Interesting essay in Harpers (cited by the muted horn).

The Scottish-born mathematician Eric Temple Bell, who witnessed the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire, saw “no running around the streets, or shrieking, or anything of that sort” but instead people who “walked calmly from place to place, and watched the fire with almost indifference, and then with jokes, that were not forced either, but wholly spontaneous.” Another survivor, San Francisco editor Charles B. Sedgwick, noted – perhaps somewhat hyperbolically – that “even the selfish, the sordid and the greedy became transformed that day – and, indeed, throughout that trying period – and true humanity reigned.” This phenomenon of “surprising” human kindness and good sense is replicated time and again.
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The Bush Administration’s response after 9/11 was a desperate and extreme version of this race to extinguish too vital a civil society and reestablish the authority that claims it alone can do what civil society has just done – and, alas, an extremely successful one.

After several shining examples of the good things people do in spite of the state, the writer’s bias against the private sector takes over; the segue is jarring.

That droll Mr Bush recently said it would be bad to stop killing people and breaking stuff in Iraq before “the mission” is completed. Say what? I thought the mission was to take Saddam’s nukes and war-germs and bad chemicals away from him, and cut off his support for al-Qaeda; well, that was accomplished quite a while ago. So what’s the mission now? To find a retroactive justification for the invasion?

Jacob Sullum observes:

As I read the relevant Supreme Court decisions, if the [New York] police said they would randomly search bags [on the subway] for drugs, unlicensed guns or other contraband, mentioning in passing they would, of course, arrest anyone they happened to find with a bomb, the searches would be unconstitutional. But since they’ve said they are randomly searching bags for bombs, mentioning in passing they will also arrest anyone found with drugs, an unlicensed gun or other contraband, the searches probably will be upheld.

Will Wilkinson at TCS

A president who fattened farm subsidies, installed tariffs for steel and lumber, doled out a massive new prescription drug benefit, and nationalized airline security, folding it into a vast, cumbersome, dangerously ineffectual bureaucracy, is hardly channeling the ghost of Murray Rothbard.

A friend asked me why Ron Paul voted against a hurricane relief bill; was there something poisonous in it, or did he think it would be ineffective? I replied that I would expect Dr Paul to vote against any such bill on Constitutional grounds; and appended a link to the story, familiar to some of you, of how Davy Crockett was turned away from the Dark Side (or, as you may prefer, toward it).

Google’s first example of the story happens to be on Ron Paul’s own website. Rereading, I found that the text of that copy appears to be somewhat corrupt; so I looked for others. Indeed, the full story is substantially longer and more instructive. Copies at: Lew Rockwell; Patrick Henry On-Line (Martin Lindstedt); SlimPickins; Return of the Gods; TRIM (John Birch Society) (broken links removed 2020)

Later: Walter Williams collects some quotations from other early politicians on the same theme.

2020: The story is repeated at hushmoney.org, Healing and Revival, Constitution Society, Foundation for Economic Education; and debunked at Jim’s Corner.

Fluffie (age 12 years) continues to snub Pillow (age 5 months).

Last evening Pillow sneaked up behind where Fluffie was sitting, reached out and tapped her on the head. Fluffie merely got up and walked away.

The referral log usually has a few surprises. This week, my mathematical doodles were found three times by searches for words that do not appear on the page:

intimate
crystal candy
best girl friend

thanks to a previous post.