U.S.: A Hayekian Solution; The Problem with Voting; Politics & Moral Values; The Matrix; these articles have their titles and text in this color and are featured this week in -
 
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Political Liberty
Articles showing a positive influence of political action on the cause of Liberty.
 
Montana: A Place Libertarians Can Call Home
        by Dr. Ben F. Irvin and Robert Hawes from Sierra Times
"Indeed, it appears that if libertarians ever want to see their ideals in operation, they're going to have to make it happen by combining their efforts in liberty-friendly places where their message may be better received, and where their numbers can make a real difference. And of all the liberty-friendly places left in America, Montana truly is the 'last best place'."
 
Green & Libertarian Presidential Candidates to Demand Ohio Recount
        from The Progress Report
"David Cobb and Michael Badnarik, the 2004 presidential candidates for the Green and Libertarian parties, announced on November 11 their intentions to file a formal demand for a recount of the presidential ballots cast in Ohio."
 
Cuffing Bush and the FBI
        by Nat Hentoff from The Village Voice
"These are obviously perilous times for constitutional freedoms. But attention should be paid to the strongest blow yet against Bush and the Patriot Act -- the September 28, 2004, decision by Federal District Judge Victor Marrero in New York in John Doe, American Civil Liberties Union v. John Ashcroft and FBI Director Robert Mueller."
 
Life in Amerika
Articles depicting the negative impact of politics on Liberty.
 
Commentary on HR 5006 and the President's New Freedom Commission on Mental Health
        by Linda Liberty from lindaliberty.com
"I don't get it. On the one hand I've read that caffeine is a psychotropic drug and that I should limit my intake of coffee. On the other hand, my country is being led by a President who supports mandatory psychiatric testing of children (and adults) resulting in prescribing psychotropic drugs such as Ritalin, a drug sold on the street for its cocaine-like effects."
 
Tuesday's winners: not us
        by Robyn E. Blumner from St. Petersburg Times
"You guys - who are more concerned about what happens in our homes than what is happening in your own - have successfully taken charge. You wanted a man in the White House who talks to God as his only adviser - a man who is willing to stop the advance of science if necessary to uphold his religious convictions - and you won the day. Congratulations. Tomas de Torquemada, the Spanish Inquisition's inquisitor-general, would be proud."
 
Ballpark Figures
        by Jacob Sullum from Reason
"I've seen a professional baseball game in person just once, and the memory of the boredom lingers. Still, I understand that many Americans not only find the game interesting but are passionate about it. What I don't understand is why the government needs to subsidize a form of entertainment that is so obviously popular and profitable."
 
Ordered Liberty without the State
Some people say it's Anarchy, some say it's not possible. It is an interesting topic.
 
The Problem with Voting    
        by Cat Farmer from Endervidualism
"The whole attitude underlying partisan politics is that freedoms must not be equal; no one gains unless someone else loses. Something seems very wrong to me with the picture of winners who celebrate political victory in the full knowledge that it comes at the expense of both liberty and equality of some, for the benefit of others. "
 
Bush Saved My Marriage
        by Scott Bieser from The Libertarian Enterprise
"You see, I'm in what some might call a mixed marriage. I'm an anarchist and my wife's a Democrat. We met and married during the Clinton years, and had several rather heated arguments concerning the President and her husband. We managed to keep things together, though it wasn't easy.... But when Dubya got (s)elected, everything changed. Now we can curse the President together, in stereo."
 
The Enemy Is the State
        by weebies from Strike The Root
"While many complain that Bush stole the election again, true lovers of freedom and the free market realize that all elections are stolen. Even if all votes are honestly counted so that vote fraud is not a factor, the results are still fraudulent in that they give the state an authority and power over individuals that each individual did not grant or agree to."
 
Spreading Decentralism
Articles demonstrating an increase in the dispersal of power.
 
The United States: A Hayekian Solution
        by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. from LewRockwell.com
"We need small states trading with each other. How many? It really doesn't matter so long as one is not overly large geographically or in terms of population. It could be 10 states or 100. At some point, the number of political units created would have to be left to the people themselves, to be decided by local plebiscite. After all, at that point, all political alliances between units would have to be voluntary and clearly dissolvable."
 
Secession enthusiasts meet in Middlebury
        by Andrew Barker from Times Argus
"Sale set the tone for the conference with a lively speech based on the idea that the United States is faced with economic, environmental, and military crises. 'There is an American empire, that like all empires before it, is inherently fragile,' he said. 'Sumerian, Roman, Timurid, Inca, Ottoman, Soviet -- all these empires fell. That's what empires do, and America will be no exception."
 
One State, Two State, Red State, Blue State
        by Jonathan David Morris from The Free Liberal
"Just imagine what life would be like if states could secede from unions, towns from states, families from towns, and people from families. It would be a true system of checks and balances. Issues like guns and gay marriage would be settled locally, because no one would accept anyone else coming in and making decisions for them (D.C., I'm looking at you.) "
 
The New World Hegemon
Depictions of the coming Imperial power
 
Submit or Die: The Conquest of Falluja
        by Jacob G. Hornberger from The Future of Freedom Foundation
"The crime for which the Fallujans were punished was their refusal to submit to the authority of an unelected CIA-designated dictator, Iyad Allawi, and to obey the orders of his all-powerful police force (the U.S. military), a police force that is significantly more powerful than the one that Saddam Hussein used to put down insurrections against his regime."
 
Why Bad Men Rule
        by Hans-Hermann Hoppe from LewRockwell.com
"[B]y opening entry into government, anyone is permitted to freely express his desire for others' property. What formerly was regarded as immoral and accordingly was suppressed is now considered a legitimate sentiment. Everyone may openly covet everyone else's property in the name of democracy; and everyone may act on this desire for another's property, provided that he finds entrance into government."
 
Uzbek torture poses problems for West
        by Nat Hentoff from The Billings Gazette
"Because we support Mr. Karimov's government [in Uzbekistan], we -- as an Oct. 16 Financial Times editorial points out -- have 'given it the confidence to sell a long-running campaign against internal dissidents as part of the campaign against Al Qaeda'."
 
Politics by Other Means
War, rumors of war, and politicians fomenting war.
 
Fear for the Future of the Republic
        by Ivan Eland from The Independent Institute
"Probably even worse than the lives lost in vain in the Iraq War is the modern imperial presidency's ability, using the excessive media coverage accorded to it, to sell the public on an unnecessarily broad 'war on terror,' including the aggressive invasion of a sovereign country."
 
The War Between the Statists
        by Jesse Walker from Tech Central Station
"There is no party of tolerance in Washington -- just a party that wages its crusades in the name of Christ and a party that wages its crusades in the name of Four Out Of Five Experts Agree. Sometimes they manage to work together. I say fie on both."
 
Purge at the CIA
        by Justin Raimondo from Antiwar.com
"[T]he reality is that the CIA, as a body of professionals charged with understanding the world, has acted as a brake on the aggressive and expansionist instincts of the world-conquerors in the Pentagon. The evolution of the CIA ranks' opposition to the neoconservatives' dreams of empire is a function, to some degree, of their job description...."
 
Spontaneous Order
Articles showing decentralized successes.
 
We All Live in Purple States
        by William L. Anderson from The Foundation for Economic Education
"I and others in this country will participate in economic transactions that are too numerous to count. It will be irrelevant to us what might be the political beliefs of those people with whom we engage in economic exchanges. "
 
We Pledge Allegiance to the Penguin
        by Julian Dibbell from Wired
"Developing nations, poor in IP rights and in the muscle to enforce them, may have a vested interest in the success of the open source paradigm. But so, in the long run, do rich nations. The rate of technological change now is such that modernization proceeds more chaotically than ever, and with every flip of the clock cycle, the whole world's reality looks more and more like Brazil's: a high-contrast, high-contact confusion of microcultures and inequalities."
 
Apocalyptic Democracy
        by Brian Doherty from Reason
"Even though Bush only pulled a 3 percent margin over Kerry, the winner-take-all aspect of our two-party system makes people feel, unjustly, that the values of the winner have swept the nation. But that isn't true. More importantly, these results have little, ultimately, to do with the warp and woof of life as it is lived by actual Americans, as opposed to those who let their minds be violently colonized by TV news and radio and political blogs and magazines."
 
Nonspontaneous Disorder
Articles showing centrally planned disasters.
 
Free the Flu-Vaccine Industry
        by Arthur E. Foulkes from The Foundation for Economic Education
"In the space of just two years, the FDA helped reduce a fairly healthy market served by four vaccine makers to what Julie Gerberding, director of the Centers for Disease Control, called the 'fragile vaccine production system' we see today."
 
Why we're a divided nation
        by Walter E. Williams  from Townhall.com
"The prime feature of political decision-making is that it's a zero-sum game. One person or group's gain is of necessity another person or group's loss. As such, political allocation of resources is conflict enhancing while market allocation is conflict reducing. The greater the number of decisions made in the political arena, the greater is the potential for conflict."
 
More Gas about Global Warming
        by Patrick J. Michaels from Cato Institute
"Think back to the 1970s. On an inflation-adjusted basis, gas was about $4 a gallon in today's dollar. When the first high-quality Japanese econos hit the U.S., they were snapped up immediately. Now with the advent of high quality hybrids, there's no similar response. Obviously the price of gas is simply not high enough."
 
War Is The Health Of The State
War is the ultimate State intervention in society.
 
Politics and Moral Values
        by Butler Shaffer from LewRockwell.com
"What are the 'moral values' championed by Mr. Bush in his first term of office? His administration put together a mixture of blatant lies, deceptions, forged documents, and unfounded fears, to whip up a war frenzy against a nation that posed no threat to the United States. His unprovoked war -- which had no more legal justification than did Hitler’s invasion of Poland -- has resulted in over 100,000 deaths and devastated much of Iraq. Some of the administration’s business friends are profiting handsomely from this vicious undertaking...."
 
Feelin' blue among the Reds
        by Nicholas Strakon from The Last Ditch
"To our rulers, the most important of those Red traditions is a seemingly incurable bedazzlement by national-statism, which the Reds confuse with patriotism. They encourage their children to stand up in school every day and pledge allegiance to the nation-state, and when those diseducated unfortunates grow up (in the physical and chronological senses, at least), the Reds encourage them to join the imperial military and kill exotic peoples at the direction of their cosmopolite supervisors over in Blue America."
 
War Crimes in Fallujah; a Gutsy Campaign Against Lantos
        by Alexander Cockburn from CounterPunch
"The United States is bringing 'democracy' to Iraq on the same terms that the Russians imposed its federal mandate on Chechnya, a region which has Iraq's future written in its rubble. The advocates of intervention in Iraq, the epigones of Wolfowitz, should take a walk through Grozny, and measure against its ruins the fate of their proclaimed ambition to bring democracy to Fallujah and other cities in Iraq."
 
Bits of History
The Past seen with a fresh look.
 
Empires as Ages of Religious Ignorance
        by William Marina from The Independent Institute
"Meanwhile, the decline of the U.S. empire has been evident for some decades now. Its growing bankruptcy since the 1960s is the most evident economic aspect, coupled with the cultural decline and intolerance regarding science and knowledge."
 
When Does Economic Calculation Become Necessary?
        by Gene Callahan from Ludwig von Mises Institute
"The history of the early stages of several civilizations suggests to me that a society comes to need economic calculation when the economic activity within it begins to exceed the ability of any one person to retain all of the important details of what is occurring within his head. "
 
A Time to Kill
        by George F. Smith from The Libertarian Enterprise
"From the country's inception to 1900, the gold dollar actually increased in buying power. Since the Fed took over, the dollar has lost 95% of its value, as a visit to the Bureau of Labor Statistics web site will confirm."
 
War and Peace
Articles showing the nature of War.
 
Forgetting Armistice Day
        by Anthony Gregory from LewRockwell.com
"November 11 was a day to remember the warriors while observing the blessings of peace. Instead, they will use the day to lionize war. They will forget the lessons of 1918, and will use a day that was meant to reflect on peace to cheer on more killing and destruction."
 
Aggressive War: Supreme International Crime
        by Marjorie Cohn from t r u t h o u t
"Associate United States Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson was the chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg Tribunal. ... [After World War II] the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg called the waging of aggressive war 'essentially an evil thing . . . to initiate a war of aggression . . . is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole'."
 
THE ROVING EYE -- Satan hides in a hospital
        by Pepe Escobar from Asia Times Online
"In terms of the information war, the hospital was indeed the most strategic of targets. During the first siege of Fallujah in April, doctors told independent media the real story about the suffering of civilian victims. So this time the Pentagon took no chances: no gory, disturbing photos of the elderly, women and children - the thousands unable to leave Fallujah in advance of this week's offensive, the civilian victims of the relentless bombing."
 
Great Individuals In History
Some people stand out from the crowd.
 
Mathematician/Logician/Philosopher - Gottlob Frege : Nov. 8, 1848
        from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
"Frege essentially reconceived the discipline of logic by constructing a formal system which, in effect, constituted the first 'predicate calculus'. In this formal system, Frege developed an analysis of quantified statements and formalized the notion of a 'proof' in terms that are still accepted today."
 
Writer - Margaret Mitchell : Nov. 8, 1900
        from Margaret Mitchell House and Museum
"Author of the best-selling novel of all time, Margaret Mitchell was born Nov. 8, 1900 in Atlanta to a family with ancestry not unlike the O’Hara’s in 'Gone With the Wind'."
 
Musician/Songster - Johnny Rivers : Nov. 7, 1942
        from JohnnyRivers.com
"John Henry Ramistella was born November 7, 1942, in New York City. When he was about five, his father wound up out of work. The Ramistella's moved to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where an uncle, head of the Louisiana State University art department, got John's dad work painting houses and antiquing furniture. John's first musical inspiration was his father."
 
Culcha'
Books, Movies, TV, Media, Music, poetry, etc.
 
The Matrix (1999)
        Reviewed by Tom Ender from Endervidualism
"There is more to 'The Matrix' than the surface. The science fiction plot plays a Trojan horse for the deeper theme of anti-statism. Humans don't produce enough electrical energy to make them worthwhile as batteries, so what does that aspect of the plot really mean? Hint: didn't Trinity break the IRS dbase? What is artificial and parasitic living off the energy of most humans? The answer: the State."
 
Bless My Homeland Forever . . .
        by Karen Kwiatkowski from LewRockwell.com
"It's too bad the Von Trapp family, or the residents of Fallujah for that matter, couldn't have just used teleportation to escape fascism and martial law. But then we wouldn't have the world-inspiring story about individuals and families living and acting at great risk in the spirit of freedom from the state. 'The Sound of Music' was one of my earliest introductions to what freedom means, and what it is worth."
 
A Time to Love and a Time to Die
        by Douglas Herman from Strike The Root
"We are always taught, from cradle to grave, that we Americans are on the side of 'good.' But how does an estimated 100,000 dead Iraqis, many of them civilians, equal moral values? The average German citizen of that era was a hard-working, church-going, equally 'good' citizen in his own eyes."
 
The lighter side
Humor, satire, cartoons, parodies, food, popular music and other things to amuse.
 
U.S. To Send 30,000 Mall Security Guards To Iraq
        from The Onion
"Pressed for additional troops to police the Iraqi general elections scheduled for January, the Pentagon announced Monday that it will dispatch 30,000 U.S. shopping-mall security guards to the troubled Sunni Triangle region."
 
Underwear disposal and national security
        by Dave Barry from International Herald Tribune
"Now in normal times, this would not be front-page news, even in Erie. But of course we do not live in normal times: We live in the Age of Stark Buttpuckering Terror."
 
Anarchism Beats Statism, Once Again
        by Anthony Gregory from Strike The Root
"Has Bush not taken the liberty to do whatever the hell he pleases? Sure, this liberty might only apply to one man, but since when have libertarians been about equality? Liberty has often only come to one group of people at a time. White men had it before black men or white women, for example. Should we despise the Founding Fathers because some of them had slaves? Of course not! So even if Bush regards all 300 million of us Americans as slaves, we should realize that by fighting for his own liberty to do what he pleases, we, too, will eventually reap the rewards."
 
Deep Thought
Scientific and scholarly studies, philosophical essays, in-depth and longer articles.
 
The Most Valuable Commodity
        by Claire Wolfe from Loompanics Unlimited
"This greatly valued, yet constantly devalued, thing is uninterrupted time. We claim to long for it, while at the same time we slam our cellphones against our ears and head off for our aerobics classes or meetings of our investment club with tomorrow's urgent report in our laps."
 
My DLC Problem, And Ours -- What's love got to do with 2008?
        by Matt Taibbi from New York Press
"[F]or the ones who woke up Wednesday morning staring a four-year shit sandwich in the face, we have another problem. We have our own souls to worry about, and this is a much bigger problem than the soul of the Democratic Party, an organization that would be purified by fire on live television if we lived in a more just era."
 
Liberty-Committed-Solidarity Is Genuine Patriotism
        by Sergei Hoff from NewsWithViews.com
"Bear in mind that unless we can allow our neighbor to live in freedom, we will surely sacrifice our own liberties. Sooner or later, with the assistance of government, someone will determine that a few of your unalienable rights are not necessary in our common pursuit of happiness."
 
Miscellany
Articles not easily classified.
 
A Libertarian Explanation of Genocide
        by R.J. Rummel from Antiwar.com
"But, one condition does stand out in all such research, and that is the kind of political system that a nation has, and particularly, the power at the center. Virtually all genocides and non-genocidal mass murders obey the following social law: The more power those who rule have, the less libertarian the government, the more likely the rulers will commit genocide and mass murder."
 
I Don't Just Think I'm Right, I Know I Am!
        by Mike Wasdin from Strike The Root
"We cannot wait to become 18, because that is the magical age when we will finally be considered an adult, and have the same freedoms as every other adult. The will to be free is in us all, and it never dies. To disagree is to instead desire to be a slave."
 
Buckshot And Designer Water -- Fred And The Election
        by Fred Reed from FredOnEverything
"Rational people, always at a disadvantage in American politics, wonder how Christians can favor bombing cities. Jesus, they say in puzzlement, didn't seem to be persuasively bloodthirsty. True, but irrelevant. You have to understand that Christians have never regarded the teachings of Christ as authoritative. Christians are as savage a clan as can be found, matched only by Moslems, Jews, and Shintoists. And probably everybody else. Check the headlines."
 
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