• Seeing Like a State. Roderick, Austro-Athenian Empire (2010-07-03). I was just watching part of a Congressional presentation on C-Span honouring the slaves who built the u.s. capitol – not by making restitution to their heirs, of course, but by setting up some sort of plaque. What especially bugged me was the speakers' continual references to expressing "thanks" and… (Linked Sunday 2010-07-04.)

• July 4 thoughts. Thoreau, Unqualified Offerings (2010-07-03). By Thoreau First, I should preface this by saying that I just went through a DUI checkpoint.  A dozen cops standing around at a low-traffic intersection, and I'll bet that a lot of them are collecting overtime for this.  Interestingly, he didn't ask me "Have  you had anything to drink… (Linked Sunday 2010-07-04.)

• The America John Boehner Grew Up In. Matthew Yglesias (2010-07-04). Conservatism Vs. The Past (Cont’d.) (Linked Sunday 2010-07-04.)

• Homeland Security Works For Disney Now? Announces Shut Down Of Movie Sites At Disney. Mike Masnick, Techdirt (2010-06-30). Well, here we go. Remember how, a few months back, we noted how odd it was that the Justice Department (which, of course, employs many former RIAA/MPAA/BSA lawyers) was designating a special task force to fight copyright infringement? After all, copyright infringement is mostly a civil issue, between two private… (Linked Sunday 2010-07-04.)

• Sumner Time Blues. Roderick, Austro-Athenian Empire (2010-07-04). William Graham Sumner said lots of things I like. (See, for example, his "Conquest of the United States by Spain.") The following (which I apparently transcribed a couple of decades ago and just came across today) isn't one of them: [H]ow are we to appreciate the work of the Constitution-makers?… (Linked Sunday 2010-07-04.)

• feministhulk: HULK NOT DOWN WITH COMPLACENCY IN THE FACE OF HEGEMONY. IF THAT’S “JUST THE WAY IT IS,” LET’S FUCK IT UP! Twitter / feministhulk (2010-07-04). feministhulk: HULK NOT DOWN WITH COMPLACENCY IN THE FACE OF HEGEMONY. IF THAT’S “JUST THE WAY IT IS,” LET’S FUCK IT UP! (Linked Sunday 2010-07-04.)

• On Celebrating Your Freedom... Radley Balko, The Agitator (2010-07-04). Libertarian activists Pete Eyre and Adam Mueller have been arrested for filming police in Greenfield, Massachusetts. (Linked Monday 2010-07-05.)

• More on Immigration. Sheldon Richman, Free Association (2010-07-03). I’m sick of all the pro-immigration articles showing how good immigrants can be for us. It’s not that the arguments are wrong. They’re just not terribly relevant to the essential issue — the freedom of people to move without permission, unmolested by governments or private individuals. Emphasizing how good immigration… (Linked Monday 2010-07-05.)

• The Political Animal. Cafe Hayek (2010-07-05). Here's a letter to DC news-radio station WTOP: In this morning's 6 am hour, your Capitol Hill reporter, Dave McConnell, excused Sen. Robert Byrd's long-ago active membership in the KKK as simply being "something that had to be done in West Virginia back then to get ahead in politics." No… (Linked Monday 2010-07-05.)

• Blogs and peer review. Eric Crampton, Offsetting Behaviour (2010-06-30). I had coffee with Bryce Edwards over the weekend. His two year old is a week younger than ours; good times were had by all. But we both pondered what the New Zealand academic evaluation mechanism – the Performance Based Research Fund – will make of our blogging when we’re… (Linked Monday 2010-07-05.)

• Let 560 Nations Bloom – Within the Boundaries of the U.S. flowidealism, Let A Thousand Nations Bloom (2010-07-02). This post by Michael Strong is part of Secession Week 2010: Federalism and Secession Arguably the simplist and most immediate path for "Letting a Thousand Nations Bloom" is to support tribal sovereignty movements around the world, especially in the Common Law nations of the Anglosphere like the U.S.  Other colonialist European… (Linked Monday 2010-07-05.)

Happy Sunday, everyone — and happy Revolution Day. In honor of the occasion:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. —That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, —That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it .... [W]hen a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

— Declaration of Independence, 4 July 1776

The 4th of July is a date that marks the death of a tyranny, and a declaration of the right of revolution against any and every government that violates the unalienable rights that belong to all people, regardless of any assigned political status. Of course, in a typical statist inversion, the date has been taken over, twisted, made into a date marked off for the exact opposite of what inspired it — for nationalist bromides, the celebration of a counterrevolutionary Constitutional government, and grotesque attempts to link up this historic event in the history of anti-imperialist guerrilla warfare with some kind of uncritical celebration of the U.S. government’s standing army. So it’s worth remembering that today is not, really, a holiday to honor armies or States-men or any form of consolidated government anywhere. To-day is a day for radicals and revolutionaries. For people who realize that if it was worth anything at all, the American Revolution is a struggle that’s far from over. Not something dead and embalmed in the necropolis of Washington, D.C., but a living struggle against any and every attempt to tyrannize people, to compact them into political formations without their leave and against their will. It is a day for standing up and standing by the most marginalized, the most criminalized, the most exploited and oppressed, against the powers that be, against the arbitrary violence of soldiers and States-men, and against every form of political regimentation. A government is always the death of revolutions, and real revolutions — when we win — are always the death of governments. As another American revolutionary said of another Revolution:

The STATE IDEA, the authoritarian principle, has been proven bankrupt by the experience of the Russian Revolution. If I were to sum up my whole argument in one sentence I should say: The inherent tendency of the State is to concentrate, to narrow, and monopolize all social activities; the nature of revolution is, on the contrary, to grow, to broaden, and disseminate itself in ever-wider circles. In other words, the State is institutional and static; revolution is fluent, dynamic. These two tendencies are incompatible and mutually destructive. The State idea killed the Russian Revolution and it must have the same result in all other revolutions, unless the libertarian idea prevail….

… There is no greater fallacy than the belief that aims and purposes are one thing, while methods and tactics are another, This conception is a potent menace to social regeneration. All human experience teaches that methods and means cannot be separated from the ultimate aim. The means employed become, through individual habit and social practice, part and parcel of the final purpose; they influence it, modify it, and presently the aims and means become identical. —My Disillusionment in Russia (1923).

All power to the people!

Here in this secessionist republic of one, we honored this international revolutionary holiday with a pleasant afternoon Feeding The Revolution with Food Not Bombs. And — given the overlap in the festival days to-day — we’ll also with some commemorative Shamelessness. How about you? What have you been up to this week? Write anything? Leave a link and a short description for your post in the comments. Or fire away about anything else you might want to talk about.

• Unbundling Government, by Arnold Kling. EconLog (2010-06-29). This week is Secession Week at Let a Thousand Nations Bloom. I have no problems with the S word, but I also use the economic expression “unbundling.” For example, Ed Glaeser writes, In a sense, the gulf between the political attitudes of New York City and Montana can be understood… (Linked Wednesday 2010-06-30.)

• The Power to Tax is the Power to Destroy. Unqualified Offerings (2010-06-30). This is actually not primarily about taxes. Or about destroying. Or about Dave Weigel. But it is an interesting point from Jim Henley about what’s new — and what’s not new — in the ethos of journalistic bloggers, and why newspapers don’t understand it. (Linked Wednesday 2010-06-30.)

• apology not accepted. Dinosaur Comics (2010-06-30). “So hey did you guys hear about the G20 in Toronto last weekend? The event itself was kinda a non-event but the 1 billion dollars Canadians spent on security was kinda – insane? We built a big wall around the downtown core of the city, and the chief of police announced that there was a new secret law passed wherein anyone within 5 meters of this fence had to produce ID or be arrested. And then, after the event, he announced that he made the law up because it suited his purposes? HILARIOUS. Toronto police Chief Bill Blair, ladies and gentlemen.” (Linked Wednesday 2010-06-30.)

• eye of the storm 2010-06-30 11:05:51. Captain Capitulation, Anarchoblogs (2010-06-30). one thing that occurs watching the kagan hearings: i am very glad i have not lived her life. so when they ask her about memos she wrote in the clinton admin, strategizing on avoiding a ban on partial-birth abortion, she's all like 'i was working for a president who had… (Linked Wednesday 2010-06-30.)

• Parking Lots. Dorothy, Cat and Girl (2010-06-30). (Linked Wednesday 2010-06-30.)

• Porkymandias. Roderick, Austro-Athenian Empire (2010-07-01). And on the pedestal these words appear: My name is Robert C. Byrd, Senator of Senators: look on my works, ye mighty, and despair! Nothing beside remains: round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, the lone and level sands stretch far away. (Linked Friday 2010-07-02.)

What is the right size for a clitoris? Pharyngula (2010-06-30):

I don’t know. They seem to come in a range of sizes; when they’re as large as a small male penis, I suppose it might be unexpected, perhaps a little confusing, perhaps a little ambiguous to people intolerant of the idea that the human form is found in intermediate shapes….

Dr. Dix Poppas has attracted special notoriety for his sexually abusive experiments on the girls that he sexually mutilates. Of course, the more basic issue here is the non-consensual surgical sexual mutilation forced on girls by doctors and anxious parents, in the name of patriarchal Genital Correctness exercised at the point of a scalpel. Which is alarmingly common, and a far wider problem than the special case of Dr. Dix Poppas. There’s every reason to say something about the special awfulness of this child rapist in scrubs; but the notion that mutilating girls’ clitorises for seeming “too big” (for what purpose?) to adult observers could ever possibly be ethical medicine — rather than what it is, pointless medical torture in the service of carving patriarchy into a girl’s skin and flesh.

Sensible liberalism — featuring Chuckles! This Modern World (2010-06-30):

The Sensible Liberal’s Guide to Sensible Liberalism in the Age of Obama — now featuring Chuckles the Sensible Woodchuck!