Table of Contents:
Note: This issue features the last "Great Individuals" section. I will have a new replacement section next issue. My blog will feature such birthdays as the occasions and opportunities arise.
If you encounter any difficulty using this document please let me know as soon as you notice. Contact information is at the bottom of this page.
I am happy to receive addresses of potential readers of Ender's Review who might like to receive a few trial issues and/or an invitation to subscribe. Or, if you prefer, please, send a link to this page or the index (which also has comprehensive source site links) to those you think might be interested.
Find all RSS feeds & e-mail lists on the Sign Up page –
or use this RSS feed for Ender's Review
"The thing that separates Silicon Valley from the east coast is that in Silicon Valley, you think almost nothing about politics. That means not only national and state politics but also politics inside organizations. Companies in Silicon Valley are transparent and non-hierarchical--if they're not this way they get snuffed. They prize above all else succeeding in the marketplace. ... In general, I don't feel--there are exceptions--the people who are in politics are worth my time. I'm much better off running my company, creating wealth, inventing technology."
http://www.news.com/8301-13578_3-9887435-38.html
"In the past, the fiat-forces of the world have been very diligent and successful in making sure that gold would never rise in the face of a falling Dow for any length of time. It seems they have lost their power. Why that is so is not hard to understand if you watch them flailing helplessly in the quicksand of their own CDO-spawns. Periods of divergence during which the Dow rose while gold fell were of course not only tolerated, but encouraged."
http://www.safehaven.com/article-9646.htm
"Since leaving office I've written about public policy from a new perspective: outside looking in. I've come to realize that protecting freedom of choice in our everyday lives is essential to maintaining a healthy civil society."
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120485275086518279.html?mod=opinion_main_commentaries
"Things will get very ugly over the next few months for the RIAA, if one disgruntled file sharing lawsuit victim gets her way. Tanya Andersen, the single mother who filed a countersuit against the RIAA after the organization mistakenly sued her for sharing music online, attempted to hold it responsible for all sorts of heavy infractions ('RICO violations, fraud, invasion of privacy, abuse of process, electronic trespass, violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, negligent misrepresentation, the tort of 'outrage,' and deceptive business practices')."
http://blog.wired.com/music/2008/03/andersen-might.html
"A growing number of political pundits are questioning America’s military efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan, and some are beginning to draw parallels to lawmakers’ much longer domestic war effort: the so-called war on drugs. The comparison is apropos."
http://www.fff.org/freedom/fd0712g.asp
"It's becoming apparent that random acts of physical violence against detainees, attended by profane verbal abuse, and followed by an attempted cover-up, constitute standard operating procedure in many local jails across this once-free country."
http://freedominourtime.blogspot.com/2008/03/leniency-is-for-powerful.html
" It's hard enough to get Americans to focus on the amazing explosion in the size of our prisons (we have 400 percent more people behind bars than in 1980) without upsetting people further by pointing to the role class bias plays in these developments. We have the highest incarceration rate in the world, and the prison population continues to grow, despite a plunge in crime rates over the past 15 years. Nearly a million Americans are behind bars for nonviolent crimes - many of which are 'crimes' only because of what political scientist Scott Lemieux has labeled 'the war on (some people who use some) drugs'."
http://www.rockymountainnews.com/news/2008/mar/05/campos-a-crisis-behind-bars/
"The folks at the U.S. Bureau of Citizenship & Immigration Services have devised a new citizenship test for those few illegal immigrants who, for some unknown reason, are actually trying to become lawful citizens. ... As a service to all, here are some actual test questions followed not by the politically correct answers but by the actual realpolitik answers that have been certified as being true based on real-life experience."
http://www.rcreader.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=12617&Itemid=42
"When did the US begin to LIE to her citizens as part of official policy? Was it in 1947, the second day after Roswell? Or was it much earlier, perhaps 1912 when the Federal Reserve rose to power and, like termites, began to destroy this archaic wooden structure called America from within? Perhaps the state began to lie in earnest in the faked war with Spain, or the faked war with Mexico, a war protested by Thoreau. Or was it long before? Or does the exact date really even matter? ... We may suffer fools gladly but rarely liars, especially official ones. The state lies as official policy. Thus, to be a Truther, in the very real sense (pre-9/11), is never to accept the official version of Anything the state tells you at face value."
http://www.strike-the-root.com/81/herman/herman2.html
"The best solution would be a government that would destroy itself. The second best solution would be a government that does nothing at all – then, at least, matters will not get worse. This is what canceling the election would do. It would introduce enough confusion and chaos to keep government from acting either domestically or internationally, which would be a wonderful thing."
http://www.mises.org/story/2910
"it's a messed-up state that systematically creates poverty through the enforcement of special privilege, and then uses welfare programs to ameliorate a small part of the poverty and inequality caused by its own policies. 'But it’s a messed-up libertarianism that looks at that situation and says, “Man, first thing we gotta do is get rid of that welfare”!' "
http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2008/03/on-dissolving-state-and-what-to-replace.html
"Government is force, its mechanisms are designed to apply that force as desired by those who control it. Its essence is disguised in order to make it more palatable. Today we speak of the 'consent of the governed' the way people once spoke of the 'divine right of kings'. ... We assume that the same people whom, as a basic premise of government, are incapable of running their own lives (or even of hiring experts to help them run their lives), ARE capable of voting into power an elite group of experts who will be able to run their lives for them."
http://www.thepriceofliberty.org/08/03/03/nathan.htm
"A True Fan is defined as someone who will purchase anything and everything you produce. They will drive 200 miles to see you sing. They will buy the super deluxe re-issued hi-res box set of your stuff even though they have the low-res version. They have a Google Alert set for your name."
http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2008/03/1000_true_fans.php
"Hackers have long been used to cranking out code in the morning and having a working prototype by the afternoon, but have been frustrated that they can't do the same with hardware. That's starting to change, and fast, driven in part by robotics enthusiasts and do-it-yourself types who are utilizing a new generation of open source hardware platforms and rapid fabrication tools."
http://www.wired.com/gadgets/miscellaneous/news/2008/03/etech_hardware
"For the first time, Americans say they would have more trouble giving up a cell phone than a traditional phone, the Pew Internet and American Life Project said in a report Wednesday. Less than two years earlier, respondents still considered their landlines the most crucial technology."
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23486819/
"Even more recently, the Federal Circuit issued an order that reveals that those judges would like to revisit the patentability of business methods as a whole, not just software patents."
http://blogs.cnet.com/8301-13796_1-9888442-79.html
"George W. Bush is the law, and he will not hear any differently from this Congress. Indeed, Bush’s claim to be the law is manifested in one thing above all others, and that is his power to torture. By defending and upholding this right, Bush shows that unlike generations of predecessors in the White House, he is King. He sets the law, and his will determines how it will be enforced and against whom."
http://harpers.org/archive/2008/03/hbc-90002574
"What business do U.S. officials have intervening in Iraqi judicial matters? But a much more important question arises: What standing does the U.S. government have to be lecturing anyone, including the Iraqis, on a proper judicial system?"
http://counterpunch.org/hornberger03062008.html
"By effectively shutting down Marshall's business, the United States has committed the censorship it condemns in other nations. Even worse, the Department of Treasury effectively shut down an international business without any type of due process. Both France and Germany followed a court process when investigating Yahoo for alleged improprieties, and the company in question (Yahoo) had the opportunity to respond to the charges in a court of law. Marshall was afforded no such luxury."
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080307-us-interferes-with-travel-to-cuba.html
"Seldom do the defenders of the government education monopoly reveal in such forthright language the true purpose of their position; they are training children to be loyal subjects of the state, not free citizens of a republic. The logic behind support for a government education monopoly and opposition to school choice is chilling and clear. "
http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/2008/03/07/loyalty-to-the-state/
"With the GOP presidential sweepstakes over, the antiwar voter – that is, the single-issue voter who conditions his support on the candidate's generally pro-peace foreign policy stance – was left with a single choice, and that is Obama. This is really the core of Obama's appeal, and not just in my case: his calls to end the war, and change our crazed foreign policy, always elicit the loudest cheers at his mammoth rallies. "
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=12475
"The biggest shockeroo, however, is that these despicable charlatans would throw a private citizen to the FBI wolves on account of his having possibly lied to them, of all people. Do they not lie to the public and to each other with nearly every utterance they make? Do they not lie routinely to their friends, their spouses, their sons and daughters, and even to their cats and dogs? Why is it that what’s good for the Clemens goose is unsuited to the congressional gander?"
http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=2139
"Of course, in the old days, the Justice Department would raise a fit about a scheme that aims to disenfranchise state legislators, and particularly those from a racial minority. However, in the Bush Administration, the Voting Rights Section will never step in the way of a plan likely to elect more Republicans to office."
http://harpers.org/archive/2008/03/hbc-90002578
"As with most issues, the senator from Arizona likes to present himself as a maverick on media regulation. ...But on the big-ticket broadcasting/telecom issues, McCain plays to big media and the telcos."
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/
20080309-john-mccain-and-the-fcc-media-ownership-fight.html
"The fundamental lesson is that property rights are not—and never have been—created by Congressional fiat. Property rights emerge spontaneously from the social fabric of a community. The job of the legislature is not to create a property system from scratch, but to formalize the property arrangements that communities have already agreed upon among themselves. A system of property rights will only be effective if it is widely viewed as legitimate."
http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/copyright-crusade.ars
"Today, butter is still viewed as our enemy in spite of the fact that hundreds of highly motivated studies have been unable to confirm a link between butter and disease. Does butter really cause disease? Quite the contrary. Butter actually [protects] us against many of the diseases on the increase today."
http://www.naturalnews.com/022793.html
"Internet companies like Google are battling with traditional telecom companies over requiring open access to spectrum, which would allow people to use whatever device they want on that spectrum."
http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9889309-7.html
"A common French weed ... underwent a form of superaccelerated evolution to cope with the difficulties of spreading their seeds in cities. Scientists ... discovered that over a period of just twelve years, the plants went from mostly producing 'dispersing' seeds that spread on the wind, to producing 'nondispersing' seeds that fall to the ground nearby."
http://io9.com/363347/plants-rapidly-evolve-new-reproductive-systems-in-cities
"Americans’ body clocks will suffer another jolt this weekend as daylight saving time returns and everyone (except Arizonans) goes back to the future by an hour. The annual ritual of springing forward and falling back has joined death and taxes as one of life’s certainties." [related article]
http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=2144
"Every winning bid in the first six auctions has been below the discount rate, usually by more than half a percentage rate. Lower rates and the cover of darkness — this is a nice deal for the banks. Bank borrowing from the Fed is so large that it is actually greater than their total reserves on hand."
http://www.mises.org/story/2905
Flash animated cartoon video w/audio
http://www.markfiore.com/doreen_downer_0
"There is no known example, in the history of the world, where a fiat currency was debased in a wild fractional-reserve multiplication by the greedy banks that did NOT end badly. And 100% of the time is as close as you can get to 'guaranteed'."
http://www.dailyreckoning.com/Writers/Mogambo/DREssays/MG030608.html
"Recall that the GDP purports to be the value at market prices of all currently produced final goods and services the U.S. economy brings forth in a year. It includes everything from hamburgers to computer software to H-bombs. Why, we might ask, should military spending bear any particular proportion to this figure? ... If the national economy produces more hamburgers and computer software next year, these economic developments in no way imply that more money should then be spent for defense."
http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=2143
"Central banks exist for the purpose of inflating the money supply in such a manner that the penalty is not borne by the major commercial lenders. Instead, the inflation is passed on to the public, who pay for it in higher prices, lost savings, and tax-funded bailouts. They also pay in less direct ways, such as unnecessary wars, lost liberty, and moral deterioration. "
http://www.strike-the-root.com/81/smith/smith1.html
"This myth, which rests on the perpetual fabricated threat of an outside enemy, has been the key to the power wielded by Bush-Cheney. It remains at the core of every official and unofficial decision made by this criminal regime, and its complicit bipartisan Washington partners. The “terrorist” threat to the US homeland, and its many propaganda variations, are now embedded fixations in the American psyche, reinforced by endless corporate media bombast."
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=CHI20080307&articleId=8262
"[W]e may see the next election counted in large part by a defense contractor. They already virtually determine the outcome of elections through their contributions and their control of the media, e.g. GE’s ownership of NBC. If this purchase goes through, they will be counting the vote in secret with no independent review."
" Over the years, I have written many essays on a whole variety of subjects, all of which I felt were important. But none came remotely close to hitting home as this one has. Undeniably, the following pages are the hardest I will ever attempt to write in my lifetime. This piece has been on my computer for almost a year now -- and I cannot begin to tell everyone how many times I have rewritten it time and again. Point blank, enough can never be said about those we dearly love and respect. For me, It would require a very thick book to truly give my parents the honorable tribute they so wholeheartedly deserve."
http://www.strike-the-root.com/81/guarisco/guarisco1.html
"Having said that, it is possible that questions of meaning are simply of a different sort to questions of matter, the physical world in which science has proven so powerful. If so, asking why there is something rather than nothing with mathematics might make no more sense than asking whether a triangle is happy or whether the rocks in the asteroid belt are friends."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/7283155.stm
"Gary Gygax, co-creator of Dungeons & Dragons and one of the fathers of tabletop role-playing games, died on Tuesday at the age of 69. He had suffered from heart problems."
http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9885383-7.html
"Listen to the heartbeat of SAGE (Semi-Automatic Ground Environment), IBM's giant air defense computer, in this propaganda ... I mean, educational ... film from approximately 1956. Weighing in 250 tons and using 60,000 vacuum tubes, SAGE 'was the largest computer ever built.' It required an acre of floor space."
http://io9.com/363385/the-worlds-biggest-computer-kept-us-safe-from-cold-war-commies
"If the American public is deluded over the surge in Iraq, it is simply ignorant of what is going on in Afghanistan. At the risk of being a 'nattering nabob of negativity,' I would argue that the United States is still losing—and ultimately will be defeated—in both of these brushfire guerrilla wars."
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2008/030508a.html
"Nothing shows the United States’s politicization of humanitarian questions and lack of concern for the people of Iraq better than its history of holds, delays, and vetoes...."
http://www.fff.org/freedom/fd0711d.asp
"While Americans have reasons to be concerned about China’s military ambitions, we should take comfort in the fact that China—along with virtually every other space-faring nation in the world—supports the proposed 'Prevention of an Arms Race in Outer Space' (PAROS) Treaty."
http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=2141
"This means that Washington will have to subject its policy choices to a serious cost-benefit analysis. We can continue, for instance, to push for renewed NATO expansion eastward or to focus on improving relations with Moscow; increasingly, we cannot do both. Choices will have to be made."
http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=9253
"Gaining notoriety for her work in the 1830's, Elizabeth continued to live in her father's London house under his tyrannical rule. ... She continued writing, however, and in 1844 produced a collection entitled simply Poems. This volume gained the attention of poet Robert Browning, whose work Elizabeth had praised in one of her poems, and he wrote her a letter. Elizabeth and Robert, who was six years her junior, exchanged 574 letters over the next twenty months. ... their romance was bitterly opposed by her father, who did not want any of his children to marry. In 1846, the couple eloped and settled in Florence, Italy...."
http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/152
"Travers' kindly, grandfatherly demeanor became familiar to filmgoers over the next 25 years, especially in films like High Sierra (1941), where he played Joan Leslie's kindly but slyly observant uncle ... but it's as the somewhat befuddled angel Clarence Oddbody assigned to James Stewart in the classic It's a Wonderful Life (1946) that Travers will forever be known."
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0871287/bio
"Paul Mauriat's 1968 cover of Andre Popp's 'Love is Blue' was the first instrumental to hit #1 on the U.S. Billboard chart since the Tornados hit with 'Telstar' in 1962."
http://www.spaceagepop.com/mauriat.htm
"In the 1960s, plastic models of many of Roth's cars, as well as models of Rat Fink and other whimsical creatures created by Roth, were marketed by the Revell model company."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_Roth
"It tells of a future society in England in which the reading of books is against the law, and in which fire departments no longer extinguish fires (since all buildings are fireproof) but set them instead--wherever books are found. The finding of books is aided by anonymous tattlers, who betray their neighbors by posting accusations in conveniently located snitch boxes. ... Bradbury didn't get it all right, of course. Our own government conditions us not by banning all books, but by monopolizing education so as to maximize control over potential authors while minimizing the number of graduates able to read functionally--so that over the course of about a century it's become barely possible to find material that raises the central question of whether or not government should exist."
http://www.strike-the-root.com/81/davies/davies9.html
"When movies are filled with human beings instead of cardboard black-and-white characters, they help viewers see things from another point of view. Nobody is all good, and nobody is all bad. Some let events turn them into bad people, and sometimes events force morally ambivalent people to make the good decisions."
http://www.partialobserver.com/article.cfm?id=2845
"Like no other Democratic candidate in this presidential campaign, Barack Obama has had an affinity for fan-launched viral videos, from a cutting spoof of Apple's famous 1984 ad to a star-studded singalong to a stump speech. But the most interesting Obama clip circulating online right now might be 'Viva Obama!,' a musical tribute cooked up by the Chicago-based marketing company Nueva Vista Media and performed by a California mariachi band."
http://reason.com/news/show/125274.html
"Fifty years ago, nobody could have imagined that one person would wield the mind-shaping power Rupert Murdoch now holds. His print and electronic media empire is in itself science fictional, so it's no surprise that scifi is full of Murdoch stand-ins."
http://io9.com/362841/science-fictions-army-of-rupert-murdochs
"Hahahaha! This is too rich! And this IMF is an organization that has 24 executive directors! Apparently, each more clueless than the last, and they want to sell our gold to make up for their incompetence so that they can keep on being incompetent. Hahahaha!"
http://www.dailyreckoning.com/Writers/Mogambo/DREssays/MG030408.html
"An FCC official clarifies new broadcasting regulations that clear the way for more nude scenes featuring the beautiful, auburn-haired Alyson Hannigan."
http://www.theonion.com/content/video/fcc_okays_nudity_on_tv_if_it_s
"Donnie opens his home to a new friend."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRnrKzOrp7M
"Calling Hillary Clinton a monster is 'odious and offensive to monsters everywhere,' said Tracy Klujian, the executive director of the Monster Anti-Defamation League, a group that monitors unflattering portrayals of monsters and miscreants in the media."
http://www.borowitzreport.com/archive_rpt.asp?rec=6842
"The government will be watching us, but we'll also be watching the government. This is different than before, but it's not automatically worse. And because I know your secrets, you can't use my secrets as a weapon against me. This might not be everybody's idea of utopia -- and it certainly doesn't address the inherent value of privacy -- but this theory has a glossy appeal, and could easily be mistaken for a way out of the problem of technology's continuing erosion of privacy. Except it doesn't work, because it ignores the crucial dissimilarity of power."
http://www.wired.com/politics/security/commentary/
securitymatters/2008/03/securitymatters_0306
"Here's the problem for democratic theory: If most people hold these demonstrably incorrect views, how can they be qualified to elect a president? They have no way to sort destructive or impossible promises from reasonable ones. As long as presidents have the power to meddle in the economy (which means meddle with us) and are expected to do so, voters ignorant of economics are unlikely to make good decisions. Incompetent voters assure incompetent candidates and officer holders."
http://www.fee.org/in_brief/default.asp?id=1931
"[T]he more the feds fight the deleveraging process - with the only thing they have at hand…more paper money - the higher inflation rates go."
http://www.dailyreckoning.com/RSS/DR030708sec1.html
"Flash memory like that used in memory cards and smaller iPods is, despite its name, the elephant of solid memory. It can store data for years without refreshing, but writes information about 1000 times slower than DRAM. New research shows that memory based quantum dots can provide the best of both: long term storage with write speeds nearly as fast as DRAM. A tightly packed array of the tiny islands – each around 15 nanometers across – could store one terabyte (1000 gigabytes) of data per square inch, the researchers say."
"[S]ilver's 'blow-off' price of $48 an ounce in the 1979-1980 cusp translates, in today's dollars, into $137.14. At $20 today, we are a long way from any market 'froth.' Ditto gold: that $890 per ounce peak we saw in 1980 dollars is equivalent to $2,542.85 today. So are we one-third to one-fourth of the distance before silver and gold top? No. Why? What's different? Simply this, and we can only speak knowledgeably of silver, insofar as gold is for Kings and we are a mere Commoner: there aren't 2 billion ounces of silver laying about in United Snakes and other government coffers to be sold below market in order to staunch the run from dollars to real money, as there were in 1980."
http://news.silverseek.com/SilverSeek/1204786680.php
"I straighten my necktie to hopefully lessen my loathsomeness before answering the question as to an alternative investment, namely gold and silver, as history proves that everyone always runs to precious metals at the end of the boom and the beginning of the bust, which I can prove with a terrific visual aid of Fred Flintstone atop a dinosaur rigged up as a crane, and he is mining gold! Gold! This is proof that gold has always been valuable!"
http://www.dailyreckoning.com/Writers/Mogambo/DREssays/MG030508.html
"Gary Gygax, co-inventor of Dungeons and Dragons, will probably be best remembered as the man who brought role playing games into the lives of millions of teenagers in the 1970s, and who helped spawn an entire industry. If you've ever rolled an eight-sided dice in a game, it's thanks to him. While his bread and butter was swords and [sorcery], he was also an avid science fiction fan...."
http://io9.com/363649/the-scifi-obsession-of-dungeons-and-dragons-creator-gary-gygax
"Microsoft Corp. on Friday asked that a lawsuit claiming it duped consumers in a Windows Vista marketing program be suspended while the company appeals a judge's decision to grant the case class-action status."
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?
command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9067400
Find all RSS feeds & e-mail lists on the Sign Up page –
or use this RSS feed for Ender's Review
Each week immediately after Ender's Review is posted at Endervidualism a small plain text note (~5K) containing a few links to the web edition is sent to ERevNote subscribers.
If you know of prospective readers, please send them a link to this page, or alternately if you don't wish to e-mail them yourself, you can e-mail their addresses to me at this address: Tom@Endervidualism.com and I will send them a message with a link to the latest issue and invite them to subscribe.
Comments suggestions and discussion on the content and structure of this review are welcome at the ERevD: EnderReviewDiscussion Yahoo group. Feel free to jump in there at any time.
Alternately, you may elect to receive a copy of an HTML e-mail object (50 - 90K). Archives of the HTML e-mail are available to EnderReview members. You may join that group or subscribe to its mailing list.