Scratching The Itch

It’s been said before, but a person’s first foray into free cul­ture of any type is often to scratch an itch. For me, my first Wikipedia edit was undo­ing van­dal­ism on the Hernando de Soto Polar page con­flat­ing him with the con­quis­ta­dor of the same name — replac­ing his actual birth date with 1500-something, etc. It’s somewhat …

I Say ‘God-Damn!’

God damn, god damn, god damn. But not all of them are focused on bor­der con­cerns. If you talk to the Minutemen long enough, the sub­ject of immi­gra­tion inevitably floats to the sur­face. “I see the nation descend­ing into poverty, philo­soph­i­cally, and part of it is ille­gal immi­gra­tion, a big part of it,” says a twentysomething …

Ding-Dong!

The Witch is Dead! The Witch is Dead! Here’s a gen­tle fist in the air, ded­i­cated to The Wicked Witch of the Midwest, the man who made it accept­able to say “democ­racy” when you mean “free-market cap­i­tal­ism”. One sum­mary of his posi­tion on Chile described it as “freer mar­kets led to free peo­ple, and that …

Dying Democracy and Dehumanization

Last Wednesday night, I was call­ing friends to try and do a lit­tle street the­ater down­town Chicago, in the hopes of pro­vid­ing a par­tic­u­larly gritty infomer­cial and gen­er­at­ing pres­sure on the Senate to not pass S.3930 (aka the “Just Confess to Something Act of 2006″). It appears I wasn’t the only one with the same …