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"The principle of volunteerism has elevated open source software into the public awareness and transformed the software industry. The growing importance of open source software is a poignant reminder that everyone who participates has the capacity to make a difference. Every participant, regardless of the scope or nature of their contribution, is helping to bring better software to all of us. "
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20071122-six-things-to-be-thankful-for-in-technology-2007.html
"In the GOP, a refreshing change from the usual blood-and-thunder warmongering comes in the person of Ron Paul, a nine-term Republican congressman from the Gulf Coast of Texas whose straight-talking unassuming persona and fiercely antiwar (and anti-interventionist) libertarian politics has electrified a whole new generation of activists. Not since the McCarthy for President phenomenon has a political campaign so captured the imagination, and the hopes, of young people in search of intellectual integrity in politics. In any case, whether you're rooting for [Kucinich], Edwards, Obama, or pounding the pavement (or the cyber-highways) for Paul, antiwar activists on both sides of the political spectrum have a lot to be thankful for"
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=11952
"People of our stripe, the libertarians and the anarchists, need to face reality: we are now in a survival situation. Just as surely as if an asteroid strike or pandemic were destroying civilization, government is doing so today. The authoritarians' gloves are off; why are you still wearing yours? Survival strategies need to be learned and implemented now while you still have a choice."
http://www.strike-the-root.com/72/mcmanigal/mcmanigal1.html
"Remember that: police are only members of the public working full time to keep the peace. None of us -- with or without a badge -- have a right to assault people, even lawbreakers, simply because they vex us with questions or treat us without the respect we believe is our due."
http://www.tuccille.com/blog/2007/11/more-on-utah-taser-incident.html
"If the science around marijuana curing cancer were to become indisputable, and if smoking marijuana delivered the medicine, would they ever mention that in the fact sheet? In other words, might the 'fact sheet' ever be balanced for both the good and the bad?"
http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2007/11/what-if.html
"If any good has come of this, it's that the media coverage surrounding Kathryn Johnston's death has at least exposed the country to the widespread use of 'dynamic entry' tactics for routine service of drug warrants, and the rather predictable problems that come with armed police breaking into someone's home. The fact that Johnston was a 92-year-old woman rather than a 19-year-old man probably has something to do with that."
http://reason.com/news/show/123632.html
"It would be difficult to find a better example of federal heavy-handedness than the recent six-hour federal raid on NORFED, the National Organization for the Repeal of the Federal Reserve and Internal Revenue Code. In fact, it would be virtually impossible to distinguish the NORFED raid from similar raids conducted by Soviet and Chinese communist officials against private businesses operating in those countries."
http://www.fff.org/comment/com0711j.asp
"The reason that the Bush administration wouldn't follow the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and get a proper warrant, even from the secret FISA court, is that the administration wanted access to huge quantities of what was read, written and said over the nation's communications channels. Warrants require some specificity and individual suspicion. No court, not even the administration-friendly FISA court, would have approved such a monstrous fishing expedition of Americans' Internet habits."
http://www.sptimes.com/2007/11/18/Opinion/In_the_US_of_A__we_ar.shtml
"Tyranny exists wherever government exercises the power to force people to live a lie. NORFED threatened to 'undermine' the fraudulent and tyrannical system under which we live by providing a tangible example of a hard money system in operation."
http://freedominourtime.blogspot.com/2007/11/monopoly-money.html
"Just in time for Thanksgiving’s travelling throngs, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has agreed to 'introduce “more aggressive, visible and unpredictable security measures”' at airports. Apparently, molesting the handicapped, groping grandmothers, and killing passengers don’t suffice."
http://www.lewrockwell.com/akers/akers75.html
"Given that the state has no incentive to protect; that it can always count on taxes; that it is institutionalized aggression; that it legislates and therefore steals and plunders – given all these things, I had to change my tune. What I had thought to be random incidents of abuse were nothing but the normal, symptomatic function of the government at work: a series of inefficient and unethical monstrosities committed against society, allegedly for its own good."
http://www.lewrockwell.com/lora/m.lora45.html
"Although I have some nuanced differences with Stefan Molyneux ... he does one of the better recent jobs of explaining part of the case for an 'anti-political' (actually intensely political, but extra-parliamentary) approach to building Liberty. That understanding ultimately boils down to libertarianism being opposed root and branch to all forms of statism. The last thing we need is Ron Paul 'saving the Republic', as 'the Republic' is a criminal enterprise."
http://www.bradspangler.com/blog/archives/857
"Government is an organization built on systematic coercion. For that reason, coercive government is by far the gravest possible threat to love and freedom. It is inevitable that those who wish to use coercion against others strive to capture government power and to increase that power. Government thus tends to grow, at the expense of love and freedom, and to fall into the hands of people who are especially interested in pushing others around by force."
http://www.strike-the-root.com/72/allport/allport19.html
"Congress has left a convenient reminder for the Commission right in the legislation to reign in any despotic impulses. ... Will the Commission consider political advocacy as promoting ideologically based violence? Politics is all about force; therefore, any political advocacy is the advocacy of force."
http://emergencybackupdog.blogspot.com/2007/11/violent-radicalization-worries-congress.html
"[Some] Ron Paul supporters and sound money advocates ... sarcastically predicted that the feds would next be going after Disneyworld for selling 'Disney Dollars' for use inside the amusement park. 'Here is a Mickey Mouse coin issued by that criminal, separatist organization, the Walt Disney Corporation. Did someone fail Common Sense 101?' wrote one commenter on the Post's Web site, offering a link to an image of the offending Mickey dubloon."
http://blog.washingtonpost.com/the-trail/2007/11/19/if_its_good_enough_for_mickey.html
"The NPR program's hosts mocked the federal government's concern about the Liberty Dollar and other alternative currencies, and one of the hosts wondered aloud whether the government has copyrighted the shape of its coins – round." [Links to Kudlow (video) and the NPR program (audio) at the site linked below.]
"In the next couple of weeks, the Supreme Court is likely to announce whether it will hear the Washington, D.C., handgun ban case. Handgun bans exist in only half a dozen U.S. cities, because although gun control is sometimes popular, gun prohibition is not." [Update: SCOTUS has decided to hear the case.]
http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=8799
"Consumers are increasingly dissatisfied with copy protection systems that erode fair use rights and impose limitations on where and how content can be used. To make matters worse, market fragmentation has led to the emergence of incompatible DRM formats which often confuse consumers and leave them wondering whether or not the content they buy will work on all of their electronics devices. That makes file-sharing more attractive for some consumers."
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20071121-uk-retailers-to-record-labels-drm-is-killing-us.html
"Because of hubris and laziness (the FBI) or greed (Hayne) or any number of other reasons, not every expert can be trusted. Giving credence to the fancy-sounding rituals and incantations summoned up by an expert witness in a trial isn't always the way to go."
http://www.tuccille.com/blog/2007/11/trust-experts-not.html
"As Ugandans were becoming aware that even respectable people could contract HIV, they began taking personal care of the sick, through small-scale service programs. By 1991, there were hundreds of community and church-based AIDS care and support groups in Uganda. Medically, there wasn’t much that could be done for people with AIDS. But Ugandans pioneered the concept of home-based care, which is now a central activity of AIDS organizations throughout Africa.."
http://www.acton.org/commentary/commentary414.php
"The government is something over and above the people with the power to issue decrees we are legally required to obey under threat of punishment. True, each of us gets an infinitesimal say in who holds office, but that doesn’t change the essential fact that once candidates are in office, they issue orders and we defy them at our peril. If you don’t like the orders, you are instructed to exercise your “power” to elect a new government. Good luck with that."
http://www.fff.org/comment/com0711k.asp
"As Gordon reports, FBI agents at Moussaoui’s trial testified that had he confessed to the plot after his August 16 arrest on immigration charges, thus giving them access to his notebooks pre-9/11, they could have moved on 11 of the 19 hijackers. But Washington steadfastly refused to move on information developed from the field offices."
http://www.reason.com/news/show/123018.html
"Human-rights history was made on February 7 of this year when, in Paris, 57 nations signed an unprecedented new international treaty prohibiting any of these countries from engaging in what the CIA calls 'extraordinary renditions': secretly snatching terrorism suspects and sending them to countries known for their expertise in torturing the people in their custody. The new treaty also forbids holding suspects in secret prisons—a continuing CIA specialty—or otherwise making people disappear. Though invited to sign the treaty, the United States of America declined, without any discernible sense of embarrassment at being, after all, the world's most expert and efficient producer of secret prisoners."
http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0747,hentoff,78426,2.html
"[T]he goings-on in Great Britain are not just mildly curious facts about a quaint little island across the sea: they are storm warnings of yet another tyrannical gale that will soon be sweeping over the United States. Last week, Prime Minister Gordon Brown unleashed a cannonade of 'security' proposals designed to transform Blake's 'green and pleasant land' into a bristling 'Fortress Britain.' Strangely enough -- or rather, not so strangely to anyone remotely acquainted with the modus operandi of Terror War states -- the measures seem to be aimed more at the British people than any would-be enemies lurking outside the gates."
http://www.chris-floyd.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1354&Itemid=135
"Musharraf, who lied about his intentions to step down as head of the army and get himself re-elected, has alienated every civilian institution in the country—the reason why he has rounded up thousands of people, including lawyers and human rights activists, in recent weeks and taken news outlets off the air. In fact, he has achieved what would have seemed impossible two or three years ago by making Bhutto and Sharif popular again...."
http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=2071
"If Boot were an anonymous nutcase posting his screeds on a neocon Web site, we might well ignore his huffing and puffing. He is, however, someone who moves in the highest circles. Formerly an editor at the Wall Street Journal, he is currently a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, a prominent fortress of the Establishment. His books touting war and imperialism have received wide notice, and perhaps someone has even read them. He is, in fact, a perfect example of the crackpot realists who constitute our ruling class."
http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=2072
"A premature move could lead to the consequence we fear most: radical Islamists wielding nukes. Just as in Iraq, where al-Qaeda never had a foothold and now does, the chances that an invasion or some kind of military strike at Pakistan would benefit rather than defeat al-Qaeda are more than even. Once again, interventionism leads to the exact opposite of its intended result: the principle of 'blowback,' as Chalmers Johnson explains it in his classic book of that title, will operate here to deadly effect."
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=11939
"The Copyright Alliance, which counts the MPAA and RIAA amongst its members, has sent letters and questionnaires to presidential candidates in an effort to determine where they stand on issues relating to intellectual property law."
"Yes, John Howard has metaphorically bit the dust in a humiliating electoral defeat. But many thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of innocent people have died because of his lies, and Bush's lies, and Blair's lies (the latter always affirmed and supported by his successor, Gordon Brown). The dust these victims have bitten is not metaphorical...."
http://www.chris-floyd.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1362&Itemid=135
"Under the circumstances, for an anti-war liberal to support Clinton, when several much less ambiguous anti-war candidates remain in contention for the Democratic nomination, is roughly equivalent to a pro-life conservative supporting Giuliani even if Giuliani had the power to eliminate legal abortions with the stroke of a pen."
http://www.rockymountainnews.com/news/2007/nov/20/campos-at-odds-with-their-bases/
"'The most important thing about the Web is that it is universal....' Berners-Lee said to a packed room of several hundred attendees. 'At the [World Wide Web Consortium], we've been focused on using standards, and it's very important that the mobile Internet platforms use the same standards,' he said. 'We've already seen a number of false starts where that didn't happen, and what people are realizing is that if you make yourself into a walled garden and block out everything from the outside, you find in the end that the flowers all grow on the outside.' "
http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/11/14/Mobile-Web-leaders-push-for-open-standards_1.html
"[T]oday, things in Rwanda are very different. Farmers are no longer required to grow coffee. The old export monopoly has ended. Farmers are free to enter into contracts with foreign buyers and to negotiate prices themselves. ... Rwandan coffee now routinely places at or near the top of international coffee competitions and, just a few weeks ago, a lot of Rwandan coffee sold for approximately $25 per pound at a specialty-coffee auction."
http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/opinion/columnists/guests/s_538793.html
"One monetary regime that would stop Zimbabwe's hyperinflation is free banking. Under this system, private banks issue notes (paper money) and other liabilities with minimal regulation. A completely free banking system has no central bank, no lender of last resort, no reserve requirements, and no legal restrictions on bank portfolios, interest rates, or branch banking. Free banking systems have existed in nearly 60 countries during the 1800s and early 1900s."
http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=8804
"The question facing us is, will commodity prices continue to boom in the foreseeable future or are we at or near the end of the rising trend we've seen since 1999? Jim Rogers, one of the world's most successful professional investors tries to answer this in his new book...."
http://www.mises.org/story/2773
"The public interest groups that have now filed a brief in the case see this as part of a larger issue: when you buy a product, do you own it? Can you control it? Can you repair it? The EFF, in particular, has fought for consumer ownership in several recent cases, including Lexmark's attempt to restrict the market for refilling its pricey inkjet cartridges."
"People I would never have associated with—people I’d have been afraid of if I’d seen them in a free-world environment on the street, people with tattoos, crazy hair, and so on—as I got to know them, and was accepted as one of them, they treated me very well. I never had the fear of violence form any of the other inmates. In fact, something else happened. It was the opposite. I found I had more fear of some of the officers who worked in the system and engaged in behaviors that we’d like to think don’t go on in the prison system."
http://reason.com/news/show/123589.html
"And all of this infringement could easily be done without even engaging in 'wrong' behaviors like P2P file-sharing. Tehranian wants to make clear how such copyright issues don't simply affect those operating in the grey or black zones of the law; they affect plenty of ordinary people who aren't doing anything that they consider to be illegal, immoral, or even a little bit naughty."
"In Boulder, Colorado, retired judge, former mayor and all-around well-connected politico Richard McLean and his wife, attorney Edith Stevens took a shine to property adjacent to their own, so they had one of McLean's former colleagues on the bench steal the parcel from its rightful owners and give it to them."
http://www.tuccille.com/blog/2007/11/crime-pays-if-youre-well-connected.html
"Just take a look at the health care systems the government already runs. The Veterans Health Administration system is a national disgrace. The VHA budget is a political football. While the program struggles with chronic budgetary problems, politicians from both parties see it has a source of political pork.... This is not a track record that inspires confidence. Yet, for some reason politicians continue to push government-run national health care. Have they forgotten that this is the same government that has mismanaged everything from Iraq to Hurricane Katrina?"
http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=8800
"If we can avoid the protectionist trap and reconcile the budget, the falling value of the dollar will eventually attract investors and stimulate exports. As the developing world becomes richer and freer, the US dollar is unlikely to enjoy the unchallenged superiority it once had, but maturing foreign markets will attract products and services designed in America...."
http://www.mises.org/story/2775
"George Orwell pointed out in his novel 1984 that when governments want to have power over us, they come up with threats to scare us. If they scare us enough, then they can grab power. The Democrats do this with global warming, with the goal of having more power over our daily lives. The Republicans, since 9/11, have tried to scare us by exaggerating by a few orders of magnitude the threat of terrorist attacks and nuclear-armed governments run by madmen. "
http://www.antiwar.com/henderson/?articleid=11929
"War always has a domestic side. Ruling classes hold power so that they may live off the toil of the domestic population. And because those ruled always far outnumber the rulers, ideology and propaganda are necessary to maintain the allegiance of the subject population. War is useful in keeping the population in a state of fear and therefore trustful of their rulers."
http://www.fff.org/freedom/fd0708b.asp
"Quigley was a closely connected elite 'insider' to the American Establishment, with impeccable credentials and trappings of respectability. But Carroll Quigley's most notable achievement was the authorship of one of the most important books of the 20th Century: Tragedy and Hope – A History of the World in Our Time. No one can truly be cognizant of the intricate evolution of networks of power and influence which have played a crucial role in determining who and what we are as a civilization without being familiar with the contents of this 1,348-page tome."
http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig8/burris9.html
"We hear a great deal these days about the bellicosity in the Quran, and how it fueled the armed conquests of the early Muslim believers, and now inflames the violent propensities of modern Islamic extremists. Disturbing stuff, and certainly worth examining – which Muslim scholars and scholars of Islam (the two are not always interchangeable) have been doing for centuries. However, we hear rather less about the bellicosity in the holy books of what is today called the 'Judeo-Christian tradition,' one of the foundations of Western Civilization. "
http://www.chris-floyd.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1360&Itemid=135
"Whatever sense an embargo might have made during the Cold War, when Cuba was allied with the Soviet Union, that justification disappeared years ago. The embargo has been repeatedly tested and has repeatedly failed. Fidel Castro has outlasted eight – perhaps soon to be nine – presidents and outlived five of them. While Europeans invest in and trade with Cuba, Washington fulminates futilely, having turned Castro into an international symbol of resistance to Yankee imperialism. Eliminating the embargo wouldn't guarantee the end of communist rule in Cuba, but it would introduce an important force for destabilization. And lifting the embargo would prevent Castro and his cronies from blaming America for their own disastrous decisions."
http://www.antiwar.com/bandow/?articleid=11948
"You must ask yourself, why, if the assassination is just a simple murder by one misfit, has there been so much secrecy? Indeed, why, if it was a simple murder, was the President’s murder not investigated in Dallas, the scene of the crime, instead of from Washington? All the evidence and most witnesses were located in Dallas. Federal agents at the hospital actually drew their guns against local police and officials to seize the President’s body for shipment to Washington, instead of allowing the perfectly normal procedure of the local jurisdiction autopsying the body. Why?"
"Every year, as Thanksgiving and the Holiday Season roll around, we must all face the inevitable sight of politicians commending America, its military, its public servants, the spirit of giving, family, brotherhood, apple pie, and all the rest of the traditional subjects of adulation that only the misanthropic or unpatriotic would ever deride. ... Yet neglected by most official hosannas sung for those whom we presumably owe our loudest thanks are the greatest public servants of them all."
http://thestressblog.com/2007/11/22/giving-thanks-to-the-market/
"For two years the harvest time failed to bring forth enough to feed the people. Indeed, many starved and many died of famine. Faced with this disaster, the elders of the colony gathered, Governor Bradford tells us, and decided that another year, and they would surely all die and disappear in the wilderness. Instead, they decided to divide the property and fields of the colony, and gave each family a piece as their own. Whatever they did not use for their own consumption, they had the right to trade away to their neighbors for something they desired instead."
http://www.fee.org/in_brief/default.asp?id=1721&year=2007&month=11
"Of all the Muslim countries created after World War I, only Turkey succeeded in expelling Western occupiers to achieve a modern statehood that many consider miraculous. Today, its treatment by the U.S. as a backwater pawn has roused the nation to defiance: 86 percent of all Turks now hold a negative view of America."
http://www.antiwar.com/orig/berga.php?articleid=11937
"Nixon's quick-fix brought such a crisis of confidence by the end of the ‘70s, gold prices shot above $800 per ounce — and it took double-digit interest rates to prop up the greenback and restore the world's faith in America's paper promises. The real crisis, however, the crisis built into the very system that allows the U.S. to print money that no one else can refuse in payment — was it merely delayed and deferred? Are we now facing the final endgame in America's postwar monetary dominance?"
http://whiskeyandgunpowder.com/Archives/2007/20071120.html
"As we approach the new year, a fresh crop of overseas crises threatens to spring up, like mushrooms after a rain, and the prospects for peace on earth, this holiday season, are dimmer than ever."
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=11930
"Fallujah has become a vast open-air prison, accessible only through biometric scanning, [patrolled] by the bristling military force that left it in ruins, with expressions of dissent tightly controlled and punished, its crippled economy at the mercy of exploiters, war profiteers and corrupt officials. The city is 'calm' because it has been beaten into submission and kept under armed guard."
http://www.chris-floyd.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1358&Itemid=135
"What do the current Pakistani political crisis, Israel's September air strike against Syria, and Iran's continued pursuit of nuclear enrichment all have in common? All three events reflect the aggressive policies adopted by the George W. Bush administration to deal with the growing threat of nuclear proliferation."
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=40157
"Well, either nuke 'expert' Bunn doesn't know what he's talking about, or Levy doesn't, or – what is most likely – none of the so-called experts know what the hell they're talking about."
http://www.antiwar.com/prather/?articleid=11955
"For the most part, Rome was accustomed to paying off each of its former soldiers with land and whatever they needed to farm it. America bestows upon its obsolete heroes—who, increasingly, have had to resort to welfare and food stamps just to feed their families during their enlistment—mysterious diseases, homelessness, and despair. Today, it's claimed that about one homeless man in four is a military veteran."
http://www.ncc-1776.org/tle2007/tle444-20071118-02.html
"Mary Anne's private life afforded her much joy. She and George were very happy together. He was constantly looking to protect her from her friends and critics alike. In 1859, they purchased their first home: Holly Lodge at Southfields. By this time the secret of George Eliot's identity wasn't very secret. Herbert Spencer and John Chapman had informed many of the members of the literary circle in London that George Eliot was none other than the unprepossessing Mary Anne Lewes."
http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/collections/projects/eliot/middlemarch/bio.html
"Back in Ithaca, he resumed his work until finally, in 1926, he succeeded ('I went to the telephone and told my wife that I had crystallized the first enzyme', he wrote in an autobiographical note)."
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/1946/sumner-bio.html
"Along with fellow actors Lon Chaney, Bela Lugosi and Vincent Price, Boris Karloff is recognized as one of the true icons of horror cinema, and the actor most closely identified with the general public's perception of the 'monster' from the classic Mary Shelley book, 'Frankenstein'."
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000472/bio
"Music was his consuming interest, and he considered himself a guy who was a 'craftsman'; a tunesmith, who loved working to find the melody that he felt fit one of the many song ideas that were forever buzzing around in his head."
"Until 1961, space travel was only the fantasy of science fiction writers. In that year, fantasy became reality as the United States and the Soviet Union both launched men into space. On May 5 of that year, a Redstone rocket launched America's first astronaut, Alan Shepard, beyond the earth's atmosphere, into space."
http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/she0pro-1
"In the cavernous underground parking area of the sprawling Fabcola Home Shopping Centre, a police cruiser flashed its lights, blipped its siren and cut across an old white sedan, forcing it to pull over near a trolley rank. The police officer driving the cruiser was six hours into what had been an uneventful shift."
http://www.sunnimaravillosa.com/node/1256
"Is this just another case of hero debunking in an age of cynicism, in which authentic virtue is a myth and there is no one to admire? I don’t think so. What’s at stake here is the reputation of leaders, who are a special breed. The state organizes itself in order to celebrate itself. It rules with the consensus of society, which also desires to celebrate the state and its leaders. The head of state has to work very hard not to emerge from this conspiracy as a hero. ... The film provides a credible alternative history, but whether or not this is the true story, the message is one we need to hear: power corrupts."
http://www.mises.org/story/2789
"It was a lot of fun, especially the amazing fight with the dragon at the end.... Grendel, by contrast, didn’t strike me as quite right.... As for the human characters, the ability of computer animation to convey human facial expression has improved dramatically...."
http://praxeology.net/blog/2007/11/24/geat-geek/
"A tear in the paper appears when you run your cursor over the 'Mobsters Fight for Dominance' headline, and if you peel that corner back it reveals 'Ha Ha Ha' scrawled underneath. Clicking on the 'Ha Ha Ha' takes you to The Ha Ha Ha Times, the Joker's mock version of the paper's site. More on that in a bit ..."
http://movies.ign.com/articles/837/837447p1.html?RSSwhen2007-11-23_110100
"On November 7, acclaimed chef, bestselling author, and outspoken TV host Anthony Bourdain came to Washington, D.C. to plug a new book based on his Travel Channel series, No Reservations. Reason.tv talked with Bourdain about foie gras bans, smoking bans, and other nanny state interventions."
http://reason.tv/video/show/155.html
"Though the bill is expected to pass the House, some Senators claim suddenly bringing back thousands of deceased Americans might send the wrong message to America's enemies. 'The tide in Iraq is turning,' Sen. Joseph Lieberman (ID-CT) said. 'American men and women dying in droves has worked thus far—it is not time to abandon this strategy.' Congress is also expected to begin drafting legislation that would completely heal all 28,385 wounded U.S. Soldiers."
http://www.theonion.com/content/news/proposed_bill_would_bring_4_000
"In a special pre-Thanksgiving radio address broadcast from the White House, President George W. Bush asked his fellow Americans to join him in giving thanks for the following things: ... 'Let’s be thankful that Pakistan will have free and fair elections, and maybe someday we will, too.' "
http://www.borowitzreport.com/archive_rpt.asp?rec=6799
"Thanksgiving is a time for far-flung family members to reunite with each other and share in holiday cheer at the airport. "
http://www.theonion.com/content/video/americans_enjoying_thanksgiving
Flash animated cartoon video w/audio
http://www.markfiore.com/darn_dictator_0
"Taking up an Uzi in my trembling hand, I am suddenly brave and bold enough to bellow, 'What in the hell is going on here? Inflation in prices is freaking roaring all around us, and yet there is no panic? This is the stuff of nightmares!'"
http://www.dailyreckoning.com/Writers/Mogambo/DREssays/MG112107.html
"So on this Thanksgiving, I offer the following thought: if you are white, male, straight and comparatively affluent, you indeed have much to be thankful for. If you are not, eh. Not so much. This is not to say that virulent racism (and/or sexism and/or sexual identity discrimination and/or classism) is the entire story of America. Obviously, it is not. But a viciously ignorant and destructive racism is a foundational element of our history, and its life is far from spent today. Its lethal effects can be seen in every area of our nation's pursuits and activities. It distorts, cripples and sometimes destroys individual lives beyond number."
http://powerofnarrative.blogspot.com/2007/11/racist-nation.html
"In debating the morality of prohibiting drug use, one often happens upon the position that drugs should be banned because they’re dangerous. For many opponents of prohibition, this is an infuriating argument. ... But arguments from indignation rarely win debates. Therefore, we should calmly examine the position advanced by the paternalists, in order to see whether it has any merit. We’ll hopefully show it is not completely defective, but that it can’t lead us to any justification for prohibition."
http://www.strike-the-root.com/72/shahar/shahar7.html
"Firefox 3 beta 1 delivers an outstanding improvement to the user experience. Unlike Firefox 2, which was a bit light on new features, Firefox 3 is practically overflowing with shiny new goodies."
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20071120-afirst-look-at-firefox-3-beta-1.html
"Many persons of religious persuasions assail atheism without truly understanding it. What they attack is not atheism as such, but rather a straw man constructed by themselves and consisting of every possible idea that they do not advocate."
http://www.quebecoislibre.org/07/071118-3.htm
"Racism is always, everywhere, an expression of ignorance. And in almost every case, this is a willful ignorance, a deliberate blindness induced by fear, by greed, by anger, by the projection of one's own base and chaotic nature (the common lot of all humanity) onto some scapegoat. "
http://www.chris-floyd.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1356&Itemid=135
"We're freaking doomed! Perhaps the most terrifying, and easily-predicted thing about all of this is the incredible amount of stuff that is going to be dumped on the taxpayers ... Yikes!"
http://www.dailyreckoning.com/Writers/Mogambo/DREssays/MG111907.html
"Regardless of the specific facts of a given divorce, the father is generally treated as useful only for making the initial biological contribution to conception and then to provide regular child support payments once his children are seized by the State. Oh, and we shouldn't forget the father's value as the object of a State-created cult of ritual execration."
http://freedominourtime.blogspot.com/2007/11/judicial-war-on-fatherhood.html
"The conductive nanotubes act as tiny wires, shuttling electrons from hydrogenase molecules as they drive hydrogen-based chemical reactions. Reacting hydrogen with oxygen releases electricity and could therefore offer a greener way to power cars, for example. Splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen offers a way to store electricity generated using technology such as solar panels."
"Looks like the Goo-goo-googlers are going to bid for a swath of the 700 MHz spectrum after all. Though the revenue engorged G-men could probably pay the $4.6 billion minimum bid out of petty cash, some analysts say they may need a wireless partner to pull off instant nationwide access. Then again, this is Google we're talking about. Even their failures are better than most companies' successes."
http://weblog.infoworld.com/robertxcringely/archives/2007/11/google_spectrum.html?source=rss
"[B]eing a good citizen means not threatening your neighbors. Unlike Microsoft, an increasing number of companies which sell open and closed source products that leverage open-source technologies are committing broadly to not assert their patents against the open-source software ecosystem. In contrast, Microsoft will not make patent grants or commit to resolving interoperability issues with the open-source software community as a whole."
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