Trip II The Moon, Parts, 1, 2 and 3. Dust off those glowsticks and pacifiers and go here!

(Actual ACEN site, not bootleg. lung says PLUR! and says that you can hear all the little lungs singing in Part II)

Radley Balko hopes:

“Here’s hoping the Davises get at least the $12.5 million the Gallardos got. Perhaps a bankruptcy will convince North Richland Hills’ inept public officials to (a) exercise some oversight over its jacked-up police department, (b) rethink the policy of sending the SWAT team after nonviolent offenders, and (c) put some accountability mechanisms in place when things go wrong in the future.”

Why would that work? The money won’t be coming out of the pockets of these people, it will of course be paid out of tax revenues. And a public bankruptcy won’t show up on their individual credit reports.

(mad props to Nicolas Gurewitch and the terrifying Perry Bible Fellowship

…especially this time of year.

Happy Holidays!

Myxomatosis

Caught in the center of a soundless field
While hot inexplicable hours go by
What trap is this? Where were its teeth concealed?
You seem to ask.
I make a sharp reply,
Then clean my stick. I’m glad I can’t explain
Just in what jaws you were to suppurate:
You may have thought things would come right again
If you could only keep quite still and wait.

—Philip Larkin

For the sake of the thundering glory of the coming ages,
For the sake of the lofty tribe of men.’
I have been deprived of the cup at the feast of my fathers,
Of merriment and honor.

Take me into the night where the Yenisey flows
And the pine reaches out to the star,
Because I am not a wolf by blood
And only by an equal shall I be killed.

Osip Mandelstam, 1932

Not long afterward I was sent a notice asking me to go to the post office at Nikita Gate. Here I was handed back the parcel I had sent to M. in the camp. “The addressee is dead,” the young lady behind the counter informed me. It would be easy enough to establish the date on which the parcel was returned to me-it was the same day on which the newspapers published the long list of Government awards-the first ever-to Soviet writers.

In June 1940, M.’s brother Alexander was summoned to the Registry Office of the Bauman district and handed M.’s death certificate with instructions to pass it on to me. M.’s age was given as forty-seven, and the date of his death as December 27, 1938. The cause was given as “heart failure.” This is as much as to say that he died because he died: what is death but heart failure? There was also something about arteriosclerosis…Recently I heard an argument as to who was more likely to survive the camps: the people who worked, or those who managed not to. Those who worked died of exhaustion, and those who didn’t starved to death. This much was clear to me, though I had neither arguments nor personal observations of my own to support either side in the discussion. The few people who survived were exceptions who proved the rule. In fact, the whole argument reminded me of the Russian folk ballad about the hero at the crossroads: whichever way he goes, he will perish. The main feature of Russian history, something that never changes, is that .every road always brings disaster-and not only to heroes. Survival is a matter of pure chance. It is not this that surprises me so much as the fact that a few people, for all their frailty, came through the whole ordeal like heroes, not only living to tell the tale, but preserving the keenness of mind and memory that enables them to do so.

- Nadezhda Mandelstam Hope Against Hope

Mounds of human heads are wandering into the distance.
I dwindle among them. Nobody sees me. But in books
much loved, and in children’s games I shall rise
from the dead to say the sun is shining.
- Osip Mandelstam, Voronezh Notebooks

From the trial of Count Yorck von Wartenburg

Yorck: “Herr President! I have already stated that in view of the development that had been taken by the National Socialist ideology, I did…”

Freisler [interrupting]: “did not agree! To state it exactly, you told him: Regarding the Jewish question, the extermination of the Jews did not suit you; the National Socialist concept of justice did not suit you.”

Yorck: “The essential point is the connection between all these questions, the claim by the state of total power over the citizen, with the elimination of his religious and moral obligations toward God.”

Freisler: “Tell me, where has National Socialism eliminated the moral obligation of a German? The German man, the German woman, infinitely more healthy, has infinitely deepened them. I have never heard before that it had eliminated moral obligations. And as for religion, there National Socialism is very modest. It says: Please take care of that as you please; only stay in the other world with your demands, church. For the souls, after all, will do their fluttering around in the other world. Here on earth our present life counts. Otherwise the church could concern itself with politics. So what you say is at least quite distorted; it makes no sense.”

Yorck: “I wanted to give this simply as an explanation.”

Freisler: “Furthermore, insofar as the National Socialist concept of justice is concerned, I can say, as a person who has been right in the middle of jurisprudence for many years, that our concept of law has also both theoretically and practically undergone an enormous deepening. The justice of our people has experienced an enormous revival and intensification . . . .

What you have said remains enigmatic. But you say. I did not agree. Now I ask you: If Stauffenberg asked you for your word of honor, and you listened to a thing like that, what kind of thoughts went on in your mind? Can such a word of honor be valid?”

Yorck: “I feel bound by it, Herr President.”

Freisler: “This is indeed a sign that your attitude is an absolutely anarchistic one.”

Yorck: “I would not express it exactly that way.”

Freisler: “But I believe that that is the clear and correct way of describing it. For it is anarchy if everyone can create a justice of freedom of action in the community, just by his own saying so. The general law of action in our community calls far combating and destroying treason against public, Fuehrer, and Reich, under any circumstances. If you make yourself the law, if you say ‘When I give my word of honor, then I may not participate’, then this is an anarchistic principle that you have. You may call it something else.”

Along the road to martyrdom,Claire Wolfe reaffirms an old lament in An American Refusenik, while at Strike the Root Per Byland lays out a better roadmap.

I live for myself first and foremost, and then come my family and friends. I do not care to save the world if I can find freedom for myself and the ones I love without doing it. Why should I? I’m nobody’s slave; I do as I please simply because I want to. It would be nice to live in a free world, but I don’t think it is worth the trouble. I’d rather be free now, on my own, than break free along with millions of strangers 40 or 50 years from now.

Isn’t this what individualism is all about? One has to make one’s own choices, for oneself and the ones willing to follow. If they do not want the freedom I want, then why the hell should I spend my time and money on making them share my ideals and go with me? I’m no selfless Samaritan or a slave of the peoples; I’m my own.

As libertarians, we need to break free from the collectivist worldview of this Savior Complex. There is no reason to work day and night to liberate people you don’t know, never will know, and who sincerely do not appreciate what you are trying to do for them.

Most NT worthy attitude.

Radley Balko speaks for libertarians:

“It’s perfectly acceptable for a constitutionally-limited government to act to prevent the outbreak of deadly, highly-communicable diseases. If the bird flu is as lethal and transferable as some have suggested, protection from it amounts to a public good worthy of government attention, provided said attention is proportional to the extent of the threat, transparent, and accountable.”

Translation: It’s perfectly acceptable for the government to put a gun to your head to compel you to participate in collectivist schemes when it will produce a sufficient public good.

But what about all Balko’s caveats you ask? They amount to nothing.

Is this government accountable? Sure, it’s accountable to the voters. How could government be more accountable than that?

Ah, but is our government constitutionally limited? Yup, as much as it can be. There’s a note in the cookie jar that says “We promise to never reach in the cookie jar. Sincerely, We The People”. Now of course the fact that they got the note in the cookie jar in the first place implies they’re going to reach in there whenever they feel the need, but you can’t really improve on the note. It’s as limiting to We The People as any such note could be in principle.

But is the public good produced sufficient? And is the government action proportional and transparent? Well someone has to judge, but who? It can only go back to accountability. The voters judge whether the benefits are sufficient and whether the means are acceptably proportional and transparent.

We pretty much already have everything Balko wants in politics, he just happens to disagree with most voters about the weights to assign to the costs and benefits of government actions. So he spends his life arguing with them about how much of your life should be stolen and what it should be spent on.

And that passes for libertarianism.

Via Beck.

We’ve been so hard on Lew Rockwell that he’s been kicked out of his pen! Luckily, he’s found a new home here at No Treason! Now it’s up to all our readers and staff to take good care of Lew! Feed him apples! Spray him down so he does not become filth-encrusted! Protect him from Hispanics and the shambling zombie corpse of Sam Francis!

Another sad attempt to control government laws by means of government laws:

Help us pass the
“Read the Bills Act of 2005” (RTBA)

You can read the text of RTBA by clicking the Draft Legislation tab above, or you can start by reading a summary of the legislation below. Following that summary is a description of our strategy for passing RTBA, and then a call to action.

And we all know that this never works - government ignores laws, so it can ignore laws about laws. Forget all of that. I propose something totally different, much better, guaranteed to work:

A Law To Control Government Laws By Controling Government Laws That Control Government Laws.

Take that, Congress! What you gonna do now, when we got us a law that says you have to pay attention to what the law that says you have to follow the law says?

Huh?

Yeah, that’s right, you’re gonna just sit down and shut up and start following this killa law-following-law-following-law we’ve got.

Tip via Claire Wolfe. Mad props to Ghertner as well.

Colby Cosh on the Paris riots:

That is why the conflagration in Paris is so troubling, if one weren’t troubled solely for the sake of Paris herself. But it is easy to be too horrified here. Even by the worst accounts, France’s Islamic rioters are less well-armed and inflicting less destruction than American blacks did in U.S. cities in the late 1960s–riots which themselves overlay the memory of much worse public disorder. (Score one for Euro gun culture: the French rioters haven’t yet been able to do any worse to the police than to ambush them and plink away at them with pellet guns.) The parallel here seems obvious, and if it has any relevance, we are not presented with a simple matter of social unrest proceeding from a failure to integrate new immigrants, or from the presence of a foreign and violent faith. It’s a question of warehousing members of a particular ethnic group in horrible, unsightly, cheaply-made housing projects.