Saturday, September 10, 2016
Paradise Lost - Taki's Magazine
Paradise Lost - Taki's Magazine
The Bible tells us that our allotted span is threescore years and
ten. Advances in medicine and public health—sanitation, for example—have
made nonsense of this in the developed countries of the West where life
expectancy is being pushed well up into the 80s, at least among the
affluent. Nevertheless, there comes to each of us the day when we become
aware that the grave is yawning or the crematorium doors are being held
open. Benjamin Franklin famously declared that “in this world nothing
can be said to be certain, except death and taxes,” and though Apple,
Google, and many multinational corporations have made nonsense of that
second certainty, the first remains inescapable. Someday the worms or
the flames will have our body, and as you advance through your eighth
decade, you can’t avoid the awareness that that day may be any day now.
William Wordsworth wrote a great poem entitled “Intimations of
Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood,” but it’s intimations
of mortality that any stabbing chest pain or mysterious lump, or simply
feeling bloody awful a lot of the time, is more likely to provoke. “Old
age,” Charles de Gaulle wrote, “is a shipwreck,” or, as the author of
the Book of Ecclesiastes has it, the day comes “when the grasshopper
shall be a burden, and desire shall fail.” Too bad, in other words.
Mortality? Immortality? The question hangs over us all. It did so
even in the centuries when religious faith went largely unquestioned. As
Andrew Marvell, 17th-century poet, reminded his “coy mistress”—his
playing-hard-to-get girl, we might say now: “The grave’s a fine and
private place/But none, I think, do there embrace.” Too true they don’t.
Nevertheless, Marvell, like almost everybody of his time, surely
believed in the immortality of the soul, life after death, even
(probably) the resurrection of the body. Read the bloody annals of
history, and time and again you find men and women going to death on the
scaffold confident that this wasn’t the end. The Scots royalist
general, the Marquess of Montrose, in lines written the night before his
execution in 1650, anticipated that his body would be dismembered and
his ashes scattered, yet declared, “Lord! since thou know’st where all
these atoms are, I’m hopeful Thou’lt recover once my dust, And confident
Thou’lt raise me with the just.” A hundred years later one of the more
notorious scoundrels in Scottish history, the octogenarian Simon Fraser,
Lord Lovat, went serenely to have his head cut off on Tower Hill,
declaring that he expected to be in paradise by noon—though there were
some who thought that as a convicted traitor and unconvicted rapist,
Lovat was more likely to find himself in the other place.
wrote that the decline of belief in personal immortality was one of the
most remarkable features of the 20th century. Clearly, as he admitted,
the belief in life after death hadn’t quite disappeared. But the
certainty had diminished. People might still recite the Apostles’ Creed
with its affirmation of belief in “the Resurrection of the Body and the
Life Everlasting,” but did they believe as their forefathers had? Even
bishops of the Church of England might, if pressed on the question,
express no more than a belief in the survival of a sort of something
after death.
You may think Orwell exaggerated. He probably did exaggerate. We all,
surely, know people who believe with what appears to be absolute
confidence in the immortality of the soul and the life everlasting.
Moreover, even the most skeptical, attending a funeral service and
listening to the words of the Bible or prayer book, are likely to be
moved and, for a moment at least, to question their own skepticism,
doubt their unbelief. Nevertheless, Orwell was right, at least to this
extent: that the 20th century was the first in the Christian era in
which agnosticism was common and atheism generally acceptable. The trend
has accelerated since he wrote about it. Church attendance has
continued to fall. The number of people who describe themselves as being
of no faith has continued to rise. Belief in the immortality of the
soul—let alone the resurrection of the body—continues to dwindle, and I
find it hard to believe that many now agree with Peter Pan, who declared
that “to die will be an awfully big adventure.”
This skepticism hasn’t invaded other religions, or at least not
Islam. The readiness of Islamist suicide bombers to go happily, or at
least willingly, to their death attests to their belief in an afterlife.
Some may even eagerly look forward to the 76 virgins reputedly promised
them in their Muslim paradise, no matter how unlikely it is that there
can be quite so many dead virgins waiting there to welcome them. For
many in the West, however, it is precisely this sort of belief that
leads them to regard Islam as a backward religion.
Few of us, I would surmise, now imagine a future life in the
old-fashioned sort of paradise with angels strumming harps and all that,
even if we imagine any sort of life after death. Yet even if we retain
some vestige of belief in a sort of heaven, we seem to have abandoned
the idea of hell. There are doubtless still hellfire preachers who
conjure up its horrors to thrill their congregation, but they are on the
fringes. The established churches seem to have sidelined hell. This is
curious if only because hell was, for most of the Christian era,
imagined more vividly and precisely than heaven. Read Dante’s Inferno
or look at the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch, and you find a detailed
representation of everlasting torment. For hundreds of years, as George
Steiner wrote, “the imagination dwelt on the flaying, the racking, the
mockery of the damned, in a place of whips and hell-hounds, of ovens and
stinking air.” Devout Christians like Dr. Johnson were awestruck and
terrified by the images and idea of hell. We may now mostly have thrust
the idea of hell aside, though, as Steiner remarked, it was only when we
no longer believed in hell after death that it was translated by the
Nazis into the hell on earth of the death camps. Indeed hell on earth,
hell in life, is an undeniable reality. Look at Syria today. Look at the
devilish practices of ISIS.
For most of us in the West such horrors are, happily, confined to our
television screens. They are things that happen, repulsively,
appallingly, to other people. The prospect of our own death is
different, and that prospect eventually becomes inescapable, either on
account of some terminal illness or simply because of age. For decades
you may never think of it, but unless you are suddenly carried off
without warning, the day comes when you hear death shuffling up on you,
when, if you don’t believe in an afterlife, you sense that the curtain
is going to come down.
It’s
reading once again the last diary of my old friend, the playwright
Simon Gray, that has got me brooding on death. This volume, Coda,
is a record of his thoughts, feelings, and experiences after being
diagnosed with lung cancer and confronted with the reality of imminent
death. It’s brave, melancholy, and witty—he was one of the sharpest and
funniest men I have known. At one time he contemplates the question of
suicide, as many must do in such circumstances. “I can always kill
myself as soon as I find that living is an agony, but how? is the
question…how exactly does one kill oneself in a fashion that causes the
least distress to those one loves—and the least inconvenience to many
people that one doesn’t love, but has no right to inconvenience?” These
are questions to which there is no satisfactory answer, and I suppose
that people commit suicide only when they have reached a stage at which
they no longer care what the answer might be. Ending the self is
unavoidably a selfish act, and I suppose that if you don’t believe in
God and divine punishment and all that, it’s imagining the distress and
inconvenience you cause that serves as the principal deterrent. Simon
didn’t kill himself. He argued himself out of the temptation, and indeed
Coda ends happily, optimistically, with the cancer in
remission and the doctors promising him two years more of life. I had a
cheerful email from him giving me the news and then, characteristically,
grumbling that he must now find a subject for a play to write. He never
did. The next news I had was of his death—sudden, from a heart attack,
not his cancer. That’s death’s way. Cheated in some fashion, it will
nevertheless creep up on you.
Nowadays, of course, we’re in a real fix about death. No longer
believing in the life everlasting, medical science, doctors, nurses,
etc. combine and contrive to make this one last as long as possible,
dragging out existence even when the patient has been reduced to a
vegetable condition. I know nobody who doesn’t shrink from that
prospect, and yet it confronts millions of us. “Why prolong life, save
to prolong pleasure?” asked that tough old pagan Norman Douglas. A good
question, and he answered it himself by taking an overdose when the
prospect of pleasure seemed to have vanished. Unless you believe, like
Hamlet, that “the Almighty has set his canon ’gainst self-slaughter,” it
seems a good way out, preferable to dragging out existence, mindless
and incontinent, in a geriatric ward. Still, no matter how the end
comes, the bell tolls for us all.
The Bible tells us that our allotted span is threescore years and
ten. Advances in medicine and public health—sanitation, for example—have
made nonsense of this in the developed countries of the West where life
expectancy is being pushed well up into the 80s, at least among the
affluent. Nevertheless, there comes to each of us the day when we become
aware that the grave is yawning or the crematorium doors are being held
open. Benjamin Franklin famously declared that “in this world nothing
can be said to be certain, except death and taxes,” and though Apple,
Google, and many multinational corporations have made nonsense of that
second certainty, the first remains inescapable. Someday the worms or
the flames will have our body, and as you advance through your eighth
decade, you can’t avoid the awareness that that day may be any day now.
William Wordsworth wrote a great poem entitled “Intimations of
Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood,” but it’s intimations
of mortality that any stabbing chest pain or mysterious lump, or simply
feeling bloody awful a lot of the time, is more likely to provoke. “Old
age,” Charles de Gaulle wrote, “is a shipwreck,” or, as the author of
the Book of Ecclesiastes has it, the day comes “when the grasshopper
shall be a burden, and desire shall fail.” Too bad, in other words.
Mortality? Immortality? The question hangs over us all. It did so
even in the centuries when religious faith went largely unquestioned. As
Andrew Marvell, 17th-century poet, reminded his “coy mistress”—his
playing-hard-to-get girl, we might say now: “The grave’s a fine and
private place/But none, I think, do there embrace.” Too true they don’t.
Nevertheless, Marvell, like almost everybody of his time, surely
believed in the immortality of the soul, life after death, even
(probably) the resurrection of the body. Read the bloody annals of
history, and time and again you find men and women going to death on the
scaffold confident that this wasn’t the end. The Scots royalist
general, the Marquess of Montrose, in lines written the night before his
execution in 1650, anticipated that his body would be dismembered and
his ashes scattered, yet declared, “Lord! since thou know’st where all
these atoms are, I’m hopeful Thou’lt recover once my dust, And confident
Thou’lt raise me with the just.” A hundred years later one of the more
notorious scoundrels in Scottish history, the octogenarian Simon Fraser,
Lord Lovat, went serenely to have his head cut off on Tower Hill,
declaring that he expected to be in paradise by noon—though there were
some who thought that as a convicted traitor and unconvicted rapist,
Lovat was more likely to find himself in the other place.
“Mortality? Immortality? The question hangs over us all.”
That was then. What about now? Some seventy years ago George Orwell wrote that the decline of belief in personal immortality was one of the
most remarkable features of the 20th century. Clearly, as he admitted,
the belief in life after death hadn’t quite disappeared. But the
certainty had diminished. People might still recite the Apostles’ Creed
with its affirmation of belief in “the Resurrection of the Body and the
Life Everlasting,” but did they believe as their forefathers had? Even
bishops of the Church of England might, if pressed on the question,
express no more than a belief in the survival of a sort of something
after death.
You may think Orwell exaggerated. He probably did exaggerate. We all,
surely, know people who believe with what appears to be absolute
confidence in the immortality of the soul and the life everlasting.
Moreover, even the most skeptical, attending a funeral service and
listening to the words of the Bible or prayer book, are likely to be
moved and, for a moment at least, to question their own skepticism,
doubt their unbelief. Nevertheless, Orwell was right, at least to this
extent: that the 20th century was the first in the Christian era in
which agnosticism was common and atheism generally acceptable. The trend
has accelerated since he wrote about it. Church attendance has
continued to fall. The number of people who describe themselves as being
of no faith has continued to rise. Belief in the immortality of the
soul—let alone the resurrection of the body—continues to dwindle, and I
find it hard to believe that many now agree with Peter Pan, who declared
that “to die will be an awfully big adventure.”
This skepticism hasn’t invaded other religions, or at least not
Islam. The readiness of Islamist suicide bombers to go happily, or at
least willingly, to their death attests to their belief in an afterlife.
Some may even eagerly look forward to the 76 virgins reputedly promised
them in their Muslim paradise, no matter how unlikely it is that there
can be quite so many dead virgins waiting there to welcome them. For
many in the West, however, it is precisely this sort of belief that
leads them to regard Islam as a backward religion.
Few of us, I would surmise, now imagine a future life in the
old-fashioned sort of paradise with angels strumming harps and all that,
even if we imagine any sort of life after death. Yet even if we retain
some vestige of belief in a sort of heaven, we seem to have abandoned
the idea of hell. There are doubtless still hellfire preachers who
conjure up its horrors to thrill their congregation, but they are on the
fringes. The established churches seem to have sidelined hell. This is
curious if only because hell was, for most of the Christian era,
imagined more vividly and precisely than heaven. Read Dante’s Inferno
or look at the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch, and you find a detailed
representation of everlasting torment. For hundreds of years, as George
Steiner wrote, “the imagination dwelt on the flaying, the racking, the
mockery of the damned, in a place of whips and hell-hounds, of ovens and
stinking air.” Devout Christians like Dr. Johnson were awestruck and
terrified by the images and idea of hell. We may now mostly have thrust
the idea of hell aside, though, as Steiner remarked, it was only when we
no longer believed in hell after death that it was translated by the
Nazis into the hell on earth of the death camps. Indeed hell on earth,
hell in life, is an undeniable reality. Look at Syria today. Look at the
devilish practices of ISIS.
For most of us in the West such horrors are, happily, confined to our
television screens. They are things that happen, repulsively,
appallingly, to other people. The prospect of our own death is
different, and that prospect eventually becomes inescapable, either on
account of some terminal illness or simply because of age. For decades
you may never think of it, but unless you are suddenly carried off
without warning, the day comes when you hear death shuffling up on you,
when, if you don’t believe in an afterlife, you sense that the curtain
is going to come down.
It’s
reading once again the last diary of my old friend, the playwright
Simon Gray, that has got me brooding on death. This volume, Coda,
is a record of his thoughts, feelings, and experiences after being
diagnosed with lung cancer and confronted with the reality of imminent
death. It’s brave, melancholy, and witty—he was one of the sharpest and
funniest men I have known. At one time he contemplates the question of
suicide, as many must do in such circumstances. “I can always kill
myself as soon as I find that living is an agony, but how? is the
question…how exactly does one kill oneself in a fashion that causes the
least distress to those one loves—and the least inconvenience to many
people that one doesn’t love, but has no right to inconvenience?” These
are questions to which there is no satisfactory answer, and I suppose
that people commit suicide only when they have reached a stage at which
they no longer care what the answer might be. Ending the self is
unavoidably a selfish act, and I suppose that if you don’t believe in
God and divine punishment and all that, it’s imagining the distress and
inconvenience you cause that serves as the principal deterrent. Simon
didn’t kill himself. He argued himself out of the temptation, and indeed
Coda ends happily, optimistically, with the cancer in
remission and the doctors promising him two years more of life. I had a
cheerful email from him giving me the news and then, characteristically,
grumbling that he must now find a subject for a play to write. He never
did. The next news I had was of his death—sudden, from a heart attack,
not his cancer. That’s death’s way. Cheated in some fashion, it will
nevertheless creep up on you.
Nowadays, of course, we’re in a real fix about death. No longer
believing in the life everlasting, medical science, doctors, nurses,
etc. combine and contrive to make this one last as long as possible,
dragging out existence even when the patient has been reduced to a
vegetable condition. I know nobody who doesn’t shrink from that
prospect, and yet it confronts millions of us. “Why prolong life, save
to prolong pleasure?” asked that tough old pagan Norman Douglas. A good
question, and he answered it himself by taking an overdose when the
prospect of pleasure seemed to have vanished. Unless you believe, like
Hamlet, that “the Almighty has set his canon ’gainst self-slaughter,” it
seems a good way out, preferable to dragging out existence, mindless
and incontinent, in a geriatric ward. Still, no matter how the end
comes, the bell tolls for us all.
Monday, September 05, 2016
A Voice From Syria | Gates of Vienna
A Voice From Syria | Gates of Vienna
Of all the intelligent and exciting speeches at the American Freedom
Alliance event in Los Angeles, August 21st 2016, probably the most
touching was given by Wafa Sultan, the author of A God Who Hates.
Herself originally from Syria, Sultan’s attacks on Islam have been so
direct and uncompromising that even the toughest American or European
Islam-critic pales in comparison with her. She started out by setting a
few things straight:
In brief, Islam is not a religion. It is a political ideology
that imposes itself by force and fear. American values, such as
compassion, respect and acceptance of others, should not get in the way
of understanding the danger that threatens those very core virtues.
Following these values blindly might lead to demise.
There
you have it: Islam is not a religion, and categorising it as such is a
mistake. Wafa did not even leave open the option that some purely
religious form of Islam may exist somewhere — she suggests that we cease
to even consider the idea that Islam should be considered a religion.
Of all the intelligent and exciting speeches at the American Freedom
Alliance event in Los Angeles, August 21st 2016, probably the most
touching was given by Wafa Sultan, the author of A God Who Hates.
Herself originally from Syria, Sultan’s attacks on Islam have been so
direct and uncompromising that even the toughest American or European
Islam-critic pales in comparison with her. She started out by setting a
few things straight:
In brief, Islam is not a religion. It is a political ideology
that imposes itself by force and fear. American values, such as
compassion, respect and acceptance of others, should not get in the way
of understanding the danger that threatens those very core virtues.
Following these values blindly might lead to demise.
Thereyou have it: Islam is not a religion, and categorising it as such is a
mistake. Wafa did not even leave open the option that some purely
religious form of Islam may exist somewhere — she suggests that we cease
to even consider the idea that Islam should be considered a religion.
Sunday, September 04, 2016
Speed of Innovation, Advanced Spine Technology | NuVasive�, Inc.
Speed of Innovation, Advanced Spine Technology | NuVasive�, Inc.
Bill Walton Back problems resolution
Bill Walton Back problems resolution
Speed of Innovation, Advanced Spine Technology | NuVasive�, Inc.
Speed of Innovation, Advanced Spine Technology | NuVasive�, Inc.
Bill Walton Back problems resolution
Bill Walton Back problems resolution
Saturday, September 03, 2016
Defend Your Person, Your Property, and Your Liberty - LewRockwell
Defend Your Person, Your Property, and Your Liberty - LewRockwell:
The Law
What book is important enough that I read it once a year? The Law
by Frederic Bastiat. Written in 1848 as a response to socialism in
France, this book essay is just as relevant today as it was then.
“What, then, is law? It is the collective organisation of the individual right to lawful defence.
Each of us has a natural right from God to defend his person, his
liberty, and his property. These are the three basic requirements of
life, and the preservation of any one of them is completely dependent
upon the preservation of the other two. For what are our faculties but
the extension of our individuality? And what is property but an
extension of our faculties?
If every person has the right to defend – even by force – his person,
his liberty, and his property, then it follows that a group of men have
the right to organise and support a common force to protect these
rights constantly. Thus the principle of collective right – its reason
for existing, its lawfulness – is based on individual right. And the
common force that protects this collective right cannot logically have
any other purpose or any other mission than that for which it acts as a
substitute. Thus, since an individual cannot lawfully use force against
the person, liberty, or property of another individual, then the common
force – for the same reason – cannot lawfully be used to destroy the
person, liberty, or property of individuals or groups.
Such a perversion of force would be, in both cases, contrary to our
premise. Force has been given to us to defend our own individual rights.
Who will dare to say that force has been given to us to destroy the
equal rights of our brothers? Since no individual acting separately can
lawfully use force to destroy the rights of others, does it not
logically follow that the same principle also applies to the common
force that is nothing more than the organised combination of the
individual forces?
Why are the most advertised Gold and Silver coins NOT the best way to invest?
If this is true, then nothing can be more evident than this: The law
is the organisation of the natural right of lawful defence. It is the
substitution of a common force for individual forces. And this common
force is to do only what the individual forces have a natural and lawful
right to do: to protect persons, liberties, and properties; to maintain
the right of each, and to cause justice to reign over us all.”
My copy of The Law is filled with highlighted yellow phrases. Among them:
“But, unfortunately, law by no means confines itself to its proper
functions. And when it has exceeded its proper functions, it has not
done so merely in some inconsequential and debatable matters. The law
has gone further than this; it has acted in direct opposition to its own
purpose. The law has been used to destroy its own objective: It has
been applied to annihilating the justice that it was supposed to
maintain; to limiting and destroying rights which its real purpose was
to respect. The law has placed the collective force at the disposal of
the unscrupulous who wish, without risk, to exploit the person, liberty,
and property of others. It has converted plunder into a right, in order
to protect plunder. And it has converted lawful defence into a crime,
in order to punish lawful defence.
How has this perversion of the law been accomplished? And what have been the results?
The law has been perverted by the influence of two entirely different
causes: stupid greed and false philanthropy. Let us speak of the first.
Every legislator should be forced to read Bastiat’s The Law once a
month for their entire term and write a synopsis of how they have upheld
the ideas contained within it. The tome should be taught in our school
systems. It should be drilled into every citizen’s head from birth until
death.”
When he was alive, Bastiat called the United States the one nation in
the world that came close to applying the law in a just manner. If he
could visit us today, he would puke all over the steps of Congress. He
would barf in the halls of the White House. He would upchuck in
lobbyists offices all over Washington, D.C. When he was done throwing
up, I do believe Bastiat would start a revolution.
He would definitely take on our current system of governance because
we’re turning into Socialism Lite ‘Less Filling, More Taxes.’
“Socialists look upon people as raw material to be formed into social
combinations. This is so true that, if by chance, the socialists have
any doubts about the success of these combinations, they will demand
that a small portion of mankind be set aside to experiment upon. The
popular idea of trying all systems is well known. And one socialist
leader has been known seriously to demand that the Constituent Assembly
give him a small district with all its inhabitants, to try his
experiments upon.
In the same manner, an inventor makes a model before he constructs
the full-sized machine; the chemist wastes some chemicals – the farmer
wastes some seeds and land – to try out an idea.
But what a difference there is between the gardener and his trees,
between the inventor and his machine, between the chemist and his
elements, between the farmer and his seeds! And in all sincerity, the
socialist thinks that there is the same difference between him and
mankind!
It is no wonder that the writers of the nineteenth century look upon
society as an artificial creation of the legislator’s genius. This idea –
the fruit of classical education – has taken possession of all the
intellectuals and famous writers of our country. To these intellectuals
and writers, the relationship between persons and the legislator appears
to be the same as the relationship between the clay and the potter.
Moreover, even where they have consented to recognise a principle of
action in the heart of man – and a principle of discernment in man’s
intellect – they have considered these gifts from God to be fatal gifts.
They have thought that persons, under the impulse of these two gifts,
would fatally tend to ruin themselves. They assume that if the
legislators left persons free to follow their own inclinations, they
would arrive at atheism instead of religion, ignorance instead of
knowledge, poverty instead of production and exchange.”
Read The Law.
It will change all your assumptions about what the role of government
should be in your life in only 76 pages. When you’re done, make your
friends read The Law. If they won’t, stop being friends with them. Send a
copy to your Representatives and Congressmen and ask them what the hell
they think they’re doing with this country of ours.
Reprinted from Amazon.com.
The Law
The Law: Should be Required Reading in Washington, D.C.
By Penfist
September 3, 2016
by Frederic Bastiat. Written in 1848 as a response to socialism in
France, this book essay is just as relevant today as it was then.
“What, then, is law? It is the collective organisation of the individual right to lawful defence.
Each of us has a natural right from God to defend his person, his
liberty, and his property. These are the three basic requirements of
life, and the preservation of any one of them is completely dependent
upon the preservation of the other two. For what are our faculties but
the extension of our individuality? And what is property but an
extension of our faculties?
If every person has the right to defend – even by force – his person,
his liberty, and his property, then it follows that a group of men have
the right to organise and support a common force to protect these
rights constantly. Thus the principle of collective right – its reason
for existing, its lawfulness – is based on individual right. And the
common force that protects this collective right cannot logically have
any other purpose or any other mission than that for which it acts as a
substitute. Thus, since an individual cannot lawfully use force against
the person, liberty, or property of another individual, then the common
force – for the same reason – cannot lawfully be used to destroy the
person, liberty, or property of individuals or groups.
Such a perversion of force would be, in both cases, contrary to our
premise. Force has been given to us to defend our own individual rights.
Who will dare to say that force has been given to us to destroy the
equal rights of our brothers? Since no individual acting separately can
lawfully use force to destroy the rights of others, does it not
logically follow that the same principle also applies to the common
force that is nothing more than the organised combination of the
individual forces?
Why are the most advertised Gold and Silver coins NOT the best way to invest?
If this is true, then nothing can be more evident than this: The law
is the organisation of the natural right of lawful defence. It is the
substitution of a common force for individual forces. And this common
force is to do only what the individual forces have a natural and lawful
right to do: to protect persons, liberties, and properties; to maintain
the right of each, and to cause justice to reign over us all.”
My copy of The Law is filled with highlighted yellow phrases. Among them:
“But, unfortunately, law by no means confines itself to its proper
functions. And when it has exceeded its proper functions, it has not
done so merely in some inconsequential and debatable matters. The law
has gone further than this; it has acted in direct opposition to its own
purpose. The law has been used to destroy its own objective: It has
been applied to annihilating the justice that it was supposed to
maintain; to limiting and destroying rights which its real purpose was
to respect. The law has placed the collective force at the disposal of
the unscrupulous who wish, without risk, to exploit the person, liberty,
and property of others. It has converted plunder into a right, in order
to protect plunder. And it has converted lawful defence into a crime,
in order to punish lawful defence.
How has this perversion of the law been accomplished? And what have been the results?
The law has been perverted by the influence of two entirely different
causes: stupid greed and false philanthropy. Let us speak of the first.
Every legislator should be forced to read Bastiat’s The Law once a
month for their entire term and write a synopsis of how they have upheld
the ideas contained within it. The tome should be taught in our school
systems. It should be drilled into every citizen’s head from birth until
death.”
When he was alive, Bastiat called the United States the one nation in
the world that came close to applying the law in a just manner. If he
could visit us today, he would puke all over the steps of Congress. He
would barf in the halls of the White House. He would upchuck in
lobbyists offices all over Washington, D.C. When he was done throwing
up, I do believe Bastiat would start a revolution.
He would definitely take on our current system of governance because
we’re turning into Socialism Lite ‘Less Filling, More Taxes.’
“Socialists look upon people as raw material to be formed into social
combinations. This is so true that, if by chance, the socialists have
any doubts about the success of these combinations, they will demand
that a small portion of mankind be set aside to experiment upon. The
popular idea of trying all systems is well known. And one socialist
leader has been known seriously to demand that the Constituent Assembly
give him a small district with all its inhabitants, to try his
experiments upon.
In the same manner, an inventor makes a model before he constructs
the full-sized machine; the chemist wastes some chemicals – the farmer
wastes some seeds and land – to try out an idea.
But what a difference there is between the gardener and his trees,
between the inventor and his machine, between the chemist and his
elements, between the farmer and his seeds! And in all sincerity, the
socialist thinks that there is the same difference between him and
mankind!
It is no wonder that the writers of the nineteenth century look upon
society as an artificial creation of the legislator’s genius. This idea –
the fruit of classical education – has taken possession of all the
intellectuals and famous writers of our country. To these intellectuals
and writers, the relationship between persons and the legislator appears
to be the same as the relationship between the clay and the potter.
Moreover, even where they have consented to recognise a principle of
action in the heart of man – and a principle of discernment in man’s
intellect – they have considered these gifts from God to be fatal gifts.
They have thought that persons, under the impulse of these two gifts,
would fatally tend to ruin themselves. They assume that if the
legislators left persons free to follow their own inclinations, they
would arrive at atheism instead of religion, ignorance instead of
knowledge, poverty instead of production and exchange.”
Read The Law.
It will change all your assumptions about what the role of government
should be in your life in only 76 pages. When you’re done, make your
friends read The Law. If they won’t, stop being friends with them. Send a
copy to your Representatives and Congressmen and ask them what the hell
they think they’re doing with this country of ours.
Reprinted from Amazon.com.
Thursday, September 01, 2016
Kapernick
The Top 40: Comment on The National Football League is on TV. It can easily be turned off.: Never in my life have I thought about America’s faults while standing, and singing, the national anthem. I may think many things, including what a great country it is, how proud and fortunate I am to live here, etc. but pondering its faults, nope. There’s plenty of time and other places for that. I kind’a feel sorry for you if you feel the need to do that then.
Higher Education and the Holy Cookie @ AMERICAN DIGEST
Higher Education and the Holy Cookie @ AMERICAN DIGEST
BEHOLD I BRING YOU TIDINGS OF GREAT JOY
MOM'S (Lois Lucille McNair Van der Leun's ) CLASSIC OATMEAL CHOCOLATE CHIP COOKIES
Please note: It is not to be made merely by combing the ingredients but by following the procedure, the sacred ritual.
Combine: 3/4 Cup brown sugar with 3/4 Cup white sugar.
Mix in until smooth but gritty 1 cup shortening ( Crisco [classic] or
butter/marge + Crisco in varying proportions )* This, and other mixing
moments, can be done with your hands if a) you have washed them, and b)
nobody's around to see you do it. Maintain plausible deniability.
Add 2 eggs -- Beaten-- plus 1 teaspoon vanilla.
Combine One and 1/2 Cups flour with 1 teaspoon salt and 1 teaspoon
soda and then work into sugar, shortening and egg mixture until smooth.
Add two cups of rolled oats and work into the dough. Add one 12 oz
package semi-sweet chocolate chips (No more. Resist temptation.) and
(optional) 1 cup chopped black walnuts**. Shape into medium-sized (no
more than 3" in diameter, baked) cookies and bake on a greased cookie sheet
Bake in a 350 oven for 10-12 minutes or until golden brown. Monitor at around 8 minutes.
The recipe is usually good for 2-3 standard size cookie sheets. When
baking, it is best to start one tray in the lower rack of the oven and
after eight minutes move it to the upper.
Allow to cool. You will snake three to five and burn your lip on the
first bite, but try to show a little restraint after this, okay?
Yield: 4-5 Dozen
Note: The Holy Cookie, when baked to perfection, should not be chewy
or soft but possess, upon being cooled, a toothsome quality and a
certain proportion of crisp-walled open cells throughout the cookie that
absorb milk when dunked, but do not become a milk sodden mush. The milk
should be present within the cells of the cookie, but the cookie
itself, providing one has not be lazy and let it just slosh around in
the glass, should still retain a certain crispness and emit a distinct
crunch when consumed.
* Yes, Crisco. This ancient pure product of Amerca can still be found
in the baking aisle. The Holy Cookies cannot achieve their proper milk
absorbing properties without its presence. If you have some sort of
issue with Crisco, get over it and just cowboy up. While butter or
margarine can be used in combination with Crisco, their proportions are
problematical. One stick is probably the maximum.
** Black Walnuts are optional but not, strictly speaking, classic.
Still, they add an extra texture which is appealing, unless, of course,
you are allergic to walnuts in which case you eat them and you die --
happy and with an enhanced skill set.
BEHOLD I BRING YOU TIDINGS OF GREAT JOY
MOM'S (Lois Lucille McNair Van der Leun's ) CLASSIC OATMEAL CHOCOLATE CHIP COOKIES
Please note: It is not to be made merely by combing the ingredients but by following the procedure, the sacred ritual.
Combine: 3/4 Cup brown sugar with 3/4 Cup white sugar.
Mix in until smooth but gritty 1 cup shortening ( Crisco [classic] or
butter/marge + Crisco in varying proportions )* This, and other mixing
moments, can be done with your hands if a) you have washed them, and b)
nobody's around to see you do it. Maintain plausible deniability.
Add 2 eggs -- Beaten-- plus 1 teaspoon vanilla.
Combine One and 1/2 Cups flour with 1 teaspoon salt and 1 teaspoon
soda and then work into sugar, shortening and egg mixture until smooth.
Add two cups of rolled oats and work into the dough. Add one 12 oz
package semi-sweet chocolate chips (No more. Resist temptation.) and
(optional) 1 cup chopped black walnuts**. Shape into medium-sized (no
more than 3" in diameter, baked) cookies and bake on a greased cookie sheet
Bake in a 350 oven for 10-12 minutes or until golden brown. Monitor at around 8 minutes.
The recipe is usually good for 2-3 standard size cookie sheets. When
baking, it is best to start one tray in the lower rack of the oven and
after eight minutes move it to the upper.
Allow to cool. You will snake three to five and burn your lip on the
first bite, but try to show a little restraint after this, okay?
Yield: 4-5 Dozen
Note: The Holy Cookie, when baked to perfection, should not be chewy
or soft but possess, upon being cooled, a toothsome quality and a
certain proportion of crisp-walled open cells throughout the cookie that
absorb milk when dunked, but do not become a milk sodden mush. The milk
should be present within the cells of the cookie, but the cookie
itself, providing one has not be lazy and let it just slosh around in
the glass, should still retain a certain crispness and emit a distinct
crunch when consumed.
* Yes, Crisco. This ancient pure product of Amerca can still be found
in the baking aisle. The Holy Cookies cannot achieve their proper milk
absorbing properties without its presence. If you have some sort of
issue with Crisco, get over it and just cowboy up. While butter or
margarine can be used in combination with Crisco, their proportions are
problematical. One stick is probably the maximum.
** Black Walnuts are optional but not, strictly speaking, classic.
Still, they add an extra texture which is appealing, unless, of course,
you are allergic to walnuts in which case you eat them and you die --
happy and with an enhanced skill set.
Wednesday, August 31, 2016
Tuesday, August 30, 2016
Sunday, August 28, 2016
Thursday, August 25, 2016
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