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"Northwest Indiana natives Vincent Emanuele and Derek Giffin grapple with their pasts. Both served in the war in Iraq and say they are scarred by what they witnessed. They say they are resentful because they feel the U.S. government lied to them about the battle's purpose. "
http://www.post-trib.com/news/835586,wprotest.article
"We tell people we use Linux because it's secure. Or because it's free, because it's customizable, because it's free (the other meaning), because it has excellent community support... But all of that is just marketing bullshit. We tell that to non-Linuxers because they wouldn't understand the real reason. And when we say those false reasons enough, we might even start to believe them ourselves. But deep underneath, the real reason remains. We use Linux because it's fun!"
http://blog.anamazingmind.com/2008/03/real-reason-we-use-linux.html
"Hosting service GoDaddy mysteriously terminated Sesto's account, and pulled RateMyCop.com offline. GoDaddy has offered several explanations to Wired's ThreatLevel blog, but thus far, none of them have made much sense. ... The good news is, the site's back up, now, though it isn't clear who's hosting it."
http://www.reason.com/blog/show/125503.html
"In the last four years, the RIAA has sued more than 20,000 people alleging copyright infringement. The majority of them have settled for a few thousand dollars. Only one case has gone to trial, and a jury concluded the infringer should pay $222,000 for 24 songs shared on Kazaa."
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/03/riaa-racketeeri.html
"With two extraordinary infomercials, MTV asks its viewers to think seriously about what happens in a police state. Is the prospect so unthinkable? Watch these scenes and reflect on it a bit."
http://harpers.org/archive/2008/03/hbc-90002625
"On the one hand, there is something satisfying in seeing an insufferably self-righteous, politically ambitious, ham-handed, and ethically challenged former prosecutor lose his grip on power because he did what he used to prosecute other people for doing. On the other hand, he was caught in a victimless crime because the ludicrously named Patriot Act requires banks to inform the IRS when their depositors engage in 'suspicious,' that is, unusual, financial activity."
http://www.fee.org/in_brief/default.asp?id=1946
"It's hard to feel excessive sympathy when a colossal hypocrite is exposed. Recently, Spitzer signed a measure increasing penalties for men caught paying for sex, who can now go to jail for as long as a year. But schadenfreude is a weak justification for laws that intrude into the bedroom."
http://reason.com/news/show/125475.html
"The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) just turned five years old. It seems like it was born just yesterday. The department’s growing pains have made it a slow learner and a downright ugly child. Born in an atmosphere of tension and fear, and cobbled together from pieces of other government departments and agencies, the prospects for this Frankenstein offspring were always dim. Yet, as Congress frequently does in times of crisis, the legislative body, in the wake of 9/11, had to be seen as doing something—anything—to respond to the crisis, even if its actions were ineffective and even counterproductive."
http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=2146
"We live in a society where the evils of the state-corporate nexus, resulting directly from the corporate size and power it promotes, are the central issues of concern to the average person. Far too large a portion of the current libertarian movement dismisses these concerns as motivated by 'economic illiteracy' (although their own pro-corporate apologetics are, if anything, more open to that charge), and then passes on to what it regards as the real problems of injustice crying out for solution: uppity union workers, welfare moms wallowing in luxury on their food stamps, and 'trial lawyers'."
http://www.theartofthepossible.net/2008/03/10/libertarian-self-marginalization/
"Last year, I did not steal, nor did I rape, nor did I plunder or kill or defraud. Nor would I have done those things even if they had been legal. I needed no law to inform me of right and wrong; nor, I trust, did you. On the other hand, how many men did things that they otherwise would not have done, merely because the state said that it was okay?"
http://www.newhampshirefreepress.com/NHFreePress/?q=node/33
"In 1849, France’s leading spokesman for libertarian 'capitalism' (Frédéric Bastiat) and France’s leading spokesman for libertarian 'socialism' (Pierre-Joseph Proudhon) exchanged a series of public letters debating the nature and legitimacy of charging interest on loans. In 1879, American individualist anarchist Benjamin Tucker translated most of the letters ... whereupon, apart from a few excerpts, they vanished henceforth from human sight."
http://hnn.us/blogs/entries/48278.html
"It is an age-old scam, and it is this very fundamental double standard that allows the state to exist and operate in the first place."
http://www.mises.org/story/2877
"It's funny how some people are so stuck on the idea that Windows, and only Windows, is the one true operating system that they can't even hear their own words. That's the case with a recent news story with the headline, 'Windows XP Will Fill Two-Thirds of Asustek Eee PCs'."
http://www.desktoplinux.com/news/NS8695263477.html
"The fact that ZeaChem does seem to know what to do with its leftovers makes the process interesting. Fuel, Imbler asserts, is a commodity. In a commodity market, suppliers can't control the price, he said. Thus, the only way to survive is to adopt efficient processes and keep raw material costs low."
http://www.news.com/8301-11128_3-9891603-54.html
"Republicans were championing a Senate bill that includes amnesty for telecoms and gives the nation's spies wide powers to wiretap using facilities inside the United States with little court oversight. Instead of caving to that rhetoric, the House Democrats doubled down on their original legislation, by including a call for a commission, armed with subpoena power, that would investigate the secret spying. The bill also allows telecoms to defend themselves in court by showing secret documents to federal judge. The Bush administration had blocked them from using classified information in their own defense."
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/03/house-refuses-t.html
"The hacking community believes this jailbreaking method (which will also let you unlock your iPhone) can't be fixed by Apple in a production version of the 2.0 software."
http://www.news.com/8301-13579_3-9892315-37.html
"[W]e are ruled not by a government but by a class. Here the media are crucial. Unless you spend time outside of America, you may not realize to what extent the press is controlled. The press is largely free, yes, but it is also largely owned by a small number of corporations which, in turn, are run by people from the same pool from which are drawn high-level pols and their advisers. They are rich people who know each other and have the same interests. It is very nearly correct to say that these people are the government of the United States, and that the federal apparatus merely a useful theatrical manifestation."
http://www.fredoneverything.net/TACDemocracy.shtml
"[T]he UN is no pacific check on the US and never has been. It is a complicit party to US hyperdominance. With the once-mighty British empire long gone, with the Soviet Union nearly two decades defunct, the United States has emerged as the solitary global empire, the culmination of 60 years of expansion, and the UN is one of several ways the US gives the facade of international consensus to its nationalist aggression. "
http://www.strike-the-root.com/81/gregory/gregory1.html
"The new team is busy making its mark today. It is much more intelligent, but no more honest than the team it replaced. The new team loves clever word play and gives us dark demonstrations of mental finesse–the finesse of an authoritarian genius. The president makes the law, they tell us, and the president can do no wrong. When the president adopts a view of the law, it is binding upon us. A seventeenth-century Royalist lackey would hardly manage a different set of formulations. So with bone-chilling calculus they rationalize torture, thwart the investigation of grave crimes and erect barriers against the discharge by Congress of its duty of oversight. In a word, they put personal fidelity to a president over duty to the Constitution and the basic principles on which our nation rests. They remove the frame from our Constitution and put in its place the notions of personal subservience that mark tyranny."
http://harpers.org/archive/2008/03/hbc-90002595
"Gov. Spitzer's bust should give pause to those in Congress who are ready to hand President Bush a free pass to continue his six-year campaign of warrantless spying on Americans. ... Want to make sure Democratic members of Congress go along with a war on Iran? Just monitor their phones and emails and catch them in conversations that are suitable for a little blackmail."
http://www.counterpunch.org/lindorff03122008.html
"Spitzer was a particularly threatening political 'enemy.' He was poised ready to take away one of the G.O.P.’s last remaining redoubts in the Northeast. The partisan desire to neutralize him could not have been more intense. ... It’s very foolish to consider this case solely within the framework of the personal destruction of Eliot Spitzer. The larger parameters are far more significant. This is a test of the National Surveillance State which has arisen in the last seven years. How are these new realities affecting our legal system?"
http://harpers.org/archive/2008/03/hbc-90002628
"I think we can be pleased that Bush was unable to muster public enthusiasm for the program. And why wasn't he? Not because it would have still resulted in a forced program. That wasn't the issue, even if it should have been one issue. There were the inevitable fears that Bush's program would lead to cuts in Social Security payments. But more important, news began to leak out that the Bush administration hadn't been wholly honest about the transition costs of switching from a socialist to a fascist system. Indeed, none of the advocates of phony privatization have been honest about this."
http://www.lewrockwell.com/rockwell/bush-market-liberal.html
"Throughout history, it’s been common for politicians to shade the truth when caught in a tight spot. But sometimes politicians push the limits, crossing the line into an Orwellian world where up is down, where bullies are victims, where people objecting to the lies are shouted down."
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2008/031008.html
"Among the Republicans in the Senate voting to carry out the wishes of Bush, Cheney, and the CIA was presidential nominee John McCain, who had formerly been the leading warrior against our use of torture, famously proclaiming that it's not a matter of 'who they [the enemy] are. It's who we are!' This was not the first time that Mr. Integrity has retreated on torture. McCain voted for the 2006 Military Commissions Act, which gave Bush the authority to allow the CIA to continue its special brand of 'coercive interrogations'—a license that Bush himself validated in an executive order last July."
http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0811,mccain-retreats-on-terror,374048,4.html
"Love is the other half of freedom; the yin to freedom's yang. Love and freedom require each other despite the commonplace denial of this truth. A free society without love – a sociopathic society – will not long remain free. An unfree society – a police state or other tyranny – is toxic to love. "
http://www.strike-the-root.com/81/allport/allport7.html
"Coskata, a start-up that wants to make ethanol out of tires and other stuff found in the dump, has raised $19.5 million in a second round of funding, according to SEC documents scoured by Private Equity Week."
http://www.news.com/8301-11128_3-9893227-54.html
"Based on my own and others’ findings, I recommend unfettered markets, coupled with financial assistance to ensure universal access, as the best way of fulfilling the ideals of public education"
http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/2008/03/13/it-aint-necessarily-so/
"Part of the driver for the deal seems to be dissatisfaction with Microsoft's document standards, with governments demanding the OpenDocument Format instead of the series of formats used in Microsoft Office applications. Some claim that the Linux PCs are also more secure than their Windows equivalents."
http://www.news.com/
IBM-denies-re-entering-PC-market-with-Russian-deal/2100-1003_3-6233782.html
"The problem lies not with the Fed, but with us. It lies with you, with me, and with all investors, businessmen, professionals, and laborers who act and interact within our [global] economic system. We have been taught from birth to regard the Fed and its equivalent in other countries as physicians, and to look to these doctors of doom for the cure for our economic ills. In our view, the central bankers are the much-revered and respected men in white coats, while those who try to point out their true 'profession' are written off as maligning malcontents. It's time for an attitude adjustment - and we are currently living it."
http://www.safehaven.com/article-9672.htm
"Look closely at what Clinton is saying. She wants something ('universal health care'); therefore people should be forced to give it to her. (No thought is given to how the free market could accomplish the goal peacefully.) If you and I claimed something like that in private life, we’d be branded as boors. And if we took steps to accomplish it, we’d be arrested for theft or extortion."
http://www.fff.org/comment/com0803b.asp
"It took investors a while to connect the dots, but now they seem to have the picture: the Fed's big bank bailout will not really wipe out losses…nor make Wall Street more profitable; what it will do is save the big banks from going broke - if they're lucky - while destroying the dollar."
http://www.dailyreckoning.com/RSS/DR031408sec1.html
"Pyramid scams collapse when they run out of enough new 'investors' to pay earlier promises. Some use this fact to deny that Social Security is really a massive redistribution scheme, since it has lasted over 70 years. That assertion misses two substantial differences between Social Security and other Ponzi schemes however: Social Security involves far longer generations, with people collecting on current promises far into the future; and it has been not one, but a series of Ponzi schemes."
http://www.mises.org/story/2906
"Libertarians who believe their program of less government, more freedom, and a return to the principles embodied in the Constitution can survive another four years of constant warfare are deluding themselves. Unless the post-9/11 War Party juggernaut is stopped, our old Republic is doomed. Not only that, but libertarianism as a credible alternative to the statist ideologies of Left and Right will be swept away in a tide of economic and political tumult, rendered ineffective and irrelevant by much larger forces."
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=12491
"[U]nless we dismantle the U.S. government’s pro-empire, pro-interventionist foreign policy, Americans will continue to suffer a loss of liberty that arguably is greater than that lost as a result of socialism and interventionism under which we suffer at home. ... The prime factors in U.S. foreign policy are control and regime change. Those Third World regimes that comply with U.S. directives are permitted to remain in power. Those that choose to go an independent route are subject to regime change."
http://www.fff.org/freedom/fd0711a.asp
"The bounty provided by what London and DC term the 'war on terror' has moved the money grubbing of these corporations to an even higher level of greed. The executives of these companies are not interested in seeing this war end. If it did, then they would lose the gravy train it has become. ... Hughes' book takes these connections even further, suggesting that the corporations' drive for profits is what might very well drive the US government to attack a certain country, even if the government believes there might be other methods it could use."
http://www.counterpunch.org/jacobs03122008.html
"Why are we fighting in Iraq? Were we ever afraid of Saddam? Give me a break. We are fighting over there to pay for Lockheed-Martin and all the other defense contractors’ budgets. We are in Iraq to give the Empire military bases to control the Persian Gulf and to assert our presence to insure our interests. We care not for the people of Iraq, nor do we care for the soldiers that die on command."
http://www.countercurrents.org/gatto140308.htm
"I’ve been watching the dollar die all my life. I sometimes think I will outlast it. When I was a young man, gold was $35 an ounce. Today one ounce gold bullion coins, such as the Canadian Maple Leaf, cost more than $1,000. Our coinage was silver. Our dimes, quarters, and half dollars had purchasing power. Even the nickel could purchase a candy bar, ice cream cone or soft drink, and a penny could purchase bubble gum or hard candy. If a kid could collect 5 discarded soft drink bottles from a construction site, the 2 cents deposit on the returnable bottles was enough for the Saturday afternoon movie. Gasoline was 32 cents a gallon. A dollar’s worth was enough for a Saturday night date." [I'm not as old as Mr. Roberts, however I remember everything of which he speaks above, from my youth. It wasn't really that long ago. People who reached teenage in the '60s should have some recollection.]
http://www.countercurrents.org/roberts140308.htm
"Military history is written by the victors. Economic history is written, to a degree, by central bankers. In both cases you have to take official accounts with a large dose of salt."
http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=9265
"[B]acking paper money with mortgages is nothing new. The French tried it in the late 18th Century, and it lead to hyperinflation. Assignats, which were first issued in 1790 to help finance the French revolution, were backed by mortgages on confiscated church properties. Although the stolen underlying collateral did have some value, the revolutionaries saw no reason to limit how many Assignats were printed, which resulted in massive depreciation. Within three years, price controls were introduced and failure to accept Assignats, initially an offence subject to six years in prison, was made a capital crime. By 1799 the currency was completely worthless."
http://www.safehaven.com/article-9695.htm
"Frederick Douglass was traveling with a friend of another color in a part of the country where public sentiment was bitterly hostile to the association of colors. They stopped at a tavern and dined together, at which spectacle the village, growling and grumbling about the stove in the bar-room, was immediately disposed to mischief. The bar-room philosophers were sadly troubled for the honor of their color."
http://harpers.org/archive/2008/03/hbc-90002480
"Hysterical and jingoistic, nearly the entire American population rallied around an aggressive invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, and roughly two-thirds supported what would become America’s biggest war since Vietnam, in Iraq. It was all out of fear, a thirst for revenge, a desire to see the US on top of the world again – to put it charitably, a miscalculation of risk and a misplaced sense of justice and national pride."
http://www.lewrockwell.com/gregory/gregory156.html
"Two seemingly disconnected events have created a suddenly dangerous turn regarding the future of U.S. wars in the Middle East. One was the abrupt resignation of the person who has been the biggest obstacle to a U.S. military strike against Iran, Admiral William Fallon, the chief of Central Command which oversees U.S. military operations in the volatile region. The second is the ugly direction that the Democratic presidential competition has taken, with Hillary Clinton’s campaign intensifying its harsh rhetoric against Barack Obama,"
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2008/031408.html
"For Israel the rockets are important as a pretext to maintain a state of siege against Hamas, and a low-intensity warfare that creates permanent distraction from the confiscation of Palestinian land and the expansion of illegal settlements – and also as justification for the slow moving ‘peace process’. However, while pro-Israeli pundits in the US and elsewhere are prepared to defend Israel’s actions, many Israelis are no longer buying into their government’s pretexts. "
http://www.counterpunch.org/baroud03112008.html
"Whether Washington likes it or not, Iran is a major regional player, and Iranian cooperation will be needed if there is to be progress regarding Iraq, Afghanistan and a host of other problems. If the United States adopts a strategy of engagement, there are indications that the Iranian public might prod its government to reciprocate."
http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=9280
"On average science unveils a new invention every day, and almost without fail these days, that daily invention disrupts the notion of ourselves. Every day we are getting news that challenges our identity. Stem cell therapy, genetic sequencing, artificial intelligence, operational robots, new animal clones, trans-species hybrids, brain implants, memory enhancing drugs, limb prosthetics, social networks -- each of these tools blurs the boundaries between us as individuals and among us as a species. Who are we and who do we want to be?"
http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2008/03/humanitys_ident.php
"The problem that every mobile device maker runs into is essentially this: How can you balance the size of the screen so it's big enough to read and reasonably watch videos, while keeping the device dainty enough to fit in a pocket? Although the entire industry has been on the hunt for the ultimate tiny all-in-one mobile device, that has yet to happen. The key ... is not in the extra features a particular phone may boast, but the screen."
http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9891347-7.html
"OLEDs are thin, organic materials sandwiched between two electrodes, which illuminate when an electrical charge is applied. They represent the next evolution in lighting products. Their widespread design capabilities will provide an entirely different way for people to light their homes or businesses. Moreover, OLEDs have the potential to deliver dramatically improved levels of efficiency and environmental performance, while achieving the same quality of illumination found in traditional products in the marketplace today[, all done] with less electrical power."
"Scientists hope that understanding how zebrafish repair themselves will lead to new treatments for human conditions caused by damaged tissue, such as heart failure, diabetes and spinal cord injuries."
http://www.dukehealth.org/HealthLibrary/News/10257
"[I]f you trace this theme back, there remains one classic of the computer-as-god genre, and it's a 1950s short story by Isaac Asimov that's available for free online. The story is called 'The Last Question,' and it has something of a fairy tale structure, beginning once upon a time when two drunk programmers ask the first AI how to reverse the process of entropy."
http://io9.com/366109/when-computers-become-gods
"They Live, in parodying the Reagan/Bush years, captures much of the ideological milieu of today’s Republican regime."
http://blog.tomender.com/2008/03/15/piper-carpenter-they-live/
"Andrew Sullivan suggests that Carl Bean's 'I Was Born This Way' might be the gayest song ever. I thought the gayest song ever was 'I Love My Fruit,' or maybe Tiny Tim's 'I'm Gonna Be a Country Queen,' but we can set that aside."
http://www.reason.com/blog/show/125508.html
Grim, in the Happy Tree Friends style, but still interesting. Sort of Pink Panther, meets James Bond, with Daredevil thrown in too, all animated.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMC5qVn-1do
"[I]t is one thing for CNBC to not report the crucial discovery of the dinosaur gold-standard economy and its stability, but it is quite another for CNBC to actually believe that the Fed and the federal government can 'divine the right combination of fiscal and monetary policy' to put everything aright!"
http://www.safehaven.com/article-9686.htm
"Hospital officials hope to locate the good Samaritan that dropped off a sack of human organs in the middle of the night so they can thank him."
http://www.theonion.com/content/video/anonymous_philanthropist_donates
"Stephen learns to love the less-than-perfect Republican presidential candidate John McCain." [I suspect Stephen anticipates what many GOP types will do.]
http://www.comedycentral.com/colbertreport/videos.jhtml?videoId=163797
"A drug deal gone bad." NSFW video w/audio
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UoHOdBEo7KE
"What about the role of government? Well, in the abstract, coming from my time and background, I thought it was a rather good thing, but tallying up the ledger in those things which affect me and in those things I observe, I am hard-pressed to see an instance where the intervention of the government led to much beyond sorrow."
http://www.villagevoice.com/news/
0811,why-i-am-no-longer-a-brain-dead-liberal,374064,1.html/full
"No answer and attitude better characterizes how to think about problem solving in a free society. Unlike the attitude in the Nanny State, which requires massive bureaucracies to plan for endless and often completely unanticipated 'solutions,' in a free society problem solving is left to citizens who individually or cooperatively volunteer to address the challenges, great or small, that face them."
http://www.fff.org/comment/com0803c.asp
"The root of all evil is the mind divided against itself. Evil isn't part of nature, it is only an idea that informs our perceptions. Without the knowledge of good and evil, the body, mind, and spirit would be in harmony. We would be as innocent as animals."
http://www.partialobserver.com/article.cfm?id=2860
"The concept of the state of perfect competition has been widely criticized by the main exponents of the Austrian School, including Mises, Hayek, and Rothbard. However, government officials and mainstream economists seem impervious to their reasoning. So, they keep analyzing and studying the alternatives of economic policy according to this absurd standard."
http://www.mises.org/story/2896
"G4 TV did an awesome piece on yours truly on their Who’s Who of YouTube segment… check it out ... G4 Television is a great network, and Attack of the Show is awesome."
http://www.hotforwords.com/2008/03/13/g4tv-whos-who-of-youtube/
"Gold is essentially a rock! So why is it so valuable? Why do people always turn to gold at the end? The answer is that there is nothing else to take its place as a store of wealth that does not rot, corrode or disappear, is divisible, is universally accepted as money, is small enough that you can stash a lot of wealth in a small place where government tax collectors cannot assess it (unlike the equivalent amount of land or buildings), and it is entirely portable, so that you can take your wealth with you to some other country where the people and the government are not so crazy with desperation, where you can start over with a new name, and new identity...."
http://www.dailyreckoning.com/Writers/Mogambo/DREssays/MG031108.html
"The Disco Detonation Device was developed in the 1970s. American soldiers, attacking at night, would be bathed in powerful disco strobe lights. The enemy, seeing them appearing and disappearing in sudden rapid, jerky, surreal motions, wouldn't know what to shoot at. Simultaneously, the enemy would be bombarded with rapid-fire arcade video game laser lights simulating an intergalactic firefight from Space Invaders, further confusing foreign combatants unfamiliar with American snickering adolescent male culture."
http://www.rcreader.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=12633&Itemid=42
"The Republican Party, in its search for consistency, has now nominated a confessed war criminal to be its presidential nominee. Having a war criminal for president for the past eight years, at least now the republicans have a candidate who admits it."
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