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"[W]hen businesses learned to treat their own products as currency through notes, certificates and debit cards, and pitted these products against the inflationary dollar supply, consumers flocked to these products - even though the inflationary Federal Reserve dollars were legal tender, meaning they had to be accepted as payment."
http://www.partialobserver.com/article.cfm?id=2948
"There are two kinds of people in this world: those for whom the ends justifies the means and those for whom the means matter. Count me as someone who cares supremely about the means. Count the present administration as one who doesn't give a hoot."
http://www.tampabay.com/opinion/columns/article508595.ece
"Members of the YFZ community said they were 'extremely grateful' for the court's ruling, but acknowledged the long road ahead. The state can still appeal the decision or renew the investigation."
http://www.cnn.com/2008/CRIME/05/22/flds.ruling/index.html
"Personally, we've never found people at parties give two shakes about what you rolled up in, but maybe we're attending the wrong parties. The survey found 45 percent of respondents consider gas guzzlers a fashion faux-pas."
http://blog.wired.com/cars/2008/05/chicks-dig-my-t.html
"Look for a brisk business in bootlegged pictures of celebrities or folks whose bodies intrigue in some way. Barry Steinhardt of the ACLU believes that 'you're going to start seeing those images all over the Internet. These images are going to have high commercial value.' They may have high vengeance values, too. An angry ex- could post his former wife's image on a webpage, whether he works for the TSA or pays a friend who does to pirate the image."
http://www.fee.org/in_brief/default.asp?id=2094
"The banks that sold the toxic financing to Jefferson County have themselves fallen victim to the subprime crisis -- none more so than Bear Stearns. The firm, which sold $1.6 billion in swaps to the county, saw its shares plunge 95 percent from Jan. 1 to March 17 before it was bailed out by the Federal Reserve in March. The Fed negotiated a deal in which JPMorgan bought Bear for $10 a share. JPMorgan had sold $3.2 billion in swaps to Jefferson County. 'It's ironic that the Fed can do corporate welfare for the banks, but they can't bail out a county that was victimized by these banks,' says Craig Greer, a Catholic chaplain at a Birmingham hospice." [Ironic? Maybe, but perhaps one can see what really captures government's first concern.]
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&sid=aF_f8gLLNvn0&refer=home
"The rare shortage offers a glimpse into the growing love of a commodity known as 'poor man's gold.' With more silver mined than gold traditionally, silver has always been far cheaper than gold and today has less than 2% of gold's value. But silver is growing in popularity, and some investors are betting that its value will surge as inventory shrinks. "
"They [central bankers] have to, they have got to, they must keep the main business of America (trading securities back and forth) profitable and paying both high taxes and high incomes, on which some more taxes will be levied, so that governments (now literally half of the economy) can spend it! Hahaha! We're freaking doomed!"
http://news.goldseek.com/RichardDaughty/1211349720.php
"The groups that deserve support are those that are resisting the state. It is not unusual to see those very groups won over by the state at a later stage of the development of statism, in which case libertarian sympathies have to change. ... Power corrupts anyone who gets it, whether that is the Right or the Left or anything else in between. And the consistent libertarian must battle power no matter what its color or variety."
"History ... has long informed us of the dangers inherent in government, whose very nature derives from a monopoly on the use of force. Intellectuals, desirous of minimizing concerns over such dangers, responded with the idea of written constitutions that could be used to restrain state power and thus protect the life, liberty, and property interests of people. Our ancestors, as well as ourselves, failed to consider that the words contained in such documents were inherently ambiguous and subject to interpretation, a power we naïvely left to political agencies to exercise."
http://www.lewrockwell.com/shaffer/shaffer173.html
"Every real and honest action governments perform can and should be funded non-coercively, in the same way that Dell and Google and every other honest organization funds their business (or charity or whatnot). This would instantly put an end to government evil and to most of the corruption now rampant in governments world-wide. Only when the customer can say 'no' with impunity do things work properly."
http://www.strike-the-root.com/81/allport/allport10.html
"Here's a nice review of the new book Punk House, which documents the squats and other punk dwellings the authors found on a cross-country trip. I crashed on a lot of sofas in houses that looked like these, and even held the lease on one at one point..."
http://www.boingboing.net/2008/05/24/punk-house-communal.html
"In Quadir's view, it's not that centralization per se creates poverty. Poverty is the natural beginning state of all societies, east or west. Rather, decentralization is the engine which removes poverty and brings wealth. To the degree that infrastructure, education, and trade can be decentralized, wealth will rise in proportion. To the degree that infrastructure, education and trade are centralized, poverty will remain."
http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2008/05/technologies_th.php
"The government would ask us to turn to them when our own preparedness fails. But waiting for FEMA or the National Guard delays help. Telling us to wait tells us to be passive. It tells us to rely on 'experts' and outsiders. That's exactly what we don't need when everything suddenly goes to hell on us."
http://www.backwoodshome.com/articles2/wolfe111.html
"With a 47.9 percent stake in Symbian, the leading mobile platform that it co-founded in 1998 and which today powers some 206 million mobile phones, Nokia has long championed it at the expense of rival platforms such as Linux. No longer."
http://www.cnet.com/8301-13505_1-9949262-16.html
"[I]n the first five years of the Gold Rush those early pioneers extracted as much as £6bn worth of gold, at today's prices. Fortunes were made - and lost - in the wild towns that sprang up almost overnight along 200 miles of central California, an area they called the Motherlode."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7378281.stm
"When James wrote her work [The Children of Men] more than fifteen years ago, the United States had no agency with a curiously Teutonic name ('Homeland Security'–very close to the name of the ubiquitous security service in her novel); it had no internal isolation camps into which tens of thousands of immigrants could disappear without a court date or chance to be heard; it had no Guantánamo concentration camps. So much has changed in fifteen years."
http://harpers.org/archive/2008/05/hbc-90002972
"With the Bush Regime we have seen President Nixon’s claim that 'it’s not illegal if the President does it' carried to new heights. With the complicity of Democrats, Bush and Cheney have appointed attorneys general who have elevated the presidency above the law."
http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts05192008.html
"The evidence is now overwhelming that Bush knew of – and approved of – those violations of the rules of war and basic human decency, that the 'war crimes' catalogued by the FBI agents could be traced to him."
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2008/052208.html
"In 'China's All-Seeing Eye,' Naomi Klein explains the terrifying and banal reality of China's new surveillance state, and the way that it represents a triumph of 'Homeland Security' technology swaps between the US and China...."
http://www.boingboing.net/2008/05/22/chinas-surveillance.html
"Many Americans are spellbound by the historic contest for the Democratic presidential nomination between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Forgetting the political context, it is indeed something spectacular, even inspiring. A woman and a black man have reached a pinnacle that just a few years ago seemed impossibly far off. If it were happening outside politics, it would be something to appreciate. But we can’t forget the political context, and it’s the nature of that context that should keep us from truly rejoicing in Clinton’s and Obama’s achievements."
http://www.fff.org/comment/com0805g.asp
"Ultimately, that might be the Clintons' real legacy. Their decision to stay in the game and press on when there was no hope of winning through good old-fashioned voting may have finally institutionalized what is becoming a habit in American politics: the fight for power through lawyers and backroom maneuvering instead of votes, and the reflexive, automatic impugning of the legitimacy of the process when the process leaves you a few bits short."
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/20830259/the_superdelegates
"There's no question John McCain is getting a free ride from the mainstream press. But with the power of YouTube and the blogosphere, we can provide an accurate portrayal of the so-called Maverick."
http://youtube.com/watch?v=GEtZlR3zp4c
"Nothing is more humdrum than another exposure of a hypocritical congressman–naturally Fossella specialized in socially conservative positions that appealed to his many Catholic constituents. But such always-gratifying revelations have a larger lesson to teach us: a member of Congress will not be forgiven a personal peccadillo, but he may with complete impunity commit the greatest crimes–grand larceny, mass murder, arson, and every other species of abomination–by authorizing and funding their commission by government agents."
http://www.independent.org/blog/?p=104
"New Orleanians have achieved much of this success by doing what New Yorkers couldn’t do after 9/11: ignoring the potentates and eggheads hankering to turn devastation into conceptual art. They’ve been building and rebuilding on their own or with small-scale help, rather than under top-down decree—and, in the process, showing that thousands of individual planners are better than one master."
http://www.city-journal.org/2008/18_2_new_orleans_rebuilds.html
"To put it differently, we owe this scene to centuries of capital accumulation at the hands of free people who have put capital to work on behalf of economic innovations, at once competing with others for profit and cooperating with millions upon millions of people in an ever-expanding global network of the division of labor."
"I talked about Smart Mobs in relation to the public sphere—the citizen discourse that undergirds democracy."
"Classical economics tells us that an asset price bubble is always followed by an asset price bust. Inflation is followed by deflation, in other words. But in our funny, complicated world, we get both inflation and deflation at the same time."
http://www.dailyreckoning.com/RSS/DR051908sec1.html
"Citizens Against Government Waste reported that 75% of the payments disbursed under 2002’s $260 billion farm bill went to the richest 10% percent of farmers. The single largest check in 2003 ($69 million) went to Arkansas’s Riceland Foods; other recipients of farm aid that year included Chevron, International Paper, and Caterpillar."
http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=2213
"Government funding may retard technological progress? Is it possible that the funding for NASA has crowded out private space transport research and development? Or more currently, that private companies are not investing in carbon capture and sequestration research as a way to mitigate man-made global warming because they are waiting for the federal government to fund such research?"
http://www.reason.com/news/show/126584.html
"The plot's unraveling: The lies accumulate and compound one on top of the another ... get passed on ... keep mounting ... forcing successive new generations of politicians to drink the same poisonous Kool-Aid ... keep the lies alive ... going strong ... till everyone believes the lies are really 'the truth,' or at least an inconvenient truth ... as the hoax becomes the conventional wisdom ... not only by Washington, Wall Street, Corporate America and the media, but also 300 million Main Street Americans."
"This legislation is so comical as to defy all logic. Who in the world do we (America) think we are that we can dictate how other counties use their own natural resources? Notwithstanding the inevitable global economic crisis it would cause, is there anything legally stopping OPEC counties from simply refusing to sell crude oil to the United States? Does anyone actually believe that the United States will file antitrust charges against OPEC countries?" [Might President Hillary do that?]
http://www.safehaven.com/article-10320.htm
"Although there are certainly people in the U.S. military who want to fight and win the wars of the future—which will be much like Iraq and Afghanistan—they are unlikely to get much money. Most Americans think that the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) should be...well...defending the United States. Yet despite all the flag waving, the DoD works like any other government agency in redistributing the taxpayer’s dollars to special interests."
http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=2212
"Obama is a mainstream politician. He can complain about foreign policy, bad decisions, “mistakes.” But he can’t name, much less damn, that which he wants to lead: the state apparatus of an imperialist country. His 'Yes we can!' gibberish gives little clue about how he’ll deal, if elected, with the ongoing crimes to which Wright rightly alludes. But his dissing of his preacher suggests he’ll cave into the system because he sees it as his."
http://www.dissidentvoice.org/2008/05/
%e2%80%9cthe-fruit-of-the-way-they-think%e2%80%a6%e2%80%9d/
"Rep. John 'Jimmy' Duncan (R-Tenn.), an old line conservative who told Kauffman: 'I've become convinced that most of these wars have been brought about because of a desire for money and power and prestige'."
http://www.antiwar.com/bandow/?articleid=12886
"Is a government guilty of terrorism if it harbors known terrorists? What should one say about a country that permits open fund-raising on behalf of a terrorist implicated in the mass killing of civilians?"
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2008/052008.html
"The irony of George W. Bush going before the Knesset and mocking the late Sen. William Borah for expressing surprise at Adolf Hitler’s 1939 invasion of Poland is that Bush’s own family played a much bigger role assisting the Nazis."
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2008/051808.html
"Honest historians know full well that the Northern states were loaded with racist sentiment. Numerous Northerners wanted to secede. They may have been anti-slavery but they still didn’t want bands of Black folks frolicking in their own backyards."
http://thatotherpaper.com/austin/politically_correct_plaque_attack
"Surely any champion of freedom wants to get rid of the income tax. And surely the way to really get rid of the income tax is to repeal the Sixteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Right? Wrong. Repealing the Sixteenth Amendment would be a waste of time because its disappearance would change nothing. Alas, Congress could continue to tax incomes (and anything else)."
http://fee.org/in_brief/default.asp?id=2100
"The British Corn Laws were designed to protect local grain farmers from foreign competition. ... The main beneficiaries of this protectionism were the English absentee landlords of Ireland, not the Irish. The Irish people were able to grow large quantities of nutritious potatoes that they fed their families and animals. Landlords benefited from the fact that the potato did not deplete the soil and allowed a larger percentage of the estate to be devoted to grain crops for export to England. .... A primary input into this increased production was the Irish peasant who was in most cases nothing more than a landless serf."
"The only way that history supports this doctrine is to exclude all the cases of wars between democracies. This theory can survive only as long as people look at history in a way that is so contorted that it makes the typical political campaign speech appear honest. Some of the advocates of the democratic-peace doctrine are slippery regarding categories, as if the fact that a nation starts a war proves that it is not a democracy."
http://www.fff.org/freedom/fd0803c.asp
"At the height of the Cold War, the Soviet Union had some 45,000 nuclear warheads. At the moment, Iran has none. But when Barack Obama said the obvious—that Iran does not pose the sort of threat the Soviet Union did—John McCain reacted as though his rival had offered to trade Fort Knox for a sack of magic beans."
http://www.reason.com/news/show/126609.html
"War poisons the spirit, and warriors return tainted. This is why, among Native American, Zulu, Buddhist, ancient Israeli, and other traditional cultures, returning warriors were put through significant rituals of purification before re-entering their families and communities. Traditional cultures recognized that unpurified warriors could, in fact, be dangerous. The absence of these rituals in modern society helps explain why suicide, homicide, and other destructive acts are common among veterans."
http://www.yesmagazine.org/article.asp?ID=2662
"At least since FDR, then, presidents have regularly negotiated with leaders of nations they publicly decried as evil. So there is no historical basis for the charge that Obama is an “appeaser,” simply because he says it makes sense to talk with the leaders of Iran, Syria, or other nations that are supposedly our enemy."
http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/5246
"How the Rand Era gave way to the Surveillance Era—and what we can do about it. A speculative flight into the future. This approximately seven-minute interview was conducted by reason.tv's Nick Gillespie and Dan Hayes."
http://www.reason.tv/video/show/430.html
"When the researchers scoped the scales, they noticed something strange: No matter the angle of viewing, the scales always appeared in the same shade of green. That's unusual for iridescent surfaces, which derive their color from light refracted through semi-transparent layers. Further study revealed that the quality came from the scales' molecular arrangement, which had the same pattern as the atoms of carbon in a diamond. Diamonds themselves are too dense to serve as photonic crystals, but researchers long ago identified their configuration as perfectly suited for manipulating light in a three-dimensional space. "
http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2008/05/photonic_beetle
"Universities impoverish society; the scholars inevitably reduce the net knowledge of the population with foolish ideas and preposterous plans. After a few generations, the professors have introduced not only gender studies and film interpretation, but Social Security, ethanol, Medicaid, central banking, option pricing models, wars on terror, tax rebates, sub-prime mortgages, progressive taxation, direct election of senators - and all the other bugaboos and balderdash of modern societies."
http://www.dailyreckoning.com/RSS/DR052008sec1.html
"Firefox fans looking for a major update to the open-source Web browser probably will get a final version of it next month."
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13580_3-9949358-39.html
"I just saw the movie this morning. And as it settles into my brainpan over the next few days — and as I see it again and again, which I most certainly will — I’m sure I’ll find a couple of goofs and missteps. But since I’ve been afraid of disappointment ever since the film was first announced, I can report that from Indy 4’s opening scene to its closing credits, I was caught up in the same sense of wonder I felt when I first saw Raiders of the Lost Ark on opening night in Westwood in 1981."
http://wconger.blogspot.com/2008/05/indy-4-magic-strikes-fourth-time.html
"A compelling story, some surprisingly hilarious bits and, OK, a fairly gratuitous rock 'em, sock 'em comic-book-style fight finale later, and I was ... shocked to find myself comparing Iron Man favorably to the best superhero movies ever made, and the superhero movie genre has really come alive here in the early 21st century. ... It doesn't hurt to have a career-reviving performance by Robert Downey Jr. as Stark, or the lovely Gwyneth Paltrow making perky Pepper Potts cooler than she ever was in the comics." [It took me a while to get to this film, but better late than never. B.W. lists good reasons to see this one, even though it wasn't written last week.]
http://bwrmontag.blogspot.com/2008/05/bw-at-movies-iron-man.html
"Without giving spoilers, we were comfortable bringing all of our children (including one as young as six) to see the movie. This movie is much more violent than The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe due to the storyline being the war between the Telmarines and the Narnians. However, as in the first movie, the battle scenes are not blood-soaked gore-fests (like, say, Braveheart)."
http://blog.wired.com/geekdad/2008/05/the-chronicles.html
"A Facebook fan page dedicated to the online campaign already has nearly 1,500 members. Some worry the efforts are overkill and will become a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy. At fan site Whedonesque, several commenters suggest that such pre-emptive campaigning will negatively affect the show."
http://blog.wired.com/underwire/2008/05/dollhouse-fans.html
"Today Now! talks with a diet book author who reveals that many things are surprisingly edible when you are driven mad by hunger."
http://www.theonion.com/content/video/diet_book_author_advocates_new_no
"Sn4tchbuckl3r starts digging around in Peopleburg, and uncovers more than he bargained for."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VrE5EV7i3Gg
"Naturally, my stupid kids come running into the room ... and they want to know why it is that the 30 companies in the Dow Jones Industrial Average can pay out three times as much as they earn, and yet I can't let them have a tiny fraction of what I make with which to buy decent food, or shoes that are not held together with duct tape. My eyes narrowing, I pointedly ask them, 'And who pays for the duct tape?' and they have to admit that I do.!"
http://www.dailyreckoning.com/Writers/Mogambo/DREssays/MG052208.html
"According to campaign managers, the triple ticket will run on a revolutionary new platform crafted during three highly contentious weeks in April. At the top of the platform is a military strategy calling for the phased withdrawal of .000006 brigades from Iraq and Afghanistan every seven months over the next 350 years. "
http://www.theonion.com/content/news/obama_clinton_mccain_join_forces
"So how could gold make a revival as a sort of international money? Well, we don't actually need a government run gold standard anymore. There are already private gold banks. They've been growing for some time. Their growth has roughly charted the decline of the dollar. People buy digital shares in gold. Gold is held in vaults by these banks, and you buy digital claims on them, just like when you buy a stock today you don't have a physical certificate. You have a digital representation of that stock. If we all owned digital shares in gold, and we were able to move money from our accounts between us, and we were able to walk around with smart cards carrying representations of this digital gold, we'd be able to travel around the world, and to transact with one another."
http://www.resourceinvestor.com/pebble.asp?relid=42919
"My response to the RS [Royal Society] is based on the work of some two dozen independent climate scientists from 16 nations who contributed to the report of the Non-governmental International Panel on Climate Change, or NIPCC, titled 'Nature, Not Human Activity, Rules the Climate.' NIPCC corrects many of the errors and misstatements made in the IPCC report, discusses evidence ignored by the IPCC, and cites evidence available since May 2006, the cut-off date for the latest IPCC Report of May 2007."
http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=2217
"First detected in 1953, neutrinos pass easily through most matter making it possible for your signal to pass through the Milky Way without being blocked by stars and interstellar dust. They are also not subject to the 'noise' of optical and radio waves traveling alongside them through space."
http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/05/searching-for-a.html
"[M]aybe bondholders are so used to being screwed out of buying power that they don't even notice anymore. Or they are all taking drugs and don't realize that they are being screwed out of buying power. Or they are masochists who enjoyed being screwed out of buying power. Or they are, as I have said so many times, just childishly-trusting morons who are so busy trying to raise a family in such a wildly inflationary environment that they don't notice, but will one day wish they had."
http://www.dailyreckoning.com/Writers/Mogambo/DREssays/MG052308.html
"I discuss the origin of the word 'machinima' and I did this awesome collaboration with the guys over at Machinima.com and their YouTube channel!"
http://www.hotforwords.com/2008/05/23/machinima/
"Speculating in the commodity markets is a bad thing, a very bad thing indeed. Congress ought to do all it can to protect the public interest - starting with its own re-election. The Committee therefore recommends closing the US commodity futures market, and imposing sanctions on any foreign state that doesn't do the same, to prevent speculative funds simply moving elsewhere. This policy - undertaken for the good of the international community - will thereby force speculators back into more socially beneficial activities, such as trading those subprime-mortgage backed bonds now stuck on the balance sheets of New York investment banks."
http://www.safehaven.com/article-10327.htm
"What did the Fed and the banks steal? The purchasing power of your money, you chump! How do I know this? Hahaha! Look at the raging inflation in the prices of food and energy, you moron! Hahaha! Do you actually think that a dollar seems to buy as much as it used to? Hahaha! Where did the purchasing power go? The Fed stole it!"
http://www.dailyreckoning.com/Writers/Mogambo/DREssays/MG052108.html
"Patents. It's unclear to me why Microsoft refuses to back off this issue. It stands alone in its dogmatic insistence on fouling the open-source downstream. Microsoft's solo crusade against open source through patents baffles me. It also prevents me from working for them or with them. I'm not alone in this."
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