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.
October 16-31, 2005
October 30, 2005
Mistakes Were Made... by Laura Rozen
Rep. Richard Cheney (R-Wyoming] commenting on the Iran Contra investigation in 1987.
A Photo Can Say So Much by Roger Young
A Home Invasion by any other name...
Brazil's Next Ban by David Codrea
A Brass Pole In Bangkok: Things I Have Aspired To Be by Fred Reed
"Some will say that our lives constitute a sordid cohabitation with the ungodly. I hope so. Detritus we are, and detritus we will be. It suits us. The world, the part worth knowing, lives in the alleys. We have known the smoke and dimness of a thousand Asian bars, known them till they run together in the mind, and found the hookers morally preferable to the expensively suited criminals of good society, more engaging than the liars of the press conferences. There is more of life and humanity in the driver of a battered Ford who picks up a hitchhiker in the darkling valleys of Tennessee than in the moral fetor and vanity of Washington.
We are not entirely without ambition. Often I have seen a young lovely in Bangkok, on Patpong or Nana Plaza or Soi Cowboy, revolving without excessive clothing around a brass pole in a dim club with disco thumping in the murk and almond eyes watching for a flicker of interest. I do not want to be president, nor a Rothschild nor a computer magnate. But a brass pole in Bangkok, that I could be."
And I guess I owe it all to pretty Pamela Brown!
October 21, 2005
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busy-bodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."
C.S. Lewis
Fear, Incivility, and the State by Butler Shaffer
"This is how the manipulation of fear degrades us both individually and socially. The torture and death that men and women so eagerly inflicted upon subdued strangers at Abu Ghraib prison; the videotaped brutalities visited upon individuals by gangs of police officers; and the surliness with which airport security people routinely deal with passengers - not one of whom poses a threat to any airliner - is evidence of how politics, driven by fear, degrades us by eating away at our souls."
The Greatest Strategic Disaster in U.S. History by Michele Steinberg
"According to media reports, and EIR's sources in the Washington intelligence community, there were high-level meetings at the White House that were a combination of damage control, and flight-forward planning for attacks on Syria, to be conducted in 'hot pursuit' of 'terrorists' who would be fleeing an American offensive in the western Anbar province of Iraq. U.S. military strikes against Syria, and the overthrow of Syrian President Bashar Assad, remains high on the agenda of Cheney and his neo-con cabal.
While no military action has been announced against Syria, as of Oct. 6, the speeches by Cheney and Bush indicate that they fully intend to expand the Iraq war to Syria and Iran."
More Imperial Stumbles by Bill Bonner
Iraqi Interim Government loots treasury and leaves. If only our own Government would leave after plundering us! by Patrick Sovereign
"This has got to be the most corrupt Government I have ever heard of. Except for all the rest."
Tommy Franks: Paid Patriot by William M. Arkin
"Franks, of course, isn't the only beneficiary of the retired military's money circuit. Here are some updates from that front."
The doomsday provision by John Stossel
"What if it were legal in America for adults to carry concealed weapons? I put that question to gun-control advocate Rev. Al Sharpton. His eyes opened wide, and he said, 'We'd be living in a state of terror!'
In fact, it was a trick question. Most states now have 'right to carry' laws. And their people are not living in a state of terror. Not one of those states reported an upsurge in crime.
Why? Because guns are used more than twice as often defensively as criminally. When armed men broke into Susan Gonzalez' house and shot her, she grabbed her husband's gun and started firing. 'I figured if I could shoot one of them, even if we both died, someone would know who had been in my home.' She killed one of the intruders. She lived. Studies on defensive use of guns find this kind of thing happens at least 700,000 times a year."
Sunni's October Salon is now available
October 18, 2005
Iraq: the state We're in by Patrick Cockburn
Shoot 'em 2: The Bird Is The Word by Liz Michael
And your politics are boring, too! by Brad Spangler
Beating the PC Name Game by Garry Reed
"The Political Correctness crazies are slinging their PC feces again. The National Collegiate Athletic Association has branded as 'hostile' and 'abusive' any school that sports an American Indian nickname. But there is a way out of this perpetual PC idiocy. Quoting libertarian science fiction writer L. Neil Smith, 'If you can, within principle, take over and adopt whatever name your enemy calls you, do so. It shuts them up very handily.' Does this work?"
Rodger Jacobs has been busy blogging about "the dark underbelly of life in the City of Angels" at 8763 Wonderland - worth a visit, especially if one's an F. Scott Fitzgerald fan!
World War II as an online Real Time Strategy Game
"If World War Two had been an online Real Time Strategy game, the chat room traffic would have gone something like this"...
