Those of you who watch the front page may have noticed a new epigraph added to the rotation. It’s from Peter Kropotkin’s book on the French Revolution; I encountered it recently thanks to a post at The Picket Line. Thus:

After the night of August 4, these urban insurrections spread still more. Indications of them are seen everywhere. The taxes, the town-dues, the levies and excise were no longer paid. The collectors of the taille are at their last shift, said Necker, in his report of August 7. The price of salt has been compulsorily reduced one-half in two of the revolted localities, the collection of taxes is no longer made, and so forth. An infinity of places was in revolt against the treasury clerks. … In this way the people, long before the Assembly, were making the Revolution on the spot; they gave themselves, by revolutionary means, a new municipal administration, they made a distinction between the taxes that they accepted and those which they refused to pay, and they prescribed the mode of equal division of the taxes that they agreed to pay to the State or to the Commune.

It is chiefly by studying this method of action among the people, and not by devoting oneself to the study of the Assembly’s legislative work, that one grasps the genius of the Great Revolution — the Genius, in the main, of all revolutions, past and to come.

—Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin (1909) The Great French Revolution 1789–1793, p. 108. Trans. by N. F. Dryhurst.

Besides being good on its own merits, the quotation is also a natural complement to one of my other epigraphs, a quotation from Proudhon on parliamentarism and social economy.

Today (or yesterday, depending on how you count these things) is the 6,000th birthday of the Universe, according to the calculations of Bishop James Ussher. I hope that Young Earth Creationists around the world are living it up over this sextamillenial weekend.

Well, not really: life, the Universe, and everything was calculated by Ussher to have been created around 6:00pm on Saturday, October 22, 4004 BC; and from 4004 BC to AD 2004 is actually not a round 6,000 years, but rather 6,007 (remembering that there is no year 0). The cosmos’s 6,000th actually passed us by at this time of the year in 1997. But if a preference for nice round numbers can make 2000 CE the time to mark the beginning of the second millennium, it can make 2,004 the time to mark 6,000 years from the Beginning.

In the meantime, you can celebrate the occasion with a delightful article about Pufferfish genomes from The Panda’s Thumb, or Roderick Long’s post on the shared premises of creationism and (state) socialism from earlier this year at Austro-Athenian Empire. (Let me just add that Long’s comments on socialism apply to state socialism but not to those of us whose flags are Black as well as Red. There is no place for central production boards or Five Year Plans here, and spontaneous unplanned harmony is no problem for us in nature or in politics—just ask Prince Kropotkin.)