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"The only honest basis for a free and healthy society is a population that generally accepts responsibility for their own lives and those of their families, works together in voluntary cooperation to achieve their goals, and actively participates in the free market. A lot of people say they agree with this, more or less, but I wonder how that translates into everyday life."
http://www.thepriceofliberty.org/08/01/07/editor.htm
Reader - Do You Speak Thuggery or Freedom?
http://www.rcreader.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=12465&Itemid=42
"The quick answer is, 'No, not if the demand for money remains the same.' If unions succeed in wage hikes, and employers raise the prices they charge consumers to maintain their own profit margins, and the supply of money remains the same, then something else has to 'give.' Either the prices of goods and services in nonunion sectors have to fall and offset the union sector hikes, or people's cash balances need to fall, in terms of their purchasing power. Remember, it is a mistake to think that the workers are sucking money out of the economy...."
http://www.mises.org/story/2839
"The Real ID Act, which Congress passed as part of an emergency spending bill in 2005, is the result of recommendations from the 9/11 Commission. Chertoff reiterated Friday that the program is necessary in part because all but one of the hijackers in the September 11 attacks carried government-issued identification cards that helped them remain in the country illegally."
http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9848924-7.html
"As many libertarian thinkers have noted, devotion to the state is often closer in character to the cult of a god, complete with sacred rites and symbols, than it is to a secular organization. This is blatantly obvious in the case of literal god-kings like the Pharaoh of ancient Egypt, and in the case of ideologies like Marxism and fascism, but it is present in less extreme forms of statism as well--in the idolatrous fixation on national power, national symbols, and the presidency of the Bush-era Right, or the loving, all-powerful, all-knowing, all-good therapeutic welfare state envisioned by the Left."
http://www.strike-the-root.com/81/markley/markley1.html
"The media has gone into overdrive trying to whitewash Hillary Clinton's inexplicable defeat of Barack Obama in the New Hampshire primary and sideline questions about vote fraud, with the latest excuse being that Clinton's name appeared above Obama's on the ballot paper. In reality, Clinton's reversal of a 10-13 point pre-polling deficit to Obama is highly suspicious and smacks of vote fraud, especially considering the fact that the New York Senator gained a crucial 7% swing thanks to provably vulnerable Diebold electronic voting machines. In addition, the head polling clerk of the town of Sutton was forced to admit that they completely failed to count 31 votes for Republican candidate Ron Paul, initially reporting his final tally as zero. "
http://www.truthnews.us/?p=1612
"According to the U.S. State Department, 307 people were killed worldwide in international terrorist attacks in 2003. The Bush administration endorsed and helped finance an anti-drug crackdown that killed more than seven times as many people in a single country as were killed by all the international terrorists in the world that year."
http://www.fff.org/freedom/fd0710c.asp
"In the latest example of overzealous policing gone fatally awry, a member of a Lima, Ohio, police SWAT team shot and killed a young mother and wounded the child she was holding in her arms during a raid aimed at the woman's boyfriend, who was alleged to be selling drugs from the residence. "
http://stopthedrugwar.org/chronicle/518/lima_ohio_swat_team_kills_young_mother
"The system is a system of power for the sake of power, and to be used by those with power and not afraid to use it. It is not a system for undermining or challenging the establishment; it is a system that maintains the status quo, and keeps challenging thoughts as far away as possible. Change, in the radical sense, is only possible through radical measures. Liberty can be restored only through immediately and without hesitation getting rid of the full extent of the system of power – not through working from within trying to tame it."
http://www.strike-the-root.com/81/bylund/bylund1.html
"The fault for despairing, dilapidated urban ghettoes lies not in the pressures of the market, nor in the character flaws of individual poor people, nor in the characteristics of ghetto subcultures. The fault lies in the state and its persistent interference with poor people’s own efforts to get by through independent work, clever hustling, scratching together resources, and voluntary mutual aid."
http://www.fee.org/publications/the-freeman/article.asp?aid=8204
"I view our political system (and that of most countries) as malfunctioning. It is dysfunctional, root and stem, by its very constitution and setup. Furthermore, its rules and organization guarantee that its malfunctioning grows worse over time. The system will break down. When that occurs, the odds are that it will be replaced by a close relative, another system that does not work properly."
http://www.lewrockwell.com/rozeff/rozeff189.html
"The state does not only mean power, it also means this power will always be used in the interest of those who keep it. It should therefore not be surprising or strange that challenging ideas are opposed, hindered, and thwarted whenever necessary. It also should not be a surprise that those with power would use whatever means necessary to maintain status quo - and to crush those who oppose power and how power is used."
http://www.perbylund.com/blog/?p=40
"In the year since CAN launched, it has sponsored a half-dozen sliding scale, sold-out workshops to encourage other acupuncturists to adopt the community-supported model. The CAN-website (www.communityacupuncturenetwork.org) offers a directory of Community Acupuncture Clinics—currently 80 of them—and a forum where practitioners can share professional problems, tips, and experiences."
http://www.yesmagazine.org/article.asp?ID=2108
"Every day, another study declares that a certain activity -- eating the wrong food, not exercising enough -- increases your risk of getting a disease. The problem is the data may not apply to a particular individual. That's why some smokers live long lives and some thin people die of heart attacks, as their unique combinations of genes and lifestyles lead to varied health outcomes. Predictive, or personalized medicine takes a different approach by looking at an individual's genetic and physiological profile to assess risk. "
http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/news/2008/01/tethys
"That's why, no matter how satisfying it is to work for a candidate like Paul, and no matter how much hope he has brought to the freedom movement, we can't afford to invest ourselves solely in him, or to put all of our eggs in his basket, as it were. Intelligent beings prepare for the future, and that includes making plans right now for after the election."
http://www.ncc-1776.org/tle2008/tle450-20080106-02.html
"The medical establishment, in fact, has taken way too much time to understand that the Internet is a disruptive innovation that has overturned the status quo. It has leveled the playing field between expert and novice -- in this case, doctor and patient. While some doctors like Haig may find that challenge threatening to their status as an expert, the Web is now providing the kind of information doctors need to be aware of if we want to continue to be good at our job, and the kind of trends that can help patients be smarter and healthier."
http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2008/01/10/web_doctor/
"Although Hayek himself never, as far as I know, applied this thinking to foreign policy, it applies beautifully. Just as central planners can't know how much, and what kinds of, steel to produce, they can't know which leader in a foreign country to support. None of them, even the most brilliant and informed of them, has enough knowledge. The odds are, therefore, that by meddling in those countries' affairs, they will do more harm than good."
http://www.antiwar.com/henderson/?articleid=12165
"Edmonds claims in the Times that even as she was providing evidence of moles within the US State Department, the Pentagon, and the nuclear weapons establishment, who were providing nuclear secrets for cash, through Turkey, to Pakistan's intelligence agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, agencies within the Bush administration were actively working to block investigation and to shield those who were committing the acts of treason."
http://www.counterpunch.org/lindorff01072008.html
"In 2002, the year of the now-notorious CIA torture videos filmed in the agency's secret prisons, high-level Justice Department lawyers told Alberto Gonzales, then the counsel to the president, and Bush himself that the commander in chief could ignore the Geneva Conventions' prohibitions on the torture of prisoners."
http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0802,hentoff,78811,6.html
"It's not necessary to romanticize the American past in any way to consider the legacy of these last years grim indeed. Let no one tell you that the institution of a global network of secret prisons and borrowed torture chambers, along with those 'enhanced interrogation techniques,' was primarily done for information or even security. The urge to resort to such tactics is invariably more primal than that."
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080121/engelhardt
"[F]or years the major parties and their allies in the media have worked hard to exclude 'fringe' candidates from third parties or other wackos from foisting their dangerous opinions on unsuspecting voters. Consequently, voters have been well protected over the years from loony proposals such as the eight-hour day, abolition of slavery, and an end to whatever imperialist adventure we may have been involved in at the time."
http://www.strike-the-root.com/81/welch/welch1.html
"Just so you know, I don't think the controversy over the Ron Paul newsletters is over. My basic position remains as I stated earlier, that Paul, at least, paved the way for this controversy by carelessly lending his name to people who, in the absence of his oversight, then used it to add legitimacy to their bigotry. If you won't defend your own good name, who will?"
http://www.tuccille.com/blog/2008/01/ron-paul-issue-continues.html
"Edmonds contends that an international nuclear smuggling ring, associated with the intelligence agencies of Pakistan, Turkey, and Israel, has been permitted to operate in the U.S. with impunity. Our government, she claims, knew all about it yet, in order to placate the foreign governments involved, allowed a vast criminal enterprise to carry out its activities, including money laundering, narcotics trafficking, and espionage involving efforts to steal U.S. nuclear technology."
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=12166
"This weekend, Bloomberg sat with David Boren, the former Oklahoma senator who convened the meeting of middle-of-the-road types designed to launch Bloomberg's candidacy. One of Boren's most enduring gifts to America was George Tenet, who served as Boren's chief of staff before going on to become director of the CIA. ... Also present at the meeting and mentioned as a possible Bloomberg running mate was Sam Nunn, the ex-senator from Georgia who, as head of the Senate's Armed Services Committee, never met a weapons system he didn't want to buy. And then there is Bloomberg's most famous adviser, a man we never seem able to get away from, that old warmonger Henry Kissinger. "
http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0802,robbins,78813,2.html
"Many different bosses, in many different firms, make different guesses. Some of the firms are profitable, some are not. No one knows what specific choices led to increased profits, or to bankruptcy."
http://www.econlib.org/library/Columns/y2008/Mungerfirms.html
"Life is a continuous process of trial and error. We try to learn from our setbacks and enjoy the successes. When we attempt to do something in concert with others, we collectively learn from failure or share in the joy of accomplishment. Today, we can all take pride in doing something well. In addition, I believe we are faced with a special bonus – a success that we can also learn from."
http://news.silverseek.com/TedButler/1199736334.php
"Gold, which used to be a symbol of the greed of empires, has ironically become a grass-roots revolt against the 'imperial' management of money by the state. The Spanish conquistadors must be turning in their graves—and Peru, the world’s sixth-largest producer, is getting its revenge centuries after massive amounts of gold passed from the hands of the dictatorial Incas to the hands of the Spanish colonial bosses."
http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=2096
"These community efforts to bring alternate software to Internet Tablet devices demonstrate the power and versatility of open, Linux-based devices."
"Any fuel that needs government help to make it in the marketplace is uneconomical and represents corruption. Take ethanol. The only reason anyone is making it is that the tax system treats it more favorably than gasoline. A special interest — the corn farmers supported by the food processor Archer Daniels Midland — favor the creation of this artificial market. There’s no other reason for it. Ethanol doesn’t save energy, once you account for how much energy is required to make it, and it has its own environmental drawbacks. "
http://www.fff.org/comment/com0801d.asp
"On their own, people and market organizations can redirect their approach as conditions change and our knowledge improves, but once a government policy gets set in stone, it develops a coercively-funded economic base. Special interests grow up around the policy (think of the military-industrial complex or the War on Drugs) and then change becomes extremely difficult – no matter how wrong and damaging the policy turns out to be. "
http://www.strike-the-root.com/81/allport/allport1.html
"Bears beware. The New Deal of 2008 is in the works. The US Treasury is about to shower households with rebate cheques to head off a full-blown slump, and save the Bush presidency. On Friday, Mr Bush convened the so-called Plunge Protection Team for its first known meeting in the Oval Office. The black arts unit - officially the President's Working Group on Financial Markets - was created after the 1987 crash."
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/main.jhtml?xml=/money/2008/01/07/ccview107.xml
"Government health care fails to control expenses. The combination of an aging population, technological advances and unconstrained consumption has led to an unsustainable growth in costs. ... The Congressional Budget Office reports that over the past 30 years, in comparison to the nation’s gross domestic product (GDP), health care spending has more than doubled. Furthermore, the CBO predicts that it will double again by 2035, to more than 30 percent of U.S. GDP. These trends would improve if medical resources were consumed with more direct personal participation in the cost of those decisions."
http://www.acton.org/commentary/424_whats_the_matter_with_socialized_medicine.php
"The defense budget is a wealth transfer to investors, managers and employees of military contractors. Since so much of the country is in on the take, at least geographically, you might wonder how that works - it recalls the miracle of the loaves and fishes. That’s where deficit spending comes in. Today’s taxpayers take a hit, and tomorrow’s do too."
http://highclearing.com/index.php/archives/2008/01/06/7686
"Most of the leading Democratic Presidential candidates are ambiguous, at best, about ending the war in Iraq if they win. Why? In part, because just as the neo-cons now dominate Republican circles, so the Democratic Establishment is in thrall to the neo-liberals. Both cabals of neos favor a world-dominating American empire, run of course by themselves. We are reminded once again that while there may be, at least on paper, two parties, there is one Establishment. It does not look favorably on ending the games off which it feeds."
http://www.lewrockwell.com/lind/lind132.html
"I am an American voter. I don't like the military-industrial complex, but I was taught that American isolationism caused World War II. I am an American voter. I feel the government is too big, except when I feel it isn't big enough. I am an American voter. I hate pork-barrel spending, but want my Congressman to get more federal dollars for our district."
http://www.partialobserver.com/article.cfm?id=2790
"Iraq might well be the ultimate manifestation of the conservative life of the lie. When it became evident that the fake and false WMD rationale could not be relied upon to justify an invasion of a country that had never attacked the United States, conservatives didn’t skip a beat, quickly shifting to their secondary 'We did it for democracy' rationale for the invasion. Never mind that at the same time they were funneling millions of dollars of U.S. taxpayer money into the coffers of Pakistani military strongman Pervez Musharraf, one of the world’s most brutal unelected dictators. "
http://www.fff.org/comment/com0801c.asp
"You need to know about how in 1962 I was a half-wild country kid of sixteen in the wilds of King George Country, Virginia, and drove a derelict ’53 Chevy that shouldn’t even have started but in fact went places that would have terrified Rommel’s panzers at their brazenest. (You may think you don’t need to know this. Well, you do. It’s like, you know, real history, and American.)"
http://fredoneverything.net/KingGeorgeDays.shtml
"The Insurrection Act and Posse Comitatus Act aim to deter dictatorship while permitting a narrow window for the president to temporarily use the military at home. But the 2006 reforms basically threw any concern about dictatorial abuses out the window."
http://www.counterpunch.org/bovard01092008.html
"[A]lmost every child in America used to leave home every day for two thirds of the year and attend an institution called a 'school,' the alleged purpose of which was to prepare him for adult life. Every day in living memory, big yellow buses did most of the hauling--over 400,000 of them, traveling four billion miles a year, consuming about 400 million gallons of diesel oil, to take the kiddies to be taught that there was a carbon-fuel shortage and pollution problem."
http://www.strike-the-root.com/81/davies/davies2.html
"Nat Hentoff was and is an intellectual. Moreover, he is a liberal intellectual, out of a liberal tradition that predated my generation's, one grounded not in sensitivity but in tolerance, a word I once snickered at but which—at a time when the right has adopted much of the prickliness and busybodiness of the left—is starting to look pretty darned good to me."
http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0802,barra,78810,6.html
"In short, it just doesn't make any sense for the Iranians to have done what they're accused of doing, and yet it does make perfect sense that an administration such as this one – which has been gunning for Tehran, lo these many months – would create an 'incident' in the run-up to launching an attack."
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=12189
"[I]t took until December 2006 for eight Marines to be charged: four enlisted men with unpremeditated murder, and four officers with dereliction for covering up or failing to report the killings. These indictments helped the Marines create the impression that those responsible for Haditha were rigorously prosecuted. Yet the four charged with murder were not the only four who pulled triggers that day. And the four officers charged in the cover up were not the only four who lied. ... They have committed awful and criminal acts, but their guilt cannot be easily separated from those who are the architects of the war."
http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/3461/the_fog_of_war_crimes/
"[A]s much as one might be tempted to laugh at the bizarre theatrical accounts of Sunday’s incident involving small Iranian boats and U.S. naval ships in the Strait of Hormuz, this is—as my old Russian professor used to insist—nothing to laugh. The situation is so reminiscent of what happened—and didn’t happen—from Aug. 2-4, 1964, in the Gulf of Tonkin and in Washington, it is in no way funny."
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2008/011108a.html
"The truth about the 'good war' is to be found in compelling evidence that the 2001 invasion, widely supported in the west as a justifiable response to the 11 September attacks, was actually planned two months prior to 9/11 and that the most pressing problem for Washington was not the Taliban's links with Osama Bin Laden, but the prospect of the Taliban mullahs losing control of Afghanistan to less reliable mujahedin factions, led by warlords who had been funded and armed by the CIA to fight America's proxy war against the Soviet occupiers in the 1980s."
http://www.countercurrents.org/pilger110108.htm
"[W]e can offer you a summary of her life which only really began when she was 13 and she heard the voices for the first time, and which ended when she was 19 on the stake."
http://pagesperso-orange.fr/musee.jeannedarc/her-life.htm
"He was the second of nine children of Landsford and Laura Colby Ingalls. Ingalls is better known as 'Pa' from the Little House on the Prairie books by Laura Ingalls Wilder."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Ingalls
"He found himself possessed of a philosophy which he was later to label 'Inhumanism,' a consistent, thorough-going world-view based on his scientific insights, paced by astronomic perspectives, and inspirited by a mystic sense of immanent divinity. For him, the world became the ongoing self-discovery by God, who unfolds in the secrets of atoms and galaxies all the possibilities of being."
http://www.jeffers.org/biography/bio.html
"Slim had the biggest hit of his career in 1966 with 'Baby, Scratch My Back.' Harpo described it 'as an attempt at rock & roll for me,' and its appearance in Billboard's Top 20 pop charts prompted the dance-oriented follow-ups 'Tip on In' and 'Tee-Ni-Nee-Ni-Nu,' both R&B charters."
http://www.bluesharp.ca/legends/sharpo.html
"Jefferson’s radical yet practical plan for decentralizing government. His 'single most profound contribution to American political thought,' in Crawford’s phrase, was explicated in a series of letters in 1814-16. He proposed that almost all governmental powers devolve to 'ward republics,' five or six miles square, which the country could rely upon for 'the eternal preservation of its Republican principles.' Crawford abhors the enlistment of historical figures in present-day crusades, but Jefferson’s ward-republic idea, though firmly set in a place and time, offers us a way out of Empire—a path of refreshment, a revitalizing end to our torpid condition."
http://www.amconmag.com/2008/2008_01_14/review1.html
"We caught 'Juno' on Saturday night, and we're telling everyone to go see it. The lead character, Juno, is played by a young actress, Ellen Page, who should, if there is any justice in the Hollywood world, become a huge star." [I agree about Ellen Page. Plus the movie was directed by Jason Reitman, the director of Thank You for Smoking. I also saw Juno this week and recommend it highly: great dialog, excellent characters, extremely well-acted and directed.]
http://emergencybackupdog.blogspot.com/2008/01/go-see-juno.html
"To sample the old Earle, listen to the title track of his 1988 album Copperhead Road. The narrator, a Vietnam vet from a long line of moonshiners, comes home from the war and decides to get into the marijuana business. The song moves through three generations in three verses...." [It ranks as one of my favorites.]
http://www.reason.com/news/show/123917.html
"The ambitious tale features an alien race known as the Overlords who come to humanity's salvation, helping us to build an utopian society. The catch? They look like demons."
http://movies.ign.com/articles/844/844997p1.html
video w/audio Very Funny
"In response to critics who claim Bush is a lame duck and plans to pass the responsibility of helplessly watching the collapse of society onto the next president, Bush said he is 'still the commander in chief,' and remains dedicated to solidifying America's legacy before the darkness takes hold."
http://www.theonion.com/content/news/bush_begins_preparations_for
"After Hillary’s success in New Hampshire, Matt Taibbi feels like he’s been diagnosed with cancer."
http://www.comedycentral.com/motherload/player.jhtml?ml_video=147285
"Speaking to reporters in Las Vegas this morning, her eyes noticeably watery, Mrs. Clinton said that her election eve crying jag would be scheduled for 4 PM EST on January 25. But the newly lachrymose junior senator from New York indicated that her South Carolinian waterworks would only be one stop on an ambitious tear-drenched campaign schedule leading up to SuperDuper Tuesday on February 5, an itinerary which she and her aides are calling her 'Sniffling Tour'."
http://www.borowitzreport.com/archive_rpt.asp?rec=6816
"For six decades the guiding lights at FEE have understood that at best politics is the trailing, not the leading, edge of social change. Until a critical mass of people understand that liberty is moral and practical, and demand that the state back off, the politicians will continue to give them shoddy theater instead of respect."
http://www.fee.org/in_brief/default.asp?id=1809
"Jean-Paul Sartre famously declared that 'Hell is other people.' Sartre got it wrong, or perhaps he was hanging out with the wrong people. The emerging science of happiness has found that the single biggest determinant of our happiness is the quantity and the quality of our relationships."
http://www.csmonitor.com/2008/0107/p09s01-coop.html
"A new study reveals that Medical Marijuana can be an effective treatment for cancer, that is the word announced by doctors in Germany who concluded that this clarification of the mechanism of cannabinoid action may help investigators to further explore their therapeutic benefit."
http://www.salem-news.com/articles/january112008/cancer_treatment_11008.php
"There will always be some unemployment in a market in the same way that there are houses that are empty and not selling and resources that are not being used for production. This isn't due to market failure but to individuals who have the freedom to lower their asking price, provided they are permitted by policy to do so and businesses are free to negotiate wages freely."
http://www.mises.org/story/2844
"Ron Paul and his supporters may be a bit loopy, but they are 100 percent correct in insisting on some type of audit of the NH results—not because Hillary hacked the vote (I currently think there are better explanations for the results than vote hacking), but because such audits should always occur as a matter of course. Again, when you use an electronic voting system, you must audit the results if you want to have confidence in them."
"The inside is a normal PC, but the outside casing is made out of material that's 50 percent plant-based materials, and 50 percent regular plastics. To make it, they take regular ears of corn, process it down to corn starch, and turn that into a polymer alloy. Fujitsu says it cuts down on carbon dioxide emissions during the manufacturing process by 15 percent."
http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9846039-7.html
"Of course it's popular, especially when the market is already pricing in a 0.50% cut in interest rates by the Fed in a couple of weeks, if not before! Therefore, any government debt bought now would go, theoretically, up in price if the Fed lowered interest rates! Popular? Of course it's popular! What in the hell did you THINK would happen? Hahahaha!"
http://www.dailyreckoning.com/Writers/Mogambo/DREssays/MG010908.html
"The FBI routinely failed to pay telecom companies promptly for providing phone and internet lines to the FBI's impressive domestic surveillance architecture -- resulting in at least one phone company cutting off a [foreign] intelligence wiretap until the FBI paid its bill, according to an audit released Thursday."
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/01/fbi-wiretap-cut.html
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