Ronald Bailey over at Reason is talking about the need for consumer-driven health care. Well and good. He mentions the problems of the current healthcare - which are legion - and says that a solution is needed. His solution?

My advice to President Bush on how really to jumpstart consumer-driven health care: mandatory private health insurance. Poor Americans would be offered a voucher with which they would buy private health coverage. Such vouchers could be paid for by abolishing Medicaid and the State Children’s Health Insurance Programs.

But they won’t be, Ron, and you know it, because you know what underlies all of this: the barrel of a gun. Why you think the solution is to point the gun in everyone’s face is beyond me, but you’re either clearly ignorant or clearly evil about this.

Over at our old friend LewRockwell.com, Karen Kwiatkowski has a bit of advice for Hamas. If you’ve been under a rock recently, Hamas is a Palestinian terrorist organisation whose political arm just won a majority in the Palestinian parliament. She does so by way of comparing Ireland and Palestine.

Unfortunately, throughout the article she conflates Northern Ireland with the Republic of Ireland. Ireland was overrun by the English in the late 16th century. In the early 19th century, it was incorporated into the United Kingdom, and its local government was abolished. In the early 20th century after many bloody rebellions, most of Ireland decided to secede from the United Kingdom, and the UK sanctioned it. However, the northern part of the island voted to stay united with the United Kingdom. Hence, Ireland broke into two political units: the independent Republic of Ireland (after a tenure as the Irish Free State) and Northern Ireland, which is still united with the United Kingdom.

The violence in Northern Ireland has lasted most of the previous century. The Irish Republican Army (IRA) supported a break with the United Kingdom and a union with the Republic of Ireland. The Unionists supported the continued union of Northern Ireland with Great Britain as the United Kingdom. Recently, the most violent wing of the IRA, the Provisional IRA, chose to lay down its arms. But don’t be fooled by this: in 2003, the most recently elections for regional government in Northern Ireland returned the radicals on both sides of the Republican/Unionist divide - Sinn Fein and the Democratic Unionist Party, respectively. This has soured the hopes for peace and some sort of coherent and liberal legal system or systems. More of Northern Ireland’s more recent troubles can be read here.

Karen says:

What happened to Ireland? I surely don’t know, and as an American, whatever I think I know about some other country’s history and political condition is probably way off base. But I do know this. The current Heritage Economic Freedom Index places Ireland number three in the world. Ireland has scored 1.99 or less every year since 1998, and scored 2.19, 2.19, and 2.2 in the three years preceding 1998. Scoring below “1.99″ is Heritage-speak for systemic economic freedom!

Dear Karen, you are confusing Northern Ireland with the Republic of Ireland. The Heritage Economic Freedom Index is referring to the Republic of Ireland, not Northern Ireland. The Republic has indeed liberalised some over the past two decades or so, mostly at the behest of the minority Progressive Democrats. It has enjoyed rising GDP growth, although whether that GDP growth is mostly on paper and not in the pockets of the average working Irishman is some matter of debate.

Northern Ireland, on the other hand, has been economically dead for a long time. You are right that prosperity does not come in an atmosphere of violence, hatred, and mistrust. But you are mistaking the peaceful Republic with the dangerous North. Hamas, Fatah, or anyone in Israel do not face any easy answers for achieving peace or protecting human liberty.

Note: in this post, I linked to a picture I found on Google, which, all unknowing, came from here. Imagine my distress when the link turned into a somewhat sinister graphic accusing me of theft! Anyway, I changed the link and wrote the adorable Mystress Serpent an appropriately contrite missive, which I reproduce below:

Dear Mystress Serpent:

1. Finding artwork on Google, presumably accessable to all, posting a link to it (which was not an image source link, but merely a direction) is not theft. However, I have changed the link in question so it no longer goes to your rather accusatory and hurtful graphic. (Luckily, I was only slightly traumatized by it.)

(Formerly the “esoteric” link. There are lots of other alchemical graphics on the web.)

2. You need to give Google a hard time, as apparantly they are getting into the secret, esoteric parts of your website, possibly using the Goetia. (or Gooetia)

I suggest you complain to Google employee Mr. P. Friedman. (Note, dear Mystress - if you complain unto Patri Friedman, forget not thy whip, to paraphrase Nietzsche.)

3. In recompense for this inadvertent “theft”, I will point out that I have written a scholarly and informative series of comments on the “alchemical marriage” and sex magick in general, to be found here.

Feel free to incorporate my comments in your coursework: they will undoubtedly prove very therapeutic.

4. A question: my friend lung has expressed, after seeing your website, the desire to become a Fire Serpent Tantric Dominatrix. “lung is kind of rubbery” says the adorable strategic weapon “and she can set things on fire.”

For obvious reasons - radioactivity being not the least of them - I feel this is not an appropriate career choice for the small, but dangerous little creature, and perhaps a few gentle and tactful words from you might discourage her. (or it, or them)

(Actually, I am pretty sure lung has no real idea what a dominatrix actually does, and merely wants to induce people to get her more donuts. lung loves donuts!)

Sorry about the link!

Yrs,

John “Esoterically Challenged” Sabotta

P.S. I’ve also posted this letter to that hotbed of Anarchism, no-treason.com, as a mark of, uh, semi-submission.

Chris Onstad, the creator of Achewood, discusses the joys of web design. All too accurately.

Maybe I’ll get back into web design.

I’m thinking of getting back into web design. It’s been a few years, and the kids probably know a few more tricks than I do, but I have one thing they don’t: I could not possibly care less about web design.

That’s right. You want your logo to spin in a circle and twist itself inside-out for twenty seconds before people can get to your splash page? How about this instead: bgcolor=#CCCCCC. That is “portable across platforms.”

You think it would be great to have a Flash movie play in the center of your splash page, and “maybe have a guy do kind of a ‘Matrix’-thing?” This is the sound of me stapling a picture of Keanu Reeves to my invoice. I made you a table where border=5.

Actually, I copied the code from somebody else.

You want the navigation buttons to change color when the mouse rolls over them? And maybe make a little “plink” sound? That’s called Javascript. I have no idea how it works. I made your buttons out of blue underlined text. The “Contact” one is actually a “mailto” command. On the house, compadre.

Look, I didn’t go to college for this. You couldn’t, when I was in college. We would spend hours, hunched over our NeXT boxes, trying to figure out why BRs would behave as Ps in certain TDs. We learned nothing and were paid nothing. Excite was still called Architext. I know this because I used to get stoned with one of the founders. I said hi to him at the mall last week and he looked at me like I was crazy.

Hm, a “chat room.” Yes, I think that everybody who comes to your model railroad website will want to sit around alone in your chat room. One thing I could also do, though, is design a link to “Yahoo Chat: Small Trains.” For the link, I can create little right-arrows using two “greater-than” signs. Or maybe I will use the guillemot right ASCII character. That’s a premium character, and rather volatile cross-platform, but breathtaking when executed correctly.

What? You want your website to automatically play a 2kb MIDI of “Oh My Darling Clementine” when it loads, and for the background to be a tiled animated GIF of an American flag? And for the header to be H1 size? Okay, I think I have that template. I may have to “back it up” off of an old hard drive. I charge $150/hr, and I don’t have a phone number.

The viewpoint expressed in the following excerpt is one I do not necessarily accept.

Nevertheless, the seemingly backwards peasantry Carlo Levi writes about knew right from wrong, rejected a cruel and unjust war in Ethiopia and displayed kindness towards the persecuted while their betters rejoiced in the dubious glories of Benito Mussolini’s Fascism.

In these latter days of the Law, in which I observe supposedly enlightened individuals wallowing in displays of vile racism, dishonest and malign stupidity and moral cowardice - it’s not nothing. How could people with such a poor philosophical and political background be better than the shining lights of freedom and liberty on our futuristic World Wide Web? What’s gone wrong?

Something, I suppose, for the planners of floating cities, free-state projects and liberty-providing enterprises to think about. Or not. As if it mattered.

“Everyone knows” they said “that the fellows in Rome don’t want us to live like human beings. There are hailstorms, landslides, droughts, malaria and…the State. These are inescapable evils; such there always have been and there always will be. They make us kill off our goats, they carry away our furniture, and now they’re going to send us to the wars. Such is life!”

To the peasants the State is more distant than heaven and far more of a scourge, because it is always against them. Its political tags and platforms and, indeed, the whole structure of it do not matter…Their only defense against the State and the propaganda of the State is resignation, the same gloomy resignation, alleviated by no hope of paradise, that bows their shoulders under the scourges of nature.

For this reason, quite naturally, they have no conception of a political struggle; they think of it as a personal quarrel among the “fellows in Rome.” They were not concerned with the views of the political prisoners who were in compulsory residence among them, or with the motives for their coming. They looked at them kindly and treated them like brothers because they too, for some inexplicable reason, were victims of fate. During the first days of my stay whenever I happened to meet along one of the paths outside the village an old peasant who did not know me, he would stop his donkey to greet me and ask in dialect: “Who are you? Where are you going?” “Just for a walk; I’m a political prisoner,” I would answer. “An exile?”(They always said exile instead of prisoner.) Too bad! Someone in Rome must have had it in for you.” And he would say no more, but smile at me in a brotherly fashion as he prodded his mount into motion.”

…The deities of the State and the city can find no worshipers here on the land, where there is no wall between the world of men and the world of animals and spirits, between the leaves of the trees above and the roots below…

…”Too bad! Someone had it in for you” You, too, are subject to fate. You too, are here because of the power of ill will, because of an evil star; you are tossed hither and yon by the hostile workings of magic. And you too, are a man; you are one of us. Never mind what motives impelled you, politics, legalities or the illusion of reason. Such things as reason or cause and effect, do not exist; there is only an adverse fate, a will for evil, which is the magic power of things. The State is one shape of this fate, like the wind that devours the harvest and the fever that feeds on our blood. There can be no attitude towards fate except patience and silence. Of what use are words? And what can a man do? Nothing.
- from CHRIST STOPPED AT EBOLI, by Carlo Levi

“The structure is a full-scale replica of England’s famous neolithic Stonehenge. A Quaker pacifist, Hill was mistakenly informed that the original Stonehenge had been used as a sacrificial site, and thus constructed the replica to remind us that ‘’humanity is still being sacrificed to the god of war.'’ - Maryhill Museum

S. and I visited that Stonehenge (the one on the Columbia) years ago (after a road trip where we looked at big dams and the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. In those days S. dressed in her Tom Wolfe-esque white suit and vest and, I - well, I looked like I always do, which is nothing worth mentioning.

The sun was going down, and when I noticed the plaques I got the creepy feeling that some, at least, of the people mentioned were actually buried somewhere on the grounds, although in fact that is not the case.

Thinking that gave rise to private unspoken and unpleasant speculations on what you might expect to happen if you did bury someone under a replica of Stonehenge, and so on, and so forth.

S. - descendent of Mormon sorcerers and gunfighters, philosophy and mathematics major and former punk rock girl, well versed in matters exoteric and esoteric - was unconcerned about either the living or the dead, however.

( Mr. Ludlow’s comments, as reproduced in the Wikipedia article, can only be described as “shabby”, considering how well Ludlow - awful journalist and opium addict - was treated by Rockwell and others while in Utah. Prudently, Fitzhugh Ludlow waited until he was well away from Zion, West, before indulging in his nasty mischaracterization. )

( When accused of shooting Lilburn Boggs, former Governor of Missouri, Porter’s defense of the alleged assassination attempt was, “He’s still alive, ain’t he?”)

(”lung is nice. lung is not a skellyton” - lung)

After all, his rights are “sorta up for grabs”, are they not?
From one of Mr. Henke’s loathesome posts at qando.net, quoting another dirty swine by the name of “Max Borders”:

[This] means that the moral status of those outside of our political “rights compact,” is sort of up for grabs. Notions of rights outside of our political regime become a fabrication of foreign policy expedience or PR-speak — and are often necessary and useful ones as in the case of human rights.

(From the Nikolai Getman Collection)

This is one of the few paintings in the collection that depicts an event or circumstance which Getman did not actually witness. It is dedicated to Aleksandr Getman, the artist’s brother, who was executed on December 1, 1934—more than likely having been led down a dimly lit corridor and shot in the back, in a basement where few were likely to hear. Aleksandr Getman was among a group tried as spies and dissidents operating out of Leningrad. All the victims of this trial were later reportedly rehabilitated—that is, had their names and public standing restored. The artist is intent on seeing his brother’s name restored officially and publicly. His campaign to thus memorialize his brother has so far been frustrated, however, both by the Soviet government and now by the Russian government.

There’s a study going around the libertarian blogosphere about Italy, its pharmaceutical industry, and patents. Alex Singleton, on Samizdata, mentioned it first. Kevin Carson, on the Mutualist blog, picked up on Singleton’s post.

The gist of the argument is this: Italy didn’t have pharmaceutical patents until 1978. According to standard economic thinking, this means that Italy should have produced fewer drugs. “Yet between 1961 and 1980, 9.28% of the world’s new molecular entities (NMEs) came from Italy. NMEs are the most important advances in pharmaceuticals as they represent leaps rather than just gradual progression.” Singleton, paragraph 2.

This seems pretty damning to patent theory, at first blush. But what does “new molecular entity” mean? According the FDA, a new molecular entity is “an active [molecule or ion] that has not previously been approved (either as the parent compound or as a salt, ester or derivative of the parent compound) in the United States for use in a drug product either as a single ingredient or as part of a combination.” So, is this a new drug? Hardly. A NME is just a new type of molecule. A drug, on the other hand, requires study, testing, approval, and industrial development. So, not only must the NME be discovered, it must be developed into a consumer product.

So, how many new drugs did the Italian industry bring to market without its patents regime? The study is silent - surprise, surprise - and I haven’t been able to find a study saying one way or the other through Google. I’d be interested to know.

In love with Love, again.

Anyone who has read Ayn Rand’s Anthem will recognize the scene in which, in the nightmare Dark Ages world of the future, Courtney Love invents the glowing neon heart lamp and restores technological civilization, while also wearing a see-through blouse. Reason is triumphant!

(Click to enlarge.)

(Lynette said that this would make Kennedy feel better. It certainly makes me feel better, although dear Courtney does seem a little scuffed up in this pic.)

From J. Cassian’s blog, February 30 (Note: You’ll have to scroll down to the entry titled “A Short, Short Story” on Sunday, January 09, 2005):

For as he was being laid in his grave in the churchyard, she said: “Now sleep well, another day or ten in the cool marriage bed and don’t let time seem long to you. I still have a little to do and soon I will come and soon it will be day again. What the earth has yielded up once more, it will not keep a second time either,” she said as she walked away and took one last look around.

Josephine Hart on Iris Murdoch.

I don’t think I ever recovered from reading A Severed Head. Its main character, Honor Klein, strode with me through the streets and down the corridors of my school, fierce and dangerous - my kind of woman. A woman who, in reply to her lover’s question: “Shall we be happy?”, had the sheer daring to say: “Happiness has nothing at all to do with it.”

It should be noted, that among other things, A SEVERED HEAD is about a fierce and dangerous person wreaking havoc among these kind of people. - Palmer Andersons, all.