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"Congrats to the Bells for fighting for their inalienable right to host dancing in the Arizona desert!"
http://www.reason.tv/video/show/422.html
"In a joint resolution, the Montana politicians argue that when Washington approved the state constitution, including a clause granting “any person” the right to bear arms, upon the Treasure State’s entry into the Union in 1889, the federal government recognized that clause as consistent with the Second Amendment. If the Court comes down on the side of a collective right, they argue, it would breach the compact for statehood between Montana and the federal government."
http://www.reason.com/news/show/126063.html
"MySQL is doing this right. It has focused on adoption first, and has committed to keeping the source of that adoption open source. But in its next phase, perhaps it demonstrates an ideal open source-based business model. Or rather, a phased approach to growing an open-source business...?"
http://www.cnet.com/8301-13505_1-9945870-16.html
"Today Americans are far more suspicious of presidential power than they were in the '50s and early '60s. Yet the fantasy of the redeemer president dies hard. That vision of the office can be found in almost every forum in which Americans interpret the presidency: in the movies, on television, in the perennial rankings of presidents, and on talk shows and op-ed pages."
http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=9402
"[T]he Bush/Cheney wars have contributed to rising oil prices. Chief among these are two factors: the threat to supplies, particularly from the Persian Gulf region from which 20 percent of the world’s oil supplies come, and a falling dollar, because oil is priced in dollars, and as it loses value, oil producing countries raise their prices to compensate. ... Moreover, it’s not just oil that has been driven up in price because of the war. As energy costs have gone up, so has the cost of food, in no small part because most fertilizer is oil-based, and because transportation costs are also largely a reflection of oil prices. As well, to the extent that American’s food is imported, they are paying in shrinking dollars, whose value is being driven down because of the war."
http://www.counterpunch.org/lindorff05172008.html
"This gap is growing more yawning with the years. It has already presented taxpayers with a whopping bill that is eating up a vast portion of government budgets at the cost of other services."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/
2008/05/10/AR2008051002883.html
"The federal government has traditionally offered workers a large tax break for job-based health benefits. In practice, however, that tax break effectively robs you of control over a large chunk of your earnings: the money your employer puts toward your health insurance. For the average insured family, that's about $9,000 per year. The law also robs you of control over your coverage decisions."
http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=9393
"We often hear complaints that today’s immigrants aren’t like the immigrants of a century ago. Those immigrants were all right because they were eager to assimilate, goes the argument. But the immigrants today want to keep their own language and customs. The anti-immigration crowd thinks that’s a crushing argument."
http://www.fff.org/freedom/fd0802g.asp
"I think what lies beyond the nation states is a world without national boundaries, but also with people organized. But not organized as nations, but people organized as groups, as collectives, without national and any kind of boundaries. Without any kind of borders, passports, visas. None of that! ... This is something anarchist theory has not worked out and maybe cannot possibly work out in advance, because it would have to work itself out in practice."
http://www.counterpunch.org/vodovnik05122008.html
"The principle that morality runs the world applies equally to statism. People believe in the State because they believe in morality. As I’ve said before, people know very well that politicians are no better than anyone else, that politicians are liars, that politicians are corrupt, that politics is a pointless struggle that never accomplishes anything, that the State is inefficient, and that the State is a tool of the exploiter class. Most people believe all of these things to some degree, and yet they still firmly believe in the State and in democracy, because they firmly believe that the State is necessary for morality."
http://francoistremblay.wordpress.com/2008/05/15/its-about-morality-stupid/
"The state is the only organization that claims to be above its own rules. It enforces laws against murder, theft, counterfeiting, kidnapping, extortion and involuntary servitude, while conducting the same on a mass scale. And to enforce its millions of pages of other dictates, it necessarily tramples on the natural law and rights of its subjects, domestic and foreign."
http://www.lewrockwell.com/gregory/gregory158.html
"The thought of abolishing all government regulation of the aviation sector and handing this task over to the free market is, to most people, as unthinkable and alien an idea as that of privatizing all police and courts."
"Noam Chomsky told Dundee-Crown High School students that a two-tiered educational system exists: While the elite attend schools that promote critical, independent thought, the masses attend schools that train students to pass tests and follow orders. The system evolved after the Industrial Revolution, Chomsky said, when the ruling elite recognized the need to transform independent artisans and farmers into pliant factory workers."
http://www.dailyherald.com/story/?id=192670&src=5
"The company's first high-performance x86 chip will be targeted at the mainstream PC market--another first for the Taipei-based chip supplier. Via processors have historically appeared in ultrasmall mobile devices (such as the OQO), embedded computers, or thin-client computers."
http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9945568-7.html
"[One] piece of welcome news is that Adobe is releasing the Flash Player 10 beta for all major platforms — Windows, Mac and Linux. Adobe has even upped the Linux ante with a new installer specially tailored for Ubuntu users. Barclay says that Adobe considers Linux a major platform and will continue to make all Flash releases simultaneous across platforms."
http://blog.wired.com/monkeybites/2008/05/flash-player-10.html
"If people shared their surplus incomes instead of putting it in banks, the lending industry would dry up. Realtors, however, could raise money to build homes by selling shares, with shareholders getting first pick of the units to lease or purchase. Houses would be seen as places to live in, not as 'investments.' That's because, in a world with no banks and no easy credit (indeed, no credit at all), no one will be able to just borrow more and more money to buy an overpriced house."
http://www.partialobserver.com/article.cfm?id=2940
"The distinct American hubris that we are 'the indispensable nation' and the braggadocio that we are an 'omnipower' has us overcommitted in alliances that we cannot fulfill. Despite 25 percent of the Iraqi population killed, injured or displaced, the 'world’s only superpower' cannot even control Baghdad. "
http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts05132008.html
"If John McCain wins the presidency – and gets to appoint one or more U.S. Supreme Court justices – America’s 220-year experiment as a democratic Republic living under the principle that 'no man is above the law' may come to an end."
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2008/051208.html
"Because of US government subsidies, American farmers were devoting more and more acreage to corn for ethanol than for food, which sparked a steep rise in corn prices. The diversion of corn from tortillas to biofuel was certainly one cause of skyrocketing prices, though speculation on biofuel demand by transnational middlemen may have played a bigger role. However, an intriguing question escaped many observers: how on earth did Mexicans, who live in the land where corn was domesticated, become dependent on US imports in the first place?"
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080602/bello
"From the administration that used the 9/11 tragedy to violently pursue an unrelated vendetta against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, we get Round Two. After a cyclone devastated portions of Burma (which the despotic Burmese government has renamed Myanmar) and killed an estimated 100,000 people, instead of concentrating on providing relief, the Bush administration couldn’t resist scoring points on First Lady Laura Bush’s pet issue—the tyranny of the Burmese military junta."
http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=2196
"Seldom in American politics has the same side of a single party split into such distinct and acrimonious factions. As virtually identical as the two candidates are in their political positions, there is no longer any common cause left between Hillary lovers and Obama supporters. There is only a culture war of epic proportions, featuring some of the most unlikely and absurd combatants in the history of impassioned conflict."
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/20626517/hillarys_bitter_victory
"How does Obama propose to give medical coverage to the uninsured? By forcing the taxpayers to subsidize it. How does he propose to replace fossil fuels? By forcing the taxpayers to pay companies to develop alternatives. How does he propose to fix Social Security? By forcing some people to pay more. How does he propose to improve education? By forcing the taxpayers to finance more programs. How does he propose to protect America? By forcing Americans to maintain a global empire, which is the source of so much hostility."
http://www.fff.org/comment/com0805d.asp
"Peggy Noonan is becoming increasingly critical of the warfare state. She won't say it that way. She performs some of the usual genuflections to some of the pro-war politicians. But the increasing power and passion in her writing when she talks about the government's power and the general ugliness that war has given rise to are unmistakable."
http://www.antiwar.com/henderson/?articleid=12811
"A regime so paranoid as to have moved the capital north a few years ago because soothsayers had predicted that a natural disaster followed by civil unrest would strike Rangoon, the traditional capital, could not allow the population to be gripped by a fear greater than the fear of repression. Any civilian commotion is a threat to a regime that owes its rule to the use of force. Hence the full information was kept, and continues to be kept, from the population at large, and civilians were prevented from organizing relief efforts directly."
http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=2198
"The Crazy Horse Memorial, when completed, will dwarf any other sculpture on the planet. Already it is an awe-inspiring sight. Carved in the round, and depicting Chief Crazy Horse astride his steed, it will be as high as a 56-story building and longer than two football fields. And the project is more than just a sculpture. A museum, the Indian University of North America and a medical training center are planned for the adjacent land. ... Unlike Mount Rushmore, which is named after a New York lawyer and was paid for with money taken from the public, Crazy Horse is being paid for with funds given voluntarily by people who want it to be completed, even if it is only after they have gone. It is a superb tribute, not only to Crazy Horse – a genuine American hero – but also to the private enterprise system itself, and to what a single individual with a dream can achieve."
http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig9/trench4.html
"[P]irates are the real innovators. Instead of posing a threat, they are in fact showing established companies what the market wants and providing companies willing to learn from them how to move forward. Think of piracy as free market research data."
http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/book-review-2008-05.ars
"[A]mong the current renewable options, wind and solar thermal appear to be the only technologies that could produce power at the utility-scale. Traditional solar photovoltaics have long payback times and are even trickier for the dumb electric grid to handle than wind. While the report is certainly a milestone for envisioning a cleaner energy future, the US remains many steps away from implementing a cohesive energy policy that would drive major innovation in the systems that produce and deliver energy around the country."
http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/05/doe-report-wind.html
“[I]f widely distributed forms of intelligence, knowledge, virtue, or prudence can add up, through many individual self-interested actions, into an benign undesigned order, then there’s no reason why widely distributed forms of stupidity, ignorance, prejudice, vice, or folly might not add up, through many individual self-interested actions, into an unintended but malign undesigned order.”
http://radgeek.com/gt/2008/05/16/women_and/
"Medical errors are pervasive in part because the way we pay doctors and hospitals leaves them with too little direct incentive to improve patient safety. For the most part, insurers pay providers on a 'fee-for-service' basis: for each service a doctor performs, he collects a fee. That creates an obvious incentive to recommend more tests and treatments, even if those services offer little or no benefit to the patient."
http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=9394
"The Fed thinks it has two mandates: to preserve the value of the U.S. dollar…and to maintain full employment. The two are as incompatible as a sanctimonious governor and the Emperor's Club. At some point, you have to choose. What're you going to be - a governor or an emperor?"
http://www.dailyreckoning.com/RSS/DR051508sec1.html
"US Labor Dept [apparatchiks] said consumer prices rose a smaller than expected 0.2% in April, tamed by energy prices, which were unchanged last month. Utilizing an obscure 'seasonal adjustment,' Labor figured that gasoline prices actually fell 2% in April, which doesn't reflect the reality of what consumers were paying at the pump. "
http://www.safehaven.com/article-10255.htm
"Perhaps this dollar turning into crap has something to do with ... the interesting statistic that the number of dollars has exploded in the past few decades, and that now 'there is 1,500% more paper money today than there was in 1970.' This is important stuff because all of that money created over those decades chased goods and services to the higher and higher prices that you see today, and produced the gargantuan system of governments that we have today, too."
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/JE15Dj01.html
"They will do what they do with the solid backing of Congress, the presidential candidates, and the mainstream press which if history is our guide will for a time shape shockingly malleable public opinion. Yes, I fear that we (most of us) will be fooled again."
http://www.counterpunch.org/leupp05122008.html
"The accusations are rather ironic for the administration of US President George W Bush, as the they charge that workers are being treated as virtual slave laborers, a human-rights issue the administration has previously claimed it is dedicated to combating."
http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=2200
"For whatever the reason, the researchers are hesitant to take the next logical step in their argument. That is, to make a value judgment regarding whether resolve undermining statements and actions are on balance bad. This hesitancy is not shared by war's proponents, however, who interpret Iyengar and Monten's research as a condemnation of opponents of the war."
http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/5220
"In a newly-released tape of a 2006 neocon luncheon meeting featuring former War Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, attended by ex-military 'message force multiplier' propaganda shills Lt. General Michael DeLong, David L. Grange, Donald W. Sheppard, James Marks, Rick Francona, Wayne Downing, Robert H. Scales and others, Rumsfeld declared that the American people lack 'the maturity to recognize the seriousness of the “threats”' -- and need another 9/11."
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=CHI20080516&articleId=9002
"The Greeks didn't give slaves the vote, but pirates offered the right to everyone, black or white. (It's probably also safe to say that pirates didn't have superdelegates.) Before each voyage, the crew elected a captain who could be deposed at any time, as well as a quartermaster whose main purpose was to make sure the captain didn't have too much power."
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/
2008/05/11/everyone_in_favor_say_yargh/?page=full
"The logic is simple: inflate the number of Dollars in issue, and you'll shrink the real value of each outstanding Dollar you owe. But if escaping your debts really could prove that easy, how come history is littered with the mischief that inflation causes instead...?"
http://www.safehaven.com/article-10269.htm
"Perhaps weary of watching dinner guests picking their teeth with the points of their daggers, Cardinal Richelieu orders the blades of his dinnerware to be ground down and rounded off. Et voilà, the modern dinner knife is born."
http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2008/05/dayintech_0513
"In 1933, group of wealthy businessmen that allegedly included the heads of Chase Bank, GM, Goodyear, Standard Oil, the DuPont family and Senator Prescott Bush tried to recruit Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler to lead a military coup against President FDR and install a fascist dictatorship in the United States. And yes, we're talking about the same Prescott Bush who fathered one US President and grandfathered another one."
http://www.boingboing.net/2008/05/15/7-insane-conspiracie.html
"War is an utterly profound and tragic event, far different from sewage pipes and tax-hikes. When the dogs of war are unleashed, men and women are sent to fight, kill, and die. Children lose their fathers and mothers, parents bury their sons and daughters, and survivors return crippled, both physically and emotionally. As the 'collateral damage' mounts, hospitals are flattened, schools are destroyed, and cities are burned to the ground. How dare anyone defend lies of this magnitude...."
http://www.lewrockwell.com/latulippe/latulippe87.html
"This has been the real purpose of the 'surge' all along – to prepare the ground for the final assault on Israel's deadliest enemy in the region, which is Iran. This is why Israel's lobby in the U.S. has made ratcheting-up tensions with Tehran their number-one priority, and clearly their relentless campaign is succeeding. Once again, the prime directive of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East stands revealed for all with eyes to see: it's all about Israel."
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=12827
"On May 15, the White House Moron, in a war-planning visit to Israel, justified the naked aggression he and Olmert are planning against Iran as the only alternative to 'the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history.' But the White House Moron has the roles reversed. It is not Iran that is threatening war. It is Bush. It is not Bush who is appeasing. It is Iran."
http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts05162008.html
"If the American people should have learned one lesson from the past seven years, it is that the careless mix of tough talk and wishful thinking gets good people killed – and pushes even powerful nations to the brink of bankruptcy."
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2008/051608.html
"As the researchers explain, by measuring EEG signals, the BCI system can monitor an individual’s physiological and cognitive states. The system takes advantage of advances in sensor and information technology to achieve reduced power consumption and production costs. Currently, the system can operate continuously for about two days before the lithium-ion battery needs to be recharged, but the researchers hope to further increase the lifetime. "
http://www.physorg.com/news130152277.html
"Researchers at Caltech are pioneering new ways to make superstrong metals that are twice as tough as titanium, and twice as elastic."
http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/multimedia/2008/05/gallery_glass_metal
"On paper, it sounds pretty good. You take the carbon dioxide ... from paper production and transform it into a paper additive."
http://www.news.com/8301-11128_3-9941541-54.html
"Generally, we don't trust numbers. Who can trust a 5 after all - with a bottom like a communist sickle and its top nicked from a swastika? Who can trust an eight - wandering back and forth and never getting anywhere? And what about the zero? What does it mean? You put it in front of a number and it means nothing. You put it behind…and all of a sudden you've got 10 times as many. So, let's look a little more at those numbers - that is, at the crooked 4s, the slick 6s, and the empty 0s - put out by the feds"
http://www.dailyreckoning.com/RSS/DR051608sec1.html
"Our sources at Fox tell us that Dollhouse will take place at an undisclosed point in the future, and the organization behind wiping the dolls and imprinting them is a corrupt, top-secret government agency."
http://blog.wired.com/underwire/2008/05/whedons-killer.html
"As a believer in Natural Moral Law, C.S. Lewis thought that certain things were naturally good and other things were naturally bad. It wasn't just a question of human beings deciding what was good and what was bad. The very nature of the universe tells us something about how we ought to live."
"The show's central conceit — that these 'Actives' are blank slates who can be programmed to have any skillset or emotion — comes out really clearly. Plus it gives a hint of one of the show's main sources of conflict."
http://io9.com/391498/final-dollhouse-trailer-kicks-100-percent-more-ass
"[T]he movie's fear of following its more adult-themed thread all the way through to its logical conclusion could ultimately be its downfall."
http://movies.ign.com/articles/874/874705p1.html
"If you shop for groceries at dollar stores, you can find bargains on discontinued lunch meats and irregular bacon."
http://www.comedycentral.com/colbertreport/videos.jhtml?videoId=168490
"In fact, there are now more people on Government Payrolls (22,385,000) than Goods Producing payrolls (21,618,000)! Hahaha! We are so freaking doomed! What makes it So Damned Funny (SDF) is that a conceited, self-absorbed nation like America, that boasts how smart we are, cannot possibly realize the utter, utter stupidity of this! Hahaha! And yet, here it is! Dare I repeat myself that we are freaking doomed? Sure! We're freaking doomed! Hahaha!"
http://www.dailyreckoning.com/Writers/Mogambo/DREssays/MG051208.html
"Hillary Clinton crushes Barack Obama in West Virginia, while Chris Matthews and Terry McAuliffe have a good old-fashioned douche-off."
http://www.thedailyshow.com/video/index.jhtml?videoId=168561
&title=indecision-2008-west-virginia
Onion Panelists discuss whether politicians are failing lobbyists?
http://blog.tomender.com/2008/05/16/almost-there/
"The immigration debate is implicitly – and almost never explicitly – grounded in the property principle. The rationale for the government being able to exclude foreigners from entering the country is that such persons are 'trespassing' upon some presumed property interests of 'America.' Clever speakers will often try to analogize people coming into America without the permission of the government, to someone camping out on your front lawn without your consent. The problem with this analogy is that it assumes too much, namely, that the state enjoys the same property rights within the territorial boundaries it has established, as do individuals regarding their claims to their lands."
http://www.lewrockwell.com/shaffer/shaffer172.html
"[T]he highest political good for both men and women doesn't come from their sexuality. It derives from their being human beings. Although men and women can be validly sorted into separate classes for all sorts of reasons -- from medicine to marketing strategy -- their basic rights and responsibilities cannot be sorted in that manner. Because those rights and responsibilities preceded any consideration of sexuality just as they precede any consideration of skin color. Those are secondary characteristics: sex, skin color, height, ethnicity... The primary characteristic is our membership as individuals in the human species. And THIS, the primary characteristic is where our rights arise."
http://www.ifeminists.net/e107_plugins/content/content.php?content.333
"Pressure to pass impossible-to-achieve legislation, like Lieberman-Warner, or grandstanding political stunts, like calling polar bears an 'endangered species' even when they are at near record-high population levels, are based upon projections of rapid and persistent global warming. Proponents of wild legislation like to point to the 2007 science compendium from the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, deemed so authoritative it was awarded half of last year's Nobel Peace Prize. (The other half went to Al Gore.) In it there are dozens of computer-driven projections for 21st-century warming. Not one of them projects that the earth's natural climate variability will shut down global warming from carbon dioxide for two decades. Yet, that is just what has happened."
http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=9406
"After two years of research, the ASU team found that of 30 types of clay tested, three displayed a surprisingly strong effect against such deadly bacteria as E. coli, Salmonella, and even the anti-biotic resistant superbug MRSA. The clay killed all or most of these strains and others in vitro. Special emphasis was put on the volcanic soil known as bentonite clay."
http://www.naturalnews.com/023217.html
"While people today have been taught to think of fascism as related to goose-stepping men in military uniforms and dictators with moustaches, it actually represents a form of social organization in which government forces policies upon the business sector in which the state directs production in exchange for guaranteed monopolized markets."
http://www.fff.org/freedom/fd0802f.asp
"To save money in these tough times, universities, conference planners and global companies have started holding gatherings for far-flung employees and students in the online world known as Second Life."
http://www.mailtribune.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080516/BIZ/805160314
"Robert Owens, a co-author of the Federal Reserve Act, later testified before Congress that the banking industry had conspired to create a series of financial panics in order to rouse the people to demand 'reforms' that served the interests of the financiers. A century later, JPMorgan Chase & Co. (now one of the two largest banks in the United States) may have pulled this ruse off again, again changing the course of history. "
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=BRO20080514&articleId=8974
"[T]his negative $58 billion trade deficit for March was interpreted as, unbelievably, GOOD news, since it was down from February's deficit of a negative $61 billion! Hahahaha! Good news! Hahaha!"
http://www.dailyreckoning.com/Writers/Mogambo/DREssays/MG051408.html
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