just relax

After reading my last post, a certain Misesian told me,

"You seem constantly to be trying to calm down."

narrow spectra

Here's a joke I find funnier if you don't complete the punchline:

Q: What kinda music you got here?

A: Both kinds: Country AND Western.

I find it funny, but I'd find it funnier if the punchline were just "Both kinds." Period. End of joke.

During orientation week of my freshman year in college, I heard someone down the hall screaming, "Oh my god, you have every kind of music here!"

Finally. College. Maybe some diversity for a change. (I had unusually high expectations from college. Looking back on it, I see the irony of a guy from Manhattan anticipating greater diversity from the suburbs of Philadelphia.)

I went to investigate. It turns out that "every kind of music" meant everything from the B-52s to Talking Heads to The Police. Not even college radio music. Not even "alternative". Just the same thing the nerdiest mainstreamers listened to in high school. I'm not complaining about any of those bands I just mentioned. I have enjoyed all of them. I just don't consider them to establish a profoundly broad range of styles and tastes.

The tapes I had brought with me (during that part of history when vinyl was on its way out but CDs were not yet common) included jazz, classical, and Indian sitar, as well as a few albums the down-the-hall screamer would have recognized. My roommate was introducing me to California punk. Within a few months, I'd come to know a good range of music and musicians I'd never heard before. But even in college -- even, in other words, during that one time in my life I was encountering people who saw it as part of their duty to expand their awareness and pursue the unfamiliar -- even then and there, most of the people around me would have known exactly what the "everything" screamer had meant, and wouldn't have sympathized remotely with my bemusement.

I signed up to do a college radio show. First-timers had to pair up. I couldn't just have a show of my own. On the application form, I'd put down "blues" as one of the categories I was interested in playing. I got paired with the only other guy who'd written "blues" on his application. All of the musicians I had in mind were black Americans. All of the musicians he had in mind were British white guys.

Am I making a racialist point? A nationalist point? No, my point is that what he meant by "blues" was "blues rock". The "rock" part was just assumed. It had never occurred to him that anyone might mean by "blues" the traditional acoustic music that came out of the old-time Negro South.

In my 20s, I had a girlfriend with a baby boy. Not mine. Somehow or other, the topic of religion came up. Her ex-husband had wanted the boy baptized Catholic. She didn't want him baptized at all. When I asked her why not, she said she wanted to introduce him to all religions and let him decide for himself. ALL religions? Seriously?

No, of course it turned out she meant Catholicism, Protestantism sort of generally, Judaism maybe, Islam maybe. I don't think she'd considered Buddhism or Hinduism. I listed the dozen other religions I could think of, assuring her I was probably forgetting some and ignorant of even more. I suspect what she really meant by "all religions" was (1) papists, (2) non-papists, and (3) atheists.

Most people reading this blog have certainly encountered the political equivalent of these stories. Someone will say they want to hear from "both sides" as if the Left Establishment and the Right Establishment exhaust the possibilities. Even those who talk about the need to hear from "all sides" rarely mean more than 3 or 4.

When F.A. Hayek first visited the United States, he wrote of his great pleasure and relief to be able to discuss advanced economics with his American peers, rather than constantly debating the foundations as he had gotten used to in the Mises Circle. I can sympathize with Hayek's feelings, but of course the advanced economics he was discussing was with people with a narrow sense of the range of options. For the Americans, there was a neoclassical consensus on the intersubjective quantification of value, the proper role of mathematics, and the proper philosophy of science. That's all fine, but did Hayek realize that the advanced theory could all be wrong if the foundational assumptions were wrong?

OK, here's what instigated this ramble on the narrow spectra of assumed options. Before going on vacation, Wally Conger recommended a great science fiction podcast magazine called Escape Pod. I started listening to it over the weekend and I've already clicked the PayPal button to give my support. But this snippet of commentary at the end of one of the podcasts just irritated the hell out of me:

Our featured listener this week is Warrant Officer Al Marshal, a longbow Apache Gun Pilot assigned to the 1-101st Aviation Regiment from Fort Campbell Kentucky. Right now he and his comrades are stationed at an airfield a few miles outside Tikrit in Iraq. He's ordered one of our CDs, and of course the military address caught my eye. He tells me he's been listening to podcasts since last spring, and he tells me his favorites are Escape Pod, the books at PodioBooks.com, and Scott Sigler's books. He says there are several soldiers in his unit who listen to audio books and whom he'll be sharing our CD with. Now that I know that, Al, I'll be sending you a few more. All politics and war opinions aside, I have the highest respect for people -- of any nation -- who choose to devote their lives to the service of their country. And if what we're doing here can provide any degree of entertainment and make a hard job marginally easier, it is an honor and a privilege. So thank you, Al. Do good, and stay safe.

No, no, no. I'm sorry. You can't combine the concepts of "all politics and war opinions aside" with "people -- of any nation -- who choose to devote their lives to the service of their country."

First of all, the very claim that a soldier is acting in the service of his or her country already is a political opinion! Some of us don't see participation in the military as "service" in any way that you're implying. Some of us don't automatically equate the nation with the state. Feel free to do so, but don't pretend you're not taking a position.

In fact, I'm guessing that this guy's stated conditions of respect won't stand up to scrutiny even if we accept all assumptions about nation, state, and service. Does he respect the Chinese soldiers who invaded Tibet? Does he respect the Soviet soldiers who invaded Afghanistan? How about the soldiers under Saddam when he invaded Kuwait? (I'm not mentioning the Germans and Poland for fear I'll be accused of succumbing to Godwin's Law.)

If so -- if our Escape Pod host really does have the highest respect for all these rank-and-file invaders -- then his announcement is a bit chilling ... certainly not the sort of thing I expect to hear tossed in casually at the end of a podcast.

And if not, then he is requiring all of us to start with the position that the invasion of Iraq was less morally reprehensible. Again, that's not putting "all politics and war opinions aside".

Free Audiobook of the Month Club

I don't do advertising on this blog. I doubt I have the traffic to really benefit from it, but even if I did, I suspect I'd still refrain for aesthetic reasons. I do link to books, CDs, and t-shirts over there on the right margin, but those are all personal endorsements. If you get one of those things and don't love it, then my recommendation has failed you and you can feel free to write me and complain. That's not a money-back guarantee or anything, but at least there's a real person and his real opinion standing behind that small set of products. The blog advertising schemes I've seen don't seem to offer anything of the sort.

Not too often, but sometimes I get requests from companies to link to their site or product. I almost never do. Here's an exception:

Hey B.K. I noticed that you linked to our site from your blog on November 25th and wanted to thank you for this. We?re a new company and every mention helps!

I also wanted to let you know that we just launched a new Free Audiobook of the Month Club. I thought that you may want to share this with your audience. More info can be found here:

http://www.learnoutloud.com/freeaudiobookclub

Thanks again for the link and I wish you the best.

Jon Bischke
CEO/Founder, LearnOutLoud.com
___@learnoutloud.com
Cell: (310) 351-____ | Office: (310) 458-____
Learn to Love Your Commute @
www.learnoutloud.com
What I'm listening to:
A Knock at Midnight by Martin Luther King, Jr.
The Success Principles by Jack Canfield
The Venture Voice Podcast

C is for ...

Back in my previous professional incarnation, I managed the development of Sesame Street's 30th Anniversary Trivia Game.

Having grown up on Sesame Street, I found the project warmly nostalgic and quite rewarding.

There were a few new faces among the muppet cast of our trivia game, but mostly it was my old friends.

As my babymomma and I start window-shopping for baby clothes, toys, children's books, nursery sets, etc., I find I have an ambivalent reaction to all the Disney and Sesame Street merchandise. I'm not nearly so anti- "commercial culture" as I once was, and I like the idea of my child having the same characters in his or her life as I did. But I also wonder how much authority we're unwittingly handing over to those whose values and agenda are different from ours.

This sort of thing is especially present for me as I begin to look into homeschooling. As much as secular homeschooling is taking off, the foundation of the movement is still Christian, and despite the far superior academic results of an at-home education, the primary motive for teaching the kids at home is still sociological: they don't want the Enemy's message infecting their children.

I find I don't have to be religious to sympathize. All it takes is a strong belief contrary to the mainstream ideology. Their enemy is Satan; mine is the State.

I was schooled in statism. If you think the idea is paranoid, I can only imagine that statism is still your unquestioned foundational assumption.

Going back through some old articles on Mises.org, I find this ominous piece of recent history:

For many years, voluntary compliance has been falling. In anticipation of this problem, the Census Bureau has been relying on wholly owned sectors of society to propagandize for its campaign. The Sesame Street character named Count von Count is touring public schools to tell the kids to tell their parents to fill out the census, even as more than 1 million census kits have been sent to public schools around the country. Think of it as the state using children to manipulate their parents into becoming volunteers in the civic planning project.

"The Census and Despotism"
by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.

future lawyers

boingboing via Tim Swanson

who whom

I'm with Huey Freeman on this one:


(Click to Enlarge)

Lew Rockwell on immigration

This is what I've been waiting to hear:

Caller: What do you think of securing our borders? I'm reading in the Constitution right now, in [Article 1,] Section 8, "To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions." Simply put, our nation is being conquered by illegals coming over the border, and OTMs -- Other Than Mexicans. So what do you think of border security?

Lew Rockwell: Well you know it's a very interesting point. The immigration policy of the country was deliberately changed in 1965 by a law that Johnson signed, that Hubert Humphrey and Teddy Kennedy (who's still around) wrote to change the demographics of the country.... This is not a coincidence this all happened ... they actually set out ... and there were many think tanks writing papers about why this should happen ... to change the demographics of the country. I don't know if it's a huge social experiment we're undergoing, but you know ... this is the way the government has designed it. I'll make that point.

The second point is that unfortunately the people who are advocating border control tend to want to put businessmen in jail for hiring an illegal. They want to give more power to the federal prosecutors, more supervision by the federal government, put more people in jail, more cops, more spies and so forth. You know, I don't think that's the way either. I must say I'm not entirely sure what to do.

One thing I think we should all be able to agree on is that nobody should be able to come here and go on welfare.

Caller: Exactly!

Lew: Nobody should be able to come here and go to public school, be allowed to have Medicaid, get AFDC and all the rest of these either state or national healthcare programs. That should help some.

On the other hand, a lot of people come here to work. People want to hire them. I wish that we would do a lot to make the cost of doing business here in this country lower so there'd be more people hired, more businesses started, more profits made and more prosperity, but ... even though I think you're making a legitimate point, I worry about the idea that we should further empower the federal government. I don't think there's any excuse ever to give the federal government more power for any reason whatsoever! I don't care what the excuse is. We need to be focused on decommissioning them.

I will just add also in the original American Constitution -- the original American Constitutional setup until the Supreme Court changed it in the 1840s and especially after the Civil War -- citizenship and immigration were matters for the states. It wasn't a federal matter at all. So I think that again, the federal government messes up everything it touches and I guess that includes immigration as well.

Host: That is a great answer!

Karen Kwiatkowski Interviews Lew Rockwell

The emphasis was Lew's.

And I repeat:

"I don't think there's any excuse ever to give the federal government more power for ANY REASON WHATSOEVER! I don't care what the excuse is. We need to be focused on decommissioning them."

left-right anarchist baby club

I found this very angry looking anarcho-infant on one of Roderick Long's web pages. As fond as I am of the circle-A symbol, especially white on black like that, I can't help but think that the years of association with punk and vandalism have contributed to this little one's obvious disctonent.

Now contrast with the clear well-adjustedness of this Rothbardian baby:


(Yes, yes -- papa's got babies on the brain.)

Clinton was right!

From my favorite Christian lawyer:

I was overcome with a deep sense of pride when I read the Atlantic Monthly article about how adolescent girls are more apt than ever to engage in fellatio and that they don't even consider it sex. This comes many decades too late for me, but I like to think that the small part I played in the War on Chastity back in the 1970s contributed to this glorious moment. The campaign that my cohort waged to convince the mothers of these girls that fellatio was (a) not sex and accordingly not Biblically prohibited and (b) not disgusting seems to have paid off. To the teenaged boys of America, I say "You're Welcome". No, don't thank us. There is no need to publish tomes about our being the "real greatest generation"; just knowing that teenage fellatio has reached "epidemic" proportions is thanks enough.

[read more]

why I blog

quote of the week

"It's impossible to quantify suffering and liberty, but I think that it's Austrian enough to say that, ceteris paribus, fewer innocents caged is better than more."

-- Anthony Gregory

maximize the contradictions

Why, in the late 1960s and early 1970s did American Maoists support Richard Nixon for president?

No, it wasn't because they recognized him as the person most likely to grow the central government, socialize the "environment," close the gold window, completely screw up the market pricing system, and make peace with Red China.

Believe it or not, the Reds thought Nixon represented the epitome of capitalist evil. They claimed that only by "maximizing the contradictions" of the capitalist system, would the West finally progress to glorious revolution.

In the West, on the Left, this was the central controversy: did half-measures move The People closer to or further away from real socialism? Sure there were also disagreements on the fine points of theory; sure these caused constant splintering and in-fighting; but they were nothing compared to the much greater split over questions of strategy.

And in This Movement of Ours?

David Friedman said, "There may be two libertarians somewhere who agree with each other about everything, but I am not one of them." (Thanks to Roderick Long for that quote.)

As with the socialists, libertarian controversy seems greatest on questions of strategy. (And disagreements on points of theory will usually express themselves at some point on questions of strategy. See, for instance, the huge rift between libertarian hawks and libertarian doves!)

Even if all libertarian, free-market anarchists can agree on what the general dimensions of market anarchy would look like (we can't!) there always remain, in the meanwhile, questions about what to support or oppose NOW, while the State is still in charge. (The most stark -- and to me, ugly -- of these splits is on the question of immigration policy.)

Rothbard made it clear where he stood on the Maoist question. Don't promote present suffering in the name of future liberty. A 1% tax cut is better than a 0% tax cut, which is still better than any tax increase. On the other hand, don't accept half-measures that only appear to increase individual liberty while actually growing the State. NAFTA, for instance, seems to liberalize trade, while actually putting all international trade under central management. School vouchers seem to increase options, while in fact moving what's left of independent educational institutions ever further under central government control.

So what do we make of half-measures like shall-issue laws for government gun permits, medical marijuana liberalization, or the recent assisted suicide ruling?

Anthony Gregory says his rule is to count the number of people imprisoned for victimless crimes. More prisoners means a step in the wrong direction; fewer prisoners means liberty has increased, however incrementally. I like that rule, as such rules go. It's much better than counting dollars, IMHO, in those situations where both numbers are available. But Sheldon Richman seems to think medical marijuana laws are a step in the wrong direction, as is the assisted suicide law. Where Gregory would point to the declining number of peaceful people categorized as criminals, Richman says that both laws grow the Therapeutic State. You can see the beginning of their exchange on the subject here.

To their credit, there is not much heat to the exchange. Unfortunately, as of this writing, I don't yet see much light, either.

3-winged beast

In his LRC piece on the American Right's reactions to contemporary visions of the ancient Crusades, historian Scott Trask gives the following political taxonomy:

There are three kinds of American conservatives: the neoconservatives, who supply the brains for the Republican governing coalition; the theoconservatives, more commonly known as the religious right, who supply the votes (and much of the cannon fodder); and the paleoconservatives, a dissenting minority, intellectually formidable, who are without much influence.

What's interesting to me is the shifting allegiance of the "theos". Back in the 1990s, the Religious Right was willing to ally with the libertarian-influenced, decentralist minarchists known as the paleoconservatives. This was in large part because the theos saw a Big Government Leftist at the helm and believed that their interests were best served by devolution of federal power.

(I'm a bit foggier on this part, but I think the theos split on the Israel question, some thinking the Holy Land had to be protected from dark heathens and therefore supporting the globalist neocons, some thinking Israel was fundamentally none of our business and recognizing that an activist foreign policy helped grow the big central government whose cultural agenda they feared, and some probably just plain old-fashioned Jew-haters.)

But now that their guy is in the Whitehouse, the theoconservatives just love them some big central government. The more arbitrary the authority, the better for God's agent on earth. Never particularly steadfast on foreign policy, they've now fully embraced the Old Testament bloodlust of the administration.

I know more than one Rothbardian who now regrets ever having had anything to do with these people. And I find even the paleocons a little creepy.

couldn't be more proud

Today

my cat

threw up

all over

a tax form!

killing me softly

Apropos my reservations about Murray Rothbard's comments on "Doctor Death," FEE has this in today's mailing:

Oregon Assisted-Suicide Law Upheld by Supreme Court
1/17/2006
"The Supreme Court, with Chief Justice John Roberts dissenting, upheld Oregon's one-of-a-kind physician-assisted suicide law Tuesday, rejecting a Bush administration attempt to punish doctors who help terminally ill patients die." (New York Times, Tuesday)

These disputes arise only because government controls the medical system and access to drugs.

FEE Timely Classic
"Kevorkian, Lies, and Suicide" by Thomas Szasz

I'm a fan of libertarian psychiatrist Thomas Szasz. Given his condemnation of Kevorkian, I should perhaps rethink my impression that Rothbard was jerking his right knee on the subject.

Szasz claims that "assisted suicide" is an oxymoron. No more so than "victimless crime" say I.

My guiding principle on questions of crime is pretty simple: Who's the victim? Whose rights were violated and how?

Both Rothbard and Szasz would say I have the right to kill myself, which would imply that there is no victim in the voluntary act of suicide. If I contract with someone else to pull the trigger, for whatever reasons, who's the victim?

Szasz at least implies a possible answer:

Eventually, Kevorkian's luck ran out and he was sent to prison for his crimes to which he appears to have been driven by his megalomaniacal vanity. Has he killed himself by self-starvation, as he promised he would? No. Either he has changed his mind or he never meant what he said. If he changed his mind, he has availed himself of precisely that option which he denied his victims.

But the problem of changing one's mind is present in all contracts. It is present in all irreversible acts, whether assisted or not. I can see that as a reason for paternalists to oppose all sorts of voluntary arrangements, but how is relevant to libertarians? I feel disoriented. I just don't get it.

(My rather stronger reservations about "the Rothbard Crime Program" I'll write about at a later date.)

clay feet and a jerky knee

If you search this site for the string "Rothbard" you'll find hundreds of hits.

They are all admiration for my hero.

But some of what he had to say is pretty embarrassing to me.

Minor stuff includes Rothbard's unfortunate opinions about music. Using the language of apodictic certainty without evident irony on questions of aesthetic taste does not strike me as charming. I think it hurts one's credibility on topics where we can talk about a priori truths. (I consider this point independent of the fact that Rothbard disliked bebop, while Dizzy and Miles are two of my favorite musicians.)

Today's podcast from Mises.org provides a less minor disappointment. It is a great summary of everything wrong with the Clintons and the Clintonians, but it's not unreasonable to come away from the talk with the impression that Rothbard supported police brutality and opposed voluntary contracts with Dr. Kevorkian.

I don't know how to account for it. The paleo alliance is not enough of an explanation, since it was only ever supposed to be about playing up points of agreement between plumbline libertarianism and the post-Cold War version of the Old Right, not about playing along with their law-and-order nonsense or being soft in any other way on paleoconservative statism.

In general, I don't think Rothbard was guilty of what Roderick Long calls "libertarians' costly inheritance from their long alliance with conservatives against the genuine menace of state socialism," but I guess by the 1990s his knee did occasionally jerk to the right.

dream snippets and false memories

I have a false memory of riding my motorcycle through Miami in January of 1989, hours before the riots started.

The part about the motorcycle is definitely false because I didn't get my first bike until 1991. The part about "hours before" is probably dramatic exaggeration, though certainly not intentional. The part about me driving through Miami in January of 1989 is true, as is the part about the riots.

My father was living in the Everglades that year and my roommate from the Israeli kibbutz (1987) was living in Orlando but visiting his family in Miami. I remember his father trying to convince me that the 2nd Amendment had nothing to do with citizens' rights.

I can't remember whether or not I visited the Keys that time. The Florida Keys are some of the most beautiful stretches of land and ocean and sky I've ever seen and I've often dreamed of being able to live there.


Anyway, when the riots started, I was safely back in a trailer park in the swamp. Airboats and alligators. And lots and lots of Georgia construction workers. The place was basically a small handful of local Floridians serving a population of south Georgia families living in trailers while the family dads paved over the Everglades. My own dad was the outsider of the community, though he was trying not to be too conspicuous. In his trailer, he was writing never-to-be-published science fiction novels and listening to jazz, while in the other trailers, everyone was ... well, doing very different things.

The other person I would have guessed was an outsider -- but my guess would have been wrong -- was a strikingly beautiful black girl. Teenager. She seemed to fit right in, despite the fact that she was the only black person I ever saw in the Everglades. She had an exaggerated red-neck accent of the south Georgia variety, and seemed to be taking the lead in loudly decrying what "the niggers in Miami" were up to. At the time I assumed she was scared and playing her role well for survival, but looking back on it, I suppose it's possible she really did identify more with the white racist swamp kids than she did with those Big City blacks down in Miami.

I've had a couple of periods of manual labor in my life. And another couple of periods working among the lowest stratum of semi-skilled labor. The hardest part for me was always dealing with chit-chat. One of the things I liked about the Israeli kibbutz was that no one expected you to say anything. Just work hard and you were fine. I was able to find a similar kind of peace among housekeeping women. They all talked to each other constantly, but I was rarely asked my opinion and never expected to chime in. (I remember listening to a room full of middle-aged black women on break, all agreeing with each other that they'd be voting for Reagan because they didn't like the fact that Mondale had picked Geraldine Ferraro as vice-presidential candidate. These women were of a mind on the question of whether or not a woman could handle that level of power.)

Anyway, in the Florida swamps, the chit-chat was about fishing and beer and engines and a long list of other topics about which I was completely ignorant, but as Martin Luther King day neared, conversation all turned to a single topic.

Standard question: What do you think of Martin Luther King?

Standard answer: Oh, he was just another nigger!

Just another 'nigger'? Just ... another ... 'NIGGER'?! Martin Luther King was one of the greatest men of the 20th century, black, white, or etc. (My poor father had to talk me out of starting trouble. He had to live there. I was just passing through.) Did these yokels want to go back to Jim Crow? Did skin color really trump all other considerations?

Well, anyone who's read "dreams can be deceiving" -- my MLK2 blog post from last year -- already knows I don't think nearly so highly of the man anymore. His legacy is mixed, at best.

It makes sense for Lew Rockwell to link to one of King's anti-war speeches today. Might as well use his absurd level of cultural authority to embarrass the neocon hawks. (You do realize that MLK is a neocon hero, right? Maybe it's based only on the most superficial understanding of his best-known sound bites, but how many of his admirers on the Left can claim differently?)

I just can't play along with the celebration. I'm not content to pick and choose what to play up and what to ignore. I still give the guy a thumbs down.

In the 1980s, I was horrified by the resistance to declaring Martin Luther King Junior Day. Now I wish I'd known enough back then to join the resistance.

the care and feeding of a needle-sharp intellect

I'm looking over a file I started a couple years ago called NotesToMyChildren. It's addressed to hypothetical future offspring, but it is in fact a list of points I want to remember when I'm homeschooling.

Some of the items on the list seemed appropriate to talk about on the babyblog. This one definitely belongs here instead:

Quoting from Walter Block's Defending the Undefendable:

At the present time, with the intense discussion on the evils of heroin addiction, it is well to heed the old adage -- "listen to both sides of the story." Among the many reasons for this, and perhaps most important, is the fact that if everyone is against something (particularly heroin addiction), one can assume that there is something which can be said in its favor. Throughout mankind's long and disputatious history, the majority opinion has, the majority of the time, been wrong.

On the other hand, even those who agree with the majority opinion should also welcome an attack upon it. The best way to teach the verities of life, according to the Utilitarian John Stuart Mill, is by hearing the opposition. Let the position be challenged, and let the challenge fail. This method was considered by Mill to be so important that he recommended inventing a challenging position, if a real one was not forthcoming, and presenting it as convincingly as possible. Thus, those who believe in the unmitigated evils of heroin addiction should be eager to hear an argument in favor of it.

random lazy redux

I was searching Google images on the string "notes to my children" to see if I found anything interesting to use in my babyblog post of a similar name. I didn't find anything I wanted to use, but I did find a couple of unexpected images, given what I was looking for.

This does happen on occasion.

Strange image #1 was (I kid you not) this picture of the late Sam Konkin, aka SEK3, spiritual leader of the Left Rothbardians and founder of the MLL.

The hit seems to be a result of the phrases "New Libertarian Notes" and "the Narnian children's books".


Strange image #2 comes from the through- the- cultural- looking- glass world of Brazil. It was on a page discussing album covers and liner notes.

OK, half the puzzle solved. What about the other half? Turns out this Tiazinha was "a whip toting, S&M masked, bikini clad Children's TV host." Again, I'm not making this up.

Go ahead. Do an image search on "Tiazinha" ... I dare you ...

live music

Here's an addendum to my previous post.

I got an invitation today to join an old friend in California for a live performance by Dave Brubeck and sons. It's tempting.

I saw Miles Davis live. B.B. King, too.

I saw Dizzy Gillespie perform live, though I was standing outside the packed jazz club, peeking in through the window, which the club had covered with newspapers to prevent me from doing what I was doing. No problem hearing through the glass. I probably heard it better than the people in the back of the club, since the stage was right by the window.

I've driven a few hours to hear certain musicians who were passing near my part of the continent. A friend and I even drove 12 hours to Atlanta to hear a couple of sets at a bar and then drive 12 hours back. (Actually, the trip was more like 19 hours for my friend who had to drive 7 hours to pick me up first.)

But those days are behind me. One of the less profound reasons I look forward to fatherhood is so my kid will provide me with a better excuse than just being an old fuddy duddy.

---

Postscript

And just as I finish this post, this song comes on the "radio" (meaning the Storyville internet jazz feed):

Don't Get Around Much Anymore

(Lyrics by Bob Russel, Music by Duke Ellington)

Missed the Saturday dance
Heard they crowded the floor
Couldn't bear it without you
Don't get around much anymore

Thought I'd visit the club
Got as far as the door
They'd have asked me about you
Don't get around much anymore

Darling, I guess my mind's more at ease
But nevertheless, why stir up memories

Been invited on dates
Might have gone but what for
Awfully different without you
Don't get around much anymore

memorex

I have a friend who has requested that I unlink to his blog.

I don't take it personally. He's asked everyone to unlink.

He wants his privacy and doesn't want to bother setting up a private blog, so he seeks security through obscurity.

This allows me to pretend that I wrote the following, and you don't know any better:

I'm not one to really go out much. I had a time in my twenties when I would see concerts and plays and things. I'd even travel to other cities for shows. But these days I'm pretty much a Stay at Home/Be Alone/Do My Own Thing kind of guy. I remember there was this one show I was at for some regional band that had come to town.... I was holding a mediocre beer that I'd paid too much for. The place was crowded and sweaty. The handful of chairs were taken. People were trying to crowd surf and were getting thrown out by the bouncers. The sound was for shit (Duh!), I was hungry (but not enough to pay too much for bad bar food), and my feet hurt. Plus just about everyone around me was younger, thinner, and prettier than I, and for the first time I felt like I was on the other side of an age gap. Right then I thought, "You know, if I had this band's CD, I could be sitting at home, relaxed, fed, listening to it, and able to enjoy both them and myself better."

gun culture & intellectual culture

Does everyone already know the story of this book? I'd never heard anything about it before listening to a Ralph Raico lecture a couple years ago, but I'm not a good test case. Having once been something of an NPR-junkie, I now actively avoid all exposure to the mainstream media.

Short version: leftist academic makes huge splash with shocking historical discovery: there never was a gun culture in America before the 20th century; nope, never happened; it was all made up by Republicans seeking the votes of gun nuts. After big splash comes big embarrassment. Leftist academic made it all up. Anyone who bothers to double-check his sources finds that there is no evidence for his conclusions.

Here's the scary part:

Who was responsible for unearthing the truth? Not the prestigious review committee. They only certified what had been discovered by people like Clayton Cramer and Joseph Stromberg, and others from gun-rights organizations. These were not exactly establishment sources, and they were going up against all leading literary reviews and even the National Endowment of the Humanities, which had thrown its weight behind the Emory historian. This was a case of David and Goliath.

Lew Rockwell, "Bellesiles: the Larger Context"

Once you let that sink in, you might take some comfort from Lew's conclusion:

[...] The political paradigm that has limitless faith in the power of government, and no confidence in the ability of individuals to manage their own affairs, has been robbed of its biggest break in many years.

People ask if there is any reason for libertarians to be confident. If you understand the sociology of ideas, it is easy to see that the statist project is running out of intellectual steam. It survives mainly due to the momentum it gathered during and after World War II. But it has no new source of strength other than its domination of existing structures of power, and without intellectual life and vibrancy, it is profoundly vulnerable.

Saying that statism has lost intellectual energy is not to claim assurance of the final victory of its opposite, of course. But we must not rule out the possibility. [...]

See also The Journalist's Guide to Gun Policy Scholars.

(Yes, yes, I know. This isn't exactly breaking news. I never claimed my blog would be topical.)

politics isn't pretty

If you follow the link from the Hooters image in the previous post, you'll eventually find silhouette images like Apple's award-winning iPod campaign, but with bikini babes. I think it's a clever derivative.

In my previous professional incarnation, I had several opportunities to go to conferences and expos. I saw my first "booth babes" in Las Vegas. While standing in a long line at one point, I got to eavesdrop on 3 blondes running a booth for some router manufacturer. I got the distinct impression that their regular job was as strippers and that they were just going back and forth that week between the club and the expo. I guess that makes Las Vegas a good place to hold a conference.

A few years later, at a different conference in a different branch of the industry, I knew the people in charge of setting up the expo booth for a computer game company. This time we were all in Atlanta. Apparently the game company didn't call the modeling agencies early enough. All of Atlanta's models were already booked, many of them working as booth babes for other companies. So the people I know ended up (1) hiring specialty models, like upscale middle-aged jewelry print-ad and junior miss types, (2) shipping some New York City strippers down to Atlanta. That's a story for another time.

So booth babes help sell network packet routers and online multiplayer games. Hooters uses local hotties to sell fried food. As I wrote about in my article, cartelized airlines used to use sexy stews to lure upscale business passengers away from each other.

Maybe what anarchism is missing is sex appeal. I'm not suggesting that the anarchist theorists should themselves be sexier -- any more than I'd suggest that circuit board designers, game coders, or fry cooks be selected for bedroom appeal. I just think maybe it's time to take a lesson from Madison Avenue. This idea will be less repellent for my comrades in the anarcho-capitalist camp, but I figure I'll have to sell it to the lefties. For example, I think bikini babes are just what's needed to promote the ideas of 19th-century Russian anarchists, whether communist, militant, or pacifist.



No, I don't think it obscures the central message. I think it grabs the attention of the fence-sitting archist, especially the statist male heterosexuals.

Or maybe I was just in the mood to play with cheesecake images in photoshop.

beef stew

I got a handful of thank-yous and compliments on my Mises.org stewardess article, as well as the usual Marxoid dissents from the Left for daring to imply that deregulation was a good thing, but mostly I got complaints from the Right that I was blaming the free market for the crimes of feminism, unions, and anti-discrimination lawsuits.

To one fellow who challenged what he believed was my claim that airline deregulation has made the industry efficient, I replied:

Deregulation is relative. We certainly didn't get a free market in air travel. In fact, I'd argue that the airlines weren't deregulated, but just decartelized. Competition introduced greater efficiency, but when the federal government is willing to bail out failing airlines, municipal governments run the airports themselves as mixed economies, unions continue to enjoy political privilege at the expense of consumers and property owners, and practically everything that isn't regulated is subject to lawsuits that have nothing to do with contract, we're nowhere close to seeing what the discipline of a free market would produce.

I never meant to suggest that the status quo is efficient or just, only better than what went before. And only in some respects.

To those who claimed I was too soft on politically privileged feminism, I ended up using the same reply, slightly modified for context. Its basic form:

I'm confident unions and lawsuits have plenty to do with it. But they are also the answers everyone seems to know. The phenomenon no doubt has multiple contributing causes, and I wanted to focus on the one I never heard anyone (other than Tom DiLorenzo) talk about.

Walter Block, whose claim that I had only covered half the story was by far the most diplomatic of that batch, ended up giving the perfect summary, I think:

"The price fixing was responsible for hiring pretty stews in the first place, the anti-discrimination laws for not allowing them to be fired as they got older."

That's why he's a famous Austro-libertarian scholar and I'm not.



(A couple of people pointed me to HootersAir.com.)

10+1

Thanks to Laurence M. Vance for reminding us what today is.

To mark the 11th anniversary of the man's passing, I've decided to change the BlackCrayon image of MNR to something less grumpy.

Here's his page.

And here's my RIP from a year ago today.

Marx's virtue

• "In the long run, we are all dead."
• evil magicians

let it snow let it snow let it snow

Snow is beautiful. Snow on mountains is beautiful. Inches and inches of snow on tall pine trees especially so.

I don't know if we're snowed in or plowed in, but we're stuck in either way.

Fortunately, our impromptu holiday comes with fire wood and a full stock of supplies for now.

Dialed in on a slow connection. No cellphone signal whatsoever. No radio signal, no television signal, but plenty of books. I don't exactly miss civilization, not even for broadband.

I had no idea the stewardess article would go up today. No time to reply to email or blog comments yet. Oh well.

lowercase marcus

Happy New Year!



Papa's little anarchist should be born mid-2006.

Wish us luck.

[Cross-posted to lowercase marcus.]