The Plug Nickel Times is proud to bring you website links to select opinion articles that you may not find through your local media. All links are offsite unless otherwise noted - followed links should open in another browser window. Links can become dated or otherwise fail to function, for this reason we quote the actual headline of an article. This may allow you to find an alternate copy of the article through a news index or search engine. Some sites we link to may require a registration process to view an article - this website may be useful to you in those instances. Comments, corrections and submissions are welcome - an email link is at the bottom of the page.
February 16-28, 2005
February 28, 2005
Ohio's Odd Numbers by Christopher Hitchens by Christopher Hitchens
February 26, 2005
Suddenly Going Sane by Bill Bonner
"Every public spectacle begins with a bold lie...and ends in shame, regret and disaster.
Every world improver is a bold dissembler...and every crowd is a bunch of damned fools for listening to him."
Coup d'État in Disguise: Washington's New World Order "Democratization" Template by Jonathan Mowat
"The U.S. government and allied forces' year-end installation of Victor Yushchenko as President of Ukraine have completed the field-testing of the 'Post Modern Coup'. Employing and fine-tuning the same sophisticated techniques used in Serbia in 2000 and Georgia in 2003 (and unsuccessfully in Belarus in 2001), it is widely expected that the United States will attempt to apply the same methods throughout the former Soviet Union."
Top of the food chain by Jeff Wells
"Have you ever seen the film Tetsuo? You're living it. No cinema does dread like the Japanese. Maybe that's the peculiar insight granted a post-apocalyptic culture. 'Revolving around the transformation of people into grotesque hybrids of flesh and metal....' And maybe that's how we're to survive in the world we're making, by ignorance and design: by becoming our toxins. All hail the new flesh."
The Resistance Will Not be Televised by Kurt Nimmo
"Iyad Allawi’s occupational government has launched a new TV show, sort of an Iraqi version of reality television. Terrorists in the Hands of Justice runs several times a day in Iraq and features the confessions of beaten up 'insurgents' who admit to terrible crimes, for instance serial murder. 'One man said he stalked 10 college girls who were translators for the U.S. Army, then raped and murdered them. Another said he beheaded 10 people after first practicing on animals,' reports NBC News.
...
Even here in the United States, thousands of miles away from Iraq, with a barrage of corporate media propaganda and a seemingly endless stream of pro-Bush pundits, it is obvious the 'security forces' are not 'defeating insurgents.' In Iraq this reality is even more obvious. Blaming Syria and portraying the resistance as a gaggle of serial murderers and animal torturers will not put an end to the violence against 'security forces' and foreign occupation troops. More than anything, it would seem, Terrorists in the Hands of Justice is an idea devised for American consumers, although the show is not run in the United States. But then it doesn’t need to be. A sound-bite sized chunk of video broadcast on NBC is more than enough, especially if the video contains content Americans are familiar with--violent young men and confessions given to police by ruthless serial murderers preying on young women."
Why I'm taking Saddam's case: Ramsey Clark takes on Hussein’s defense by Lizzy Ratner
"'I have long believed that one of the greatest barriers to peace is demonization,' Clark said. 'It has always been necessary in war for soldiers to demonize the enemy. Now, with the mass media saturating the public with perceptions that come from very slim contact with actuality and are heavily influenced by desire and prejudice, we demonize.'"
Hunter Thompson - All Gone Now by Fred Reed
"You can see why he ate his gun. Everything he hated has returned. Nixon is back in the White House, Rumsnamara risen from the dead, bombs falling on other peoples’ suburbs. The Pentagon is lying again and democracy stalks yet another helpless country. This time the young are already dead and there will be no joyous anarchy. The press, housebroken, pees where it is told. But he gave it a hell of a try."
The Hunter S. Thompson Interview by Adam Bulger (Mar. 9, 2004)
February 23, 2005
Rummy Dropped from the Loop? by Nick Turse
"You'd think with this kind of spending the people at the DoD could manage to get copies of crucial materials to their chief. But they either can't or won't. They've left Rumsfeld twisting in the wind, forced to admit on a daily basis that he can't get the information he asks for or wants to see in a timely fashion. The implications for national security are obvious. It's time for an inquiry. We need to know what Rumsfeld didn't see, when he didn't see it, and why he is so incredibly uninformed."
Bush’s New Defense Budget by Robert Higgs
"When the Bush administration released its budget for fiscal year 2006 recently, the news media, as usual, had a tough time in making sense of the government’s proposals for defense spending. To some extent, we can’t blame them for their confusion, because even people who follow this subject closely have trouble sorting out the government’s various ways of stating the defense budget. Figures that appear at one place in the budget documents are often difficult or impossible to reconcile with figures that appear at other places in the documents. Conspiracy theorists might easily conclude that the government deliberately tries to make a clear understanding impossible. More charitably, we might conclude that the government simply does not know how to keep a clean set of books."
Bombing Iran: Never Say Never by Kurt Nimmo
"No doubt about it--a lot of Iranians are fed up with the medieval mullahs. But this does not mean they will welcome shock and awe, the destruction of their electrical grid, water purification plants, sewage treatments facilities, hospitals, schools, etc., the whole of their civilian infrastructure. Daily we are told by the corporate media Bush and the Strausscons--or maybe the Israelis who are impatient and believe the United States should have invaded Iran on the day after they shock and awed Iraq--will conduct 'surgical' strikes against Iran’s secret nuke program, a program the International Atomic Energy Agency says does not exist. Nonsense. Bush and the Strausscons have one goal and one goal only--reduce Iran to a smoldering ruin the same way they reduced Iraq. The Iranians know this and they are making a list and checking it twice."
Let's Shut Down Dangerous Websites from John Young
A call for censorship from a publisher of 'condensed books'...
Hunter S. Thompson on 911
audio files and transcript
Ralph Steadman on Hunter Thompson
"...(H)e has proved that a redneck Southern gentleman who has the fire in his belly and the indignation in his soul can make it happen."
February 21, 2005
the illusory dichotomy of monomaniacs by charley hardman
"what i find most disgusting and laughable is the aura among some liberty groups of "is it getting to be claire wolfe time?" ROFL. getting to be! it's way past time, morally, for the state to be wiped out and get its guns shoved up its ass. who do you see fighting back for real? carl drega. randy weaver. the branch davidians. there are your role models. enjoy your future."
Aboard Air CIA by Michael Hirsh, Mark Hosenball and John Barry
"No one's laughing these days, least of all the CIA. Newsweek has obtained previously unpublished flight plans indicating the agency has been operating a Boeing 737 as part of a top-secret global charter servicing clandestine interrogation facilities used in the war on terror."
Under False Colors by L. Neil Smith
"It's long past time that individuals like "Mike" were made to understand that the Libertarian Party is not now, and never was an appendage of the Republican Party. The latter is a warm, loving friend of huge, voracious government and a vicious, bloody-handed opponent of individual liberty. It's always been that way, since its inception in the middle of the 19th century. Any claim Republicans make to wanting less government and more freedom is a low, belly-crawling, barefaced lie."
The World’s Warmonger by Garry Leech
Generation Landslide by Alice Cooper
February 20, 2005
Shotgun Golf with Bill Murray by Hunter S. Thompson
With the throttle screwed on there is only the barest margin, and no room at all for mistakes. It has to be done right . . . and that's when the strange music starts, when you stretch your luck so far that fear becomes exhilaration and vibrates along your arms. You can barely see at a hundred; the tears blow back so fast that they vaporize before they get to your ears. The only sounds are wind and a dull roar floating back from the mufflers. You watch the white line and try to lean with it . . . howling through a turn to the right, then to the left and down the long hill to Pacifica . . . letting off now watching for cops, but only until the next dark stretch and another few seconds on the edge . . . The Edge . . . There is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over. The others - the living - are those who pushed their control as far as they felt they could handle it, and then pulled back, or slowed down, or did whatever they had to when it came time to choose between Now and Later.
Hunter S. Thompson from Hell's Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga
February 19, 2005
'Nobody is talking' by James Meek
"What at the time seemed like a partial victory for the defence of individual human life and dignity now looks like a defeat. For it is exactly that distinction the European Court made 30 years ago that the White House has used as a precedent to claim that the US government may inflict pain and suffering on any foreigner it suspects of doing something it doesn't like. The European Court ruling was cited not only by Bybee but by Diane Beaver, a US military lawyer based at Guantánamo, when she gave a formal written opinion in 2002 that the water-boarding technique didn't constitute torture."
First They Came for Lynne Stewart ... by Marjorie Cohn
Douglas J. Feith: Speech to the Council on Foreign Relations
"Our nation’s most basic interest is to protect the freedom of the American people--our ability to govern ourselves under the Constitution. The sovereignty of the United States is another way of referring to this freedom. The United States strengthens its national security when it promotes a well-ordered world of sovereign states: a world in which states respect one another’s rights to choose how they want to live; a world in which states do not commit aggression and have governments that can and do control their own territory; a world in which states have governments that are responsible and obey, as it were, the rules of the road."
The Way It Could Have Been by Bob Wallace
On the merits of lead poisoning...
