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The 57th verse of the Tao Te Ching, by Lao-tzu (Dr. Wayne Dyer�s new adaptation, from If you want to be a great leader,
you must learn to follow the Tao.
Stop trying to control.
Let go of fixed plans and concepts,
and the world will govern itself.

How do I know this is so?
Because in this world,
the greater the restrictions and prohibitions,
the more people are impoverished;
the more advanced the weapons of state,
the darker the nation;
the more artful and crafty the plan,
the stranger the outcome;
the more laws are posted,
the more thieves appear.

Therefore the sage says:
I take no action and people are reformed.
I enjoy peace and people become honest.
I do nothing and people become rich.
If I keep from imposing on people,
They become themselves.

In the event of an aggressive war on Iran, a number of people have pledged to engage in protest. I am highlighting the petition that individuals have been signing below:

To: All Friends Of Peace And Progress
Preamble.

The Bush regime lied knowingly, openly and repeatedly in order to
justify waging aggressive war against Iraq and its subsequent occupation.
Hence, its current propaganda campaign attempting to demonize and justify
war with Iran has no credibility and is a source of great concern.

Past US governments are guilty of a long series of assaults on Iran.
In 1954, the democratically elected government of Iran was overthrown by a
CIA sponsored coup, introducing 26 years of brutal dictatorship under the
Shah - and lucrative concessions for American oil companies. From 1980 to
1988, the US government financed Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi aggression against
Iran, resulting in a million Iranian casualties and costing them $350
billion. Today, having invaded and occupied its neighbors, the US
government has a quarter million combat soldiers and mercenaries stationed
on both Iran’s eastern and western borders and three aircraft carrier led
naval battle groups lurking off Iran’s coast. Daily the Bush regime
regales the public with accusations against Iranian leadership and sponsors
sanctions against them while refusing to talk to them. Reports of current
US military incursions into Iran and attempts to destabilize Iranian
society are consistent with past US government activities.

Oblivious to domestic and world opinion and to international law, the
war criminal Bush regime conspires to instigate a pretext to attack Iran
again. It is their clear intent. We have seen this before.

Pledge.

We, the undersigned, will not further acquiesce to military aggression
against other nations by the Bush regime. In the event of an attack by US
military forces against the nation of Iran, we pledge to oppose that
aggression by our active participation in a campaign of mass non-violent
resistance, including civil disobedience, with the express intent of
impeding further aggression.

Sincerely,

The Undersigned

The link to the peitition is here.

Not only is the American Empire not even bothering to declare wars any more, but they don’t bother to declare their armies either. According to AlterNet, a new disturbing trend is arising: private armies taking the place of soldiers when there aren’t enough of them. If you think the U.S. has only 160,000 troops in Iraq, [...]

In left wing circles, it's an article of faith the reason the mainstream media are so awful is the increasing concentration of ownership. But how much does this explain? The point is usually treated as self-evident, not something to be proved. As one observer notes
"partisans of the concentration thesis, armed with their ominously tangled cross-ownership maps, have little to say when asked just how these sinister interlocks explain content. Did People magazine run "investigative" pieces on the "consciousness" industry in the days before Time merged with Warner and both ate up CNN.


Just what are we nostalgic for - the days of David Sarnoff [Shag notes: the former head of RCA whose company tried to steal credit for the invention of FM radio from Edwin Armstrong and eventually caused the latter to commit suicide in 1954] or perhaps William Hearst"?

... We certainly had less state interference in everyday life as a whole forty years ago but we also had the south-east Asian war which only ended after twenty years of slowly developing public opinion, capital punishment, and "medical" oppression of homosexuals. Compare this to the rapid escalation of opposition to empire in this century. The current decline of CBC radio (Canada's state network) has very little to do with the presence or absence of advertising. Commercialism certainly contributed to the decline of television but people have been complaining about the "vast wasteland" since the nineteen fifties. Today the same complaint centres around the strange but obvious fact that the "choice" provided by cable and satellite provides more and more of the same stuff. Passivity breeds it own problems. Whether you are viewing Monday night football or the Metropolitan Opera you are watching not doing. This is one reason Shag particularly objects to claims that the Internet is contributing to illiteracy. A thing over which we have some control must certainly be an improvement over being a mere "antenna" for prolefeed. This might be a bother to politicians and religious nuts with their crocodile tears over "free choice". These complaints seem to rise or ebb with their ability to undermine that choice for anyone they don't like and can't argue with. Such people resemble the civic politician in the movie Pleasantville. Their sleaze imbibes and amplifies the weaknesses and fears of ordinary people. Personal honesty and courage aided by democratic experience, self reliance and a moral desire to see other people as valuable and interesting is our weapon against them.

Having cleared up why we should use non-violent means, as opposed to political violence (political means) or non-political violence (violent revolution), I should explain basically how it works and dispel some myths about it. Non-violence is the most effective method to use against a violent enemy. In a war, one side can be defeated by the [...]

I saw this article in my Sunday newspaper and thought "Aha, what a great story to blog about!" Then I tried to think of something interesting to say that hasn't been said a billion times over, and failed. So I'll just post the link, and a highlighted excerpt, and put this down in the "more evidence" folder:

Paul and Laurie Lynch bought a small farm in Maxatawny Township 10 years ago. They inherited some hens from the previous owner and, more important, a 1988 township designation allowing the 8-acre Hottenstein Road property to be used as a farm even though it was smaller than the 11-acre minimum for farming.

By all means, read the entire article - the whole thing is a fascinating look at the travails one has to endure in order to try to be a small business owner. Keep in mind that the area of Pennsylvania in discussion is definitely the "Alabama" part, to paraphrase (IIRC) Carville. However, in the last 10 years during the housing boom, it is becoming increasingly suburban Philadelphia (and not without a few commuters to NYC, even!)

Minor wingnut talk radio figure Jim McQuinn out of Pittsburgh this morning confirms what most who can add 2 and 2 in order to come up with 4 already knew…

The Bush admin’s recent labeling of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist organization is part of a deliberate attempt to prepare the legal groundwork for an unprovoked attack on Iran in the very near future.

The fascists who control the US government have been aching to make such an attack for a long time. A while back, a few of us on the left put together the Iran Pledge of Resistance in response to their ongoing threat:

We, the undersigned, will not further acquiesce to military aggression against other nations by the Bush regime. In the event of an attack by US military forces against the nation of Iran, we pledge to oppose that aggression by our active participation in a campaign of mass non-violent resistance, including civil disobedience, with the express intent of impeding further aggression.

I ask readers to do three things:

1) Join us in signing the Iran Pledge of Resistance.

2) Help promote the Iran Pledge of Resistance. Tell your friends and family. Send people links. Talk about it. Spread the word far and wide.

3) Help promote jury nullification as the correct grassroots response to criminal charges for acts of non-violent resistance carried out in accordance with the Iran Pledge of Resistance. If I was on a jury, I would remember that the historical prerogative of jurors has, for hundreds of years, been to disregard any and all instructions from the judge in order to judge the justice of the law in question in addition to the facts (and mitigating circumstances) of any given case.

Cross-posted to Daily Kos. If you have a DKos account, please join in promoting the copy of the post there by logging in and using the “Recommend Diary” button in the right sidebar on that site.

This is the first known photograph of the new band The Rockingham Whigs. The band is shown here playing at a clandestine studio somewhere in the south-central U.S. As you can tell, this picture was taken with a hidden cellphone camera and is not an official release. This is exclusive to Free Association. Check back here for news of more sightings.

Photo credit: Jennifer Richman

A favorite long-out-of-print classic of historical scholarship is now online as a free PDF eBook: A New History of Leviathan: Essays on the Rise of the American Corporate State, edited by Ronald Radosh and Murray Rothbard. This is a left libertarian favorite that's little known outside of that circle, but it's easy to see why it's so well remembered.

Turning the mainstream view of the political spectrum inside out, the collection features a tag team from the radical Left and Right taking on the historical mythology of the corporate center. As the introduction by the two editors puts it, one editor, Rothbard, "is one of the intellectual leaders of the new 'right-wing libertarian movement' ... a firm believer in laissez-faire capitalism ... a free-market economist, a former contributor to National Review ... [who] favors removing the privileges of the large corporations and returning to laissez-faire"; the other, Radosh, "emerges from the ranks of the New Left ... he was an active member of the Wisconsin Socialist Club, and functioned as an associate editor of the radical journal, Studies on the Left ... a libertarian socialist ... a firm believer in the necessity of socialist revolution ... [who] favors a decentralized socialist economy". Similarly with the other contributors: for instance, William Appleman Williams and Martin J. Sklar on the New Left, and Leonard Liggio on the libertarian side.

So, what could possibly draw these extremists together? As the introduction says, "each, because of his critique of liberal ideology and concepts, has been able in his own work to transcend the ideological myths that enable the large corporations to mask their hegemony over American society." Both ideologies include an emphasis on spontaneity, voluntarism and decentralism, as well as a deep-seated and genuine opposition to corporatism -- not only to the overt power of corporations and the immediate harm they do, but to the more subtle political and ideological forms of corporate influence (which are often disguised, ironically, by anti-corporate rhetoric) and the historical roots of how they arose. And so, both groups of contributors dissent form a "Leviathan Corporate State" that is driven by an exaltation of stability and control, and which combines leftist rhetoric about helping the weak and restraining the power of business with a reality of indirect subsidies and priviliges towards corporations that cement their dominance of the economy. And so, each side takes on its own sacred cows: Radosh has the essay debunking "The Myth of the New Deal" and Rothbard trashes Herbert Hoover's "Myth of Laissez-Faire".

Now that this book is freely available, let's hope that it finally reaches a wider audience and gets both leftists and rightists to rethink their assumptions about American history and ideology.

So Abu Gonzales has resigned. I’m not impressed. The torture and violations of civil liberties will not stop. The slaughter in Iraq will not stop and the American people will continue to be coerced into paying for it all.

I’d much rather watch George W. Bush sing “Sunday, Bloody Sunday”.

Hat tip: End the War on Freedom