Author: Eric Garris

The San Francisco Chronicle ran a very nice obituary of Mike Mayakis, longtime libertarian and antiwar activist, and my best friend. Following is the article:

Mike Mayakis – Libertarian activist and agile debater

by Charlie Goodyear, Chronicle Staff Writer
August 19, 2004

Mike Mayakis, a prominent Libertarian whose surprising political positions made him a formidable debater, has died. He was 53.

Mr. Mayakis died at his home in San Francisco on Sunday after a long struggle with leukemia.

A native of Los Angeles, he moved to San Francisco in 1971 and worked for more than a decade at the Haight Ashbury Switchboard as a counselor and trainer for the service that provided information, assistance and counseling to the city’s growing counterculture.

Mr. Mayakis was elected to the switchboard’s Board of Trustees in 1973 and became its president in 1980.

During the 1970s, he worked as an aide to liberal Republican state Sen. Milton Marks of San Francisco and eventually became active in Libertarian politics, founding a chapter of Students for a Libertarian Society at San Francisco State University.

In 1982, Mr. Mayakis was the Libertarian Party’s candidate for state Senate. He was elected chair of the San Francisco Libertarian Party and held that position three times during the 1980s.

He became well known for defying assumptions in political debates. He argued frequently for the rights of smokers when he himself was an asthmatic.

In 1988, he worked for the Libertarian Republican Organizing Committee at the Republic Convention in New Orleans. But he was never a Republican, and in 1995 helped found the popular Web site Antiwar.com.

His failing health took its toll on his political activism. But Mr. Mayakis turned his frustrating experiences with the medical system into a guide called "Express Hospital Emergency Room Admission & Survival Kit" to help other patients.

He is survived by his wife, Betty Honeycutt; siblings Matthew Mayakis, Martha Mayakis and Sara Tisher, all of Los Angeles; and stepfather Lloyd Daic, also of Los Angeles.

A memorial service is being planned. For details, phone (650) 838-0381.

My best friend for the past 26 years died this evening. He was 54 and finally gave up his long battle with leukemia. I saw him yesterday and he was in so much pain. I am glad that pain is gone, but very sad that Mike is gone.

Some of you knew Mike. Without Mike, there would be no Antiwar.com. I would have long ago given up political action if it weren’t for his constant prodding and pep talks.

Mike insisted I use my political time efficiently and get on the Web, urging me to secure the Antiwar.com domain back in 1995.

Mike gave me constant input and advice to help build Antiwar.com. He wrote one article for us, Superman vs. the War Party.

Mike was very active in the Libertarian Party, and held many positions and ran for office once or twice. His views on the LP are most notable in his "Turning Burnout Into Victory."

I love Mike and I will miss him so much.

As they move ahead toward abandoning their pacifist constitution, Japan’s Navy is ahead of America’s in trying to appeal to the MTV generation. Check this out! This page actually appears on the Japanese Navy website.

Now read this hilarious article by Mike Rogers over at LewRockwell.com.

My old associate Tom Palmer, who is now a Senior Fellow (formerly Vice-President) of the Cato Institute, explains his foreign policy:

Our Enemies’ Handiwork
The radical Islamicists have shown us again what they really are. The world should see the photos they released of their latest act of savagery. What else can one do but find and kill all of them before they kill all the rest of us, Muslim and non-Muslim alike?

Thanks to Lew Rockwell for this story.

A guest blog entry responding to my brief review of Fahrenheit 9/11:

Eric, I understand your reaction. I think If I had gone alone, I would be of the same mind.

I, however, accompanied two people with whom I had tried to interest in the questions surrounding 9-11 and the subsequent geopolitical mess for over two years, but to no avail.

This movie woke them up. They turned repeatedly to me during the movie and asked if the news accounts Moore featured were true.

The military record issue was surprising to them because it meant the mainstream news orgs didn’t do their job. They were surprised that news anchors dont tell the truth.

They hated Wolfowitz and reacted viscerally to the moniker Prince Bandar Bush.

They cried buckets at Lila’s story.

They loved the music…after all, they were raised to expect their news to be entertaining.

They were furious that an Israeli national working for the Harris Corporation could guarantee oil to American businessmen with government support even before the Iraqi War began; in fact, because of it.

I walked behind them out of the theatre muttering over their heads, "Well, this saves me ten hours describing the cast of characters."

You’re surprised at the acclaim because you are steeped in facts all day, and want to see more of them. You need to understand how – truly, really, unbelievably – ill-informed most people are to begin with.

When you go to school at the Sorbonne in Paris, every freshman is taught the story of how the intellectuals acted with lightning speed after the French Revolution to prevent the French priestcraft from capturing the minds and imagination of the great unwashed, the enormous uneducated French populace. They threw a theatre up on almost every corner in record time, and employed the likes of Moliere and La Comedie Francaise, etc, to get their emerging and developing points-of-view into the common man’s head before the priests or Jesuits. The intellectuals prevented a religious lock-down on the country as a result.

The French bishops who came over to French Canada and the Northeastern section of the US remembered the intellectuals’ subterfuge and warned their compatriots here of the danger; hence, the ubiquitous steeple in every neighborhood of the original 13 colonies, not to mention the total religious lock-down in French Canada that continued through the 1960s as a result.

I suspect Moore might be more aware of this than you think. Read David Brooks’s June 26, 2004 Op-Ed.

Hmmph. As I finished writing this, one of the two who attended Fahrenheit 9-11 with me just called to ask if I wanted to see it again today…Sunday, June 27. Because she doesn’t get her news from the web, she is genuinely concerned that MSNBC and FOX and the alphabet-majors are interfering with the range of information she needs to make an informed vote.

~ Janie Angus

Please note that this is a blog entry. It is the opinion of the author and doesn’t represent the views of everyone at Antiwar.com. So all you angry letter-writers can address me personally, not all of Antiwar.com.

I really wanted to like Fahrenheit 9/11.

I was excited about seeing it and happy to see that it was beating expectations to top this weekend’s movies, even White Chicks.

I got to the theater early to beat the crowds (not so much for the matinee), full of anticipation. A little over two hours later, I was very disappointed.

The movie opens with Moore’s version of the "stealing" of the 2000 election by the Bush family. Regardless of one’s opinion of this event, it should be clear that this was the weakest opening he could have gone for in terms of actually convincing those not predisposed to hate GW Bush.

He then spends about 20 minutes on the "Saudi connection," which actually struck me as quite racist. I won’t critique this section in detail – I am sure Justin Raimondo will cover this in his Monday column.

The rest of the movie was quite tedious. A combination of boring and overkill, combined with the fact that Moore himself narrates the entire 116 minutes. Literally everything is telegraphed, with no surprises. Moore repeatedly hits you over the head. His focus on victims is limited to only a few individuals, and he makes you sick of them by the time he is done.

Moore blames so much on GW Bush that I actually found myself silently defending him, a feeling that did not sit well with me at all.

I am quite surprised at the near-universal acclaim (see these typical reviews by Roger Ebert and Rex Reed). It reminds me of the reviews for the simply-dreadful movie Bullworth, which was hyped by liberals for its socialist message.

I can only recall a half-dozen brief scenes that made me laugh, in spite of many obvious attempts at humor. And good antiwar movies make me cry. This one didn’t.

I cannot imagine any person changing his or her mind about Bush or the War in Iraq based upon seeing Fahrenheit 9/11. It is a shame.