My perfectly tacky boot planter

The other people in my house think this is horrid but I fell in love with it at the garden store and even managed to get a slight discount on it.

Pack yer bags, it’s time to move

Here’s a secession move in the works:

The owner of a tiny island in off Scotland declared its independence from the United Kingdom on Saturday, saying he wanted the territory, population one, to be a crown dependency like the Channel Islands.

An island free of income tax, sales tax, and government tyrants? Sign me up already!

 

Ditch the charade altogether

Could Senator Chuck Hagel (R-NE) be Obama’s running mate? He will certainly consider it.

Hagel’s vocal criticism of the Bush administration since the 2003 invasion of Iraq has touched off speculation that if Obama were to pick a Republican running mate, it might be Hagel. Hagel said in an interview with The Associated Press that after devoting much of his life to his country — in the Senate and the U.S. Army — he would have to consider any offer.

“If it would occur, I would have to think about it,” Hagel said. “I think anybody, anybody would have to consider it. Doesn’t mean you’d do it, doesn’t mean you’d accept it, could be too many gaps there, but you’d have to consider it, it’s the only thing you could do. Why wouldn’t you?”

Interesting stuff to be sure and I, for one, do think it’s time the Rs and Ds ditch the charade of party differences altogether and move toward the more apt beauty pageant coronation ceremonies better suited to the media crowning of prez. Look at the “success” the Libertarian Party is claiming by having republicans, Bob Barr and Wayne Allyn Root on the ballot what with all the media attention. Libertarians have long said that there ain’t a dime’s worth of difference between the major political parties and then, in Denver, we (well some) put all our dimes where our collective mouth was and proved ourselves right.*

One thought though on a Republican Obama running mate: He should hold out for the Republican Obama that Bobby Jindal (LA) represents. What a CHANGE! and UNITY! ticket that would be! Gotta love the jackasses that want you to think even less at the polls!

*The LP has long been the third largest political party in the United States and I was, until May, a member and office holder. With the nomination of Bob Barr, it became a third extension of an unholy not a dime’s worth of difference trinity.

My first cavity search

via No State

What I’m reading right now

I like to read things that both support and challenge my viewpoints and inclinations. Right now I’m reading The Politics of Obedience:The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude by Étienne de La Boétie and A Republic, Not an Empire by Patrick Buchanan. (See, just by reading Buchanan I am challenging myself.)

Discourse is so far a very interesting look at how the public actually participates in its own slavery by consent:

I should like merely to understand how it happens that so many men, so many villages, so many cities, so many nations, sometimes suffer under a single tyrant who has no other power than the power they give him; who is able to harm them only to the extent to which they have the willingness to bear with him; who could do them absolutely no injury unless they preferred to put up with him rather than contradict him. Surely a striking situation! Yet it is so common that one must grieve the more and wonder the less at the spectacle of a million men serving in wretchedness, their necks under the yoke…

The solution for liberty? Simply withdraw consent.

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.

It’s such a simple idea, isn’t it?

Buchanan’s book is actually surprising me a bit. When I first picked it up, I’d just finished Chalmers Johnson’s, Blowback. The first few chapters of Republic drew the characteristically cynical observation that perhaps the subject matter was, in the late 90’s a fad that never caught on. But Buchanan’s book reads thus far like a very good history book and his warnings have proven spot on. I’d be a liar if I didn’t admit though that it is bringing into very sharp focus the idea that empire is inevitable in a world where democracy is championed. It just impossible to for people to vote their interests and expect otherwise and that idea was well developed in Bastiat’s, The Law.

I guess all in all, I cannot get on board with reforming the republic into a mirror image of its past. The American republic was a great experiment but with the stains of slavery and genocide, it was far from perfect. It’s a lofty goal to try to get back to the cherry picked parts of history but until it is recognized on a mass level that the slavery and genocide of the American past have simply been repackaged into a “new and improved” item that no longer discriminates based on skin color or anything other than political connections, most in this country will never know true prosperity.

And so let me now declare myself a truly pragmatic person and say that I hope whoever wins our upcoming elections bring our chains more into the light. Individual liberty may not seem like such an overstretch of imagination or wishful thinking and people may actually withdraw consent when the noose is tightened. I just won’t be participating in the process of tightening that noose by voting for any of the jokers running. Besides, I’m going to have better things to do in November- there are many more fabulous books to read.