I’m sorry for not blogging the last few days. Last-Chance Gulch had company from far away and we were busy doing wild-n-crazy things. I intended to blog about the visit and our flamboyant visitor. But as I considered what to write, I realized that our activities — while harmless — were nearly all illegal, immoral, or fattening. Or at least some of the above. Now that I’m recuperated, I may take time and use my better judgment before writing up any of our scandalously fun behavior. Or not. In the meantime, I’ve been collecting. And some of what I’ve gathered…
Category: Mind and Spirit
Spirituality, moods, feelings, and thinking free to live free.
Ragnar insisted in a blog comment last week that I’d better darned well come up with a great post on 4/19. Nothing like a little pressure there, eh? Well, the brain’s not working too well and neither is the cursed up-and-down Internet connection here in the high desert boondocks. And WordPress has also gone cranky on me and twice erased portions of this post. So sorry, Ragnar, there will be no Great Thoughts coming from this direction today. Perhaps you noble readers will leap in and supply some GTs of your own in the comments section. I’ve just got this…
After several years in which I believed I wasn’t likely to write another freedom book this side of the grave … I sorta kinda feel a book coming on. Not promising anything, mind you. Right now the feeling is like the one you get when a sneeze is coming on — but may or may not actually emerge. If I do this thing, though, I already have a working subtitle picked out: “Everything you need to know.” Yeah, I know. No freedom book can deliver that. But trust me, I’ll use that phrase to ironic effect. I’ve already made some…
Via lrc.com comes an excellent bit of tax-day snark: “What Do We Do If the Rich Start to Leave?” Good beginning of a good question. The writer, Bill Frezza, says, “500 American citizens and green card holders in the last quarter of 2009 said goodbye to America forever. Not many, but double the number of expatriations in all of 2008. Good riddance, other millionaires will take their place.” He’s not real clear on what he means by the rich, or whether those 500 surrendered their citizenship or just slipped away, PT-fashion, to friendlier climes.* But it’s the thought that counts.…
Tip o’ hat to Radley Balko, the Flex Your Rights video 10 Rules for Dealing with Police is now on YouTube in four 10-minute segments. I haven’t yet seen this and I understand it’s directed primarily at urban minorities who so often find themselves profiled and stopped on flimsy pretexts. But the earlier Flex Your Rights video, Busted: A Citizen’s Guide to Surviving Police Encounters, is excellent and we all need to know the things FYR teaches. How to: Deal with traffic stops, street stops & police at your door Know your rights & maintain your cool Avoid common police…
One more reason the mainstream media is dying. They’re still stuck back in the “reefer madness” days. Case in point: CNN (via an alleged new-media affiliate) discovers a “new” drug that strips users of their free will. Gasp! OMG! The horror! But the name of the supposedly new drug sounded very, very, very, extremely, wildly familiar. And sure enough. It’s been around forever and its been quite well known to science for 130 years. As to stripping away free will — dubious. But it’ll make you heave your guts out and hallucinate and it can kill you, as thousands of…
Still need some bucking up after Sunday’s ObamaCare disaster? Well, here’s one small reminder that even we ignored and “powerless” individuals can — and will prevail. Okay. Maybe not exactly in our most idealized way …
I’m thinking today about the next “big” piece I want to write (either for this blog or for the print edition of Backwoods Home). So I won’t have too much to say until my brain works that out. The piece will be based on Albert Jay Nock’s concept of freedom lovers as something like the biblical “remnant,” expounded in his essay “Isaiah’s Job.” If you follow that link, you’ll see that the copy of “Isaiah’s Job” I chose (there are copies all over the ‘Net) is on the site of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons — a damnfine…
Got a bitterly amusing voice mail last night. It was forwarded to me as an MP3 file by Rich Lucibella, publisher of S.W.A.T. magazine (for which, oddly enough, I write; Rich and editor Denny Hansen are terrific people). Anyhow, my latest S.W.A.T. article is called “Proudly Redneck.” It points out that in this veddy, veddy PC age, the one group it’s still socially acceptable to stereotype is “rednecks” — crackers, rubes, hayseeds. You know, us country folk. The article opens with eight bad old racial or ethnic slurs that no polite person uses these days and goes on to ask…
“I would not give a fig for the simplicity this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity.” — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. “Life is so complex that government efforts to regulate and control it are doomed to fail, just as the Austrians say. And life is simple in the principles we use to guide us.” — Paul Bonneau —– Part I here. Part II here. Now we’re at the final installment, and reading Paul Bonneau’s comment above, I wonder if maybe I should just leave it at what he…