Wisdom from Across the Pond

To serve and protect, citizen

No Treason Has Moved

The blog is at http://www.no-treason.com/

Want To Know What Cops Think About You?

Go here and read the comments from "Wayne" and "Sergeant Mac".

The laughing, sneering contempt displayed by these public "servants" is quite touching. And just think: the fact that these two are commenting on an obscure gun-rights case means that they are very likely among the closest that their kind gets to being in favor of human freedom.

Tip: Bill St. Clair

Trapped In A Blogosphere He Never Made

Or: Never Can Say Goodbye

The Captain of the Clueless is still trapped in a blogosphere of ankle biters.

Given A Reasonable Choice...

A recent post by Beck sent me to Tyler Cowen's blog by way of which I found this:

I'm only spitballing here -- in the absence of research on the question, what else to do? -- but I think that if given a reasonable choice, at least a million or two people would opt out of Social Security. There are at least that many people in the United States for whom it would make financial sense to pay to get out.

Given a reasonable choice nearly everyone would opt out of Social Security. Just try making it voluntary and see what happens.

Given a reasonable choice nearly everyone would opt out of all taxes, thus opting out of government completely.

The only reasonable choices are free choices, which means that the reasonable alternatives to the state are always to be found in private enterprise, never in collective politics. Properly understood, the dismantling of the state is the greatest business opportunity of our time.

Make an exception in my case, dear little creature

For anybody who's buying a pet for for the kids this holiday season - or the future lung (or lungs) of 6,000,000,000,000,000 AD:

Take One Home for the Kiddies

On shallow straw, in shadeless glass,
Huddled by empty bowls, they sleep:
No dark, no dam, no earth, no grass -
Mam, get us one of them to keep.

Living toys are something novel,
But it soon wears off somehow.
Fetch the shoebox, fetch the shovel -
Mam, we're playing funerals now.
-Philip Larkin

Endless night can be adorable, too.

To everybody else

This is the first thing

This is the first thing
I have understood:
Time is the echo of an axe
Within a wood.

- Philip Larkin

To S.

When first we faced, and touching showed

When first we faced, and touching showed
How well we knew the early moves,
Behind the moonlight and the frost,
The excitement and the gratitude,
There stood how much our meeting owed
To other meetings, other loves.

The decades of a different life
That opened past your inch-close eyes
Belonged to others, lavished, lost;
Nor could I hold you hard enough
To call my years of hunger-strife
Back for your mouth to colonise.

Admitted: and the pain is real.
But when did love not try to change
The world back to itself--no cost,
No past, no people else at all--
Only what meeting made us feel,
So new, and gentle-sharp, and strange?

- Philip Larkin

The blueish grey thing

So I'm talking to E. who I've known for probably over a decade now. He's moved to a faraway desert-like state now, but nothing has changed. I ask E, I ask, How's it going, Eric? and I get back the same answer I've always gotten year after year after year, the same answer I got even when E. was going out with the large-breasted Little Mother Of All The Fetish Scene (whose name was also E., for Erika):

How's it going, Eric?

Could be better.



(I grimly attempt to keep the conversation going by politely inquiring Getting any of that Mormon girl action? to which E. only replies with a sound - halfway between a sardonic choked burst of laughter and a dismal sob - that indicates the hopeless folly of all human endeavor.)

Shodan!

After a many hour test, demonstrating well over a hundred techniques, I earned my shodan (first degree black belt) in judo today. I'll be having a nice cigar later.

Here's something NT'ers will like from the founder of judo, Jigoro Kano's book, "Kodokan Judo":

Respect for life is universally recognized, and if an individual's life is at stake, any means available to avert the danger is undeniably justified. Even when life is not threatened, the power to restrain others is a source of physical and psychological confidence.

Lewrockwell.com's Next Hero?

In the past, LRC has had warm words for the likes of commie Ted Rall and idiot racist Jared Taylor, when their gibbering has fallen sufficiently close to the paleo party line. So, why not this latest person to slither aboard the "cultural conservatism" bandwagon?

Why not Hillary Clinton?



Tip: STR

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Sorry for the inconvenience, but the comment spam is out of control.

DiLorenzo On Spooner

Stephan Kinsella and Karen De Coster have sought a response to a recent article by Thomas J. DiLorenzo on Lysander Spooner. The piece is quite evidently a response to me, DiLorenzo has taken it upon himself to school this site on Lysander Spooner.

DiLorenzo's revel elation is that Spooner held the Civil War to be unjust aggression by the Union. I knew this, of course, and have said so. The Union had no just grounds to force the South to remain in the Union. Southerners were perfectly entitled to defend themselves from such aggression. I freely grant that the cause of defending secession was a just cause and the basis for just war on the part of the South.

But so what? That and pocket change will get you a cup of coffee. The fact that the Confederacy had a just cause in defending secession doesn't remotely make the Confederacy a just nation. And no cause could justify the means employed by the Confederacy, starting with conscription.

It's misleading to say Spooner defended the South: He defended secession.

Consider what defense Spooner would make of John C. Calhoun, the champion of slavery so admired by DiLorenzo. Spooner would of course have held that Calhoun had a perfect right to secede from any political union. He would also have advocated making war on Calhoun's property. He'd have taught Calhoun's slaves to burn Calhoun's buildings and kill his cattle and horses. He'd have had Calhoun flogged. Hell, he'd have given John Brown whatever support he needed to separate Calhoun's head from his shoulder's if that was what it took to free his slaves.

Some defense.

Ghoul Finds Nice Fresh Corpse

An opportunistic idiot ghoul takes advantage of the recent "Dimebag" Darrell Abbott murders to whine piteously on A Small Victory's comment thread:

I don't know much about metal, and I won't even speculate on the motives of the fellow who killed Darrell Abbott, but being upset that people are jumping to rash and unfair conclusions might be causing some of you to be too dismissive of a body of research, some of it pretty thorough, on the cognitive effects of aural stimuli and repetitive messages. It's one thing to defend an art form you appreciate and scorn the benighted. I'm all for that. But it's a little defensive and illogical to deny that music and lyrics have ANY baleful effect on people, that it's all about the baggage. Again, I'm not offering any speculation about this terrible incident other than to give the benefit of doubt to the victim. Perhaps this is slightly off topic.

and then the idiot ghoul continues:

But I'm not talking strictly, or even chiefly, about loud music — but about longterm exposure to aggressive, antisocial messages through the most emotionally evocative of art forms.


Again, I'm not trying to hijack the thread. I understand the point made here. I too get tired of cynical media personalities latching on to and promulgating the lowest lowbrow, predictable angle after something like this happens.


But if the issue is mental health ...

To which I reply:

But if the issue is mental health..." says "allome"


Oh well, if "mental health" is the battlecry, then let's trash any old-fashioned notions of personal responsibility or of individual liberty.


And let's replace those old-fashioned notions with some freshly whipped-up pseudo-scientific crap, shall we?


Crap like "a body of research, some of it pretty thorough, on the cognitive effects of aural stimuli and repetitive messages." Not that you'd care to cite any of this "body of research", of course, since upon close examination it'd prove to be about as scientific as homeopathy.


Tell us all about the evil subliminal messages again, please! Hearing about them gives me a strange demonic thrill.


Idiot.


(Michele is, of course, right on the money.)


(apologies to Richard Upton Pickman for any aspersions cast on actual ghouls, who are, in reality, among the more respectable citizens of Earth's Dreamland. Never before had he known what shapeless black things lurk and caper and flounder all through the aether, leering and grinning at such voyagers as may pass, and sometimes feeling about with slimy paws when some moving object excites their curiosity. These are the nameless larvae of the Other Gods, and like them are blind and without mind, and possessed of singular hungers and thirsts.)

Quote Taken Out Of Context, Blogosphere Silent

Horror of horrors, the market for ideas strikes again:

The University of Louisville received 1,600 e-mail messages yesterday after a religious group said on its Web site that an instructor had urged violence against conservative voters.

Members of the American Family Association fired off the messages, which called for the "strictest disciplinary action available" against part-time sociology instructor John McTighe.

It seems that McTighe said a little something about killing Republicans:

In his column, student Brian Yates, publisher of the Patriot, quoted McTighe as saying to his sociology class in explaining President Bush's re-election: "It was the religious zealots who say they are voting on morals. I think we should all buy AK-47s and shoot them all! That's what I would suggest, if it were allowed."

Predictably, the good Professor claims his words were "taken out of context". Boo hoo. McTighe has no right to be sucking from the taxpayer tit in the first place, let alone all the while calling for the deaths of those selfsame people.

I have exactly zero sympathy whatsoever for this sort of thing: being more of a defender of private property than folks saying whatever's on their minds and all, I take the view that employers have every right in the world to know what sort of people work for them, whether they're advocates of torture for the good of "The People", or they're advocates of machine-gunning Red-state voters. What those employers then do about the matter is up to them, though I'd suspect that there's more room for would-be Republican killers in university sociology departments than there is room for torture-by-government cheerleaders in mainstream libertarian organizations.

Lest this turn into a discussion of the sorry state of the libertarian movement and/or the schools, I'll emphasize that my main concern here is for the various libertarian webloggers that get all up-in-arms over this kind of action. Without a doubt, all of the consistent defenders of "open debate" will roundly denounce these mafia tactics being used against McTighe.

Or maybe they won't. In any case, it'll be instructive.

Destroy All Hippies

A e-mail sent after reading this article by William Tucker. (A wave of the hippie-smashing mallet to Billy Beck)

Dear Mr. Tucker:

Reading your article "Unlike A Rolling Stone", I am struck with horror at this line:

"Shaun Considine, coordinator of new releases at Columbia in 1965, breathlessly recounted how he rescued "Like a Rolling Stone" from the slush pile and introduced it at a popular East Side disco"

You know, the concept of a dance venue (and what else could a "disco" be fairly described as, even pre-seventies?) where people get it on to Bob Dylan is just plain grotesque. Even in 1965. What did people do when it came on? Shuffle their feet respectfully? Stand to attention? How can anyone dance to what is, in effect, a dirge?

This terrifying scene from the past is just one more reason to destroy all hippies.

John Sabotta


(Admittedly, I can see using bits and pieces in a Fatboy Slim-like remix. But even so, you'd be better off with bits and pieces of old James Bond movie soundtracks. See "The Rockafella Skank".)

Destroy all hippies! The battlecry that will save the world!

Mark Twain, Fellow Traveller

The following quote from Samuel Clemens' work is what arouses my sad suspicion that he would have become an apologist for the Bolshevik Revolution, if he'd lived long enough. Perhaps not. Still, can anyone spot the historical and moral flaws in this paragraph, taken from A CONNETICUT YANKEE IN KING ARTHUR'S COURT?

There were two ‘Reigns of Terror’, if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the ax compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heartbreak? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror – that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves."

The "momentary terror" in the Bolshevik Revolution lasted for decades, and dwarfed the worst cruelties of Tsarism - and the notion that human beings can be murdered for the crimes of their "class", or their ancestors, or their "race" was the fuel that drove the terrible engines of death that characterize the late, unmourned Twentieth Century. Why couldn't Clemens - otherwise so often perceptive and right - see what the consequences would be if anyone took seriously his notion of historical and class revenge? Later the narrator claims:

For it could not help bringing up the un-get-aroundable fact that, all gentle cant and philosophizing to the contrary notwithstanding, no people in the world ever did achieve their freedom by goody-goody talk and moral suasion: it being immutable law that all revolutions that will succeed must begin in blood, whatever may answer afterward. If history teaches anything, it teaches that.

"Whatever may answer afterwards." It's no coincidence, I think, that A CONNETICUT YANKEE IN KING ARTHUR'S COURT ends with a horrifying massacre. It's true that the narrator (obviously speaking for Clemens, as he has been all through the novel) continues: "What this folk needed, then, was a Reign of Terror and a guillotine, and I was the wrong man for them." but that hardly reassures me that, if he'd lived long enough, Mark Twain would not have ended up in the contemptible position of a Lincoln Steffens:

...In America, one might add to the list the name of Ella Winter, who began her career in politics being introduced by Felix Frankfurter to Lincoln Steffens in the midst of the Versailles Conference. Steffens fell in love with her, and their relation lasted the rest of his life. Throughout the Twenties, Winter moved more and more obviously into the role of a classic fellow traveler, resolutely guiding the famous muckraker into the paths of her Stalinism as she did so. By the time of his death, it must be said that Lincoln Steffens had become a creature, an intellectual abject.

-Stephan Koch

Would Twain have needed an Ella Winter? Sometimes, I think, death is kind.

2004 Election Stolen By Neocon Plot - Proof!

A secret surveillance photograph taken last summer proves that George W. Bush was put into office by a right-wing conspiracy! The forces of reaction are shown here meeting at a secret conference bunker (the corner of Pike and Broadway) to work out details of their plan to subvert the electoral process. (Labels show names and affiliations of the participants)

If Only!

Just now, flipping past CSPAN2, I caught this hilarious statement from some goof blubbering on about the Ohio elections:

Bush, he's trying to get rid of every program of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's...

"You Don't Have To Be A Weatherman..."

...To see the hurricane around you:

In an apparent reversal of decades of U.S. practice, recent federal Office of Foreign Assets Control regulations bar American companies from publishing works by dissident writers in countries under sanction unless they first obtain U.S. government approval.

...

Officials from the U.S. Treasury Department, which oversees OFAC, declined comment on the lawsuit, but spokeswoman Molly Millerwise described the sanctions as "a very important part of our overall national security."

"These are countries that pose serious threats to the United States, to our economy and security and our well-being around the globe," Millerwise said, adding that publishers can still bring dissident writers to American readers as long as they first apply for a license.

Yes, we can't have Americans' virgin brains exposed to (horror of horrors!) unlicenced ideas, especially ideas from wogs. Right, Molly?

Don't worry about a fucking thing, folks, she's from the government censorship office and here to help you:

"The licensing is a very important part of the sanctions policy because it allows people to engage with these countries," Millerwise said. "Anyone is free to apply to OFAC for a license."

No application refused! Zero down! Apply now for your book licence!

So don't go thinking that you can just publish books if you feel like it, on some God-damned whim or something, like you own the joint. Unless, of course, they've been pre-approved by the proper authorities:

U.S. publishers are allowed to reissue, for example, Cuban communist propaganda or officially approved books but not original works by writers whom the Cuban government has stifled.

Castro's denouncement of the enemies of the Cuban State can be on store shelves even before the bodies are cold, and their stories get consigned to a DMV-esque drone's in-box, awaiting "government approval".

Here, in America.

The Endarkenment proceeds at a gallop, and the consequences are clear to everyone who cares to look, by now. This is how the end comes: not with a bang or a whimper, but with a smug declaration that it's for your own good, for national security, for the people. And you aren't against that, are you?

Are you, Citizen?

The Treasure of G. Rodgers

My friend S. (who is never wrong) informs me that One Piece, on the Saturday morning WB is the shizit, and what all the cool kidz are watching. No Treasoneers must now join the Straw Hat Pirates!

A Song For Bruce Simpson

I won't charge you millions of dollars like the big-boys might. I won't question your politics or religious beliefs. I simply ask that you provide me with travel to your location plus safe, warm, comfortable accommodation for the duration of the project, and employ me at an agreed rate for my services. - Bruce Simpson, martyr.

Gather round while I sing you of Wernher von Braun
A man whose allegiance is ruled by expedience
Call him a Nazi, he won't even frown
"Ha, Nazi schmazi," says Wernher von Braun

/ G7 - C - / G7 C G7 C / G7 - C A7 / Dm C G7 C /

Don't say that he's hypocritical
Say rather that he's apolitical
"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down
That's not my department," says Wernher von Braun

/ B7 - Em - / / G7 - C A7 / Dm C G7 C /

Some have harsh words for this man of renown
But some think our attitude should be one of gratitude
Like the widows and cripples in old London town
Who owe their large pensions to Wernher von Braun

You too may be a big hero
Once you've learned to count backwards to zero
"In German oder English I know how to count down
Und I'm learning Chinese," says Wernher von Braun

- Tom Lehrer

(One would think that our Bruce would take pause from the sad, sad fate of Dr. Gerald Bull but probably not. Not that Simpson has anything worth going to all that trouble for.)

Too Few Dead In Ohio

Proving that too many hippie swine survived the Kent State shootings, "Democratic Socialist" dirtbag and community college teacher/state-subsidized lunatic Bob Fitrakis threatened:

Judging the unprecedented voter turnout I observed at the eight polling places in the inner-city of Columbus, it seems highly improbable that even the notorious Bush family, with all its covert operatives and CIA ties, can steal this election. If they attempt to do so, I fear there will be a terrible reckoning, and a terrible swift sword of justice will be visited upon us in the form of civil insurrection.

A terrible reckoning and a terrible swift sword of justice, Bob? Together for the first time, like some idiot Reese's Peanut Butter Cup of retribution? Well, Bob, it's been a while since the "CIA" stole the the election - where's the insurrection, bitch?

Lynette and Kennedy

(from Jeff Rowland's WIGU)

Lullabye Mountain

"As a group of Scientists, blown off course, crash land their plane, world leaders begin to spontaneously combust. Coincidence? You be the judge."



Something from my old friend Karl.

(This post dedicated to dear Karen. Check out the rest of the Krogstad world here. And whatever happened to Mosquito, Karl?)

Net.Crybabies

Good grief. Matthew Barganier pointed out what this Maxwell Borders guy thinks:

If boiling people alive best served the interests of the American people, then it would neither be moral or immoral.

Now Max is whining like a little baby about being called on the whole affair.

If Borders didn't think that Barganier had a point, there wouldn't be anything for him to bitch about anyone "playing dirty" with. But like the folks at You-Know-Where say, "If you can't refute them, just make criminal accusations".

You heard it here last!

By now, if you haven't heard that Gary Becker and Richard Posner are going to co-blog, you've been living under a rock. Nevertheless, it's here.

Professor Gary Becker is a Nobel Prize winning economist, a fellow at the Hoover Institute at Stanford, and a Professor of Economics and Sociology at the University of Chicago. He won the Nobel Prize for extending economic analysis into areas of non-market behaviour, especially family relations.

Judge Richard Posner is a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit (Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin). He is also a Senior Lecturer in Law at the University of Chicago.

Considering how controversial Prof. Becker's economic analyses of family interactions are, and how everything that Judge Posner writes causes an uproar, this should be a lot of fun.

For the Oracle

Meanwhile more were pouring in through the Kerkoporta, where the defenders had not been able to eliminate the first intruders. Soon the first enemy flags were seen on the walls. The Emperor and his commanders were trying frantically to rally their troops and push back the enemy. It was too late. Waves of Janissaries, followed by other regular units of the Ottoman army, were crashing throught the open Gates, mixed with fleeing and slaughtered Christian soldiers. Then the Emperor, realizing that everything was lost, removed his Imperial insignia, and followed by his cousin Theophilus Palaeologus, the Castilian Don Francisco of Toledo, and John Dalmatus, all four holding their swords, charged into the sea of the enemy soldiers, hitting left and right in a final act of defiance. They were never seen again.

Death and Resurrection of Constantinos Palaeologus

Odysseas Elytis

I

As he stood there erect before the Gate
and impregnable in his sorrow

Far from the world where his spirit sought
to bring Paradise to his measure
And harder even than stone
for no one had ever looked
on him tenderly--at times his crooked teeth
whitened strangely

And as he passed by with his gaze a little
beyond mankind and from them all
extracted One who smiled on him
The Real one
whom death could never seize

He took care to pronounce the word
sea clearly that all the dolphins
within might shine
And the desolation so great it might
contain all of God
and every water drop ascending steadfastly toward
the sun

As a young man he had gold glittering
and gleaming on the shoulders of the great
And one night
he remembers
during a great storm the neck of the sea
roared so it turned murky
but he would not submit to it

The world's an oppressive place to live through
yet with a little pride it's worth it.

II

Dear God what now
Who had to battle with thousands
and not only his loneliness
Who?
He who knew with a single word
how to slake the thirst of entire worlds
What?

From whom they taken everything
And his sandals with their crisscrossed
straps and his pointed trident
and the wall he mounted every afternoon
like an unruly and pitching boat
to hold the reigns against the water


And a handful of vervain
which he had rubbed against a girl's cheek
at midnight
to kiss her
(how the waters of the moon gurled
on the stone steps three cliff-lengths
above the sea ...)

Noon out if night
And not one person by his side
Only his faithful words that mingled
all their colors to leave in his mind
a lance of white light

And opposite
along the whole wall's length
a host of heads poured in plaster
as far as his eye could see

"Noon out of night -- all life a radiance!"
he shouted and rushed into the horde
dragging behind him an endless golden line

And at once he felt
the final pallor
overmastering him
as it hastened from afar.

III

Now
as the sun's wheel turned more and more swiftly
the courtyards plunged into winter and once
again emerged red from the geranium

And the small cool domes
like blue medusae
reached each time into the silverwork
the wind so delicately worked as a painting
for other times more distant

Virgin maidens
their breasts glowing a summer dawn
brought him branches of fresh palm leaves
and those of the myrtle uprooted
from the depths of the sea

Dripping iodine
while under his feet he heard
the prows of black ships
sucked into the great whirlpool
the ancient and smoked sea-craft
from which still erect with riveted gaze
the Mothers of God stood rebuking

Horses overturned on dump-heads
a rabble of buildings large and small
debris and dust flaming in the air

And there lying prone
always with an unbroken word
between his teeth
Himself
the last of the Hellenes!

(For A. , the Oracle)

Why I Hate Conservatives, Part 2

Mike Tennant points out some ripoff artists in training. "Their first federal grant". How heartwarming - maybe they'll frame it to show to their "customers".

Rotten Creep Jared Taylor

...is a moderate racist.

What to think about breathing, Lew

I am not very familiar with the recent election shenanigans in the Ukraine, but one thing is certain - I'll never find out the truth about them over at Lew Rockwell's Paleocreep Central. Why not? you may ask. Because (I reply, dear Karen agreeably snuggling next to me and whispering something in my ear about bunnies) of the mindless fashion in which True Blue Confederate Lew reaches his conclusions:

"Every neocon in the world is screaming the same line. No rational man could agree on that basis alone."

This could be roughly translated as "Whatever those pesky Jews are for, we're against."

In light of this, I'd very much like to see the "neocons" (whoever they are) come out in favor of oxygen. Then Lew would be obliged by his ideals to stop breathing. This would be a good thing.

One notes that Lew's desire to never agree with the "neocons" involves him in a good deal of floundering as, torn between religio-political obscurantism and neo-hatred, he tries to find a third position. I have no idea, by the way, whether the "neocons" are all really "screaming" for one side or the other - Lew's stupidity is so often based on believing his own lies that reading Paleocreep Central is like walking through a wilderness of funhouse mirrors, complete with spring-loaded papier-mache clown. (Bob Wallace) This deserves further investigation, but alas, dear Karen is becoming ever more importunate. Hey, that tickles!

Comments Suspended Again

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