Month: October 2009

Thought for the day

From the book Power in the People by Felix Morley, as linked by Gary Galles at the Ludwig von Mises Institute[*1] :

The American tradition is of course completely opposed to authoritarian government … The American conviction is that the ‘Safety and Happiness’ of the governed takes precedence over every governmental prerogative and that deference is not necessarily owing to those temporarily in a position of political command.

OK, the user id experiment is over.

I have now turned off the automatic user request feature on the board, because it seems that the vast majority of users of that feature were obvious spammers. I don’t like spammers very much.

So, the only way to get an account here is to ask via e-mail. Ask nicely.

The procedure:

1: Ask for a user id that might possibly be a real name, or at least a real word.
2: Use an e-mail address that actually works.
3: Send an e-mail to me from that e-mail address proving you’re someone who has something more than spam on their mind.

You may mail me with your request at medaryrequest (clever user name, isn’t it?).

Then the little curly-cue at-sign. This one: @.

Then yahoo.com.

Put it all together into an e-mail address, and send something coherent to me if you want commenting privileges here. I don’t check that account all that frequently though, so you’ll have to be patient.

And remember, I’m still picky about who my friends are.

Four Years Ago: Springtime in Paris

On October 4, 2005, I posted:

This is just a bit tardy, but . . . Snookums and I took our honeymoon (our FIRST honeymoon, anyway) in Paris. Yes, the one in France. Here are a few pictures:

The French referendum on the European Union was going on while we were there. I wanted to get a picture of Oui and Non posters together and caught this one from the top of a tour bus:
Snookums and I (and some other guy at right) in a mirror in Versailles:
Next, a typical Paris street. Actually, some of them are more picturesque than this one, some of them aren’t, so this one is pretty much average.
Of course, any trip to Paris includes an elevator ride to the top of the Eiffel Tower:
Sunset in Paris, from the top of the Eiffel Tower:

(You didn’t think all of these blasts from the past would be about dreary politics, did you?)

Thought for the day

A person who maintains that the State should solve, by necessarily coercive methods, any problem that individuals are capable of solving voluntarily, is…the very opposite of a liberal. The essence of tyranny is reliance on external, as opposed to internal, compulsion.