Ender's Review: Jan. 16

Rain On Rocks; Other People's Business; Matter of Conscience; Future of the Republicans; 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 Jan. 16 - 22, 2005.

Table of Contents: (Click on the name to go to that section)
Political Liberty, Life in Amerika, Ordered Liberty without the State;
Spreading Decentralism, The New World Hegemon, Politics by Other Means;
Spontaneous Order, Nonspontaneous Disorder, War Is The Health Of The State;
Bits of History, War and Peace, Great Individuals In History;
Culcha', The lighter side, Deep Thought, Miscellany.

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Political Liberty
Articles showing a positive influence of political action on the cause of Liberty.

Perspectives on Liberty
by Stephanie R. Murphy from LewRockwell.com
"My intent is by no means to ignore or downplay the egregious attempts of the political classes to erode our property rights, free speech, free choices, and free will. I simply wish to remember a fact which is often overlooked. Despite the actions of the despots, we still have a cornucopia of achievements to appreciate and to enjoy."
http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig6/murphy-s4.html

Not So Funny
by Paul Krassner from New York Press
"Miller told Editor & Publisher that he's upset by 'the laziness and lack of guts by our entire 'news' media -- both print and electronic. They should all be embarrassed by what happened in the Ukraine. But that would take integrity, wouldn't it? At least they're providing me with material, so maybe I shouldn't complain'."
http://www.nypress.com/18/3/news&columns/krassner.cfm

The Fed versus the Backseat Boys
by George F. Smith from The Libertarian Enterprise
"We have no choice about using the Fed's paper for money -- it's forced on us by law. We once chose gold for money, but government took that away from us a long time ago, in 1933. Now notice: It's a lot easier to print paper dollars than it is to find, mine, and mint gold. This makes it tempting to print lots of money so that government can buy things with it and banks can loan it out at interest."
http://www.ncc-1776.com/tle2005/tle302-20050116-04.html

Life in Amerika
Articles depicting the negative impact of politics on the cause of Liberty.

Will Bush Side with the Property Thieves?
by Sheldon Richman from The Future of Freedom Foundation
"Governments justify such plunder on the grounds that the higher tax revenues produced by the new uses will benefit the public. Bah! That's a tissue-thin rationalization for land grabs on behalf of the well-connected, but courts, unfortunately, are buying it."
http://www.fff.org/comment/com0501g.asp

Weaker than we think
by Walter E. Williams from Townhall.com
"Being too safe from terrorist attacks can be costly in at least a couple of ways. The most costly is our willy-nilly acceptance of government intrusions on our liberties and privacy in the name of security. For just one example, banks, brokerage houses, insurers and other financial institutions have been turned into state informers who must notify the Treasury Department about 'suspicious' transactions."
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/walterwilliams/ww20050119.shtml

Swastikas, Hypocrisy and Prince Harry
by David MacGregor from Strike The Root
"Am I offended by Prince Harry wearing a swastika at a fancy dress party? Not one bit. I'm offended by the fact we're living in an increasingly fascist world--and that barely anyone notices. I'm offended by the people who ARE fascists--not those who dress up as them. That's the real outrage--offence at the image, not the reality."
http://www.strike-the-root.com/51/macgregor/macgregor1.html

Ordered Liberty without the State
Some people say it's Anarchy, some say it's not possible. It is an interesting topic.

Other People's Business
by Cat Farmer from Endervidualism
"People who use government muscle to accomplish their noble deeds and implement their grand visions of society… well, I find it hard not to feel sorry for them because so often they know not what they do. For those of us who find ourselves on the receiving end of the shortsighted OPB minders among us, it often feels hard to bear that in mind. If people are open to reason, they're open to persuasion - and the ancient pyramid scheme that is political government will eventually get smart from the bottom up."
http://endervidualism.com/catfarmer/other_peoples_business.htm

Ethics, Religion and Freedom
by Jim Davies from Strike The Root
"The self-ownership axiom and the ethic of universal respect to which it leads are the amply sufficient components of the 'individual responsibility' that Johnson rightly says are indispensable to a harmonious, prosperous and humane society; but they owe nothing at all to the hypothesis that humankind, or anything else, was created by a supernatural being--and they are diametrically opposed to the idea of government, the entire business of which is always to deny the right of self-ownership, to make decisions on the individual's behalf, to enslave."
http://www.strike-the-root.com/51/davies/davies3.html

Murray N. Rothbard on States, War, and Peace: Part II
by Joseph R. Stromberg from Antiwar.com
"Control of education and communication was central to the state's peaceful existence, and here we find the relationship between states and intellectuals -- a problem much larger, unfortunately, than a few art-phonies demanding state subsidies for their bad paintings. States everywhere have understood the need to 'keep' intellectuals to spread the word of the state's good intentions, nobility, supremacy, necessity, and so on."
http://www.antiwar.com/stromberg/?articleid=4420

Spreading Decentralism
Articles demonstrating an increase in the dispersal of power.

When Bad Things Happen
by Ali Hassan Massoud from Endervidualism
"For someone like myself who aspires to religious values without the religious dogma, acceptance of what is, and the genuine effort to bear and deal with life and its unfairness in a humane and rational manner is what brings me comfort and relief."
http://endervidualism.com/amassoud/bad_things_happen.htm

Congress Should Restrain the President
by David Boaz from Cato Institute
"Too often we assume that only the Supreme Court has the duty to uphold the Constitution. In fact, every person elected or appointed to office takes an oath to 'support and defend the Constitution of the United States.' The first duty of every official is to act within the authority of the Constitution and to ensure that other officials do so as well."
http://www.cato.org/dailys/01-18-05.html

A New Paradigm for Federal Lands
by Brian Yablonski from A Better Earth
"Though not pure free market environmentalism, the trust approach goes a long way toward fostering free market environmentalist values in the public sector. But even at this early stage, opportunities to get the incentives right have been missed."
http://www.abetterearth.org/article.php/923.html

The New World Hegemon
Depictions of the coming Imperial power

Let's Look within Ourselves for Iraq's WMD
by Jacob G. Hornberger from The Future of Freedom Foundation
"It is impossible to overstate the horrific consequences of an imperial foreign policy based on 'regime change' that U.S. officials, especially those in the CIA, State Department, and the Pentagon, have wrought for the American people."
http://www.fff.org/comment/com0501f.asp

The Ghosts of Torture
by Nat Hentoff from The Village Voice
"The CIA has been kidnapping American prisoners and sending them to other countries to be tortured since the Clinton administration, but with particular urgency and quantity since 9-11.... Moreover, the CIA has forcibly transferred prisoners from various locations into its own secret interrogation centers, including ships at sea, where the prisoners' identities are secret, resulting in their being called 'ghost prisoners' by human rights organizations. "
http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0504,hentoff,60389,6.html

What America Should Learn from 'King Arthur'
by Andrew Young from Strike The Root
"The Romans utilized religion to convince their British subjects to live in serfdom. In Guinevere's village, for example, the Romans taught the villagers to view the Roman priest as a godlike figure. Therefore, resisting serfdom equaled heresy. Similarly, to persuade Americans to support the 'war on terrorism,' George W. Bush has infused his speeches with religious rhetoric and said he believes Providence placed him in his position."
http://www.strike-the-root.com/51/young-an/young-an3.html

Politics by Other Means
War, rumors of war, and politicians fomenting war.

The Future of the Republicans
by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. from LewRockwell.com
"The ideological base of the party has returned to its historic stance. The love of liberty in evidence among the party faithful is a feature of the out-of-power principle: Republicans don't like to be ruled by Democrats. But the test of its sincerity comes with the behavior of the party in office, and here Republicans fail miserably, with the single exception of Ron Paul."
http://www.lewrockwell.com/rockwell/gop-future.html

Dying for Sycophants
by Paul Craig Roberts from CounterPunch
"Can you believe this administration's insanity? Bush intends to rise from the ashes of defeat in Iraq by invading Iran, a country three times the size in population and geography? Does it remind you of Adolf Hitler who, unable to invade tiny England, marches his army off into Russia?"
http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts01202005.html

Congress heads toward nuclear winter
by Robyn E. Blumner from St. Petersburg Times
"In his role as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, the Utah Republican obliterated a series of longstanding formal and informal agreements on judicial nominees that had ensured input by minority party senators. Rules that Hatch strictly enforced during Clinton's tenure were suddenly wiped away as soon as Bush took office."
http://www.sptimes.com/2005/01/16/Columns/Congress_heads_toward.shtml

Spontaneous Order
Articles showing decentralized successes.

Privatize the Evolution Battle
by Neal McCluskey from Cato Institute
"Thankfully, there is a way for all parents -- the phonics crowd, whole language enthusiasts, creationists, defenders of Darwinian dogmas, etc. -- to get their way: privatization. If governments were to let parents choose their children's schools, then fights over educational standards would disappear, becoming matters of consumer choice, not political power."
http://www.cato.org/dailys/01-21-05.html

UR–3R: A Recycling Revolution
by Chris Prunty from A Better Earth
"That Global Renewables has entered into a contract with a local government to provide it with waste means that rubbish has now taken on private property characteristics: it has become a raw material in production. This has profound implications because businesses, motivated by profit, will have strong incentives to innovate and come up with even more efficient means to extract value from our rubbish."
http://www.abetterearth.org/article.php/871.html

The Failings of the Economic Freedom Index
by Stefan M.I. Karlsson from Ludwig von Mises Institute
"Clearly there is a great difference between the degree of economic freedom in the traditional capitalist bastion of Hong Kong and in Stalinist North Korea. But beyond such clear-cut cases how do we determine which countries are the most free and the least free?"
http://www.mises.org/fullstory.aspx?Id=1724

Nonspontaneous Disorder
Articles showing centrally planned disasters.

Social Security Is in Good Shape? -- It Just Ain't So!
by Michael D. Tanner from The Foundation for Economic Education (FEE)
"In reality, however, the Trust Fund is simply an accounting measure, a promise against future taxes, in essence an IOU. As Douglas Holtz-Eakin, director of the Congressional Budget Office, puts it, the Trust Fund 'has no real economic resources....' "
http://www.fee.org/vnews.php?nid=6568

The Tax-Reform Racket
by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. from Ludwig von Mises Institute
"Now, if you read the economics texts, they will tell you that there is such a thing as a neutral tax, one that does not distort the operation of the market economy. But the neutral tax is a myth. In one way or another, every tax punishes productivity in both seen and unseen ways."
http://mises.org/fullstory.aspx?Id=1727

All That Have Not Fins and Scales
by Kerry Howley from Reason
"Whether or not the subsidies are eventually revoked, it's a curious message we send to a region absorbing historic amounts of foreign aid. As American NGOs build elementary schools, immunize children, and promote school-feeding for poor Asians, American trade laws are sapping their chances for future employment, closing off markets and crushing industries where Asia has competitive advantages."
http://www.reason.com/links/links012005.shtml

War Is The Health Of The State
War is the ultimate State intervention in society.

The New American Militarism
by Paul Craig Roberts from Antiwar.com
"The greatest threat to the U.S. is not terrorists but the neoconservative belief, to which President Bush is firmly committed, that American security and well-being depend on U.S. global hegemony and impressing U.S. values on the rest of the world."
http://www.antiwar.com/roberts/?articleid=4445

The Coming Wars - The Pentagon has new powers
by Seymour M. Hersh from The New Yorker
"The White House solidified its control over intelligence last month, when it forced last-minute changes in the intelligence-reform bill. The legislation, based substantially on recommendations of the 9/11 Commission, originally gave broad powers, including authority over intelligence spending, to a new national-intelligence director."
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?050124fa_fact

U.S. Foreign Policy: Question All Assumptions
by Ivan Eland from The Independent Institute
"In addition to expending much blood and treasure, all U.S. wars have eroded civil liberties at home. Even if the USG could militarily convert all of the nations of the world to real democracies (most democracies in the developing world are fake) -- and the record here is not good -- the United States could very well endanger its own democracy."
http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=1450

Bits of History
The Past seen with a fresh look.

Portrait Of A Literate American
by Fred Reed from FredOnEverything
"How do you render witless kids who by their nature want to know everything? In the early Fifties, when I was a wee tyke, toy stores sold chemistry sets. (Gilbert. One had fifty bottles.) You did actual sort of chemistry with them. They had the alcohol lamp, test tubes, NiChrome wire for jack-leg spectroscopy, as well as cobalt chloride, phenolpthalein, sodium silicate, sodium thiosulfate, and such like. "
http://www.fredoneverything.net/Gilbert.shtml

Fables of Federal Regulation
by Jonathan H. Adler from A Better Earth
"The oft-told explanation for federal environmental legislation- that ever-deteriorating environmental quality made federal regulation necessary-does not fit the historical record. Rather, a mix of factors led to the adoption of federal environmental laws, even though environmental quality was already improving in many respects. "
http://www.abetterearth.org/article.php/926.html

In Defense of Open Immigration
by Anthony Gregory from The Future of Freedom Foundation
"But by and large, the Progressive movement was one of the most harmful episodes for American liberty and constitutionally limited government in U.S. history. It was an essentially socialist movement, and American progressives of the early 20th century understood the incompatibility between a free immigration policy and a managed economy, as well as the logical correlation between such an economy and immigration controls."
http://www.fff.org/freedom/fd0410e.asp

War and Peace
Articles showing the nature of War.

A Matter of Conscience
by Sgt. Kevin Benderman from Antiwar.com
"I have learned from firsthand experience that war is the destroyer of everything that is good in the world; it turns our young into soulless killers, and we tell them that they are heroes when they master the 'art' of killing. That is a very deranged mindset in my opinion."
http://www.antiwar.com/orig/benderman.php?articleid=4455

The Nuremberg Principles Today
by Nancy Oden from CounterPunch
"No one has yet dared to say the Nuremberg Principles are irrelevant. That would be like saying the Nazis were right, that they should not have been punished."
http://www.counterpunch.org/oden01192005.html

A Salute to Lee and Jackson
by Pastor Chuck Baldwin from NewsWithViews.com
"While the strategies and circumstances of the War of Northern Aggression can (and will) be debated by professionals and laymen alike, one fact is undeniable: Robert E. Lee and T.J. Jackson were two of the finest Christian gentlemen this country has ever produced! Both their character and their conduct are beyond reproach. "
http://www.newswithviews.com/baldwin/baldwin211.htm

Great Individuals In History
Some people stand out from the crowd.

Inventor - Henry Bessemer : Jan. 19, 1813
from Objectivist Center
"Wherever he looked, he saw problems, and often enough he saw solutions for them. With his restless, problem-solving mind, he was, apparently, the first person ever to earn his living as an inventor selling to the open market. As he did so, however, Bessemer was always looking for his big break, the invention that would make his fame and fortune. In 1853, he found it, and the result was the Steel Age."
http://www.objectivistcenter.org/navigator/articles/nav+rdonway_victorian-atlas.asp

Libertarian - Isabel Paterson : Jan. 22, 1886
from Cato Institute
"Conservative icon Russell Kirk, with whom Paterson corresponded during World War II, and upon whom she exerted a profound influence, believed that Paterson would forever be remembered for her columns, novels, and literary commentary. Instead, it is The God of the Machine and its effect on the nascent libertarian movement for which she is best remembered."
http://www.cato.org/special/threewomen/paterson.html

Singer - Sam Cooke : Jan. 22, 1931
from history-of-rock.com
"Sam Cooke was a true superstar in his lifetime. After his death, his legend became even larger. His influence can be heard in the precise phrasing of Smokey Robinson, in the conscientious songwriting of Marvin Gaye, in the raw emotion of Lou Rawls and in Aretha Franklin's controlled passion."
http://www.history-of-rock.com/cooke.htm

Culcha'
Books, Movies, TV, Media, Music, poetry, etc.

Rain On Rocks
by Russell Madden from Atlas
"Out of sight, out of mind. That could be the mantra for her fellow citizens, Treyna thought. Ignore the reality staring you in the face and perhaps it will cease to exist. Evade, deny, avoid. If you don't acknowledge the problems disturbing you, then they will trouble you no more. An attitude she no doubt shared to a certain degree. That willful blindness had exacted its terrible price from her." This is an excellent piece of short fiction.
http://home.earthlink.net/~rdmadden/webdocs/Rain_on_Rocks.html

Victor/Victoria (1982)
Reviewed by Tom Ender from Endervidualism
"To say this film is about gender issues is to make a tremendous understatement. However, unlike most films made more recently on similar topics, this film has a very well developed sense of humor. It also has exceptional music and dancing."
http://endervidualism.com/agora/victor_victoria_1982.htm

Scorsese's "Aviator" Reflects Randian Lessons
by Edward Hudgins from The Objectivist Center
"In The Aviator, a bio-pic about Howard Hughes (1905-1976) starring Leonardo DiCaprio with script by John Logan, director Martin Scorsese projects on the screen a moral message that is rarely found in philosophy books much less in movies: the path to joy in life is loving one's work."
http://www.objectivistcenter.org/mediacenter/articles/ehudgins_rff_aviator-review.asp

The lighter side
Humor, satire, cartoons, parodies, food, popular music and other things to amuse.

Python swallows Bush!
by Laura Miller from Salon (Ad view required)
"Monty Python's Terry Jones talks about becoming a political writer, the decline of the British press and how Bush and Blair have erased the line between absurdity and horror."
http://www.salon.com/books/int/2005/01/21/jones/index.html

What Do You Think? -- Georgia's Evolution Stickers
from The Onion
"Last week, a U.S. district judge ordered a Georgia school district to remove stickers reading, 'Evolution is a theory, not a fact' from its textbooks. What do you think?"
http://www.theonion.com/wdyt/index.php?issue=4103

The Interactive Inaugural Map
by Mark Fiore from The Village Voice
Just click a point on the map to find an event...
http://villagevoice.com/news/0503,fiore,60330,9.html

Deep Thought
Scientific and scholarly studies, philosophical essays, in-depth and longer articles

Imagining an Ideal World
by Bob Wallace from Endervidualism
"The book is about what America could have been, and what it should be. ... It is a novel everyone, whether a libertarian or not, should read. I think it is especially suited for those between 11 and 14, which is the perfect age to run across imaginative, action-filled, informative novels like this one."
http://endervidualism.com/bwallace/imagining_ideal_world.htm

Business Ethics and a Return to the Core Questions
by Rev. Gerald Zandstra from Acton Institute
"There is an enormous body of literature available that has been built up for thousands of years. This truly global material provides guidance as to what is ethical and what is not and leads to the kind of reflection that is necessary. It is found in the major teachings of world’s religions. It is found in ancient and modern philosophers."
http://www.acton.org/ppolicy/comment/article.php?id=241

The Naked Crowd
by Jeffrey Rosen from spiked
"Many factors put tremendous pressure on individuals in the Naked Crowd, to expose personal details of their lives and strip themselves bare. The crowd demands exposure out of a combination of voyeurism, desire for emotional connection, fear of strangers, democratic suspicion of reticence as sign of elitism, demand for markers of trustworthiness, and an unwillingness to conceive of public events or to relate to public figures except in personal terms."
http://www.spiked-online.com/Articles/0000000CA5FF.htm

Miscellany
Articles not easily classified

dreams can be deceiving
by bkMarcus from lowercase liberty (his blog)
"Marcus Epstein writes, 'The slightest criticism of him or even suggesting that he isn't deserving of a national holiday leads to the usual accusations of racist, fascism, and the rest of the usual left-wing epithets…' True. And for most of my life, I would have been among the epithetic. To oppose MLK2 was to condone coercive segregation, racial hatred, and violence." But there is more....
http://www.bkmarcus.com/blog/2005/01/dreams-can-be-deceiving.html

The Free Market for War: How I Almost Became a Mercenary
by Ali H. Massoud from The Free Liberal
"The sprawling, voracious, military-industrial complex has constituted anything but private free enterprise from its very inception during the Cold War years. In this giant muck pit of warmongering, waste, and misdeeds not only bordering on, but also often entering deeply into criminal conduct, no consumer-determined bottom line has dictated which firms would survive and which would go bankrupt."
http://www.freeliberal.com/archives/000637.html

Hate as an Eye-Opener
by Bob Wallace from LewRockwell.com
"The hatemails are a devaluation, character assassination done in the same spirit as murder. It's just not as intense of a spirit. It's still the same one, though. In a sense, the writers are trying to feed me to Moloch. I'm a bad person they want to sacrifice. It's why they tell me to leave the country. They're murdering me in their minds."
http://www.lewrockwell.com/wallace/wallace198.html

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