Big In Japan

A friend sent me an email today with the Subject heading What the.....?! and the entire message was just this URL:

http://www.fourvalley.co.jp/fourvalley/pickup/03_1/image/Knatz.jpg

which is for this picture:

... on this page.

Knatz, you see is my original family name. Family Kname. Knatz is the K in BK.

Here is yet further evidence that there is a Japanese pop band called KNATZ:

http://www.shimamura.co.jp/e_ne/00_artists/0101/knatz.html

starry starry night

I spent the day with mon temoin during his week off between the AOL job and his new Martha Stewart gig.

Hadn't seen him offline in a year or two.

I infected him with the Apple virus. I'm so proud.

When we were teenagers, his favorite painting was Van Gogh's Starry Starry Night.



I mention this because, for some reason, Google's logo today looks like this:

RFK2

OK, I'm willing to get on the bandwaggon. Here's something for my "environmentalist" friends to think about:

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (yes, son of that RFK!) acts as Chief Prosecuting Attorney for Riverkeeper, "an advocacy group that monitors the Hudson River ecosystem and challenges polluters, using both legal and grass roots campaigns." He also serves as Senior Attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council and as President of the Waterkeeper Alliance. At Pace University School of Law, he is a Clinical Professor and Supervising Attorney at the Environmental Litigation Clinic in White Plains, New York. Earlier in his career Mr. Kennedy served as Assistant District Attorney in New York City.

blah blah blah

OK, here's what the libertarian critter and the mutualist have both already blogged:

You show me a polluter and I'll show you a subsidy. I'll show you a fat cat using political clout to escape the discipline of the free market and load his production costs onto the backs of the public.

The fact is, free-market capitalism is the best thing that could happen to our environment, our economy, our country. Simply put, true free-market capitalism, in which businesses pay all the costs of bringing their products to market, is the most efficient and democratic way of distributing the goods of the land -- and the surest way to eliminate pollution. Free markets, when allowed to function, properly value raw materials and encourage producers to eliminate waste -- pollution -- by reducing, reusing, and recycling.

In a real-market economy, when you make yourself rich, you enrich your community.

The truth is, I don't even think of myself as an environmentalist anymore. I consider myself a free-marketeer.

Corporate capitalists don't want free markets, they want dependable profits, and their surest route is to crush the competition by controlling the government.

Let's not forget that we taxpayers give away $65 billion every year in subsidies to big oil, and more than $35 billion a year in subsidies to western welfare cowboys. Those subsidies helped create the billionaires who financed the right-wing revolution on Capitol Hill and put George W. Bush in the White House.

I read this and I'm awfully suspicious. I'm suspicious of any Kennedy. I'm especially suspicious of a rich-boy Yankee in the spotlight.

But I read this. I reread this. And all I can say for now is:

"Right on, Bobby, Jr!"

my brother

Having grown up in the 1970s and 1980s, I never considered the term "family values" to be anything more than Republican spin. I happily declared myself "anti-family-values" for many years. (Easier done, of course, before you have wife or children.)

When CJ first spoke to me of "chosen family" the term resonated.

I feel far less ambivalent about my chosen family than I do about my genetic family.

Of course, chosen family can be just as casually abandoned as casually chosen. There's the rub. One thing I'll say for my genetic family: they're there when fair-weather "chosen" family might choose to be elsewhere.

I'm very unfond of the term "brother" being applied to someone genetically unrelated.

But ...

My first blood brother (each prick a finger, mix the red ooze) died of leukemia. His family and mine seemed to think that my blood brother's genetic brother and I should be friends. It didn't take.

My next blood brother (same oozy procedure) moved to the other side of the country a few years after we mixed blood. (This is the half-Negro kid the new California locals called Zebra. The one with whom I'd drive our mothers crazy by singing the off-color lyrics from Hair.) Honest-to-G*d, I don't know if Blood Brother #2 is currently alive or dead. I give it 50/50.

I also have an adopted brother, who was witness at my wedding. He was also one of the pilots in the air just over Ground Zero when the second plane hit on 9/11. But even the term "adopted brother" is stretching it since his sire and my siress lived in sin, nothing legal about it -- not by the standards of the State or Church.

If I were to say "my brother" then you might think (a) I'm delirious, since neither of my parents (as far as I know) had any offspring other than yours truly, or you might assume (b) I'm talking about the son of the man my mother lived with and cared for for the couple of decades before his slow demise, or (c) you could believe I'm adopting an African-Americanism to refer to my oldest friend, mon temoin, the best man at my wedding -- the one who just took a position with Martha Stewart.

Or, if you know me frighteningly well, you might suspect I'm referring to a thoroughly unlikely candidate:

My father writes about him here and here.

comic strip paranoia

I have a black friend who grew up in the hood.

(The South Bronx, not the predominantly white neighborhood I grew up in on the upper Upper West Side.)

My friend has just accepted a position with Martha Stewart.

Between today's Boondocks and yesterday's, I'm beginning to suspect that Aaron Mcgruder is spying on us.


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For more of my thoughts on conspiracy theories (also inspired by a Boondocks strip), see here.

diseconomies of scale

Kevin Carson, the interweb's leading voice of hardcore mutualism (i.e., Benjamin Tuckerite individualist anarchism) is contemplating his next project, which will draw on the works of Ivan Illich, Paul Goodman, and Robert Anton Wilson. I note this sentence in particular:

"The organizing theme, as I understand it so far, is that the state subsidizes the diseconomies of large scale, and thus encourages the growth of business firms far beyond the size that could possibly survive in a free market."

The State's role in encouraging oversized corporations is not just in subsidizing particular diseconomies of scale (i.e., "corporate welfare") but much more pervasively in penalizing optimum scale.

For instance, by taxing dividends, the government discourages the dispersal of profits. Investors and shareholders prefer growth in stock price for a postponed capital gains payoff to an ongoing share of profit. Thus profits are artificially redirected back into growth where entrepreneurs see no need for further growth.

(This example in particular works me up, because Marxoids and statist leftists in general believe that the free market has a natural tendency toward centralization and monopoly. It's the State, baby! It's government that puts the Big into Big Business!) (more)

Another f'r'instance: central banking (i.e., state-sponsored and -protected fractional reserve banking), by keeping interest rates artificially low, encourages both malinvestment (which is seen in inappropriate size as well as inappropriate direction, etc.) and now also in a culture of consumer debt and spending rather than savings and investing. I've already commented on the State's role in the "consumerism" decried by the Left, but I believe there is another subtle and pernicious effect from this same phenomenon: the dichotomizing of the spending and investing classes.

In a free market, with externalities internalized, the tendency is toward lower time preference and greater investment on the part of everyone. Only newcomers to a free economy have to work hand-to-mouth. But under political capitalism, with price signals and rewards warped and redirected, only those who already have a great surplus are encouraged to invest. With artificially low interest rates, the average worker is steered away from savings and investing and toward borrowing and spending. The culture of the credit card.

The firms begin to feed themselves on the dividends they're not dispersing (see above), and the general population works ever harder to deplete capital rather than develop it. We have less and less synergy between producers and consumers and more and more dichotomy between capitalists and workers.

Classical liberalism does have a class-conflict theory: the productive (economic) class versus the parasitic (political) class. This theory predates Marx, who perverted it into working class versus capitalist class. But the grain of truth in Marx's version -- political capitalists versus the masses -- should still be blamed on the State.

In the free market, capitalist and laborer are roles played within the economy. Under state capitalism, the roles played by individuals become classes of individuals.

my world in 6 panels

Today's comic strips (emailed to me daily) feel like a summary of recent conversations I've been having:






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soupe thaï de poissons

It's been a while since I blogged a recipe. After I started the current vast editorial project for a certain Misesian institute, I've felt somewhat lax in my ongoing domestic duties. But I had an unexpected, last-minute visit from some semi-foreign relatives this past weekend, and they seemed surprised and impressed at the presentability of my humble abode. I guess I'm a better house husband than I realize.

Meanwhile, the wife wants me to blog about fish soup. One reason I've hesitated is that the first ingredient is a Taste of Thai product, which feels like cheating. The product in question is the Coconut Ginger Soup Base, which I use to fry the catfish (or talapia or orange ruffy) for this soup.

My soup is a fishy variant of the Coconut Ginger Chicken Soup recipe offered on the site.

First, I mix a cup of white cooking wine (which is already quite salty) with 2-4 cups of vegetable broth. Into this, I dump a pound of tailless, deveined frozen shrimp.

In a pan, I'm frying in olive oil a chopped red onion and some other vegetable which I haven't yet settled on. Last night it was celery. I use a carrot peeler to add a whole bunch of fresh ginger to this mix. When it's all brown, I dump it into the pot of broth-and-shrimp.

I slice some more fresh ginger into a pan of olive oil and the Taste of Thai base. I slice up the catfish (or talapia or orange ruffy) and add it to the sizzling pan, mixing it all until brown. Then I pour in a can of coconut milk, mix it all up and dump it into the rest of the soup pot.

I add a load of black pepper and simmer the concoction for the next several hours. (Hint: you can't add too much fresh ginger.)

The missus brought home a baguette last week which neither of us loved. Instead of throwing away the stale baton the next day, I cut it up and fried it in a pan of olive oil with salt and pepper. This has provided us with homemade croutons for the several experiments I've made with this ginger/coconut/fish formula.

I tried one version with crab meat and didn't love it. I tried one version with potatoes and didn't love it. The celery has been good.

a hero on a hero on a villain

Walter E. Williams on Thomas DiLorenzo on Abraham Lincoln:

DiLorenzo Is Right About Lincoln

The War between the States settled by force whether states could secede. Once it was established that states cannot secede, the federal government, abetted by a Supreme Court unwilling to hold it to its constitutional restraints, was able to run amok over states' rights, so much so that the protections of the Ninth and Tenth Amendments mean little or nothing today.

[...]

The Real Lincoln contains irrefutable evidence that a more appropriate title for Abraham Lincoln is not the Great Emancipator, but the Great Centralizer.

our fearless leader

Lest you thought this might be a fluke, Wally Conger over at the out of step blog offers us this:

7 Samurai

It's not that I have nothing interesting to say (at least, interesting to me); it's that I haven't taken the time to write any of it down. Instead I share this note I passed among friends and family a couple of summers ago:

22 Aug 2003 14:04:30 -0400

Last night, the Vinegar Hill finished its summer-long Kurosawa/Mifune film festival with The Seven Samurai.

One of the difficulties of getting older -- especially as information technology makes access to almost everything so much easier -- is that my memories of books, movies, and television from childhood and adolescence are often better than my adult return to those same stories.

Even Yojimbo, which is still great for 36yo bk, was not as great for 36yo bk as it had been for 16yo bk, or even as great as it was for 24yo bk.

I am therefore happily caught off guard to report that the Seven Samurai matures with age. It is much richer than I remember, more disturbing than I remember (although Nathalie commented on what a light touch it had throughout) and overall a grown-up experience.

There were teenagers behind us in the theater last night who did not enjoy it half as much as I did 20 years ago, but the fact that they were rude enough that I can report on their reception of the film might tell you more about those individual teenagers than it tells us about how well the film would do for the 2003 equivalent of 16yo Brian and David.

Most remarkable to me was that the version we saw last night was 200 minutes -- a "director's cut" of the film that I may or may not have ever seen before -- and I never once wanted to look at my watch. With so many Hollywood features getting longer and longer (which is the opposite of the trend from a decade or two ago) and with me finding it harder and harder to sit still for anything longer than 2 hours, I was very pleased that an almost-3-and-a-half hour film could keep me enthralled. With a dozen itchy wasp-stings, a throbbing arthritic hip, and various other physical discomforts that had been bothering me through the day, I was somewhat reluctant to attend the film. But during those 200 minutes, I was barely distracted by them.

I've seen Kurosawa films throughout the past 20 years, and only on this, my third viewing of Seven Samurai, do I realize that it is by far my favorite.

Quote of the Day

"There's somebody somewhere with a little doll that looks like me that's poking the fuck out of it with needles and what not."

-- Ant Johnston

agnostic, apparently

You scored as agnosticism. You are an agnostic. Though it is generally taken that agnostics neither believe nor disbelieve in God, it is possible to be a theist or atheist in addition to an agnostic. Agnostics don't believe it is possible to prove the existence of God (nor lack thereof). Agnosticism is a philosophy that God's existence cannot be proven. Some say it is possible to be agnostic and follow a religion; however, one cannot be a devout believer if he or she does not truly believe. agnosticism 67% atheism 63% Buddhism 54% Judaism 42% Hinduism 33% Paganism 29% Satanism 29% Islam 25% Christianity 21% Which religion is the right one for you? created with QuizFarm.com

Well, I'm sure this confirms what some already believed.

I have to say I'm a little surprised that Christianity scores last.

I'm closer to Satanists* than I am to Christians?

(Actually the friend who pointed me to this quiz got Satanist as his top score!)

((And so, it turns out, did my very own beloved missus. Well, hail Satan, I suppose.))

And here I thought I was, if anything, moving closer to the Thomistic tradition.

I blog about religion here, sort of:

• Thou Art God
• On Atheism, Agnosticism, and Faith
• Let's put the X back in Xmas!
• Abraham & Isaac
• Aren't I worth saving?

* A note on Satanism, according to the quiz:

Before you scream, do a bit of research on it. To be a Satanist, you don't actually have to believe in Satan. Satanism generally focuses upon the spiritual advancement of the self, rather than upon submission to a deity or a set of moral codes.

Thomas Sowell

I mentioned Thomas Sowell briefly before, as a hero of mine.

I wish he were a little less Establishment conservative and a little more antiEstablishment libertarian. I keep thinking he's one of us, and then I'll discover that he supports some Friedmanite/Catoite faux-libertarian, neoliberal proposal for a more "market friendly" bit of government management.

But anyway, he produces some excellent quotes for my economics quotes collection, such as:

• Raising Social Security taxes today will not leave a dime more to pay pensions to future retirees. Right now there is more money coming into the system than is going out -- and the difference gets spent on other things. Higher taxes now would mean a bigger excess to be spent on other things, leaving nothing more for the future.

• Time and again, over the centuries, price controls have produced three things: shortages, quality deterioration and black markets. Why would anyone want any of those things with pharmaceutical drugs?

• What "eminent domain" laws mean in practice is that politicians have a right to seize your property and turn it over to someone else, in order to gain campaign contributions and win votes.

• It is amazing how many people think that the government's role is to give them what they want by overriding what other people want.

• A check of official records shows that my property line extends farther than I thought -- but laws prevent me from using that additional land. However, I can probably be sued if anyone gets injured while trespassing on it. In other words, I am worse off for owning more land than I thought I had.

• If the government gave a $5,000 subsidy to anyone who buys an automobile, do you doubt that the price of automobiles would go up -- perhaps by $5,000? Why then does no one see any connection between government subsidies to college students and rising tuition?

(Thanks to line in the sand for pointing to Sowell's Random thoughts article.)

Yet More Calvin on Time Preference

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I've blogged Calvin and Time Preference already here and here.

	This panel reminds me of almost everyone I've ever talked to about politics, especially registered Democrats and Republicans.
And this panel, of course, is how they see me:

color me critical

I like that the black crayon on Crayola's website stands for Helpful Information.

Here are a few things about the Crayola history I don't like quite as much:

Prussian Blue ... Name changed to "midnight blue" in 1958 in response to teachers' requests.

What the ...?!

Flesh ... Name voluntarily changed to "peach" in 1962, partially as a result of the U.S. Civil Rights Movement.

Does this imply that the other name changes were involuntary?

Indian Red is renamed Chestnut in 1999 in response to educators who felt some children wrongly perceived the crayon color was intended to represent the skin color of Native Americans. The name originated from a reddish-brown pigment found near India commonly used in fine artist oil paint.

This one reminds me of the North Carolina teacher who was reprimanded a few years ago for using the word 'niggardly' in class.

Fluorescent colors added in 1972, including Chartreuse.
Fluorescent color names change in 1990. Chartreuse becomes Screamin' Green.

And kids just get dumber and dumber.

(Thanks to Brumaire for pointing out this page.)

consumerism and exploitation

Here are 2 important questions from (and for) the Left, broadly defined:

1. What is consumerism?


1. What furious has to say over at furyblog:

   As long as you're comfortable it feels like freedom.
   All of which to say, my question a while back about marketing was motivated by a profound sense that marketing generates a great deal of what is wrong (my humble) with our consumer-based culture.

2. What I had to say over at the Austrian Forum:

   [D]oes consumerism -- the general culture that the Left decries -- find its roots in government interventionism? I think the answer is yes and no, because we're talking about two different things: (1) the culture of mass markets and mass consumption, which is genuinely a product of capitalism; (2) the culture of the credit card -- the culture of artificially inflated time preference. Number 1 is what advocates of laissez faire should be ready to celebrate. Number 2 is what we should recognize as wealth-reducing, destructive, degenerative, and truly decadent in the old-fashioned use of the word.



2. What is exploitation?


1. What MDM has to say over at Upaya:
   

   So while leftists are right to insist that even voluntary transactions can be exploitative, libertarians are right to insist that even exploitative voluntary transactions should not be subject to state interference. (Though the child labor example is more complicated because of issues of child consent.) Moreover, as Carson demonstrates, the State engages in extensive direct, harmful, nonconsensual exploitation and it is also what makes possible much of the consensual, mutually advantageous exploitation in society.

2. What I had to say over at BlackCrayon:

   THE ABOLITION OF EXPLOITATION
   Can leftists and libertarians find common ground in opposition to exploitation?
   This essay proposes that a model for such common ground is the 19th-century Individualist Anarchism of Benjamin Tucker.
   Individualist Anarchism sees the exploitation of certain groups or classes as the visible symptom of a deeper problem whose root cause is coercive monopoly. The individualist does not sanction the use of force to fight the symptom, but only to fight the coercive root cause itself. Non-coercive monopolies are to be opposed only through peaceful and cooperative means, such as innovation and education.
   

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And perhaps a little more from my exploitation essay:

Is the prostitute's situation "tainted with injustice"?
Only if, as Tucker would say, "the terms of contract are dictated to [her] disadvantage". The question becomes, Does a coercive context force her to negotiate on unequal footing? A woman in the 19th century may have had few alternatives for decent income. The woman of the 21st century, we hope, has fewer obstacles and more options. And if she doesn't, then the question must be how to maximize her options -- not how to limit her yet further. If anyone is reducing the prostitute's options, it's the coercive cops, not her contractual clients.

(For more on this particular issue, see McElroy's excellent talk on "Selling Sexuality".)

I forgot what now?

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Party Line Update #327

Just look what I've gotten myself mixed up in:

Party Line Update #327

(Maybe I need to apologize!)

fish-n-chips (w/ fries)

If you google the term "fish and chips" the first hit is for this recipe, which ends by saying:

Wrap in tabloid newspaper shaped like a cone. If lacking, a plate will have to suffice.

My mom was born in London. She remembers the blitz. She was a little girl, hiding under the table while the German bombs fell ...

When I turned 18, she decided to take me back to "the old country" and I got to see Britain for the first time. I remember how awkward it was not just to drive on the left, but to sit on the right and stick-shift with my left. I remember how boring the English food was, how excellent the Indian food was, and I remember how fish-n-chips was always served in a newspaper.

This past Friday night, as we drove the last hour of our roadtrip home, the wife and I were discussing what to do about dinner. With two cats in the car, we didn't want to stop for a leisurely meal, and neither of us wanted to cook when we got home. I told her I craved fish-n-chips, but I didn't know where we could get any. She reminded me that the pizza parlor just down the block from our apartment had "fish and chips (with fries)" on their menu. (I know I'm not the only one to figure that "chips (with fries)" ought to mean a double-portion of chips/fries.)

I'll not mention the giggling teenage girls at the pizza place, or the Eastern European guy who was trying to sound British by saying "oh, bugger!" when he forgot to order a side dish and "fanTAStic!" when told that he could indeed use the facilities. I won't mention the delivery guy who told the guy looking for work in "acting or teaching" to apply for a job at our local food co-op, or the pierced-eyebrow cashier with the barcode tattoo on the back of his neck, or the beautiful young man with the crewcut who prepared our dinner and who offered the delivery guy a dollar to give him a ride, saying, "You can get 10 minutes of long-distance phone calls for a dollar: just dial 10-10-220!"

In fact, I won't mention anything about the meal itself, because the reason I bring all of this up is that I asked myself for the first time on Friday night why exactly fish-n-chips traditionally come wrapped in newspaper. (Ours didn't: they came in a Styrofoam box, sadly.)

At 18, I just treated it as a curious cultural difference. I didn't wonder why the fish-n-chips didn't come in, for instance, butcher's paper, or why the merchants didn't buy newspaper stock sans newsprint. I just treated it as a charming detail of my travels and kept tucked away safely in the back of my mind the question of whether or not I was ingesting the ink from the newspaper.

But the other night I asked myself all these questions (except for the part about the ink, about which I no longer seem to care), and the answer came to me from a combination of (a) a childhood memory in which we visited The New York Times on a school daytrip, and (b) the question furious asked a while back about the role of marketing/advertising in the general economic benefits of free-market capitalism.

I've blogged before on an 8th-grade indoctrination trip to the ILGWU. Now I recall another field trip that year to the Times. We learned many fascinating things, only two of which I still remember: (1) the obituary department keeps draft obituaries uptodate for celebrities who aren't dead yet, and (2) it costs something like $2 to produce a 50¢ paper.

A paper that costs the reader 50¢ to purchase costs the company $2 to produce? Yes. If I've gotten the numbers wrong, the basic point is still the same: it costs several times more to put out a single unit than is charged for that unit. The rest of the cost, plus profit, comes from advertising.

Advertising is paid for (indirectly, but nevertheless) by consumers of the products advertised. So all those subway commuters I used to see on my ride to school were reading subsidized material -- news and entertainment subsidized by the consumers of various things other than newspapers.

It seems to me that it's not just possible but even likely that a newspaper costs less than the paper it's printed on, in which case it's cheaper to buy newspapers in which to wrap fish-n-chips (you didn't think those food merchants just used the newspapers they'd already happened to read, did you?) than it would be to buy the ink-free paper the printers purchase.

So the folks who eat fish-n-chips get their meal cheaper because of the grease-stained advertising under their lunch -- advertising they probably never bother reading. Three cheers for the voluntary redistribution of wealth!





(Anyway, that's my educated guess. Anyone whose guess is more educated, please let me know.)

---

Update -- another educated guesser (by the name of Barry P.) gives a much simpler explanation:

"I think the author overcomplicates things: the value of day-old newspapers is basically zero - the fishsellers most likely got them for free from news merchants who would have had to dispose of them some other way."

all apologies

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Last night, Tim Swanson greeted me in IM by saying "holla" ...

I thought he'd said "hola" and so I responded with "que pasa" (actually, I responded by misspelling the pasa in que pasa but let's not get side-tracked here).

He pointed out that he had greeted me with the African-Americanism (and therefore the young Caucasian derivative) of holla as in holler as in "holler back, negro!" or as in "HOLLA BACK HUEY!"


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See, in the NYC of my youth, white people imitating black people was considered quite passé. What was hip was for white people to imitate Puerto Ricans.

But anyway, Mr. Swanson said, "You're so old and dusty."

I know, I know: he meant it in the nicest possible way, which was exactly how I took it, and even if he had meant it in an unkind way, it's still true. No argument here.

In fact, I'm so so old and dusty, that I don't even know who Darius Rucker is. He's Hootie of Hootie and the Blowfish. They're not exactly here-and-now, are they? They're from the 1990s. I was already old and dusty enough in the 1990s (during part of which time, I was 20-something) that I don't know who's Hootie or who are the Blowfish.

So nevermind my question about the singing black cowboy and the TV commercial. I found the answer here, at ad-rag.com.

learn to love the machines

A week ago this morning, my wife woke me with the words, "Hagbard has been hacked!"

A week ago this afternoon, we left for our spring break visit to her parents -- her parents who don't use computers and have no internet access.

Lucky for me, I have friends and neighbors who are generous, helpful, and savvy. We now have our websites on a new host, untouched by invaders, and locked down more tightly than the previous ancient machine, which I'd been neglecting since my interests shifted from computer science to economic science.

(Note to self: blog about the economics of fish and chips.)

One of the consequences of this unfortunate event was that we had to spend much more time in Charlottesville than we had originally allocated for that stage of our trip to and from the in-laws. As we are settling into the fact that we'll be in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania for another year, we rediscover just how much we love and miss Charlottesville, Virginia.

Anyway, sorry for the unexplained downtime. I will now return to the questioning of assumptions, the splitting of hairs, and the exploration of a people's capitalism.



Meanwhile, those who haven't spotted them yet can check out my public apologies on the new dailyapology blog, as well as one apology directed (I think) to me.



(Seriously: is there really a singing black cowboy on the TV commercials now?)

hacked

Oh, goody! Look what I found on most pages of most of my websites this morning. (I guess everyone wants a piece of me.)

We Are? Lord Cha0s - c0de_Susy - mescalin - ShAd0wS - hak0 g0t r00t? uname -a;id;uptime Linux hagbard.casagato.net 2.4.18-14 #1 Wed Sep 4 13:35:50 EDT 2002 i686 i686 i3 86 GNU/Linux uid=0(root) gid=0(root) 2:39am up 10:41, 0 users, load average: 0.00, 0.02, 0.00 GreetZ? Gorgory - SmartBoy_ - R3x_M4ld1t0 - khrusT - b4tb0y - Tyriel - The_Rat - SP34K3R - insan0w - N0FL0G - welsidubi _A_Thais_RC - Tita - XxX_aNiNhA_sLiPkNoT_XxX - ScriptGirl_JC - mOrEnOnAh - PlugadA - MariahCarolina Help Admin? /Server Irc.BrasNet.Org -j #NCrimez NCrimez@LinuxMail.Org

damage control

The shock of seeing that hideous quarter-century-old beaver shot smack dab in the middle of my very own blog has led me to review the other images currently showing.


They certainly paint a dark and somewhat scary picture of me. I know I'd be wary of someone whose blog looks like mine.


No, this doesn't mean I'm going to change the general color scheme. Not yet. Takes too darn long for blogger to update and upload big changes.


But really, it's time to change the visuals.

Look at all these pretty photos I've taken, and forget about:

• 1 photograph of Hitler and Mussolini together
• 1 photograph of 3 other war criminals
• 1 old photograph of race-segregated public drinking fountains

• 1 confederate battle flag that says "God, Guns & Southern Pride"
• 3 nasty Spring Break girly pics (though less nasty than the rest that were on the site I pulled them from)
• 3 stills of an angry German intellectual yelling at a baby

• 1 photograph of money burning (not quite as bad as book burning)
• 5 drug-addled images of Belle and The Beast at a rave
• 2 shots of a pregnant lady who sold ad space on her belly
• 1 silhouette of a soldier with his machine gun
• 1 guy in a white hooded cloak toting a giant green Uzi

• 1 old-fashioned illustration of a black servant attending to a white child
• 1 old-fashioned illustration of a beggar woman and child
• 1 statue of a kid throwing up
• 1 mug shot of a bruised and battered anarchist
• 1 snapshot of a now-dead anarchist
• 2 -- count them, 2 -- pictures of a lawyer

I'll try to be less visually oppressive in March than I was in February.

Fool me once ...

... shame on me!

So today I am the butt of Kinsella's practical joke.

I should know better than to use pictures from other people's sites without copying them locally first. If it's on their site, they can change the picture, as Kinsella did today with his professional headshot. (Plus, it's using their bandwidth without permission, which is rude on my part.)

<-- This is the image you were supposed to see in the "my bigot" post.

And this is the image he replaced it with. (Warning: the picture is not only X-rated pornographic, but also quite ugly by my tastes. Do not view it within a few hours of meals or intimacy.)

I shouldn't have linked to his image, but I must admit: I never thought he'd replace the image on his own professional blog with such a nasty skank. This man is a successful attorney and a respected scholar, but his inner child seems to be a little brat. In the future, I'll know better than to put anything past him.

For more of his visual esthetic, see here.

my bigot

I finally had him!

I've long suspected that Stephan Kinsella is a hate-filled bigot. He even admits it! (And he hates exclamation points, so I've thrown one in just for him.)

He might tell you that he's only "reclaiming" the B-word. He might even try to claim it was all my idea. But we all know how he really feels, right? He is an unapologetic Southron.

Here's what I read today in a comment on the Mises blog:

Comments: Idiot Patrol

These PC college-boy punks got owned. Professor Hoppe has been vindicated, redeemed, and exalted. Hopefully, this is the last time somebody attempts to prevent us from celebrating our culture. The loser brainwashed idiots got their dessert.

Posted by Stephan Kinsella at March 2, 2005 12:20 PM

So I was getting ready to post a follow-up comment that would say only "celebrating our culture?!" (note the spurious exclamation point) but I made the mistake of asking him directly WTF he was talking about.

To my great frustration, it turns out he didn't post the comment. (Or so he claims!) A certain Misesian looked at the plumbing and found that the comment came not from Kinsella's IP address, but from an anonymizer. The anonymizer address has now been banned from posting to the Mises blog.

So what do we make of this? Certainly it's not evidence that Kinsella is not a bigot. (He'll have you believe that it's impossible to prove a negative.) But it does seem to be evidence that someone out there is awfully anxious to prove that he is.

My take on it is this: the troll would have waited for the comments to grow on that post, hoping that someone -- like me, for example -- would call Kinsella on his celebrating-our-culture comment, and the troll would use the whole thing on some other blog to trumpet the fact that Kinsella had finally slipped and revealed his true feelings.

Right on, my brother! Better luck next time ...

environmentalism is a political ideology

iceberg left a comment on my post, I'm with the priest, where I quote Father Jim Tucker distinguishing lamentation for Lincoln's crimes from love for slavery. (I can hate Lincoln and slavery both. There are more than two options here.)

iceberg compares Father Jim's point with something he read on slashdot, by a slashdotter named Brandybuck. I think Brandybuck's point is so good and so important that I wanted to post it here:

There is no "anti-environmental" lobby, but there certainly is an "anti-environmentalist" lobby. Like it or not, environmentalism is a specific political ideology. Not everyone who wants to protect the environment is an environmentalist. Not everyone who wants to eliminate pollution is an environmentalist. Pretending that wanting to clean up the Earth is environmentalism is as silly as pretending that wanting to eliminate poverty is socialism.

unemployed former philosophy major

In reply to Another (completely sincere) Open Question on the Furyblog (which you may want to read first, as I don't repeat it here):

OK, two weeks later and I see that no one else has commented. Am I the only libertarian who reads your blog?

Of course, I do notice that you ask after Bush Junior's corporatist scam as if it has something to do with liberty. It doesn't. It's just a right-wing regressive welfare scheme to replace a left-wing regressive welfare scheme. Don't be fooled by the Cato Institute -- they are less and less libertarian and more and more neoliberal Republican.

Actually, I also notice that you don't use the term libertarian in your question, but rather individualist. This would indicate that you're asking not an economic question, but an ethical/philosophical one, since individualism is a position within moral philosophy about who does and doesn't have which sorts of rights.

But you also say, "I imagine that deep down, few people are interested in that, and that what we see instead are different imaginings of how best to achieve a good outcome for all."

This would indicate that you're asking the consequentialist -- "economic" -- question: looking for the utilitarian perspective.

So either you or I or both of us are quite confused about what exactly you're asking.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing my article, "The 3 'E's of the Minimum Wage" I'd ask you to assess whether yours is an E1/ethical question, an E2/economic question, or the E3/emotional question.

If you're asking the connotative emotional/symbolic (E3) question then I probably can't help you.

If you're asking the utilitarian/economic (E2) question, then I'll repeat my previous recommendations.

To those I will add a second-hand recommendation (meaning that this book has been recommended to me): From Mutual Aid to the Welfare State: Fraternal Societies and Social Services, 1890-1967 by David T. Beito. Sixty-five smackers is why I haven't gotten it yet, but I'll bet your library has a copy.

And I don't see how you can be asking the ethical question, since (from an individualist perspective) it practically answers itself: robbing Peter to pay Paul is theft, no matter who does the robbing or how much you believe Paul deserves Peter's resources.

Between your consequentialist parenthetical and the fact that you are still asking the question, I infer that you believe the ends can justify the means. In other words: your ethics would seem to be utilitarian, in which case we're back to recommending economic reading and ethical principles are irrelevant.

2:29 AM

I'm with the priest

What the good father said:

One point, though, must be stressed since the slow-witted always seem to miss it [...] to be against slavery doesn't mean one has to praise Lincoln's rape of the South, and to lament that rape doesn't mean one has any love for slavery.

Fr Jim Tucker, "Liberty and the War Between the States"

And We're Back!

I lost contact with my web host (a box that sits under my desk in Charlottesville) in the wee hours of Monday morning. I learned later that there was a bad snow storm in Charlottesville. My nextdoor neighbor offered to go and bounce my box, but my DSL provider told me that the trouble was on their end, not mine.

Well, the DSL folks have been terrible. I won't go into all the details.

This time, when my neighbor repeated the offer, I took him up on it, and what do you know -- everything came back up. We'll see what the DSL people say when and if they ever come by to fix whatever they think the problem is. (After, I'm told, they deal with all the broken dial-tone lines in the area. Bad storm.) It's strange to have to deal with all this stuff from hundreds of miles away.

Sorry for the unexplained absence.