Robert Heinlein on Duty

“Do not confuse 'duty' with what other people expect of you; they are utterly different. Duty is a debt you owe to yourself to fulfill obligations you have assumed voluntarily. Paying that debt can entail anything from years of patient work to instant willingness to die. Difficult it may be, but the reward is self-respect.”

Care of Stephen Browne.

Have I mentioned that Robert E. Howard is one of my favorite writers?

A guilty pleasure, I guess.

I just finished watching The Whole Wide World, with Renee Zellweger and Vincent D'Onofrio. "A true story about the true love of the greatest pulp fiction writer of all time."

Where the hell was I when this movie was out? Oh, I know: we were having our first baby. That knocked a whole lot of BS out of my head. I didn't get around to throwing out my Conan collection, though. My daughter just pulled them out of my paperback shelf and read them last year.

If you decide to read one, "Beyond the Black River" is the best story. I think it's in Conan: The Warrior. Ah, yes it is. There are other great ones, but there's something more in that one. Je ne sais quoi.

It's a beautiful movie. Howard was more than the bios in the books, apparently - though he was quite a lot in those. The movie is based on the memoir by Novalyne Price of her time with him. Brought a tear to my eye. Get it and watch it.

Oh, Novalyne Price's book is One Who Walked Alone.

How can we have sustainable government?

Here's the PDF he mentions. It's just a two-pager, so have no fear about downloading it.

"But what about the poor?" you ask?

Raise kids to be entrepreneurs!

Here's the way to do it.

Thank you, anarchei!

Ah, crap, I gotta go to bed.

I didn't notice: my last post was my 2500th!

But few of my own words, of course.

Speaking of someone else's words, here's J. Neil Schulman praising Glenn Beck's.

I'm pretty sure the Overton window isn't named after the Overton who wrote An Arrow Against All Tyrants. No, the link I found, there, proves it wasn't. Ol' Richard certainly did his part to move the window, eh?

You know what sucks?

When you accept that all political parties' critiques of all other political parties are essentially correct, it really leaves you very little to say about the topic. The Democrats are right about the Republicans, the Republicans are right about the Democrats, Conservatives are right about Liberals and vice versa, Marxists are right about Capitalists - and again vice versa...

We're talking about the Capitalism as it really exists, not the pure Free Market that has never existed except in Iceland and Ireland, and, well, actually anywhere where a government was nominally acknowledged but actually ignored, like colonial Pennsylvania and the back country of... well, any back country.

Take the oil spill. Of course they f'ed up! They're all standing around pointing guns at each other and everybody who looks at 'em instead of concentrating on getting petroleum products to me. 'They' are everybody sticking their noses in between the hole in the ground and me - all the "governmental affairs" specialists in the various companies lobbying for special privileges and wheeling and dealing for special restrictions that only hurt their competition, all the environmental groups lobbying for their personal hobbies, all the bureaucrats fighting for their cushy jobs and all the politicians preening before their constituents so they can keep their cushy jobs.

We've got to do whatever we can to stop supporting the lot of 'em.

By the way, on Probligo's blog I repented of ever having supported George Bush or anything he did. That certainly doesn't mean that I support anything Obama's doing - anybody who thought he return us to Clinton's '90s was an ignoramous - but that should all be clear from my first two paragraphs.

I think it was Kropotkin who wanted us to grow societies until they choke out governments (I'm using the terms as Tom Paine used them). That's the plan.

Sad news on the spare blog

I lost an old, reliable friend.

It'd be tasteless to let you think I'm talking about a person or a pet. I've posted the last days in the life of my first powertool over there.

I haven't been able to find the old camera

I haven't really had a lot of time to look, though. The main drain in the laundry room backed up right when we (all right, I mean my wife) needed to do six loads of laundry. Well, part of that need was created by the back up soaking all the clothes on the laundry room floor. So, after we got tired of vacuuming up the water and lugging the bucket around to the shower drain, we jury-rigged a hose directly from the washer to the shower drain. Somebody still had to watch to make sure that didn't overflow - it hasn't, except when I covered the drain with 'Liina's tub when I was giving her her bath last night and the washer started draining just as she finished. I didn't know it was running because I had the dehumidifier and the ceiling fan running to help the rug dry out from the first flood.

Anyway, I went to Menard's to see what they had to unclog it. Being kind of a Tim Allenish sort of guy, I bought the strongest thing they have: concentrated sulfuric acid.

I have a recommendation: use something else to unclog your drain.

No, I used the stuff carefully and conscientiously, but the whole house smells like a giant pig took a dump in it. And it's still too early to check and see if it worked or not.

Hey! We just doubled our chance of having a good time on a Friday night!

Nooo, nobody changed their sexual orientation! Jeez!

We bought a pop-up camper. I'll show you some pix of it and talk about them tomorrow. $500. But it's older than the guy we bought it from.

Yeah, the canvas needs work, and there's a little bit of fiberglass work to do too, but it seems pretty solid otherwise.

I'm fine

Running. I've got a race Saturday, the Manitou 15K around White Bear Lake. I liked that run back in 2007 so I wanted to do it again. I ran about that distance just now in 110 minutes, compared to 93 minutes for the race back then, but training isn't racing. Plus, I think it's warmer now than it will be Saturday morning. They're predicting thunderstorms.

I'll post the results on the other blog (linked at the bottom of my link bar).

We went up to the inlaws place on Lake Vermilion for Memorial Day weekend. Sid and I put the track system in, so we could take a boat ride and we enjoyed a cruise around Birch Point and back. Very nice. The lilacs are still in bloom up there and the wild roses are blooming in the ditches.

The kids went in swimming and the puppy thought she'd join them. I think she's decided she's not a water dog. The waters pretty cold yet. The ice typically isn't off the lake until the second week of May.