The Sudden Curve

Browne is Baaaaack

I knew Harry Browne long before he recieved his second 15 minutes of fame as the twice nominated presidential candidate of the Libertarian Party. His first fame came in the seventies, when as an investment writer, financial analyst and market commentator he had the Midas touch.

Glad to say that his classic books are being republished in downloadable form at bargain prices:

Harry Browne was the first and only Presidential candidate in cycle 2000 that I recall who'd stood up definitively proclaiming, for the record, that there would be no Y2K Crisis.

BTW - Snatching up a few of his publications is personal prevention for the next dotbomb on the horizon ...

Plan Omega

EMILIO LARGO, No. 1, was a big, conspiciously handsome man of about forty. He was a Roman and he looked like a Roman, not from the Rome of today, but from the Rome of the ancient coins.

Largo was an adventurer, a predator on the herd. Two hundred years before he would have been a pirate -not one of the jolly ones of the story books, but a man like Blackbeard, a bloodstained cutthroat who scythed his way through people toward gold. But Blackbeard had been too much of a bully and roughneck, and wherever he went in the world he left behind a tell-tale shambles. Largo was different. There was a cool brain and an exquisite finesse behind his actions that had always saved him from the herd's revenge -from his postwar debut as head of the black market in Naples, through five lucrative years smuggling from Tangier, five more master-minding the wave of big jewel robberies on the French Riviera, down to his last five with SPECTRE. Always he got away with it. Always he had seen the essential step ahead that would have been hidden from lesser men. Here was the epitome of the gentleman crook -a man of the world, a great womanizer, a high liver, with the entree to cafe society in four continents, and the last survivor, conveniently enough, of a once famous Roman family whose fortune, so he said, he had inherited. He had also benefitted from having no wife, a spotless police record, nerves of steel, a heart of ice, and the ruthlessness of a Himmler. He was the perfect man for SPECTRE, and the perfect man, rich Nassau playboy and all, to be Supreme Commander of Plan Omega.

Thunderball
Ian Fleming,
1961
Original screen treatment by K. McClary, J Whittingham and Ian Fleming

The View Beyond Mars

THE HUMAN RACE will have to be always on guard, most especially about twenty-five years from now if we don't come back but the flying saucers do.

We don't know why the titan monsters follow the twenty-nine-year-cycle of Saturn's "year," but they do. The reason may be simple; we ourselves have many cycles that match the Earth year. We hope that they are active only at one period of their "year"; if they are, Operation Vengence may have easy pickings. Not that we are counting on it. I am going out, heaven help us, as an "applied psychologist (exotic,)" but I am also a combat trooper, as is every one of us, from chaplain to cook. This is for keeps and we intend to show those slugs that they made the mistake of tangling with the toughest, meanest, deadliest, most unrelenting - and ablest - form of life in this section of space, a critter that can be killed but can't be tamed.

Whether we make it or not, the human race has got to keep up its well-earned reputation for ferocity. The price of freedom is the willingness to do sudden battle, anywhere, anytime, and with utter recklessness. If we did not learn that from the slugs, well- "Dinosaurs, move over! We are ready to become extinct!"

For who knows what dirty tricks may be lurking around this universe? The slugs may be simple and open and friendly compared with, let us say, the natives of the planets of Sirius. If this is just the opener, we had better learn from it for the main event. We thought space was empty and that we were automatically the lords of creation; even after we "conquered" space we thought so, for Mars was already dead and Venus had not really gotten started. Well if Man wants to be top dog -or even a respected neighbor- he'll have to fight for it. Beat the plowshares back into swords; the other was a maiden aunt's fancy.

Every one of us who is going has been possessed at least once. Only those who have been hagridden can know how tricky the slugs are, how constantly one must be on guard -or how deeply one must hate.

We are about to transship. I feel exhilarated. Puppet masters -the free men are coming to kill you! Death and Destruction!

The Puppet Masters
Robert Heinlein
1951

The Vindication of Fra' Jacques

"I THINK it only right that at so solemn a moment, when my life has so little time to run, I should reveal the deception which has been practised and speak up for the truth. Before heaven and earth with all of you here as my witnesses, I admit that I am guilty of the grossest iniquity. But the iniquity is that I have lied in admitting the disgusting charges laid against the Order. I declare, and I must declare, that the Order is innocent. Its purity and saintliness are beyond question. I have indeed confessed that the Order is guilty, but I have done so only to save myself from terrible tortures by saying what my enemies wished me to say. Other knights who have retracted their confessions have been led to the stake, yet the thought of dying is not so awful that I shall confess foul crimes which have never been commited. Life is offered to me, but at the price of infamy. At such a price, life is not worth having. I do not grieve that I must die if life can be bought only by piling one lie upon another."

Jacques de Molay,
Grand Master of the Poor Knights of the Temple of Solomon
Speaking from the scaffold to the People's Assembly,
Notre-Dame du Paris,
14 March, 1314

Fight For Bovine Freedom

Planning on grilling over Labor Day? Notsofastthere, Buckarooo.

Think again ... the playing field has been leveled:

Cows with Guns!

Out, out, drat'd Wyrms!

Blast!
Sobig!
Nachi!
Aaarrrggghhhh!

Return to connectivity,
can't tell how long it will last.
Just time to borrow Perseus' shield,
and enter the gorgon's lair ...

"Shhh, be vewy, vewy kwai-it, I'm hunting worms "

Dr Faustus, I presume ...

One of today's leading thinkers in the realm of political economy (shunned by the media and the oligarchy - natch) Hans Herman Hoppe gives us a brief outline of National Greatness under the Habsburgs. Too bad, the Germans tossed out the Ancient Regime Baby as they bathed in Bismarckism and didn't have the sense to listen to

Goethe

The Politics of Obedience:

RESOLVE to serve no more, and you are at once freed. I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break in pieces.

The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude
Etienne de La Boetie
1553

Twenty Years After

Chapter I

THE PHANTOM OF RICHELIEU

In a room of the Palais-Cardinal which we already know, near a table with silver gilt corners, loaded with papers and books, a man was sitting, his head resting in his hands.

Behind him was a vast fireplace, red with fire, whose blazing brands were crumbling upon large gilded firedogs. The light from this fire illumined from behind the magnificent dress of this dreamer, and the light from a candelabra filled with candles illumined it in front.

To see this red gown and these rich laces, to see this forehead pale and bent down in meditations, to see the solitude of this cabinet, the silence of the antechambers, the measured step of the guards upon the landing, one could well believe that the ghost of Cardinal Richelieu was still in his chamber.

Alas, it was in fact, only the shadow of the great man. France, enfeebled, the authority of the king disregarded, the great nobles again strong and turbulent, the enemy once more on this side of the frontiers, everything bore testimony that Richelieu was no longer there.

But that which showed still more than all else that the red gown was not that of the old cardinal was this isolation, which seemed, as we have said rather that of a phantom than of a living person; it was the mocking expressions which came up from the streets and penetrated the windows of this chamber shaken by the breath of a whole city leagued against the minister; it was, in fine, the distant sound, continually renewed, of firearms, discharged happily without aim or effect, and only to show the guards, the Swiss, the musketeers, and the soldiers who surrounded the Palais-Royal - for the Palais-Cardinal itself had changed its name - that the people also had arms.

This phantom of Richelieu was Mazarin. Now, Mazarin was alone, and felt himself to be weak ...

Alexander Dumas
Vingt ans apres, serialised in Le Siecle, 1845.
This translation by William Robson, 1856.

The Two Cultures

After contemplating the culture and manners of the underclass of 2003, Fred Reed decides that he has more respect for dirt, after all, at least "you can grow plants in it."

Here's his elitist lament:

Hook 'em, Horns!

THE TEXAS LONGHORN made more history than any other breed of cattle the civilized world has known. As an animal in the realm of natural history, he was the peer of bison or grizzly bear. As a social factor, his influence on men was extraordinary. An economic agent in determining the character and occupation of a territory continental in its vastness, he moved elementally with drouth, grass, blizzards out of the Arctic and the wind from the south. However supplanted or however disparaged by evolving standards and generations, he will remain the bedrock on which the history of the cow country of America is founded. In picturesqueness and romantic realism his name is destined for remembrance as long as the memory of man travels back to those pristine times when waters ran clear, when free grass waved a carpet over the face of the earth, and America's Man on Horseback - not a helmeted soldier, but a booted cowboy - rode over the rim with all the abandon, energy, insolence, pride, carelessness and confidence epitomizing the booming West.

The Longhorns
J. Frank Dobie
Austin, Texas 1940

Damnable REBELS!

"Our situation has undergone very little change since the affair of the 17th of June [the battle of Bunker Hill], except the daily loss of men and officers in the hospitals. I suppose the accounts of that transaction did not meet with credit in England, and that it could not be believed that a thousand men and officers of the bravest troops in the world could in so short a time be cut off by irregulars. After two or three such instances, you good people of old England will find out that five or six thousand men are not sufficient to reduce a country of 1,500 miles in extent, fortified by nature, and where everyman from fifteen to fifty is either a volunteer or compelled to carry arms; amongst whom the number of our countrymen is very great, and they are the most enemies we have to encounter. [The people of England] will find out that some other mode must be adopted than gaining every little hill at the expense of a thousand Englishmen; and if they mean to continue masters of this country, they will lay aside that false humanity towards these wretches which has hitherto been so destructive to us. They must lay aside the notion that hurting America is ruining Great Britain, and they must permit us to restore to them the dominion of the the country by laying it waste, and almost extirpating the present rebellious race, and upon no other terms will they ever possess it in peace."

Captain W.G. Eveyln
(serving with the British forces in New England) to the Hon. Mrs Leveson Gower
19 August, 1775

Gnomedex 3 :: Gnotes, Gnews and Reviews

Fermenting in the cask since July 27, 2003

Nobody don't like Gnomedex -- don't like Chicken on Sunday, baby!

-note - the following are in no particular chronology and have no logical order whatsover due in part to your editors three-day spate of irrational exurberance, foggy memeory, and sensory overload from venturing out of underground parking and into the wide wide world.

Eric Sink - Wow, this is a VERY impressive  presentation by Eric- I didn't see the cardboard cutout's mouth move once.  I have no idea what he is talking about ...  but if somebody ever explains to me what it is, and why I need it - well, you can bet that Eric is where I am going for it, uh, whatever IT is.

TANSTAAFL (from FREE LUNCH Friday) Gee, this guy from the Des Moines, Chamber of Commerce is bow-RING, and I can't believe they booked a speaker who drones on and on about ... whaasat? The Chamber PAID for the lunch? They are big-time backing Gnomedex?  In fact  tomorrow will be declared Lockergnome day in honor of geek boy's birthday?? Weeeeell - YES! YES! Hallelueyeeyaaah!  You preach on, daddy.

Beths's Toys:
(from Saturday) Gee, Beth Goza gots nice toys.  Somebody yell, "FIRE!" so I can swipe that Fujutsu tablet PC when the room clears out - update - Cripes, now she's got some Sony top-o-da-line notebook, and a big ass plasma Teevee - Sheee-iit!

You know, so far everyone around me has won all kinds of neato prizes here at Gnomedex 2003, and I'm reaaal happy for them -  but I haven't won a thing. Hmmm.

NVIDIA  - huh? Okay, I went to the nvidia breakout session on overclocking and I didnt' understand a word of it... luckily my phone started ringing off the , uhmmm - the belt? and since I was sitting in the back row I could step out to answer it and then I was even more lost than when... oh well, nevermind - I just ordered a video card and mother board with their stuff in it. Why? Because they supported Gnomedex and their competitors didn't.  Nuff said.

If Sam is MISTER Gnomedex, why is he dressed like the statue of liberty?

Crap! I still haven't won a thing!  Alltheseotherunworthy specimens of evolution are raking in the swag, but me? Noooooooooooooo!

Crap again, I forgot to collect swizzle sticks from all the bars - I mean, all the adult recreational establishments, I visited in Des Moises... Des Maons,,, Des  Mowns,,, Des - What?  Just kidding, it's DES MOINES.  Des Moines, Iowa!  The absolutely cleanest downtown in America.  In fact, it's so clean that even the bums are perfectly groomed and behaved and well-ordered ... no icky transmittabliness allowed there, and I can testify to that, laws yes, because on Saturday night I saw the bums lined up in front of the Y at the soup kitchen and they were the most goldanged well-behaved bums I've ever seen before.  And I've seen bums!  These bums were even keeping in time with the tambourine.

Des Moines restaraunts -  as for the exotic dining aspects of this middle american mecca, I have to give major kudos to two establishments in particular, the Latin Kings Italian restaurant(superb Chianti - Woof!) this is a real treasure, we took the Marriot shuttle over and I can't wait to do this again for Gnomedex 2004. Also, a top notch restaurant anywhere in the english speaking territories is the 801 Steak and Chop house this place is the best, dead-cowfest I've experienced since that last cattle drive, MOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! Plus, and as if that aint enough for two days, the restaurant in the Renaissance Savery Hotel (sold out by nerds attending Gnomedex) was right up there too with way above average fare and good service with reasonable prices.  Nice bar in thar, as well.

MacCat Blogging with Dvorak - Oops, it's a religion... BURN HIM! BURN HIM!!!! What can you say about John that hasn't been said with Voodooo Reprisal Incantations before?? I fell into the aisle laughing.

Microsoft Movie Night- (friday night) DAMN! I STILL haven't won anything! Hey! for years I've worn a purple batik shirt with gekkos on it just like that champeen surfer dude.  All this geek festy-ness reminds me, that the literal translation in greek of symposium is 'drinking festival.' Why am I reminded of that?

Pirillo's Birthdate Bash -
(saturday night) gosh, everyone should have Googgggle arrange their birthday parties, in fact, I see a whole new direction for that company, forget that silly seach engine crap - become an event organiser. Okay? That'll be my usual $1500 consultation fee - I take Paypal.  The comic Lori hired was really funny, after he warmed up and figured out his audience... And, speaking of Lori - she must have a Dorian Grey type painting somewhere because as the conference wore on, with all the head-aches and stress and hassles and grinding out of schedules and whatnot, she didn't show it a bit.  In fact, she got more gorgeous day by day until her steller, show-stopping  performance of "Mustang Sally" live, onstage, sometime 'round midnight, Saturday, July 26, 2003 in Des Moines, Iowa, USA. Oh yeah, then we'all went to the Penthouse at the Savery on a perfect hot midwestern summer's night.

Where will YOU be next year?  Come on ... the Popular Crowd will be at Gnomedex 2004!

The Golden Age of Neo-cons

Grecian precedents for the actions of post-modern presidents...

For a generation, studying Western Civilisation has been verboten in Publik Skools so it's news to the graduates of that system that Periclesian Athens was not at all representative of ancient or classical greece. As a matter of fact, it was quite the looney bin - although, thanks to it's oligarchists robbing funds from the Delian League it was a looney bin with lots of swank marblework! For a short discourse on some disturbing "coincidences" we'll turn to economist "Scary Gary" North

The rotten dictator of Cuba ...

celebrated yet another crawled-out-from-under-the-rock-day. Yes, Virginia, there is truth to the notion that some things are just too evil to die.

You can be sure that the likes of Ted Turner, Diane Sawyer, George McGovern, Charles Rangel, Steve Speilburg, Oliver Stone, Jesse Ventura, and so on and so forth and all of the rest of the of the dupes, greedheads and collectivists who dote on the poster-boy of communist terrorism don't read Humberto Fontova

But YOU should

The Cremation of Shelley

"Even Byron was silent and thoughtful. We were startled and drawn together by a dull hollow sound that followed the blow of a mattock; the iron had struck a skull, and the body was soon uncovered. Lime had been strewn on it; this, or decomposition, had the effect of staining it of a dark and ghastly indigo colour. Byron asked me to perserve the skull for him; but remembering that he had formerly used one as a drinking-cup, I was determined Shelley's should not be so profaned. The limbs did not separate from the trunk, as in the case of William's body, so that the corpse was removed entire into the furnace. I had taken the precaution of having more and larger peices of timber, in consequence of my experience the day before of the difficulty of consuming a corpse in the open air with our apparatus. After the fire was well kindled we repeated the ceremony of the previous day; and more wine was poured over Shelley's dead body than he had consumed during his life. This with the oil and salt made the yellow flames glisten and quiver. The heat from the sun and fire was so intense that the atmosphere was tremulous and wavy. The corpse fell open and the heart was laid bare. The frontal bone of the skull, where it had been struck with the mattock, fell off; and rested on the red-hot bottom bars of the furnace, the brains literally seethed, bubbled, and boiled as in a cauldron, for a very long time. Byron could not face this scene, he withdrew to the beach and swam off to the Bolivar [his yacht]. Leigh Hunt remained in the carriage. The fire was so fierce as to produce a white heat on the iron, and to reduce its contents to grey ashes. The only portions that were not consumed were some fragments of bones, the jaw, and the skull, but what surprised us all, was that the heart remained entire. In snatching this relic from the fiery furnace, my hand was severely burnt; and had anyone seen me do the act I should have been put into quarantine."

Edward John Trelawny
15 August, 1822

OTZI

Research on Europe's oldest intact prehistoric mummified man reveals the everyday, peace, joy and harmony of the natural life Yes, my oh my, wasn't life lovely before we had all these nasty SUV's and computers and cheese doodles? That Otzi, what a lucky guy he was... I know, let's chuck everything Occidental Civilisation has created in the last four thousand years and go back to tribalism. What? You mean that's what we've been doing for a generation? Oh - how wonderful, Praise Gaia!!!

The Creep Hannity!

LOL!!

Poor ol' "Cutie Pie." He's just been gigged, gutted, grilled and served up steaming on a platter of banana leaves by a blonde harpy from hell

Woof! I hope that that De Coster broad never gets peeved at me. But just in case - I think I'd better get some scraping, bowing and groveling practice in beforehand, "Yes, Karen, whatever you say, Karen. You're right, Karen, forgive me, Karen ..."

Reminds me yet again of why Jodie in her infinite genius created this for all of us dumb guys.

Roistering in Edinburgh

"I received a note from Mr Johnson, that he was arrived at Boyd's Inn, at the head of the Canongate. I went to him directly. He embraced me cordially; and I exulted in the thought that I now had him actually in Caledonia. Mr Scott told me that, before I came in, the Doctor had unluckily had a bad specimen of Scottish cleanliness. He then drank no unfermented liquor. He asked to have his lemonade made sweeter; upon which the waiter, with his greasy fingers, lifted a lump of sugar, and put it into it. The Doctor, in indignation, threw it out of the window. Scott said he was afraid he would have knocked the waiter down. Mr Johnson told me that such another trick was played him at the house of a lady in Paris.

He was to do me the honour to lodge under my roof. Mr Johnson and I walked arm-in-arm, up the High Street, to my house in James' Court; it was a dusky night: I could not prevent his being assailed by the evening effluvia of Edinburgh. I heard a late baronet of some distinction observe, that 'walking the streets of Edinburgh at night was pretty perilous, and a good deal odoriferous'. The peril is much abated, by the care which the magistrates have taken to enforce the city laws against throwing foul water from the windows; but, from the structure of the houses in the old town, which consist of many storeys, in each of which a different family lives, and there being no covered sewers, the odour still continues. a zealous Scotsman would have wished Mr Johnson to be without one of his five senses upon this occasion."

James Boswell, Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides,
14 August, 1773

Huzzah for King Bob

Over the last few months I've been reading a few poly-tickal blogs... some might say that they are postcards from Cloud-Cuckoo Land (not me, of course). The imperial chickenhawk side of the nest has been reprehensible enough as they worship the current presidential Carpet-bagger in Chief (yeah, those're some people who could use a nice big cup of shut-up), but now - not to be outdone, lately, the sado-marxochistic half of the cuckoos' nest've been clucking up to this Howard Dean guy. He is some kind of a NooYawk doctor turned weasel yankee professional politician who in the course of pretending to be appealing as he runs for president did some web logging a week or two ago. Oh, how techie, how messianic!! "He LIKES us, he Likes us." Okay, fine - whatever. Just what we need to do, fall all over ourselves to line up and elect the Mule the first chance we get.

Not seen a thing about actual cutting edge political philosophy and theory out there amongst the blogeratti. Just tired old statist drivel. Wanna' be radical? Learn Hoppe kiddies. Or get on the right track of political economy with human action

In the meantime, we still have King Bob