: A Modest Proposal

      By Wilton Alston from Strike The Root

"Human nature suggests that if a person knows he’ll really have to answer for his lies, or aggressions, he tends to act responsibly. However, when he knows the 'opportunity costs' for violence can be externalized to someone else, a constituency for example, he also knows he doesn’t need to worry. This is why war (and its attendant violence) always increases under a coercive state."

http://www.strike-the-root.com/71/alston/alston3.html

A Confederation of War-Seeking Factions

      By Glenn Greenwald from Antiwar.com

"From its inception, the campaign to depict and treat Iran as pure, unadulterated Evil has been driven by this manipulative and dishonest attempt to conflate Iran's posture toward Israel with its posture toward the U.S. Whether the president himself was a victim of that manipulation or a knowing propagator of it is something one can debate, and the truth likely lies somewhere in between."

http://www.antiwar.com/orig/greenwald.php?articleid=11193

Taking Mike Gravel Seriously

      By Matt Hutaff from The Simon Magazine

"The battle for the Democratic nomination is an embarrassing hodgepodge of career politicians who've done little but prop up the status quo until it suits them to levy charges against it. I'd more or less written off the group, but Gravel's recent pounding on Hillary Clinton, 'Why Hillary Scares Me,' shows there are Big Government proponents with a soul."

http://www.thesimon.com/magazine/articles/
canon_fodder/01410_taking_mike_gravel_seriously.html

Spontaneous Order

Articles showing decentralized successes.

Your Freedom needs Free/Libre Software

      By Richard Stallman from Znet

"The only way to assure that your software is working for you is to insist on Free/Libre software. This means users get the source code, are free to study and change it, and are free to redistribute it with or without changes. The GNU/Linux system, developed specifically for users' freedom, includes office applications, multimedia, games, and everything you really need to run a computer. See gNewSense.org for a totally Free/Libre version of GNU/Linux."

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=43&ItemID=13157

The Case for Open Borders

      By Hogeye Bill from Strike The Root

"I agree with Hoppe that in an anarcho-capitalist society 'there exists no such thing as freedom of immigration' if it involves violation of property rights, and that 'there exists the freedom of many independent private property owners to admit or exclude others from their own property in accordance with their own unrestricted or restricted property titles.' Hoppe's definition of 'free immigration' is contorted and, frankly, wrong. Free immigration should logically be analogous to free speech and free trade--that someone (in particular the State via its agents) should not prevent an individual from engaging in actions that he is entitled to do."

http://www.strike-the-root.com/71/bill/bill2.html

A Market for Criminal Skills

      By Jeffrey Tucker from Ludwig von Mises Institute

"So what do we have here? A skill gained from, mostly likely, years spent doing things they should not have been doing, now put to service in a way that is beneficial and profitable to the human community of civilized people. It's hardly the only example. We can think of the number of computer hackers now serving large companies to the benefit of everyone, or toughs who might otherwise be hurting people who play sports, or people with a penchant for guns and violence now serving as security guards or bouncers. There are many ways in which skills associated with criminality can serve a productive purpose. "

http://www.mises.org/story/2630

The original human (‘Old Stone Age’) diet is good for people with diabetes

      By Anna Johansson from Innovations Report

"The main result was that the blood sugar rise in response to carbohydrate intake was markedly lower after 12 weeks in the Paleolithic group (–26%), while it barely changed in the Mediterranean group (–7%). At the end of the study, all patients in the Paleolithic group had normal blood glucose."

http://www.innovations-report.com/html/reports/medicine_health/report-86534.html

Nonspontaneous Disorder

Articles showing centrally planned disasters.

Whole Phooey on Antimonopoly Action

      By Fred Foldvary from The Progress Report

"As more people buy organic foods, the mainstream grocery are increasingly offering organic products, produced without pesticides, hormones, and artificial chemicals. Safeway, Wal-Mart, Trader Joe's and other large chain stores do compete with Whole Foods. Conventional stores sell most of the natural foods in the USA. They have locational advantages as well as lower prices. There are also many small natural grocery stores that compete with Whole Foods. People buy from Whole Foods not just for the organic goods but also to get fresh produce and fish, supplements, and goods that most other stores don’t have, such as coconut juice that does not have added sugar.."

http://www.progress.org/2007/fold513.htm

"Big Corn" and Unintended Consequences

      By Ray Nothstine from Acton Institute

"Ethanol is expensive to produce, has contributed to a rise in gasoline prices, and has its own pollution problems. It requires a lot of fertilizer, fresh water, and productive farm land. And, because of corrosive properties that make pipeline transportation problematic, it takes a lot of trucks to haul it. Americans may be able to afford their corn on the cob for this year’s Fourth of July celebration, but price increases are increasingly noticeable for a wide array of foods. That’s because of the widespread use of corn products in U.S. food, less land for other crops due to an increased need for corn fields, and the higher cost of corn feed for livestock."

http://www.acton.org/ppolicy/comment/article.php?article=390&wherefrom=email

organic > USDA “organic”

      By freeman from freeman’s interweblogosaur

"To all those who believed that the state needed to step in and create a uniform set of standards: I hope you’re happy! Enjoy those factory 'farm' sausage casings! Finding food that is actually organic can now be challenging, and it’s only gonna get worse thanks to inevitable assaults on food integrity and farmers who actually care by USDA and it’s cult of centralization."

http://freemania1.com/?p=50

Ten Reasons to Cut Farm Subsidies

      By Chris Edwards from Cato Institute

"Although politicians love to discuss the plight of small farmers, the vast majority of farm subsidies go to the largest farms. In recent years, the biggest 10 percent of farm businesses have received 72 percent of farm subsidies, according to the Environmental Working Group."

http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=8459

War Is The Health Of The State

War is the ultimate State intervention in society.

Saving England Wasn't Worth It

      By Scott Horton from Antiwar.com

"For a short time after World War II, as after every previous war, the U.S. began to demilitarize, but the inheritance of so many foreign empires demanded a permanent state of military readiness and deployment – and an excuse. The only way to gain consent to secure this world empire would be to 'scare the hell out of the American people' – that is, lie – as Republican Sen. Arthur Vandenberg advised President Harry Truman."

http://www.antiwar.com/orig/horton.php?articleid=11213

My, How Times Have Changed!

      By Barry Tudor from Strike The Root

"And that is the crux of this article ... [to] point out the change that happened and is happening to this place we live in called America. The militarization of the police, the meddling into our lives, the constant trumpet of 'zero tolerance,' the lessening of individual freedoms, the restrictions of government restraints onto its citizens, all have had their impact, and all have demolished what all mankind desires – freedom and prosperity."

http://www.strike-the-root.com/71/tudor/tudor8.html

Bringing Africa Together: The Unsung Triumph of George W. Bush

      By Chris Floyd from Empire Burlesque

"Imagine an African country not wanting to have 'Iraq done right' on its own soil! Imagine a nation turning down the prospect of a little runoff from Halliburton and other Bush cronies trickling into the coffers of a few of its co-opted elites, in exchange for alienating its own population and acting as another outpost for the 'flypaper strategy' that has worked so well in the Babylonian satrapy. "

http://www.chris-floyd.com/Articles/
Articles/Bringing_Africa_Together%3A_The_Unsung_Triumph_of_George_W._Bush/

War, Foreign Policy, and the Church

      By Laurence M. Vance from LewRockwell.com

"The state uses war to strip its citizens of their liberties. The authority of the legislature and the force of law that, at least in principle, thwart government power in peacetime quickly diminish during times of war. The 'father of the Constitution,' James Madison, said about the relationship between war and civil liberty: 'If tyranny and oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy'."

http://www.lewrockwell.com/vance/vance114.html

Bits of History

The Past seen with a fresh look.

A Second Look at the Slave-Trade Bicentennial

      By T. Norman Van Cott from Foundation for Economic Education

"Why have these American subplots escaped attention? One possibility is that some Americans who opposed slave imports did so for reasons of self-interest. In particular, American slaveholders who were selling their slaves to expanding slaveholding sections of the country opposed slave imports because they undermined the prices they could command for their slaves. "

http://www.fee.org/in_brief/default.asp?id=1401&year=2007&month=6

The Active Authoritarianism of Teddy Roosevelt -- Bully Boy by Jim Powell

      Reviewed by George C. Leef from The Future of Freedom Foundation

"In his previous books, Powell has critically examined two other vastly overrated presidents (Woodrow Wilson and Teddy’s distant cousin, Franklin D. Roosevelt) and exposed them as dangerous misfits who should never have held any public office, let alone the presidency. He pulls no punches with Teddy Roosevelt either, showing him to be a man obsessed with power and control, utterly unable to comprehend the damage that his mega-state would cause."

http://www.fff.org/freedom/fd0703g.asp

The Legacy of 1967: A Leading Historian Assesses the Year That Split America in Two

      By Sean Wilentz from Rolling Stone

"A sexual frankness mixed with both communal adhesiveness and insistent individualism - the long-suppressed tradition of Walt Whitman - washed over American culture. Yet, as the contrasting scenes from that New Year's Eve suggest, the stock images are also incomplete. Even as the counterculture was helping to transform America into a nation of greater tolerance and freedom, the country was beginning a long-term political shift to the right. ... We should remember 1967 not as the time the nation turned on and tuned in but as the moment the United States began hurtling toward a nervous breakdown, riven by conflict that would change the country and the world forever."

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/15255443/

Mort Sahl, the angry young comic, at 80

      By John Rogers from Akron Beacon Journal (Ohio.com)

"Truth be told, Sahl's humor has always targeted the powerful, whoever they were. He's proud to have met - and made fun of - just about every president since Eisenhower. He doesn't list favorites, although he notes that he and Ronald Reagan became good friends. Richard Nixon, he says, liked being portrayed as a raving lunatic, once telling him that image intimidated other world leaders. As for his own politics, Sahl shrugs and says he has remained what he was when he left the University of Southern California in 1950 with a degree in urban planning: 'An independent, populist radical'."

http://www.ohio.com/mld/ohio/entertainment/music/17420944.htm

War and Peace

Articles showing the nature of War.

End the Occupation

      By Patrick Cockburn from CounterPunch

"Iraqi politics increasingly resembles Chicago during Prohibition in the 1920s in which criminal mafiosi and politicians are linked together and disputes are settled violently. Turf wars are endemic."

http://www.counterpunch.org/patrick06292007.html

Surging Numbers in Iraq

      By Tom Engelhardt from Antiwar.com

"The question is: What word best describes the situation these Iraqi numbers hint at? The answer would probably be: No such word exists. 'Genocide' has been beaten into the ground and doesn't apply. 'Civil war,' which shifts all blame to the Iraqis (withdrawing Americans from a country its troops have not yet begun to leave), doesn't faintly cover the matter. If anything catches the carnage and mayhem that was once the nation of Iraq, it might be a comment by the head of the Arab League, Amr Moussa, in 2004. He warned: 'The gates of hell are open in Iraq'."

http://www.antiwar.com/engelhardt/?articleid=11206

Slandering the Dead: The American Massacre at al-Khalis

      By Chris Floyd from Empire Burlesque

"Iraqis have to deal with the brutal reality of the war. And they know that everyone killed there by the invading forces is not 'al Qaeda.' They know that many Iraqis being killed by the Anglo-American coalition are innocent civilians. And they are increasingly embittered at the American slander of their dead."

http://www.chris-floyd.com/Articles/Articles/
Slandering_the_Dead%3A_The_American_Massacre_at_al-Khalis/

Bargaining with Tehran

      By Christopher Preble from Cato Institute

"Washington could offer a grand bargain to Tehran. The Bush administration would renounce its stated policy of regime change in Iran and would offer to normalize diplomatic and trade relations. In exchange, Tehran would pledge to open its nuclear program to rigorous, on–demand international inspections to guarantee that nuclear material was not used for weapons purposes. If the Iranians rejected such an offer, we could revert to alternative policies. "

http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=8402

Great Individuals In History

Some people stand out from the crowd.

Mathematician -- Henri Lebesgue : June 28, 1875

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

"Building on the work of others, including that of Emile Borel and Camille Jordan, Lebesgue formulated the theory of measure in 1901 ... he gave the definition of the Lebesgue integral that generalises the notion of the Riemann integral.... This generalisation of the Riemann integral revolutionised the integral calculus."

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

Writer -- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry : June 29, 1900

       From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"If not always autobiographical, Saint-Exupéry's work is greatly inspired by his experiences as a pilot. No exception is The Little Prince, his most famous book, a poetic illustrated tale in which he imagines himself stranded in the desert where he meets The Little Prince, a young boy from a tiny asteroid."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antoine_de_Saint-Exup%C3%A9ry

Actor -- Pat Morita : June 28, 1932

       from IMDb

"Abundantly busy and much loved Asian-American actor who became an on-screen hero to millions of adults and kids alike as the wise and wonderful Mr. Miyagi in The Karate Kid (1984)…."

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001552/bio

Singer -- Eva [Little Eva] Boyd : June 29, 1943

       from History-of-Rock.com

"Perhaps no babysitter in history got a bigger break than Eva Boyd, who baby sat for songwriters Carole King and Gerry Goffin. King and Goffin asked her to record a song they had written called 'The Loco-Motion'."

http://www.history-of-rock.com/little_eva.htm

Culcha'

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

Election (1999)

      Reviewed by Tom Ender from Endervidualism

Political satire / black comedy stars Matthew Broderick, Reese Witherspoon, Chris Klein, Jessica Campbell; screenplay by Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor, adapted from the Tom Perrotta novel, directed by Alexander Payne. “[T]he send up of electoral politics reveals a rich vein of both entertainment and insight. What people do in their pursuit of winning elections provides the main theme, with the story line focused on a high school race for student government President.”

http://endervidualism.com/agora/election_1999.htm

The Deal with the Devil -- Part II: Justice

      By Claire Wolfe from Backwoods Home Magazine

"We were happy and more than a little relieved when we watched the negotiators (because everyone wandered in and out of the meetings and occasionally even offered an opinion) hammer out the clause that said the Delaval organization would issue an immediate 'cease and desist' message to federal attorneys and researchers looking into the exact nature and location of Hardyville."

http://www.backwoodshome.com/columns/wolfe070625.html

Constructive Engagement

      By James Leroy Wilson from Independent Country

"I saw most of the tribute to Paul Simon on PBS this evening, in the event of his being awarded the first-ever Gershwin Prize for Popular Song. The group Ladysmith Black Mambazo performed, bringing to mind Simon's 1986 Graceland album that propelled them to the world stage."

http://independentcountry.blogspot.com/2007/06/constructive-engagement.html

ERB's Best Novels

      Reviewed by Bob Wallace from The Sudden Curve

"ERB really wasn't much of an artist, and most definitely was a workman-like writer, but dang, he could tell a hell of a story."

http://tonova.typepad.com/thesuddencurve/2007/06/erbs-best-novel.html

The lighter side

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

Tired Of Traffic? A New DOT Report Urges Drivers: 'Honk'

      By staff from The Onion News Network

"The Department of Transportation reports gridlock can be eliminated by simply honking your car's horn"

http://www.theonion.com/content/video/tired_of_traffic_a_new_dot_report

Back in Black: New Media

      By Lewis Black from The Daily Show

"You know what a fake news show on Fox News should give you? Real news!"

http://www.comedycentral.com/motherload/player.jhtml?ml_video=89307

ThreatDown - Coral Reefs

      By Stephen Colbert from The Colbert Report

"Coral reefs carry the herpes virus. Who's been f@#king the coral reefs? "

http://www.comedycentral.com/motherload/player.jhtml?ml_video=89057

Another Joker Joins Race: Dave Barry Running for Prez!

      By Greg Mitchell from Editor & Publisher

"'And in case you're wondering if I am fully committed to the campaign, consider this: I have bumper stickers,' Barry explains. 'For more on the campaign you can visit davebarry.com, where I spell out my positions on the issues. Basically, I agree with the American public on everything'." [More Q&A here; an example: "This is not a time for platitudes. This is a time for straight talk. This is a time for separating the sheep from the goats by getting off the pot."]

http://www.editorandpublisher.com/
eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003601818

Deep Thought

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

Identifying With the State

      By Butler Shaffer from LewRockwell.com

"To the politicized mind, the idea that 'we are the government' has real meaning, not in the sense of being able to control such an agency, but in the psychological sense. The successes and failures of the state become the subject’s successes and failures; insults or other attacks upon their abstract sense of being – such as the burning of 'their' flag – become assaults upon their very personhood. "

http://www.lewrockwell.com/shaffer/shaffer159.html

A conscientious objector in the Gender War

      By Wendy McElroy from ifeminists.com

"This is the key to understanding the cult of victimhood surrounding PC feminism. As long as 'male institutions' remain, women are -- by definition and everywhere -- oppressed. In their worldview, the only way to cease being victims is for feminists to grab the helm. ... Until the 'utopian' day when the institutions of society have been reconstructed, gender feminists claim no equality is possible."

http://www.ifeminists.net/e107_plugins/content/content.php?content.182

An Evolutionary Argument for Decentralism

      By David Baake from Strike The Root

"The important thing to note is that, while human beings were undergoing their formative evolution, they were not in situations in which it would have been adaptive to evolve altruistic or moral behavior towards individuals that they did not know or would never meet. There would not have been situations where an individual's behavior would affect the lives of people that he did not know, so humans did not develop and perfect complex behavioral adaptations to deal with these situations."

http://www.strike-the-root.com/71/baake/baake1.html

Risks of Data Reuse

      By Bruce Schneier from Schneier on Security

"I don't mind that my automatic road-toll collection tag is tied to my credit card, and that I get billed automatically. I even like the detailed summary of my purchases that my credit card company sends me at the end of every year. What I don't want, though, is any of these companies selling that data to brokers, or for law enforcement to be allowed to paw through those records without a warrant."

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/06/risks_of_data_r.html

Miscellany

Articles not easily classified

ZEITGEIST, The Movie

       from Google Video

"What [do] Christianity, 911 and The Federal Reserve all have in common?" [1 hr 57 min http://www.zeitgeistmovie.com/]

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5547481422995115331

The Soul Eaters--A Family Business

      By Retta Fontana from Strike The Root

"It’s one thing to screw up your own life with ego attachment to beliefs. It’s entirely another when, in order to keep the lie going, one must run what James Redfield calls 'control dramas' on others. Politics is the ultimate control drama and it’s easy to see why the 'kings of the hill' enjoy the fun. "

http://www.strike-the-root.com/71/fontana/fontana20.html

Giant microwave turns plastic back to oil

      By Catherine Brahic from NewScientist.com

"A US company is taking plastics recycling to another level – turning them back into the oil they were made from, and gas. All that is needed, claims Global Resource Corporation (GRC), is a finely tuned microwave and – hey presto! – a mix of materials that were made from oil can be reduced back to oil and combustible gas (and a few leftovers)."

http://environment.newscientist.com/channel/earth/dn12141?DCMP=NLC-nletter&nsref=dn12141

An AIR of Invisibility: Adobe has Microsoft in its sights

      By Robert X. Cringely from I, Cringely

"Adobe absolutely dominates nearly every market for graphical software and is a strong competitor in video, too. For the company to reach the next level of growth would require either absorbing or destroying Autodesk, thus taking over Computer-Aided Design, the last graphic niche Adobe does not control, or choosing to branch off in some new direction. Much to the relief of Autodesk, I believe Adobe has opted for the latter course."

http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2007/pulpit_20070629_002360.html

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