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"Why good news? It means that consumers are starting to cut back. They could be going into less debt. They might be saving more. They are being more careful about long-term plans pending short-term trends."
"Stamper, who holds a Ph.D. in leadership and human behavior from United States International University, has emerged as one of the most thoughtful and outspoken critics of the war on drugs, which he believes causes untold misery, undermines effective law enforcement, and doesn't begin to pass any sort of cost-benefit analysis."
http://reason.tv/video/show/514.html
"It's rare enough in this age of politician worship and dutiful rules-following for a citizen to speak truth to Power, but it's outright stunning when Power speaks truth to citizens."
http://www.rcreader.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=12974&Itemid=42
"Having complete control of a high-powered OS would make all of the performance-demanding Adobe software run rings around any other implementation, if engineered correctly. It would become the viable desktop alternative to both the PC and the Mac."
"Monsanto’s announcement that it is 'repositioning' Posilac, its artificial growth hormone used in milk production and more commonly known as rBGH, is good news for consumers but not the end of the struggle for food safety advocates...."
http://www.fwwatch.org/press/releases/not-even-monsanto-wants-rbgh20080807
"As an antidote for our perverse zeitgeist, there is no better medicine than this readable and entertaining book by one of the most influential writers of the 20th century. As Mencken explores the democratic man, the democratic state, and the conflict of democracy and liberty, he laughs and pokes fun at fundamentalists, teetotalers, law enforcement zealots, judges, victimless crime laws, presidents, public schools, our history of warmongering, and the drooling stupidity that seems to run through our society like a bubbling sewer with lots of inconvenient clogs."
http://www.strike-the-root.com/82/ludlow/ludlow2.html
"The jury has delivered a verdict in the trial of Charlie Lynch: Guilty on all counts."
http://reason.tv/video/show/510.html
"The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration has raided more than 60 medical marijuana dispensaries in the last two years. Because the deck is stacked against them, dispensary operators facing federal drug charges typically plead guilty. Lynch instead gambled on a defense known as entrapment by estoppel, which occurs when someone is arrested for actions the government assured him were legal. "
http://www.reason.com/news/show/128062.html
"Wall Street, Washington and Corporate America are a one-trick pony with one narrow-minded strategy: Economic g-r-o-w-t-h, bull markets, megabonuses. In good times they tout 'free markets.' But when greed bombs, these big babies throw free market 'principles' under the 'Reagan Revolution' bus as their lobbyists go whining to Congress for megabillion taxpayer bailouts and access at the Fed casino's discount window to siphon off more taxpayer money. What hypocritical wimps!"
"Middle Georgia, along with the rest of the state's private probation industry, owes much of its business to Bobby Whitworth, who was Georgia's commissioner of corrections until 1993, when a sex-abuse scandal involving female inmates forced him out."
http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2008/07/slammed-probation-for-profit.html
"[K]eep in mind what the reality is. These people, and probably most of your neighbors as well (otherwise it never could have gotten this far), believe that it is acceptable to shoot you if you refuse to follow their stupid idea.... [F]ailure to bow to their commands is punishable by death. That is the bottom line. It is not about justice, it is about control. "
http://www.strike-the-root.com/82/nonentity/nonentity1.html
"There is a great intellectual cost associated with the central bank. People today imagine that not having one would be the equivalent of anarchy. It would be as if we had a state that nationalized the shoe industry and after a time no one could even imagine how private enterprise could make shoes. Anyone who would suggest that the state dispense with the role would be treated like a crazy person. But how crazy is it?"
"So, in an anarchic society, citizens are just inhabitants. In a voluntary society, then, individuals would be free to try to establish various systems for accomplishing certain tasks—and, most importantly, others would be free to remain outside the systems if they so chose, without penalty as a necessary consequence of that choice."
http://www.sunnimaravillosa.com/node/1423
"The fear of looking foolish in the eyes of those whose respect you desire, is one of the greatest pressures used to keep the herd in line in a collectivist system."
http://www.lewrockwell.com/shaffer/shaffer181.html
"This book presents a full-length, scholarly study of the life of the nineteenth-century anarchist Michael Bakunin. It gives full and fine treatment of Bakunin's life, his relations with other revolutionary figures such as Alexander Herzen, Pierre Proudhon, Sergei Nechaev, Karl Marx, and Friedrich Engels; of his involvement in various revolutionary organizations and uprisings (not to mention the hard prison time he served as reward for these efforts); and of his elaboration of anarchism as the anti-authoritarian wing of socialism, opposing capitalism and religion as well as the state, and favoring their replacement with voluntary, collective self-organization."
http://www.nolanchart.com/article4480.html
"It strikes everyone and anyone immediately. Somehow these coins are 'real'; the coins we use today are not. But what does this really mean? ... To own these coins helps grant some sense of independence to you too. You will possess a store of wealth that is not subject to wild bubbles, state-manufactured inflations, and political whims. It is a kind of privatized secession."
http://www.lewrockwell.com/tucker/tucker103.html
"In a free market in education, teachers would be sales reps for their schools. Some might even be owner-entrepreneurs who hang out their shingles and then must recruit — i.e., sell and service — their paying customers by meeting the customers' needs and wants."
"I like the direction. Google and others are pushing new paradigms for desktop computing, but IBM still has billions at stake in wrenching Microsoft out of enterprises, both small and large. IBM has the heft to give Microsoft a run for its money on the traditional desktop. It's one thing to have Novell, Red Hat, and Canonical/Ubuntu pushing the Linux desktop, but it's quite another when IBM gets into the fray. IBM is just as biased but the move brings a brand that commands respect beyond Linux. This should matter."
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10008388-16.html
"An unexpected, favorable ruling by a state court judge threw a monkey wrench into the city’s plans. At enormous expense, the Gores have apparently been able to keep what is theirs."
http://www.fff.org/freedom/fd0805g.asp
"[T]he first phone to run the Android software will be announced by handset maker HTC on T-Mobile's network next month and could begin shipping in October."
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-10018149-94.html
"Thus the American imperium is revealed as a costly, provocative, but in essential ways impotent force in the world. For this the taxpayers are coughing up hundreds of billion dollars a year. And people are dying."
http://www.fff.org/comment/com0808e.asp
"The many years of lies--9/11, Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, al Qaeda connections, yellowcake, anthrax attack, Iranian nukes, 'the United States doesn’t torture,' the bombings of weddings, funerals, and children’s soccer games, Abu Ghraib, renditions, Guantanamo, various fabricated 'terrorist plots,' the determined assault on civil liberties--have taken their toll on American credibility. No one outside America any longer believes the US media or the US government."
http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts08152008.html
"It’s a safe bet that when President Washington urged the nation to 'steer clear of permanent alliances' in his Farewell Address, he never dreamed that the United States would someday be entangled in an alliance that threatened to draw us into a conflict on behalf of the state of Georgia—the one on the Black Sea, nearly 6,000 miles away."
http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=2295
"In both copyright and patent law, the powerful continue to hoard their power (which is natural), while judges and lawmakers seek to capitulate to that power (which is not natural--or shouldn't be)."
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10006829-16.html
"America is at war again, and so Obama’s (or McCain’s) fascism will likely resemble, qualitatively, the late FDR period more so than the anti-business leftwing New Deal of his middle years in office...."
http://www.independent.org/blog/?p=151
"Having railed against the 'ruination they [the conservative politicos and their corporate co-conspirators] have wrought,' he declares: 'Repairing it will require years of political action.' Fancy that: politicians are manifestly corrupt; bring on more politicians to fix this mess."
http://hnn.us/blogs/entries/53142.html
"This vision looked unstoppable for a while; there was a time in the early Bush years when this mean-spirited program of flag-waving, gun-toting biblical nationalism looked destined to become a kind of continental religion, a Church of America our missionaries would spread everywhere — and woe to those liberals and Frenchmen and other heretics who didn't get with the program! "
http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/21896154/without_a_prayer
"Indeed, some irony lies in a candidate who is running a law-and-order campaign being sued for intentional copyright infringing and appropriating someone else's identity without their permission."
http://blog.wired.com/music/2008/08/jackson-browne.html
"When was the last time a candidate for prime minister of India or president of Peru visited the United States? For that matter, how often do the actual leaders of these countries feel the need to venture outside their borders, and especially to other continents, aside from attending international conferences and the like? Perhaps they are content just to deal with the problems of their own nations rather than sticking their noses into everyone else’s business."
http://www.fff.org/comment/com0808c.asp
"Good thing there’s an election coming up. Once Bush is gone, the world will get better. Won’t it? At least one of the candidates has to be against all this war and threats of war, right?"
http://www.dissidentvoice.org/2008/08/i-read-the-news-today-oh-boy/
"'The market' is not an outcome, nor is it an end unto itself. Rather, the market is a process by which people discover effective (and not so effective) ways to satisfy our needs and wants. Entrepreneurship is essential; this consists of appraising the factors of production in the market and undertaking new production plans based on the expectation that such an endeavor will be profitable. Those who choose wisely are rewarded with profits. Those who choose poorly are punished with losses."
"The people took action, but not by pressuring politicians to 'do something' on their behalf. Instead, they did things on their own. Their own self-interest caused them to reduce gasoline consumption, which led to lower oil prices. They looked at the money they could save, and they drove less."
http://www.partialobserver.com/article.cfm?id=3027
"Open source won't win through rallies and petitions. It will win as it becomes better and better, such that normal people want to use it."
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10016172-16.html
"When you have a lot of problems you also have a lot of opportunity. I want to start with some wise words from John Templeton. Templeton actually died a few weeks ago at the age of 95. His is a great story."
http://whiskeyandgunpowder.com/Archives/2008/20080814.html
"For many fruit, the main goal in life is to be eaten by animals. This is so that the consumer of the fruit can spread the seeds and hopefully allow the next generation of fruit to grow. But fruit can also fall victim to bacterial or fungal infections."
"A considerable number of libertarian commentators have remarked on the sheer scale of subsidies and protections to big business, on their structural importance to the existing form of corporate capitalism, and on the close intermeshing of corporate and state interests in the present state capitalist economy. We pay less attention, however, to the role of past state coercion, in previous centuries, in laying the structural foundations of the present system."
http://www.fee.org/in_brief/default.asp?id=2263
"The world economy is riddled with subsidies and regulations that distort decision making and create privileged and exploited groups. But Pickens is not calling for an end to this corporatist system. On the contrary, he merely wants to shift the privileges to different groups through subsidies for his favored projects. The exploitation would continue. And as a domestic oil producer, he would profit from a forced reduction in oil imports."
http://www.fff.org/comment/com0808b.asp
"Though written six years ago, Rogers’s book is a still a fascinating and relevant read. I find it interesting that gold has been mankind’s money through much of its history, and with few exceptions, governments have either corrupted or outlawed gold in an attempt to maximize their power. "
http://www.strike-the-root.com/82/smith/smith2.html
"And with a fiat currency and a demonstrated willingness on the part of Congress, and every other government on the face of the planet, to abide every possible corruption…they can spend and spend and spend, and it will never end until it collapses in a Big Stinking Heap (BSH)!"
http://www.dailyreckoning.com/Writers/Mogambo/DREssays/MG081508.html
"The SEC subpoenaed Wall Street's largest firms and hedge funds for trading records and communications, including e-mails. The agency also enacted an emergency limit on so-called naked short sales in Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae and 17 brokerages as it prepares broader rules to thwart stock manipulation. That limit expires at midnight tomorrow."
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&sid=aGmG_eOp5TjE&refer=home
From Part Two: "The institutions that were the framework in which individualism flourished have been so discarded or distorted as to be unrecognizable. The justice system has no connection to justice. Police agencies do the opposite of protecting you from violence. Public schools do not teach how to think but how to obey."
Part One:
http://hnn.us/blogs/entries/53010.html
Part Two:
http://hnn.us/blogs/entries/53071.html
"Now the media are revising the facts to manage public perceptions, just as they did with the fictional WMD in Iraq. Many people think that the press learned its lesson after they were exposed for using bogus information in the lead up to the war in Iraq. But that is not true. The corporate media--especially FOX News, CNN and PBS (the smug, liberal-sounding channel)---continue to operate like the propaganda arm of the Pentagon. Its disgraceful."
http://www.counterpunch.org/whitney08162008.html
"To an America Firster, the love of the country, meaning its people, its natural beauty, its customs, and its idiosyncrasies, comes first. Yes, its political system and laws have (or may have once had) some appeal as well, but mainly in comparison to the government-induced poverty and oppression once seen in almost every other country in the rest of the world, something far less true today."
http://www.partialobserver.com/article.cfm?id=3031
"As is normally the case with issues surrounding terrorism, the average citizen will probably be shocked to learn that their government is often a bigger threat than the terrorists. Remember the CIA’s creation of the 9/11 threat by supporting the most radical Islamist groups fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan during the 1980s and then the U.S. government’s provocation of terrorist attacks from those same militants by its non-Islamic military presence in Islamic Persian Gulf countries in the 1990s, which had continued unnecessarily subsequent to the first Gulf War."
http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=2288
"America long ago lost the moral high ground. Hypocrisy has become America's best known hallmark. Bush, the invader of Afghanistan and Iraq on the basis of lies and deception, thunders at Russia for coming to the defense of its peacekeepers and Russian citizens in South Ossetia. Bush, the vampire who ripped Kosovo out of Serbia's heart and handed it to the Muslims, has taken an adamant stand against other separatist movements, especially the South Ossetians who wish to be part of the Russian Federation."
http://www.opednews.com/articles/
Will-American-Insouciance-by-Paul-Craig-Roberts-080813-259.html
"The Anti-Federalists, men filled to varying degrees with fear, mistrust, and loathing of the new federal government, insisted on a bill of rights as additional shackles imposed on that new government. Knowing this one, tiny fact, knowing that the famous Bill exists primarily to please the people most mistrustful of the new government, definitively ends any confusion or debate surrounding the meaning of the Second Amendment."
http://www.fff.org/freedom/fd0805e.asp
"The paper currency they were receiving in exchange for the gold had always been redeemable in gold in the past, so few saw anything amiss in this coerced transaction, and most trusted the government's assurances that this was somehow necessary in order to combat the Depression. Only later would they discover that they weren't getting that gold back, and that the paper dollars they were being given in exchange would be devalued."
"Political history tends to be written primarily with reference to formal state leaders—pharaohs, caesars, kings, prime ministers, presidents, and their most notable civilian and military officers. Yet probably at all times and places, much less prominent individuals have exerted potent influence out of the limelight or completely behind the scenes."
http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=2294
"Probably the most striking Latin American phenomenon associated with both global oil and food price hikes is going on in Peru, where surging prices for synthetic fertilizers have turned guano into a commodity almost as promising as it was for Peruvians in the mid-19th century. The dried excrement of seabirds, known in Quechua as huanu, is highly rich in unleached nitrogen and phosphorus which makes it the best natural fertilizer known to humankind."
http://www.econlib.org/library/Columns/y2008/Martinezguano2.html
"IBM introduces the 5150 personal computer. It will sweep away the competition and effectively have the field to itself, for a while."
http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2008/08/dayintech_0812
"Putin's claims are all indisputable, that is why he has entered the neocons crosshairs. He poses a direct challenge to what Brzezinski calls the 'international system', which is shorthand for the corporate/banking cartel that is controlled by the western oligarchy of racketeers."
http://www.counterpunch.org/whitney08142008.html
"Any 'point' the United States government sought to make about its newly devised military power, whether to the Japanese or to the Soviets, had already been made all too well by its devastating explosion of an atomic bomb over Hiroshima three days earlier. The decision to drop the second bomb must be condemned by every decent person as a gratuitous criminal act."
http://hnn.us/blogs/entries/53157.html
"That's what Western reporters aren't telling their readers: the South Ossetians (and the Abkhazians) have had de facto independence since 1991, when they rose up against their 'democratic' central government, which had banned regional parties from participating in elections."
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=13285
"An American military move into Poland is the height of folly -- then again, we have been living on those dizzy heights for a number of years now, so there's nothing new in that. "
http://www.chris-floyd.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1586&Itemid=135
"If there is a lesson to be learned from Iraq, it is not that the surge is working. Rather, it is that military occupation of a Muslim country is not in the United States’ larger strategic interests. A foreign military force is a rallying cry for jihad, as was the Soviet experience in Afghanistan. And we should not forget that 5,000 U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia became the cause célèbre for Osama bin Laden to gather support for making the United States a target of terrorism on 9/11."
http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=2296
"What we are about to see is a race to the bottom by the world's major currencies as each tries to devalue against others in a beggar-thy-neighbour policy to shore up exports, or indeed simply because they have to cut rates frantically to stave off the consequences of debt-deleveraging and the risk of an outright Slump. When that happens - if it is not already happening - it will become clear that the both pillars of the global monetary system [the Dollar and the Euro] are unstable, infested with the dry rot of excess debt."
"Mr. President, I realize you are a busy man so let’s get down to brass tacks…we are calling the ball and withdrawing our support of your Administration and the Federal government in DC. Effective immediately, we have coordinated to place all outgoing receipts to the IRS in a caged account here in Boise…"
http://www.lewrockwell.com/buppert/buppert11.html
"The days when Web pages were static collections of text and graphics are long past. But as the Web matures, there's a fierce competition over which technology will propel it into a medium for rich, interactive applications."
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-10011048-92.html
"The web is pretty big. Researchers at Google won't say how many pages Google indexes, but they recently said that their inspection of the web reveals that it has more than one trillion unique urls."
http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2008/08/a_trillion_hour.php
"The dollar is rising? So, why? Did it become better, acquire more gold backing, solve its chronic balance of payments deficit last night? Come on. Did the euro get worse overnight? The yen? How much worse could it get? You are seeing competitive devaluations, all very much worked out collegially in advance by central bankers. Fundamentally meaningless."
http://goldprice.org/silver-and-gold-prices/2008/08/either-this-is-greatest-silver-and-gold.html
"Mel Gibson faces a rare opportunity to pull himself out of the career black hole he's fallen into. Rumors of Mad Max 4 are circulating again and this time it sounds like the movie has some proper funding,"
http://io9.com/5037089/the-power-of-science-fiction-could-save-mel-gibsons-career
"'We' are ordinary people getting by: the poor, the powerless, the kind-hearted, the freedom-loving, the hopeful. 'They' are the power that jails terrorists while terrorising the country with all the apparatus of militarised imperialism."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/aug/16/fiction3
"B.W. opened his notebook and gave me a couple of mini-scenes to pique your interest for the rest of the story."
http://unclewarrensattic.blogspot.com/2008/08/uw-attic-54i-revolution-chapter-1.html
"There's nothing specific about rock n' roll that leads to drugs. If accountants worked for only two hours every few days at the same pay, one could guarantee a drastic jump in their drug and alcohol abuse. Most of us have 9-to-5 jobs and can't afford to do drugs because of our responsibilities."
"There are two kinds of 'savage' or 'barbarian' in Robert E. Howard’s fiction."
http://praxeology.net/blog/2008/08/08/he-picked-picts-to-depict/
"An ad for The Paris Hilton Presidential Campaign. Paid for by Funny Or Die."
http://www.funnyordie.com/videos/64ad536a6d
"The spokesdrone will field questions deemed too dangerous for a human press secretary, whose career could be irreparably damaged by answering them."
http://www.theonion.com/content/video/pentagons_unmanned_spokesdrone
"Statisticians admit the energy savings we realize from our annual spring migration to an hour ahead of ourselves and fall migration to where we would have been are elusive."
http://archive.cynicmag.com/archive.asp?articleid=2307&cat=Features
"Well, as far as I can tell, diving back into my dark little cubbyhole in renewed fear, the economy is already in shambles because of inflation in consumer prices, and my marriage, my life and my career are in shambles because everybody hates me and is out to get me, and that is why I seem to be broke all the damned time."
http://www.safehaven.com/article-10921.htm
"A number of groups withdrew financial support after Cooter Obama punched a swan in the face and mistook Sen. John Kerry for an outhouse."
http://www.theonion.com/content/news/obamas_hillbilly_half_brother
"Controversies over the meaning of rules -- especially rules about justice, freedom, and force, which must be applied in unforeseeable circumstances -- are inevitable. Constitutions do not speak for or interpret themselves. People interpret them. There is no way to avoid moral and political discourse. And there’s always the chance that someone else’s interpretation will prevail. What then?"
http://www.fee.org/in_brief/default.asp?id=2262
"We have no good evidence that ... a disaster scenario is imminent, but nobody can conceivably prove it to be impossible. Once you get past the table-pounding, any rationale for rapid emissions abatement that confronts the facts in evidence is really a more or less sophisticated restatement of the precautionary principle: the somewhat grandiosely named idea that the downside possibilities are so bad that we should pay almost any price to avoid almost any chance of their occurrence."
http://www.cato-unbound.org/2008/08/11/jim-manzi/
keeping-our-cool-what-to-do-about-global-warming/
"US and Russia hypocrisy cubed...."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3fuCoZdSfR8
"After shelling and attacking what he claims is his own country, killing scores of his own Ossetian citizens and sending tens of thousands fleeing into Russia, Saakashvili's army was whipped back into Georgia in 48 hours. Vladimir Putin took the opportunity to kick the Georgian army out of Abkhazia, as well, to bomb Tbilisi and to seize Gori, birthplace of Stalin. "
http://www.lewrockwell.com/buchanan/buchanan93.html
"When a major cyclone created widespread devastation in Burma earlier this year, some proponents of humanitarian aid urged the U.S. military to compel delivery even in the teeth of opposition from the Burmese junta. American leaders rejected their pleas, however, deeming such an operation to be too dangerous. Apparently that situation was considered more dangerous than barging into a war zone where the military forces of a nuclear-armed power are conducting military operations."
http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=9592
"This is a cautionary tale about how journalism sometimes gets practiced in contemporary America."
http://www.rockymountainnews.com/news/2008/aug/06/campos-thin-slice-of-journalism/
"The Rocky Horror Picture Show's original writer, composer, singer and beloved Riff Raff is casting a monstrous scowl on the new remake from MTV...."
http://io9.com/5037376/riff-raff-curses-mtvs-rocky-horror-remake
"My nickname is Koba… was little mermaid when I was younger… but why the word nick in nickname?"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofw0AuYwWqk
A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language
"The proceedings culminated with the lighting of the Olympic torch by one of China's sporting greats, Li Ning, who was hanging from a wire high above the crowd. Who would have thought that at the same time, one of the stadium's projectors was displaying the famous Microsoft Blue Screen of Death?"
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