Sheldon Richman (with help from Paddy Chayevsky) nails Memorial Day.

I’m reading Cory Doctorow’s novel Little Brother, which has been nominated for a Prometheus Award. In another tab I’m reading an autobiographical comic-strip by a boy of the same age as the novel’s narrator; switching between them is sometimes surreal.

Though he has lived in San Francisco, Doctorow makes occasional errors.

Even if you’ve never been to San Francisco, chances are you know what the Golden Gate looks like: it’s that big orange suspension bridge that swoops dramatically from the old military base called the Presidio to Sausalito, where all the cutesy wine-country towns are with their scented candle shops and art galleries.

Sausalito is indeed the nearest town north of the bridge, but it is only one of the cutesy towns in Marin County (which isn’t usually called part of “wine country”).

“He was going to take the BART over.”
“Don’t you know about the BART?”

Only a tourist says “the BART”.

“. . . But it used to be impossible to fly or go to the moon or get a hard-drive with more than a few kilobytes of storage. . . .”

Hm, given the narrator’s youth I guess I can believe he has the impression that the first HDs were so small.

… one of her favorite Brazilian tecno-brega bands, Carioca Proibidão — the forbidden guy from Rio.

That ‘ã’ looks out of place. Andre, shouldn’t it be –ido?

Mom’s a freelance relocation specialist who helps British people get settled in in San Francisco. The UK High Commission pays her . . . .

Most of the members of the (British) Commonwealth have the same head of state, so they don’t send each other Ambassadors; they have High Commissioners instead. Doctorow, being Canadian, may have forgotten that the UK has an embassy to the US.

Ocean Beach is way out past Golden Gate park, a stark cliff lined with expensive, doomed houses . . . .

The clifftop houses are at China Beach, further north. The area of Ocean Beach (where I lived, 1988–92) is mostly flat.

“Mr Governor” sounds alien. I never thought of that before: why do “President” and (usually) “Mayor” get the prefix, but not “Governor” or “Senator”?

Qaeda is misspelled Quaeda two times out of five.

Does Professor Carr, for example, realize, when he asserts that “we can no longer find much meaning in the distinction familiar to nineteenth-century thought between ‘society’ and ‘state,’” that this is precisely the doctrine of Professor Carl Schmitt, the leading Nazi theoretician of totalitarianism and, in fact, the essence of the definition of totalitarianism which that author has given to that term which he himself had introduced?

F. A. Hayek: The Road to Serfdom (1944), chapter XIII: “The Totalitarians in Our Midst”

You cannot say you love your country and hate your government.

Bill Clinton, 1995 (possibly misquoted)

When we are called upon to pay the debts of a corporation because it is “too big to fail”, shouldn’t the beneficiary at least be required to break up into pieces small enough to fail?

I laughed aloud.

Stefan Molyneux on voting

No one could have predicted the housing bubble pop, right?

Charlie Stross, interviewed in H+ magazine, mentions in passing

. . . the more socially dysfunctional libertarians (who are convinced that if the brakes on capitalism were off, they’d somehow be teleported to the apex of the food chain in place of the current top predators).

I’m curious to see his favorite examples; I hope I, at least, have never (since age ~25) said anything to justify such a crack, beyond indulging in “if I were dictator” daydreams as I assume everyone does.

I can’t imagine a plausible world that would have someone like me at the top of the heap. I’m a libertarian because I’m convinced that the poor and the dysfunctional would live easier in a more open world.

But I can say that until I turn blue, and there will always be someone to call me a liar.

Charlie goes on:

. . . they mostly don’t understand how the current system came about, or that the reason we don’t live in a minarchist night-watchman state is because it was tried in the 18th and 19th centuries, and it didn’t work very well.

For whom? Presumably it disappointed those with the power to change it, before the masses got the vote.

The “Master of the Revolution”, cofounder of the International Society for Individual Liberty, a former flatmate of mine who taught me much about firearms, has died.

Tributes: Tom Knapp, Joseph Bast (Heartland Institute), Sieg Pedde, Tim Starr, Classically Liberal, LPUS press release