Anyone know, off the top of their heads a good, entry-level focused treatment of government supports for and structuring of industrial agribusiness? (It doesn’t have to be exhaustive, just a relatively comprehensive overview.) I am looking for “Further reading …” sorts of footnotes, and the best thing I’ve got off the top of my head are things like scattered articles on the school/military surplus buy-up programs, a bunch of stuff about the evils of Monsanto, passages of e.g. FAST FOOD NATION (where the author himself doesn’t necessarily see the import of the things he’s documenting) or something like Joel Salatin’s EVERYTHING I WANT TO DO IS ILLEGAL. But something that pulls all of these items into a more comprehensive overview would be nice.

How to make every Daft Punk song ever: (1) take previous Daft Punk song. (2) Change two or three notes in the main hook. (3) Take out the 3-5 word vocodered slogan. (4) Replace with another 3-5 word vocodered slogan. The cool thing about this process is that no matter how many times you repeat it, the result is still amazing.

To-day Fair Use Repository: “Kate Austin,” obituaries from FREE SOCIETY (November 30, 1902). Includes a photo, a biographical sketch by Will Holmes and letters from Voltairine de Cleyre, “Joy” of Freedom colony, Kansas, and James F. Morton, Jr. http://fair-use.org/free-society/1902/11/30/kate-austin

Immigration freedom is a civil rights issue. “[Melissa] Murrell joined five other members at the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute to introduce the project to the public. She says the organization already has collected some twenty stories from immigrants and their families, both documented and undocumented. ‘To kind of put a face on the issue to help people understand that every time we talk about immigration reform we’re talking about real people,’ she said. Over the next several months the coalition will compile more stories. Those stories will then be archived at the BCRI. . . .”

From Salon, “With gun nuts hoarding bullets, will cops be disarmed?” (*) (* Yes please.) “But what those rushing to stockpile guns and ammo seem to miss is that their actions have consequences on the people [police] whose job it is to keep us safe. . . .” http://www.salon.com/2013/03/27/cops_are_running_out_of_bullets_thank_the_nra/ I have no real idea what “those rushing to stockpile guns and ammo” think about or don’t think about. Maybe if you want to know that, you could ask some, instead of spending the entire article interviewing cops. But I do know that many of us would be much safer if police had no bullets at all. Did police bullets keep Kimani Gray safe? Emma Hernandez? Angel Alvarez? Alonzo Heyward? Sean Bell? Amadou Diallo? Who seriously believes that “keep[ing] us safe” is what police do? Who’s the “us” they have in mind when they think that?

This is the best thing I’ve heard all day about “NRA fans.” Good on them. I don’t own any guns but this makes me wish I had the money to run out and buy boxes of ammunition right now. Because I have no use for it, but the cops do. And that’s the problem with the cops. Disarm your local police.

From the comment section in a thread elsewhere on Facebook: “So here’s something that I truly don’t understand about radical libertarianism. If we were to get rid of police entirely, who would protect the poor.” . . . The problem with pragmatic anti-radicalism is that it so often, the questions being asked by people who consider themselves practical actually depend on some background presumptions about what practical, day-to-day reality must really like. Background presumptions which, with even a little bit of investigation, turn out to be pretty hard to distinguish from a bad joke.

Now available for pre-order. Yessssss…. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0544115899/ref=pd_csr_tt_t1_detai_b_t

Big Government is Big Business’s most dangerous weapon. Big Business is Big Government’s most profitable cash-crop.

is scanning and sheet-protecting a big box of collected (A), feminist and general global-justice flyers from summer 2001. Not sure about what to do about getting a digital copy of “A Citizen’s Guide [*] to the World Trade Organization” [* Meh.]