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"Libertarians and other advocates of the right to bear arms have long argued that the presence of law-abiding but gun-toting citizens might well reduce the number of large-scale shooting incidents, both by discouraging them in the first place and stopping them before they get out of control. The second of the church shootings yesterday provides another example to bolster this point...."
http://hnn.us/blogs/entries/45421.html
"Did Andrea win a small victory, you bet. Because she resisted. Will the inspectors be back? Probably. Is Andrea prepared? Of course, because she believes in the sanctity of her property and God-given property rights and is willing to defend them by challenging and questioning the government enforcer/inspectors' authority."
http://www.thepriceofliberty.org/07/12/10/ewart.htm
Film producer / Health freedom activist interviews candidate Paul.
http://kevinpmiller.blogspot.com/2007/12/ron-paul-interview-with-producer-kevin.html
"Here we go again. Someone tell me why, with nearly 3,000 articles written worldwide within 48 hours following the tragic slaughter at the Omaha, Neb. Westroads Mall last week, not a single article mentioned the most important fact of all -- that there were 'no guns allowed' in the mall? What helped cause the tragedy is the liberal dream known as 'gun-free zones.' Guns also weren't allowed at Columbine High School, Virginia Tech University, Luby's cafeteria in Killeen, Texas, and every other location where the wanton slaughter of unarmed, helpless victims is a virtual guarantee." [According to Wikipedia, Ted Nugent had his birthday last week, the same birthday — though different year — as “Helicopter“ Ben Bernanke.]
http://www.detnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20071210/OPINION03/712100338/1007/OPINION
"It has become illegal in the USSA to unknowingly break unknown, never-before-heard-of laws while protesting war. It will be impossible for you to know what these laws might be. The only way you can find out what is illegal is to simply do something and then see if you get arrested for it. "
http://www.rcreader.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=12417&Itemid=42
"The process of 'injecting liquidity' is a euphemistic way of saying 'creating money out of thin air.' The Federal Reserve doesn’t need a printing press to do this. They simply create a book entry on its balance sheet, and presto, $40 billion (or whatever amount they deem appropriate) of new ‘money’ is created, which the Fed then lends to those bankers coming to it hat in hand. ... Creating money this way ...is hailed by the banking insiders and their apologists as a brilliant maneuver to fight the worsening liquidity crunch. Of course it is a view of those with vested interests, and bluntly, is just their selling pitch to the masses."
http://www.kitco.com/ind/turk/turk.html
"I believe that the U.S. dollar is in a long state of decline. This is going to be an ongoing tragedy because so many people in the U.S. and around the world will be caught in the riptide as the value of the dollar washes away."
http://whiskeyandgunpowder.com/Archives/2007/20071211.html
"I doubt any Led Zeppelin members requested pulling amateur videos from YouTube. As this sort of corporatist interference in everyday life advances I continue to wonder how many parasites actual producers can tolerate."
http://blog.tomender.com/2007/12/12/merely-the-guitar-solo/
"Politics tries to control what individuals are unable to control themselves. And what they are unable to control is the actions of other people. ... They do believe, however, that government can assert the control that they, as individuals, lack. The problem is, every government action causes a reaction the government can't control. "
http://www.partialobserver.com/article.cfm?id=2772&RSS=1
"In truth, every healthy want and need can be handled better, more efficiently, and far more safely by non-coercive means; this includes police protection, courts, roads, charity, and other common excuses for the State.... On the other hand, war and genocide and widespread torture and systematic society-wide theft really do require a coercive power, which typically means the State."
http://www.strike-the-root.com/72/allport/allport22.html
"The victims of the worst serial killer in the world are but a drop in a lake compared to the political victims of Mao Tse Tung, Pol Pot, Stalin and Hitler. They are still but a drop compared to the victims of Lincoln, Wilson, and FDR. They're a drop compared to what Bush has done, and to the murders that will be committed by those who come after him. The State is the worst serial killer in the world."
http://www.ncc-1776.org/tle2007/tle447-20071209-05.html
"A person can decide at any time that he is tired of asking for permission to live.... No, it isn’t always easy, and one cannot accomplish everything a free person should be able to do without state interference.... As such no amount of groupthink will free a person who does not want to be freer. You truly want a free society? Then stop chirping and obsessing about the best leader—cuz there ain’t such a beast—and be your own leader."
http://www.sunnimaravillosa.com/node/1283
"As promised earlier this year, Six Apart has released an open-source version of Movable Type, the company's main blogging platform. The new Movable Type Open Source (MTOS) is licensed under the GPL, which means users can freely modify, redistribute, and use Movable Type for anything they want."
http://blog.wired.com/monkeybites/2007/12/six-apart-wants.html
"Industry Minister Jim Prentice was expected to introduce new Canadian copyright reform legislation yesterday, but instead... didn't. It was a stunning reversal and an unexpected success for a grassroots campaign against the bill, widely expected to mirror the US DMCA."
"Colorado's right-to-carry law — which USA TODAY fiercely opposed as 'an old West remedy' — empowered volunteer security guard Jeanne Assam to stop a mass murderer inside her crowded church. It is ... not relevant that Assam had a law enforcement background. All permit-holders undergo training, testing and background checks."
http://blogs.usatoday.com/oped/2007/12/opposing-view-r.html
"A movement will never move forward with archaic sectarian factions or unyielding adherence to entrenched political philosophies. We must overcome our unwillingness to collaborate and collectively organize."
http://www.antiwar.com/frank/?articleid=12047
"[T]he U.S. has regularly employed torture for many decades. Most liberals and progressives, together with Democratic apologists generally, prefer to view the Bush administration as 'unique' in American history, as representing a profound shift in national policy. None of this is true: these are lies cravenly dishonest apologists tell themselves to justify their otherwise indefensible political allegiances. ... If the Democrats do not repeal the Military Commissions Act -- and they will not -- and you support them in 2008, you are supporting evil. To that extent, you are evil yourself."
http://powerofnarrative.blogspot.com/2007/12/supporters-of-evil.html
"US senators think it is 'worth considering' for Congress to overturn habeas corpus, the greatest bulwark against tyranny, [indicating] how much the US constitutional tradition has been lost. The importance of the case seems to be completely over the heads of the media, who appear to be looking for a technical solution that permits people accused without evidence to be held forever. The American press apparently believes that the US government can make no mistake or behave improperly and that the detainees, actually comprise ... 'a danger to our troops'."
http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts12122007.html
"It would be an exaggeration to say torture never works. But it is, to say the least, unclear whether the practical costs of cases like Zudabyah's outweigh the benefits of the occasionally useful piece of information torture elicits."
http://www.rockymountainnews.com/news/2007/dec/12/campos-by-fear-corrupted/
"The government's circular logic here seems better suited to a Monty Python sketch than a court of law: Throw the old lady in the pond, and if she floats, she's a witch! She might drown, you say? Why are you so worried about what happens to witches?"
http://www.reason.com/news/show/123899.html
"The latest news from presidential front-runners Hillary Clinton and Rudolph Giuliani illustrates their very different views of power and the presidency."
http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=8837
"America’s spooks finally had their revenge. After being forced by the White House in 2002-2003 to concoct a farrago of lies about Iraq, and then get stuck with the blame for the ensuing fiasco there, the 16 US intelligence agencies struck back last week with high drama and devastating effect. ... The new NIE is a devastating, humiliating blow to Bush, Dick Cheney and the neocons who have been furiously whipping up war fever and hysteria against Iran. Only two months ago, Bush actually warned Americans that Iran’s secret nuclear program threatened the entire planet and could ignite World War III."
http://www.ericmargolis.com/archives/2007/12/revenge_of_the.php
"After debacles in Iraq and New Orleans and mushrooming scandals that exposed much of Congress and the Cabinet as a low-rent crime family hired to collect protection money for the likes of Halliburton and Pfizer, people simply do not trust the politicians they vote for to be anything less than an embarrassment. You get the sense they approach the upcoming election with the enthusiasm of a two-time loser offered a selection of plea deals."
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/17652931/obamas_moment
"What do Candidate and Candid have in common? HotForWords investigates! "
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XE4cTA-EHqc
"Any free-market advocate knows that what is in short supply is not work but workers -- if government does not interfere with individual freedom. In the nature of things there is always more work to be done than people to do it. This is not news, just another way of saying that we live in a world of scarcity. ... If tomorrow we need only half the number of people it takes today to make a steady supply of some product, we'll be able to afford things we can't afford today and our living standard will rise. That's progress."
http://www.fee.org/in_brief/default.asp?id=1764
"By looking for wide swaths of genetic material that vary little from individual to individual within these sections of great variation, the researchers identified regions that both originated recently and conferred some kind of advantage (because they became common rapidly). ... Comparing the amount of genetic differentiation between humans and our closest relatives, chimpanzees, suggests that the pace of change has accelerated to 10 to 100 times the average long-term rate...."
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=culture-speeds-up-human-evolution
"Notwithstanding the official press release and subsequent media coverage, the goal of mechanism design is, generally speaking, to study how best to harness markets."
http://www.mises.org/story/2792
"Both virtue and sophism ... possess attractive features. The genuine pursuit of truth, in one sense, should be free of economic encumbrance. Professors should not feel that their livelihood is in jeopardy if they voice an unpopular opinion. At the same time, if consumer choice does not set the limits of academic activity, then what will?"
http://www.acton.org/commentary/419_education_virtue_and_sophism.php
"It is not exactly news that the Western world's fetishized 'free market' is actually a mixed economy, combining cradle-to-the-grave socialism for the rich with ball-breaking, bomb's-away capitalism for everyone else. This truism was on naked display once again this week as the central banks of the United States, Britain, Switzerland, Canada and the Eurozone announced plans to provide almost $100 billion in taxpayer money to save their banking brethren from the consequences of their own greed and stupidity."
http://www.chris-floyd.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1381&Itemid=135
"The political establishment loves this method of subsidizing the public as much as it loves the welfare state or any other transfer program. In fact, it loves it even more. The transfers associated with easy money are harder to detect than taxes and spending, but they are no less a redistribution. They redistribute money from dollar holders to dollar spenders."
http://www.mises.org/story/2811
"In 2005, the federal government spent $9.4 billion in taxpayer money to promote corn production. The resulting cheap overproduction has driven small farmers off their lands in countries such as Mexico, because they were unable to compete with U.S. imports. This oversupply helps explain why, in 2000, U.S. residents consumed an average of 73.5 pounds of high-fructose corn syrup (up from 0.6 pounds yearly in 1970)."
http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/3445/
"Though AmeriCorps abounds in 'feel good' projects, it has never provided credible evidence of benefit to the United States."
http://www.fff.org/freedom/fd0709c.asp
"I recently saw a couple getting out of their car in a parking lot. Their auto was a bandwagon of slogans for the war system.... I thought to myself what terrible parents these people must have been, to not only fail to protect their child from the war system that wants to consume him or her, but to brazenly celebrate it! If their child should die in battle in furtherance of the state’s political and economic ambitions, will they regard the death as the fulfillment of a 'meaningful existence'?"
http://www.lewrockwell.com/shaffer/shaffer167.html
"The truth is that the reason underlying many wars is internal, not external. It is the freedom of the American people that is dangerous to the mahouts of the governing elite, who ride uncertainly on top of the elephant of the great unwashed, never quite sure that they are actually as in control of events as they would like to believe themselves to be."
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=59114
"There's a refreshing libertarian edge to much of the material, especially the ways in which governments baldly manipulate the truth in wartime. 'In war,' Winston Churchill is quoted, 'truth should be accompanied by a bodyguard of lies'."
http://www.reason.com/news/show/123939.html
"Peace? Israel doesn't need it or want it. Oh, sure, the people of Israel may want it, at least in theory. In practice, however, the successive governments they keep electing are not the least bit interested in real negotiations with the Palestinians or anybody else in the region. Where's the payoff? From the Israeli perspective, things are going just swimmingly, thank you: no need to upset the apple cart."
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=12042
"No serious historian has been willing to make such a simplistic and senseless case in public. One of the most comprehensive histories of the Nazi era was written by William L. Shirer, a journalist assigned to Germany during the period when the Nazis came to power. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich covers 1,143 pages, the first 276 of which describe the multiple forces and events that led to the rise of Hitler. American isolationism is not once mentioned in that section of the book."
http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig5/duffy-p3.html
"[H]e launched the avant-garde journal Fuck You: A Journal of the Arts (a platform for late Modernists and fellow beats) and opened the Peace Eye Bookstore, which the NYPD promptly raided on grounds of obscenity, leading Sanders back to jail and onto the cover of Life magazine, which dubbed him a 'leader of New York’s other culture.' By then, Sanders was best-known as the singer/songwriter for the influential band The Fugs, which formed in 1965."
http://www.praguepost.com/articles/2007/12/12/60s-survivor.php
"After World War II, Taft called for an international tribunal founded on the rule of law. If adopted, this would have established within the international arena the same regime he espoused in domestic affairs.... As Taft observed, the United Nations was not founded on any underlying body of international law. To make matters worse, Security Council members’ ability to veto resolutions cemented into place a permanent regime of inequality under the law."
http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=2088
"During the first decades of the 20th century, lunch wagons, the predecessors to diners, were so popular that cities often passed regulations limiting their hours of operation. In 1952, three years before Ray Kroc franchised his first McDonald’s, one out of four American adults was considered overweight.... The idea that rootless corporate invaders derailed our healthy native diet may be chicken soup for the tubby trial lawyer’s soul, but in reality overeating fatty, salty, sugar-laden food is as American as apple pie."
http://www.reason.com/news/show/123473.html
"I am stunned by the thought that we, the 'civilized' nations, have bombed cities and countrysides and islands for a hundred years. Yet, here in the United States, which is responsible for most of that, the public, as was true of me, does not understand--I mean really understand--what bombs do to people. That failure of imagination, I believe, is critical to explaining why we still have wars, why we accept bombing as a common accompaniment to our foreign policies, without horror or disgust."
http://www.counterpunch.org/zinn12152007.html
"We can only be grateful that this war-loving administration has once again discredited itself in the eyes of the world. The turnaround reminded everyone of the infamous Iraq WMD deception. At least this time we learned the facts before the war. How do we know these are the facts? Reports out of the administration say release of the National Intelligence Assessment was delayed while critics tried their best to knock it down. They failed."
http://www.fff.org/comment/com0712b.asp
"This is a classic Karl Rove tactic. (Oh, you think he's gone, do you, no longer pulling any strings for the White House?) You spread the muck around, instill a sense of general disgust with politics among the electorate ("A plague on both their houses!"), which drives away the majority of voters, leaving a clearer field for your rabid rightwing base. "
http://www.chris-floyd.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1377&Itemid=135
"If antiwar people are unable to stir up or motivate a sense of urgency among the larger populace, if the coming campaign revolves around health care or immigration or tax policy rather than the war as the single most important issue, then the momentum will be on the side of the status quo (if that isn't a logical contradiction). And the status quo at this point still favors the war party, which is, after all, still in control of the executive branch, which controls the Pentagon."
http://www.antiwar.com/bock/?articleid=12057
"Ada called herself 'an Analyst (& Metaphysician),' and the combination was put to use in the Notes. She understood the plans for the device as well as Babbage but was better at articulating its promise. She rightly saw it as what we would call a general-purpose computer. "
http://www.sdsc.edu/ScienceWomen/lovelace.html
"After Trumbo was blacklisted, some Hollywood actors and directors, such as Elia Kazan and Clifford Odets, agreed to testify and to provide names of fellow Communist party members to Congress. Many of those who testified were immediately ostracized and shunned by their former friends and associates, and in later years, were frequently viewed with contempt by many in Hollywood. However, Trumbo always maintained that those who testified under pressure from HUAC and the studios were equally victims of the Red Scare, an opinion for which he was severely criticized."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dalton_Trumbo
"It was a fortuitous situation made even more so by the fact that I was sharing an office with Aage Bohr that year. We had many discussions of the implications, subsequently very successfully exploited by Bohr, Mottelson, and others of the Copenhagen Institute."
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1975/rainwater-autobio.html
"In 1951 Don Robey signed Thornton to his Peacock Records label. Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller wrote 'Hound Dog,' and Willie Mae recorded it. ... [T]he single sold almost two million copies. She received one check for the single in her life for only $500, even though Elvis Presley went on to make 'Hound Dog' a rock and roll classic three years later. In a similar occurrence, she wrote and recorded 'Ball and Chain,' which became a hit for her. Janis Joplin, a rock and roll singer from Texas, later recorded 'Ball and Chain,' and it became a huge success in the late 1960s."
http://www.tsha.utexas.edu/handbook/online/articles/TT/fthpg.html
"Smith is simply dazzling here, ... what's most appealing about him is his active intelligence—how he thinks his way through a role.... If, as a movie, I Am Legend is less stylistically mind-blowing and intellectually ambitious than last year's yuletide dystopia, Children of Men, it's not far off. ... Lawrence's direction, too, is more subdued and artful than you expect to find in a high-ticket holiday blockbuster...."
http://www.villagevoice.com/film/0750,foundas,78573,20.html
"Critics have claimed it pro-fascist, anti-capitalist, pro-violence, Marxist, anarchist, libertarian, and who knows what else. Political labels are pretty much [irrelevant]. What it's about, ultimately, is alienation. The unnamed [protagonist] is an emotionally dead man who cannot find any meaning through materialism. In fact, the movie [clearly] states materialism leads to this emotional deadness -- all the SUVs, DVD players, big houses and money will never bring happiness. "
http://uncabob.blogspot.com/2007/12/fight-club-biff-baff-pow-were-all.html
"Needless to say, it's thrilling to see three warnings against totalitarianism among their 10 classics - and all of these books have strong individuals in them."
http://bwrmontag.blogspot.com/2007/12/ten-essential-books.html
“There’s been plenty of speculation and rumor about Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, but at last, producer Frank Marshall has some answers to our oh so curious questions.”
http://snarkerati.com/movie-news/indy-films-finally-facts-about-crystal-skull/
"In this special feature, troops overseas talk about things that make the season special, like modular tactical vests and M40 field protective masks."
http://www.theonion.com/content/video/our_troops_send_holiday_wishes
Animated flash cartoon video w/audio
http://www.markfiore.com/learn_speak_intel_0
The 12 Threats of Christmas, an adaptation of the traditional Christmas Carol: The 12 Days of Christmas.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSRPGHyYq90
“So I am looking at this Big, Big Problem (BBP)…when I was saved by a little-known Law Of Physics: 'If at any time you find yourself doing a transfinite amount of work, the answer can be obtained by inspection.'”
http://www.dailyreckoning.com/Writers/Mogambo/DREssays/MG121307.html
"I firmly believe that the powers that be have worked too long and hard to allow it to happen. It’s obvious that wanton killing is not beneath them and they will not hesitate to employ it, even when unnecessary. So even if the unthinkable happened and someone like you, say Ron Paul, were to win the Republican nomination and again, unthinkably, win the presidential election (uh, who owns those Diebold vote counting machines?), I don’t think he would be allowed to live, much less change anything."
http://www.strike-the-root.com/72/fontana/fontana8.html
"After further research, new high-resolution ice core results (data points only a few hundred years apart) in 2000—2003 allowed us to distinguish which came first, the temperature rises or the CO2 rises. We found that temperature changes preceded CO2 changes by an average of 800 years. So temperature caused the CO2 levels, and not the other way around as previously assumed. The world should have started backpedaling away from blaming carbon emissions in 2003."
http://www.mises.org/story/2795
"In Benedict’s view, Marxism could not help but leave behind 'a trail of appalling destruction.' Marx, Benedict says, was virtually silent about the end-state of his promised heaven-on-earth because he 'forgot man and he forgot man’s freedom.' In other words, once you accept the reality of human liberty, you know society can never be static, never perfect. There is no human-engineered 'end of history'."
http://www.acton.org/commentary/420_encyclical_anti_political_politics.php
"Our analysis shows that social spending is rapidly replacing expenditures on traditional government functions advocated by Smith. As a result, governments will find it increasingly difficult to provide and maintain traditional services without significant tax increases or larger deficits."
http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=2085
"Jorn Barger of Robot Wisdom coined the term 'weblog' Dec. 17, 1997 -- 10 years ago Monday -- to describe the daily list of links that "logged" his travels across the web."
http://www.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/news/2007/12/blog_advice
"Now, pick up that remote control and hit the 'fast-forward' button from 1776 to the last half of the 20th century, where we see that we have finally overruled the Jeffersonian Republic that made America into the world power that it became, in favor of that Hamiltonian nightmare of a huge, powerful, dictatorial, fascist federal government, an eviscerated Constitution and a corrupt Federal Reserve destroying the dollar."
http://www.dailyreckoning.com/Writers/Mogambo/DREssays/MG121107.html
"We see here a man doing all he can to reverse the tide of American interventionism, against the warmongering inertia of both parties, and if his words at times become somewhat repetitive it is only because he is tirelessly repeating the neglected truths and wisdom of the noninterventionist strain traditional to America. "
http://www.fff.org/freedom/fd0709f.asp
"The late Douglas Adams once wrote that dishwashers washed tedious dishes for you, saving the trouble of washing them yourself, and VCRs watched tedious television for you, saving you from the same fate. He would have loved the SnapStream Television Search Appliance, a digital video recorder that can record up to ten television channels simultaneously and store up to 2,300 hours of programming on 1.5 terabytes of storage (or more)."
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