Mysticism VS Rationalism; Horse Sense; ID After the Revolution; Honoring the Dead; these articles have their titles and text in this color and are featured this week in -
 
Ender's Review of the Web
 

Web articles of likely interest to individualists found during the week of Apr. 25-May 1, 2004.

 
Comments and suggestions on the content and structure of this review are welcome. To accommodate such discussion I have created a Yahoo group for it. That group is ERevD: EnderReviewDiscussion. Feel free to jump in there at any time.
 
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Political Liberty
Articles showing a positive influence of political action on the cause of Liberty.
 
Will the Ideal Freedom-Doer Please Stand Up?
        by Cat Farmer from Doing Freedom!
"Wherever you are, and whatever you can do to help freedom along, it's worth the effort as far as I'm concerned. Don't let anyone tell you you're not doing enough or you're wasting your time on the wrong thing. Who are they to tell you what you should be doing?"
 
Thermopylae, the Alamo, and Election Season
        by Ron Beatty from The Libertarian Enterprise
"We know that no matter what they say, both parties want American citizens to be defenseless, unable to resist the whims and dictates of those in power. Is this really any different than what Leonidas, Travis, Bowie and Crockett faced?"
 
School, in the comfort of home
        by Melissa Schorr from Tri-Valley Herald
"Considered the fastest growing segment of schooling, about 2 percent, or some 150,000 Californian children, are currently tutored at the kitchen table by parents who are disgruntled with school systems they believe cannot adapt to their child's unique needs -- or simply think they can do better."
 
Life in Amerika
Articles depicting the negative impact of politics on Liberty.
 
'In America You Can Be Anything You Want'
        by Anthony Gregory from Strike The Root
"...[Y]ou have two choices. You can try to make good connections with the state, and find a way to live off the work of other people. [Or] ... you can work hard to follow your dreams. If you're lucky, you won't be derailed by the bully down the street who achieved his dream of becoming a police officer, a prosecutor, or the president of the United States."
 

Links to Terrorism - Build a Web site, go to jail

        by Jacob Sullum from Reason
"'The core of the case,' the prosecutors say, is four fatwas ... posted at www.alasr.net, a site that Al-Hussayen helped maintain. The fatwas, which appeared in 2001, defend suicide attacks on 'the enemy' as consistent with Islam. ... They were among thousands of postings that he handled for various sites, which also included articles arguing that terrorism is contrary to Islam."
 
How Wars Subvert Freedom
        by Alan Bock from Antiwar.com
"If the government, however, simply by declaring Hamdi and Padilla (who are both US citizens) to be 'enemy combatants,' can confine them in a military brig with no charges brought against them, no access to a lawyer and no contact with friends or family, American freedom will be substantially undermined and in a very real sense the terrorists will have won."
 
Ordered Liberty without the State
Some people say it's Anarchy, some say it's not possible. It is an interesting topic.
 
ID After the Revolution
        by Sunni Maravillosa from Doing Freedom!
"The first function of ID is authentication. This type of ID simply verifies that a certain name, symbol, or sign identifies a specific individual. To get such ID would be fairly easy; one could provide documentation that already links a name with their person. Or, with a certain number of individuals willing to accompany you and physically attest that you are said individual, you can get this type of ID."
 
Why the Public Puts Up With Abusive Cops
        by Brad Edmonds from LewRockwell.com
"For generations, government officials have had it in their financial best interest to foster the lie that forcible government is necessary. Government instituted compulsory education, provided by government (or approved by government if done in a private setting), to be sure we are told the right lies and are not told the truth about our own history and natural rights."
 
Defense for a Free Society
        by Jim Davies from Strike The Root
"[Libertarian] theory holds that all potential aggressors, seeing the way that most members in their target, free society are well armed and determined not to be ruled, will count the cost of invasion too large relative to any loot that victory might yield, and seek a softer target."
 
Spreading Decentralism
Articles demonstrating an increase in the dispersal of power.
 
The Coming Storm - Maybe, Anyway
        by Fred Reed from FredOnEverything
"There are huge numbers of people who don't read books, have never read a book, who can't read. ... The illiterate live in a mental world beyond the capacity of a biochemist to imagine. Try to erase from your mind everything that you have ever read. Then imagine regarding a camera as simply incomprehensible."
 
Anarchist priest obeys conscience over law
        by Brian Baer from fredericksburg.com
"'I think the Bible is a handbook for anarchy,' he said. 'Jesus was an anarchist.' While the word conjures images of violence and destruction, to Frankel-Streit anarchy means communal living, harmony and peace. ... 'I will not dominate anyone and will not let anyone dominate me,' he said. 'No rulers.'"
 
Homeschooling Goals and Methods
        by Rachel Kielsky from Doing Freedom!
"There is a big conspiracy out there to hide the secret from us. The secret is that I don't have to teach her how to learn! It is hardwired into them to be curious and to learn. Think about talking and walking. Do we actually teach them how to do this?"
 
The New World Hegemon
Depictions of the coming Imperial power
 
The Ill-Wind of the Draft
        by Ivan Eland from Antiwar.com
"Conscription -- which undermines the liberties of young Americans and harms the civilian economy by their absence from highly productive labor -- allows politicians to avoid the tough choice of getting rid of outdated military commitments or making the Army more efficient."
 
Pat Tillman: He Lifted a Finger
        by Doug Newman from Strike The Root
"America's military budget is equal to the sum of the world's next nine largest military budgets combined. Logically, nobody ought to be screwing with us. Yet, everyone is screwing with us. Why? Because we insist on screwing with them. You cannot throw your weight around to the extent that America does and have everybody love you."
 
Can the President Imprison Anyone, Forever?
        by Gene Healy from Cato Institute
"Congress can suspend the writ of habeas corpus under very narrow circumstances 'when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.' But Congress has made no such attempt here -- instead the president has unilaterally stripped Padilla of his rights, holding him without even a semblance of due process."
 
Politics by Other Means
War, rumors of war, and politicians fomenting war.
 
Horse Sense
        by Chris Floyd from The Moscow Times
"But fake horses are more tractable than powerful live beasts -- and self-serving lies are easier to handle than a volatile, complex reality. Anyway, is it really so surprising that so many Americans prefer a Potemkin world? Otherwise, they would have to accept the incontrovertible facts...."
 
On the War Issue, a Vote for Kerry is a Vote for Bush
        by Anthony Gregory from LewRockwell.com
"By accurately pointing out the hypocrisy of their opponents while concealing their own, Republicans and Democrats distract us from the fact that presidents of both parties start wars that wreak havoc and run counter to American interests. Unable to condemn unnecessary wars with a straight face, they have reduced mainstream debate over war to meaningless bickering."
 
Bush's Pals Are Panicking
        by Mark Dankof from Strike The Root
"And the most interesting aspect of this burgeoning crisis is one either missed or deliberately ignored by Corporate Media in the United States--the revolt against King George comes not simply from Left and Middle, but in a renewed ideological struggle within the American Right over its identifiable heart and soul."
 
Spontaneous Order
Articles showing decentralized successes.
 
Cotton Candy
        by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. from Ludwig von Mises Institute
"Free trade means the unencumbered exchange of goods and services, and nothing more or less. ... It does not demand that costs of production be the same in all countries. The right to buy and sell is not conditioned on the existence of a mythical, perfectly competitive environment."
 
Hack Roast
        by Matt Welch from Reason
"In 2004 it's much harder to get away with such shaggy-dog reporting, thanks to a tidal wave of amateur online media criticism that has finally started to break into professional newsrooms. ... Web strategy is now central, not marginal, to the campaigns ... and the scrutinizers' gazes have shifted from the op-ed pages and weekend gabfests to the nuts-and-bolts reporting itself."
 
Outsourcing Food
        by Gary North from LewRockwell.com
"Economists have discovered a way for drivers and diners to fulfill their respective desires with the least expenditure of money. It is called free trade. Each producer specializes in what he does best.... Each consumer is therefore able to take advantage of the cost-effective production methods of the least wasteful producers."
 
Nonspontaneous Disorder
Articles showing centrally planned disasters.
 
Privatize the Airwaves!
        by Sheldon Richman from The Future of Freedom Foundation
"It's possible that a public outcry against indecency, backed by a boycott of sponsors (which would be perfectly legitimate), might have pressured the radio stations to drop offensive programs. But since the government is imposing fines, we'll never know."
 
Will CODEX Protect Your DNA?
        by Bill Sardi from LewRockwell.com
"Every country in the world may be coerced by CODEX to limit the amount of antioxidant nutrients in vitamin pills to prevent unfair competition and prevent alleged side effects from high-dose nutrients. These upper limits are likely to be far below the levels required for adequate protection of human DNA."
 
IRS Commissioner Answers Questions on Income Tax Liability
        by Robert R. Raymond from People for Truth in Taxation
"So there you have it. Ah, uh, and um. That's their answer. Given the opportunity to clear up doubts about our income tax system, Commissioner Everson stumbles and bumbles and still can't find the answer. The government wants to put people in jail for not finding the law the IRS Commissioner himself can't find."
 
War Is The Health Of The State
War is the ultimate State intervention in society.
 
Honoring the Dead
        by Butler Shaffer from LewRockwell.com
"The state, being grounded in a network of lies and contradictions held together by force, is always threatened by truth. This is why truth, as has often been said, is the first casualty of war, a victim whose loss must be honored by any decent society.  But as we have seen in these post-9/11 months, truth-telling is not a priority for a nation whooped up in a mania for war."
 
Worse Than Nothing
        by Nicholas Strakon from Strike The Root
"A man who defends his country is not a sucker. He may well be a hero.... But Tillman was not defending his country. He was promoting imperialism and criminal war. He had turned his fate over to evil men embarked on an evil enterprise. He threw his life away, but not for nothing. He threw it away for worse than nothing. He threw it away in the cause of imperialism and criminal war."
 
Neoconservatism Versus Libertarianism
        by Justin Raimondo from Antiwar.com
"This is why libertarians oppose the war plans of our leaders, and why libertarianism is the polar opposite of neoconservatism. The tendency of war is to centralize economic and political power, to intrude the long arm of government into every sector of the private sphere, to militarize and regiment society and enforce uniformity of thought."
 
Bits of History
The Past seen with a fresh look.
 
Wanted: The Truth About The Kent State Killings
        by Murray Polner from LewRockwell.com
"In Kent State/May 4, edited by Scott L. Bills (KSU Press) Thomas wrote, 'it looked very much as if someone had doctored the evidence to minimize any impression of the Guard's brutality and to plant the spurious notion that the soldiers had been confronted with a raging student mob'."
 
Love Me Dieu
        by Cathy Young from Reason
"And yet Jacoby's account also demonstrates that today's antisecularist backlash is far from unique -- rather, it's part of a cyclical pattern that has persisted throughout American history."
 
Inflation and the French Revolution: The Story of a Monetary Catastrophe
        by H.A. Scott Trask from Ludwig von Mises Institute
"The revolutionary government first decided to cure the evils generated by inflation with more inflation. Instead of destroying assignats received for the national properties, they reissued them in the form of smaller notes."
 
War and Peace
Articles showing the nature of War.
 
Flag-Draped Memories
        by Charles Paul Freund from Reason
"Hiding such imagery, as many administrations have done, is in the end an act of self-defeating censorship, one that raises questions about the state's view of the citizens it is sending to war, and potentially about the state's view of the war itself."
 
The occupation - Things fall apart
        by David T. Wright from The Last Ditch
"When a mercenary is killed, his death isn't counted in the running total of U.S. armed forces casualties. Can it be that the mercs are used for the more dangerous missions to keep the official body count down, while members of the formal armed forces are kept back?"
 
Pat Tillman, Meet Max and Lutz
        by Douglas Herman from Strike The Root
"This weekend Pat Tillman was eulogized as a great American hero who made the 'ultimate sacrifice.' But do not allow his memory to serve as a recruitment poster for further nationalistic designs or brutal abuses of the State."
 
Great Individuals In History
Some people stand out from the crowd.
 
Humorist - Artemus Ward: Apr. 26, 1834
        from The Daily Objectivist
"Mark Twain knew him, learned from him, followed in his footsteps.… Ward influenced many other noble literary spirits as well, including Albert Jay Nock and H.L. Mencken."
 
Inventor - Guglielmo Marconi : Apr. 25, 1874
        from The Official Web Site of The Nobel Foundation
"He demonstrated his system successfully in London, on Salisbury Plain and across the Bristol Channel, and in July 1897 formed The Wireless Telegraph & Signal Company Limited (in 1900 re-named Marconi's Wireless Telegraph Company Limited)."
 
Thinker - Kurt Gödel : Apr. 28, 1906
        from Kurt Gödel Society
"In 1930/1931 Gödel proved his most famous result, the incompleteness theorem. It states that any not too weak formal theory, in particular any reasonable formalization of number theory, cannot prove everything that is true, i.e. such theories are necessarily incomplete."
 
Culcha'
Books, Movies, TV, Media, Music, poetry, etc.
 
Artists For Censorship
        by Tim Cavanaugh from Reason
"For every kid who watches The Matrix and shoots up his high school, we can cite millions more who saw the same movie and did nothing. Does this demonstrate that art is harmless? And if it is harmless, what's the point of it? Sadly, I suspect that it is harmless, and that there is no point to it."
 
The Politics of South Park
        by Michael Cust from LewRockwell.com
"Unlike other popular 'libertarian' cultural programming, such as Star Wars, The Simpsons, and the Dukes of Hazzard, South Park requires no belaboured interpretation. The show's political mandate is manifest. Like the humour, the libertarianism of the show is direct and free of nuance."
 
Puny Warmongers! Bob Will Smash!
        by Bob Wallace from Strike The Root
"You can see this pity and fear in the characters in Brazil, and Hulk. We fear them (Hulk) or the lives they lead (Brazil ).  We also pity them.  I am reminded of a scene in Blade Runner, when Roy Batty says to Rick Deckard, 'That's what it means to live in fear. That's what it means to be a slave.' The Hulk does not live in fear, and therefore is not a slave.  He has power, and freedom."
 
The lighter side
Humor, satire, cartoons, parodies, food, popular music and other things to amuse.
 
Free Play
        by Kevin Parker from Reason
"Like movies, novels, and plays before them, computer games have discovered politics. Even the pure, plot-driven action that remains often comes attached to heavily politicized back-stories. ... Political ideas are infiltrating not just the back-stories of games but their 'play mechanics' -- the inner workings that shape game behavior."
 
Satan Disappointed in Neocon Spawn
        by Bob Wallace from Strike The Root
"I've been behind some major players -- Pol Pot, Stalin, Hitler, Lincoln, FDR -- and compared to them, these guys are buffoons. They couldn't even con the US administration into invading two insignificant little countries without fouling it up. I wanted millions dead, decades of war and murder and destruction, and trillions of dollars wasted. These punks couldn't even do that. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse? Try Pony League klutzes always dropping the ball!"
 
Bush / Cheney '04
        by Mark Fiore from The Village Voice
The campaign of George W. Bush
 
Deep Thought
Scientific and scholarly studies, philosophical essays, in-depth and longer articles.
 
Mysticism VS Rationalism
        by Cat Farmer from Endervidualism
"A true path to freedom lies inward, away from the deceits and seductions of worldly power toward a sense of competent authority to govern oneself and an ability to respect the sanctity of the inward voyage as a uniquely individual, and even highly subjective, process."
 
Washington's Biggest Crime Problem
        by William L. Anderson and Candice E. Jackson from Reason
"When Congress creates a federal penalty for actions traditionally prosecuted at the state level, it violates the core constitutional principle of federalism, which prohibits Congress from legislating on local matters. Such laws also burden the federal court system, promote selective prosecutions, and stack the deck against defendants."
 
Fourth Circuit Moussaoui Ruling Is a Loss for the Constitution
        by Jacob G. Hornberger from The Future of Freedom Foundation
"The government is also claiming the power to transfer such people to its base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, which it claims is beyond the jurisdiction of the U.S. Constitution and U.S. courts. At that base, it claims the power to execute any 'enemy combatant' after a show trial in which U.S. military officials are the judges and in which the accused is denied the attorney of his choice and due process of law."
 
Miscellany
Articles not easily classified.
 
The Great Satan
        by Paul Craig Roberts from Antiwar.com
"In his war propaganda, President Bush portrays America as a morally superior country whose innate virtue is the reason we are in Iraq. ... With the US now guilty of war crimes as defined by Article 3 of the Geneva Convention, our sanctimonious president will never again be able to wear American virtue on his sleeve without the entire world laughing in his face."
 
Organ donors are getting the shaft
        by David J. Undis from RationalReview.com
"You can give your organs to other committed organ donors who have agreed to do the same for you. You can band together with other committed organ donors to make sure that you get a fair shake if you ever need an organ. You can do this by joining LifeSharers."
 
Nevada--Libertarian Leaning?
        by Matthew Bryan from Strike The Root
"If you feel inspired to visit our little libertarian enclave ... remember these things. You will pay a state tax on your airline ticket, hotel room, and rental car. If you see a show, you will pay an entertainment tax. Really. Your credit card and other personal information are subject to review by local and federal authorities." The list continues.
 
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