Attribute to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

Okay, someone told me that on their iMac tablet they were not able to vote for “What Shall I Write Next?”. I have diddled with the code a bit to use the new w3.css tool, and perhaps that will work now? I hope!

I have an Android tablet, and I must say the touch-interface drives me crazy. It is an RCA Viking Pro (discontinued model on sale at WalMart), and one nice thing is, it comes with a detachable keyboard. On the other hand it is a little keyboard and drives me crazy too, seeing as how I’m a touch-typist. On the third hand it has a normal-sized USB socket (I believe it is called Type-A), and it will work with a normal-sized USB keyboard, which is Great!, although a normal-sized keyboard kind-of exceeds the size of the tablet. Oh boo-hoo to me. There is always something, right?

Talk about hitting that nail:

“Some personalities in the business world don’t suffer fools very much, You’ve got to suffer a lot of fools in politics.”
—John Suthers, Mayor of Colorado Springs, Colorado
“The Short, Unhappy Life of a Libertarian Paradise”

It does seem strange when somebody up and tells the whole truth right there in front of everybody. It should happen more often.

Of course, many people will be shocked, shocked! by such a thing. I have no sympathy.

I went to The Doctor this week. Had lab-work done. And of course, after peeing in the cup, I sat it down and immediately knocked it over. Some days ya shoulda stayed in bed… which actually what I mostly did that day anyway. I am feeling better now and begin to suspect it was just heat-exhaustion from the hot weather. Or not. We will see. The thunderstorm season is getting started now and that makes life much cooler, although lightening does eat various electronic devices if ya don’ watch out… by which I mean “unplug”.

I do not know why I have been reading Russian novels lately, first it was Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago [Kindle] [paperback], or [hardback]. Then Ayn Rand’s We The Living [Kindle] [paperback], or [hardback]. Then Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov [Kindle], [paperback], [hardback], or [Free from Project Gutenberg]. (Dostoyevsky was an engineer, perhaps that explains why he wrote so well?). And now I have just finished Solzhenitsyn’s In the First Circle. Like Rand’s horror story of living in Soviet Russia, Solzhenitsyn’s horror story is an even more horrifying tale of living in one of the secret prisons for political prisoners; a political prisoner being so loosely defined as to to include almost anyone (telling a joke about the government would do it). The secret prison Solzhenitsyn was in, and the secret prison in which the novel is set was a “special prison” where the slave labor of the prisoners was aimed at some sort of scientific or technical development (Solzhenitsyn was a mathematician).

Unlike the starvation diet in most of the work camps, the special prisoners actually were fed. They had butter! Meat! And only had to work 12-hours a day, 7 days a week instead of… “until you drop” as in the manual labor camps. The title is an allusion to the first circle of Hell in Dante’s Inferno—if you had to be in hell, the special prisons were the best part thereof.

This system was set-up by Lenin and “improved” and expanded by Stalin.

The novel is painful to read, conditions were so horrible as to be almost unbelievable. And yet the prisoners engaged in long complex philosophical arguments just like in all the other Russian novels. So it goes.

Anyway, would I recommend reading it? Yes, I would. It gives a clear picture of the kind of world Hillary and the Democrats want to create (so do the Republicans, but more gradual, right?). The kind of world we are struggling to keep our children and grandchildren from inheriting. So yes, read it and be appalled:
[Kindle], [paperback], or [hardback].