My fellow teetotaler gives a righteous rant on the Obama administration’s hypocritical drug policies: “it’s not a god damned joke! People who smoke marijuana must be set free. It is insane to lock people up.”
“I’d go Rothbard one further. Why is the criterion for de facto government status the amount of profits directly subsidized from state revenue? What about corporations that function within a web of state regulatory protections, and artificial property rights like Bill Gates’ ‘intellectual property,’ without which they couldn’t operate in black ink for a single day. Anyone who’s read much of my work for any length of time knows that I consider the entire Fortune 500 a pretty good proxy for such de facto branches of the state. As I already argued in an earlier post, the largest corporations are so intertwined with the state that the very distinction between ‘public’ and ‘private’ becomes meaningless.”
"President Obama’s inability to simply state whether he’s for or against gay marriage is unacceptable," Obama said during a spirited 30-minute address in which he sharply criticized the president for failing time and again to articulate his beliefs.
¡Yo Soy 132!
Also: http://americancynic.net/log/2012/6/4/north_america_is_stirring.html
A good interview with Kristian Williams about abolishing the police and stuff.
“Without a concept of mutual aid, solidarity, and common struggle against an oppressive system, libertarianism is no more than a way to whitewash privilege and sweep injustice under the rug of 'free choice'. It’s not enough to defend a hollow freedom, because people need more than that. We can help each other achieve more than just freely choosing the best in a set of options the powerful and wealthy provide us.”
George Donnelly’s account of being attacked and framed by US Marshals while filming his friends passing out jury nullification pamphlets outside a federal courthouse. This is the kind of thing that will make you hate cops.
Illustrating the difference between direct- and indirect-action.
Police behaving poorly at political protests.
Three members of Pussy Riot are serving two year prison sentences for creating this video.
An English interview with some members of Pussy Riot, an anti-Putin, feminist-punk, Russian performance group. In Feburary several [alleged] members were arrested after the group performed a "punk prayer" in a Russian Orthodox church. Three members were convicted of "hooliganism" for the act and sentenced to two years imprisonment.
"Fortunately, it won’t work. If you think the music industry has a hard time combating file-sharing, just wait till the old-line manufacturing companies try to prevent hundreds of thousands of hardware hackers in neighborhood garage factories from replicating 'pirated' industrial designs on CAD files from The Pirate Bay.
"This is a desperate, last-ditch effort by the rentier classes, the lords of scarcity who’ve lived off our sweat for five thousand years, to stave off their inevitable demise."
“The best currently available public aggregate data on drone strikes are provided by The Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ), an independent journalist organization. TBIJ reports that from June 2004 through mid-September 2012, available data indicate that drone strikes killed 2,562-3,325 people in Pakistan, of whom 474-881 were civilians, including 176 children.[3] TBIJ reports that these strikes also injured an additional 1,228-1,362 individuals. Where media accounts do report civilian casualties, rarely is any information provided about the victims or the communities they leave behind.”
See also Kevin Gosztola’s summary: http://dissenter.firedoglake.com/2012/09/25/life-for-pakistanis-in-us-drone-war-detailed-in-new-report/
[May 25, 2017]: The livingunderdrones.org domain is currently not resolving. But the Standford project page and the wayback machine cache are available:
“And your old buddy Ronald Reagan! Now there’s a lesson in liberty for you. On one side of People’s Park there is the State of California with its right of eminent domain. It took the land. I would say it stole the land. How, I wonder, do you describe the right of eminent domain? On the other side are people who have an exotic notion about ownership. They don’t think it should be exercised at the point of a gun or a bayonet. They worked that land. They homesteaded it. They owned it in a sense far deeper than any government proclamation. Think of it that way: a scrap of government paper on one side; real people on the other, and your old friend Ronald Reagan, so help us, now supporting that scrap of paper against the people, with as much bloodcurdling diligence as any man you ever fought in the political arena. Senator, are you really sure you want to be a deputy sheriff for state power? That’s just what you are on the other side of the fence at the People’s Park!”
Green Party Candidates for President, Vice President Arrested at Presidential Debate | The Dissenter
Jill Stein pulled a Ralph Nader.
“Mormonism is not so simple as a quirky version of American conservatism, and both Mormons themselves and their fellow Americans would do well to notice.”