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"A delegation of Lakota leaders delivered a message to the State Department on Monday, announcing they were unilaterally withdrawing from treaties they signed with the federal government of the United States, some of them more than 150 years old."
http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5iVC1KMTOgwiSoMQyT2LwZc9HyAgA
"The Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army was organized by UK activists and included hundreds of clowns (some veterans, some novices) from around the world. ... Film footage of the [2005 G8 Summit] protests show a befuddled group of police officers who stand idly by while the clowns take over roads."
http://www.yesmagazine.org/article.asp?id=2090
"Here's a quick snapshot of the race for the Republican presidential nomination. The closest the party has had to a frontrunner is a big-city mayor from a deep-blue state; he's a pro-choice adulterer who used to shack up with some gay guys. His chief rival is a tax-hiking governor who says our 'responsibility to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions' is a 'moral issue' and who denounces pro-market conservatives for their 'greed.' (He also thinks the world was created in less than a week, but in this party that isn't a disadvantage.)"
http://www.reason.com/news/show/123969.html
"Every act of rebellion I see from students, whether they understand it themselves or not, gives me hope that one day more of them will have their own awakening to the inherent violence of government. "
http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig8/heeringa2.html
"As the end of the year approaches, it's time for another column of government overreach predictions for the New Year. What outrageous, beyond-parody grabs at power and erosions of civil liberties will transpire in 2008?"
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,317198,00.html
"The FBI is embarking on a $1 billion effort to build the world's largest computer database of peoples' physical characteristics, a project that would give the government unprecedented abilities to identify individuals in the United States and abroad." [Consider this also, coincidence?]
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22366208/
"Overall, sentences for offenses involving crack are three to six times longer than sentences for offenses involving the same amount of cocaine powder. This injustice has fallen disproportionately on blacks, who account for more than four-fifths of federal crack offenders but only a quarter or so of cocaine powder offenders."
http://www.reason.com/news/show/123998.html
"Luther Ricks Sr. was at home in Lima, Ohio, when burglars broke into his house. In the ensuing struggle, Ricks managed to fatally shoot one of the assailants. But he was still robbed of over $400,000."
http://www.tuccille.com/blog/2007/12/thieves-with-badges.html
"Of course, some of us still know this will never ever work. Government cannot be tamed and power and brute force cannot be used to do good, even if a libertarian is running the show. Becoming part of the system to change it isn’t only a naïve and ignorant strategy – it is dangerous as well. You cannot change the system, but the system will change you.”
http://www.strike-the-root.com/72/bylund/bylund7.html
"When the use of power is primarily self-centered and largely unexamined, as it is in our society, the logic of 'might makes right' prevails, and society becomes formalized around systems and practices that benefit the powerful at the expense of the weak. The promise of anarchism is that we might rise to the challenge of being transparent about our uses of power, intentional about sharing power in a more just way, and thoughtful about the corresponding organization of systems and structures."
http://www.yesmagazine.org/article.asp?id=2092
"In a free society there would be no medical cartels. Instead of having a government monopoly in medical education and certification, there would probably be a variety of decentralized organizations handling health care. Hospitals and clinics, for example, to attract customers, would want to hire employees with good qualifications and education. Further, because most hospitals would be insured, insurance requirements might mandate that professionals met certain criteria such as certification and experience. This would be handled by the market."
http://www.lewrockwell.com/lora/m.lora47.html
"If I could advance my ideals within our present framework (i.e., the existing states and the United States), my main libertarian concern would be to get people off government rolls. Tax rolls, business licensing rolls, social security number rolls, etc. Take a census to find out how many live in a residence, but don't take names. To the extent the government doesn't 'know' you exist, i.e., doesn't have your identity on file, the freer you are."
http://independentcountry.blogspot.com/2007/12/ideal-government.html
"The Flemish had rebelled against the Francofication of public life during the French occupation. They heroically resisted the suppression of their language and lifestyle, and eventually overcame and defeated the state's attempt at ethnic cleansing, though it took over 100 years. There is nothing 'accidental' about individuals fighting for their own freedom and against the oppressive decrees of an omnipotent state."
http://www.lewrockwell.com/blog/lewrw/archives/017935.html
"It was exclusively in response to that blog-based outpouring of citizen passion that Dodd -- within a matter of a few hours -- emphatically vowed that he would do something he has almost never done during his 24-year Senate career: place a 'hold' on this bill and, if necessary, lead a filibuster against it on the floor of the Senate. Dodd's responsiveness, and the all-too-rare leadership he displayed, prompted an outpouring of support for his campaign from citizens hungry for any sort of Democratic leadership, as he raised $200,000 in small donations over the next 24 hours alone, exceeding the total he had raised for the preceding many months."
http://salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2007/12/18/victory/index.html
"An armed civilian acting swiftly and deliberately saved lives because she had a gun and used it appropriately, thereby stopping a mad man who was on a murderous rampage. Instead of four dead bodies, there would have been scores more if not for the fact that a law-abiding citizen ended the carnage by using a gun."
http://www.newswithviews.com/Mary/starrett77.htm
"Because U.S. immigration is so readily conflated with Americanization, the mythology of America’s immigrant past cuts against acceptance of a guest worker program. The story of the American Dream does not include a chapter for those who want to take the money they’ve earned and buy a home with a white picket fence and two-car garage in Mexico. The narrative allows no space for transience. Even the terms we use, from 'anchor baby,' to 'chain migration,' belie an inability to accept the essentially fluid nature of world migration patterns."
http://www.reason.com/news/show/123474.html
"Of course, they will say it’s about “terrorists,” or about “narcotics traffickers.” And indeed every authoritarian and wannabe totalitarian system from the dawn of time has cast its snooping on citizens in just these terms. No problems with the honest citizen, they say, it’s the criminals and the enemies we’re after. We need your cooperation. But the technology used makes no such distinction—it is snooping on everyone." [Credit Sen. Chris Dodd with at least delaying this outrage.]
http://www.harpers.org/archive/2007/12/hbc-90001937
"Is waterboarding, known during the Spanish Inquisition as tortura del agua, really torture or not? The question seems to answer itself, but the Bush administration says No. Its critics disagree, noting that the 'interrogation technique,' which makes a subject physically and mentally react as though he is drowning, has long been regarded as torture by international agreements and outlawed in the United States."
http://www.fff.org/comment/com0712e.asp
"More than anything else, what these revelations highlight -- yet again -- is that the U.S. has become precisely the kind of surveillance state that we were always told was the hallmark of tyrannical societies, with literally no limits on the government's ability or willingness to spy on its own citizens and to maintain vast dossiers on those activities."
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2007/12/16/telecoms/index.html
"There is no credence when government agencies so thoroughly integrated into the torture policy investigate themselves without independent review. This constitutes not merely the extreme perception of conflict of interest, but the extreme reality of conflict of interest."
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2007/121807a.html
"A President Giuliani would inherit an office bestowed with such dark powers as indefinite detention, interrogation methods widely considered to be torture, vast warrantless surveillance authority, and an impenetrable wall of secrecy secured by multiple executive and judicial instruments. Set all of that next to a submissive and impotent Congress and an equally supine media—to say nothing of the prospect of another terrorist attack to exacerbate every one of those factors—and it is hard to imagine a more toxic combination than Rudy Giuliani and the Oval Office."
http://www.amconmag.com/2008/2008_01_14/article1.html
"Americans are living under the biggest, most powerful government in history. It is the biggest-spending government in history. Its currency is crashing because of its out-of-control spending. Its military power extends over the entire globe. It is an empire that polices the world, sometimes with brutal and deadly force. It kidnaps, tortures, sexually abuses, incarcerates, and murders people with impunity and without even the semblance of due process or trial by jury."
http://www.fff.org/comment/com0712f.asp
“Similar conferences have been held around the world in countless extravagant resorts, and there appears to be no shortage either of extravagant resorts or taxpayer loot. The next climate conference will be held in Monaco. Many will arrive in ocean-going yachts, considered 'earth-friendly' by rich, smug Hollywood climate-change groupies because they're wind-powered when not running on their powerful diesel-belching engines.”
http://www.rcreader.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=12431&Itemid=42
"Huckabee's single rival as a genuinely interesting candidate is another Republican, Ron Paul, who set a record a few days ago, by raising $6 million in a single day. Unlike Huckabee, Paul's core issues are opposition to the war and to George Bush's abuse of civil liberties inscribed in the U.S. Constitution. His appeal, far more than Huckabee, is to the redneck rebel strain in American political life the populist beast that the US two-party system is designed to suppress. "
http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn12222007.html
"There's a sort of built-in progressivism to the division of labor that, although it benefits all and almost always will benefit specialists by an absolutely greater amount, provides a greater proportional benefit to those who are relatively unskilled or weak. Again, this notion is so profoundly the opposite of the accepted economic tales of 'robber barons' and Dickensian factory owners that, even while writing it, I find it startling."
http://www.mises.org/story/2802
"People would deposit their coins into the bank, and be issued these dollar bills. The dollar bills could be traded around like the dollar coins had been, and you could always go to the bank to exchange the bill back for the coin if you wanted. People could now carry lots of money with them in the form of these bills, but it is easier to hide a $100 bill than one hundred coins.”
http://www.partialobserver.com/article.cfm?id=2776
"Reason.tv host Drew Carey revisits the problem of eminent domain abuse following up on his earlier video, National City: Eminent Domain Gone Wild. The City of Los Angeles used eminent domain to take a popular Hollywood bar and numerous other small businesses so that the city could hand the land over to private developers planning to build a W hotel and million-dollar condos. Fortunately, there's a better way to revitalize neighborhoods."
http://www.reason.tv/video/show/58.html
"Second Rotation makes its money by finding the sweet spot between what a consumer is willing to take for a device and what that device will fetch on the secondary market. Aurelien says the system works because the company does two things right: offering an appropriate price for the product and handling the product correctly once it's received."
http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/clean-break-second-rotation.ars
"So today there are two ways the state can extract money from the population: stealing or counterfeiting. The political class favors the latter to the former. What's best for the country and the economy, taxes or credit expansion? That's a tough call. Republicans are right that new taxes can cause recession. Democrats are right that government just can't keep accumulating debt forever without regard to the eventual results. Arguably, monetary expansion is worse because it breeds the political lie that the state can spend and spend all it wants and never collect. That's the big lie that central banking makes possible."
http://www.mises.org/story/2820
"The banks don't have the reserves to cover their downgraded assets and the Federal Reserve cannot simply 'monetize' their bad bets. There's no way out. There are bound to be bankruptcies and bank runs. 'Structured finance' has usurped the Fed's authority to create new credit and handed it over to the banks. Now everyone will pay the price."
http://www.counterpunch.org/whitney12172007.html
"I am not sure why it is in the national interest of the United States to make a cab driver and his family live on rice and fish. I did not feel notably safer on hearing about it. An embargo makes sense when it makes sense, but doesn’t when it doesn’t. Cuba is no longer the spearhead of the Soviet Union; indeed, according to many observers, there is no Soviet Union. We seem to proceed from pure vengefulness against Castro. Fidel, a freelance reprehensible dictator, beat Batista, our reprehensible dictator. We want to get even."
http://fredoneverything.net/Cuba.shtml
"Although there is a diagnosis, pill or surgical treatment for each of their ills, the family members could simply be suffering from exposure to advertising that sells a fantasy of flawless health, perfect skin, clockwork bowels, extended youth and perpetual cheerfulness in the face of disappointment, aging, money woes and the reign of George Bush. They may, in fact, be healthy people snookered by the pharmaceutical industry, the media and their doctors into believing that ordinary frailties are diseases; that the human condition can be cured."
http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/3455/
"In short, as General Smedley Butler informed us more than seventy years ago, the modern military establishment, along with most of its blessed wars, is for the most part nothing but a racket. Worse, because of the way it engages and co-opts powerful elements of the private sector, it gives rise to a costly and dangerous form of military-economic fascism."
http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=2091
"Aside from the impropriety of Hunt's investment – as a member of the PFIAB, he has access to secret intelligence that is unavailable to his competitors – there is the question of his ties to the CIA. As referenced here, Hunt Oil aircraft were spotted making at least two recent visits to the CIA's Camp Peary training facility."
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=12076
"Obviously I have decided to vote in the coming election, or I would not be writing this. There is one and only one reason: Ron Paul promises to withdraw all troops and stop the physical and spiritual carnage on all sides in Iraq."
http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig4/maccallum3.html
"We confront more than power elites. There is psychological resistance to 9/11 truth -- an unthinkable truth about our elected government. Even if people have doubts about the official story, they instinctively recoil and erect mental barriers to block out the full truth. They want to believe that when the Bush administration is replaced our democracy will be in good shape again. Hard to accept that 9/11 truth could not have been suppressed this long without the approval of Democratic politicians and power brokers."
http://www.progress.org/2007/hirsch34.htm
"From John Locke to Jesse Ventura, a stroll down Libertarian lane"
http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2008/01/a-timeline-of-libertarian-thought.html
"One of the rewards of being a reporter is getting to know people you'd normally not be able to meet. And sometimes, after writing stories on them, the relationship continues. That's how I became friends with Malcolm X, John Cardinal O'Connor, Justice William Brennan—and Fred Friendly, my mentor on the First Amendment. He and Edward R. Murrow ended Joe McCarthy's reign of fear, and Fred later developed a way to shine a constitutional light on Joe McCarthy's hunt for domestic terrorism suspects."
http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0751,hentoff,78670,2.html
"Kropotkin's Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, published in 1902, is a repudiation of the theory of natural selection and competition. Arguing on factual biological and historical grounds, Kropotkin maintains that humans, being social animals, are more naturally inclined to cooperation than competition, and fare better in that environment."
http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2007/12/dayintech_1221
"Told in a rich narrative style, The Forgotten Man follows dozens of historical figures through the Depression, weaving the stories of people as varied as American Civil Liberties Union co-founder Roger Baldwin, Alcoholics Anonymous creator Bill Wilson, power utility magnate (and failed presidential candidate) Wendell Willkie, and African-American evangelist Father Divine into a rich human tapestry."
http://www.reason.com/news/show/123476.html
"While Jeffers wrote political poetry, he was hardly a mere polemicist. His views were rooted in his essentially conservative view of human nature, which he insisted on calling “Inhumanism,” perhaps as a goad to the “humanist” liberals who had hopped on the war bandwagon with such alacrity."
http://www.amconmag.com/2007/2007_12_17/review.html
"As in Iraq, Bush's 'Terror War' operation has put corrupt and vicious militias in control of a despised and ineffectual government installed and maintained by foreign forces. The inevitable result is brutality, atrocity and privation on a massive scale. And as in Iraq, Afghanistan and everywhere in the Terror War imperium, there is nothing that Washington's proxy forces can do – no crime they can commit – that will lose them the support of their Potomac masters…as long as they continue to prove useful to the Terror Warrior's larger agenda."
http://www.chris-floyd.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1384&Itemid=135
"A more stable, long-term solution is to adjust the border so that Serbia can retain some – if not most – of these critical historical and religious sites. Although the new state of Kosovo would be slightly smaller, it would be more secure against its stronger Serb neighbor. For security purposes, Kosovo would not have to be a ward of the U.S. and Europe. Such a settlement might avoid a future Serb-Kosovo war that could escalate to a confrontation between the U.S. and Russia – two nuclear-weapon states."
http://www.antiwar.com/eland/?articleid=12073
"In the event of an attack the United States will have more responsibilities than just attacking Iranian nuclear facilities. It will have to keep the Strait of Hormuz open, international oil traffic running, and defend against Iranian missile attacks from land, air and sea."
http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=8860
"Separately, but almost simultaneously with William Stanley Jevons and Carl Menger, French economist Leon Walras developed the idea of marginal utility and is thus considered one of the founders of the 'marginal revolution.' But Walras's biggest contribution was in what is now called general equilibrium theory. Before Walras, economists had made little attempt to show how a whole economy with many goods fits together and reaches an equilibrium."
http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/bios/Walras.html
"A 1942 survey of former major league managers pointed the finger toward Ty Cobb as the greatest baseball player of all time. Many great players have surfaced on the diamond, but none out-hit, outplayed, or out-hustled the man they called 'The Georgia Peach'."
http://www.cmgworldwide.com/baseball/cobb/bio.html
"In 1961, Davis wrote and starred in the critically acclaimed Purlie Victorious. He has written and directed many films, including Cotton Comes to Harlem (1970) and Countdown at Kusini (co-produced with his wife, Ruby Dee,1976), the first American feature film to be shot entirely in Africa by Black professionals."
http://www.aaregistry.com/african_american_history/2178/Ossie_Davis_a_special_actor_and_author
"Although it has been perhaps over-emphasized in recent years, it is important to point out that the release of The Paul Butterfield Blues Band on Elektra in 1965, had a huge effect on the White music culture of the time. Used to hearing blues covered by groups like the Rolling Stones, that first album had an enormous impact on young (and primarily White) rock players. "
http://www.bluesharp.ca/legends/pbfield.html
"Peter Jackson, director of New Line's wildly successful Lord of the Rings trilogy, is officially returning to J.R.R. Tolkien's fantasy realm as producer of a two-film adaptation of The Hobbit."
http://movies.ign.com/articles/842/842098p1.html?RSSwhen2007-12-18_091700&RSSid=842098
"Leary was a man whose importance, while subterranean, is vast—and it underlies, in that subterranean way, a lot of what was interesting in American culture in the second half of 20th century, a historical league in which baseball obsessive Leary could be well considered an MVP, though a controversial and truculent one. "
http://www.reason.com/blog/show/124065.html
"The film is part horror, part action and part drama. The CG scenes of an abandoned, weed-overgrown New York City are nothing less than astonishing. ... Will Smith's acting, as expected, is also superb. He plays the emotional range of his character with heart-wrenching dynamism. ... Not everything is perfect with the film, of course. ... The film is ... a bit flat in its unwillingness to venture past the mere surface on issues like bioethics and the dangers that modern medicine's hubris poses to the future of humankind."
http://www.newstarget.com/022410.html
"I spend most of the show rummaging through the Attic in search of this thing I saw in the newspaper once...."
http://unclewarrensattic.blogspot.com/2007/12/uwattic45-scandinavian-zombie-holiday.html
"For 57 consecutive months, viewers across the country were subjected to monotonous and tedious roadside bombings, predictable charges of corruption and negligence against private contractors, and a chaotic, hard-to-understand political situation that never seemed to change."
http://www.theonion.com/content/news/iraq_war_no_longer_interesting
"In short, the banks loaned every additional dime of the trillions of dollars that they took in! And then more on top of that! No additional reserves at all! Not a freaking additional dime of reserves has been added in a decade or more!”
http://www.dailyreckoning.com/Writers/Mogambo/DREssays/MG121907.html
"I’ve been waiting for this news since the Writers Guild went on strike! Apparently, the producers are pushing John Stewart and Stephen Colbert to go back on the air, with or without writers."
http://snarkerati.com/celebrity-gossip/the-daily-show-colbert-report-to-return-january-7th/
A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language
"Ownership is a function of agreement. All parties need to understand that there is an idea of property and ownership before ownership can exist. Not only that, these parties must agree to the ownership, otherwise it is more of a wish (on the part of the possessor) than actual ownership. Just because I am holding this hammer does not mean that I own it. Ownership relies on the fact that you understand the concept of property and grant that the hammer is mine. Otherwise it is not owned by me, it is simply possessed.”
http://www.strike-the-root.com/72/nonentity/nonentity2.html
"There are so many major, seismic shifts in the computing industry happening at the 32nm process node that it's hard for me to get my mind around it all. I've been covering the story of x86's journey into the ultramobile and embedded space, a journey that starts at 45nm and really gets interesting at 32nm, but that tale is only one thread in a much larger epic that's emerging bit by bit in one press release and news story after another."
"The irritatingly vague Oracle at Delphi famously exhorted seekers of wisdom: 'Know thyself.' Easy to say, hard to do. At least, it used to be. Thanks to the miracle of modern technology, about half of Americans have gotten a little closer to knowing themselves by typing their names into Google, according to a survey out this week from the Pew Internet and American Life Project."
http://reason.com/news/show/124024.html
"One [perhaps counter-] example is Ajax, the backbone of many modern web applications. The bit of code central to the technology was originally developed by Microsoft for Internet Explorer. Only later was it implemented by other browsers and eventually taken up by the W3C. The code, called XMLHttpRequest, is now overseen by the W3C's Web API working group."
http://www.wired.com/software/webservices/news/2007/12/w3c_critics
"Cringely has taken the rest of the week off (frankly, we haven't seen him since the office party two nights ago), so we hired old Tin Pan Alley songmeister Skip McJingle to reinvigorate some holiday classics with high tech themes. Feel free to sing along."
http://weblog.infoworld.com/robertxcringely/archives/2007/12/vista_nsa_faceb.html
"'And the Christmas viewing list grows longer and longer but must always include some historical context. I make my reservations explicit in "Let's put the X back in Xmas!" but I still consider the History Channel's Christmas Unwrapped to be the seasonal must-see.' ... And now, to put my HTML where my mouth is, I've created a 'Christmas Unwrapped' page to let you see the movie on YouTube...."
http://bkmarcus.com/blog/2007/12/christmas-unwrapped
"I’m an agnostic libertarian, though Dinesh will probably be disappointed to learn that I’m not gay, don’t use illicit drugs, and have been with the same girl for four years. It’s just that I’m not particularly interested in damning people who’ve made different choices or live different lifestyles than I have. But to answer his question, my 'equivalent' of Christmas is . . . Christmas."
http://www.theagitator.com/2007/12/22/dinesh/
"Maybe someday Microsoft will perfect mind-control technology. But until then, we're free to have our own opinions, like: 'Keep that new Microsoft OS the hell away from me!' Hordes of PC shoppers have echoed the same sentiment as news of application incompatibility, resource-hogging performance and bloated junkware all but obliterated the enthusiasm for Windows Vista."
http://www.wired.com/gadgets/gadgetreviews/multimedia/2007/12/YE_Gadgets_Top10Letdowns?slide=5
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