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"[I]f
experience
teaches
us
anything
at
all
it
teaches
us
this:
that
a
good
politician,
under
democracy,
is
quite
as
unthinkable
as
an
honest
burglar.
His
very
existence,
indeed,
is
a
standing
subversion
of
the
public
good
in
every
rational
sense.
He
is
not
one
who
serves
the
common
weal;
he
is
simply
one
who
preys
upon
the
commonwealth."
~
H.L.
Mencken
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Carpe Libertatem Thursday, July 2 |
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Cheryl Cline is the guest editor today. STR will be on hiatus until July 6. In the meantime, you can check out the archives and the links. |
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Photo courtesy of A Walk Through Durham Township, Pennsylvania
Things to Do While Boycotting July 4 "It doesn’t matter whether you think [the Founders'] action was a good, bad, or indifferent thing – they had no business doing it for anyone other than themselves. It was entirely outside the realm of legitimacy for them to make such a decision on everyone’s behalf." Column by Alex R. Knight III.
Gen.
Odierno Concedes Troops Remain in Iraqi Cities, Won’t Say How Many
Troop
Movements Are Not a 'Withdrawal' Dennis
Kucinich reminds us that “this is not the same as a withdrawal of
Trying
to Understand the 4th of July from an African-American Perspective
My
Top 10 Frightening Scientific Papers The
list includes the Milgram Behavioral Study of Obedience and the infamous
Stanford prison experiment.
California
Poised to Issue IOUs to Vendors, Local Governments
Pirates:
No Leftist Utopians, They
Joe
Stiglitz fears that the current economic crisis will drive developing nations
to abandon free markets.
The
1967 movie How
to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying satirizes the
corporate ethos.
The
fee-for-service model doesn’t explain healthcare’s skyrocketing costs.
Taxes
don’t do it.
The
Internet helped make Ben Casnocha a libertarian.
Stef the war hero. (video, Editor's pick)
A
photo blog.
In the DVD player: Breaking Bad, Season 1 (pretty good), Mission Impossible (decent), Weeds, Season 4 (decent), I Am David (decent), Radio Bikini (interesting), In the Valley of Elah (pretty good), Home Front (decent), Frontline: Inside the Meltdown (recommended), Valkyrie (recommended), White Light, Black Rain (strongly recommended), Rendition (highly recommended), Bottle Shock (pretty good), Religulous (recommended), Flags of Our Fathers (pretty good), The Ground Truth (highly recommended), Frontline: The Medicated Child (recommended), I.O.U.S.A. (highly recommended), The Wire, Seasons 1-5 (highly recommended); see recommended movies
On the nightstand: Anatomy of the Bear by Russell Napier
Playing on Pandora or in iTunes: "Find Me, Ruben Olivares" by Red House Painters
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Supporters Matthew Bredeson Glen Allport Polo Leyendecker Donovan Conrad Gretchen Vanek Rex Bell Scott LeGear Jon Davis Matthew Bryan Bill Ross Old Will Thirteen Anne Berg Jacques Martell Gilberto Heredia Derek Henson Joe Stamper Donna Mancini Dick Mancini Less Antman Brent McElroy Mike Powers
Guest Editors Cheryl Cline Robert Fredericks Anthony Gregory Derek Henson Chris Lempa Mike Powers Don Stacy
Helpers Log from Blammo Roger Young Scarmig
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The Root Cellar Recent columns by Root Strikers America
Closing Her Door to Freedom "We so feared a Stalin or Hitler that we ignored endless assaults on our liberty by idealistic home-grown statists and the seductive narcotic of ever more government goodies buying our acquiescence. What makes Americans’ surrender to statism so shameful is that we freely chose this course in direct contravention of our founding principles." Column by new Root Striker Douglas Young.
Waste and Corruption Out of Thin Air Column by Les Lafave.
"We
have the serious opportunity in our hands right now of terminating the era of
government absolutely, and so of removing from the human race the threat of
ever more brutal tyranny ending only with
Resisting Power and the Curse of Greyface "No longer need the Anarchist dream of a utopian millennium as he struggles to outwit the State – for he can find freedom in the contest, by simply knowing that freedom is everywhere for those who dance through life, rather than crawl, walk, or run." Column by Marcel Votlucka.
Behind the Wire: An Insider's Reflections on Gitmo "I admit that I do not have, nor am I aware of anyone having, all the information necessary to determine the guilt or innocence of each person detained in Gitmo. Therefore, I honestly confess that I have no basis on which to claim justification for my actions in continuing the confinement of fellow human beings while I was there." Column by new Root Striker Daniel Lakemacher.
"The problem of incarceration is systemic, exponential, horrifying, colossal and deadly. The correctional industrial complex is only one tyrannical aspect of the vast, modern spawn of centuries of institutionalized lust for power." Column by Retta Fontana.
Do You Really Want Freedom, Or Are You Just Kidding Yourself? "The people who take actions such as those police officers or that vice principal, on behalf of the State, very likely learned those lessons at home or at school, as children themselves. Each time one teaches those closest to him from this playbook, he deepens the chasm between freedom and the routine acceptance of the State’s naked authority. He also lengthens the time it will take to fill that chasm." Column by Wilt Alston.
"Violence goes both ways. One ideologies’ heinous crime cannot be another’s isolated incident." Column by Michael Kleen.
I Don't and Won't Vote: Here's Why "I have a very hard time believing that grown adults, quite able to grasp the concepts I laid before them, do not understand what they are intentionally doing by being so foolish, shortsighted, self-degrading, and destructive as to continue voting in political elections." Column by Alex R. Knight III.
Recommended "Freedom comes from within. It does not come from without. It does not come from a charismatic leader. It does not come with a set of instructions....It does not come from being given your freedom only after you prove yourself to your parents, teachers, pastors, or other authority figures. It does not come from any God who demands obedience before He promises blessings (or threatens curses). It does not come from delineated rights. It does not come from The Constitution. It is you from whom freedom springs. It is you in whom freedom thrives. No one gave it to you. Like Dorothy and her ruby slippers, your way home was with you all the time." Column by B.R. Merrick.
Recommended "Only when individuals give up their humanity and principles to kill for the king can the obscene drama of war begin. Only when the state witnesses the fact that individuals are willing to surrender their benevolence and decency to fight, kill and die whenever ordered can the state feel confident to attack still more liberties that individuals hold dear." Column by Roger Young.
Time for Government to Finally Ban Itself Recommended
"After centuries and millennia
of tyranny, war, mass murder, torture, corruption, legalized theft, unjust
imprisonment, economic devastation, and other needless evil, isn't it finally
time we banned the cause of all
that horror? Can we
not find the strength to end this
intrusive, violent, coercive scam – this conspiracy
against love and freedom, this formalized über-criminal empire, this sick
enabler of Hitler and Stalin and Kim Jong-Il and so many other psychopaths,
this boot on the neck of ev
A New Strategy for Liberty, Part 1 An open letter to Ron Paul supporters. Column by Stewart Browne.
A New Strategy for Liberty, Part 2 MUST READ Secession in three easy steps. "Just as the rules of basketball favor those who are tall, strong, and have a good jump shot, the rules of democracy favor those who want to grow the government. For decades, we have been playing by Goliath's rules, the very rules that allowed Goliath to rise to power in the first place. The only way we can play away from our weakness is to get out of the electoral politics game altogether." A brilliant column by Stewart Browne.
Ten Questions for Everyone Who Supported Obama "Obama supporters, you got everything you wanted on Election Night. Obama won big, the Democrats won big in Congress, the Democrats cleaned up at the state level. But the only change you got was even more of what you hate. An escalation in our wars overseas, blatant, disgusting government windfalls for the wealthiest Americans, and an overwhelming sense that a group of oligarchs have partnered with the President to enrich themselves at everyone else's expense." Column by Stewart Browne.
It's Time to Get Passionate About Not Voting Recommended
"The
non-voting libertarians won the ethical debate years ago, but the voting
libertarians are still more numerous and visible because they want to get out
there and do something. We need to share the difficult truth with
these people that their efforts in the political arena are hopeless. We
need to remind them that libertarians have already won the hearts and minds of
Further Adventures in the Quantum Wrongness Field, Economic Crisis Edition MUST-MUST
READ "If
printing up trillions of dollars to 'stimulate spending' is going to save the
economy, why do we ever put up with even the slightest recession? Just print
that funky money, boys and
girls! Give every citizen a high-speed color laser printer and require everyone to download the Official Dollar Jpeg Files and then print, print, PRINT those
dollars nonstop, day and night! Every man, woman, and child would be a
multi-billionaire, and economic activity would be red-hot forever!"
Column by Glen Allport.
Recommended "What's being done is (a) to fabricate some money that has not been saved by postponed consumption and is not owned by someone who earned it (because fiat money isn't earned by anyone and stolen money is certainly not owned by the thief) and then (b) to spend it on projects that seem likely to give jobs (of some kind . . . any kind) to people who will vote, come next election--so that, presumably, the cycle can be repeated." Column by Jim Davies. (Editor's pick)
Recommended "Laws are made by people who are, for the most part, the very scum of the earth; if something they impose on society is ethically beneficial, therefore, the coincidence involved is considerable. They are drawn from those with an urge to dominate, who have quite often never done a day's work in their lives....Instead of being benevolent, disinterested and morally upright, therefore, lawmakers are normally psychologically freakish, kleptocratic, mendacious, murderous, irrational and hypocritical." Column by Jim Davies.
Why Does the World Feel Wrong? Recommended "Moreover, we should consider that the state not only acts like a recruitment center for psychopaths, but that psychopaths probably invented the state to take advantage of the rest of us. I can give you no better explanation for the existence of an organization that fails in every ethical dimension and invokes psychopathic thinking at every turn than this." Column by Will Groves.
MUST READ Column by Glen Allport.
MUST READ "The America of Henry David Thoreau, of Mark Twain, of Walt Whitman, of Thomas Jefferson and Tom Paine and the millions more who brought this nation into being and kept it alive in their hearts and, to a large extent, on the ground, for so long – that America, the real America, the 'asylum for mankind' that Paine wrote about so eloquently – that America is gone, fading already into myth and legend, gone soon even from living memory as the last citizens who remember America's dying embers wink out from this world, one by one." Column by Glen Allport.
Grand Theft America: "All Your Wealth Now Belong To Us" Recommended
"By now, the original idea of
Recommended "That is directly where my pushing of a button on an electronic voting screen leads. It leads to the threat of violence from the government that is encouraging my participation. I am...engaging in a violent act by silently threatening those with whom I disagree." Column by B.R. Merrick. (Editor's pick)
Recommended
"The
state’s money removes the idea of limited means, and since it’s controlled
by the state, it removes the idea of limiting the state.
Given the federal influence on education, media, and just about
everything, should we be surprised no one is on center stage calling the
government a counterfeiter?
I Don't Mind If You Keep Voting, But Do You Mind If I Keep Laughing While You Do? MUST READ "I don’t care who the candidate is. I don’t care what issues to which he seems to gravitate. I don’t care about his record, his leadership qualities, the apparent first-lady-ness of his wife (or her husband), his insider-ness or his outsider-ness, his race, his height, his weight, how well he speaks, how wonderfully he photographs, the nation of his birth, how likely it might be that he’s fun to drink with, or his appreciation for unique uses for a fine cigar." Column by Wilt Alston. (Editor's pick)
MUST READ "Can gold prevent such horrors [the democide of the 20th Century]? No, not entirely, but gold can and does reduce the likelihood of such horrors when used as a nation's money. Gold as money provides a strong limiting factor on the resources available to government, and in so doing, gold saves and improves the lives of millions." Column by Glen Allport. (Editor's pick)
Not to Worry, They're on Our Side Recommended "It’s pointless to look at their campaign platforms. They’re made up of words, and words to a politician are like drops of water on a hot skillet – they sizzle, then they’re gone. We know a priori both candidates are certified, homogenized, lobotomized statists, otherwise they wouldn’t be the two contenders." Column by George F. Smith.
Notes on Democracy: Mencken Vents His Spleen for His Era and Ours Recommended "Read onward as Mencken’s delightful microscope tears into the presidencies of Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Franklin Roosevelt with relish—exposing them and their adoring constituencies for what they are. If Machiavelli took off our blinders and exposed the rancid underbelly of tyrants in The Prince, Mencken did the same for democracy in this gem of a book." Column by Lawrence Ludlow.
MUST READ "When we think of a truly free market...we understand that we do not have to work for years and years, and give up thousands of hours and tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, to satisfy our wishes. If I want to shop for vegetarian food, say, I do not have to spend years lobbying the local supermarket, or joining some sort of somewhat ineffective advisory board, and pounding lawn signs, and writing letters, and cajoling everyone in the neighborhood – all I have to do is go and buy some vegetarian food...." Column by Stefan Molyneux.
The Loopy Dynamics of Feedback Recommended "In any rational reality there would be some kind of reciprocity between the actions of humans in relations with each other. Somewhere along the line there arose the idea of 'sovereign immunity.' And even though we realized a couple of centuries ago that the idea of 'sovereigns' having power over others is really, really stupid, we still think it is all right for hired thugs to be completely devoid of any responsibility for their actions." Column by Nonentity.
MUST READ "The statist looks at a problem and always sees a gun as the only solution – the force of the state, the brutality of law, violence and punishment. The anarchist – the endless entrepreneur of social organization – always looks at a problem and sees an opportunity for peaceful, innovative, charitable or profitable problem-solving." Column by Stefan Molyneux. Spread this one far and wide.
Scapegoating and the Anti-Immigrant Hysteria MUST READ "...Americans, like most people, would rather not look too closely at their unattractive traits. We like to pretend that we are self-sufficient, honest people. But our desire to rely upon and preserve the welfare state reveals the truth about who we really are. Instead of facing up to the theft and self-deception that surround our support of the welfare state in its various manifestations, we simply project our traits onto people who seem different because they are poor and desperate and have nowhere else to go to make a better life. Furthermore, when we accuse these immigrants of 'breaking our laws' to come here, perhaps we should remember that the kind of laws they are breaking are the kind that were firmly in place in the Soviet Union before it fell – laws against making a profit, earning a good living, and creating one’s own destiny. In other words: laws against freedom." Column by new Root Striker Lawrence Ludlow.
MUST READ "I like this analogy because it reveals how voting is an act of submission: When you no longer resist tyranny, but agree to submit to the threat or use of force and do as you are told, when you no longer question the higher authority because you are allowed to choose your supervisor. In the process you condemn your offspring and future generations to be subjects of this authority establishing an institution of tyranny that eventually is accepted unquestioningly, perhaps even celebrated." Column by Mark Davis.
Danger Is My Middle Name--And So Is Yours MUST READ "Nothing is completely safe, including eating and breathing. And if nothing is safe, then throwing people in prison for doing something that endangers them is insane, even without considering the dangers of arrest and imprisonment, which are substantial. Using coercion to "save people" from their own choices is a huge, horrifying mistake that can only lead to ever-larger disaster, because the list of dangerous activities includes everything that people might ever do." Column by Glen Allport.
Recommended "Without the United States federal government, the Fed would not exist and the money used by Americans would be gold and silver – things which could not be counterfeited constantly to supply 'money' for war, for special interests, and for other groups and purposes opposed to the interests of the average American. Nor would Americans be forced to literally borrow money – money created from thin air – from a privately-owned central bank (as our government does now) and then pay interest on it as part of the national debt. What a scam!" Column by Glen Allport.
Recommended "What have we bought with all that money? Thousands of dead American soldiers, many thousands more injured, 655,000 (and counting) dead Iraqis, cancer-causing depleted uranium poisoning in Iraq (and DU particles are being spread around the planet on the winds), a ruined Iraqi infrastructure (which had already been wrecked in the first Gulf war and which a decade of sanctions kept in poor repair), millions of Iraqi refugees fleeing the mess we have made of their country, an increased threat of terrorism in America, widespread use of torture by our own government, a sharply lower opinion of America by people in other nations, and (on a separate invoice, for additional money) a police state here at home." Column by Glen Allport.
MUST READ "But what you’re doing, what you’ve been doing for 20 years, is telling people that the Klan can be good if only the right person is in charge. You’re giving people false hope, because the Klan can never be good." Column by Stefan Molyneux.
E-Passport: Doorway to the Panopticon MUST READ "The logistics of trying to interconnect 189 governments’ databases quickly escalates well beyond the realm of 'nightmare' into some kind of Lovecraftian singularity of technological horror." Column by Scarmig.
MUST READ "Immigrants weren’t in charge when we lost our freedoms. White guys were. Millions of 'illegal immigrants' threaten you somehow? Compared to your neighbor who votes Democrat or Republican and demands his Social Security? Puh-lease!" Column by Stefan Molyneux and (new Root Striker) Wilton Alston.
A Short Guide to Market Anarchy Deconversions Recommended "[Market anarchy] means everyone is allowed to live the way they want, according to their value system. Everyone has different value systems, and all that statism does is impose the ruling class value system over everyone, creating social warfare. In an M.A., there would be no more need for social warfare because everyone would be free to live the way they want." Pamphlet by Andrew Greve, Aaron Kinney, David Pearson and Francois Tremblay.
The Two Great Evils and the Hammer of Infinite Power Recommended
"There is no doubt that the
Hammer of Infinite Power is coming; the leading edge is already here. It smote
Murdering the Group, Saving Individuals MUST READ "It’s the same with immigration, the national debt, welfare, the war on terror and all the other state-driven and media-obscured questions of the day. Obsessed by details, blind to the obvious, we are like swimmers in shark-infested waters worrying about cramps." Column by new Root Striker Stefan Molyneux.
How We Can Get There From Here MUST READ "So the main task to be completed in my opinion is to so educate every member of society one by one as to convince him that a zero government society is the only kind consistent with his human nature and the only one that will maximize his pleasure in life; and that must be done by reason. So the two obstacles to surmount are the vast numbers involved, and the ugly fact that most people have been so well indoctrinated that they are barely open to reason; they live rather by myth, prejudice and superstition." Column by Jim Davies.
MUST READ "How has it come that we no longer see each other as people? How can we reverse this trend? The next time you are asked for identification, consider the ramifications of participating in this system. Who owns you?" Column by NonEntity.
MUST READ "And so it was 'ordained and established'--the wind was sown. Today, we reap the whirlwind." Column by Jim Davies.
MUST READ "The question of who gets to make decisions about the disposition of certain property is central to understanding freedom. Who gets to decide what activities are too dangerous for you? Should I get to decide what activities are too dangerous for you? What about your neighbor? Or the majority? Or the president? Or Congress? Or some judge? In a free society, the owner of the property gets to decide how the property is used. Because you own your body, I assert that you should decide how your body is used or abused." Column by Marc Victor.
MUST READ "There is a certain suspension of disbelief attendant to those social and political theories endorsing endless and boundless murder, theft and fraud (i.e. "statecraft"); one must believe, with the naive faith of a child who believes that world hunger can be eradicated by making a law that everyone can have ice cream for dinner if they want it, that one may kill the goose bearing golden eggs and still have eggs every day for the taking. The iron laws of time, human desire, and economics are in the process of refuting that belief; its defense rings hollow, there are no believable Utopian adherents of this philosophy anymore, only those that make no pretense about wanting to kill millions of people and suck the marrow from their bones for the sake of their own glorification and what they conceive of as a better world, organized by boot heel and rifle butt." Column by Szechuan Death, who sounds like a libertarian Mark Morford.
SpyChips: How Major Corporations and Govt. Plan to Track Your Every Move With RFID MUST READ Chapter 1 of a new book by Katherine Albrecht and Liz McIntyre. You can buy the book by clicking on the link at the end.
MUST
READ "To
define anarchy as statist-government failure is such an obvious distortion of
the concept of a free society that it is hard to decide where to begin to
dismantle such thoughtlessness. I
like to begin by simply pointing out that at least four layers of
statist-government agencies still claim jurisdiction over the area known as
Serene Outlaw: Henry David Thoreau in His Second Century MUST READ "At times, Thoreau thundered at his readers like a Calvinist preacher, rhapsodized like an Indian prophet, stung like a gadfly or chided their sensibilities as a droll friend. The odd collection of essayists who write for Strike The Root, and the thousands of readers who peruse the columns there may hardly reflect on the moralist under whose portrait their work appears, but by striving to write essays on a variety of topics, many of them dedicated to the rights of individuals, they keep his standards alive." Column by Doug Herman.
Important News and Offers from Strike The Root!
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