Or Next time you think I’m showing too much sunshiny faith in humanity, remind me of this so I’ll get real again. You may recall that I handle email for a local animal-rescue group. Well, here’s the latest to cross our mailbox. Names changed to protect innocent and guilty alike: Hi my name is [Moronia] and I adopted two kittens from you about two months ago their names were [Oliver Twist] n [Poor Pitiful Pearl]. I hate to have to ask if I can return them but seems like that is my last option. We started seeing signs of fleas…
25 CommentsLiving Freedom Posts
In their impossibly good book Money, Markets, and Sovereignty (2009), Benn Steil and Manuel Hinds make the point that over the last four thousand years, the only period in which humanity has not consistently based its currency in metal, specifically gold, is the last forty. That’s right. Ever since President Richard M. Nixon announced forty years ago today, on August 15, 1971, that the U.S. would no longer officially trade dollars for gold, we have been enjoying a new era of human history. Quoted from “August 15, 1971: A Date Which Has Lived In Infamy” And more here. I linked…
Leave a CommentFirst, to assist with your Monday morning work avoidance: Jake MacGregor posted three new chapters last week, beginning with Chapter 25 in which Our Intrepid Hero … dons a dress and discovers why it really isn’t his style. “The Five Stages of Awakening.” Dog helps rape victims in court and provokes controversy. This is most absolutely definitely not safe for work. And Felonious Munk’s grasp of economics might not rise to Misean levels. Still. a pretty good rant. States rights isn’t only a “right-wing” position. More in the common-ground department. Blueberry season! It feels as if summer has barely begun.…
12 CommentsSince I was five years old, I wanted a house with one of these. On the outside, it’s a door knocker, which nobody these days would ever think to use … On the inside, it’s a portal that opens to lets the person outside declare themselves friend or foe. You know: “Joe sent me” (I could run a speakeasy!) or, “The eagle flies at midnight” (I could be a spy!) … I was thrilled when my new-old house came with one in its front door. Alas, after having this brass relic for one year, less three days, my potential careers…
18 Comments… Americans received word that the Japanese had surrendered. I don’t usually mark government anniversaries, especially military ones. But I received an email from a friend, a Marine whose family has been through multi-generational hell serving a country that … well, I’ll just let him tell it in his own words, without editing or embellishment. The man he honors is known as “LD, Jr.” some of you knew my Grandfather, most of you did not he was a ‘card’ – a little stumped up man of 5’4″ smoking his pipe he drove too fast, too close to people’s bumpers (maybe…
10 CommentsHardyville Tales by Claire Wolfe “Like A Prairie Home Companion … with grenades!” — Michael W. Dean, filmmaker and gadfly See below for two ways to order. ONCE UPON A TIME … … there was a town called Hardyville. Truth to tell, it wasn’t much of a place. The nearest freeway passed about 200 miles away — and kept right on passing. It didn’t have a single sign of what people in the real world might have called civilization or culture. It was just one dusty intersection with one lone stoplight, a few encircling residential streets, a fair number of…
11 CommentsMany hat tips today. To S, C^2 and Matt, another. Have you noticed that companies you deal with online increasingly force you to place symbols, capitals, and numbers in your passwords — under the illusion that their nannying guarantees a password stronger than any you could possibly invent for yourself? In its own inimitable style XKCD notes the folly of that. Another bank closes. But not for the usual post-crash reason. Nope. Just the usual governmental reason. “A right to be forgotten”? There’s an interesting concept. Could it really interfere with the right to free speech? More village self-defense. But…
4 CommentsOver the weekend — between Friday’s S&P downgrade and Monday’s 630-point oopsie on the Dow — I had a couple of conversations with world-watching friends. They went like this: FRIEND: Hang onto your carbine and check your dried lentils. Here it comes! ME: Yeah. Uh huh. Well. Maybe. “It,” of course, is the financial apocalypse. The long-fabled, eagerly dreaded financial apocalypse. The Big Event that’s finally going to implode the established systems and either a) allow freedom to arise phoenix-like from the ashes or b) bring about Zombie War III, from which only the hardest and most savage will ever…
16 CommentsHad a little excitement around Ye Olde Town the other day. When I arrived at the post office, a cop car with lights flashing sat in a nearby bank parking lot. No, not a bank robbery. As I headed up the steps to the P.O., a woman just ahead turned and in a most accusatory way demanded, “Did you leave a little boy in your car?” What? Do I look like somebody who totes toddlers around? Me and this silver hair? “Um … no. Why?” “Well,” she said with a glint that you really had to see to understand, “somebody…
20 Comments“Three deputies equals one SWAT team.” A memory from reader ΛΕΟΝΙΔΑΣ (a former LEO) of a moment at the dawn of the “bad new days” of total militarization. Russian villagers defend their town. (Tip o’ hat to Matt, another.) A thorough history of “The Nixon Shock: How Nixon stopped backing the dollar with gold and changed global finance, a 40-year-old decision that still echoes in Greece, Ireland, and the U.S.” And a perfect example of how sloppily the most momentous decisions get made by Our Masters. AntiSec. Revenge of the nerds. Raising a fist to death in the Warsaw Ghetto.…
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