Pharmacracy
Poetry reveals that there is no empty space.
When your truth forsakes its shyness,
When your fears surrender to your strengths,
You will begin to experience
That all existence
Is a teeming sea of infinite life.
In a handful of ocean water
You could not count all the finely tuned
Musicians
Who are acting stoned
For very intelligent and sane reasons
And of course are becoming extremely sweet
And wild.
In a handful of the sky and earth,
In a handful of God,
We cannot count
All the ecstatic lovers who are dancing there
Behind the mysterious veil.
True art reveals there is no void
Or darkness.
There is no loneliness to the clear-eyed mystic
In this luminous, brimming
Playful world.
(The Subject Tonight is Love; 60 Wild and Sweet Poems of Hafiz -- Versions by Daniel Ladinsky
I'm writing this early Saturday morning from Myrtle Beach. Couldn't sleep right away after spending seven hours in airports and airplanes. It worked well for Karla to leave the car in long-term parking at the airport. I called her on the GTE airphone to ask where it was. First time I ever used one of those. It worked well, but at $3 per minute, I won't use it often.
following Eden is back with a passion. Reality spoken here. Go read.
AdCritic - Sprite: Extreme is Dead - Oh my! Requires QuickTime. Will take a long time to download over a modem. [picks]
AdCritic - Pepsi: Movie Theater - another good one.
Declan McCullagh at Wired - FBI Crashes Parody Party - Dickheads ain't got no sense of humor. So, what else is new. [grabbe]
bob lonsberry - Message to Mom: Stay Home - Bob's conclusion on a new n.i.h. study: don't put your kids in day care. Stay home and take care of them yourself. Good idea.
A good crop at LewRockwell.com today...
Thomas S. Szasz at Independent Review - The Therapeutic State: The Tyranny of Pharmacracy - the link is to a summary page. The story itself requires Acrobat Reader. Very long. I didn't finish it. [lew]
In my view, the coercive apparatus of the state ought to be as separate from the professional treatment of medical illness as it is from professional treatment of spiritual illness. Such a separation of medicine and the state is necessary for the protection and promotion of individual liberty, responsibility, and dignity.
...
To understand our present dilemma, we must understand the growth of the American state, especially since the Roosevelt years (see Flynn [1948] 1998). The United States has become a complex, bureaucratic, regulatory, welfare state--a condition brought about by means of the time-honored political tactic of declaring a national emergency and requiring that all of the state's "human resources" be mobilized. "Every collective revolution," warned Herbert Hoover (1874-1964), "rides in on a Trojan horse of 'Emergency.' It was the tactic of Lenin, Hitler, and Mussolini. . . . This technique of creating emergency is the greatest achievement that demagoguery attains" (qtd. in Higgs 1987, 159).
Robert Klassen at LewRockwell.com - The License - Licensing of all kinds should be abolished. This means no drivers licenses, no license to practice medicine or cut hair, no license to get married, no license to do anything. Just do it. [lew]
The structure of the licensure process in our society sits on a foundation that presumes there is some state authority that knows more than anybody else, that knows best who is qualified and who is not qualified to do something, without any guarantees. The fact that this authority is a person who merely collects and files documents demanded by a checklist prepared by a committee is totally ignored. None of these people are accountable in a malpractice lawsuit, for example, because they issued a license to somebody who was totally incompetent to do the licensed job, but who was fully competent to supply the required documents. Documents don't do surgery. I think we'd all be better off if we left the certifying of medical professionals to insurance underwriters who have a financial stake in being right. Insurance could guarantee to the consumer that the practitioner is educated and competent, the state cannot.
Myles Kantor at LewRockwell.com - Barry McCaffrey, Roundhead Ironist-Accomplice - a good rant on the war on freedom, er... some drugs, motivated by Gary Johnson's speech at the NORML 2001 Conference, ending today in D.C. [lew]
This is how governments implement tyranny: Select an undesirable segment of society, criminalize it, and incrementally diffuse the policy. By the time people realize the deviants’ (so-called) persecution has encompassed them, it’s too late. (This, incidentally, is one reason why sodomy laws are so noxious. Assume the power to proscribe consensual intimacy on private property and further omnipotent government is logically implicated.)
David Dieteman at LewRockwell.com - St. Andrew's Cross - The "X" on the Confederate battle flag is really St. Andrew's Cross. Mr. Dieteman gives a little history of this symbol. [lew]
Joel on Software - From the "Extreme Programming" Test Lab - Joel concludes, based on anecdotal evidence, that the quality gained by pair programming is not worth the productivity lost.