Quotulatiousness

May 19, 2020

The Karenist coup

Filed under: Government, Health, Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

L. Neil Smith on our current self-inflicted plight:

We find ourselves here, in this particular time and this particular place in the history of our republic, because of a 239-year-old oversight made by the Founding Fathers, in that the first ten amendments to the United States Constitution, commonly known as the Bill of Rights (the name itself is a mistake), contain no penalty clause for those — politicians, bureaucrats, policemen — who violate them. I’m not entirely sure it was accidental, but, as a result, they are violated daily, hourly, as a matter of course, and this Corona Virus farce — many others come to mind — is simply the most recent and most preposterous example.

(The name itself is an error because this document is not a mere list of privileges that the government generously lets the people exercise. Quite the opposite, it is a list of things that the government is absolutely forbidden to do It should have been called the “Bill of Limits”. And if the Founders, who had just fought and won a desperate, bloody war against the world’s most brutal and rapacious super-power, hadn’t meant them to be absolute, then why — for all you “living document” idiots out there — would they have even bothered to write them down?)

All over this bruised and battered country, a flock of mean, moronic, petty tyrants have issued illegal orders to those they clearly regard as the peasantry: stay home, avoid your fellow human beings, and above all, shut down the Machinery of Freedom which we know as capitalism. If it’s ever allowed to start up again, it must strictly be on terms that are essentially Marxist in character. No mere individual can ever again scratch his ass without written government approval and permission. In effect, the left has the revolution — as usual, achieved by somebody else — it has wanted for 180 years, since the days of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon.

What’s more, many otherwise decent and intelligent folks are out there begging for their rulers to let them be free again. I find that repulsive and unAmerican. And to those boobies (including Sean Hannity and Joy Behar) blubbering about patriots bring their weapons to demonstrations, listen up: the Founders meant the government to be intimidated by the people, you hapless buffoons.

My bottom line, here, is that, in the short run, we must free ourselves — now — from what we have to call Faucism. Scientific pleaders like the dictatorial doctor must be made painfully aware that when their pronouncements have clear political and economic consequences, their protests of innocence sound a bit too much like “I was just following orders”.

May 12, 2020

QotD: A jaundiced view of science fiction conventions

Filed under: Gaming, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

When I went to my first science fiction convention […] I noticed a couple of things.

The first was that nobody at these gatherings, at least as far as I could tell, actually read science fiction, or much of anything else.

There were plenty of board gamers. (This was long before computer gaming or even Dungeons and Dragons; the hottest item on CRT was Pong, or early versions of Star Trek eating up mainframe time across the country.) There were plenty of self-proclaimed artists of one kind or another, and hordes of kids — of all ages — who loved to dress up in costumes.

Another thing I noticed was that these conventions, or “cons” as they were called, seemed to be the only social life most of their attendees had, a sort of portable soap opera migrating from city to city throughout the year. The atmosphere was heavy with prehistoric rivalries and hatreds, grudges and vendettas, sometimes going back decades.

Actually, the first thing I noticed — although I was too polite to put it first here — was that the vast bulk (and I use the term advisedly) of female attendees could have used a carload of deodorant and long-term memberships in Weight Watchers. Which, of course, was why events like these were the only social life they had. Nobody else wanted them hanging around.

L. Neil Smith, “The Security Syndrome”, The Libertarian Enterprise, 2005-01-15

April 15, 2020

“Experts” and their “models”

Filed under: Economics, Government, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the latest Libertarian Enterprise, after offering us his current favourite mixed drink recipe, L. Neil Smith gets around to discussing our modern dependence on “experts” wielding their intricate and convoluted computer models to guide our lives:

My preferred variant of Mott’s Clamato … I’ll have to try it with tequila as Neil suggests.

Start with a tall glass of Mott’s Clamato over ice. Many people can’t stand the idea of tomato juice enhanced with sweet clam juice (and some spices), and I won’t try to sell you on it, here. But if you relish it the way I do (I used to buy it by the gallon), then bon appetit! Throw in a healthy shot of tequila — mine is Cuervo Gold, but your mileage may vary. Add a fat slice of lime on the edge of the glass, a slice of lemon, and a slice of orange. The citrus really dresses it up. These are all ingredients I like very much, and together, they take the edge off a day I spent writing 1000 or 2000 words (my record so far is 3200) and let me relax.

At the end of that day, when my lovely and talented wife quits work and comes home — from the dining room, these days — we have a nice, comfortable cocktail hour (she drinks Cuba Libras) and watch Tucker Carlson. Ordinarily, three giant cans of the Budweiser concoction (which is also made with Clamato) will make me the tiniest bit silly. This drink, the Bloody Mermaid (ick) is surprisingly gentle and I have had two and a half so far without embarrassing myself. I love the taste of tequila neat (many don’t), and I would still be doing shooters, except that my loving bride of 36 years won’t let me eat that much salt.

Please enjoy this silly little drink if you can until we’re all free again.

Oh yeah — I couldn’t resist after all. There’s something I need to get off my chest. I’m sure you remember the way “experts” with computer models warned us all about Y2K, and the way it meant the end of Civilization-As-We-Knew-It. Then there was Global Warming — more experts, more computer models — there are still gullible morons out there who believe it’s not an obvious hoax. Now experts and their — increasingly failing — computer models are all telling us we are in the middle of the worst health crisis since the Black Death.

I happen to be, as you know, a lifelong libertarian and the most fervid advocate of the First Amendment that you will ever read. Therefore, I cannot endorse the suggestion I’ve heard that whenever an “expert” testifies about anything before any legislative body anywhere, and the words “computer model” come out of his mouth, the Sergeant-at-Arms should smash his face in, drag him out into the street, and shoot him him the back of the head. Perhaps millions of lives could be saved that way, but, as a lifelong libertarian and the most fervid advocate of the First Amendment you will ever read, I cannot endorse that position.

So drink up, my dear friends and readers and have the best time — under house arrest — that you possibly can!

February 29, 2020

Dardick Model 1500: The Very Unusual Magazine-fed Revolver

Filed under: History, Technology, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 12 Nov 2019

This is Lot 1953 in the upcoming RIA December Premier auction.

The Dardick 1500 was a magazine-fed revolver designed by David Dardick in the 1950s. His patent was granted in 1958, and somewhere between 40 and 100 of the guns were made in 1959, before the company went out of business in 1960. The concept was based around a triangular cartridge (a “tround”) and a 3-chambered, open-sided cylinder. This wasn’t really of direct benefit to a handgun, but instead was ideal for a high rate of fire machine gun, where the system did not need to pull rounds forward or backward to chamber and eject them. In lieu of military machine gun contract, Dardick applied the idea to a sidearm.

The Model 1500 held 15 rounds, inside a blind magazine in the grip. It was chambered for a .38 caliber cartridge basically the same as .38 Special ballistically. A compact Model 1100 was also made in a small numbers, with a shorter grip and correspondingly reduced magazine capacity (11 trounds). A carbine barrel/stock adapter was also made. The guns were a complete commercial failure, with low production and lots of functional problems. Today, of course, they are highly collectible because of that scarcity and their sheer mechanical weirdness.

http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons

Cool Forgotten Weapons merch! http://shop.bbtv.com/collections/forg…

Contact:
Forgotten Weapons
6281 N. Oracle #36270
Tucson, AZ 85704

I’ve always had an interest in the Dardick, from their appearance in some of L. Neil Smith’s science fiction novels. I linked to an earlier article of his, and commented:

As Neil pointed out in one of his books, the Dardick was the answer to a bad crime writer’s prayers: it was literally an automatic revolver. (For those following along at home, an “automatic” has a magazine holding the bullets which are fed into the chamber to be fired by the action of the weapon: fire a bullet, the action cycles, clearing the expended cartridge and pushing a new one into place, cocking the weapon to fire again. A “revolver” holds bullets in the cylinder, rotating the cylinder when the gun is fired to put a new bullet in line with the barrel to be fired. The Dardick is the only example I know of that combines both in one gun.)

February 11, 2020

Animal “rights”

Filed under: Food, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the latest Libertarian Enterprise, L. Neil Smith republished a short essay he wrote for the March 1996 edition which is still fully relevant today:

An olive ridley sea turtle, a species of the sea turtle superfamily.
NASA image via Wikimedia Commons.

Last Friday I watched an episode of X-Files in which innocent zoo animals were being abducted — apparently by benign, superior UFOsies (the ones who mutilate cattle and stick needles in women’s bellies) — to save them from a despicable mankind responsible for the erasure of thousands of species every year.

Or every week, I forget which.

I was reminded of a debate I’d found myself involved in about sea turtles; I’d suggested that laws prohibiting international trade in certain animal products be repealed so the turtles might be privately farmed and thereby kept from extinction. After all, who ever heard of chickens being an endangered species? From the hysteria I provoked — by breathing the sacred phrase “animal rights” and the vile epithet “profit” in one sentence — you’d have thought I’d demanded that the Virgin be depicted henceforth in mesh stockings and a merry widow like Frank N. Furter in The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

That debate convinced me of two things. First: I wasn’t dealing with politics, here, or even philosophy, but with a religion, one that would irrationally sacrifice its highest value — the survival of a species — if the only way to assure it was to let the moneylenders back into the temple. Its adherents abominate free enterprise more than they adore sea turtles.

Second (on evidence indirect but undeniable): those who cynically constructed this religion have no interest in the true believers at its gullible grassroots, but see it simply as a new way to pursue the same old sinister objective. A friend of mine used to refer to “watermelons” — green on the outside, red on the inside — who use environmental advocacy to abuse individualism and capitalism. Even the impenetrable Rush Limbaugh understands that animal rights and related issues are just another way socialism pursues its obsolete, discredited agenda.

In my experience, those who profess to believe in animal rights usually don’t believe in human rights. That’s the point, after all.

December 23, 2019

Repost – “Merry Christmas” versus “Happy Holidays” versus “Happy Midwinter Break”

Filed under: Business, Government, Religion, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

L. Neil Smith on the joy-sucking use of terms like “Happy Midwinter Break” to avoid antagonizing the non-religious among us at this time of year:

Conservatives have long whimpered about corporate and government policies forbidding employees who make contact with the public to wish said members “Merry Christmas!” at the appropriate time of the year, out of a moronic and purely irrational fear of offending members of the public who don’t happen to be Christian, but are Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh, Jain, Rastafarian, Ba’hai, Cthuluites, Wiccans, worshippers of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, or None of the Above. The politically correct benediction, these employees are instructed, is “Happy Holidays”.

Feh.

As a lifelong atheist, I never take “Merry Christmas” as anything but a cheerful and sincere desire to share the spirit of the happiest time of the year. I enjoy Christmas as the ultimate capitalist celebration. It’s a multiple-usage occasion and has been so since the dawn of history. I wish them “Merry Christmas” right back, and I mean it.

Unless I wish them a “Happy Zagmuk”, sharing the oldest midwinter festival in our culture I can find any trace of. It’s Babylonian, and celebrates the victory of the god-king Marduk over the forces of Chaos.

But as anybody with the merest understanding of history and human nature could have predicted, if you give the Political Correctness Zombies (Good King Marduk needs to get back to work again) an Angstrom unit, they’ll demand a parsec. It now appears that for the past couple of years, as soon as the Merry Christmases and Happy Holidayses start getting slung around, a certain professor (not of Liberal Arts, so he should know better) at a nearby university (to remain unnamed) sends out what he hopes are intimidating e-mails, scolding careless well-wishers, and asserting that these are not holidays (“holy days”) to everyone, and that the only politically acceptable greeting is “Happy Midwinter Break”. He signs this exercise in stupidity “A Jewish Faculty Member”.

Double feh.

Two responses come immediately to mind, both of them derived from good, basic Anglo-Saxon, which is not originally a Christian language. As soon as the almost overwhelming temptation to use them has been successfully resisted, there are some other matters for profound consideration…

Original infographic from Treetopia – https://www.treetopia.com/Merry-Christmas-vs-Happy-Holidays-a/304.htm

November 25, 2019

QotD: The origins of the state

Filed under: Government, History, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Taxation most likely began ten thousand years ago, when nomadic hunter-gatherers gave up their wandering ways — and the tools associated with them — settled down, and started growing crops and herding livestock, which requires an entirely different suite of tools than hunting. The hunter-gatherers’ tools could be used as weapons because that’s essentially what they were — ask any mastodon — the farmers’ could not. As a result, anti-productive marauders who had been held off by the hunters’ tools (or the ability of the hunters and their families to escape and evade) took advantage of those who were stuck to the plots of land they had learned to farm with clumsy agricultural implements (which could not be wielded as easily by females, relegating them to a subordinate role for fifty centuries), and forced to to pay tribute to the bandits. Go take another look at the 1960 movie masterpiece The Magnificent Seven for illustration. The thieves eventually learned to call themselves “government” and the goods they stole, “your fair share”.

L. Neil Smith, “What Would Real Tax Reform Look Like?”, Libertarian Enterprise, 2017-10-29.

November 11, 2019

Addressing the real extinction-level environmental threat

Filed under: Science, Space, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In the latest edition of the Libertarian Enterprise, L. Neil Smith points to what he thinks will be Donald Trump’s signature achievement: the United States Space Force.

The biggest nuclear weapon ever detonated on Earth, Tsar Bomba, was 50MT. The Chicxulub impact was, at these numbers, 2 million times as powerful as Tsar Bomba.
Image and caption from Stephanie Osborn’s “Incoming: The Chicxulub Impactor, Part 3 — The Impactor & Effects” at https://accordingtohoyt.com/2019/10/31/incoming-the-chicxulub-impactor-part-3-%e2%80%95-the-impactor-effects-by-stephanie-osborn/

Many thoughtful observers believe that the most significant thing that Donald Trump has accomplished so far is his appointment of dozens of federal judges who share his philosophy of governance and I, amateur historian that I am, am inclined to agree with them — with one exception, that is, a little item that just might prove to be a thousand times, a million times, a billion times more important than anything else the Donald — or anybody else, for that matter — has ever done.

Most of us have become aware of the way that a relatively small piece of rock — an asteroid approximately the size of Manhattan Island or the Matterhorn — changed the course of life-history on this planet. It struck the Earth at 40,000 miles and hour, hitting what is now the northern coast of the Yucatan, generating a titanic explosion that ignited every plant standing above the ground, raising a tidal wave that swept over most of North America, and opening a chain of deadly volcanoes on the other side of the world, near India. The esteemed Bob Bakker to the contrary, the late, lamented dinosaurs, I believe, died from smoke inhalation.

Three quarters of all life on this planet, plant and animal, land and sea, was brutally exterminated by this “Cretaceous-Tertiary Event”, and apparently not for the first time. There was a much worse die-off between the Permian and the Triassic eras. The important fact, for you and me, is that there are thousands, if not millions of other lethal asteroids still out there, with which our vulnerable little blue marble is still playing a murderous game of roulette. It is only a matter of time before another “extinction-level event” occurs, possibly wiping out every last living entity on Earth. We can see plenty of evidence of that kind of phenomenon, that magnitude of destruction, elsewhere in the Solar System.

Take your precious carbon footprints and stuff them where the sun don’t shine, Greta. It is Donald Trump who has made the historic first move to prevent this very real cataclysm, and probably to extend the life of the human species indefinitely (an idea environmentalists hate), by calling for the organization of a United States Space Force. At this moment it still isn’t clear exactly what methods will work best to destroy or divert asteroids that threaten our home-world (I mention possibilities in my 2010 Ngu Family Saga novel Ceres), but it is something that must be done, sooner or later, probably by manned spacecraft.

The other important task for which we need a Space Force is to clean up the tens of millions of items of orbital debris that NASA and other agencies have very sloppily left circling over our heads. Remember when the Gemini astronauts simply threw those expensive Hasselblad cameras out the door? These objects range in size from particles of dust to cast-off booster stages which endanger satellites and spacecraft. A hunk of junk the size and shape of a small screw can damage solar panels, pressurized living and working spaces, as well as helmeted individuals in spacesuits, to whom that flying screw would be like a bullet through the head.

November 5, 2019

The three ways human beings can organize themselves

Filed under: Government, History, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the latest Libertarian Enterprise, L. Neil Smith relates the time he took a week-long seminar with Robert LeFevre:

I already considered myself a libertarian — of the Randian variety — when I first met Bob in 1972, at a seminar he delivered in Wichita, Kansas, sponsored by the Love Box Company and the local 7-up bottlers. I spent five magical 8-hour days in a motel basement meeting room, with about forty other people, listening to Bob’s moral, historical, and economic observations. Nearly half a century later, I can still remember large swatches of them, virtually verbatim. Bob reminded me of Frank Morgan in The Wizard of Oz. I didn’t agree with everything the Wzard of Libz said and thought (most notably, Bob was a Gandhian pacifist, while anyone who knows me or my work will tell you that, I, decidedly am not.)

But it was Bob’s unique view of history that won me over and changed my life. There are only three ways, he said, for human beings to organize themselves: (A), one guy tells everybody what to do; (B), everybody tells everybody else what to do; and (C) nobody tells anybody what to do. The last, he insisted, is the very definition of libertarianism.

Inevitably, Bob was an advocate of (C), and so was I, once he had rid me of the cob-webs in my head and the myth of “limited government”, which, he pointed out, somehow never manages to stay limited. Option (A), he suggested, was the way that the world had turned for ten thousand years or longer.

(B) is supposed to be the be-all and end-all of sociopolitical arrangements. It encompasses various forms of collectivism, including socialism, fascism, and the most dangerous of all, democracy, under which you are encouraged to believe that you’re free, but your neighbors can vote to control your life and impoverish you any time they want. As Robert A, Heinlein (a friend of Bob’s) put it, “‘Vox populi, vox dei‘ usually means ‘How the hell did we get into this mess?'”

The violent transition to (B) in 1776 accomplished two important things. It may yet prove to be a pathway to real liberty (no, I’m not holding my breath). In terms of what I’ve written here, it also pissed off all the right people. It schmussed humble pie in the face of the insane King George III and the rest of his inbred, slithery, pampered ilk. And when British General Corwallis surrendered his sword to George Washington, the band (where the hell did that come from?) played a little ditty called “The World Turned Upside-down.”

Most of history since then, according to Bob, has been a series of attempts — the War Between the States, public schooling, World War I, the Federal Reserve banks and the income tax, World War II, the United Nations, communism’s rise in Europe and Asia, the overpopulation and Global Warming hoaxes, the Silicon Valley commisars, the socioeconomic war on the Productive Class — by the pre-Revolutionary elites (who all seem to be related to each other) to regain the power they once wielded over the rest of the human race.

Aside from what I’ve written in The Libertarian Enterprise about the political significance of gun ownership, if you want to see who’s really on what side, take a look at the war on cattle and red meat. For centuries, the aristocrat class have hunted, and they have dined lavishly on animal protein, while trying to forbid the peasantry — us deplorables — the same rights and forcing them to subsist on boiled turnips. There’s a good reason for this: meat is mind. If you remembver nothing else of what I’ve said here, remember that: meat is mind. It contains certain components that let you build a strong and efficient nervous system (look up myelin), creating uppity peons, the last thing any right-minded upper cruster wants.

For decades, these creepy, perverted parasites have been sneaking up on us, falsely calling themselves “Progressives”, hoping to reverse the American Revolution and everything it has meant to humanity. Since socialism was invented in the early 19th century by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, they’ve made more and more of what they regard as “progress”. By the beginning of the 21st century, they thought their victory was inevitable — until it was rudely snatched out of their blood-soaked hands by those uppity meat-eating peasants, eventually led by Donald J. Trump. The patricians and their surrogates are the swamp Trump wants to drain.

October 1, 2019

Bring back the Aurochs!

Filed under: Europe, France, History, Science — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

L. Neil Smith has a dream, and it includes lots and lots of barbecue sauce:

Aurochs in a cave painting in Lascaux, France.
Image via Infogalactic.com

The aurocs, you probably know, was a kind of wild bovine critter that lived and flourished in fairly recent prehistoric times. It ranged all over the Old World, from Japan and what became Sahara country, to Europe, where it first showed up about 270,000 years ago. (Homo sapiens arrived there about 100,000 years ago, when Adam and Eve got expelled from the Garden of Africa.

The aurocs is the number one game animal depicted lovingly in cavemens’ wet dreams, as painted by torchlight on the walls of certain caves, notably in France. I don’t know why French cavemen produced the most beautiful paintings in the world, but the genetic thread seems to have run true from 40,000 years ago, straight to Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, Paul Gauguin, and Claude Monet. Our ancestors hunted wooly mammoths, too — it must have seemed to them as massive an undertaking as the Space Progran — but I don’t think I’ve ever seen one depicted on a cave wall.

[…]

Julius Caesar described aurochs in Volume III of his Gallic Wars — another French connection, coinzidenza? The last one died, regrettably, in 1627, in a forest in Poland, but I recently learned to my delight that aurochs DNA abounds in the world’s laboratories (it’s found in their bones), and the entire genome has been mapped. It wouldn’t be much of a feat to plant some of it in the egg cell of a closely related descendant species — say an Indian cow — and bring it to term. It would certainly be less ambitious than trying to resurrect wooly mammoths (a favorite scientific undertaking of mine) and a hell of a lot more practical — and profitable.

Imagine, if you can, the Wyoming prairie (my wife is from Wyoming, the original Marlboro Girl, and as inveterate a Westerner as I am) or the flatlands of northern Texas, blackened from horizon to horizon, not with American bison (although I like them, too — yummy!) but with archaic European aurochs. Fifteen hundred pounds of politically incorrect red meet, stamping around, munching the prairie grass, paying court to the lady aurochs and doing whatever else aurocs did when Fred Flintstone and Ringo Starr were wandering the countryside with flint-tipped spears in their hands and growling stomachs under their aurochs-hide Speedos.

So that’s my idea, friends and readers. Resurrect the first big game animal our distant ancestors likely ever hunted and ate. It should prove to be a highly profitable enterprise. We may even discover that we have a genetic affinity for aurocs meat. Perhaps we’ll be less likely to gather deadly fat in our arteries, chowing down on the creature we evolved to consume.

Pass the barbecue sauce, please, and in any case, Bring Back The Aurochs!

June 25, 2019

Mars Automatic Pistols

Filed under: Britain, History, Technology, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published on 1 Mar 2015

Sold for:
$74,750 (.45 cal example)
$40,250 (8.5mm example)

The Mars pistol was designed by Sir Hugh Gabbett-Fairfax in England in 1898, and only 81 were produced by the time manufacturing ended in 1907. These pistols were chambered for several different cartridges, all of them tremendously powerful for the day (and really not equaled by another self-loading pistol until the Automag).

Cool Forgotten Weapons Merch! http://shop.bbtv.com/collections/forg…

Theme music by Dylan Benson – http://dbproductioncompany.webs.com

I first heard of these pistols in one of L. Neil Smith’s first SF novels, and they sounded so over-the-top that I assumed he’d made them up for the story. This is a fascinating piece of hand artillery that I’d be terrified to have pointed at me (but I’d probably be nearly as terrified to shoot).

December 23, 2018

Repost – “Merry Christmas” versus “Happy Holidays” versus “Happy Midwinter Break”

Filed under: Business, Government, Religion, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

L. Neil Smith on the joy-sucking use of terms like “Happy Midwinter Break” to avoid antagonizing the non-religious among us at this time of year:

Conservatives have long whimpered about corporate and government policies forbidding employees who make contact with the public to wish said members “Merry Christmas!” at the appropriate time of the year, out of a moronic and purely irrational fear of offending members of the public who don’t happen to be Christian, but are Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh, Jain, Rastafarian, Ba’hai, Cthuluites, Wiccans, worshippers of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, or None of the Above. The politically correct benediction, these employees are instructed, is “Happy Holidays”.

Feh.

As a lifelong atheist, I never take “Merry Christmas” as anything but a cheerful and sincere desire to share the spirit of the happiest time of the year. I enjoy Christmas as the ultimate capitalist celebration. It’s a multiple-usage occasion and has been so since the dawn of history. I wish them “Merry Christmas” right back, and I mean it.

Unless I wish them a “Happy Zagmuk”, sharing the oldest midwinter festival in our culture I can find any trace of. It’s Babylonian, and celebrates the victory of the god-king Marduk over the forces of Chaos.

But as anybody with the merest understanding of history and human nature could have predicted, if you give the Political Correctness Zombies (Good King Marduk needs to get back to work again) an Angstrom unit, they’ll demand a parsec. It now appears that for the past couple of years, as soon as the Merry Christmases and Happy Holidayses start getting slung around, a certain professor (not of Liberal Arts, so he should know better) at a nearby university (to remain unnamed) sends out what he hopes are intimidating e-mails, scolding careless well-wishers, and asserting that these are not holidays (“holy days”) to everyone, and that the only politically acceptable greeting is “Happy Midwinter Break”. He signs this exercise in stupidity “A Jewish Faculty Member”.

Double feh.

Two responses come immediately to mind, both of them derived from good, basic Anglo-Saxon, which is not originally a Christian language. As soon as the almost overwhelming temptation to use them has been successfully resisted, there are some other matters for profound consideration…

October 23, 2018

California (secessionist) dreaming

Filed under: Economics, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the latest Libertarian Enterprise, L. Neil Smith suggests that the kindest thing to do to California is to allow it to secede from the Union:

… some Californians bleat that they want to secede from a United States that threatens to make them straighten up and fly right. Superficially, that might be a workable idea: on paper, California has one of the largest, most powerful economies in the world — bigger than that of many independent nations. It has a long, wonderful coastline and a couple of really good natural ports. Its agricultural sector is second to none. There is oil and gas within easy reach. It has no real military defenses, but I’m sure they’d be more than willing to leech off America’s defenses, our Navy, our Air Force, and our nuclear umbrella, like the deadbeat pajama boys they resemble, living in their mothers’ basements.

But wait. On the reasonable assumption that the California secession movement is limited to people in the counties that voted for Hillary Clinton, and that people in the counties who voted for Donald Trump do not want to secede, I consulted a California county-by-county election map for 2016. Blue counties dominate all but a tiny spot on the northern coast, which is too bad; most of the interior — the most productive part of the state — is bright red.

So here’s my brilliant idea. Instead of fighting another bloody, stupid, senseless War of Secession like the one we had in 1865, let’s grandly and magnanimously permit the state of California to secede — even insist on it — one county at a time. Those counties that vote to secede may do so and create the People’s Republic of Californistan, or whatever.

In exchange for defending this dog’s breakfast of a polity, we will keep all of our military bases and installations, somewhat like Guantanamo Bay Naval Air Station in Cuba. I believe the legal term is “adverse possession”. Those counties that do not vote to secede — we wouldn’t want them to become like the captive peoples and nations of Europe during the Cold War — may remain in the Union, joining the adjacent state (mostly Nevada) or forming their own. To paraphrase the Borg, “We will add their productiveness to our own.”

However the trouble (for California, anyway), if you look at the map, is that county-by-county secession leaves the people’s Republic without visible means of support, a vagrant state, as it were, full of pencil-neck politicos and other worthless parasites, guilty of loitering on our Left Coast. They’re already bankrupt, after decades of Leninist-Stalinist policies. Now they will never recover with their productive counties gone — and we get their avocados!

Let them eat software.

June 11, 2018

L. Neil Smith on the Koch brothers and the libertarian movement

Filed under: Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the latest issue of the Libertarian Enterprise, L. Neil Smith discusses his experiences working with the Koch brothers:

It says here that David Koch is retiring. In case you don’t know, he is the younger of two oil billionaire brothers associated with the libertarian movement who bankrolled the Cato Institute, and whom “progressives” love to hate, automatically blaming them for what little they don’t blame Donald Trump for.

Genuine libertarians and conservatives don’t like them much, either, for a variety of reasons. My own first is that I served on the 1977 Libertarian Party National Platform Committee with Charlie, David’s older brother and found him to be a timid, unimaginative soul, more concerned with credibility and respectability than with truth or principle. At the time, the think-tank he and his brother created was attempting to turn the LP into a wholly-owned subsidiary (David ran in 1980 for Vice President with Ed Clark), and I didn’t like that, either.

The Koch brothers are also open-borderists, siding with establishment Republicans like that smirk-weasel Paul Ryan who want an imported servant-class they can abuse. I’ve changed my mind on that issue for good and sufficient reasons, and they ought to be good and sufficient for the Koch Brothers, too, if they were really libertarians. American culture is unique and wonderful; I do not want to see it changed or destroyed as the cultures of Sweden and England are being, by uncontrolled mass immigration. Letting a lot of Third Worlders into the United States of America is like letting a lot of Californians into Colorado. Pretty soon it’ll be just like the mess they made and left behind.

We have a saying here: “Don’t Californicate Colorado”.

David is retiring, it says here, due to an extremely long bout with prostate cancer. It does not say what his prognosis is. My own father, whom I miss every day, fought prostate cancer for six ghastly years and died. I’m sorry David has it now; I would not wish that fate on anybody.

But the reason I’m writing this is to speak the truth, to a great big pile of money, if not to power. The Kochs don’t have power because they don’t have a clue how to spend money politically, and, among other counter-productive follies, they threw their dough away with all four hands, supporting a think-tank incapable of reaching the people by the millions the way Donald Trump has. I have never known anyone who read a paper produced by the Cato Institute or listened to a lecture given by one of their wonks — except other wonks.

June 4, 2018

L. Neil Smith on his time in the salt mines of the Star Wars universe

Filed under: Books, Business — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Around the time I picked up my first L. Neil Smith novel (Tom Paine Maru), I saw his name on a couple of Star Wars tie-in novels. I didn’t buy them, as I’ve rarely found tie-in work to be worth much unless you’re a huge fan of the larger franchise. By the time I’d gotten around to reading Tom Paine Maru and rushed back to buy all the rest of Smith’s available works, the Star Wars books had gone. I haven’t seen any of them in my travels since then. In the latest Libertarian Enterprise, Smith explains how the books came to be:

In 1983, I was chosen (or condemned — it depends how you look at these things), by Del Rey Books, a division of Random House, and Lucasfilm Ltd., to write three little ”exploitation” novels about the Star Wars character Lando Calrissian, specifically because I wasn’t Brian Daley, author of three similar books about another Star Wars character, Han Solo.

“Lando Calrissian, meet Londo Mollari. Lando, Londo. Londo, Lando … ”

The late Brian Daley was one of the kindest, gentlest, most generous men I’ve ever known, a colleague to be proud of, and it was bewildering trying to figure out why the movie company had told the book publisher, when arranging for the second set of books, “Anybody but Brian Daley!”

Brian loved Millennium Falcon. He was like a little kid when he got invited to go out to Hollywood and was most excited that he got to clamber around inside the set. But it turned out that he had accidentally and unknowingly allowed himself to become associated with the losing faction in some kind of petty internal corporate feud and found himself rendered persona non grata.

My editor at Del Rey obligingly brought my name up. I was extremely reluctant to write in anybody else’s corpus, but I needed the money very badly — around that time I’d spent two weeks with nothing in the house to eat but a bag of shredded coconut. When requested, my editor sent LucasFilm a “sample” of my work — a copy of my highly-political libertarian first novel, The Probability Broach. I’d love to have been there, a fly on the wall, when they saw it. Remember Beaker, from Muppet Labs, with a shock of bright red hair, a big red nose, great big eyes, whimpering and terrified of every known phenomenon? It must have been a lot like that.

In any case, LucasFilm freaked out, and, hypocritically asked that Brian be brought back into the project as my co-author, apparently to temper my politically incorrect passions. My editor told me later that he blew up dramatically, and told them “These are authors we’re dealing with here, not Hollywood writers, they don’t write by committee!” They backed down eventually, but I had to promise I would write no politics in the books — which, given the attitude they were displaying, I interpreted to mean as much politics as I could possibly squeeze in before they squealed.

I was told to write about Lando but leave all other Star Wars characters and other things alone (I did end up using mynocks). I told them I would have the spaceship, or I would give the project a miss. Brian started calling us “the Brotherhood of the Falcon”. My editor advised me to politely decline any invitations to come to Hollywood, and stay out of company politics, which I gladly did. I invented a number of animals for the books but was told that only animals made up by George Lucas could be capitalized.

In the beginning, they gave me sixteen weeks to write three books which I regarded as tough, but doable. “But wait! We have to approve your outlines first!” And by the time they finished — altering my arch-villain Rokur Gepta to something other than a “Dark Lord of Sith” and making other insignificant changes, I had nine weeks left. For two and a half months, I got up each morning and wrote. My cute little fiancee came home for lunch and then I wrote. We had supper and I wrote. Then I collapsed and started the whole thing over the next day. Forget anything resembling a real life. This was just before word processors came along, and I did the whole thing in one draft, as Robert Heinlein advised, on a Sperry-Remington knock-off of an IBM Selectric II. It took a long, long time to recover my health.

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