Also found in the archives, whom to blame.

Paul Berman in Salon

It becomes ever more obvious that the First World War was the great trauma of modern civilization. Something huge cracked in the First World War and has never been repaired. Out of the First World War came a series of rebellions against liberal civilization. These rebellions were accusations that liberal civilization was not just hypocritical or flawed, but was in fact the single great source of evil or suffering in the world. Then the accusation was followed by the proposal to build a civilization of a completely new kind, which would not be liberal, which would have the quality of a granite rock — eternal and perfect.

. . . .

At some very deep level all these movements were the same — they all shared certain qualities of mythology, all shared a fascination with mass death and all drew on the same kinds of manias.

My argument is that Islamism and a certain kind of pan-Arabism in the Arab and Muslim worlds are really further branches of the same impulse.

(link from Tom Parmenter)

California Coastal Records Project:

Our goal is to create a aerial photographic survey of the California Coast and update it on a periodic basis. . . . We currently have over 12,100 photographs (totaling over 82GB) of the California Coast online, covering from the Oregon Border (42N latitude) to the Mexican Border (32.5N latitude), except for the Vandenberg AFB restricted area.

I suppose you could stitch them together to make a very narrow wall poster. (Link from Bruce Sterling by way of David Mankins.)

see also

Clayton Cramer wrote, by way of introducing himself over at the Volokh Conspiracy:

. . . As I look back on my youth, growing up in Santa Monica, California, I can identify three defining moments in creating my political ideology.

The first was a woman who worked at Baskin-Robbins, an ice cream store, on Wilshire Boulevard. She had a tattoo on her arm. . . . It was just a number. . . .

The second defining moment was a teacher that I had . . . [who had worked] with the Dutch Resistance during World War II. . . .

The third defining moment was living in Santa Monica in the late 1970s, when Tom Hayden and my fourth cousin, Jane Fonda, were running a little political machine that used rent control as their method of taking control [emphasis added]. The power madness I saw there, both at City Council meetings, and when I ran for City Council in 1981, persuaded me that the totalitarian instinct is not limited to history books and foreign lands.

These three events in my life play a big part in why I am a gun rights activist. Never again.

Sam Heldman finds this “truly nutty”: ( . . more . . )

More from my archives, 1998 April 04:

If anarcho-capitalism depends on everybody’s goodwill, so what? If that’s a serious flaw then we’re in deep trouble, because DAILY LIFE IN ANY SYSTEM depends on everybody’s goodwill to the same degree. Every single person in several counties is betting that I (and the rest of our neighbors) won’t steal a car tonight and go burn their house down.

Where power is dispersed, no one person is much of a threat, and there are balances to every plausible threat. Where power is concentrated, the opposite is true.

And from the same thread, April 10:

We have government (in the broad sense which includes PPAs [private protection agencies], contracts, custom etc) to protect us against a TINY MINORITY of badguys. The state, which depends for its livelihood on a public perception of its necessity, puffs itself up by exaggerating what threats exist (Saddam is going to conquer the world if we don’t get him!) and inventing new ones (pornography on the internet! protect our children!).

It’s sad to see how many people cannot distinguish between sentimental affection for Our Nation’s soldiers and unquestioning support for whatever policy those soldiers are sent to carry out.

Thanks to Rob Power for pointing out this petite annonce. I imagine Craigslist content cycles rapidly, so I’ll quote it in full for posterity.

I was the WASPy guy who hopped off my bike to drag your cement trash can off the trolley tracks* on Market Street. You were the slightly unwashed twenty-something fresh off BART knocking over stuff.

Did you feel your neck flush with carnal heat as I gazed at your lithe, patchouli-scented body? You were a vision of politicized perpetual motion as you passionatly smashed that capitalist-pig-dog Chronicle vending machine. You felt my gaze, you little marxist minx, you chirping songbird of leftist lust. I am certain you did, for your words betrayed you. As I dragged the Chronicle machine back onto the sidewalk, you cried “are you some kind of f@%king nazi?!”. Your masked comrades heard a pointed insult, sure to bring me to my knees and force tearful confessions of genocidal ambition. I heard a plea for intimacy.

We continued our dance as a crowd of picture-taking voyeurs gathered. I would clumsily two-step a newspaper machine out of the public street travelled by thousands of good people on their way to daycare, the hospital, and jobs that feed and educate their children. You would scream “pig!”, “cop!” and “f@%king nazi!” and waltz it right back into traffic with graceful purpose. Your self-righteous feet seemed to step on air, not the dirty asphalt laid over Mother Earth by a society of bourgeois globalist exploiters.

Alas, our tango of Direct Action was cut short because I had to get to the office and put in an honest days work so I’m able to keep a roof over the head of my wife and unborn child.

I hope smashing all that shit and pissing off sympathetic commuters and demonstrators actually accomplished your goal of educating the masses on the evils of war. Or were you really just lashing out with senseless violence in a pitiful attempt to fill a void in your soul left by years of bad choices and time spent in the company of mooching losers?

Connect with me if you want to talk about it over coffee. At a legistlatively-mandated-organic coffee shop in Berkeley, if you wish. Or maybe at Starbucks in the Pleasant Hill Mall after you get off work at the Fashion Bug.

*track no doubt built on the underpaid backs of un-empowered migrant workers to transport captains of greed to the Financial District.