At the risk of being philosophical, as my friends James Holland complains, the contentious issues addressed by jim Splaine are part of a same issue, car culture. Our individual libert is manifest in our mobility and in the 20th Century the American people were convinced that their mobility is to be realized by navigating on prescribed routes in cages on wheels. In effect, an ideally managed society restrict itself to secured homes, locked cars, supervised shopping centers and restricted work places. Walkers are suspect. Joggers, wearing themselves out and properly attired are OK. Humans tetheres to domesticated animals are OK. People on bicycles are a law enforcement bother because they can go where law enforcement in cruisers cannot follow. That individual liberty has been severely restricted to the point that humans are fearful of being in the out-of-doors has gone largely unnoticed. We are reminded of the frog in the pot on the stove. However, irony of ironies, a population that bused or chauffeured every where is throwing car culture to the curb. They are moving into the cities, perambulating on their own two feet and giving the powers that would control them fits. They are not even learning to drive, for goodness sake. They do not care if parking meters are installed in the interest of “keep ‘em movin’ in their cars” which is also the ambition of the traffic engineer. In my youth, we used to routinely march from 34 th Street to 96th in New York. If New York is a walkable city, so is Portsmouth. Liberty loving people just have to insist on it.

For about four decades now, the denizens of Capitol Hill have been pretending that the Executive is the guy in charge. This obfuscation has allowed them to use the federal Treasury for just one pupose — to keep themselves in office for decades, despite having to hold elections every two years. Why? Because they have made longevity in office the key to the absolute control of legislation.
Continue reading →

Prefrontal brain lesions have been associated with fundamentalist religiosity in a neurologal study under the direction of Dr. Jordan Grafman.

Since the study was conducted on military veterans, the lesions were presumably the result of injuries suffered by adults. Lesions that result from peri-natal insults (forceps deliveries) may well show similar behavioral symptoms, which I would call, to coin a phrase, Distangeance syndrome
Continue reading →

We tend to forget that the separation from Britain was prompted primarily by commercial interests and amended, after the Confederation proved unworkable, by a more idealistic group committed to the primacy of the individual man (children slaves and women not included.)
Continue reading →

A peace plan that subjugates Ukraine to Russia for fifty years is evidence.

“Give me liberty or give me death”

Liberty is derived from automobility. Calling a cage on wheels an automobile is a grand deception.
Continue reading →