Growing UP
Roger woke to find his tarp sprinked with new snow. Leaden, threatening clouds were coming down the mountain like an avalanche. He had made one last attempt to find the northern pass, and now he knew he'd made a terrible mistake. David's horse and bedroll were gone and though the new snow covered any track, Roger knew that he must have gone in the direction they'd talked about last night. David had wanted to make one last attempt, ignoring the older man's feel for the weather change coming.

Knowing that to look for David himself would be fruitless and dangerous, he saddled his horse quickly and spurred for the ranch trail. If a seasoned rescue team could not locate David before the blizzard struck, he had only a dim chance of survival even if he remembered all of his training and kept his head. David was only 15 years old, and fairly new to the wilderness. (Read the rest here)

When I use the term casus belli in posts, it is merely pointing out that the particular trend or incident is adding to the just cause by which the civil war, when it breaks out, will be justified. The cumulative effect of such individual reasons, stacked one upon the other, will later be seen as background, the fuel, the dry grass if you will, of the conflagration.
The prairie fire will be started by a single spark, or series of sparks -- incidents so compelling that no one, given the common understanding of the explosive tinder building up, will be surprised that it happened, only when it happened.

The Founders experienced such a rising series of casus belli, each new outrage of the King's ministerial government piling upon the one before, causing reactions among the liberty-loving populace COMMENSURATE WITH THE THREAT.

(Read the rest here) (Use the back button to return.)

In measured doses, mortification cleanses the soul. It's the perfect antidote for excessive self-regard. After 23 years spent inside the U.S. Army seemingly going somewhere, I now found myself on the outside going nowhere in particular. In the self-contained and cloistered universe of regimental life, I had briefly risen to the status of minor spear carrier. The instant I took off my uniform, that status vanished. I soon came to a proper appreciation of my own insignificance, a salutary lesson that I ought to have absorbed many years earlier.

As I set out on what eventually became a crablike journey toward a new calling as a teacher and writer -- a pilgrimage of sorts -- ambition in the commonly accepted meaning of the term ebbed. This did not happen all at once. Yet gradually, trying to grab one of life's shiny brass rings ceased being a major preoccupation. Wealth, power, and celebrity became not aspirations but subjects for critical analysis. History -- especially the familiar narrative of the Cold War -- no longer offered answers; instead, it posed perplexing riddles. Easily the most nagging was this one: How could I have so profoundly misjudged the reality of what lay on the far side of the Iron Curtain?

Had I been insufficiently attentive? Or was it possible that I had been snookered all along? (Read the rest here) (Use the back button to return.)

Often, when debating some new statist restriction on our lives, I am confronted with a simple argument: “Why do you care? It is not such a big thing that they installed a few more cameras down the street. That in itself doesn’t pose some kind of Orwellian menace! Stop being so paranoid!” In short, they argue, while the given restriction is perhaps a restriction on liberty, it is so minor as not worth being concerned about.

Such erstwhile individuals have always reminded me of an old joke that probably already had a long, gray beard when I was a small child in Soviet Russia: “How do you defeat a karate master? Offer him as many small coins as you can shove into a hat before he says “stop”. Of course, to get the money, he must catch the hat – with his head, as you drop it from the fifth floor.”

The (rather unfunny) Soviet joke implied that the karate master will not be able to track the moment where just a handful of coins becomes a weighty weapon, and will be mislead by his own avarice into accepting a strike to the head with the coin-bag. To a libertarian, every new statist restriction is similar to a coin from this joke. If you’re a non-libertarian who wants to understand how libertarians think, I suggest you do this with actual coins. Get yourself a sizable bag, and some coins a shekel each (to our American readers: a single shekel is worth about as much as a dime) and let’s play a little educational game. (Read the rest here) (Use the back button to return.)

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A Self-Educated Chicken
by Debbie Harbeson