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You have a small garden, and with it you grow some of your own food. You don’t sell any of it to anyone else.

This gardening activity, however, means that you do not purchase as much food from others as you would if you didn't have the garden. It is sensible, then, for the government to have you figure out how much produce you grew, figure out the cash value of it, and pay taxes on it.

Furthermore, this gardening affected interstate commerce. Your selfish insistence to grow some of your own fruits and vegetables influences the local market, and the local market affects the statewide market, and that affects the national market. Congress therefore has the right to prohibit individuals from growing their own food. And it should, to protect jobs.

Indeed, the entire do-it-yourself mentality is terribly selfish, greedy, and harmful to the economy. When you, as you call it, “save money,” you are depriving somebody else of that money. If you like to fix cars as a hobby and you fix your friend's car, that means a professional mechanic couldn’t do it, so he's lost that income. If you cook your own meals, restaurants will go out of business. Paint your house, clean the carpet, do the laundry, move, whatever it may be - there are professionals who are better at it than you, so you are not only hurting them by not hiring them, you are hurting yourself.

The nation would really be better off if each individual focused on doing one thing well, and only one thing. If their jobs become obsolete, they would be allowed to train for something else, but not before that. People should only be allowed to learn other skills if the economy depends on them. I mean, of course people should learn how to drive and use a computer keyboard, because there aren’t enough chauffeurs and typists to go around. Maybe they should even be allowed to prepare some meals at home to keep supermarkets in business - as long as they can’t grow their own food. But the underlying point is the same: generally speaking, self-sufficiency is bad for the economy.

In fact, all of your life choices also affect your economic choices, and that in turn affects the economy. So I don't understand how people can say that the Constitution prohibits Congress from regulating your life. After all, your bad choices will be bad for the economy, and that hurts other people. That hurts the general welfare. Of course Congress should step in.

Indeed, all these people shouting “freedom” or “liberty” are just being selfish. We are free because we live in a democracy.

Okay, the above paragraphs are absurd. But I will never understand the logic of those who concede people should have the right to grow their own food, but don't have the right to grow their own medicine. Or why friends can fix each other's cars, but aren't allowed to give medical help without a license. Or why some people creatively interpret the Constitution to give the government broad powers over some aspects of our lives, but then protest when the same creative interpretation is used by other people to empower the federal government over some other aspects. Or why they value democracy more than personal freedom.

The title of this post is an extraordinary question: “Is the Bush admin assassinating USAF airmen at Minot AFB?”

I didn’t expect to be asking any such question today. Even as much as I, an anarchist, despise any form of government; my mind instinctively recoils at the very possibility that question implies — not merely from horror at the notion, but just from natural skepticism. Even so, the potential importance of this matter, if the following report is true, is very, very grave.

Mystery surrounds deaths of Minot airmen [article text follows in its entirety for archival purposes]

Six members of the US Air Force who were involved in the Minot AFB incident, have died mysteriously, an anti-Bush activist group says.

The incident happened when a B-52 bomber was “mistakenly” loaded with six nuclear warheads and flown for more than three hours across several states, prompting an Air Force investigation and the firing of one commander.

The plane was carrying Advanced Cruise Missiles from Minot Air Force Base, N.D, to Barksdale Air Force Base on August 30.

The Air Combat Command has ordered a command-wide stand down on September 14 to review procedures, officials said.

The missiles, which are being decommissioned, were mounted onto pylons on the bomber’s wings and it is unclear why the warheads had not been removed beforehand.

In addition to the munitions squadron commander who was relieved of his duties, crews involved in the incident, including ground crew workers had been temporarily decertified for handling munitions.

The activist group Citizens for Legitimate Government said the six members of the US Air Force who were directly involved as loaders or as pilots, were killed within 7 days in ‘accidents’.

The victims include Airman First Class Todd Blue, 20, who died while on leave in Virginia. A statement by the military confirmed his death but did not say how he died.

In another accident, a married couple from Barksdale Air Force Base were killed in the 5100 block of Shreveport-Blanchard Highway. The two were riding a 2007 Harley-Davidson motorcycle, with the husband driving and the wife the passenger, police said.

“They were traveling behind a northbound Pontiac Aztec driven by Erica Jerry, 35, of Shreveport,” the county sheriff said. “Jerry initiated a left turn into a business parking lot at the same time the man driving the motorcycle attempted to pass her van on the left in a no passing zone. They collided.”

Adam Barrs, a 20-year-old airman from Minot Air Force Base was killed in a crash on the outskirts of the city.

First Lt. Weston Kissel, 28, a Minot Air Force Base bomber pilot, was killed in a motorcycle crash in Tennessee, the military officials say.

Police found the body of a missing Air Force captain John Frueh near Badger Peak in northeast Skamania County, Washington.

The Activist group says the mysterious deaths of the air force members could indicate to a conspiracy to cover up the truth about the Minot Air Base incident.

Now, this is a report from Iranian media, so to give “the devil” (the US government) “his due”, it must be noted that the Iranian government has an obvious potential interest in disinformation campaigns. That alone doesn’t make this disinformation, though.

The group cited, Citizens for Legitimate Government, is an actual US activist group and the report on the Iranian web site is linked to by a headline on the CLG web site. So it would appear that is really what CLG is saying, at the very least.

Beyond that, it’s not clear. Perhaps a little digging can turn up some other reports of the individual deaths. It’s not clear how we might or might not verify that the dead airmen cited were all involved with the misplaced cruise missile nuclear warheads incident (that was so widely considered a potential “black op” gone awry or called off at the last minute).

Even if all of those details are eventually verified, it does not definitely indicate they were “rubbed out” to cover the ass of a high political official — such as Dick Cheney, for instance. Coincidences and weird synchronicities really DO happen.

The problem, though, is that Occam’s Razor potentially cuts both ways. Sometimes, the most sensible explanation turns out to be a conspiracy after all.

According to Lew Rockwell, the answer seems to be “none” (does he include himself in that assertion?). Or so he argues in his article “None Dare Call It Genocide”: To the extent anyone pays attention to this stuff, they only hear the words of the State Department spokesman: “The bottom line is that the secretary wants [...]

Everybody, try to act natural. Slowly turn, smile and wave hello at the pachyderminoids.

With his forty-fifth birthday staring him in the face, Gabe knows it’s high time he did something with his life, beyond puttering in the archive and constructing elaborate collages in his studio/study. Or maybe it’s past time. Some years back, the love of Gabe’s life left him to be the female messiah and spokes-model of the revived Saint-Simonian cult, and his current “girlfriend” is quite literally damaged goods—roughly decommissioned military materiel, in the form of a “minor military Madonna,” the cybernetic product of an experiment the Federals would dearly love to forget. She roams the abandoned military reserve that stretches from New Earth west nearly to the ocean. So does the “Man-Bear of the Saint Mary’s,” if the tabloids can be trusted, and everyone knows the woods are teeming with insect-machines. Things have arguably always been strange in New Earth, but the strangeness seems to be growing—all over the world, really.

Enter the Council of Councils (Universal Code Union, Owenite-Orthodox), who call on Gabe to attend an “Intergalactic Encounter” in the Marianas, where, in accordance with Fourierist prophecy, the ocean is turning into something very much like lemonade, and the first stirrings of the Era of Harmony seem to be repairing environmental damage that decades of anti-radiation remediation has hardly dented. Ill-prepared and armed with the most uncertain of mandates, Gabe flies off to give Radical Babelism and the Universal Code Communities a voice in what promises to be something of a replay of the Babelites favorite story.

Landing at Enewetak atoll, Gabe arrives in time to witness in person what most of us watched on tv—the terrorist attacks, the U. N. intervention, the Battle of the Lagoons—and those events send him off on a new journey, in the islands of the Free Fourierists and on the floating platforms of the Pyrate Archipelago, and there he begins his initiation in the mysteries of the Distributive Passions.

The ruling class, the political class, use war and statism generally to milk the productive class (the rest of us). Although their politicians compete against each other as gladiators in the political arena, they also exhibit their ruling class loyalties by cooperating in maintaining their system of oppression. For example, Bush is quietly advising Hillary Clinton and other Democrats on how to continue the war they all want:

Washington, D.C. - President Bush is quietly providing back-channel advice to Hillary Rodham Clinton, urging her to modulate her rhetoric so she can effectively prosecute the war in Iraq if elected president.

I picked this up from WorkPlace Blog attached to the University of British Columbia. Their source was the online version of the DesMoines Register in Iowa. Shag has reprinted part of the story here. WPB describes itself as covering issues, events and breaking news from Workplace: A Journal of Academic Labor.

A community college instructor in Red Oak claims he was fired after he told his students that the biblical story of Adam and Eve should not be literally interpreted.

Steve Bitterman, 60, said officials at Southwestern Community College sided with a handful of students who threatened legal action over his remarks in a western civilization class Tuesday. He said he was fired Thursday.

"I'm just a little bit shocked myself that a college in good standing would back up students who insist that people who have been through college and have a master's degree, a couple actually, have to teach that there were such things as talking snakes or lose their job," Bitterman said.

Sarah Smith, director of the school's Red Oak campus, declined to comment Friday on Bitterman's employment status. The school's president, Barbara Crittenden, said Bitterman taught one course at Southwest. She would not comment, however, on his claim that he was fired over the Bible reference, saying it was a personnel issue.

"I can assure you that the college understands our employees' free-speech rights," she said. "There was no action taken that violated the First Amendment."

Bitterman, who taught part time at Southwestern and Omaha's Metropolitan Community College, said he uses the Old Testament in his western civilization course and always teaches it from an academic standpoint.

Bitterman's Tuesday course was telecast to students in Osceola over the Iowa Communications Network. A few students in the Osceola classroom, he said, thought the lesson was "denigrating their religion."

"I put the Hebrew religion on the same plane as any other religion. Their god wasn't given any more credibility than any other god," Bitterman said. "I told them it was an extremely meaningful story, but you had to see it in a poetic, metaphoric or symbolic sense, that if you took it literally, that you were going to miss a whole lot of meaning there."

Bitterman said he called the story of Adam and Eve a "fairy tale" in a conversation with a student after the class and was told the students had threatened to see an attorney. He declined to identify any of the students in the class.

"I just thought there was such a thing as academic freedom here," he said. "From my point of view, what they're doing is essentially teaching their students very well to function in the eighth century." read more here.

Also have a look at this article from USA TODAY, extracted below, on the fears expressed by the Holy See concerning the decline of religion in social democratic Europe.

Last month, Pope Benedict XVI lamented the weakening of churches in Europe, Australia and the USA. "There's no longer evidence for a need of God, even less of Christ," he told Italian priests. "The so-called traditional churches look like they are dying."

The forces driving the decline include Europe's turbulent history, an increasing separation between the church and government — and perhaps ... most of all, the continent's unprecedented affluence.

"For most of history, people have been on the borderline of survival," says Ronald Inglehart, director of the World Values Survey, a Swedish-based group that tracks church attendance. "That's changed dramatically. Survival is certain for almost everyone (in the West). So one of the reasons people are drawn to religion has eroded."

Now what was that about the Opiate of the Masses? Or could it be that, despite the distortions injected by the existence of governments, socialism is an intrinsic part of adult behaviour and aids the development of personal responsibility?

Also read this article from the Labour Humanist website on attempts by the Democratic Unionist Party in northern Ireland to use that unfortunate region of the UK as a staging area for creationist crap. The DUP as some will recall was Ian Paisley's group back in the days of the "troubles".

In my previous entry, I presented the popular belief that “the State protects our rights,” and demonstrated that rights are in fact inherent. So how can the State grant me that right when I already possess it by virtue of being a human being? Granted, the statist reasoning is somewhat more sophisticated than that. A [...]

I am debuting the blog of Rachel Kramer Bussel in this digest and encourage people to give it a chance. See near the bottom of the digest for the three selected posts from her blog. I’ll be making use of the wealth of blogs she has listed on her sidebar to continue to bring you quality posting in the sexuality category

The Usual Wartime Press

New Military Report Acknowledges Signs of Police State in Baghdad

The Totalitarian Personalities Among Us

The Totalitarians Among Us

Economics and the State

Giant Food Companies Welcome the Regulatory State

In Turnaround, Industries Seek U.S. Regulations

Civil Liberties Speaking

Help Create Special Website for The Future of Freedom Foundation’s recent conference titled “Restoring the Republic: Foreign Policy and Civil Liberties”.

Naomi Wolf interview on The Colbert Report.

Debuting Ms. Bussel

Feminism vs sexuality or the false dichotomy that will not die

Why im happy with the cleavage situation

Feminist blowjobs and other oxymorons

One Last Decent Item

The Science Behind Personality