On Kennedy’s recommendation, I was inclined to give Balko the benefit of the doubt. Although I found his writing disjointed and lackluster, I’d drop in now and again to see if he’d started to earn his no-treason syndication. Even after this, I read on. I mean, it could have been a clumsily constructed satire, right?

But this and this broke the camel’s back. I mean, what the creeping hairy fuck, over? I’m opposed to government on principle; I’d throw that switch right now, if I could, but I can’t think of a less illegitimate function of government than shoving time-stealing, trespassing scumbags back in their hole. And that includes national defense and subsidized Harleys.

Until we get market-based justice and enforcement, I’m calling the cops if my car is stolen; I’m going to a monopoly government court if it’s the only way I can get restitution for some civil tort; and I’m by God placing scumbag telemarketers on notice, in the most effective way possible, that they are not welcome to invade my privacy. If that way makes me a recipient of Federal largesse, so be it. The only sanity-preserving alternative is not pretty.

I found a link to this USA Today article on menacing pop-ups, which are served through a weakness in Windows Messaging Service.

How many pop-ups (or attempted ones if you’re blocking them) do you get when you click the link?

George Reisman writes much truth in today’s Mises article, Sins of Businessmen, Crimes of Politicians. He correctly identifies many crimes perpetrated by the state:

…one must say that while there may be many businessmen engaged in activities ranging from various sharp practices to outright fraud, the government and the politicians who determine its activities are routinely, day in and day out, engaged in massive theft, which is what the income and estate taxes clearly are…

…the government and the politicians commit or are accessories to the commission of such criminal acts as extortion, theft, and unjust imprisonment. This last occurs not only when people are incarcerated for crimes they did not commit, which happens as the result of carelessness, and worse, more often than one might think, but when they are incarcerated for acts they did perform, but which are not genuine crimes, such as the commission of so-called victimless crimes and “economic crimes.”

And when it imposes a draft, the government is engaged in kidnapping and enslavement on a massive scale, in that it forcibly compels people to be where and do what it wants them to do rather than be where and do what they choose to do. The same characterization may arguably be said to apply in a milder form to public education and compulsory school attendance laws, under which parents are given the choice of surrendering their children’s minds or going to jail.

Fine so far. Wonderful and rousing, in fact. However, he then goes on to say,

Fortunately, in this country and the other countries whose legal systems are still within the Anglo-Saxon legal tradition, the government and the politicians have not yet gotten around to the commission of murder, though the politicians of many other countries certainly have.

Say what? Does the government get a bye on Waco, Ruby Ridge, and poor Ashley Villarreal? I imagine Reisman would characterize those events as murder or mass murder if they were carried out by a private individual or organization. Also, since he characterizes imprisonment of the innocent as “unjust imprisonment,” should not any executions of non-murderers, whether innocent, convicted of a non-crime, or convicted of a non-capital crime, count as murder? I can’t name an individual case that is undeniably so, but I think it’s safe to say that there has been at least one since the late 1700’s. The Rosenbergs, anyone? David Spence?

As I started on this, I reflected that things had sorted themselves out after a fashion. Or some things had. I was feeling tense again, and my heart was beating heavily, moving toward the point where it would begin to flutter and stumble. Also, as had been happening increasingly of late, I noticed how clumsy I was getting, knocking my shoulder against the bathroom door-jamb, barking my knuckles on the shower-taps when I reached for them, slamming the soap down in the holder with unwilled violence, as if I were drunk, which I certainly was not, or as if my powers of co-ordination were progressively deteriorating. That thought wearied me unendurably, and so did the thought that tomorrow was another week, and I must telephone the insurance company about the Volkswagen, and see the solicitor about my father’s will, and fetch the meat, and bank the takings, and make new arrangements about fruit and vegetables, and prepare for another week after that. And Joyce, and selling the house, and looking for another, and finding somebody to go to bed with.

Much sooner than I could have expected (I had not really had any such expectation), I found I had begun to understand the meaning of the young man’s prophecy that I would come to appreciate death and what it had to offer. Death was my only means of getting away for good from this body and all its pseudo-symptoms of disease and fear, from the constant awareness of this body, from this person, with his ruthlessness and sentimentality and ineffective, insincere, impracticable notions of behaving better, from attending to my own thoughts and from counting in thousands to smother them and from my face in the glass. He had said I would never be free of him as long as the world lasted, and I believed him, but when I died I would be free of Maurice Allington for longer than that.

I put on my dinner-jacket, swallowed a strong whisky, and went downstairs to begin the evening round.

From the concluding pages of THE GREEN MAN, by Kingsley Amis, possibly the greatest novel of supernatural horror - or the simple horror of everyday life - ever written.

“The writings of Kingsley Amis provide unique pleasures and pose persistent challenges. Early and late, Amis is a virtuoso stylist, creating the inflections, accents, idiom that define and expose characters. He revels in linguistic follies, and endows ordinary language with vitality . His forte is cant and clich�, especially the descent into banality or stupidity. Despite his enduring reputation as a comic novelist, few Amis novels after Lucky Jim are purely or even predominantly comic. In most of his books, circumstances are gloomy, fate unconsoling. People live in a precarious Hobbesian state, vulnerable to mortal woes, prey to awful forces. The world of Amis is more disturbing and painful than amusing or reassuring. The funniest writer of our time is also one of the most troubling.”

- INTRODUCTION to Critical Essays on Kingsley Amis, edited by Robert H. Bell

Drink a shot every time Bill O’Reilly makes an unprincipled argument.

I dare you….

“>

Astute readers of No Treason will have no problem spotting the irony in requiring students to recite a pledge containing the words “…with liberty…for all” as has been done in St. Paul, MN. At least one student was, well, taking it sitting down. At one point, her teacher gave her the choice of leaving or standing during the flag-worshipping ceremony, to which she initially agreed. She later declined, saying “that is my right. I should not have to go outside.”
The problem, however, is not that she was given this choice, rather than being allowed to sit. She is obviously not a member of their flag-worshipping religion, and has no more right to sit disrespectfully than a non-Catholic has the right to take communion in a Catholic church, or to disrupt the ceremony. The problem is that, unlike most churches, she is required to be there unless she goes to another “approved” school, and that her family is required to pay for the school whether or not she attends.

(My friend S. writes again from lovely Deseret - about a blight upon the land she calls “liberal food”. Excerpts from her correspondence follow - JS)

“You are kidding about suh-shee au gratin, I hope? I hope? Then again, I guess you probably aren’t, considering the crimes against food that are plaguing American diners (the people, not the places) across the country. I call it liberal food, and attribute its rise to self-hatred and envy of cultures with ancient and famous food traditions, combined with a uniquely American hubris and arrogance.”

“What about us? It’s not fair that all we’ve got is hominy and catfish, cranberry sauce and hush puppies and sweet potato pie! Europe’s laughing at us! Waaaaaaaaa! Oh and don’t forget the wretched hamburger. (beat breast for a moment.) But that’s ok… we’ve eliminated every other form of unfairness, and this one is not beyond our grasp. Let’s just calm down and think about this for a minute. It’s true that we are Americans (sob). We can’t do anything about that, but we can concoct an all-American cuisine that will simultaneously put us in the big league (China, France, Italy, Mexico - ed.) and be inedible to regular Americans, a cuisine that will really set us apart.”

“Let’s start out with a nice fettucine in a sauce of orange juice and zest, a clove of garlic, parmesan and a cup of sugar. Ok. Have we choked that down? Good! Follow that up with salmon slathered with corn, papaya and lychee salsa, with radiccio baked until limp and brown… the only really important thing is that no ingredients come from the supermarket. The supermarket is the very center of our shame. Farmer’s markets only, thank you! Just see what they have at the moment and make something up. It’s easy! Otherwise how would those stupid foreigners have come up with so many recipes?”

- S.

This weekend in northern Kentucky, an 18-year old driver killed one motorcyclist and injured eight others in a pack of close to two hundred bikes when he crossed the centerline. The optimist in me says that the fact that the car driver is still alive demonstrates that people are basically good-natured and forgiving. The cynic in me says that he was protected by the state from getting his due, and only the presence of witnesses prevented him from being beaten to death at the scene.

I ride almost every day, and I know I would love a few minutes alone with this guy.

“>The question I get asked most often is: Where’s Kipawa Condor? A lot of people think I just made him up because he so rarely posts. The truth is that Kip is on special assignment uncovering a vast conspiracy.

“2^21701 - 1 (bottom text) is the 25th Mersenne prime. Compare this with “the 29th Mersenne prime” (left side text), which is 2^110503 - 1. These #’s are probably some kind of cipher-key to decode other parts of the text. Given the repeated references to meetings at the ‘hotel california’, I tend to suspect that these pages are announcements to a group of people who are in the know about the code. Perhaps some sort of ’skull and crossbones’ organization at the University would explain the longevity of the ads, as well as their mysticism and diversity. If you want to figure out what they mean, I suggest trying to guess what the ‘hotel california’ refers to, deciphering the current years meeting date, and crashing the gate on one of their meetings (of course, this assumes my theory about a scret society is correct, and also could be a trifle dangerous). Maybe they are a sect of the Discordians or something.” - Kipawa Condor

Or something indeed.

I spent as much time reading “Bloom County” on the toilet as anybody, but I gradually came to recognize the strip as an odious, barbless swirl of untethered political references and hypercommercial sentimentality, all strained through Garry Trudeau’s lower intestine. “Doonesbury” for Dummies. The strip is so middle American, in the worst sense of the phrase, that reading it now is like choking to death on apple pie - Colby Cosh

I share Cosh’s revulsion with the comparison of Bloom County to Calvin and Hobbes.

In late June, two teenaged boys took potshots at cars on I-40 in Tennessee with a .22 rifle. Of course, they are not to blame for their stupidity, a game made them do it. I have never played Grand Theft Auto, but from what I have seen there is no part in it where you hide in the woods and shoot at tractor-trailers with a .22 rifle.

This commentary at The Register has it about right, with the exception of their comments about gun ownership, which are only to be expected from the British:

“Or perhaps the answer to the perennial problem of delinquent teenagers dropping bricks from motorway and railway bridges is to sue the creators of Tetris.”

Here.