Benjamin Constant said this in 1819:

It follows from what I have just indicated that we can no longer enjoy the liberty of the ancients, which consisted in an active and constant participation in collective power. Our freedom must consist of peaceful enjoyment and private independence. The share that in antiquity everyone held in national sovereignty was by no means an abstract presumption as it is in our own day. The will of each individual had real influence: the exercise of this will was a vivid and repeated pleasure. Consequently the ancients were ready to make many a sacrifice to preserve their political rights and their share in the administration of the state. Everybody, feeling with pride all that his suffrage was worth, found in this awareness of his personal importance a great compensation.

This compensation no longer exists for us today. Lost in the multitude, the individual can almost never perceive the influence he exercises. Never does his will impress itself upon the whole; nothing confirms in his eyes his own cooperation. The exercise of political rights, therefore, offers us but a part of the pleasures that the ancients found in it, while at the same time the progress of civilization, the commercial tendency of the age, the communication amongst peoples, have infinitely multiplied and varied the means of personal happiness.

It follows that we must be far more attached than the ancients to our individual independence. For the ancients when they sacrificed that independence to their political rights, sacrificed less to obtain more; while in making the same sacrifice! we would give more to obtain less. The aim of the ancients was the sharing of social power among the citizens of the same fatherland: this is what they called liberty. The aim of the moderns is the enjoyment of security in private pleasures; and they call liberty the guarantees accorded by institutions to these pleasures.

Yeah, it's them Mises guys again.

Now that there's a little distance between now and the sad event

I can tell you my clearest memory of Don Ho.

Actually, it's not of him per se, as much as it's of his name. Back in the late Seventies, National Lampoon put out a personality test (and you know how I love personality tests) called "Are You a Homo?" in which one of the answers to the question, asked by your Uncle Moe, "Who's your favorite singer?" was "Don Ho, Moe."

The test was morally non-judgmental, so you could feel perfectly comfortable choosing that answer.

Update: Some corroboration. And, I'm sure they've got it archived on their website somewhere. I've already wasted too much of my LifeForce on the subject.

LibertyBob reminds us why

[LibertyBob link] as I like to say, "Nobody should live in the city without a Streetsweeper."

Here's a picture of what I'm talking about (from here):


I suppose, though that I'd rather have the next descendant of that weapon, shown in the following pic on that site.

A society armed with fully automatic, large-capacity-magazine shotguns is a polite society.

Have I quoted this before?

Great part of that order which reigns among mankind is not the effect of government. It has its origin in the principles of society and the natural constitution of man. It existed prior to government, and would exist if the formality of government was abolished. …Common interest regulates their concerns, and forms their law; and the laws which common usage ordains, have a greater influence than the laws of government. In fine, society performs for itself almost everything which is ascribed to government.

Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man (1791).

Richman quotes it at the end of a fine exposition of Paine's Common Sense.

There. Now I have links to all of Paine's published works on one page. Oh, come to think of it, The Crisis link is in a comment.

Wait a minute, I'm forgetting a fourth. What is it, LibertyBob? Oh, yeah! The Age of Reason! [I like that USHistory.org.] Which is a lot better explication of Deism than, say, Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion [scroll down] or Ethan Allen's Reason: The Only Oracle of Man. Of course, I read Paine first and the other two were deadly boring rehashes of the same stuff after that. Paine inserts some fireworks into the discussion at least.

Just so you know

Your Score: Robot

You are 71% Rational, 0% Extroverted, 42% Brutal, and 42% Arrogant.

You are the Robot! You are characterized by your rationality. In fact, this is really ALL you are characterized by. Like a cold, heartless machine, you are so logical and unemotional that you scarcely seem human. For instance, you are very humble and don't bother thinking of your own interests, you are very gentle and lack emotion, and you are also very introverted and introspective. You may have noticed that these traits are just as applicable to your laptop as they are to a human being. You are not like the robots they show in the movies. Movie robots are make-believe, because they always get all personable and likeable after being struck by lightning, or they are cold, cruel killing machines. In all reality, though, you are much more boring than all that. Real robots just sit there, doing their stupid jobs, and doing little else. If you get struck by lightning, you won't develop a winning personality and heart of gold. (Robots don't have hearts, silly, and if they did, they would probably be made of steel, not gold.) You also won't be likely to terrorize humanity by becoming an ultra-violent killing machine sent into the past to kill the mother of a child who will lead a rebellion against machines, because that movie was dumb as hell, and because real robots don't kill--they horribly maim at best, and they don't even do that on purpose. Real robots are boringly kind and all too rarely try to kill people. In all my years, my laptop has only attacked me once, and that was only because my brother threw it at me. In short, your personality defect is that you don't really HAVE a personality. You are one of those annoying, super-logical people that never gets upset or flustered. Unless, of course, you short circuit. Or if someone throws a pie at you. Pies sure are delicious.

To put it less negatively:

1. You are more RATIONAL than intuitive.

2. You are more INTROVERTED than extroverted.

3. You are more GENTLE than brutal.

4. You are more HUMBLE than arrogant.

Compatibility:

Your exact opposite is the Class Clown.

Other personalities you would probably get along with are the Hand-Raiser, the Emo Kid, and the Haughty Intellectual.

*

*

If you scored near fifty percent for a certain trait (42%-58%), you could very well go either way. For example, someone with 42% Extroversion is slightly leaning towards being an introvert, but is close enough to being an extrovert to be classified that way as well. Below is a list of the other personality types so that you can determine which other possible categories you may fill if you scored near fifty percent for certain traits.

The other personality types:

The Emo Kid: Intuitive, Introverted, Gentle, Humble.

The Starving Artist: Intuitive, Introverted, Gentle, Arrogant.

The Bitch-Slap: Intuitive, Introverted, Brutal, Humble.

The Brute: Intuitive, Introverted, Brutal, Arrogant.

The Hippie: Intuitive, Extroverted, Gentle, Humble.

The Televangelist: Intuitive, Extroverted, Gentle, Arrogant.

The Schoolyard Bully: Intuitive, Extroverted, Brutal, Humble.

The Class Clown: Intuitive, Extroverted, Brutal, Arrogant.

The Robot: Rational, Introverted, Gentle, Humble.

The Haughty Intellectual: Rational, Introverted, Gentle, Arrogant.

The Spiteful Loner: Rational, Introverted, Brutal, Humble.

The Sociopath: Rational, Introverted, Brutal, Arrogant.

The Hand-Raiser: Rational, Extroverted, Gentle, Humble.

The Braggart: Rational, Extroverted, Gentle, Arrogant.

The Capitalist Pig: Rational, Extroverted, Brutal, Humble.

The Smartass: Rational, Extroverted, Brutal, Arrogant.

Be sure to take my Sublime Philosophical Crap Test if you are interested in taking a slightly more intellectual test that has just as many insane ramblings as this one does!

About Saint_Gasoline

I am a self-proclaimed pseudo-intellectual who loves dashes. I enjoy science, philosophy, and fart jokes and water balloons, not necessarily in that order. I spend 95% of my time online, and the other 5% of my time in the bathroom, longing to get back on the computer. If, God forbid, you somehow find me amusing instead of crass and annoying, be sure to check out my blog and my webcomic at SaintGasoline.com.

Link: The Personality Defect Test written by saint_gasoline on OkCupid Free Online Dating, home of the The Dating Persona Test

I AM THE CUBE OF SIX!!!

Does that seem like an odd thing to say? Actually, it doesn't quite describe my whole essence. Just my weight. In pounds.

6x6x6=216. Somebody should come up with a measure of length that would make that describe my volume as well. But then, density variations....

Hi. I'm still here.

But enough about me, here:

Although we often hear that the Indians knew nothing of private property, their actual views of property varied across time, place, and tribe. When land and game were plentiful, it is not surprising that people exerted little effort in defining and enforcing property rights. But as those things became more scarce, Indians appreciated the value of assigning property rights in (for example) hunting and fishing.

In other words, the American Indians were human beings who responded to the incentives they faced, not cardboard cutouts to be exploited on behalf of environmentalism or any other political program.

Were American Indians Really Environmentalists? by Thomas E. Woods.

BTW, Economics is about the use of scarce resources. Money is just one of them and you don't see the best economists forgetting that.

My guys are giving you a sword, Prob,

in Tales of Titans and Hobbits, by Juliusz Jablecki:

The Lord of the Rings shows not only the great danger associated with all attempts to defeat evil power by power, but it also teaches that collectives do not really exist, that every one of us is the hero of his own individual story, and that law and order can easily exist without the state. Despite its egoistic message, Atlas Shrugged is full of imperatives to act, to fight, to bring salvation. Rand's characters suffer not only because the state reaches into their wallets, but because the society rejected their rational, "enlightened" vision of what is good and right.

[Really? I missed that point. One of those elisions I mentioned, I suppose.]

Tolkien, on the other hand, disliked such imperatives. He hated the outlook that if something can be done, it has to be done, and once even admitted that the greatest deeds of mind and spirit are born in abnegation. That is most likely the reason his characters do not look for great challenges, nor wish to change the world, and instead live quietly, fulfilling Voltaire's dictum Il faut cultiver notre jardin.

[I won't rely on my beginner's knowledge of French and faux amies this time*: Google says Voltaire's quote means, "Our garden should be cultivated." That could use a little context, I think, though it works here.

*Censeur means critic, not censor.]

And my personal hero, Sheldon Richman,

has this to say:

Comte and Dunoyer, along with Augustin Thierry, whose publication, Le Censeur européen [is there a typo there?], was a hotbed of radical free-market thought, were influenced by the important, but underappreciated, French free-market economist Jean-Baptiste Say, whom Murray Rothbard lauded as brilliantly innovative and the superior of Adam Smith. The seeds of early classical-liberal class theory can be found in the second and subsequent editions of Say’s Treatise on Political Economy (first published in 1803), which reflected his response to Napoleon’s military spending and intervention in the French economy. For Say, government's power to tax the fruits of labor and to distribute largess and jobs is the source of class division and exploitation. As he wrote in another work, "The huge rewards and the advantages which are generally attached to public employment greatly excite ambition and cupidity. They create a violent struggle between those who possess positions and those who want them." Of course someone has to provide the largess.

That someone is you and me...at the point of our "servants'" guns.

Rothbard:

The State indeed performs many important and necessary functions: from provision of law to the supply of police and fire fighters, to building and maintaining the streets, to delivery of the mail. But this in no way demonstrates that only the State can perform such functions, or, indeed, that it performs them even passably well.

The Nature of The State.

Reading Rothbard always makes me feel like I've been trying to reinvent the wheel. The dude has covered everything I've been trying to say. Here he says that much and more:

...Spooner was the last of the great natural rights theorists among anarchists, classical liberals, or moral theorists generally; the doughty old heir of the natural law-natural rights tradition of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was fighting a rearguard battle against the collapse of the idea of a scientific or rational morality, or of the science of justice or of individual right.

Not only had natural law and natural rights given way throughout society to the arbitrary rule of utilitarian calculation or nihilistic whim; but the same degenerative process had occurred among libertarians and anarchists as well. Spooner knew that the foundation for individual rights and liberty was tinsel if all values and ethics were arbitrary and subjective.

Yet, even in his own anarchist movement Spooner was the last of the Old Guard believers in natural rights; his successors in the individualist-anarchist movement, led by Benjamin R. Tucker, all proclaimed arbitrary whim and might-makes-right as the foundation of libertarian moral theory. And yet, Spooner knew that this was no foundation at all; for the State is far mightier than any individual, and if the individual cannot use a theory of justice as his armor against State oppression, then he has no solid base from which to roll back and defeat it.

With his emphasis on cognitive moral principles and natural rights, Spooner must have looked hopelessly old-fashioned to Tucker and the young anarchists of the 1870s and 1880s. And yet now, a century later, it is the latters' once fashionable nihilism and tough amoralism that strike us as being empty and destructive of the very liberty they all tried hard to bring about. We are now beginning to recapture the once-great tradition of an objectively grounded rights of the individual. In philosophy, in economics, in social analysis, we are beginning to see that the tossing aside of moral rights was not the brave new world it once seemed — but rather a long and disastrous detour in political philosophy that is now fortunately drawing to a close.

The next paragraph is even more important. Read it there.

Triskadekaphilia

I washed the truck today. I was on vacation. The radio told me while I was working that the temperature went from 73-76 degrees F. Sunny (or "partly cloudy," who cares?)...

Beckham married Posh Spice...

Probligo ragged on me about Capitalism...

My life is effin' wonderful!

I've been listening to Dennis Miller all week from 10:00 to noon every day on AM 1570 for the last week...

I am psyched about life!

Friday the 13th is Bulls--t!

Here's a hint at how today went:


All right [Morons: note spelling] I'll let you see the parts of that - that I find most important - a little closer:


I just realized I haven't brushed her hair today. Sorry.

My Daughter wants to read The Kalevala.

I picked this version, but there's plenty.

If anyone in the Twin Cities wants to help me learn Finnish using it, that would be wonderful. Or just buddy up to work on it together.

I suppose I could do that with the kids.

Diamonds and Water

I just discovered a guy, Daniel J. McLaughlin, who has some valuable insights:

There are some very good teachers, but teaching in a typical classroom is not generally a route to superstardom. There are relatively limited classroom positions in any geographic area, and usually plenty of competent and capable people willing to fill the spots. They are similar to water in our example. They may be necessary, they may be very good, they may provide a very valuable service, but they are also abundant.

Aspiring athletes get to be superstars because they have some type of rare talent. Top athletes can do things that mere mortals can't. Most have paid a heavy personal cost to get there. Many more try, but don't even come close. Only a tiny fraction actually make it to the big time. The level of ability and dedication it takes to be a superstar is, indeed, very rare. That rarity makes them the diamonds in the realm of professional endeavors. They have millions of adoring fans willing to pay money to see them. The supply is extremely low and the demand is extremely high. They command a high price for the same reason that diamonds are expensive.

All athletes, however, are not diamonds. Some are rubies, some are quartz, some are coal. Those that are not diamonds command less pay and may play at lower levels, farm teams, semi-pro or amateur leagues.

There are also different levels in teaching. While some are not called "teachers", they still need to be included for comparison. Some are called professors, consultants, public speakers, writers, etc. The level of pay for any of them depends on the perceived value of the skill that each individual exhibits in relation to the skills of those that would replace him or her. Thus, a renowned consultant or professor with a significant reputation , who is a popular writer and has taught many thousands of people, may actually make millions of dollars. He or she is just as much a teacher and, though called by a different name, can be thought of as a superstar of teaching, similar to superstar athletes.

I've argued these points before, though not here, I don't think. He puts it very clearly. There are teachers making millions. We just don't call them teachers. And they don't work for the government.

I should tell you that I didn't realize he was the author of this article when I finally got around to reading Economic Lessons from the Amish in my email.

Have I mentioned Father Sirico's speech

“Socialism, Free Enterprise, and the Common Good”, given at Hillsdale College and printed in Imprimus? He's the co-founder and president of the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty.

The Acton Institute really kicks my butt in saying everything I want to say.

F'rinstance:

The core of the old socialist hope was a mass prosperity that would free all people from the burden of laboring for others and place them in a position to pursue higher ends, such as art and philosophy, in a conflict-free society. But there was a practical problem: The Marxist prediction of a revolution that would bring about this good society rested on the assumption that the condition of the working classes would grow ever worse under capitalism. But by the early twentieth century it was clear that this assumption was completely wrong. Indeed, the reverse was occurring: As wealth grew through capitalist means, the standard of living of all was improving.

...

Historians now realize that even in the early years of the Industrial Revolution, workers were becoming better off. Prices were falling, incomes rising, health and sanitation improving, diets becoming more varied, and working conditions constantly improving. The new wealth generated by capitalism dramatically lengthened life spans and decreased child mortality rates. The new jobs being created in industry paid more than most people could make in agriculture. Housing conditions improved. The new heroes of society came from the middle class as business owners and industrialists displaced the nobility and gentry in the cultural hierarchy.

Much has been made about the rise of child labor and too little about the fact that, for the first time, there was remunerative work available for people of all ages. As economist W. H. Hutt has shown, work in the factories for young people was far less grueling than it had been on the farm, which is one reason parents favored the factory. As for working hours, it is documented that when factories would reduce hours, the employees would leave to go to work for factories that made it possible for them to work longer hours and earn additional wages. The main effect of legislation that limited working hours for minors was to drive employment to smaller workshops that could more easily evade the law.

In the midst of all this change, many people seemed only to observe an increase in the number of the poor. In a paradoxical way, this too was a sign of social progress, since so many of these unfortunate people might have been dead in past ages. But the deaths of the past were unseen and forgotten, whereas current poverty was omnipresent. Meanwhile, as economic development expanded in the nineteenth century, there was a dramatic growth of a middle class that now had access to consumer goods once available only to kings—not to mention plenty of new goods being created by the engine of capitalism.

I'm not too sure about this Communitarianism article, though. But I'm not going to go all Ayn Rand on 'em before I read it.

WOD: Idiolect

An idiolect is a variety of a language unique to an individual. It is manifested by patterns of word selection and grammar, or words, phrases, idioms, or pronunciations that are unique to that individual. Every individual has an idiolect; the grouping of words and phrases is unique, rather than an individual using specific words that nobody else uses.

From Wikipedia.

It's my blog and I'll quote LvMI if I want to.

In Time for Another Revolution, Frank Chodorov said:

But regardless of their argument and regardless of their intent, the Constitutional shackles did in fact, though perhaps inadvertently, protect the people in the enjoyment of their cherished rights.

From this we learn a little heeded lesson in social science, namely, that the real struggle that disturbs the enjoyment of life is not between economic classes but between Society as a whole and the political power which imposes itself on Society. The class-struggle theory is a blind alley. True, people of like economic interests will gang up for the purpose of taking advantage of others. But within these classes there is as much rivalry as there is between the classes.

When, however, you examine the advantage which one class obtains over another you find that the basis of it is political power. It is impossible for one person to exploit another, for one class to exploit another, without the aid of law and the force to back up the law. Examine any monopoly and you will find it resting on the State. So that the economic and social injustices we complain of are not due to economic inequalities, but to the political means that bring about these inequalities.

If peace is to be brought into the social order it is not by accentuating a class struggle, but by restraining the basic cause of it; that is, the political power. To bring about a condition of equal rights, which is a condition of justice, the hands of the politician must be so tied that he cannot extend his activities beyond the simple duty of protecting life and property, his only competence.

"His only competence." No form of redistribution works better than protecting life and property for creating a peaceful, happy society. The authorities don't do that perfectly either, but if they focused on it, they might improve.

And, if all that seems too tame, Chodorov goes on:

For about a century and a half the American citizen enjoyed, in the main, three immunities against the State: in respect to his property; in respect to his person; in respect to his thought and expression. Pressure upon them was constant, for in the pursuit of power the State is relentless, but the dikes of the Constitution held firm and so did the immunities. Only within our time did the State effect a vital breach in the Constitution, and in short order the American, no matter what his classification, was reduced to the status of subject, as he was before 1776. His citizenship shriveled up when the Sixteenth Amendment replaced the Declaration of Independence.

The income tax completely destroys the immunity of property. It flatly declares a prior right of the State to all things produced. What it permits the individual to retain is a concession to expediency, not by any means a right; for the State retains the liberty to set rates and to fix exemptions from year to year, as its convenience dictates. Thus, the sacred right of private property is violated, and the fact that it is done pro forma makes the violation no less real than when it is done arbitrarily by an autocrat. The blanks we so dutifully fill out simply accentuate our degradation to subject status.

Demagoguery loves to emphasize a distinction between human rights and property rights. The distinction is without validity and only serves to arouse envy. The right to own is the mark of a free man. The slave is a slave simply because he is denied that right. And because the free man is secure in the possession and enjoyment of what he produces, and the slave is not, the spur to production is in one and not in the other. Men produce to satisfy their desires and if their gratifications are curbed they cease to produce beyond the point of limitation; on the other hand the only limit to their aspirations is the freedom to enjoy the fruits of their labors.

BTW, I haven't had time to study this, but a guy named Bill Benson claims that the 16th Amendment hasn't really been ratified. The guys with the guns say otherwise, so use your own judgment about what to do about it.

I don't have anything better to say today than

what Captain Ed said, so I'll send you to him. I discovered the post via The Atlasphere.

The quote of Reagan is magnificent and he has a link to the original speech.

I, myself, would just tell you to read the Declaration and the Preamble to the Constitution today.

Aloud to your family.

The slackers are bailing out of the old work-place

Like rats from a sinking ship today. It's supposed to be beautiful out all weekend, and, of course, the Fourth is next week.

But, I'll be hanging out here. Might go to the Lake for the weekend tonight, but the wife was questioning that this morning when I told her it was cool out during my run. About 60: nice for a slow 2-mile jog.

I ran 5 yesterday and 3 Tuesday. Need to run 9 tomorrow or Sunday.

Last Saturday, I was supposed to run 8, but Laurie and Rosie went on a Girl Scout camping trip, so I was left home with Aliina. She woke up with me both days, so Saturday, I just blew it off and we ended up visiting two of the local parks, and Sunday I put her in the jogging stroller and pushed her for about five miles. You don't feel that thing for the first few, but you definitely start to notice the minor up grades after that.

We ended up at a park about 2 miles from the house, and after playing for an hour, I just walked her home.

I'm finally starting to drop some poundage. I took off about 4 lbs this week. Add that to 3 since the beginning of April and I'll be back to the weight I ran the Marathon at in another couple weeks.

Remember, I continued to lose weight during the post-Marathon recovery all the way into November. A sure sign that I hit the Wall hard.

Now that I know what that's like, I have absolutely no fear of it. Big deal! So I had to walk half of the last 10 miles! What of it? I felt tired for a month. Well, I felt tired for the month previous, too, when I wasn't running.

At this end of the training cycle I find that I'm recovering pretty quick. Part of that is because I'm studying magazines and books on how to train and recover; the other part is that the training for the first four weeks isn't as hard as the training for the last four.

Agh! I'm talking about running again. What is this?! An obsession?!

I'm going to hand out about a page of Mark Steyn's

America Alone, starting in the middle of the paragraph beginning on p. 97:

Reviewing the film The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, Polly Toynbee, the queen of progressivist pieties in Britain, wrote that Aslan "is an emblem for everything an atheist objects to in religion. His divine presence is a way to avoid humans taking responsibility for everything here and now on earth, where no one is watching, no one is guiding, no one is judging, and there is no other place yet to come. Without an Aslan, there is on one here but ourselves to suffer for our sins, no one to redeem us but ourselves: we are obliged to settle our own disputes and do what we can."

Sounds very nice. But in practice the lack of belief in divine presence is just as likely to lead to humans avoiding responsibility: if there's nothing other than the here and now, who needs to settle disputes at all? All you have to do is manage to defer them till after you're dead--which is the European electorates' approach to their unaffordable social programs. The meek's prospects of inheriting the earth are considerably diminished in a post-Christian society: chances are they'll just get steamrollered by more motivated types. You don't have to look far to get the cut of my jib.

What? They must use that expression differently in Canada.

And yet even those who understand very clearly the nature of Islam are complacent about Europe's own structural defects. Olivier Roy, one of the most respected Islamic experts in France, nevertheless insists "secularism is the future." Almost by definition, secularism cannot be a future: it's a present-tense culture that over time disconnects a society from cross-generational purpose. Which is why there are no examples of sustained atheist civilizations. "Atheistic humanism" became inhumanism in the hands of the Fascists and Communists and, in its less malign form in today's European Union, a kind of dehumanism in which a present-tense culture amuses itself to extinction. Post-Christian European culture is already post-cultural and, with its surging Muslim populations, will soon be post-European.

Discussions of world events will be shallow if they ignore this book.

I've said that first generation atheists are thoughtful people and wonderful humanitarians who were convinced by philosophy and[/or] experience that what they grew up believing is wrong. But their children are another story. They grow up believing the simple statement "there is no God" and all the rest is "blah, blah, blah." The stories and explanations don't cut very deeply when they're not your own (especially when you don't tell them well - and hard). So I find his line here quite plausible.

The children take the belief and then what? There'd better be a helluvan ethical theory to latch on to. Relativism sure isn't it.

Yet my theory may also apply to any conversion - I've only noticed it in atheists. Come to think of it, I know quite a few apostate Christians for whom this applies as well. Myself included (sometimes), although I think the apostacy in my generation's case is a direct result of farming kids out to central government controlled education.

It's that Dewey bastard's fault.

BTW, my first post on Steyn's book is here.

Update on finishing the book: Steyn believes we should reshoulder Kipling's White Man's Burden, citing the literary arguments of Arthur Conan Doyle in The Tragedy of the Korosko.

Hmm. I hope we don't have to take that pill. I find it hard to swallow. I think I prefer the commentary on Kipling's poem at GMU. Oh! They have more!

As long as I'm hanging out with the Mises people

One of them, Roderick Long, has announced on the Blog a collection of Spoonerisms.

Ho ho! Damn, I'm funny!

No, Shawn Wilbur is scanning issues of Lysander Spooner's Liberty magazine to .pdf and making them available on the web.

I'll have to practice my speed reading on them.

Hans Sennholz has died.

February 3, 1922–June 23, 2007

Thats' a good website to study.

Here's what Mises.org has so far. Apparently they don't can obits ahead of time, but it's a good speech Rockwell gave in Sennholz' honor in 2004.

Update: I forgot that FEE might have something to say about Sennholz dying. He was President there from '92-'97.

Oddly enough, Richard Ebeling's (current President of FEE) obit is a better read than the one at Sennholz.com. Here's the fun part:

Rising to speak at that seminar, Hans was soon hunched over the podium, a finger pointed at the audience, in what I discovered was his characteristic pose. He proceeded to explain the "absurdities" of government intervention, socialism, and inflation. In a thick but easily understood German accent -- that always had a great effect on the crowd -- he preached hell-fire and brimstone about how free markets and limited government were the only paths away from economic and political perdition.

In the evening he sat around with a group of the attendees and told us about his early life. Hans had been born on February 3, 1922, in the Rhineland area. He had been drafted into the German Luftwaffe in World War II and was shot down while serving in North Africa. He ended up in a POW camp outside of Austin, Texas. I asked him what it was like to be a prisoner of war. He replied that those were among the best years of his life. The camp cook had been a chef in a Berlin restaurant before the war, and all the meals were "wonderful." It turned out that he had some relatives who had immigrated to America in the 1920s and who happened to live in the area. They vouched for him so he could enroll at the University of Texas at Austin. He was escorted by a military policeman, who would stand behind him at attention in the classroom.

Then he went back to Germany (Marburg; I've been there!), discovered Mises and became a great economist.

Long lost friends and relatives post a comment here please.

Jonny, Jez, Gerald, Ellie, Cozzie, Tim, Tom, Willy, Pat F., Scott or any other old Superior buddies, or, goddamnit! Randall Sivertson, Carl Fish or any old UMD buddies... I want to f___in' hear from you!

I'm an INTP. That means that I can spend long periods of time focussing on things other than my friends, but it doesn't mean that I don't love them. Indeed, it means that I love them intensely, but have no idea how to express it. Often, I'm able to have fairly intimite relationships with people who can help me learn about whatever subject(s) I'm focussed on.

The people named here are loved intensely by me, personally, whom I have not heard from in too many years.

I suppose it's possible that you don't know who's asking. I'm Al Erkkila, or Alan Erkkila. My wife is Laurie. When she married me her name was Molinaro, but her maiden name was Wovcha. So here's where Google searches of Laurie Molinaro and Laurie Wovcha should end up.

And for all you Nazi bastards, that means that my wife and kids have Jewish blood, and I swear eternal enmity to you.

Update 5/25/2011: Whoa! Wonder how many beers I'd had when I wrote this?

Kid pix

Next door.

Government Too Big AND Taxes Too High

Both are problems. Feel free to publish your own analysis under that title or any variation thereof. Just link me.

Hell, you can rip me off completely on that one, but tell me where I can read it, so I can learn from it.

What I really want to see is a study of the tax burden on various "classes" before the American Revolution and after, in the various states under the Articles of Confederation not ignoring the smart or stupid monetary policies of each, and before the ratification of the Constitution, immediately after and five and ten years after. Once again, not ignoring smart and/or stupid monetary policies. And including government spending levels.

I said somewhere (speak up if you know where) that [oh, I'll quit being coy and go over to Grandpa John's and see what the H it was that I said] Capitalism is God's way. Of course, I mean pure Capitalism, not any sort of Government-assisted business. That ain't Capitalism, that's Fascism. As is hindering some business in favor of others.

I want a government that neither favors nor hinders any particular business.

Hey! Dave Thompson's got Forrest Wilkinson on!

Ringer! What a character!

He slips in two lines I think ya'll'll appreciate in his article "Salting the Record." [In particular, I mean. But no hillbillyisms: that's just me being silly.]

"You may as well have trusted Kofi Annan to hold your wallet for you while you went for a jog."

You'll have to read the article for the context of that one, and it's interesting that the context actually camouflages this one,

"I first heard this term from an attorney who was explaining to me how important it is to document your dealings in great detail. He pointed out that the Clintons are a perfect example of people who have mastered this art. He opined that their conscientious salting of the record is the primary reason why they aren’t salted away in a federal prison somewhere."

Vickie Oddino, who looks like someone I know,

has an article in The Atlasphere comparing The Fountainhead to Amadeus. [If you want to compare apples to apples, The Fountainhead is a movie too.]

I wonder about the fate of the generation of children brought up in a world where the contrast between the superior and the average, the mediocre if you will, is deliberately suppressed. A world with no valedictorians for fear of hurting the feelings of those who did not earn the highest grades. A world where no one keeps score and where all baseball players on all teams receive trophies. A world of social promotion in education to save a student from the embarrassment of being held back.

What does this teach our children about the best and the brightest? Only that it is the presence of the best that makes us feel badly about ourselves. And the only way to feel better is to keep them suppressed.

Excellent! You should read it.

But it pricks at my conscience a bit.

There was a guy in my high school who was stronger than I was. I benched 320, he benched 330. Not only that, he was three inches taller, stunningly good-looking, affable, built like a bodybuilder and lazy as the day is long.

I think, though, that what bothered me most was that all he did was keep just barely ahead of me. "330? Is that enough for you? The school record's 385! Come on!"

At our twenty year reunion, he looked like he could bench 530. Still single and virile.

What's he doing with his life? He didn't say. He didn't say anything important. I don't think he can.

Or, maybe it's classified.

Well, bleep! Somebody brought up exercise.

As to my beating 3-4 miles of running per day, I can't say that I have. I ran seven again Saturday, be darned if I remember whether I ran or not Sunday, did three Monday in 27 minutes, two yesterday and five today. I feel great today, so I'll probably run another slow two tomorrow and we'll see what I'm up to Friday morning. The program calls for seven Saturday. Sounds easy, but we'll see. (It called for six last week, but I look my seven mile route better than what I could come up with for six.)

I've been feeling the need to write all that down before I forget what I'm up to. "You" asked for it.

As to my politics, I've had to give up a couple things in order to be a whole-hearted supporter of Ron Paul. Temperamentally, I'm an open-borders guy. I've liked all the Mexicans I've met, whether they were here legally or illegally, but I see the Constitutionally consistent position in shutting the borders down. Particularly in time of danger.

I was rather astounded at the controversy that has arisen over it. I've been more astonished that it hasn't happened. Nationalizing airline security, and the attendant politicization of the screening process, has been quite a silly step as a replacement for that. (I'd rather like to take a plane on my trips south to see my mother, but I'm boycotting the airlines until they stop this foolishness.)

We've supposedly got 12 million illegals in this country, and, near as I can tell, about 14 of them cause problems. I don't consider the existence of a black market a problem by itself. I consider murder, robbery, rape and destruction of property to be problems, but they only go hand-in-hand with illegal immigration and markets because those laws are silly and having silly laws breeds contempt for all laws, wise or silly.

The other thing I'm willing to give up in order to support Ron Paul is a strong, active military presence outside our borders. As long as we continue to strengthen our intelligence gathering capabilities. We were caught with our pants down on 9-11. We need, to expand on that homely simile, to have the outhouse well-armored and armed, and we need to be able to see who's sneaking up on it.

I've always been perfectly willing to give up a bullying diplomatic stance. Trade should be free, but Free Trade is too often confused with coerced trade. All the trades between the US and other nations is between our individuals and companies and their counterparts in those nations, not between our government and their government.

Of course, if one of our companies wanted to trade with a government, I wouldn't stop them. Unless they wanted to trade a secret weapon to a foreign government. But, then that would be contractual matter with our military. "If you want our protection here, you don't give our enemies equal or better weapons than you provide your protectors." I wish that could go without saying, but you can still read arguments against Free Trade that seem to consider that thought a major trump card against it. To my mind, it's the only thing that comes close to an exception, and, at that, it's only a small part of foreign trade.

Here I thought I was just going to post a couple sentences about each of these items. I went and summarized the major points of my political views. As a believer in medium-short blog posts, I have to cut myself off now.

Hey, I got the bourgeois poetry thing

goin' on over here.

I need help.

I should capitalize that: Bourgeois Poetry Thing - "thing" being Icelandic for "congress." And don't forget that Congress is a pun.

The last scary book I read

was Richard Preston's The Hot Zone, about the Ebola virus.

I just got another one the other day and I'm reading it now. America Alone, by Mark Steyn. This paragraph from page 3 is a good summation of the story so far:

In the fourteenth century, the Black Death wiped out a third of the Continent's population; in the twenty-first, a larger proportion will disappear--in effect, by choice. We are living through a rare moment: the self-extinction of the civilization which, for good or ill, shaped the age we live in. One can cite examples of remote backward tribes who expire upon contact with the modern world, but for the modern world to expire in favor of the backward tribes is a turn of events future anthropologists will ponder, as we do the fall of Rome.

Perhaps I should also cite the passage in which Steyn distinguishes his own doomsaying from that of Al Gore, etc:

For Al Gore and Paul Ehrlich and Co., whatever the problem, the solution is always the same. Whether it's global cooling, global warming, or overpopulation, we need bigger government, more regulation, higher taxes, and a massive transfer of power from the citizen to some unelected self-perpetuating crisis lobby. Not only does this not solve the problem, it is, in fact, a symptom of the real problem: the torpor of the West derives in part from the annexation by government of most of the core functions of adulthood.... When the foreign policy panjandrums talk about our enemies, they distinguish between "rogue states" like Iran and North Korea and "non-state actor" like al Qaeda and Hezbollah. But those distinctions apply on the home front too. Big governments are "rogue state," out of control and lacking the wit and agility to see off the threats to our freedom. Citizens willing to be "non-state actors" are just as important and, as we saw on Flight 93, a decisive part of our defense, nimbler and more efficient than the federal behemoth. The free world's citizenry could use more non-state actors.

So this is a doomsday book with a twist: an apocalyptic scenario that can best be avoided not by more government by by less--by government returning to the citizenry the primal responsibilities it's taken from them in the modern era.

Steyn speaks my language.

On the other hand, I'm afraid he looks, at this early stage of the book, to be pushing for a big American presence abroad.

I'm willing to see if the "Surge" in Iraq works, but by "works" I mean, allows us to leave Iraq in the hands of the Iraqis, with no worse problems than we had with gangsters in Chicago during Prohibition.

Some interesting thoughts on prohibition here, btw.

And, as long as we're by the way, I bought John Stossel's Myths, Lies, and Downright Stupidity at the same time. It should scare me just as much, but I'm pretty inured to the picture he's painting. Actually, Stossel's main thesis is that we're too afraid of the pictures we get from The Media, so it's the antithesis of a "doomsday book."

Reading the two simultaneously will probably destroy me. If The Media report a nuclear explosion in Minneapolis in the next few days, don't suspect al Qaeda. They're too busy basking in the glorious demographic news from Steyn.

Laugh of the day:

You may choose to spend the rest of your life feeling under-appreciated and under-compensated, just as so many do. That won't get you what you want - but you will have the feeling that you're getting screwed to warm you up at night.

-- Michael Masterson, The Real Reason Your CEO Makes More Than You Do. [You can find it either on the front page there, or in the archives after today.]

This guy's got a helluva good post

on Ron Paul. Here's a taste:

Seriously, in the last Republican debate a large segment was devoted to evolution – they actually debated their views on evolution as if it mattered. When it wasn't that, there was the question of gays in the military, why the terrorists will win if Republicans aren't elected and, of course, abortion. It's so painful to listen to, it makes it obvious why the Republican Party endorses torture – they wouldn't be able to give speeches otherwise.

I'm not sure what Paul has said about most of these things, but as for abortion, he's against it.

Here are my guesses [I'll just go ahead and project my own views, what the hell. That's what everyone else does in favor of their favorite party hack. Maybe I'll do some research on his views of these issues someday:
Evolution? I wasn't there when God created the world, so I don't know how He did it.
Gays in the military? Don't bug people with your sexuality and there won't be a problem. Don't ask, don't tell works for me, Al, and it ought to apply to straights too. [Paul probably takes the issue of sexuality and state the other way, actually, but I don't know.]
Dems and Repubs on the War on Terrorists? Don't let 'em kid ya, it's a horse apiece. Would the Dems even have attacked the Taliban? If they'd followed Clinton's example, they would have. And, given the same, incompetent intelligence President Bush got, they'd have probably attacked Iraq too. The libertarian prescription for governments is kill the guilty (well, depending on the crime...), leave the innocent alone. Dems and Repubs think they're hamstrung by the Constitution, but what we're really hamstrung by is about a 100 years of misinterpretation of the Constitution.

I'm actually very happy with Bush on one score: he's reinvigorated our intelligence gathering ability. Spies are absolutely essential to a free nation.
We covered abortion, that leaves torture: the Constitution covers that.

Mainstream politicians and career bureaucrats have been moving this country in the wrong direction since the dawn of the Progressive Era (and there were some awful mistakes before that, too). I do give Reagan credit for beginning to turn the ship of state back on course, and the Gingrich revolution for continuing the course correction, but we're not there yet.

Here's a funny line:

Granted, our burdensome tax system and heavily regulated economy does not make it easy on wage earners. But, that’s no excuse to steal your neighbor’s bike or run a pyramid scheme.

It's from an Atlasphere article by Allison Taylor about Bill Whittle's Ejectia. You need to have a look at that.

First I've heard of it, but it sounds PD cool.

Off the subject, the younger girl was claiming to be cool today, but her explanation was toddler gibberish, so I can't verify whether she was being cool or not.

I've gotten terribly lazy about Trackbacks.

Are they for your benefit, or mine. Seems like mine mostly, and yours a little, so I have trouble getting worked up over them.

It might be because the HaloScan process I use is such a pain in the rear.

You know, Liberty Dog's over there postin' up a storm

at Canis Libertas.

Apparently, the first Congressman I ever voted for, Dave Obey, is the new sheriff in town.

Atheist!! A-t-h-e-i-s-t!

A as in "not";
the-from theos: God;
-ist as in "believer."

Theist as in "believer in God."

It's not a GDSOB superlative!

AAAaaaggghhh!!!

I get so tired of reading "athiest" all over everywhere.

It should be too obvious for words that decisions

about who is to come into the United States and live among Americans should be made in the United States by Americans. Tom Sowell.

Unfortunately, It does need explaining.

Jeez, dude!

I'm pretty sure the guy who said, "Violence begets more violence, not the other way around" is not one of ours.

You know... I support the Marijuana Policy Project and your First Amendment right* to speak, but... When you combine the two, you make me want to exercise my Ninth Amendment right* to ignore you.

*Neither the Constitution nor the Bill of Rights are to be construed as "granting" rights, either to the people or the states. These documents simply enumerate powers delegated to the Federal Government by the people and describe some of the limitations of the uses of those powers.

Ron Paul on Patriotism

The original American patriots were those individuals brave enough to resist with force the oppressive power of King George. I accept the definition of patriotism as that effort to resist oppressive state power. The true patriot is motivated by a sense of responsibility, and out of self interest -- for himself, his family, and the future of his country -- to resist government abuse of power. He rejects the notion that patriotism means obedience to the state.

Resistance need not be violent, but the civil disobedience that might be required involves confrontation with the state and invites possible imprisonment.

Peaceful non-violent revolutions against tyranny have been every bit as successful as those involving military confrontation. Mahatma Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. achieved great political successes by practicing non-violence, yet they themselves suffered physically at the hands of the state.

But whether the resistance against government tyrants is non-violent or physically violent, the effort to overthrow state oppression qualifies as true patriotism.

There's more, and he's quite blunt. You'll enjoy it.

Oh, I gotta put this in here:

Randolph Bourne said that “war is the health of the state.” With war, he argued, the state thrives. Those who believe in the powerful state see war as an opportunity. Those who mistrust the people and the market for solving problems have no trouble promoting a “war psychology” to justify the expansive role of the state.

This includes the role the federal government plays in our personal lives as well as in all our economic transactions. And certainly the neo-conservative belief that we have a moral obligation to spread American values worldwide, through force, justifies the conditions of war in order to rally support at home for the heavy hand of government. It is through this policy, it should surprise no one, that our liberties are undermined, the economy becomes overextended, and our involvement worldwide becomes prohibitive.

Out of fear of being labeled unpatriotic, most citizens become compliant and accept the argument that some loss of liberty is required to fight the war in order to remain safe. This is a bad trade-off in my estimation, especially when done in the name of patriotism.

Loyalty to the state and to autocratic leaders is substituted for true patriotism—that is, a willingness to challenge the state and defend the country, the people, and the culture. The more difficult the times, the stronger the admonition becomes that the leaders be not criticized.

You know how much I love Tuktoyaktuk

It seems all hell has broken out up there. The Ibyuk Pingo is in danger!

I got that link from Taranto today.

I keep forgetting that I planned to

put polished stuff here and unpolished stuff - as well as vignettes from my bourgeois life, including running, family and whatever - over at Bourgeois Philistines.

Oh, well, whatever. If you don't care, I don't.

I believe I'll work for Ron Paul this year.

Here's his take on Immigration Reform. That's from the Ron Paul Library, which has his speeches and press releases - I think, from his whole 30 years as a Republican Congressman for Texas.

RonPaul2008 is his campaign website.

There are videos of him on YouTube, a MySpace site, a Yahoo group and a MeetUp group.

Corey Stern, who calls himself an Independent Libertarian [I think I'll start calling myself a Revolutionary Liberal (c. 2007 - go ahead and use it, but share any income you derive from it with me. We'll let the lawyers hash out the percentage.;)], is quoted extensively in an article describing a MeetUp event Stern organized, and that I didn't get to.

I did get to the MeetUp organizational meeting though. A lot more fun and interesting than I expected. We had Constitution Party guys, Buchanan guys, some Democrat defectors and a bunch of libertarians, small and large L.

I think I understand the lefties' double standard.

I just sent this message to Dave Thompson on AM1500[.com].

I don't like it, or agree with it, but I see what they're up to.

They don't have any standards for themselves, but some of them know that we do have standards for ourselves. They think it's the funnest game in the world to get us to oust our heroes, past and present, by pointing out their peccadillos. Or, since "peccadillos" means "little sins," their "peccas." [You might not want to read that on the air. I've led you astray before.]

For example, they can get us to oust Thomas Jefferson as a hero, but they get to keep him, because they worship peccadillos as those things that bring geniuses down to their own level. Or so they like to think.

Of course, EVEN IF Thomas Jefferson was a sinner, it is no proof of the truth or falsity of his writings. To say so is to commit the ad hominem fallacy, better known these days as a personal attack.

Which is much beloved of Marxists, especially when they use the "follow the money" argument. One counter to that argument, as the Public Choice economists have shown, is to "follow the power."

There are, of course, other counters to Marxist arguments. Von Mises presents the best ones.

I wonder if C. Bradley Thompson

was considering what a strong case he was making for a Democrat in the Whitehouse and a Republican Congress when he wrote The Decline and Fall of American Conservatism.

I just started reading it. I'm sure he didn't miss it.

Don't miss Walter Williams and John Stossel

at Townhall.com today. Williams: Compassion Versus Realityand Stossel's Why Is Profit a Dirty Word?.

One more thing.

Ayn Rand Institute Press Release

[That's where you'll find this when they post it.]

Compulsory National Service Is Anti-American
June 4, 2007

Irvine, CA--There has been a resurgence in calls for compulsory universal national service, most recently by former defense secretary Melvin R. Laird, who declared, "Young Americans . . . need to serve their country."

But according to Dr. Yaron Brook, executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute, "Compulsory national service is anti-American.

"According to the advocates of compulsory service, young people take America's freedom for granted, being more concerned with selfishly pursuing an education and a fulfilling career than serving their country. To remedy that, they propose forcing young people to spend a few years working in the Peace Corps, nursing homes, or soup kitchens. This, supposedly, will make them appreciate freedom. But if the government can order a young person to stop pursuing the career he passionately loves in order to plant trees or clean bed pans, there is no freedom left for him to appreciate.

"America's distinctive virtue is that it was the first nation to declare that each individual is an end in himself, that he possesses an inalienable right to pursue his own happiness, and that the government's only function is to safeguard his freedom. Compulsory national service turns young people into temporary slaves in order to inculcate in their minds the opposite premise: that they have a duty to selflessly serve society. To justify such a policy on the grounds of promoting appreciation for freedom is perverse. To call it patriotic is obscene.

"Compulsory national service is a threat to freedom. It should be condemned for the anti-American policy that it is."

### ### ###

Copyright © 2007 Ayn Rand® Institute. All rights reserved.

I thought this Student of Objectivism had something to say on this issue. He didn't, but he's not short of things to say.

Hey!

Read Marginal Utility Is Not Rocket Science!

There's your economics for today.

You want to learn about running? Check out Training for your Marathon, by - and/or edited by - Jay Hendrickson. It's a 100-some page .doc ebook that the guy ought to be selling for money. His key point is: optimal stress + optimal rest = optimal progress.

The rest of the book is about what "optimal" means.

I love the quote he starts his "philosophy" article with:

"Take a primitive organism, any weak, pitiful organism. Say a freshman. Make it lift or jump or run. Let it rest. What happens? A little miracle. It gets a little better. It gets a little stronger or faster or more enduring. That's all training is. Stress. Recover. Improve. You'd think any damn fool could do it, even...

But you don't. You work too hard and rest too little and get hurt." - Bill Bowerman

[Emphasis Hendrickson's, I believe.]
There's a Runbayou blog as well. Though he hasn't said much since his kid won the 2007 UIL Division 1A Texas High School Tennis Championship in early May. Before that he writes about the Boston Marathon.

I know a guy who ran Boston in 3:45. But I haven't asked him about it. I've only talked to him once. That doesn't hardly constitute a relationship in my book.

You have to run a 3:30 to even qualify to enter Boston, but if you read Hendrickson's description of the race conditions you can see why a good runner (great runner from my viewpoint) would have trouble getting there there on that day.

The subtitle of H's book is "Information for the Obsessed Athlete." Does it seem like I'm getting there?

Oh, that crunchy knee?

When the student is ready, the teacher appears.

My new Runner's World magazine has a stretching exercise that seems to have made that go away. Instead of stretching your quads by pulling your heel to your butt, just stand with your hands on your thighs, use one hand to help brace yourself bend your knees and lean forward slightly and raise one heel behind you as high as you think you should. Hold for a second or two, then do the other leg. 10 times/leg.

I also learned a foot stretch a while back that has significantly reduced a budding case of plantar fasciitis: sit down and cross one leg over the other knee, grab your toes with the hand of the same side and pull them back. Don't overstrain, but make sure you feel the stretch. 20-30 seconds each side, three times a day.

I bring these up because the improvements from each have been almost instantaneous.

Now for some sleep.

Kevin Hogan's in a rotten mood this week.

He's talking about the stupidity of boycotting Big Oil in the first article here (in the upper right corner) and, in the article about Will Power, he says

Want to give your kids powerful suggestions to succeed in life?

Never teach your kid get to "get a job."
Teach your kid to PRODUCE.
To CREATE VALUE.
To make people happy.
To decide what they truly want and get them to commit to a Plan and DO IT.

I'll tell you this: I don't really know what it takes for me to succeed, but I know that the most powerful lessons I learned growing up haven't done it for me yet. These things he's saying weren't part of my catechism.

Well, I ran the Manitou 15K in White Bear Lake yesterday.

That's 9.3 Miles, for those of you who don't like metric conversions.
I finished in 1:28:35. One minute 25 seconds better than my goal. 9:31/mile.

Not bad. I mean, it's good for me, but I came in 19th out of 20 in my division - 108th out of 130 finishers (and 7 missing - there was speculation that they stopped at one of the dozens of garage sales that were starting up as we slower people went by).

Oh, here are the results. Let me find mine.... Here:

bib number: 302
age: 43
gender: M
location: Brookly Center, MN
overall place: 102 out of 134
division place: 19 out of 20
gender place: 70 out of 79
time: 1:28:36
pace: 9:31

I suppose you noticed that I was I little off. And, apparently we located 4 out of the seven missing.

Every time I checked my split-time I was pretty much on that 9:31 mark. I was trying to go faster ["...but my legs just wouldn't go any faster!" as J. Beebe would say.] No, I wanted to run between 10 and 8 minute miles, and I did. Now I need to push that closer to 8.

Of course, today I have a crunchy knee, but you take the good with the bad.

I gotta get ready to go here.

What the H does "serrefine" mean?

That's the word that Evan O'Dorney spelled to win the National Spelling Bee.

I had to wash caked on playdirt from the younger girl, so I missed the end of it, but those words are unbelievable. I suppose they have to find words that will knock those kids out, man, but I don't know...

Here I go, looking it up...

serre·fine (sâr-fn, sr-)
n.
A small spring forceps used for approximating the edges of a wound, or for temporarily closing an artery during surgery.

OK, so there's actually a semi-common use for that word.

The girl was knocked out by cyanophycean. Wouldn't you be? When I write my dictionary, fancy words for pond-scum will be specifically excluded.

Cyanophycean is apparently an adjective derived from

Noun 1. Cyanophyceae - photosynthetic bacteria found in fresh and salt water, having chlorophyll a and phycobilins; once thought to be algae: blue-green algae

I wonder how long ago they found out that it was bacteria and not algae. They never give any history in dictionaries.

Larry Elder:

What about gas prices as a percentage of our income? In other words, does the gas bite of our paycheck rival the bite of yesteryear? Not even close. Given today's fatter paycheck, we pay less as a percentage of our mean disposable income. A gallon was 27 cents in 1949 -- but to put the same pinch on your wallet today, you'd pay $6.68. Gas for 1962's "muscle cars" cost 31 cents a gallon. To feel the same economic impact today, you'd pony up $4.48 a gallon.

Townhall.

Lew Rockwell's parrot here...

Reasons to read Economics In One Lesson (from Three National Treasures, by Lew):

If Hazlitt were followed, interventionist politicians and their intellectual bodyguards in the academic world would be unemployed. If it's not bad enough that he defied the economics establishment, his airtight case for the free market is accessible to the layman, and that's anathema to the economics establishment. Thumb through any issue of a top economics journal and you'll know why Hazlitt's book is considered heretical. Not because it doesn't make sense, but because it does; not because it isn't logical, but because it is; not because it isn't true to life, but because it is. Translate their jargon into English, and we find most economists beginning with such axioms as "let's assume everybody knows everything" or "nobody knows anything" or "people never change their minds" or "all goods are identical." Men and women are stripped of their individuality to make them fit into mechanistic models, and the economy is seen as static, or at best a series of shifting static states, without elaboration or the process of change. Deductions from such axioms must, of course, be false.

Hazlitt, like Mises, starts with the assumption that individuals act, that they do so with a purpose, and that as conditions change, their plans change. He makes no separation between "microeconomic" and "macroeconomic," terms commonly used to give the impression that different principles and laws apply to the whole economy than apply to individuals. So that while it may be justified to talk about purposive action, decisions on the margin, and subjective valuations at the individual level, this is of no relevance for the macro-managers in government.

But Hazlitt is a methodological individualist, and thus recognizes that the economy must be analyzed from the standpoint of individual action. Most economists are notorious justifiers of special-interest legislation because they ignore what Hazlitt so eloquently charts in Economics in One Lesson: the unseen and long-run effects of government policy. To Hazlitt, as an Austrian school economist, "economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups."

I'd be perfectly willing to mail you mine. Or read it here, or download the pdf here.

Basic Natural Rights doctrine

From Thomas Bowden at ARI:

"...there is no rational basis upon which the government can properly prevent an individual from choosing to end his own life. Our right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness means that we need no one's permission to live, and that no one may forcibly obstruct our efforts to achieve personal happiness. But if happiness becomes impossible to attain, due to a dread disease or some other calamity, a person must be able to exercise the right to end his own life."

"To hold otherwise--to declare that society must give us permission to commit suicide--is to contradict the right to life at its root," said Bowden. "If we have a duty to go on living, despite our better judgment, then our lives do not belong to us, and we exist by permission, not by right.

"For these reasons, each individual has the right to decide the hour of his death and to implement that solemn decision as best he can. The choice is his because the life is his. And if a doctor is willing--not forced--to assist in the suicide, based on an objective assessment of his patient's mental and physical state, the law should not stand in his way."

Copyright © 2007 Ayn Rand® Institute. All rights reserved.

Want to off yourself? Try using this magic formula: law, schmaw. Just don't get caught.

Agh! Looks like the 15K is full already.

That's what I get for waiting to register until after I talk to my wife.

DDT talk here if you're interested. It's apparently Rachel Carson's birthday.

Update: On the 15K: I'm in. I was just having trouble with the security settings on the computer I was using.

So now I have to run 1.3 miles farther than my training program calls for for Saturday.

Matoska Park. Saturday. 8 AM. Be there.

Ah, heck, as long as I'm here, I'll talk about how my running is going

I'm still working on making a habit of running at least 2 miles a day. I missed Thursday (but I would have anyway - it was raining cats and dogs), but otherwise I've been kicking butt on that goal. The goal of running every day is a rule meant to be broken. Weather, health and other plans and issues are always going to get in the way, but if you've run two out of the last four days, who cares, eh?

Here's a quickie mileage log, that'll be useful to me if nobody else cares:
Starting a week ago last Friday: 2, 7, 0, 0, 2.5, 5, 0, 2, 7, 3.

I have numbers before that written somewhere else, but I'm not overly concerned about them. I have a tendency to always average 10 minute miles, though, of course, I've done eights and nines.

I'm going to get up early and run a slow 2 in the morning, and then go out looking for Rosie's flowers. And the missing parts for my trailer. So, off to bed I go.

Oh, I'm going to run a 15K next Saturday. That strikes me as the sort of oddball distance that will only draw serious runners, so don't be surprised if I come in dead last.

My daughter wants to plant some flower that she calls Canyon Peeps

Anybody know what the bleep she's talking about?

As she describes it, it sounds like a vetch - a low-growing, creeping perennial, which I'm not sure I want.

My efforts to google it, or find it at any of the local nurseries - online, I mean - have been a failure.

One great American leads to another

In a comment a bit ago, I mentioned that H.L. Mencken wrote an article about Mark Twain which explodes the myth of him as a kindly old clown. The article is called Mark Twain's Americanism. I think you can see, just by the title, why I jumped on it right away. I had to see what one of my heroes had to say about another--particulary on that topic.

I can't remember when I first picked up Tom Sawyer. It must have been fifth grade, or maybe right at the end of fourth. Our gradeschool library had three editions of it and two editions of Huckleberry Finn, and I know I had devoured them all (thinking, somehow, that they were different from each other) by the time I turned eleven. At which point, I had exhausted their Mark Twain resources and began to search abroad. I read a lot of his fiction and a lot of his autobiographical works...

Whoop! Bedtime.

So, anyway, what I really wanted to do was bring to your notice Twain's philosophical dialogue "What is Man?" published in 1906.

I have a feeling that a young Russian gal who arrived in America 17 years later learned some of her English reading it.

I just found the mother lode of Americanism

The H. L. Mencken Page!

No time to go into to anything much right now, but there are tons of links to online writings by Mencken.

This is from the front page:

Mencken's Creed

I believe that religion, generally speaking, has been a curse to mankind - that its modest and greatly overestimated services on the ethical side have been more than overcome by the damage it has done to clear and honest thinking.
I believe that no discovery of fact, however trivial, can be wholly useless to the race, and that no trumpeting of falsehood, however virtuous in intent, can be anything but vicious.
I believe that all government is evil, in that all government must necessarily make war upon liberty...
I believe that the evidence for immortality is no better than the evidence of witches, and deserves no more respect.
I believe in the complete freedom of thought and speech...
I believe in the capacity of man to conquer his world, and to find out what it is made of, and how it is run.
I believe in the reality of progress.
I - But the whole thing, after all, may be put very simply. I believe that it is better to tell the truth than to lie. I believe that it is better to be free than to be a slave. And I believe that it is better to know than be ignorant.

I came to it starting with Wendy Kaminer's Opinion Journal article, The American Liberal Liberties Union: The ACLU is becoming very selective about what it considers "free" speech, which led to The Free For All blog - particularly this post by Harvey Silverglate, and a link to Mencken's obit of William Jennings Bryan. That led me to google Mencken and find that great treasure trove.

That obit is entitled, "To Expose a Fool." Pretty good intro to Mencken. It doesn't quite refute the mischaracterization of him presented by Hollywood in the movie Inherit the Wind, but I think the credo I posted above covers that.

Hmm. From the "Peak Oil correspondent"

At the Agora Financial newsletter Whiskey and Gunpowder [A "free e-mail service brought to you by a team of rebellious brigands."]:

...the overall trend in the U.S. refinery business in the past 30 years has been to expand existing refineries, as opposed to building new ones. For many reasons, it is just too hard to build a new plant in this country, so the refiners have been overhauling and expanding the existing production base. There are fewer environmental hurdles, the local communities tend to be more in favor of expansion, and the refiners are dealing with fewer political unknowns. So the net effect is that in the past decade, refinery upgrades and expansions in the U.S. have added the equivalent of 10 ‘new’ refineries to the total base, and there is something like the equivalent of eight more refineries being ‘built’ via upgrades to existing facilities. This is why U.S. refinery output is at a record high.”
...
“The price of gas is rising,” said the Peak Oil correspondent, “because there are more people buying it than there are selling it. And there will be, for the rest of your life.”

As I say: hmmm.

Ahh! That felt good!

Ringer relieves our discomfort:

One thing history has taught us is that when you’re dealing with totally irrational people, the middle-road approach doesn’t work. Yet, this is precisely the approach that flip-flop, mushy politicians continue to pursue in the Middle East. In fact, it’s pretty much their approach to all the major problems of our day.

Again, Ron Paul’s stance on 9/11 is not the issue here. My respect for him is based on the consistency of his beliefs. He is not coming at the Iraq War or the 9/11 attacks from a 21st century liberal’s point of view. The latter views are not mushy, they’re just plain stupid.

By contrast, Congressman Paul’s viewpoints on all major issues are based on his libertarian belief that government powers should be confined to those specifically set forth in the Constitution. It is for this reason that he believes the government has no right to use your tax dollars to roam the earth and stick its nose in other people’s business.

He believes this to be so whether it involves invading other countries with bombs or invading them with humanitarian aid. I think we can all agree that humanitarian aid is a wonderful thing, but it should be left to the humanitarians! In case anyone has bothered to notice, the Founding Fathers never put anything about humanitarian aid (or thousands of other activities that today’s politicians engage in) in the Constitution.

That's as much as I can safely copy. To tell you the truth, I didn't think he'd be posting part II today. I figured we'd have to wait until Wednesday or so.

I've been working on a review of V for Vendetta over at BPoMN. Once in a while you get the feeling we need a little of that action around here.

You said you'd get to it in a minute, Ringer!

Cripe! It's gonna be Monday before you get to it! At the earliest!

Robert Ringer has an article out called The Age of Mush. In it, he has this gem (with supporting examples):

Politicos like Mush Romney, Mush McCain, and Mush Giuliani can always be counted on to tell the mush, the whole mush, and nothing but the mush. In fact, the whole event was mush to do about nothing. The more things change, the more they stay the same. But if you’re a mush lover, the “debate” must have been a real treat.

What brings out the mush in most candidates, of course, is their insatiable thirst for power. It is a thirst that completely overwhelms the petty notion of principle.

He says there's one exception in the Republican crowd - which he'll get to in a minute. I'm sure it's not a provable case of false advertising - he probably did get to it in a minute. He's just not going to share it with us in a minute.

Now, I happen to know what he's talking about, so the preceding should be understood as tongue in cheek, though I did want to hear what Ringer had to say about it.

The "it" is what Ron Paul has to say.

I have to admit, though, that I haven't been keeping up with the debates (because I find all the front-runners distressing).

I have the urge to attack all those issues myself. I'll get to it later tonight.

Richard Harris is now one of my favorite authors.

Who would have believed the life of a plumber could be so exciting?

All right, he was a hydrological engineer who lived in an interesting time.

You get the impression, reading Pompeii and Imperium, that the Roman Empire was run by the Mafia. But I'll be adding Harris to my favorite authors next time I update my profile.

How about that?

Johnny Appleseed really was a hero.

Jerry Falwell taught me this Bible verse:

If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land.

2 Chronicles 7:14.

It's surprising how often I think about that. Don't know how much insight I've gained from it.

But I can't say he did nothing for me.

RIP, sir.

Weekly Mises

.org quote, from Spidey's Forgotten World, by Jeffrey Tucker:

It was only after it became perfectly obvious to every living person that the market was serving the poor that the socialist Left abandoned its goal of material prosperity of the working poor. Now they tell us that material prosperity itself is the problem (and actually Rothbard took note of this ideological turn in the late 1950s). If we want true justice, the new view went, we must all learn to live without. What should concern us is the destruction of the environment, the exploitation of cultural minorities, the hidden costs of industrialization, and even such bogeymen as warm weather.

What the Spider-Man movies show us is a simpler time when the socialists made a strong but empirically testable claim: socialism would serve proletarian interests whereas capitalism is always contrary to proletarian interests. That claim turned out to be 100% false. The movie makes one nostalgic for such simple-minded and easily refutable views. Perhaps it is appropriate that such a vision live on only in comic books and the movies based on them.

Bernard Bailyn defends The Founders

Against the usual charges of racism, sexism, classism, homophobia, etc.:

There was no end to the problems, and there was never any certainty in the outcome. Some of the problems in the course of time would be solved, some persist to this day and will never be fully resolved. But what strikes one most forcefully in surveying the struggles and achievements of that distant generation is less what they failed to do than what they did do, and the problems that they did in fact solve. One comes away from encounters with that generation, not with a sense of their failings and hypocrisies -- they were imperfect people, bound by the limitations of their own world -- but with a sense of how alive with creative imaginings they were; how bold they were in transcending the world they had been born into -- a world in which the brutality of unlimited state power was normal -- and in conceiving of a state system in which power was limited, defined, and defensive, and whose force would liberate people, not confine them.

What is important, is what they did. And why.

He asks questions,

How did that happen? What accounts for their creative imagination? What conditions made it possible? Can such conditions and such achievements recur?

It's worth your while to see what he's come up with.

Robert Ringer:

Sadly, when idealistic lads and lasses bid farewell to their clueless profs at Princeton, Harvard, and Yale, they have learned very little about the lessons of history. Worse, the pudding heads who were in charge of teaching them likely perverted the lessons of history to ensure that these future leaders of our society will make the same mistakes as their predecessors.

The great Thomas Sowell explained it even better than Santayana when he said, "Everything is new if you are ignorant of history. That is why ideas that have failed repeatedly in centuries past reappear again, under the banner of 'change,' to dazzle people and sweep them off their feet."

Amen, man.

Where is that...? Ah, here.

This Free Market Underdog store

That's advertising in my sidebar looks pretty kickbutt. I should talk to him about a JV.

Look this guy up:

Alexander of Aphrodisias.

Thanks Roderick Long.

A Rod is 16 and a half feet

That's my combination sports and weights and measures commentary for today.

There are an awful lot of people

including, sometimes, me - who could stand to look over Dictionary.com's Style Guide.

If for no other reason than to learn about weights and measures.

Will I?

Good question.

Liberty Dog's back

as Canis Libertas. He thought he could fool us.

Be slappin' that in the old blogroll in a minute here.

Feelin' a little stiffer this mornin', I'll tell ya. I think I may have a slight hammy pull. I ran about a mile and a half this morning on it.

Crap!

I ran the TC 1 Mile again today.
Unofficial Results:
date: May 3rd, 2007
location: Minneapolis, MN

Summary number of finishers: 1376
number of females: 685
number of males: 691
average time: 00:07:55

Alan Erkkilabib number: 477
age: 43
gender: M
location: Brooklyn Center, MN
overall place: 780 out of 1376
division place: 105 out of 134
gender place: 524 out of 695
time: 8:05
pace: 8:05
Here's what I said about it last year.
Talk about not leaving it all on the track! I way underestimated my ability and played it safe.

My wife said, just before I headed out, "Do you want to carry a cell-phone in a fanny pack in case something happens?" It's tough to give it all you've got, with that thought ringing in your head: visions of myself lying on the street with my head in some useless do-gooder's lap, hoping the paramedics get there in time... Aaaagh!

Yeah, I beat last year's time by 35 seconds, but I had so much left after the race that I ran sprints back to the start to get my stuff. Well, actually, I walked and jogged and cheered on the other runners for a while, first.

I bet I could approach a 7-minute mile, and with a little work, beat it.

I race like a nice-guy.... grumble...

I'm framing this in a disgusted tone, but I see all the great news in that too. I'M IN GOOD SHAPE! Not great shape, but very promising shape. My joints feel good; my feet feel good; I have excellent wind. I'm apparently bi-polar... Hahahahaha!!

Hard to believe I trained better - I felt like a slacker. I suppose I was comparing what I did for this to what I did for the Marathon.

You bet I'll be signing up for that again. I was thinking that my goals for the year are: a sub-20 minute 5K, a sub-40 minute 10K and that 4 hour Marathon I wanted last year. Sub-4, if I can do it.

Am I replacing alcohol addiction with a running addiction?

Sure, why not?

I was just reading TF Stern's latest "rant"

about PBS' The Mormons and the following show*, which I'm sorry to say I missed both of, and it reminded me - speaking of things that bring a tear to your eye - that my church put on a production of Godspell last Sunday.

I was led to believe, as a child, that there was something wrong with the show. I looked for something to criticize and found absolutely nothing. It was wonderful!

I think the guy who played Jesus could be accused of being a "ringer" - at least I didn't know him, but I only go to the 10:30 AM service - I mean, he was too good an actor and singer. We have some great musicians and singers in our congregation, but I've never seen that good an actor in our productions before.

I think the criticism I heard was that the story ends with the crucifixion. No, it doesn't. Not really. Jesus comes back and joins his powerful voice to the chorus in the end, clearly as The Leader.

It struck me as a show design to encourage, instruct and exhort believers, rather than convert unbelievers. The show was marvelous. The fundy critics look like they were expressing sour grapes to me, now that I've seen it.

I'll go into it a bit more later, though. My wife's expecting me.

*Remind me to find links to these.