Good Read

"All passports issued by the US State Department after January 1 will have always-on radio frequency identification chips, making it easy for officials – and hackers – to grab your personal stats. Getting paranoid about strangers slurping up your identity? Here’s what you can do about it. But be careful ..."

"4) The best approach? Hammer time. Hitting the chip with a blunt, hard object should disable it. A nonworking RFID doesn’t invalidate the passport, so you can still use it."

“First, Congress banned the use of credit cards ‘and other payment forms’ to settle Internet wagers. Now the San Francisco Chronicle wants to impose a similar ban on the use of credit cards to make purchases from online pharmacies. … Credit cards and other payment systems, once seen as a potential route to financial flexibility, have become tools of political control. There are alternative means of payment, but these have proven vulnerable to government pressure.

"I'd like to offer you a better answer than that.

"I believe in America.

"I believe in the values of individual freedom and unlimited opportunity that made this country great.

"I believe that the Republican and Democratic parties have betrayed those values, and that in so doing they have failed in their duty to the American people and to the American Dream.

"I believe that those values, and that dream, can be restored."

"As a result, government now has so many ways to incarcerate parents that hardly a family in America has not been touched. The criminalization of parents is highly bureaucratic, effected through a bureaucratic judiciary and supported by a vast "social services" machinery that few understand until it strikes them. They then find themselves against a faceless government behemoth from which they are powerless to protect their children or defend themselves.

"That is the all-important context in which the Bill of Rights was created. The Anti-Federalists, men filled to varying degrees with fear, mistrust, and loathing of the new federal government, insisted on a bill of rights as additional shackles imposed on that new government. Knowing that alone, knowing that the famous Bill came into existence only to please those most apprehensive of the new government, definitively ends any confusion or debate surrounding the meaning of the Second Amendment.

"Wisconsin v. Yoder, a 1972 Supreme Court case dealing with an Amish family who wanted to withdraw their children from public school after the eighth grade. [Citation] from the majority opinion written by Chief Justice Warren E. Burger:

'In a recent class at Abraham Clark High School in Roselle, N.J., business teacher Barbara Govahn distributed glossy classroom materials that invited students to think about what they want to be when they grow up. Eighteen career paths were profiled, including a writer, a magician, a town mayor -- and five employees from accounting giant Deloitte LLP.

'"Consider a career you may never have imagined," the book suggests. "Working as a professional auditor."

"High on Mount Sinai, Moses was on psychedelic drugs when he heard God
deliver the Ten Commandments, an Israeli researcher claimed in a study
published this week. Such mind-altering substances formed an integral
part of the religious rites of Israelites in biblical times, Benny
Shanon, a professor of cognitive psychology at the Hebrew University
of Jerusalem wrote in the Time and Mind journal of philosophy. 'As far
Moses on Mount Sinai is concerned, it was either a supernatural cosmic
event, which I don't believe, or a legend, which I don't believe

"For the first time I saw some of the candidates seeking the LP nomination. If this is as good as they can do they ought to pack up the tent and go home.

The immediate problem is that Libertarians seems to be losing their uniqueness. They are turning [into] Republicans before our very eyes."

from Classically Liberal: Sorry state of the Libertarian Party

[Nice editorialized review of the Libertarian Party candidates. Hattip RRND. --MJ]

"Steven R. Shapiro, the ACLU’s legal director, has said his group is in a "Catch-22" because the government says the identities of people whose communications have been intercepted is secret. But only people who know they have been wiretapped can sue over the program"

from Associated Press: High court turns away challenge to domestic-spying program

"A commuter was arrested at gunpoint and had his DNA and fingerprints taken simply for listening to his MP3 player while waiting for a bus."

from Associated Newspapers Limited: Arrested, caged and DNA tested - for using MP3

"The one thing I fear if either of these cretins become president is higher taxes because I don't want to give the bums any more than I'm already giving them. They're bleeding me dry. I don't want to give the bums in the street another turkey sandwich. I don't want to give junkies another needle. I am sick and tired of the taxes I pay, and I don't want to pay another dime."

from Trevor Zimmer: Savage claimed Lantos used the Holocaust as "a weapon the rest of his life"

"Wow, I mean if you have been looking for an instance of our civil rights, and/or the first amendment being trampled you hit the jackpot on this one. I mean would the treatment given by the Secret Service of been the same if it was a war supporter?"

from Hyer Standard: Dick Cheneys Dirty Little Secret

Eighty someodd entries. Additional "Good Reads" are broken out into their own pages. --MJ