I made this my wallpaper

My daughter found this in the yard. It's dated July, but that's no guarantee that that's when the picture was taken.  She took the picture and that's her hand.

The kids and I just got back from watching "Megamind"

All the adjectives in the trailer here are dead on. Foremost, it's a hilarious movie. I'd go see it if I were you.

The Onion's got a pretty butt-kickin' article:

Mom, Jeremy Won't Let Me Create An Atmosphere Of Sustained Menace By Daniel Gellman.

Read it all the way to the bottom.

Somethin' else y'all should read:

Kenneth E. Hartman, "The Trouble With Prison":

Most prisoners are uneducated, riddled with unresolved traumas and ill-treated mental health problems, drug and alcohol addictions, and self-esteem issues that are beyond profound, bordering on the pathological far too often. The vast majority has never received competent health care, mental health care, drug treatment, education or even an opportunity to look at themselves as human. Were any of these far less draconian interventions even tried, before the descent into this wretched cave, no doubt many of my peers would be leading productive lives. Nothing else works is not a statement of fact; it is the declaration of an ideology. This ideology holds that punishment, for the sake of the infliction of pain, is the logical response to all misbehavior. It is also a convenient cover story behind which powerful special interest groups hide.

Prison employees benefit by our failure. This startling fact contains within it a monstrous truth. These well-organized government workers created the victims’ rights movement, a sad shill for the prison-industrial complex. Using the handful of politically active victims of crime to obscure their actual agenda, propositions are passed, laws are changed, and policies that could prevent victimization in the first place are suppressed. Both of these groups, working in tandem with the corporations that supply and construct prisons, pour millions of dollars into the political process to achieve a system guaranteed to fail. But this failure by any other measure – high rates of recidivism, high rates of internal disorder, growing prison populations serving longer sentences – results in greater profits to the corporations, increased membership in the unions, and ever growing piles of dollars to buy still more influence.

Raimondo

from AntiWar.com:

The TSA can conduct a full-body search, prison-style, on everyone who gets near an airport: we can lock down the country, and treat everyone like a potential criminal, conducting random searches on the streets like they’re already doing in New York City. We can turn the country into one big prison yard, and still the terrorists will get through, eventually.

They’ll get through because we’re creating new enemies every day, many thousands of them, as we extend our perpetual "war on terrorism" to new regions, and claim more blood sacrifices on the altar of our new god, Revenge. The conduct of our foreign policy for the past decade or so ensures that the supply of terrorists will be endless, as the relatives and loved ones of our victims come gunning for us. By hook or by crook they will get us – unless the cycle of revenge is stopped.

I guess, perhaps, I haven't come right out and said it, though I think it: The Probligo's analysis of American foreign policy is, and has been, correct.

Here's my dog

Our dog.

Here's something you may not know

I found this thanks to Arther Silber's article, "All You Know Are Lies":

The US rate of unemployment, if measured according to the methodology used in 1980, is 22.5%. Even the government’s broader measure of unemployment stands at 17%. The 9.6% reported rate is a concocted measure that does not include discouraged workers who have been unable to find a job after 6 months and workers who want full time jobs but can only find part-time work.

Silber's quoting Paul Craig Roberts.

I feel what Silber says about it deeply:

In our world today, if you are minimally conscious and honest, profound anger and bitterness are major indicators of psychological health. Given the suffocating cocoon of lies in which we live, it requires an almost unfathomable amount of sheer willpower to try to pierce the noxious air of our culture.

I look forward to his next article.

The Drama of the Gifted Child

is available as a free download here. Get it and read it.

There is nothing more important that I could say right now.

Acrobat Reader will even read it to you if you prefer.

There's something important

here that I need to deal with later.

Nope. I was mistaken. I figured some Homer Price fan must have a more singable version of "42 pounds of edible fungus" than I do. I get the impression that they do, but they're not singing it on YouTube.

This gal's got the lyrics.

For anyone who wants to know how Presuppositional Apologetics works

Against somebody who's too smart for it, check out the discussion to this post.

Hm. This sounds familiar.

From Stef's new book, Against the Gods:

Historically, the word “God” has never meant, “things that may exist in other dimensions of the multiverse, as described by modern physics.” “God” has never referred to some unknowable X factor, Schrödinger's cat, the unified field theory, the cosmic craps player so derided by Einstein, or any of the other trappings of modern science.

No, let's not empty the word “God” of its true and original meaning, which was a cosmic and spiritual father who created the universe, breathed life into mankind, burns the wicked and saves the innocent, and so on. This meaty and monstrous superman, this thunderbolt-hurling patriarch of our dim and brutal histories, this frustrated and enraged slaughterer of rebels and sceptics – this fearful and omnipotent beast should not be reduced to some pale and conceptual ghost hiding out in the dim theoretical alleys between the atoms.

Using the word “God” to refer to some theoretical possibility of mind-bending modern physics is to take a word steeped in the superstitious blood of our earliest collective histories, and attempt to propel it like some time-bending slingshot forward into the future – an exercise in futility, since this old and very brittle word cracks and collapses in the face of such insane velocity.

Considerably more poetic than I put it a year and a half ago. I'm saying that I agree and appreciate the further development, not that I'm accusing him of stealing my idea. Development will grind to a halt if people don't stop abusing notions of intellectual property.

Stef's redone the audio here.

I just did a search of my blog

[That's my blog, spammer.  There's no committee or team here.  Although, for a while, invadesoda was posting here.]  for what I've said about the Bill of Rights.  You should too.  Here's a link to the full listing.

Feels like I got some exercise out of that deal.

I ran a 4 mile race today. I've never raced that distance before, so whatever my time was was a PR [personal record]. I did it in 34:53. I think, let's see if I can double check that.

Not yet, at least. It was the PACER 1st Annual Run/Walk/Roll Against Bullying. I was looking for a 5K, but the cause and the location - supremely beautiful Normandale Lake in Bloomington (MN, for those wandering by) - cried out to me.

There were tons of kids there. It was good to see all the kids, some in wheel chairs, all happy and well-behaved, with no one yelling at them. It looked to me like they took their cause seriously. They were living it.

Kids are good when you understand what they're trying to achieve and try help them.

That park is just awesome in the fall. Most of their trees still have their leaves and they're just twenty miles south of here. They and we are both past our peak for fall colors, but they've got a lot more than we do right now.

I got that picture from these guys.

The maples around the parking lot are all grown up. They'd just been planted the first time I walked around there. When I was delivering paper and copy supplies for Beckwith (who were based in south Edina) I used to walk around the lake on my lunch hour. When I became a floater, I sometimes worked in the building across the street, so I got to do that in all seasons for the next seven years. I don't think I've been back there since about '98. I feel regret when I'm going near there and can't stop by.

I wonder what people would have thought if I'd walked up to one of those maples, put my hand on its trunk and said, "You've grown so big!" I'm pretty sure they were all liberals, so their edging away would only have meant that they were giving me a private moment with my tree.

I wish I had done that.

I saw a bald eagle in a tree there while I was walking around before the race warming up. He (or she - what do I know?) stayed there while we ran past him twice. I saw that he did turn around and face the trail the first time past. The second time I was pushing harder, so I just checked that he was still there.

Walking back to the car, I saw another one flying way up above the parking lot. I checked to see if my guy was still in his tree and he was. I could see him from a spot about thirty yards from the truck.

Last weekend we went up to the in-laws place on Lake Vermilion, 200 miles north, and the only trees that had any leaves were the willows down by the water, but they glowed a beautiful golden from dawn 'til after sundown. We were stowing the docks for the winter and it was hard to take my eyes off them. The tamaracks are gold up there now, too. Highways 169 and 53 go by and through a lot of boggy land, so it was like driving through the leprechaun's cache at the end of the rainbow on the way home.

It's been a gorgeous autumn.

Kevin Carson's back and better than ever

Well, I'm quoting him again here, anyway. He hasn't really gone away. His last couple of articles have really kicked butt. Oh, I guess I've only read two of the last four - the second and the fourth of these:

If You’re Not an Extremist, You’re Not Paying Attention
Posted by Kevin Carson in Commentary • No comments
Kevin Carson says America’s real owners need a population just smart enough to keep doing their jobs — but too stupid to look at the man behind the curtain.

Oct 12, 2010
Is the South Fulton Fire Department Really an Indictment of Libertarianism?
Posted by Kevin Carson in Commentary, Feature Articles • 17 comments
Kevin Carson on the Cranick fire incident.

Oct 8, 2010
Only the Guilty Need Fear? Tell It to Anne Frank
Posted by Kevin Carson in Commentary • 6 comments
Kevin Carson on gullibility and a long history of criminal government.

Oct 6, 2010
Why Self-Organized Networks Will Destroy Hierarchies — A Credo
Posted by Kevin Carson in Commentary • 11 comments
Kevin Carson explains why we’re going to win the struggle for humanity’s future.

Here's the conclusion of the fire department article:

By the way, there’s one thing we should never lose sight of in all this: what the actual statist alternative is. Lots of people point to the harshness of letting the house burn down for nonpayment. But keep in mind that having one’s house auctioned off for nonpayment of taxes is more common than house fires, and that it entails just as much of an effective loss of your house as having it burn down. The modal statist alternative, as practiced in most places, is to fund fire services with mandatory taxes — and unless taxation is backed in the last resort by punitive measures almost as harsh as having your house burn down, it’s prone to exactly the same moral hazard problems as a voluntary payment system.

That’s a favorite tactic of critics of libertarianism: to compare the actual performance of voluntary institutions to the good intentions of the state. But any social system can be expected to work optimally if it’s staffed by angels.

Hey! Looks like the Swedish Academy has done some good!

They do, now and then.

http://www.independent.org/blog/index.php?p=8062

I've never read anything of Mario Vargas Llosa's.  I think I'll have to, now.  This War at the End of the World looks pretty good.

Did the TCM today.

Pretty close to 4:30.  I'd guess 4:32 something, but I forgot to stop my stopwatch at the finish, so I don't know for sure.  I caught it at 4:34, after I'd picked up my medal, spaceblanket and a banana. 

Once again this year, it was cool out, but sunny.  It went from about 34° (F - approximately 1° C) to maybe 55° while I was running. Didn't even need to hunt shade.  Very little wind.  Perfect day for a marathon.  You gotta wear a couple layers at the start and shed them as you go, but it gives you something to do down the road.  Besides hunt the hottest babes to run behind.*

*No, I didn't - but a couple did pass me and run in front of me for a couple miles.

Edit: HOLY CRAP!!!  I was aiming for 4:30 and LOOK AT THIS!!!

Watch out what you tell your subconscious, eh?  [Don't call me a "sub-" conscious.]

Where and Why I run

Actually, these are all in Brooklyn Center, MN.  In fact, they're all taken within a couple hundred yards of each other, and the Bridge, the Duck and the Puddle were within 50 yards.  The Bridge is one mile exactly from my house.  West southwest, if you care that much.

I took some pix at another park I like to run in, but none of those were as good as these.

Happy Birthday, Jim Henson!

Kent McManigal writes some pretty awesome stuff

I highly recommend him. Here's a 'graph from his article A problem with authority:

This man [who taught McManigal how to start fires with a bow drill] was an authority and he had authority. He didn't need to force anyone to behave as though he were an authority. There was no coercion and no implied threat. You knew he had authority by his actions and his expertise and his results. If he told you that you were doing it wrong, you would be wise to listen, yet he would have let you try your own way if you refused to follow his suggestions. Your success or failure was no threat to his authority. I have now started hundreds (or thousands) of fires in this way, and taught the skill to others, all thanks to one true authority.

I like the point he's making with that example and the brevity with which he makes it. This kind of authority makes the world go around. The other kind stops it.

Here are his article archives.

Equinox Wednesday

Get your robes ready.