{"id":1184,"date":"2010-04-23T07:15:24","date_gmt":"2010-04-23T14:15:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/ClaireWolfe\/?p=1184"},"modified":"2010-04-23T07:15:24","modified_gmt":"2010-04-23T14:15:24","slug":"friday-miscellany","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/2010\/04\/23\/friday-miscellany\/","title":{"rendered":"Friday miscellany"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>You&#8217;ve probably already spotted the &#8220;lite&#8221; blogging this week. Unfortunately, expect the same for the next week-plus. We&#8217;re about to begin a serious building project here at Last-Chance Gulch and for roughly 10 days, it&#8217;ll be nothing but work and visitors around here. (Most of the visitors will be helping in some way with construction, bless their hearts; but we&#8217;ll all be busy.) And wouldn&#8217;t you know it, a surprise deadline came up at the same time. So much for my peaceful hermitude.<\/p>\n<p>If I can blog along, the way, I surely will. But don&#8217;t hold me up to really high expectations, okay? In the meantime, here&#8217;s some miscellany to keep you going:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Oh, so <a href=\"http:\/\/abcnews.go.com\/WN\/sec-pornography-employees-spent-hours-surfing-porn-sites\/story?id=10451508&#038;page=1\" target=\"_blank\"><i>that&#8217;s<\/i> what SEC regulators were doing<\/a> while Wall Streeters were getting away with economic murder! Well, given typical government justice and effectiveness, I suppose it&#8217;s better than, you know, actually <i>regulating<\/i>. (Oh yeah &#8230; and the &#8220;solution&#8221; to this problem will be &#8230; wait for it &#8230; <i>more regulation and bigger budgets<\/i> for the SEC. Of course.)\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2010\/04\/15\/garden\/15alone.html?pagewanted=1\" target=\"_blank\">&#8220;Embracing a Life of Solitude.&#8221;<\/a> Amazing, though, how many of these hermits have significant others.\n<li>Yes, that new Arizona immigration bill <a href=\"http:\/\/www.tuccille.com\/blog\/2010\/04\/arizona-poised-for-anti-immigrant.html\" target=\"_blank\">really is a bad idea for freedom<\/a>. I&#8217;m guessing the governor will sign it, though. (<a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2010\/04\/24\/us\/politics\/24immig.html\" target=\"_blank\">She did.<\/a>)\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.johndennis2010.com\/blog\/2010\/march\/top-ten-pelosisms\" target=\"_blank\">Top Ten Pelosisms<\/a>. The woman&#8217;s a master of the Bushian language-mangle, as well as being a majorly scary b-word. (Thank you, Charles, for the link.)\n<li>I mentioned the other day that <a href=\"http:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/ClaireWolfe\/2010\/04\/16\/do-i-feel-another-book-coming-on\/\" target=\"_blank\">I feel a book coming on<\/a>. You guys made interesting suggestions and sparked some good thinking. Where things stand right now: I still feel a book coming on, but my dread of being asked to do interviews and having to explain to a bunch more people why they shouldn&#8217;t look to <i>any<\/i> damn writer (or anybody else) as a freedom guru is so depressing I don&#8217;t ever want to face it again. If only I could just write a book, then let it find its way in the world on its own merits while I went on with my life, undisturbed. Now that would be a very okay thing.\n<li>This post coincidentally mentions both Wall Street regulation (darling cause of liberal-progressives) and illegal immigration (darling cause of conservatives). Both those issues smack me in the face with what is (IMHO), one of the hugest causes of the loss of freedom: In the belief that &#8220;government must DO SOMETHING about THAT,&#8221; people will support the most egregious sort of legislation &#8212; without reading it, without understanding it, without submitting it to either the Bill of Rights test or the plain old smell test, without a clue about its long-term ramifications. &#8220;We have to regulate Wall Street!&#8221; &#8220;We must DO SOMETHING about the rising cost of health care!&#8221; &#8220;We must DO SOMETHING about the drug problem!&#8221; &#8220;DO SOMETHING about illegal immigrants!&#8221; Etc., etc. so on, ad infinitum, world without end, amen. And thus, both right and left serve as enablers to the ruthless, scamming, lying, sometimes-just-downright-stupid criminal state. Because, of course, DOING SOMETHING, always means more power and money to government and more opportunities for sneaking both corporatism and police-statism into every new law. Sigh. As the Mogambo says, &#8220;We&#8217;re so frreaking doomed.&#8221;\n<\/ul>\n<p>But individually we can still kick statist butt. Must never forget that &#8230;<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Last-minute add-on: Bovard does it again with <a href=\"http:\/\/www.csmonitor.com\/Commentary\/Opinion\/2010\/0423\/Tea-party-activists-Do-they-hate-liberals-more-than-they-love-liberty\" target=\"_blank\">his take on a Tea Party rally<\/a> he attended. Perfect example of why freedom always fails in groups and institutions despite the best intentions in the world.\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>You&#8217;ve probably already spotted the &#8220;lite&#8221; blogging this week. Unfortunately, expect the same for the next week-plus. We&#8217;re about to begin a serious building project here at Last-Chance Gulch and for roughly 10 days, it&#8217;ll be nothing but work and visitors around here. (Most of the visitors will be helping in some way with construction, bless their hearts; but we&#8217;ll all be busy.) And wouldn&#8217;t you know it, a surprise deadline came up at the same time. So much for my peaceful hermitude. If I can blog along, the way, I surely will. But don&#8217;t hold me up to really&#8230;<\/p>\n<div class=\"more-link-wrapper\"><a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/2010\/04\/23\/friday-miscellany\/\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Friday miscellany<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1184","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-miscellaneous","category-poly-ticks","ratio-natural","entry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1184","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1184"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1184\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1184"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1184"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1184"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}