Q: What sort of person would pay a hundred grand for a magical totem?

A: This kind:

The baseball blamed by many Chicago Cubs fans for the team’s playoff disaster last year was reduced to a pile of thread on live television Thursday evening by a Hollywood special effects expert.

…

Grant DePorter, who helped buy the ball at an auction for $113,824 on behalf of Harry Caray’s Restaurant Group, lined up hours of music, comedy and celebrity appearances.

“It’s like the ring from ‘The Lord of the Rings’ and we’re kind of like Frodo, trying to get it over with,” Deporter said.

Kind of, uh huh.

I’ve never understood ’sports fans’ in any case, but this is simply appalling. This sort of behavior is what Westerners read about in National Geographic: it’s called animism when some primitive does it with an antelope thighbone in front of his stick hut. When some idiot paid a hundred thou for the object of it, and Katie Kouric describes it with her patented perky-but-glass-eyed stare on national teevee, it’s called “sports”. Right here in twenty-first century America, we have people, and plenty of ‘em, who wholeheartedly believe in this. Encouraging, idnnit?

But here’s the worst of it: those hooting, drooling boobs worshiping a friggin’ ball, they get to vote on your life.

A co-worker recently told me that her near-adolescent stepson had shoplifted a minor item. She was sad and frustrated, saying “I’d like to have taken him back and made him apologize, but you never know these days. You know what I mean?”

“I know exactly what you mean”, I replied, nodding. I know.

We live in Post-Reductio America. More and more people recognize this state of affairs, now, even if they can’t put words to it. Would anything untoward have happened had this quite normal bit of child discipline been carried out? Likely not, but you never know, these days. Children are expelled from school for having Tylenol or penknives, government child-protection agencies rampage unchecked, insane lawsuits proliferate. You can’t use “common sense” as a guide any longer: the idea of reductio ad absurdum is obsolete. The growing irrationality of American society leads to more timidity and caution - the kid might get arrested, the state could take custody - you just never know.

Each new decline of civility and sense gives us a new and lower norm, each undisciplined child grows up to create more undisciplined children. The irrationality spreads, and the more it spreads, the more it can spread. It feeds itself, like an acid leak eating an ever-larger hole.

I know what she meant, indeed: The Endarkenment. Think about it: Here, now, is quite likely the best that the situation is ever going to be. You ain’t seen nothin’, yet.

As Old Europe sinks into ruin (and so do we) it’s still possible to take pleasure in the news of un film de Enki Bilal. Just watching the trailer, what old-time fan of Metal Hurlant cannot but thrill at the subtitle “Central Park - Zone de l’Intrusion - Danger de mort!” What does it matter that Bilal’s Euro-future is hopelessly dated? Stilted dialogue! Murky pretension! Floating pyramids! Guys with bird heads! Beautiful topless Eurotrash girls with spiky hair* and blue-dyed nipples! These are the things I love. (All this and Charlotte Rampling, too! Yay!) Ideally, the best way to see this film is at some midnight cult film showing years later, so you can stumble out of the theatre mumbling “What the fawk was that all about?”

(*Hint, hint, dearest Karen! )

I am running my novel Minerva on the website Strike The Root. Below are the links to the first two chapters. I hope people who want a smaller government will enjoy the work.

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

The No Treason Metablog is an aggregated feed of the blogs with the greatest congeniality to our own purposes. Our Metablog currently combines the feeds of No Treason, Two–Four, Catallarchy, Selling Waves, and Improved Clinch.

Rollup.org provided a solution that Shonk and I (among others) have been seeking for some time.

Let me know if you’d like your feed included in the NT metablog, but don’t be offended if I turn you down because I’m very particular.

The Eagle and the Mole

Avoid the reeking herd,
Shun the polluted flock,
Live like that stoic bird,
The eagle of the rock.

The huddled warmth of crowds
Begets and fosters hate;
He keeps above the clouds
His cliff inviolate.

When flocks are folded warm,
And herds to shelter run,
He sails above the storm,
He stares into the sun.

If in the eagle’s track
Your sinews cannot leap,
Avoid the lathered pack,
Turn from the steaming sheep.

If you would keep your soul
From spotted sight or sound,
Live like the velvet mole:

Go burrow underground.

And there hold intercourse
With roots of trees and stones,
With rivers at their source,
And disembodied bones.

Elinor Wylie

(Courtesy of Anorakish)

“Mr. Hackworth,” Finkle-McGraw said after the pleasantries had petered out, speaking in a new tone of voice, a the-meeting-will- come-to-order sort of voice, “please favour me with your opinion of hypocrisy.

“Excuse me. Hypocrisy, Your Grace?”

“Yes. You know.”

“It’s a vice, I suppose.”

“A little one or a big one? Think carefully-much hinges upon the answer.”

“I suppose that depends upon the particular circumstances.”

“That will never fail to be a safe answer, Mr. Hackworth,” the Equity Lord said reproachfully. Major Napier laughed, somewhat artificially, not knowing what to make of this line of inquiry.

“Recent events in my life have renewed my appreciation for the virtues of doing things safely,” Hackworth said. Both of the others chuckled knowingly.

“You know, when I was a young man, hypocrisy was deemed the worst of vices,” Finkle-McGraw said. “It was all because of moral relativism. You see, in that sort of a climate, you are not allowed to criticise others-after all, if there is no absolute right and wrong, then what grounds is there for criticism?”

Finkle-McGraw paused, knowing that he had the full attention of his audience, and began to withdraw a calabash pipe and various related supplies and implements from his pockets. As he continued, he charged the calabash with a blend of leather-brown tobacco so redolent that it made Hackworth’s mouth water. He was tempted to spoon some of it into his mouth.

“Now, this led to a good deal of general frustration, for people are naturally censorious and love nothing better than to criticise others’ shortcomings. And so it was that they seized on hypocrisy and elevated it from a ubiquitous peccadillo into the monarch of all vices. For, you see, even if there is no right and wrong, you can find grounds to criticise another person by contrasting what he has espoused with what he has actually done. In this case, you are not making any judgment whatsoever as to the correctness of his views or the morality of his behaviour-you are merely pointing out that he has said one thing and done another. Virtually all political discourse in the days of my youth was devoted to the ferreting out of hypocrisy.

“You wouldn’t believe the things they said about the original Victorians. Calling someone a Victorian in those days was almost like calling them a fascist or a Nazi.”

Both Hackworth and Major Napier were dumbfounded. “Your Grace!” Napier exdaimed. “I was naturally aware that their moral stance was radically different from ours- but I am astonished to be informed that they actually condemned the first Victorians.”

“Of course they did,” Finkle-McGraw said.

“Because the first Victorians were hypocrites,” Hackworth said, getting it.

Finkle-McGraw beamed upon Hackworth like a master upon his favored pupil. “As you can see, Major Napier, my estimate of Mr. Hackworth’s mental acuity was not ill-founded.”

“While I would never have supposed otherwise, Your Grace,” Major Napier said, “it is nonetheless gratifying to have seen a demonstration.” Napier raised his glass in Hackworth’s direction.

“Because they were hypocrites,” Finkle-McGraw said, after igniting his calabash and shooting a few tremendous fountains of smoke into the air, “the Victorians were despised in the late twentieth century. Many of the persons who held such opinions were, of course, guilty of the most nefandous conduct themselves, and yet saw no paradox in holding such views because they were not hypocrites themselves-they took no moral stances and lived by none.”

“So they were morally superior to the Victorians-” Major Napier said, still a bit snowed under.

“-even though-in fact, because-they had no morals at all.” There was a moment of silent, bewildered head-shaking around the copper table.

“We take a somewhat different view of hypocrisy,” Finkle-McGraw continued. “In the late-twentieth-century Weltanschauung, a hypocrite was someone who espoused high moral views as part of a planned campaign of deception-he never held these beliefs sincerely and routinely violated them in privacy. Of course, most hypocrites are not like that. Most of the time it’s a spirit-is-willing, flesh-is-weak sort of thing.”

“That we occasionally violate our own stated moral code,” Major Napier said, working it through, “does not imply that we are insincere in espousing that code.”

“Of course not,” Finkle-McGraw said. “It’s perfectly obvious, really. No one ever said that it was easy to hew to a strict code of conduct. Really, the difficulties involved-the missteps we make along the way-are what make it interesting. The internal, and eternal , struggle, between our base impulses and the rigorous demands of our own moral system is quintessentially human. It is how we conduct ourselves in that struggle that determines how we may in time be judged by a higher power.” All three men were quiet for a few moments, chewing mouthfuls of beer or smoke, pondering the matter.

“I cannot help but infer,” Hackworth finally said, “that the present lesson in comparative ethics-which I thought was nicely articulated and for which I am grateful-must be thought to pertain, in some way, to my situation.”

- From The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson

John Venlet notes Diana Mertz Hsieh’s departure from The Objectivist Center.

I’m unimpressed. There is another letter that has been sitting, out there in space, for a very long time:

No one can evade the fact that, historically, the state is a blood-thirst monster, which has been responsible for more violence, bloodshed and hatred than any other institution known to man. Your approach to the matter is not yet radical, not yet fundamental: it is the existence of the state itself which must be challenged by the new radicals. It must be understood that the state is an unnecessary evil, that it regularly initiates force, and in fact attempts to gain what must rationally be called a monopoly of crime in a given territory. Hence, government is little more, and has never been more, than a gang of professional criminals.

…

There are only two alternatives, in reality: political rule, or archy, which means: the condition of social existence wherein some men use aggression to dominate or rule another, and anarchy, which is the absence of the initiation of force, the absence of political rule, the absence of the state. We shall replace the state with the free market, and men shall for the fist time in their history be able to walk and live without fear of destruction being unleashed upon them at any moment—especially the obscenity of such destruction being unleashed by a looter armed with nuclear weapons and nerve gases. We shall replace statism with voluntariasm: a society wherein all man’s relationships with others are voluntary and uncoerced. — Roy Childs, Open Letter To Ayn Rand.

So, Diana Mertz Hsieh nailed some questions to the door? Roy Childs drove a stake through the very heart of Objectivist politics. Would it be unfair of me to call the resounding silence that Childs is treated with a “blank-out”?

In any case, I wish Diana Hsieh well in her studies of Objectivism. Indeed, I hope that someday she turns her eye, and her pen, to Roy Childs.

This is almost too much to believe.

	"Why aren't you an Atlantan?"
	"Because I don't want to live that way. All the people in Dovetail like to
make beautiful things. To us, the things that the Atlantans do--dressing up in
these kinds of clothes, spending years and years in school--are irrevelant.
Those pursuits wouldn't help us make beautiful things, you see. I'd rather
just wear my blue jeans and make paper."
	"But the M.C. can make paper," Nell said.
	"Not the kind that the Atlantans like."
	"But you make money from your paper only because the Atlantans
make money from working hard," Nell said.
	Rita's face turned red and she said nothing for a little while. Then, in a
tight voice, she said, "Nell, you should ask your book the meaning of the word
discretion.”	

	–Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age

If you hippies want to live like “dirt-scratching savages” (Beck), it’s nothing to me - you probably weren’t producing anything of value anyway - but why are you trying to spread your disease? Don’t you realize that if the hard-working Chinese and Indian entrepreneurs you shamelessly condescend to in this ad knew what you were up to, they’d flay you alive, scoop out all your harvestable organs and sell them back to crass consumers of medical necessities in the U.S for a hefty profit?

It’s very simple - less consumption means less production. Less production means less wealth. Less wealth means lower standards of living. Lower standards of living may not mean much in the most affluent country in the world, but for hundreds of millions around the world it means the difference between death by starvation or lack of basic medical care, and a fair shot at a comfortable life.

Normally I don’t care much for shopping, especially during the holidays. But tomorrow I think I’m going out and buy gifts for everyone I know. And maybe a new computer for myself. It’s been a long time since I’ve owned an Apple; a Power Mac G5 might just hit the spot.

It’s the only humane thing to do.

I’m normally not too keen on showing emotion. Yet, every now and again, something gets me. Call me weak, but the parts catalog makes me cry.

Today, I took on a minor modification project that requires a number of six inch long, thin threaded pins. Think of a regular hardware store bolt that’s three feet, tip to tail - that’s a scaled-up model of the thingy I needed. Now, this isn’t the sort of item Home Depot carries, and I was nerving myself up to fabricate these things from scratch. Hand-fabbing small mechanical parts, if you’ve never tried it, is a character-building experience. Like camping in blackfly country, or splitting knotty log sections with a maul and wedges. So before going on my adventure, I decided to check out one particular source, the lovely yellow and green catalog of McMaster-Carr.

Did they have what I needed? Yes - in multiple lengths, thread sizes, and materials. A pair of 98847A005’s caught my eye: 3 foot long 4/40 18-8 SS threaded rod sections. Bingo - I’m in business, gonna hacksaw these babies into pieces and run with ‘em, saving a good four hours labor in about 5 minutes of desk time. Cost for these wildly exotic fasteners? $1.34 each.

And that’s not all. This catalog is a textbook as well. It tells you more than what they have in stock; it tells you what an item is, and what it’s for. If you’re at all mechanically inclined, then this book is 3000+ pages of crack cocaine, distilled into dead trees - more information than you can possibly digest, orderly pages of drill bits and roller bearings and fuel line, megabytes of productivity compressed into a dense paper cinder block.

This is what the free market has produced: an overwhelming bounty of information and help and usefulness, so much literal goodness that you can’t take in even a tenth of it, lying right there on the desk. And this wealth of information is just a fragment of the wealth that I bathe in every day. Looking around my office, every desk has reference manuals, every shelf is jammed with catalogs and books and pamphlets, boxes and racks are stuffed with professionally produced magazines and software, almost every bit of it provided for free.

Here we are, a handful of people in a small building in a minor city in an obscure state, holding and using this mountain of informational treasure. And in the Big Picture, we’re nothing - noise lost in the pulsing signal of the minds of untold millions of productive people, a signal that amplifies itself again and again, four hours here, a dollar-thirty there, human lifetimes of effort saved every second, faster and faster into infinity. This is what free men have made: the glory and the wonder and the beauty of the free market, the essence of humanity, distilled, condensed, and given to me, right there on my desk.

Of course the parts catalog makes me cry.

One of the many lucrative benefits of having my world-view is the near-infinite supply of “I-told-you-so’s”. Now, that doesn’t mean too much in the big picture; every man jack among us is staring down the barrel of The Gun:

As Ken Schoolland noted in the ?Escalating Crimes? chapter of ?Jonathan Gullible,? as long as an individual continues to resist a law, the penalties? severity will rise. Death is the final punishment if the disobedience doesn?t stop, even if the original offense was minor. Every law is backed by a gun.

But I take my comfort where I can find it.

And this fits the bill. This particular copy of the story is funny in ways beyond the 20-second blurb I heard this morning, but the main thesis made me a happy, laughing commuter:

Anyone trying to sneak a knife onto an airplane could be fined $250 and a passenger with an explosive could get as much as $10,000 under new guidelines. …”Fines may help awaken a sleeping population here,” said David Stempler, president of the Air Travelers Association.

The TSA is now a self-confessed permanent failure. Told ya so.

The Plan may not work, but if you beat the tar out of the proletariat, at least they’ll stop making fools out of you, like Nate did:

A 20-year old college student, Nathaniel Heatwole of Damascus, Md., has created a huge furor over the leaky state of aviation security and raised the prospect of angry hearings in Congress. To point out weaknesses in the aviation security system, Heatwole says he deliberately carried box cutters and other paraphernalia such as matches, bleach and modeling clay (to simulate explosives) through security and onto six Southwest Airlines B737 jets. The items were contained in Ziploc-type plastic bags and concealed in the aircraft lavatory.

The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) was clueless until two of the packages were discovered weeks after they were placed aboard the aircraft by airline technicians called to troubleshoot malfunctioning lavatories.

In general, the harder the whip comes down on us peasantry, the more miserable the failure of the government plan in question. And that’s all that this “Homeland Security” nonsense is ever going to be.