An 11-pound hero. (Thank you, S&L, for the news.) Another great dog story. Okay. Equal time for cats. This is not only amazing cat news, but the implications for severely injured humans are pretty awesome, too. Gold. Yes, it’s likely to end up as a bubble. But in the meantime, take a look at that chart. Besides, the Dow really could go to 5,000. Are any actual humans investing in stocks any more? Or is it all just banks and computers? “A Sermon on Ethics and Love.” (Hail Eris! All Hail Discordia!) Tip o’ hat to C2 for this and…
Category: Mind and Spirit
Spirituality, moods, feelings, and thinking free to live free.
Perfect example of the broken-window fallacy. Not to mention public relations idiocy. Yes — the Gulf oil spill is good for you! Every person who ever takes a government office should have this tattooed on his or her forehead. Backwards so it’s readable in the mirror every morning: “Truth never damages a cause that is just.” — Gandhi (and Wikileaks) You remember that “ending welfare as we know it” thingie back in 1996? Uh. Well … not quite.. (That chart is from a June 1 Heritage Foundation report, which contains many other “fedgov by the numbers” charts guaranteed not to…
Y’all may know that I have a friend named Debra. Some of you know her. She used to be an officer in the Free State Project. She was a founding member of The Claire Files Forums (now the Mental Militia Forums). Today, instead, she has a life. If you know Debra, you know that she’s definitely Debra. Or Deb. Never, ever Debbie. But she told me a story the other day that surprised me. It’s a simple story about a name. But it speaks more volumes than the Encyclopedia Britannica (since Wikipedia, though much bigger, doesn’t have volumes). She gave…
Monday, I posted about Freedom Outlaws and was overwhelmed with intriguing responses. (I swear, this blog has the best comments section.) One surprise: Very few people objected when I added “Cockapoo” to the list of Outlaw types. True, long-time reader Jim B. accused me of insulting the adorable dogs. He may have a point there. And a couple of folks made cogent arguments against the Cockapoo strategy. But to my surprise, most seemed even to consider it not even an issue — and one person chimed in to proclaim his own Cockapoo identity. When RagnarDanneskjold asked whether the Mental Militia…
“Freedom Outlaw.” The term came up here a few days ago. It’ll arise again and again on this blog. If you’ve been hanging out in my vicinity for a few years, you probably know what I mean by it. If not, you might be puzzled or even offended by the notion that people who believe in freedom are (or should be) criminals. Thought I’d stop this morning and define some terms. So this is mostly for people who haven’t heard it all before. A Freedom Outlaw is (loosely) somebody who cares so much about freedom that he or she will…
Got this note last night from my beloved former veterinarian up in the Pacific Northwest: I thought this may make you smile. I had a visit … from an outlaw last night. Someone left a note attached to a $100.00 bill shoved in the front door of the clinic. The note said, “I had some extra cash while passing through, please use it to care for an animal in need.” It was signed “Colton Harris-Moore AKA the barefoot bandit.” [My receptionist] found it and was busy trying to figure out which client left it when I came in. After reading…
P.T. reminded me that today is the birthday of the late, great (and sometimes rather quirky) Karl Hess. She pointed me toward his 1969 Playboy article, “The Death of Politics.” Yeah, bits of it are dated now. But even those parts give an interesting look at the way politics and government never fundamentally change, even as the world shifts around them. If I have one hero in the ranks of libertarians and market anarchists, it’s Hess. Whatever else the man did, he seriously tried to live by his principles and implement them in the real world.
This is my first full spring in the desert and I’m not loving it. I knew, from word and brief visits, that it could be windy here in springtime. “Heck, it’s windy anywhere that time of year,” I thought. But wind here is something cosmic — even worse at times than the howling gales that are part of Wyoming’s very identity. We’re under high-wind warnings two to three days a week right now. And that’s not to say that the other days are calm. Merely that they’re windy enough to be annoying and to make havoc of both your housecleaning…
Does it seem to you that the world is about to shatter? That there is so much wrongness that “the centre cannot hold”? Ah well, a lot of us have had that feeling since we became aware of the Lies Our Civics Teacher Told Us. It’s dogged me on and off since Nixon removed the last gold backing from the dollar. The fall became inevitable then; we doomsayers just expected it to come quicker. But come it must. And these days, as mainstream economists continue to tout the return of prosperity while we watch catastrophe rolling onward with our own…
Well, since it appears that the U.S. stock market isn’t going to crash — yet — this morning — okay, for the next couple of hours, at least — I’m going to sit down and take up a much more serious, but slower-paced, problem that’s been on my mind. I’m talking about the national, even global plague of “do somethingness.” You know how people are always trying to find solutions to gigantic problems, and (because their only tool is government), making a worse mess of everything? Blame “do somethingness.” If we could only end the “do something” plague, clever, independent…