Oh, Man! What a great article!

Wilt Alston's Do You Really Want Freedom, Or Are You Just Kidding Yourself?, about freeing yourself contains this bit (I think I'll put in his links):

...I came across a fascinating post from a woman who “escaped” from her Amish sect. In the comments of response to her story one can find, among several interesting musings, a discussion of this supposedly Biblically-derived phrase which is generally used to justify physical punishment of children. The fascinating tidbit was this: The Bible doesn’t actually contain that phrase. The sentiment is apparently a paraphrase of Proverbs 13:24, which says:

He that spareth his rod hateth his son: but he that loveth him chasteneth him betimes.

While I’m certainly no Biblical scholar, it seems to me a bit of a self-fulfilling prophesy to use that single verse as a justification for physical abuse. Back on Ferriss’s blog, a poster simply shown as “Betsy” offered what I believe is the most humane (and libertarian) translation of that verse:

“Spare the rod and spoil the child” is actually analogous to the rod of the shepherd. It’s really a beautiful, sentimental teaching that has been totally perverted by some.

The poster went on:

A good shepherd never beats the sheep, but uses the rod to guide them with a gentle touch. That this homily should justify child abuse is the exact opposite of its intended meaning, which is “by failing to guide your child with love and instilling discipline (not punishment) in a consistent and gentle way, you ruin the child’s chances of successfully functioning in relationships and society as a whole.”

Indeed! This sentiment seems to resonate with the non-aggression axiom. How can the thugs with whom so many of us deal claim to be protecting anyone from anything? (They certainly aren’t gently guiding anyone, either.)

I think everybody who knows me would find it incomprehensible that I'd convert to this philosophy, but this guy's got me pegged. Nietzsche's "What does not kill us, makes us stonger" has been more my style... S**t! It's been pretty much my motto until about a month ago.

Once again, let me say that since my older daughter was born I've been trying to figure out how to make the world the kind of place she'd be happy in. I think Alston and Molyneux and Alice Miller have the answer: knock it off with the humiliating!

What ideas of the American Founders, and those who influenced them

come from the Bible? The Founders were steeped in the Bible, although probably not as much as the regular folks of the time. The former spent more time studying law, English and European history, Greek and Roman history, philosophy and mythology than did Americans who were left out of the Framing.

Did Jesus support any particular constitution? Freedom of Religion is an extra-Biblical idea, certainly. What was the preferred mode of government in the Old Testament? It seems to me that God allowed Centralization for about the same reasons he gave the Hebrews food other than manna... and divorce.

The Tenth Amendment informs me that today is the bicentennial

of Thomas Paine's death. They've got an exerpt of his here.

[Whoops! Correction: "The Tenth Amendment Center informs me..."]

And, naturally, a quote:

Government is no further necessary than to supply the few cases to which society and civilization are not conveniently competent; and instances are not wanting to show that everything which government can usefully add thereto, has been performed by the common consent of society, without government.

For upwards of two years from the commencement of the American war, and a longer period in several of the American states, there were no established forms of government. The old governments had been abolished, and the country was too much occupied in defense to employ its attention in establishing new governments; yet, during this interval, order and harmony were preserved as inviolate as in any country in Europe. There is a natural aptness in man, and more so in society, because it embraces a greater variety of abilities and resources, to accommodate itself to whatever situation it is in. The instant formal government is abolished, society begins to act. A general association takes place, and common interest produces common security.

So far is it from being true, as has been pretended, that the abolition of any formal government is the dissolution of society, it acts by contrary impulse, and brings the latter the closer together. All that part of its organization which it had committed to its government, devolves again upon itself, and acts as from reciprocal benefits, have habituated themselves to social and civilized life, there is always enough of its principles in practice to carry them through any changes they may find necessary or convenient to make in their government. In short, man is so naturally a creature of society that it is almost impossible to put him out of it.

Hey, kids! See if you can follow ol' Stef

out to the end of this one True News 42: Morality, Atheism and Child Abuse!

I you want to check his references, he talks about this study here and refers to an earlier video here.



There's a link there on the video that will let you go straight to YouTube where you can see what other commenters have to say about this.

I had a couple teeth yanked today.

I'm surprised I'm not out cold right now. They told me they were prescribing Vicoden for me, but I think my wife just picked up whatever they prescribed for her. She had one out too. She's afraid I'll get hooked on the crap, I'm sure.

I'm actually pretty sure I won't. I'm working on the issues my subconscious wanted me to deal with, so I don't think it'll be flailing around so wildly now. I'm not so confident that I feel free to roam the aisles at the liquor store - thinking about cheap, strong, high-gravity beer still sucks me in, but other things don't, really. I never was that big a fan of hard liquor... I mean, don't set your bottle of scotch right in front of me... but if I walked into a store that only had hard booze and wine, even if I had a pocketful of cash, I don't think I'd be that strongly tempted to turn away from the joys of sobriety. I'd found the buzz I was looking for.

Interestingly, I can still get most of that buzz just by staying up, staring at a computer screen until ungodly hours of the morning.

I found out today that a guy I used to work with

died in a car crash. The funeral was tonight.

The reason we were no longer working together was actually a fairly strong reason not to go, though it had nothing to do with how he and I had gotten along. I decided that, since I had liked and admired him I had to go.

The service was beautiful, though very modern. They called it a celebration of his life and they did it well. The church band played brilliantly executed Christian rock songs and the pastor preached a moving sermon based on Isaiah 61, of all things. He explained how, in the verse which says, "I will give you beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, a garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness" the words for "ashes" and "beauty" in Hebrew are nearly the same three letter word with the second and third letters transposed, so we could get a sense of how rhetorically powerful that must have been for the hearers of Isaiah's prophecy. Particularly since, when the Israelites mourned, they threw ashes on their heads and the word for "beauty" more literally means 'a beautiful turban' or other head covering, such as a crown.

All the eulogists spoke about how much he had grown since I last saw him... which made me very sad that I hadn't been there for that. They told stories showing how he'd gained great self-esteem from helping others in the church's ministries.

It was all deeply moving, and, as you may imagine, troubling to me.

I replaced the screen door on the back porch today

We've been making do with an old, bare aluminum thing that I dug out of the neighbor's garbage. It was the right width but the wrong height, so I had to go buy a metal cutting disk for my circular saw and adjust it. But it's been going to hell for the last couple years, since you-know-who couldn't get it open one day and kicked the hell out of it. Then the daughter followed that example after I fixed it that time. Just so you know, I never did get the lock to work right. I could get it open... but I have seventeen and a half inch biceps.

Anyway, Menard's had a door that sounded good to the shopper-lady on sale for $99. Naturally, they were out by the time we got there, so we offered to take the floor model off their hands. Since it didn't have any hinges or the latch and they considered it a little dinged up, they gave it to us for fifteen bucks. The missing hardware was about another fifteen.

Well, this one is the right height for the doorway, but it's two inches wider. So I had to scab a new frame on top of the old one. I got the happy child to help me prime it. We were going to paint it together too, but as we were getting all ready to do it, I found out I'd grabbed a can of red off the shelf, instead of white. Boy, did I wish I could think of a way to make that work. But I couldn't, so I just nailed it on, hung the door and we'll paint it later.

I'd show you a picture, but the new door makes the rest of the porch look crappier. So now I'll have to buy enough paint to do the whole thing.

See: the benefits of bitching about your wife. [I won't talk about the little scene we had this morning. Really it was over too fast to make much of a story, but I won.] It loosens up the blockage so you can get things done.

Tipping my hand

His basic point in the title is absolutely true. I gave up atheism before because...when you proclaim yourself an atheist, you suddenly discover that all those people you thought were godless heathens before turn out to be devout Christians, who will dismiss everything you say thereafter. It was too lonely for me.

Maybe I'll get away with this if I just put filler in the title.

It probably shouldn't be too entertaining filler, though.

Here's my question: how do I stop my wife from being a screechy, bullying, nagging nutjob shrew? See, I figure the problem is that there is no God.

When I asked my mother about it, damn near 20 years ago, she said, "Well, she's a teacher and she's had a hard day..."

Bullshit! Mom, you didn't behave that way. What the f*** position do you expect me to occupy in this world?! Well, whatever it was, I sure as f*** haven't! Unless you expected me to SIT DOWN AND SHUT UP!!

There. That's what my mother did to me. And, by the way, nobody's asked her for any advice since, I'll tell you that. When it was offered it's been ignored.


Pretty G--D--- funny that one of the strongest fundamentalists Christians I ever met (that's Mom) didn't tell me that I'm the man of my house and I've got to lay down the law! It wouldn't have worked, but that's what the Bible says.

More importantly, let me post this

from Alice Miller (I'm going to just start in the middle. You can get the context by reading the whole thing):

The tormenting feelings of guilt triggered by this failure are unrelenting and implacable. What have I done wrong? These people ask themselves. Why have I failed to free my parents from their misery? I try the best I can. And it's the same with my therapists. They tell me to enjoy the good things in life, but I can't, and that makes me feel guilty too. They tell me to grow up, to stop seeing myself as a victim; my childhood is a thing of the past, I should turn over a new leaf and stop agonizing. They tell me not to put the blame on others; otherwise my hatred will kill me. I should forgive and forget, and live in the present; otherwise I'll turn into a "borderline patient," whatever that is. But how can I do that? Of course I don't want to put the blame on my parents, I love them, and I owe my life to them. They had trouble enough with me. But how can I banish my guilt feelings? They get even more overpowering when I hit my children. It's awful, but I can't stop doing it, it's driving me to despair. I hate myself for this compulsive violence; I disgust myself when I fly into an uncontrollable rage. What can I do to stop it? Why must I hate myself all the time and feel guilty? Why were all those therapists unable to help me? For years I've been trying to follow their advice, but I still can't manage to dispel my feelings of guilt and love myself as I should.

Let me quote my answer to a letter that contained all these elements:

"In your first letter you said you had never been cruelly treated as a child. In this one you tell me that when you were young you were cruel to your dog because you were a naughty child. Who taught you to see things that way? The point is that no single child anywhere on earth will be cruel to his/her dog without having been severely maltreated. But there are a whole lot of people who see themselves as you do and whose guilt feelings drive them to despair. Their sole concern is not to see their parents' guilt because they fear the punishment they would incur for putting the blame where it belongs. If my books have not helped you to understand this, there is nothing more I can do for you. You can only help yourself by no longer protecting your parents from your own justified feelings. Then you will be free of the compulsive urge to imitate them by hating yourself, blaming yourself, and describing yourself as a monster."

I was spared a lot of trouble by being the fifth of five kids, all born in the space of 4 and a half years. I learned how to get along with my parents by watching the troubles my older siblings got into. Out of ignorance, not evil. How can a kid see an unwritten rule?

What evidence do we have for God again?

Or gods, spirits, angels, demons... Sprites, pixies, nixies, elves, brownies, fairies, UFOs... Leprechauns...

I dunno, maybe it's a little inflamatory

to say, as Jim Davidson does,

Obama also took huge contributions from the defense contractors, or baby killer companies as I prefer to call them. Of course GE, a baby killer company, has NBC networks (which it owns) play cuddly with Obama and his family. Of course Westinghouse, a baby killer company, which owns CBS, has nothing but bubbly kindness for Obama. They want to continue to build bombs to be exploded over foreign cities to slaughter children, because that is how these evil men and women get money for their "work."

Working evil pays well, that's why there is so much of it.

Obama is a mass murdering thug. He has slaughtered thousands of women and children, non-combatants, enemy troops, and American soldiers in his time in office, and he loves it. He relishes every death and wants more. He wants to paint his face with blood the way Stephen Colbert painted his face with gold on a recent episode. Obama loves the taste and smell of blood, which is why he supports torture, which is why he loves the military for torturing its captives to death.

Who the h--l is Stephen Colbert? Am I out of touch with popular culture? Son of a b___h.

I ran the TC 1 Mile last night.

Instead of going to my meeting, I might add.

My lungs are feeling a bit raw this morning. I'm coughing a lot, which scares the hell out of everyone I meet. I wasn't able to train for the run, because I've been on the Shigella Diet for the past week. Lost seven pounds! [Yay! icon]

Hey, if people get away with calling that "stomach flu" I can call it The Shigella Diet. I doubt it was Shigella. More likely Salmonella.

I ran it in 8:41. Eh. It'd be nice, some time, to be able to run a race that I don't have to make excuses for.

I've developed a fascination with Mark Skousen

and his wife Joanne. He's Cleon Skousen's nephew.

Mark said this, back in '91:

Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes once said, "Taxation is the price we pay for civilization." But isn't the opposite really the case? Taxation is the price we pay for failing to build a civilized society. The higher the tax level, the greater the failure. A centrally planned totalitarian state represents a complete defeat for the civilized world, while a totally voluntary society represents its ultimate success.

Let's dump that "we" business. Every time you use force, you raise everybody's taxes. And even parents, when they use force, create children who will use and justify the use of force (and/or fraud).

I'm working on that.

Actually, what I came here to say was: the Skousen's casually mention, here and there, the fact that they teach a class on entrepreneurship at Sing Sing prison that has been extremely successful in reducing recidivism rates. Somebody's gotta do a movie on that! Molyneux? Masterson?

It kind of seems the Skousens aren't interested, so maybe it's up to an investigative journalist. Stossel?

I think I can work with this

Who knows?

I'd like to get my HaloScan comments back. I really like the sidebar widget. It looks like I can...uh...

Sorry, several thoughts just crashed together in my brain. No survivors.

From today's FEE In Brief

Unlike Chrysler’s, Banks’ Bondholders to Get Government Protection

“There will be one sure group of winners in the aftermath of the government’s ’stress testing’ of 19 major U.S. banks: The investors who own the banks’ bonds. That fact won’t be lost on Chrysler’s dissident debtholders — the ones who balked at the Obama administration’s restructuring offer for the company last week, only to be labeled as villains. Debt holders of the 19 banks already have been reassured that the administration won’t allow the institutions to fail. If the banks need more capital, and private investors won’t provide it, the government will.” (Los Angeles Times, Thursday)

Governmment discretion is poison to an economy.

FEE Timely Classic
“Rent-Seeking: A Primer” by Sanford Ikeda

Mussolini and his American cousins, the Progressives, liked to call it Corporatism.

Looks like I need to find the code for my header

and move it over to Blogger. I'm sure I have it saved on a CD around here somewhere.

Then I've gotta figure out how to do that...move it over, I mean.

My buddy Sean was hosting it... he probably got a new server and erased that file accidentally. Notice I'm not calling him Smichael.

It may be that I wouldn't like everything

Andrew Bacevich has to say, but I agree with everything he says here. I would add Lenin and Stalin to his list of people to thank for the end of the Cold War and recommend that he read Mises' Socialism.

Other refinements

The biker chick: she looks perfect when she's out on wall - just a cute young underclassman. Her pink top and pants turn bikerish when we're in the former bathroom together, and she gets rougher and tougher looking the closer together we get - never to the point of revulsion, she's still good-looking, but tough. I suppose I should mention that, like the later scene in reverse, when I found we didn't need coverings, we didn't have them. I speak this way because there are others in the room (now, while I'm typing) and I don't want any words jumping off the screen at them.

The coverings returned when others entered the area. The longing to get back to this occurred in the transitions between scenes, when I was doing the "task" of each scene I was concentrating on that. Did I mention that the area emptied whenever I was involved in a task. It's like the appearance of others was the signal to move on. They'd get me started on some task, clear out and come back when it was time to go somewhere else.

Unfinished Dream

I'm walking along, apparently in Switzerland and/or France, lots of modern buildings around. I enter a doork, at my old college, UM-Duluth - actually, I walk up to the door, the one on the end of Griggs Hall. There is a cute blond girl sitting on a retaining wall by the door. She follows me in. She's kind of a Euro-biker chick, medium tall, kind of tough looking. We end up in a dingy, dirty former bathroom with all the fixtures removed. "Something good" is about to happen, but other people come in and we leave. We're not scared, we just leave.

Wanting to get back to this scene permeates the rest of the dream.

Then I'm walking down a residential street; I go into this picnic shelter (big square tent-type thing in somebody's yard) where my brother and sisters are preparing to spend the night. There are a lot of people coming and going, siblings, cousins, my wife and kids. Whenever I look at somebody they've been replaced by somebody else. This is also a constant theme throughout the dream.

The tent has obviously been there a while, the floor is dirt, and there are sleeping pallets around the edges, the front is folded up and the side farthest from the street is apparently open, people keep coming and going that way. There's a sort of room in the back where there are bunks. A small opening in the back wall leads in there. As younger kids we visited some cousins who had a club house like that. I hesitate to say it, but I think it was a converted pig shed or chicken coop. It didn't stink at all.

There was a square box in the middle with juice and something to eat on it. There are a bunch of those bugs that you see when you pick up a board that's been on the ground too long, clustered on the lower left corner of the box I see sitting down to eat on the entrance side. And, of course, there are more as I peel up the loose ply to look at this. They seem to be contending for something sticky on the middle of that side with a mass of ants who are swarming up from the bottom.

At first I want to just let them kill each other, but then I decide to speed up the process by squishing them with the loose ply, except that doesn't get them all and I use a napkin and my bare fingers to squish the rest. The ants are easy to kill but the other bugs are bigger and harder shelled.

When I quit, I know they'll be back...or, rather, there'll be more to take their place.

I get up to go wash my hands, walking behind the tent into somebody else's somewhat unkempt yard, with lots of trees and bushes, where I'm attacked by a vine with a leafy end. The vine is a parasite growing out of a tall cedar, like the ones that grew around our yard at the "old house," from the crotch of the first branch which rises out to the left from eye level down to the ground and out about six feet. The vine acts a lot like any one of the Schnauzers we went to see Sunday afternoon, though I interpreted their actions as playful and affectionate, whereas the vine was protecting itself and its territory; whenever you came near it, it would "attack," though, other than startling the hell out of me the first time, and unnervingly jumping right up into my face a couple of times, it had no way to harm anyone.

By the way, the word "crotch" is just used as a descriptor here. There was nothing about the tree that suggested sexuality in any way. Although...

Someone was standing in my way as I tried to get out of reach of the thing - I would have had to do something rude to get past him (or her - it seemed to alternate between my wife, my older stepson and my cousin Tim, all of whom are well-known [by me] to do such things). S/he wanted to converse a bit about this oddity, but then I picked up a stick and started destroying it. I wished (non-verbally) that I had a better too for the job, and the stick turned into this steel bar I have in my garage. I've toyed with the notion of pounding that par into a sword, and, for a moment or two, when this challenge was resembling a battle, the bar was a sword.

I felt a bit concerned about how the heck I was supposed to snuff out this thing's consciousness or whatever. Was it at the end cluster of leaves or what? Anyway, striking it there seemed to quiet it enough that I could hold it and shred it with the bar. When I had shredded the vine back to about two feet up the trunk and I was thinking about putting the bar away, I think it turned back into a stick and I just dropped it and went on. I was a bit worried that the vine would grow back leaving that much, but I wasn't prepared to get that picky about somebody else's problem.

More later.
____________
Sorry about that. I forgot I had to take the older girl to dance class.

Anyway...

I walked up to the stoop of a long, one-story house with light gray asphalt siding - very run down. You see a lot of houses like it in Oklahoma, where I've spent a lot of time. The stoop has a gable over it with pillars, but it's just a stoop. I go into a living room with polished, brown, stone tiles and sort of a sidewalk running from the door to the kitchen. After the fact, it reminds me of my aunt's place that she rented after divorcing my uncle. Her son, my cousin Tim, invited me to stay there for a couple days when he got out of the army and I was coming back from a summer of working in the oil fields of West Texas between my Junior and Senior years in college.

There was a little blond kid, about 2 or 3 playing on the couch there. I thought somebody should be watching him, so I kind of stood there until he went to sleep on the floor. I was tired, so I lay down on the sidewalk-y part of the floor with my head next to his feet. I guess it was night. Oh, yeah! It got dark while I was killing the weed. People, of course, were wandering in and out all night - relatives and their friends. They were quiet, but...

The kid got up and left in the morning. I looked where his feet had been. There were a bunch of eighth-inch long, squiggly, brown worms there. I got up and checked to see if I had any on me. Of course. So I brushed off the ones on my clothes, my arms and my face... I could feel them in my hair and inside my clothes... I don't think I had a beard. I was picking them out of the hairs on my arms and squishing them with my fingers as I walked down toward the river (river?) to see if Mom or somebody knew what to do about this. (Mom's a nurse.) My sister met me and was leading me there when the alarm went off.

So,...basically a bunch of shit happened to me and I either wasn't able to complete anything I started or complete it to my own satisfaction. Lotta bugs, lotta relatives, lotta walking. Any guesses what it all means?

Later thought: The path Lisa was leading me down was very light and sandy, well-traveled - like the path to the Johnny T. bluff in Tenkiller State Park. It went through the woods just like that.

Every time clue I see in the dream points to things I did in my 20s. I also don't remember actually walking through a door or even looking at a door. The street in the residential neighborhood was curvy, not straight. I could never see very far ahead.

I take all this to mean that I am what and where I am due to a complete lack of long-range planning. It has all led to a frustrating existence. I do work that plunks itself down right in front of me, but otherwise, it ain't my problem.

My unconscious mind is telling me exactly the same thing my conscious mind is. Thanks for the freakin' help, pal.

Ooh, that's - that frustration - is a bug that needs squishing. Well, let's see. Are there any signs of something I'm passionate about here? Cute blond biker chicks, of course. Any way to make a living out of that passion? I mean, legally?