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"I agree with Jefferson that that government is best which governs least. I am in favor of greatly reducing government power. ... The government has got no business doing the vast majority of the things it is doing nowadays. When choosing what to write about, I don't focus on government programs that can be fixed. Instead, my point is almost always that abolition is the only meaningful reform."
http://endervidualism.com/salon/intvw/bovard.htm
"I'm suggesting that we do much more than simply repeal all welfare-state programs. I'm suggesting that we go further and elevate our vision to the same level as that of our American ancestors when they separated church and state. I'm suggesting the following amendment to the Constitution: 'The federal government shall not provide any subsidy, grant, welfare, aid, loan, or other special privilege to anyone.' (The amendment could, at the same time, bar the states from engaging in the same activity, pursuant to the principles of the Fourteenth Amendment, but for purposes of this discussion, the amendment will be limited only to the federal government.) "
http://www.fff.org/freedom/fd0601a.asp
"When Padilla first appeared before the Supreme Court two years ago, John Paul Stevens, speaking for justices who wanted to hear his case then, said: 'At stake in this case is nothing less than the essence of a free society'."
http://villagevoice.com/news/0616,hentoff,72883,6.html
"Durham, North Carolina is a middle class town where the average annual income is approximately $47,000; about 44 percent of townspeople are African American. Durham is also home to the ivy-league Duke University where the average yearly tuition is approximately $43,000. There is a history of conflict between 'the towns'' and 'the gowns', and it is 'the towns' who elect DAs. Crusading on behalf of a black townswoman raped by rich white Duke students might have looked like a perfect wave to ride into office."
http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=1708
"So it is that the Republicans have learned the limits of free speech and the virtues of restricting the corrupting influence of 'Big Money' in our politics. There's just one problem with that flip-flop. Money must be given to public officials to corrupt the political process. Money given to consultants and marketing companies to spread ideas cannot corrupt our elections or Congress."
http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=6357
"While the most embattled cartoons in the history of that genre have receded from the front pages, the fallout lives on. Just last week, the animated and often-controversial South Park television show took on the issue and was rebuffed when its creators tried to depict the prophet in a scene. Instead, a black screen appeared with the words, 'Comedy Central has refused to broadcast an image of Mohammed on their network.' It's more of the same in academia."
http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/editorials/2006-04-18-free-speech_x.htm
"There will always be a small number of truly evil or insane people within society. There are far, far better ways of dealing with them than our existing system of dehumanizing, brutal and destructive state gulags, which generally serve only to expand their criminal skills and contacts. Also, it is important to remember that the existing state prisons have barely any evil or insane people in them!"
http://www.lewrockwell.com/molyneux/molyneux19.html
"I'm talking about a comfortable place to live in the country and a quiet restoration project with a fall-back business plan in mind. While I fully agree that gold is the best hedge against inflation, I think that fertile land is the ultimate hedge against social meltdown."
http://www.strike-the-root.com/61/klassen/klassen5.html
"Natural disasters, the desire to relocate to improve one's life, jealousy of power and resources -- such things are inevitable in human affairs. They will never stop. It is the State that worsens these problems, often making them unsolvable. The institution of private property always provides the readiest solutions...."
http://www.mises.org/story/2108
"Neighborhood associations already have demonstrated that even basic governance tasks at this micro level can be undertaken privately. One adviser to neighborhood associations has said that an association is 'both a community and a business to meet the expectations of the members' and appropriately functions privately in both these capacities. The result is a radical privatization of many local government functions, both in concept and in execution."
http://www.reason.com/0604/fe.rn.welcome.shtml
"I'm told Apple has long had this running in the Cupertino lab -- Intel Macs running OS X while mixing Apple and XP applications. This is not a guess or a rumor, this something that has been demonstrated and observed by people who have since reported to me."
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20060420.html
"I believe General Pace should resign for his comments, I would argue that any active duty general who has the audacity to speak out against the war should also be sacked. The difference is that retired generals are, well, retired and should be allowed to express political opinions just like any other civilian citizen."
http://independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=1704
"Will we adopt a frankly terrorist doctrine that asserts a 'right' to initiate force anywhere, at any time, against anyone for any -- or no publicly revealed -- reason? This is the question that confronts us as we begin to evaluate -- or, rather, back away from in horror -- the consequences of the so-called Bush Doctrine to date."
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=8881
"I decided long ago that I'd never switch to Vista once it is released. This news will likely be the nail in the coffin to many others who may have been wary about Vista. Anyone who cares about liberty and privacy should consider M$ to be a serious threat. Anyone who is troubled by state/corporate collusion should place M$ near or at the top of their shit list."
http://freemanlc.blogspot.com/2006/04/microoft-how-would-you-like-to-be.html
"People in Latin America can't understand why they are scapegoated for the American demand for drugs. It's a fair question. And contrary to the brainiacs in Washington, eradicating coca crops has not made cocaine more expensive. The market is amazingly resilient, and as a result, the price of cocaine is historically low. The U.S. government is undeterred. It makes the spraying of poisons possible, showing little regard for the resulting environmental damage and social disruption."
http://sheldonfreeassociation.blogspot.com/2006/04/eradicating-crops-who-do-they-think.html
"What has to be understood is that rectifying the mistakes of the past rests on our ability to challenge and reevaluate not only the strategy but the policy -- the policy of global intervention that posits the U.S. as the policeman of the world."
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=8861
"In democracies, the majority does not always rule. Groups of like-minded citizens (lobbies) can dominate an issue if they are motivated and active and the majority isn't--or has real difficulty in disseminating its views. ... Some lobbies are small, others are multifaceted, well-financed and highly effective. ... No one can object to the unquestioned right of the Israel lobby, individuals and organizations, to promote close relations with Israel. Denying that it exists, however, and is both extremely active and highly successful, is simply idiotic."
http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=1705
"Africa has an army of customs officials, whose job it is to collect import duties. With wages low and deteriorating rapidly in real value due to inflation, customs officials rely on bribes to speed shipments through or look the other way altogether. Thus, when a group of South African churches and nongovernmental organizations raised money to purchase emergency aid for the people of Zimbabwe in the winter months of 2005, the Zimbabwean customs officials demanded that import tariffs be paid. South African blankets and food languished at the Johannesburg airport for weeks."
http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=6364
"George holds up free trade as the natural condition. That is, men, when unaffected by artificial restraints, instinctively engage in free exchange whereas protection is a fabrication of mankind, and therefore is not native to our state of being."
http://www.mises.org/story/2086
"For an excellent discussion of what inflation really is and the critical role that government plays in producing it, I'd recommend for everyone's reading 'Inflation in One Page' and Economics in One Lesson, (especially its chapter 'The Mirage of Inflation'), both by Henry Hazlitt, famous old-time economist."
http://www.fff.org/freedom/fd0601f.asp
"Fortunately, in home-schooling and in true private schools the racial performance disparity disappears. That is to say black and Hispanic children show no genetic inability to excel. They thus have the most to gain through the elimination of the fraud-riddled, wasteful and counterproductive anti-literacy camps know as 'the public schools'." Most of this article discusses nonspontaneous disorder (government schooling in this case), but it contains some good news too.
http://www.reviewjournal.com/lvrj_home/2006/Apr-16-Sun-2006/opinion/6593902.html
"People often say, 'We as a nation have the right to decide who comes here and who doesn't. So we must get control of our borders.' The problem with this is that 'we as a nation' don't do anything. Individuals act, sometimes in concert with other individuals, but collectives do nothing. When we say 'the nation does such and such,' we mean a group of politicians calling themselves 'the government' and claiming to act for the nation do such and such."
http://www.fff.org/comment/com0604f.asp
"There's a whole genre of free-market literature that defends sweatshops and the like on the grounds that they're the best available option for their workers--jobs they've freely chosen because the immediate alternatives are all worse. I don't reject that argument outright, but I've never found it entirely satisfying either. That's partly because some of those sweatshop titans don't just give their charges low wages and long hours; they engage in direct coercion or fraud."
http://www.reason.com/links/links042106.shtml
"In a world in which personal and property rights are always respected, the logic of the economic libertarian is impeccable; however, advocates of this philosophy should continuously remind ourselves that this is not always the context in which real suffering people (especially in underdeveloped nations) operate when we demand that corporations be allowed to benefit from the differing legal systems abroad...."
http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2006/04/free-market-attack-on-sweatshops.html
"Is it any wonder that the Bush administration has told the Iraqis that it is at the end of its tether and to get on with the task of forming a government? And can we have any doubt that U.S. bases will be a permanent part of this inverted mercantilist enterprise -- one funded by the average American, who sinks into penury while the most profitable companies on the planet are about to rake in astronomical earnings?" Smedley Butler may have said it most succinctly: "War is a racket."
http://www.antiwar.com/orig/berga.php?articleid=8862
"The message is clear. Indeed, it's gigantic for all Iraqi's, for the entire world to see. A 100 acre compound - ten times the size of the typical U.S. embassy, the size of 80 football fields, six times larger than the UN, the size of Vatican City. The U.S. Embassy Compound, in the middle of Baghdad - the center for U.S. domination of the Middle East and its resources."
http://democracyrising.us/content/view/469/151/
"But the Bush Administration has used Iran's gleefully announcement that it enriched uranium to 3.5% (83% is need for nuclear weapons), to generate a major US-Iranian crisis seven months before national mid-term elections. The administration clearly hopes its lurid claims that Iran is a nuclear threat to the world will whip gullible Americans back into war fever. A bombing campaign before elections would likely reverse the Republican's steep decline in the polls."
http://www.ericmargolis.com/archives/2006/04/countdown_over.php
"Waco is still important, because it illustrates the violent nature of the state, the fact that political power flows from the barrel of a gun, and the scary truth that the U.S. government is ultimately no different from all others in this respect. Many people, including many libertarians, would just as soon forget the debacle. But we must remember. ... America's police state is utterly bipartisan. It is designed to persist and indeed extend its reach with each administration, no matter the party in charge. In fact, the political party illusion serves to distract people from the real issues, the state's trampling of our liberties, and instead devote their hopeful attention and energy to getting one dictatorial gang elected rather than the other."
http://www.lewrockwell.com/gregory/gregory117.html
"The British Major John Pitcairn rode forward and ordered the rebels to disperse. Realizing the futility of their position, the patriots began to do so, but refused to surrender their arms. Suddenly one shot rang out, who fired it will never be known. A British officer ordered his troops to fire."
http://bwrmontag.blogspot.com/2006/04/april-19-1775.html
"'Progressivism was infested with the most repugnant strains of racism.' That was no accident. And it wasn't just some minor blight on a basically good movement. It was part and parcel of Progressivism, its pseudodemocratic anti-radicalism, its sustained assault on autonomous, state-free mutual aid assocations and labor unions, its contemptuous pity for the downtrodden, and its embrace of the government-backed Expert as the natural person to solve their problems for them (whether they liked it or not)."
http://radgeek.com/gt/2006/04/22/over_my
"The dissident novelist Zdenek Urbánek told me, 'In one respect, we are more fortunate than you in the west. We believe nothing of what we read in the newspapers and watch on television, nothing of the official truth. Unlike you, we have learned to read between the lines, because real truth is always subversive.' This acute skepticism, this skill of reading between the lines, is urgently needed in supposedly free societies today."
http://www.lewrockwell.com/pilger/pilger40.html
"Let's accept that Britain and the United States are the intended targets of future terrorist attacks. Why are they the targets? Why ... [not] mention Switzerland, Sweden, Holland, or any of the other countries in Europe....? Why ... [not] mention Canada? ... There is one main difference: the U.S. and British governments have intervened in the affairs of Iraq and other countries in the Middle East, while the governments of Switzerland, Sweden, Holland, and Canada have not. So the lesson seems to be not that the U.S. and British governments should continue intervening, but that it should imitate these other governments and refrain from intervening."
http://www.antiwar.com/henderson/?articleid=8851
"The most important point in this excellent study is precisely the one that Washington will be most reluctant to learn: 'Rather [than] "do it better next time," a better lesson is "don't do it at all".' "
http://www.counterpunch.org/lind04202006.html
"In 1883, disenchanted with socialism, Labadie embraced individualist anarchism, a non-violent doctrine. He became closely allied with Benjamin Tucker, the country's foremost exponent of that doctrine, and frequently wrote for the latter's publication, 'Liberty.' ... Beginning in the early 1900s, Labadie's extensive collection of labor literature was sought by several universities for the growing field of labor scholarship. Labadie chose the University of Michigan, where it formed the nucleus of the renowned Labadie Collection, considered the most comprehensive repository of radical literature in the United States."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Labadie
"The Chicago-based label [Chess] issued several in-concert albums and his 1968 novelty hit, 'Here Comes The Judge'. This tongue-in-cheek recording was inspired by the artist's catch phrase, which was used extensively on the American television comedy series Rowan And Martin's Laugh-In."
http://www.aaregistry.com/african_american_history/2327/Pigmeat_Markham_comedian_extraordinaire
"Her biggest hit, the melodramatic 'You Don't Have to Say You Love Me' (1966), was a major success on both sides of the Atlantic. But by this time she was shifting from Queen of the Mods to female drag queen. She claimed she learned her make-up techniques from female impersonators--as her hair and dresses became increasingly over-the-top."
http://www.glbtq.com/arts/springfield_d.html
Mythological adventure stars Harry Hamlin, Judi Bowker, Laurence Olivier, Maggie Smith, Burgess Meredith; directed by Desmond Davis, produced and with special effects by Ray Harryhausen. "[T]his movie was the last large scale production of a man who has become a legend in films: Ray Harryhausen. During his career Harryhausen's name became synonymous with outstanding special effects and also timeless stories of adventure. This movie has both...."
http://endervidualism.com/agora/clash_titans_1981.htm
"She not only stayed on the subject, thus providing an excellent overview of the craft of fiction-writing, but she created a three-dimensional portrayal of Rand."
http://endervidualism.com/salon/books/holzer.htm
"What makes the 'Firefly'/'Serenity' universe so unique is that although it's set a few hundred years in the future, things haven't changed that much. There are space ships and humans have colonized other planets, but there are also horses, frontier towns reminiscent of the Old West, rusty sinks, folding beach chairs and six-shooters. Perhaps the show's most unique touch is the Chinese influence coursing through its language and set decoration; considering the fact that the Chinese outnumber all other cultures on Earth today, it makes for a logical and plausible facet of futuristic life. And did I mention there are no aliens? There are no little green men and no one 'beams down' from the mother ship. Instead, the world of 'Firefly' is the most believable portrait I've seen yet of where we humans are likely headed in the not-too-distant future."
http://www.techliving.com/archives/2006/04/universal_releases_serenity_hd.shtml
"Jason Jones investigates a woman brewing political unrest in a planned Floridian community."
http://www.comedycentral.com/sitewide/media_player/play.jhtml?itemId=61943
Words fail me to describe this QuickTime video (with audio), but it's funny.
http://www.firefoxflicks.com/flick/index.php?id=19542&c=false
"Apple Computer, producer of the successful iPod MP3 player, is now offering consumers limited rights to buy their own home movies from the media store iTunes for $1.99 each." I'm surprised Apple beat Microsoft to this "market," what would we do without either of them?
http://www.theonion.com/content/node/47468
"Geographical regions are abstract concepts. Every town I've ever lived in was defined with all the rigidity of a six-year-old saying, "Anything past that dead bird in the grass is a homerun.' But many Americans would like to militarize our ghost of a border right now. And just think about what that would mean. We would essentially be creating our own prison here."
http://www.freeliberal.com/archives/002013.html
"Moreover, to label opponents of an aggressive war, which was considered the pre-eminent Nazi crime at the major Nuremberg war-crimes trial, as being somehow Nazi-like is to descend spelunkingly deep into the realm of Orwellian absurdity. And it becomes even more absurd when such criticism comes from members of the Israel lobby who promoted the falsehoods that led the United States into war against Iraq. Even Orwell would be dumbfounded by such super-chutzpah."
http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_mear_walt.htm
"To understand the misconceptions perpetuated about climate science and the climate of intimidation, one needs to grasp some of the complex underlying scientific issues. First, let's start where there is agreement. The public, press and policy makers have been repeatedly told that three claims have widespread scientific support: Global temperature has risen about a degree since the late 19th century; levels of CO2 in the atmosphere have increased by about 30% over the same period; and CO2 should contribute to future warming. These claims are true. However, what the public fails to grasp is that the claims neither constitute support for alarm nor establish man's responsibility for the small amount of warming that has occurred."
http://www.ncc-1776.org/tle2006/tle363-20060416-05.html
"I have no doubt that the mature, glorious Lascaux paintings were made by adult artists -- simply because they would be beautiful to behold. I wish there were some way for the artists to know how many generations later their work is being admired. And, regrettably, misinterpreted."
http://www.ncc-1776.org/tle2006/tle363-20060416-07.html
"According to the United States military, they are neither terrorists nor 'enemy combatants.' So why are they being held at the camp nearly a year after a military panel ruled that they pose no threat to the US? They have no place else to go. Their appeal for freedom suffered a setback Monday."
http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0418/p02s02-usju.html
"The fact is that such 'markets' are artificial constructs of political entities--in the case of the Kyoto standards, the governments that have ratified the treaty. In this sense, characterizing cap and trade schemes as 'market-based' is rather misleading, because these systems lack the fundamental elasticity and flexibility of authentic and spontaneously generated markets."
http://www.acton.org/ppolicy/comment/article.php?article=319
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