Friday, February 20

Christopher Lempa is the guest editor today.

 

A Juggernaut of Destruction

"For most people the state is still the country they love for the freedom it permits them.  It is the entity that is trying its best to “do something” to fix the mess it created, which it blames on the market for failing to function under its impediments.  The something it does is more intervention."  Column by George F. Smith.

 

Taylor, Ghadafi, Ex-CIA Agent Organized Arms, Diamonds Smuggling Co.

“A retired Italian agent of the United States Central Intelligence Agency ( CIA ) joined then NPFL rebel leader Charles Taylor, and others, to organize an enterprise to smuggle weapons into the West African sub region.”

 

Kyrgyzstan Parliament Votes to Close U.S. Air Base

“The Kyrgyzstan parliament voted Thursday to close a U.S. air base that the Pentagon had hoped to use to expand NATO operations in Afghanistan and reduce the need to ship supplies through a dangerous corridor in Pakistan. But U.S. officials said they have not given up hope on a deal to keep the base open.” ( Washington Post)

 

Recession Ups US Demand for Third World-Type Loans

“Sokoloff and Powell are among thousands of Americans using microcredit, a financing system originated in the Third World , to help open small businesses or get through rough spots. While the dollar amounts are much bigger in the U.S. than the tiny loans in developing countries — some for less than $10 — the principle is the same: a financial stake that lets people in need better their lives.”

 

Market Anarchism: Government Regulation and the Financial Crisis

“Kyle Burris speaks to local anarchist activist William Gillis, and historian Shawn Wilbur, about the theory know as Market Anarchism, or Left Libertarianism.  They discuss the role government plays in the current economy, and also take a historical look at government's affect on unions and health care in the US .” (Audio)

 

Questions and Answers Regarding Liberty and Property

Brad Spangler on liberty and property.

 

Punk Band Sticker Causes Bomb Scare

“Traffic was shut down at a portion of Memphis International Airport after police confused a sticker for punk band This Bike is a Pipe Bomb for a real threat.”

 

Facebook Terms of Service Compared With MySpace, Flickr, Picasa, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Twitter

“With today’s outrage over Facebook’s newly altered Terms of Service at its peak, I figured I’d do a quick comparison of their terms of service as regards user-uploaded content to the terms specified by other social networking sites, just to see if said outrage is fully justified. It looks as though the finger-pointing at the Bush robots.txt file wasn’t justified, for instance, and I was guilty of spreading that story.”

 

Killing Special

“Some friends and I were recently talking about special things from our childhoods and we realized that most of what we really loved and remembered were not toys or possessions, but experiences.”

 

What Invasive Species Are Trying to Tell Us

Les Gibson takes me out to teach me how to hunt, which is what he calls fishing. Despite the fact that every public beach in Queensland, Australia, has been periodically closed this season due to blooms of box jellyfish, and despite the fearsome saltwater crocodiles living here, Les strides confidently into the bay with a pair of 10-foot-long bamboo spears and his wooden woomera, the multipurpose Aboriginal atlatl, or spear-thrower.”

 

Nutrition and Biodynamics: Evidence for the Nutritional Superiority of Organic Crops 

“While it is generally acknowledged that pesticide residues in food and drinking water may be a bad thing, the conventional wisdom still holds that organic food is no more nutritious than conventionally grown food. A stunning lack of interest on the part of government and university researchers is in large part to blame for this situation. What is behind claims about the nutritiousness of organic food and how does biodynamic food stack up against the rest of the pack? Let's take a look at the evidence.”

 

Wikileaks Forced to Leak Its Own Secret Info

“What's Wikileaks, the net's foremost document leaking site, supposed to do when a whistle-blower submits a list of email addresses belonging to the site's confidential donors as a leaked document?”

 

Public Schooling #2: Criminal Texting

Rad Geek on texting while in custody.

 

New Atlas Shows Dying Languages Around the World

"Only one native speaker of Livonian remains on Earth, in Latvia . The Alaskan language Eyak went extinct last year when its last surviving speaker passed away.  Those are just two of the nearly 2,500 languages that UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, says are in danger of becoming extinct or have recently disappeared. That's out of a total of 6,000 world languages."

 

Born Red

A photo blog.