I quite enjoyed this piece of journalism on the American libertarian movement. I liked how the author used Déjacque as the communist foil to the "libertarian" capitalists of the Cato Institute. I guess she chose him because he coined the term "libertarian," but it's good to see a crazy anarchist who was not sexist like Proudhon or already well-known like Kropotkin get some mention.

"The trial revealed that CPD infiltrators Mehmet Uygun and Nadia Chikko, known to the activists as 'Mo' and 'Gloves,' helped plan and instigate the crimes. They plied the defendants with alcohol, getting them drunk on multiple occasions, helped purchase gasoline for the Molotov cocktails, and even cut up a bandanna to use as a wick."

"Unless you’re a southern Coloradan with roots in the area, or a union member well-versed in the hard-fought rights of fellow workers or a history buff who has delved into books on the topic, you could easily not know that in the height of the so-called Progressive Era, the state of Colorado killed scores of strikers at the behest of the world’s richest family. Most U.S. history schoolbooks don’t mention Ludlow. Those that do generally treat it as a blip."

Josef Stalin interviewed by HG Wells [1934].

I loved reading this interview. I've never read Stalin before (partly because I find his politics to be atrocious), but it turns out he was very good at explaining Marxism; and Wells, with his "Anglo-Saxon Socialism" and mishmash of liberal sociology and worship of order for the sake of order, was very good at making Marxism sound appealing.

(Mirror: http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1934/07/23.htm)

"This weekly round of deportations at the NWDC comes as Ramon Mendoza Pascual and J. Cipriano Rios Alegria continue their hunger strike in medical isolation, under solitary confinement sentences."

"The only player in the game unworthy of “civil” is the defendant, because the object of the game is to put him in prison. And that’s why judges don’t find cops to be liars. It’s the same reason judges grow disgusted with criminal defense lawyers who won’t let the wheels of justice grind smoothly. We mess up the game."

“The Scriptures are clear that God condones the use of deadly force in killing whenever we are threatened,” Eipper said.

"In 1971, I was part of a group of activists called the Citizens' Commission to Investigate the FBI who broke into a small FBI field office in Media, PA. I trained myself as a locksmith and used tools I made to pick the lock to the office door."

"As a group, our goal was strictly to reveal to the public what those inside the movement already knew from first-hand experience: the FBI was not fighting crime they were fighting change."

"This Day in WikiLeaks was created on November 8, 2011 as a daily blog for news related to WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning, and other matters of transparency, whistleblowing, and surveillence. Its mission is to create an accessible, regular, and accurate source for WikiLeaks news."

"The drawbacks of using police sweeps to deliver people to social services are especially relevant in Arizona, where the length of mandatory jail sentences start at 15 days and increase each time a sex worker is convicted."

I keep finding quality articles here. Paleoconservative is the best kind of conservative.

Hobbes was right. Without the government monopoly on violence, life is nasty brutish and short. The moral of Takhar Province: it is the fear of the greater power of the state that keeps us in line. The moral of Beirut: injustice is better than Civil War. The moral of New York: abandoning state control is a political decision, as is reclaiming it. The moral of Basra: the return of stability will be welcomed everyone of no matter what political affiliation, except perhaps the gunmen.

"This is a list of notable online encyclopedias that are accessible on the Internet."

"Although the call that led Texas investigators to the ranch was proven to be a hoax, CPS removed 439 children as a precaution. The subsequent litigation to reunite the children with their families and the prosecution of 11 church members, including leader Warren Jeffs, dragged on for years. Ten of the 11 were convicted on child sexual assault charges."

Judges, prosecutors, and police who invoke the fear of violence to commit their monstrous acts of violence are incredible hypocrites.

Here's an interesting fellow. Watt became the first British convert to Mormonism by winning a foot race, he was a writer of Pitman shorthand and took down and edited several volumes of Brigham Young's sermons, he invented a phonetic orthography called the Deseret alphabet, and he had six wives. He was excommunicated from the church after joining the Godbeites.

100 years ago today in Ludlow, Colorado.

Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludlow_Massacre

"as long as our own freedom is secured through the segregation of others, into concrete abysses – even, or especially, if these others remain invisible to us – it is a false sense of freedom, and it diminishes our own capacities for critical awareness."

Ha. I had no idea Grooveshark depends on DMCA's safe harbour provisions. I assumed they had some sort of clever licensing scheme worked out with music publishers.

Pretty animated graphs! Suicide has become the number one violent cause of death.

3 Quarks Daily is one of my favorite link-aggregator logs on all of the internet. It is strange and charming, and, um, top-ish. They post a lot of poetry, but that's usually easy to ignore. On Monday's they post original content.

The fact that this guy is talking to Salon on a cellphone while in solitary gives me the impression that the Free Alabama Movement has done some impressive pre-strike organizing.

LA and Palo Alto have joined the list of cities where it is illegal to sleep in a car.

LAPD shot to death a homeless man in Hollywood while I was writing my essay about police who kill the homeless.

"A man facing deportation from Sweden has been granted a temporary reprieve after fellow passengers aboard his flight to Iran prevented it from taking off by refusing to fasten their seat belts."

Piketty's "Capital" has been getting a lot of attention. It sounds interesting and like he has done the tedious empirical work that I would never do. I'll have to read it... after I finally read Graeber's "Debt".

This is a link to the first of a four-part review. Find the next three parts immediately following it in Wolff's weblog archives.

A trio of essays against "anarcho-capitalism" and "national-anarchism".

Michael Hudson defines some terms.

The Denver Post also reports "Six arrested in downtown Denver Protest": http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_25505064/six-arrested-downtown-denver-protest

There was also a "not one more deportation" pro-immigration march scheduled earlier in the afternoon on Saturday, but I haven't seen any reporting on it. I guess no one got arrested.

"Employees at Gillman's Hardware confirmed Monday that despite the company's small size, single location, and the fact that it has been family owned and operated for over 35 years, it still manages to treat its staff as if they worked at a faceless multinational chain."

This sort of thing is tempting -- but it's also a lot like providing your identification before robbing a bank. Still, he's not in jail yet!

"And I was struck anew that this case was all talk, talk, talk. Church said this. Chase said that. Betterly said this (although not much.) Right up until at the prompting of the undercover officers they poured some gasoline in some beer bottles and stuffed a torn rag in the top, they hadn’t committed any crime.

"What they would have done with those “Molotov cocktails”— a scary word for a weapon that any dumb kid can make at home as many have — we’ll never know. But I will always believe the NATO 3 never posed as great a threat to the freedom of the people of Chicago as those who assigned police officers to infiltrate dissident political groups in search of potential “criminals”— and by those who chose to define those criminals as terrorists."

The late Peggy Pascoe is the author of "What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America," an award-winning history of miscegenation law. In this essay she points out some of the parallels between the fight for racial equality and the fight for sexual equality under marriage law:

"I would argue that it is virtually impossible to understand the current debate over same-sex marriage without first understanding the history of American miscegenation laws and the long legal fight against them, if only because both supporters and opponents of same-sex marriage come to this debate, knowing or unknowingly, wielding rhetorical tools forged during the history of miscegenation law. The arguments white supremacists used to justify for miscegenation laws--that interracial marriages were contrary to God's will or somehow unnatural--are echoed today by the most conservative opponents of same-sex marriage."

And don't forget how Google illegally conspired with Apple and Intel and friends to suppress wages: http://goo.gl/1Piuez

(Also, I like how Google's top lobbyist, Molinari, shares the name of the originator of market anarchism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustave_de_Molinari)

"Yes, the cops raided Daniel’s home because they wanted to find out who was behind @peoriamayor, an account that had been shut down weeks ago by Twitter. When it was active, Daniel used it to portray Jim Ardis, the mayor of Peoria, as a weed-smoking, stripper-loving, Midwestern answer to Rob Ford. The account never had more than 50 followers, and Twitter had killed it because it wasn't clearly marked as a parody."

"Mexican food was also associated with anarchism and union organizing. Tamale vendors were blamed for the Christmas Day Riot of 1913, when police raided a labor rally in Los Angeles Plaza. Milam Plaza in San Antonio, where the chili queens worked in the 1920s, was a prominent recruiting ground for migrant workers. Customers could eat their chili while listening to impassioned speeches by anarcho-syndicalists of the [Industrial] Workers of the World and the Partido Liberal Mexicano."

Here is a nice online/ebook version of Orwell's Homage to Catalonia. I've started reading this on my Kindle.

"On that morning three officers from Raleigh Police Department prevented us from doing our work, for the first time ever. An officer said, quite bluntly, that if we attempted to distribute food, we would be arrested."

That's right. Somebody called the cops on Jesus.

It wouldn't be the first time.

"today the Justice Department announced its findings that the Albuquerque Police Department (APD) has engaged in a pattern or practice of excessive force that violates the Constitution and federal law."

This outline provides a good summary of the first volume of Giorgio Agamben's homo sacer project. But it doesn't include any quotations from the werewolf chapter, which was one of my favorites.

"The purpose of the investigation, of course, may just have been to discourage activism, but in this case it had the opposite effect: People were inspired by the activists’ refusal to testify against one another in the face of what even four years ago looked to be a clear instance of a law enforcement agency overreaching."