Paul Rosenberg: United We Fall. Mass movements and leaders always drag us in the wrong direction. So… So, if you need a pile of bodies to knock down other bodies, unity’s your ticket. If you want a large number of people to turn off their minds and obey you, unity’s also your ticket, especially if you mix in some fear. But if you want, thinking, creative, upright, beneficial human beings, ditch unity and call for self-will. As individuals we rise. United we fall. Didn’t realize Rosenberg also has a new novel out this year. Even though it’s a collapse-of-civilization tale…
Category: Books and Movies
Via Firehand, I see that the book The Orphan Tsunami of 1700 is available free online via the U.S. Geological Survey.
Though technically a research paper, it is in fact, a lively, well-illustrated account of how researchers in two countries gradually came to realize that Cascadia was never the seismically moderate region once imagined, but is in fact prone to some of the largest earthquakes possible — with accompanying tsunamis (that in this case helped solve the puzzle of the Cascadia subduction zone).
.Elicitation. Kit Perez wrote an article about it last week. Every one of us should read it. If you haven’t, I’ll wait while you do.
….
I hadn’t heard the term, but anybody who’s been around the Outlaw scene knows the tactic. It’s a way of getting us to snitch on friends, give away secrets, or incriminate ourselves without us fully realizing what we’re doing.
And it works off our ordinary personality traits — anything from a desire to be polite and helpful to a desire to show how smart and “with it” we are. Which is what makes it so insidious.
Here we are, less than 250 years after one of human history’s most glorious moments, the supposed beneficiaries of that glory, watching our country crumble. Economic ruin and stagnation. A police state obsessed with surveillance and control. Even formerly all-holy free speech under relentless attack from glassy-eyed apparatchiks.
And even the most unaware among We the Ordinary are beginning to wonder, “How did we get here?”
Two very different ones: J.K. Rowling tells of the founding of Ilvermorny, the North American wizarding school. There’s a video, too. The Age of Disintegration. There’s a bit to disagree with. The author doesn’t get the difference between real free markets and crony capitalism within a statist system. But it’s as good an analysis of the Middle East mess — and its western roots — as any.
How to kill an Islamonazi (H/T Y.B.) They can also be killed after the fact. But that’s just sad. How law and lawyers killed Europe’s Jews and have done plenty of other murder and tyranny. Which is merely the brilliant lead-in to a condemnation of the current “due process is an inconvenient luxury” anti-gun nonsense. The criminalization of speech. It starts young. Jeff Jacoby discovers the biggest armed mob in America. Good question, there toward the end. But we already know the answer. (H/T FH) It’s no longer some vague right-wing conspiracy that’s responsible for the nation’s distrust of Hillary.…
I owe hat tips for several of these items, but I’ve fogotton to whomm I owe them all, so please accept much general hat tipping. Preferring to avoid negative campaigning is one thing. Libertarian candidates sucking up to Hillary on media demand is another. Don’t care about the Brexit that’s consuming the world’s media right now? Well, how ’bout a Texit — a Texas exit? (I’m amused at those “constitutional scholars” who say a U.S. state can’t secede from the union. The constitution neither said nor implied that; only overwhelming military force said that. Doesn’t take any scholar to see…
Thomas Paine wrote those words after the shooting had already begun at Lexington and Concord, after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, a fact that always surprises me. We tend to think that by that time, the game was on, lines were irrevocably crossed, and everybody who was going to take a side and get involved was already committed. But not quite so.
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We of course haven’t even had our Lexington moment yet and frankly I pray we never do. Even in the best cases (and the American Revolution was certainly one of those), shooting wars ultimately play into the hands of the most wily statists. Who shoots first, shoots straightest, has the biggest weaponry, or has “God on their side” doesn’t always determine how free people are once the smoke has cleared.