Defining anarchy
Strike the Root
Mark Davis

"Anarchy is a functioning society free of government controls. That is individual persons operating together in harmony based on freely reached agreements concluded between individual members and groups of a society. Anarchy is simply a free society. Anarchy is not the result of a statist-government failure; that would be chaos. The chaos in New Orleans is not due to anarchy, it is an example of the failure of statist-government. .... To define anarchy as statist-government failure is such an obvious distortion of the concept of a free society that it is hard to decide where to begin to dismantle such thoughtlessness. I like to begin by simply pointing out that at least four layers of statist-government agencies still claim jurisdiction over the area known as New Orleans (city, parish, state and federal). The undeniable fact is that they all four failed to provide the services they had promised to provide when they were justifying the theft of individual resources called taxes." (09/08/05)

http://www.strike-the-root.com/52/davis/davis4.html

-----

Invincible ignorance
Strike the Root
John Markley

"If the state performs its functions well, that is proof that we need the state. If the state performs its functions poorly, the resulting misery is, we are told, also proof that the state is needed. .... I do not think this is produced by willful intellectual dishonesty; it seems to be a pattern of thought that people easily slip into without realizing it. This may help explain why a single example of an unpleasant area with no state (which are usually themselves not anarchies of long standing, but are instead the wreckage left by failed and especially malicious states, e.g. Somalia) is often seen as an adequate refutation of anarchy, but no amount of incompetence and failure, no number of injustices and atrocities can ever shake people's trust in the state. How could they, when so many people have, without even realizing it, turned statism into a position that can never be touched by any evidence?" (09/05/05)

http://www.strike-the-root.com/52/markley/markley1.html

-----

A disaster map 'wiki' is born
Wired

"Of all of the websites tracking the Katrina disaster, surely one of the most remarkable is Scipionus.com. Visitors swoop down over a map of the Gulf Coast that's awash in hundreds of red teardrops, each denoting information about specific geographical points in the area. That's pretty amazing in itself, but there's more: All of the information on the map has been provided by ordinary citizens, most of whom presumably have come to the site in search of information on the flood themselves. .... The site is the brainchild of Jonathan Mendez, a 24-year-old computer programmer living in Austin, Texas. Mendez says he grew frustrated combing message boards trying to find out if his family home -- the one his parents and brother had just fled from -- had been destroyed. Mendez turned to his co-worker, Greg Stoll, a 23-year-old software engineer who had experimented with Google Maps' API, and asked him to code a way for people to report and find damage assessments on a Google Map. " (09/02/05)

http://www.wired.com/news/hurricane/0,2904,68743,00.html

----

What kind of extremist will you be?
Common Dreams
Cindy Sheehan

"I can feel my son's presence urging me on to save his buddies. I can hear him whispering in my ear and in my dreams: "Mom, finish my mission. Bring my buddies home alive" I can hear Dr. King's words similarly challenging me to action: "The question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists will we be?" Well, Casey, my son, my hero. Well, Dr. King, the hero of millions, I pledge to be the kind of extremist who works for peace with justice and who will never take "No" for an answer. I will strive to hold the bad people in our government accountable for all of the heartache and emptiness they have caused our world by their deliberate lies and deceptions and by their misuse of power and their abuse of our nation's precious human resources. I will be the kind of extremist who believes that our country can be taken back from the corporatocracy and unethical war profiteers that have control of it now. I will be the kind of extremist who believes that the people of Iraq can rebuild their own country without the dangerous "help" of the American military presence and I will be the kind of extremist who strives to bring our kids home from the Middle East immediately. If there ever was a time in our nation's history that required the passion and compassion of extremists, it is now: This very minute." (09/08/05)

http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0908-31.htm

-----

Censored stories
Tucson Weekly

"Just four days before the 2004 presidential election, a prestigious British medical journal published the results of a rigorous study by Dr. Les Roberts, a widely respected researcher. Roberts concluded that close to 100,000 people had died in the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Most were noncombatant civilians. Many were children. But that news didn't make the front pages of the major newspapers. It wasn't on the network news. So most voters knew little or nothing about the brutal civilian impact of President George W. Bush's war when they went to the polls. That's just one of the big stories the mainstream news media ignored, blacked out or underreported during the past year, according to Project Censored, a media watchdog group based at California's Sonoma State University." (09/08/05)

http://www.tucsonweekly.com/gbase/Cover/index