I'm Taking A Break From Blogging...

I'm taking a break from blogging for an unknown period of time. I suppose I'll most likely resume posting some time well into the new year.

Nothing Outside The Power Of The State

Alan Watts had a worldview radically different than mine, but I think the following statement of his is precisely true:

"As is the nature of revolutions, the revolution against God gives place to the worst tyranny of the absolutist State. Worse, because it cannot even forgive and because it recognizes nothing outside of the powers of its jurisdiction." - Alan Watts

Sabatini on Prohibition

Rafael Sabatini was a novelist particularly well-known for his pirate stories (such as Captain Blood and Sea Hawk). Here is what he once said in an interview when asked to comment on prohibition.

"Being a temperate man, it logically follows that I abhor the very idea of prohibition. In my eyes a teetotaller is quite as intemperate as a drunkard, and he is without a drunkard's sense of decency. For whereas most drunkards are ashamed of their intemperance, most teetotallers glory in theirs, make a boast of it, and ram it down the throats (literally, in the form of ginger ale and such chemical abominations) of their guests and other victims. A drunkard is usually content to be drunk himself. He does not demand that the whole world shall be drunk with him. A teetotallers insists—and when possible enforces this insistence—that everybody else shall abstain as well."

Neither Hawk Nor Dove: A "Poem"

I'm neither
hawk nor dove.

Reasons for war
are legion
but not necessarily
good reasons.

There is just war
but I'm not sure
I've seen it
in my lifetime...

When war happens
it should be decisive
and declared.

Not carried away
by major players
with tides of altruism
into world conflicts
leading to tyranny
or disaster
maybe both.

The best foreign policy
is friendly
and selfish.

Counter intuitive it is
but a foreign policy
of "selfishness"
rather than "altruism"
usually serves our
neighbor-nations best.

You Can't Defeat Tyranny with Tyranny

"The march of communism or other forms of slavery can never be checked by suppression of freedom of speech." - J. Gresham Machen, The Christian View of Man, 1937

Now, if only this wise insight was digested by those who were carrying out the various forms of the "Red Scare" inquisitions back in the day, such as the HUAC-hearings, etc.

The true way to fight the Reds was to offer a viable alternative of genuine liberty for the people, NOT to use their tactics on local citizens.

To apply this to our modern day, Islamic terrorism can not be defeated by installing an alternate Westernized authoritarianism. Anyone who seriously suggests that we need accept tyranny to be safe from terrorism is simply asking us to exchange one tyranny for another. Its sort of like inviting a coyote into the pen to protect the sheep from wolves--when really the coyote will neither fend off the wolves nor leave the sheep alone. A wolf may theoretically be more of a threat than the coyote, but a coyote in the pen is more of a direct threat to the sheep than the news that a wolf is SOMEWHERE out there.

And Ben Franklin's words also ring true here: "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety".

From The Books: Worth Remembering

"The most I can hope for is that someday a suggestion I've made is remembered: that our debate would shift to a different plane. Instead of asking which form of intervention and planning government should impose, perhaps someday Congress will debate intervention versus nonintervention, government versus voluntary planning. U.S. sovereignty versus internationalism--the pros and cons of true liberty. Today the debate is basically only that of deciding who will be the victims and who the beneficiaries. I hope the hours of debate over the mechanisms of the political system orchestrated by the special interests will give way to this more important debate on freedom." - Ron Paul in "A Foreign Policy of Freedom: Peace, Commerce and Honest Friendship"

"Again, Mr. Chairman, I believe that the American people are sick and tired of supplying, either deliberately or through accident, both sides of in the conflicts since World War II." - Ron Paul in "A Foreign Policy of Freedom: Peace, Commerce and Honest Friendship"

"Chesterton was an enormous man, weighing well over three hundred pounds and claiming to be suspicious of 'cold, thin people.' He loved nothing better than arguing, and Chesterton's public debates with a wide range of opponents were one of the great spectator sports of early-twentieth-century England. One of his opponents, a dramatist and (later) screenwriter with a delightful name of Cosmo Hamilton, was, like most people who knew him,, simply overwhelmed: 'To hear Chesterton's howl of joy...to see him double himself up in an agony of laughter at my personal insults, to watch the effect of his sportsmanship on a shocked audience who were won to mirth by his intense and pea-hen-like quarks of joy was a sight and a sound for the gods...It was monstrous, gigantic, amazing, deadly, delicious. Nothing like it has ever been done before or will ever be seen, heard, and felt like it again." - Alan Jacobs in "The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C.S. Lewis""