LOL: Judith Miller criticizes Wikileaks' Assange for not verifying his sources. Boing Boing (2011-01-18):

Why is disgraced former New York Times reporter Judith Miller not fond of Wikileaks and Julian Assange? “Because he didn’t care at all about attempting to verify the information that he was putting out or determine whether or not it would hurt anyone,” she said.

Sometimes I am genuinely surprised when the cognitive dissonance doesn’t make somebody’s head explode.

Guy Claims He Owns The Idea Of Oprah Visiting Australia, Plans To Sue. Techdirt (2011-01-18):

When you think that ideas are ownable, you get absolutely ridiculous scenarios, such as the idea that anyone could ever “own” the idea of Oprah Winfrey visiting Australia. And yet, a dive boat operator in Australia is planning to sue Tourism Australia, because of Oprah Winfrey’s recent visit. You see,…

The Australo-Galambosian strikes back. Hey, a man’s got a right to defend his Primary Property.

(Via Kevin Carson, who I will not be paying $5 for the idea. Sorry, dude.)

• Why All Police Are Bad — for Society. Ademo Freeman, Cop Block (2010-12-30). I'm often questioned about my stance on police which is fine — anyone who knows me is aware that I don't mind sharing my thoughts. Oftentimes during the conversation I'm accused of being a "cop hater" or told that not all cops are bad. I understand the reasoning most people… (Linked Friday 2011-01-14.)

• From the Downsize DC Foundation: The Dictator Fallacy. DownsizeDC.org (2011-01-13). The Downsize DC Foundation’s website, www.DownsizeDCFoundation.org, continues to grow. Today, we bring you one of those articles, from the Our Lexicon category . . .  "The Dictator Fallacy" by Jim Babka fal·la·cy  –  * a misleading or unsound argument.  * Logic. any of various types of erroneous reasoning that render… (Linked Saturday 2011-01-15.)

• Nothing Natural about It. Sheldon Richman, Free Association (2011-01-15). The sharp historical division between labor and capital ownership is not a natural emergent feature of the market economy but largely the conscious result of government privilege.Atom (Linked Sunday 2011-01-16.)

• Two Little Pigs: How Some Cops Get Jail While Others Go Free. Modesto Anarcho (2011-01-16). It’s not that police “protect their own,” exactly. It’s that police protect their power. Rape your step daughter or get plastered and drive your car off the road, and you’re well behind the blue wall. Do something that disrupts command and control within a prison, and the long knives come out. (Linked Sunday 2011-01-16.)

• Kiva Lending Team: Anarchists for Empowerment. tolstoyscat, things along the way (2011-01-11). Join here: Anarchists for EmpowermentKiva’s mission is to connect people, through lending, for the sake of alleviating poverty. Kiva empowers individuals to lend to an entrepreneur across the globe. By combining microfinance with the internet, Kiva is creating a global community of people connected through lending.Anarchists for Empowerment: We loan… (Linked Sunday 2011-01-16.)

• Mistakes Were Made. Guns Were Pointed. A Family Was Terrorized. Pets Were Threatened. Radley Balko, Gangsters in Blue (2011-01-16). The DEA has apologized for the wrong door raid in the Hudson Valley that I blogged about last week. Sort of. John P. Gilbride, special agent in charge of the Drug Enforcement Administration, issued a statement Friday clearing Spring Valley resident David McKay and his family of anything to do… (Linked Sunday 2011-01-16.)

• Why read about it when you can play? Shelley, MyTech (2011-01-16). Earlier today I got into a friendly discussion and debate on Twitter about a new web site called W3Fools. The site bills itself as a "W3Schools intervention", and the purpose is to wake developers up to the fact that W3School tutorials can, and do, have errors. The problem with a… (Linked Sunday 2011-01-16.)

• The state begins in robbery; some patterns of robb… Gary Chartier, Comments on Free Association: Take It to the Limit (2011-01-08). The state begins in robbery; some patterns of robbery are doubtless spontaneously ordered, but surely others are planned by groups of robbers.Once the state has been established and mechanisms for obtaining power have been regularized, it will surely be unsurprising if people who do obtain power are people who like… (Linked Sunday 2011-01-16.)

• The Semicolon Wars » American Scientist. www.americanscientist.org (2011-01-16). I mock the pettiness of these squabbles—and I believe some of them deserve mocking—and yet I don’t want to give the impression that only cosmetic issues are in dispute, or that programming languages are really all alike under the skin. On the contrary, what’s most fascinating about programming languages is… (Linked Sunday 2011-01-16.)

• Let a million bookmarks bloom. l.m.orchard, 0xDECAFBAD (2010-12-19). TL;DR: Don't depend on Delicious; host your own, pay for it elsewhere, or hope for the best. Use real-time feeds to stitch the bookmarking diaspora back together into topical aggregate indexes. In the last entry, I wrote about why my use of Delicious has dropped over time, and what I've… (Linked Sunday 2011-01-16.)

• STANFORD Magazine: March/April 2010 > Features > Clelia Mosher. www.stanfordalumni.org (2011-01-12). In 1973, historian Carl Degler was combing the University archives, gathering research for a book on the history of the family. Sifting through the papers of Dr. Clelia Duel Mosher, who taught in Stanford's hygiene department around the turn of the 20th century, he came across a mysteriously bound file. Degler… (Linked Wednesday 2011-01-12.)

• Common Sense, or a functioning economy has no underclass. Marja Erwin (2011-01-12). 1. A government can’t solve systemic unemployment through stimulus. It can create temporary boosts which *mask* systemic unemployment; it may even have significant effects depending how easily it responds to spending and how slowly the unemployment rate approaches its normal level relative to the economic system.2. A functioning economy has… (Linked Wednesday 2011-01-12.)

• Reading Chomsky. Roderick, Austro-Athenian Empire (2011-01-12). The Good (in churlish brevity) I've just finished reading Noam Chomsky's Imperial Ambitions: Conversations on the Post-9/11 World (it was a Christmas gift). Unsurprisingly, nearly all of it is excellent, and I highly recommend it. Chomsky lucidly explains how u.s. foreign policy is not only imperialist now but has been… (Linked Wednesday 2011-01-12.)

• The Taxpayers Won't Benefit. Sheldon Richman, The Freeman | Ideas On Liberty (2010-12-15). Why does everyone say the taxpayers will be winners when the banks, AIG, and GM repay their TARP and other bailout money with interest? The taxpayers won't see a dime! I doubt if any money will even go toward reducing the debt. The only real winners will be the politicians… (Linked Thursday 2011-01-13.)

• What "Undercover Boss" Could Be. Steven Horwitz, The Freeman | Ideas On Liberty (2010-12-15). Recently I stumbled across the TV show Undercover Boss.  A CEO poses as a new employee at one of his firm's factories or stores in order to see how the company really runs.  In the episode I watched, the CEO of the Johnny Rocket's restaurant chain spent time working in… (Linked Thursday 2011-01-13.)

• Winner of Beth A. Hoffman Prize for Economic Writing Named. Foundation for Economic Education, The Freeman | Ideas On Liberty (2011-01-12). The first annual Beth A. Hoffman Memorial Prize for Economic Writing has been awarded to Kevin A. Carson, the Foundation for Economic Education announced. Through the generosity of a FEE donor, the prize has been established to honor the memory of Beth A. Hoffman by recognizing the best article on… (Linked Thursday 2011-01-13.)

• If Martin Luther King Were Alive Today, He’d Be Just Like Me. Jesse Walker, Jesse Walker: Reason Magazine articles and blog posts. (2011-01-13). You know all those articles that purport to say what George Orwell would believe if he were alive today, in which Orwell turns out to have had a change of heart on every significant subject where the author disagrees with him? You can do that to Martin Luther King too:… (Linked Thursday 2011-01-13.)

• Food:Class:Working Class. bfp, flip flopping joy (2011-01-03). I've been wondering why food for working class people is always represented as "manly man food" that is greasy, heavy, thick food. I mean, I get the origins of working class food as thick greasy meat based food—fish and chips, for example, has enough heaviness and calories to last through… (Linked Thursday 2011-01-13.)

• Szasz in One Lesson. Sheldon Richman, Free Association (2011-01-13). (First posted in 2006, and now amended. The relevance to the Tucson massacre is self-explanatory.)This is something I came up with some time ago to summarize a good deal of what Thomas Szasz, a great libertarian and hero of mine, has been saying for half a century.If neuroscientists discovered that… (Linked Thursday 2011-01-13.)

• Radio Theater. Jesse Walker, Jesse Walker: Reason Magazine articles and blog posts. (2011-01-14). Get ready to suspend your disbelief. One of the most resilient acts in theatrical history has returned to the D.C. stage: the We're Going To Defund Public Broadcasting show. Every time this play gets revived, the director alters the story slightly to reflect recent events. This time the performers are… (Linked Friday 2011-01-14.)

• no one who has ever been tempted toward a revolutionary. Captain Capitulation, eye of the storm (2011-01-10). no one who has ever been tempted toward a revolutionary politics or a radical political philosophy or envisioned a big transformation can be entirely comfortable with the the notion that "anti-government" rhetoric must be…controlled, lest it lead to violence. that sort of thing threw eugene debs in prison and deported emma goldman. (Linked Monday 2011-01-10.)

• On Cable News | The Agitator. www.theagitator.com (2011-01-10). Ta-Nehisi Coates: …it’s my impression that much of cable news is rigged. Complicated questions are forced into small spaces of time, and guests frequently (Linked Monday 2011-01-10.)

• The Agony of Paul Krugman. Jesse Walker: Reason Magazine articles and blog posts. (2011-01-11). Paul Krugman is a Very Serious Thinker. His words are like the rain. If he did not say these things about purely political matters, who else possibly could? (Linked Tuesday 2011-01-11.)

• Graceless Degradation: WordPress Uglification for Outmoded Browsers. drench.github.com (2011-01-12). Graceless Degradation Graceless Degradation is a WordPress plugin that gives visitors still using Internet Explorer 6 an appropriate user experience. (Linked Wednesday 2011-01-12.)

• If suspect Jared Lee Loughner has schizophrenia, would that make him more likely to go on a shooting spree in Arizona? – By Vaughan Bell – Slate Magazine. www.slate.com (2011-01-12). If you found evidence on the Web that Jared Lee Loughner or some other suspected killer was obsessed with soccer or football or hockey and suggested it might be an explanation for his crime, you’d be laughed at. But do the same with “schizophrenia” and people nod in solemn agreement…. (Linked Wednesday 2011-01-12.)