Honesty.

It almost literally kills me when I feel the need to keep secrets.  Or find out that I have been feeling that need and acting on it.

On that, here's a quote from the great co-discoverer of Marginal Utility, William Stanley Jevons,

It would not be easy to say offhand whether every action which is not honest is dishonest, or whether there may not be actions of an intermediate character. The rule is that wherever the question is one of degree or quantity a medium is possible, and the subject belongs rather to the science of quantity than to simple logic; where the question is one of the presence or absence of a quality, there cannot be more than two alternatives…

That's from Elementary Lessons in Logic.  The best way to get it is google it.  The Mises Institute has it as a free PDF.  The quote is from page 24.

So here's where I'm at:

Brutal honesty requires me not to accept belief in things for which there is no, or insufficient, evidence.  So, I don't accept fallacious arguments for anything supernatural, nor have I ever seen non-fallacious arguments for them.  What I'd like to be the case has no bearing on what is real.

So they call me an atheist.

I don't respect claims to authority by those who haven't demonstrated their expertise, whether they be teachers, presidents, kings, UN Secretary Generals, any member of any hierarchy (bureaucrats, middle-managers, etc), police, soldiers, prophets, priests or parents.  Or siblings.

Respect at a job requires competence at that job.  Competence (or even brilliance or genius) at one job, does not imply competence at anything else.  Newbs who won't train must be fired.

Most of those jobs above are too broad in their attempted scope to allow for any training whatsoever.  The jobs for which training is actually possible are the ones that are actually useful and their current organization in hierarchies must be reorganized so as to remove control from power and glory grubbers who lie about the value of their contributions.

The basic principle of that reorganization is the Non-Aggression Principle.

So they call me and anarchist and anti-family.  I'll wear the first two labels, atheist and anarchist, with some degree of pride, though they're not perfectly accurate.  I don't like agnostic, because it gives the illusion of respect to theists.  Faith is not respectable whether it's in God, government, ghosts, ufos or Dialectical Materialism.

Gotta go.

Your child is not yours

He (or she) is a rental. 

Her permanent owner is her future self.

There will be stiff penalties to pay if you don't return your child to his future self in good order.

Actually, it's more like a stock holder. 

Remember the Parable of the Talents.

H/T Stefan Molyneux on the question of whether (note spelling - not weather) your children are your property.

Ides of March, People!

Have you stabbed your local dictator yet?  Time's a-wastin'!

(Seriously, though, don't stab anyone I wouldn't stab.  WWAtOWD?)

Update: Time is celebrating with me!

I have to apologize.

Stef just reminded me that a couple of my favorite authors are also self-published.  Stef himself and Larkin Rose both are but they write so well you couldn't tell that no huge organizations were backing them.

Sorry, I put a political post on the other blog.

In my defense, there is a work of art there.

I need a link to it, don't I?

Peter Gerlach

I'm going to be spending a lot of time on this guy's materials.  He's an Internal Family Systems therapist (with an Engineering and Business background before he decided to take therapy and then become a therapist).  He has about 170 videos on YouTube.