“Everything is proceeding as I have foreseen.” One might imagine that I’d have mixed feelings about Greg Swann and Billy Beck starting their own blogs, since they have been two of No Treason’s most valuable contributors and now NT stands to lose the lion’s share of their blogging output. But one would be wrong. It’s all part of my plan.

Swann and Beck are two of the strongest voices for individualism I’ve come across in my adventures on the net. The aim of No Treason has always been to find a wider audience for such voices. It’s not like these gentlemen didn’t know their way around the web, they’ve both had substantial websites of their own for years and they’ve been highly active in online forums, especially on usenet where I first encountered them. But I saw that blogging had the potential to more deeply engage them in a broader conversation.

I take special pride in having drawn Billy into the the blogosphere. It was easy enough, I knew he’d find blogging more addictive than crack cocaine. Over the years he’s produced a prodigious body of valuable writing on the internet, but only a microscopic fraction of that was captured on his web site. That writing is of course available through usenet archives, but it takes considerable effort to sift through usenet to find it. I sought to draw Beck into a format that would lend more coherence to his output, a format that would make it easier for others to follow his train of thought.

Billy always presented a special “danger” to NT that my co-editor and I have been well aware of. He’s such a prolific writer with such a strong voice that there was always the danger that No Treason could effectively become The Billy Beck Blog. We weren’t about to let that happen because Beck’s isn’t the only voice we’re interested in. That’s over now, and it is most fitting that Billy has his own channel to present his thoughts in undiluted form.

I didn’t know Swann nearly as well as I knew Beck. I just knew that Greg was a force to be reckoned with so I took a flyer and invited him to contribute to NT, without much hope that he would accept the invitation. But he did, and his contribution to NT has been tremendous whether he knows it or not. With his new blog Swann announce that he is “in league with the Greeks”, and that makes me smile. It puts me in mind of the observation of Leo Strauss that everything in the West is descended from two cities: Jerusalem which is Faith, and Athens which is Reason. In that sense I was born and raised in Jerusalem. but I was quite apparently a changeling because I’ve never felt at home anywhere but in Athens.

So: Hail Athenian! Our true kinship is affirmed. Our home is the home of Philosophy, which recognizes no authority but Nature.

And I hold that all individualists are the offspring of Athens. The philosophical differences between individualists such as myself, Warren, Beck and Swann are often profound, fundamental and practically irreducible; but we recognize each other as fellow Sovereigns. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Beck and Swann, off to do my bidding…

With all due respect to my friends on the Team Liberty cultural revolutionary committee, I bristle at the thought of being known as an activist. To me, activism brings to mind visions of the mentally impaired - banner wavers who flop down before the treads of oncoming trucks in the interest of animal rights or who slather their naked bodies with ketchup and play dead in protest of some ever-unspecified aspect of free trade. The idea of lifting a torch and leading the victimized masses (I hate the masses and I generally don’t give a damn when they get victimized) up the hill to the Evil Oppressor’s Castle is unfathomable and queer to my very nature.

I do admit that Kennedy and I are not very good team players. It’s a good thing that we run this operation from 3000 miles apart, or else we’d constantly find ourselves at each others throats and never get a thing done with it. Well, actually I’m looking forward to my impending move to the Nutmeg State, even if the face time takes a toll on my business relationship with the No Treason staff out there. Even so, I’m dead serious about my shortcomings as a team player.

It became such an item of contention that the editors of No Treason have been, in the fashion of a chi-com late night critiquing session, dragged from our virtual beds and carted into a room full of clucking tongues, wagging fingers, and chants of “shame, shame” for not doing enough for libertarian causes. We were admonished to get off our backsides and get ourselves active in a real and tangible libertarian cause rather than just kvetching and whining on a website about the state of things.

“You could show more outrage,” we were told, but as my co-editor, aptly puts it in “The Revolution Will be All Business,” there is no Ghandian struggle, no mob, no movement that can accomplish what an average individual minding his own business can do when he seriously takes up the affair of quietly moving his own financial resources outside the reach of the pilferers and takes charge of the manner in which he governs his private life without regard to the sanction of the state or the state’s minions.

If it’s been months since you read Dick Freely’s article, “Do Something!” take another look at it to see what I’m talking about. Well before Freely ever penned his timeless offering on personal liberty, I chose that very route. It amounts to more than just a knock-off piece of irreverent humor. It’s my emphatic opinion, that therein lies the brightest potential for individualism and it goes miles above and beyond the implications that any free state project or any annual t�te � t�te of think tankers can bring to the board.

That’s not to say that such concerted and collective enterprises have no value, but much like the trip to the moon, they have more to offer in the journey and the development of the mission than in what awaits at the targeted destination. Such efforts yield limited return and barely go beyond that which can be achieved via the use of informal networking systems that are now available to individuals - average joes across the continent from Moclips to Magog with access to a phone and modem.

This is why I won’t hang my hopes for liberty on any activist or collective endeavor and neither will I rely upon others to blow a hole in the side of the cattle car so that I may escape it. There will be no Moses for libertarians. No Anti-Marx. No promised land of freedom, except for the one I make for myself and my own. I’ve already taken foot bail without the leave of Pharaoh and I won’t look back in outrage for those who choose to stay within the porous walls of a city which cannot hold them.

A woman has ultimate say in whether or not she’ll bear any child and the fact that she chooses, repeatedly in the months long process, to bring forth her child is a clear acknowledgement that she will see to the well-being of her infant. It constitutes concrete recognition of her duty to care for her child’s needs at least until such point as she can arrange for someone else to voluntarily take over the care of the child.

Children are born as the consequence of a series of deliberate and cognitive decisions that only their mothers make, such as 1) Will I have sex? 2) Will I use birth control? 3) Will I carry this child to term? 4) Will I elect to keep this child rather than to adopt it out?

Those are each questions that take considerable thought and deliberate action to implement over the course of time. However, if potential mothers would face up to just one question, it would solve almost all custody and support issues existing today. It’s a question which has been so far relegated into the background that it’s hardly ever featured in these sorts of discussions, but it’s what women need to put the most emphasis on.

Is this man worthy of fathering my children?

It’s only in recent times that the above question of utmost importance has been driven into obscurity by the perversity of a statist system that inevitably awards the most irresponsible behaviors. Throughout the ages, women have realized the importance of being selective about the men with whom they breed and have recognized that they are ultimately responsible for the care and upbringing of their children, but the burgeoning nanny state vigorously selects for numb-cunted felon factories who siphon the public dole, it encourages good for nothing ex-wife princesses to use their crotchfuit as an excuse to soak their ex-husbands for a 20 year meal ticket and it has muddled the heads of the masses into thinking that some external force must always ride to the rescue of any bedraggled madonna who ends up in the cold with her sprog because of dismally poor choices on her own part.

It’s clear to me that women are, by nature, 100% responsible for the children they bear. If the prospect of having children is such a burden to them, if they cannot shoulder that responsibility on their own, it’s imperative that they use special care and caution in the selection of a mate and/or get a signed contract addressing the duties of each parent toward their children and each other if needs be.

This is not so hard to figure out, but in the event that it’s all just too complicated there is always the option of remaining child free.

It appears that Front Sight is suing Diana Mertz Hsieh.

Why? At this point we don’t know, but the characterization of this as an attack on free speech by Scientology is getting a lot of play.

In reading Hsieh’s site it seems clear that Hsieh is more than a bit of a crusader against Scientology and that she’s been harassing Front Sight founder Ignatius Piazza about possible personal ties to Scientology. Quite apparently she wants him to publicly repudiate Scientology, and she tosses around thinly veiled threats of turning his customers against him.

Piazza says he’s a Catholic. He says there is no connection between Scientology and Front Sight. Even Hsieh agrees on that point. I think people would be looking at this a lot differently if Hsieh were badgering Piazza to publicly repudiate Catholicism because of crimes real and imagined that the church has participated in. Can a decent person be a Catholic in good faith without sanctioning everything his church has ever done? I think so. I don’t see why a Scientologist can’t do the same. And we don’t even know that Piazza is currently a Scientologist, though it seems clear he has been connected.

Hsieh started down this road by following up on inflammatory reports about Front Sight, reports which she now concludes were “libelous in their wild speculations and claims”. I see no good evidence that Piazza or Front Sight have done anything wrong at all, for all I know the suit may be an attempt to get her remove some of that libelous material from her site; she quotes the libelous material. Front Sight’s right to such relief may be highly arguable, but I wouldn’t be terribly alarmed that they would argue for it if the law permits.

But this is more speculation; we don’t know what the suit is about. I’ll tell you this though, I don’t see anything particularly noble or attractive in Hsieh’s harassment of Piazza and Front Sight.

“But in the future there will be no wives and no friends.” O’Brian continued. “We shall abolish the orgasm. Our neurologists are at work upon it now. There will be no loyalty, except loyalty towards the Party. There will be no love, except the love of Big Brother. There will be no laughter, except the laugh of triumph over a defeated enemy. There will be no art, no literature, no science. There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always — do not forget this, Winston — always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — for ever.’

(The first draft ends here, although at the bottom of the typescript are a few scrawled sentences in Orwell’s handwriting. Although almost illegible, a few lines can be made out, although they have so far puzzled Orwell scholars. What did Orwell mean by “artificial mammal-like thing…beady little eyes not of this dimension…Ia! Cthulhu fthagn R’yleh!….the timecube…arrrrrgggggghhhh.”? One can only regret that Orwell did not follow up, in his final version of the famous novel, on some of the interesting, (if rather puzzling), directions we see indicated in this fascinating first draft. If nothing else, his reputation would have been enhanced by not only being among the first to warn against the dangers of totalitarianism, but also being among the first, in 1948, to predict 8-track tape players and Iron Butterfly. - JS)