Political Power; Why We Fight; Be Good, Chillun; Other People's Money; 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.
 
John Ashcroft's Achievements
        by Nat Hentoff from The Village Voice
"Long before the mainstream media took notice, a network of insistent resisters -- a combination of demographic and political bases in hundreds of towns and cities -- created a Bill of Rights dynamic that propelled town and city councils to pass Bill of Rights resolutions that vigorously informed their members of Congress that these constituents demanded they rein in Ashcroft and the rest of the Bush team who were dismantling the Constitution."
 
Thank You, America
        by Russ Madden from ATLAS
"In this country, I am responsible for my own life, and everyone else is responsible for his or her own life, as well. In this nation dedicated to freedom, I can live without fear of repression or star chambers or wars of aggression against other nations that pose no threat to my well-being or safety. In this culture, liberty is honored above all other considerations because the people understand that freedom -- and the rights and obligations attendant upon it -- is [indispensable] to living a truly human life."
 
The Bill of Rights: The Right to Keep and Bear Arms
        by Jacob G. Hornberger from The Future of Freedom Foundation
"Arguably, the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution should have been made first in the Bill of Rights because without the right to keep and bear arms, such rights as freedom of speech and freedom of the press would be treated as nothing more than meaningless 'privileges' bestowed and taken away by government officials at will."
 
Life in Amerika
Articles depicting the negative impact of politics on Liberty.
 
Be Good, Chillun -- Gitmo Gonna Getcha
        by Fred Reed from FredOnEverything
"Fear seemed to be everywhere, or at least to be promoted everywhere, but I wasn't sure who was afraid. Nobody I met was afraid. Nobody talked about terrorism or paid the least attention to Mommy Metro. Maybe just the government is afraid. Or maybe it wants us to be afraid. Maybe it's afraid of us."
 

Loving Those State Prisons

        by Ronald Fraser from AlterNet
"The more prisoners counted in a town or county, the bigger will be its share of tax-funded goodies from Washington.... This gravy train includes a slice of $200 billion a year in formula grants from Washington to all state and local governments for Medicaid, foster care, adoption assistance and 169 other programs."
 
Backward, Christian soldiers
        by Robyn E. Blumner from St. Petersburg Times
"What we are experiencing is the rise of Dominion Theology. This ideology says Christians must begin to take over all secular institutions of government, reclaiming them for Jesus Christ. It is seen as a readying for the Second Coming. "
 
Ordered Liberty without the State
Some people say it's Anarchy, some say it's not possible. It is an interesting topic.
 
Balance of Power: Political Power
        by Sunni Maravillosa from Endervidualism
"Self-government -- in which an individual takes responsibility for his choices and the consequences -- is highly individualistic and tolerant. ... Most individuals already rely on this kind of structure for most of their daily actions and interactions without giving it much thought. ... Institutionalized aggression, in whatever form, is anathema to liberty; to the degree humans are to succeed and flourish, we must put it behind us and create -- and allow others to create -- voluntary systems that work for those who choose to be in them."
 
Free Market Anarchism
        by weebies from Strike The Root
"There is wide disagreement among anarchists, especially about how an individual should use his freedom to choose a method to live by. This is not unusual, undesirable, or bad, but indicative of how humans can arrive at different solutions to similar problems."
 
The Death of a Libertarian
        by Jay P Hailey from The Libertarian Enterprise
"Like the 1996 and 2000 elections, 2008 will be more of the same but incrementally worse. 2012 will be worse still, but it'll be all part of the same deal we've been watching forever. I am bailing out of politics as a watcher and a thinker. It's too insane and the large majority of people involved are too stupid. It makes me crazy for no good reason."
 
Spreading Decentralism
Articles demonstrating an increase in the dispersal of power.
 
Secession Of Cascadia : What Do We Want? Self-determination.
        by David Jones-Cook from Vive le Canada
"We demand the right to alter or abolish our relationship with the government, because this is our inherent right. We demand self-government, because without a say in what governs our lives, we are slaves to the political and economic interests that can buy the most power."
 
A Dichotomy in Two Colors
        by Christopher Westley from Ludwig von Mises Institute
"But secession seems a far way off -- just like it did in the Soviet Union in the 1980s.  Until then, the country will remain divided, a landmass of blue Peters robbed to pay red Pauls. Don't think that our pols in Washington aren't concerned about this development."
 
Libertarian Island
        by Mike Wasdin from Strike The Root
"What is Libertarian Island, you ask? It is a project that myself and others are working on to get away from these United States of embarrassment. We are hoping to construct our own utopia free of government. The only laws will be those pertaining to trespassing. As long as you do not trespass on your neighbor, you will be free to do as you wish."
 
The New World Hegemon
Depictions of the coming Imperial power
 
Virtuous Violence Is Upon Us -- There Is No One Left to Stop Them
        by Paul Craig Roberts from CounterPunch
"These partisans do not doubt for a second that Bush has the right to dictate to Muslims and everyone else (especially the French). Many also express their conviction that all of Bush's critics should be rounded up and sent to the Middle East in time for the first nuke. These attitudes represent a sharp break from American values and foreign policy. The new conservatives have more in common with the Brownshirt movement that silenced German opposition to Hitler than with America's Founding Fathers."
 
Fighting for What?
        by Ron Beatty from The Libertarian Enterprise
"The government in charge of the occupation, located far across the sea, is doing all that it can do to destroy our culture, our society, and our beliefs. Open rebellion and fighting breaks out when occupying forces assault a town which is a center of rebellion, and which is believed by the occupying forces to hold weapons and supplies for the insurgents." 1776 or 2004?
 
The Middle East Quagmire
        by Rep. Ron Paul from The Free Liberal
"We conveniently forget, however, that American tax dollars militarized the entire region in the first place. We give Israel about $3 billion each year, but we also give Egypt $2 billion. Most other Middle East countries get money too, some of which ends up in the hands of Palestinian terrorists. Both sides have far more military weapons as a result. Talk about adding fuel to the fire!"
 
Politics by Other Means
War, rumors of war, and politicians fomenting war.
 
Down With Left and Right
        by Anthony Gregory from LewRockwell.com
"Sadly, instead of the more libertarian folks on the two sides seeing their common ground and uniting in solidarity where they can agree, they become divided by the ridiculous Left-Right dichotomy. Instead of recognizing the similarities between Left statism and Right statism, many of the good folks on the Left and Right end up choosing the statism that appears aesthetically less offensive to their senses."
 
Politics and the CIA
        by Ivan Eland from The Independent Institute
"It has now become apparent why Porter Goss, a politician, was named to head the CIA in an administration that already has been accused of politicizing intelligence during the Iraq war: to settle old scores. … Playing politics with intelligence is bad for the republic."
 
Wimblehack: the Sad End -- Elisabeth Bumiller takes the cake at center court.
        by Matt Taibbi from New York Press
"It was all a game to these people, which is why they covered it like a game. There were some people I know personally out there who hated it, who felt guilty about being part of the whole ugly charade. But there were a lot more who were really proud of this life of free lunches, VIP seating and the chance to be the planted audience for the occasional dick joke in an off-the-record chat with some of the hired liars on Air Force One."
 
Spontaneous Order
Articles showing decentralized successes.
 
From NASA To Commercial Space Enterprises
        by Edward W.Younkins from Le Québécois Libre
"As a symbol of freedom and adventure, space is also a romantic frontier. The 1999 film, 'October Sky', based on Homer Hickam's biographical novel, 'Rocket Boys', illustrates the excitement, motivation, and sense of personal potential and achievement that can result when private individuals set out on their own to conquer the final frontier."
 
Wolves in Yellowstone
        by Samuel Wardle from aBetterEarth.org
"Defenders have become synonymous with the healthy wolf recovery and their program is constantly evoked by Yellowstone wolf advocates and biologists as a shining example of good environmentalism. They were given an Environmental Achievement Award for the fund, and have even started a similar fund for Grizzly Bears."
 
Social Liberty and Economics
        by Adam Young from Strike The Root
"In order to act, each individual must choose between a range of possible actions. By acting, the individual chooses to expend energy, but also to spend his only irreplaceable and nonrenewable capital--TIME. Everyone stands equally naked before the face of time. By choosing one action, he foregoes the others at that moment."
 
Nonspontaneous Disorder
Articles showing centrally planned disasters.
 
Seeing and Not Seeing
        by Scott McPherson from The Future of Freedom Foundation
"The federal government, in its zeal to spend more money, takes more of what others have produced and spends it in one favored region -- Northern Virginia, for example -- and so creates the semblance of an 'economic boom'."
 
How Science Abuses Politics
        by Patrick J. Michaels from Cato Institute
"Politically, it is profoundly easy to demagogue any climate anomaly into global warming. Remember September's hurricanes? A coalition of scientists -- 'Scientists and Engineers for Change' -- exploited those disasters by plastering central Florida with billboards claiming that re-electing President Bush would make hurricanes worse because he's not doing enough about global warming."
 
Economic lunacy
        by Walter E. Williams from Townhall.com
"Think about it this way. Using Cochrane's statement, if 'from an economic point of view, it (hurricanes) is a plus,' would the country have been even better off if the entire East Coast shared Florida's damage and destruction?"
 
War Is The Health Of The State
War is the ultimate State intervention in society.
 
Why We Fight: A reminder
        by Justin Raimondo from Antiwar.com
"War has a degenerative effect on republican institutions, and fatally undermines the rule of law and constitutional government, for the simple reason that war is lawlessness. ... War centralizes political authority and economic power, investing all power in the state -- and assigning obedience, rather than freedom, to the top rank in the social hierarchy of values. This, for libertarians, is the crux of the matter."
 
Global Eye -- Ring of Fire
        by Chris Floyd from TheMoscowTimes.com
"Bush still needs Zarqawi, or someone like him -- a killer whose lurid malefactions obscure the even larger crime that set all these atrocities in motion: an unprovoked aggressive war based on lies, whose only goal is the imposition of a regime that will enrich Bush's cronies while advancing American dominance of the world's resources."
 
How Dare Families and Survivors of 9/11 Question Government Version!
        by Devvy Kidd from NewsWithViews.com
"Why don't all these high-paid GOP promoters have some of the eye witnesses on their programs who can give an accounting of why they believe Flight 93 was shot down? Professor Griffin gives a superior accounting of this aspect of 9/11 that can't be denied -- except by those who can't handle the truth. I suppose my question is rhetorical: O'Reilly, Hannity and others wouldn't dare -- not if they want to keep their multi-million dollar incomes from their books and radio/tv gigs."
 
Bits of History
The Past seen with a fresh look.
 
Amerika Über Alles vs. America, Land of the Free
        by Anthony Gregory from LewRockwell.com
"What always made America great was not what the government did: it was indeed what the government didn't do. It didn't disarm its population, treat the citizenry as property of the state, extract high percentages from their income, wage imperial wars around the world, despotically search and seize private property without due process, attempt to run the economy, circumvent the free choices of individuals, jail people without trial, create thousands of regulations and laws against peaceful behavior, or interfere with the freedom of people to speak and worship."
 
What do police departments really do?
        by Vin Suprynowicz from Las Vegas Review-Journal
"What professor Davies reveals is that modern government police forces were set up -- largely in a delayed response to the French Revolution -- to do 'social policing' of the urban working class, wading into the slums on behalf of the ruling elite, inventing new 'crimes' for which they could threaten the residents with arrest, thus breaking up any incipient movement toward social revolution before it could bloom."
 
We have ways of making you stop smoking
        by Dr Michael Fitzpatrick from spiked
"If anti-smoking campaigners have been slow to recognise the German contribution to tobacco epidemiology, they have been even more reluctant to acknowledge the parallels between their public health policies and those pursued by the Nazis. Yet the similarities are remarkable."
 
War and Peace
Articles showing the nature of War.
 
Fallujah: Force First, Yet Again
        by Alan Bock from Antiwar.com
"Karl von Clausewitz, the stern old Prussian philosopher of war, had it right. War is politics carried on by other means. ... It is likely, then, that war will be a part of our lives as long as politics is so much a part of our lives. When we move beyond politics – it's an intellectual and psychological process first, and difficult to begin, let alone to achieve – then perhaps we will have a chance to move beyond war as well."
 
Fallujah 101: A history lesson about the town we are currently destroying
        by Rashid Khalidi from In These Times
"By invading, occupying and imposing a new regime on Iraq, the United States may be following, intentionally or not, in the footsteps of the old Western colonial powers -- and doing so in a region that within living memory ended a lengthy struggle to expel colonial occupations."
 
Is it Time for Conscription?
        by Robert Ewing from The Foundation for Economic Education
"U.S. Air Force veteran and current U.S. Rep. Ron Paul acknowledges this: 'A true fight for survival would elicit, I am sure, the assistance of every able-bodied man and woman. This is not the case with wars of mischief far away from home."
 
Great Individuals In History
Some people stand out from the crowd.
 
Musician/composer -- W.C. Handy : Nov. 16, 1873
        by Phillip Oliver from University of North Alabama Libraries
"'Memphis Blues' was such a huge success that Handy published it in 1912. Although he sold the rights to the song for a mere $100, his musical style had been asserted and in 1914, at the age of 40, he published his most famous composition, 'St. Louis Blues'."
 
Composer -- Aaron Copland : Nov. 14, 1900 
        by Patricia Juliana Smith from glbtq.com
"Given the social prejudices of the times in which he lived, Copland was relatively open about his homosexuality, yet this seems not to have interfered with the acceptance of his music or with his status as a cultural figure. The likely explanation is that Copland conducted his personal life with the characteristic modesty, tactfulness, and serenity that marked his professional life as well."
 
Singer/Actress -- Petula Clark : Nov. 15, 1932
        from PetulaClark.net
"Urged by her friends in Britain to record something in English, Petula allowed Tony Hatch to visit her in Paris where he presented his new song, 'Downtown.' Petula recorded it and the rest is music history. 'Downtown' skyrocketed to number 1 in the USA, launching Petula's American career and earning her a Grammy in 1964."
 
Culcha'
Books, Movies, TV, Media, Music, poetry, etc.
 
Other People's Money (1991)
        Reviewed by Tom Ender from Endervidualism
"Although the movie's main storyline is the corporate raider vs. the 'Mom and Pop' company, to make that entertaining and not formulaic, the relationship between 'Larry the Liquidator' and daughter Kate is extensively developed. However, the overarching theme through the entire film is the concept of the market's creative destruction."
 
SHAKEDOWN: How Corporations, Government, and Trial Lawyers Abuse the Judicial Process
        from Laissez Faire Books
"Levy observes that whatever the differing details of judicial abuse, at least one modus operandi remains the same: when government is perpetrating the abuse, almost anything goes. Long-standing legal principles get tossed as fictional new ones get concocted at will."
 
Burning Man's Piano Mover
        by Brian Doherty from Reason
"Most of the pianos were already in various stages of collapse, burnt, their inner workings exposed. For days it became a giant meta-percussion instrument, with everyone plucking and banging strings and the pianos' bodies. It generated a constant resonant smack-boom-hum, and it was so much nothing you had ever seen before that it became an instant Burning Man legend. At the end, it burned."
 
The lighter side
Humor, satire, cartoons, parodies, food, popular music and other things to amuse.
 
Republicans Call For Privatization Of Next Election
        from The Onion
"Citing the 'extreme inefficiency' of this month's U.S. presidential election, key Republicans called for future elections to be conducted by the private sector."
 
Hello Alberto
        by Mark Fiore from The Village Voice
Attorney Extraordinaire (animated cartoon)
 
Have some turkey? Gee, I'll go with the charcoal
        by Dave Barry from International Herald Tribune
"Of course, no Thanksgiving dinner is complete without the pumpkin pie. … [T]he simple truth, obvious to anybody with half a brain, is that NO PART of the pumpkin looks, smells or tastes ANYTHING like so-called 'pumpkin' pie. This is why nobody actually makes 'pumpkin' pie; everybody buys it at the supermarket."
 
Deep Thought
Scientific and scholarly studies, philosophical essays, in-depth and longer articles.
 
Economics: Vocation or Profession?
        by Joseph T. Salerno from Ludwig von Mises Institute
"The medical profession is therefore a natural profession that would exist on a free market because it has a natural clientele; the economics profession, along with most other social science professions, is a fiat profession that has no free market clientele and would exist as a truth seeking vocation in the absence of a particular historical pattern of government interventions."
 
Selective support for choice
        by Tibor R. Machan from YumaSun.com
"Actually, the problem is double think -- holding contradictory views simultaneously. Many people are guilty of it. It's what eating one's cake and having it too is all about. Some erudite folks even defend such thinking in books."
 
The homosexual choice
        by Nicholas Strakon from The Last Ditch
"The modern leviathan pretends to widen the scope of choice among 'lifestyles,' and it pretends to 'liberate' ever more classes of the 'oppressed,' but the state cannot really administer free choice. It can only destroy freedom overall. For Americans, clear thinking on this point is sabotaged by their attachment to the Lincolnite Fallacy, which freed some people from their subjugation by local governments ('that which is seen') by subjugating all the people under the rule of a newly empowered Central Government ('that which is not seen')."
 
Miscellany
Articles not easily classified.
 
Please Don't Call Officer Charles a Pig, Daddy!  He's Really Nice!
        by Ali Massoud from Strike The Root
"Despite what I've read about societal order from Anarchist theorists and academics, I have my doubts that we'll ever be able to rid ourselves fully from the need of security officers, policemen, or someone along those lines who handles the basic issues of public safety and order. Unless we are talking about a very small city-state, enclave, or neighborhood, where people handle public safety and order issues on his or her own, someone will have to do it. And even if that 'someone' is a private security officer hired on a contract or through a security company, the questions is still: Who watches them?"
 
Free Advice for Democrats
        by Bob Wallace from The Price of Liberty 
"First, never nominate for President another New England Yankee. Not just another New England Yankee like John Kerry, but no other New England Yankee, period. For some bizarre reason these creeps cannot mind their own business, and seem to think the American people want such interference."
 
Read the WSJ, If You Can Stand It
        by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. from LewRockwell.com
"Those of us in the Old Liberal camp, who think of market economics as tied to peace, can only be disgusted by its identification with the cause of indiscriminate, imperial, total war. And yet the WSJ is not alone."
 
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