Herbie and the Spice Girls

In my post about my mutts below I mentioned that our dogs had their own web-page but that I couldn't find it. Well, Chas found it using the WayBack machine. Here it is.

This is the pic at the top of that page. From left to right: Saffron, then Rosemary in back and Marjoram in front, (both deceased) then Herbie and finally Coriander.

My mutts

Whew! What a day. It clean escaped my mind that the end of the month would fall over a weekend and I've been rushing to get things tied up before I take a three day weekend. Anyway, I've paid all the bills and have got a bit of time to tell you about my pooches.

They're all mutts - "discarded dogs" which I adopted.

My oldest dog, Saffron (named after the bossy daughter in "Absolutely Fabulous") is a border collie/mutt mix who is nearly 15 years old. Saffie needs to herd all the time so she treats the ducks and chickens like sheep and constantly rounds them up but it's getting harder for her to do because she is slowing down and her old bones are getting a bit creaky. She's probably on her last legs now - one foot in the grave and the other on banana peel (as my Mom would say) but she still loves life.

Soon after I got Saffie I adopted a little black and tan English toy terrier. She was about 6 when I got her from a woman who rescued discarded dogs. No one wanted this dog as she had cancer in her titties probably because she had been used as a puppy factory by an unscrupulous breeder for too long. I called her Rosemary because I already had one spice girl, Saffron, and it seemed fitting for a restauranteur (which I was at the time) to name dogs after herbs and spices. Rosie's cancer went into remission and she lived for another 8 years.

Rosie adored children and once ran away with a team of ten year old soccer players while I was walking her in the park. I hunted for her everywhere and eventually went home heart-broken. A few hours later the soccer coach phoned me and told me that he had Rosie. I once watched Rosie chase two kids up a tree. Halfway up she realized where she was and jumped ten feet to the ground. Like most terriers, she was a complete clown and absolutely willful and independent-minded. Eventually she got the doggie equivalent of Alzheimers, lost her sight and hearing and became incontinent. She became constantly frightened and miserable just like my grandma who had Alzheimers and I had to euthanize her. It took nearly a year to recover from the pain of putting her down.

Until I got Rosie, I swore I would never have an ankle-biter as I did not like small dogs but Rosie changed my mind. One day the woman who rescued dogs phoned me and asked me if I would take a 6 month old chihuahua puppy because it had been injured (broken jaw) and was too weak and small to survive with her other dogs. I adopted her without even seeing her. The moment that the dog-rescue lady put this little fluff-ball in my hands, she snuggled into me and I fell in love. I named her Coriander and grew to love this extremely intelligent and brave little dog more than any other dog I have ever owned. Corrie is now about 11 years old but still as fit as a fiddle.

Next I adopted a tiny little white and tan American toy terrier puppy who belonged to a "homeless" bum. I was walking along one day when suddenly this little thing that looked like a rat bumped into my feet and vomitted on my shoes. It turned out that the bum had not given her distemper shots and she was blind from the disease. I took her home and called her Marjoram. She also had other health problems and could not digest food too well. That is why I originally switched from commercial pet food to home-made food. Marjie lived for another 8 years. Like Rosie, she was a clown and could sing like a canary - well maybe her "singing" was more like yodelling. She looked a lot like a possum and made funny snuffling noises as she shuffled around bumping into things until she remembered where everything was.

Soon the dog-rescue lady asked me to take another dog, a chihuahua/sausage-dog mix. (Why so many small dogs? More small dogs are abandoned than big dogs.) He had had to have his left thigh bone removed because of cancer and no one wanted him. He was about a year old when I got him. I named him Herbie. He is now nearly 10 years old but he thinks he is still a puppy. He also thinks he is a Rhodesian ridge-back - maybe because he knows that ridge-backs are my favorite dogs - and his nickname is Mr Macho because of the way he attacks any stranger who dares enter his territory.

(When we had the restaurant, Chas made a special page on our restaurant's website dedicated to our dogs, Herbie and the Spice Girls. That page brought us more new customers than any other page on our website. I wish I still had that web-page so I could show you.)

Then I bought my farm in Oregon. The sellers had a beautiful Aussie shepherd/border collie mix who was about a year old. They asked me if I would take the dog as they were moving into the city. So I adopted Tippy. At first I regretted it because he was a big dog and had not been trained and was an undisciplined piece of trailer trash just like his former owners. He regularly demolished half the furniture whenever he wagged his tail - which was often - and our neighbors on the farm down the road hated him because he chased their livestock. But we persevered with his training and changed his name to Digby to give him more of a sense of dignity. He is not the smartest dog in the universe but he has turned out to be the most mild-mannered dog with a lovely affectionate nature.

Right now I can't find pics of all the dogs but I did find this one of Coriander.

Orwell - "Politics and the English Language"

George Orwell lived in the age of the totalitarianist regimes of Hitler and Stalin and was reacting in particular to their mutilation and perversion of language. Some of the insincere, manipulative and deceitful language of National Socialism and Communism still infests political speech and writing to this day. It is language used to obscure and deceive rather than to communicate clearly and honestly. But, thanks to Orwell, we now know what Newspeak sounds like and today only the most incorrigible commies still try to use words to deceive rather than enlighten.

Here are some excerpts from his 1946 essay, "Politics and the English Language." (It's about a lot more than political language and is actually a pretty good guide for all writing.)

Now that I have made this catalogue of swindles and perversions, let me give another example of the kind of writing that they lead to. This time it must of its nature be an imaginary one. I am going to translate a passage of good English into modern English of the worst sort. Here is a well-known verse from Ecclesiastes:

I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

Here it is in modern English:

Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.

[...]

In our time it is broadly true that political writing is bad writing. Where it is not true, it will generally be found that the writer is some kind of rebel, expressing his private opinions and not a "party line." Orthodoxy, of whatever color, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style. The political dialects to be found in pamphlets, leading articles, manifestoes, White papers and the speeches of undersecretaries do, of course, vary from party to party, but they are all alike in that one almost never finds in them a fresh, vivid, homemade turn of speech. When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases -- bestial atrocities, iron heel, bloodstained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder -- one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy: a feeling which suddenly becomes stronger at moments when the light catches the speaker's spectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them. And this is not altogether fanciful. A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance toward turning himself into a machine. The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself. If the speech he is making is one that he is accustomed to make over and over again, he may be almost unconscious of what he is saying, as one is when one utters the responses in church. And this reduced state of consciousness, if not indispensable, is at any rate favorable to political conformity.

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism., question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them. Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, "I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so." Probably, therefore, he will say something like this:

"While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigors which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement."

The inflated style itself is a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as "keeping out of politics." All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer. I should expect to find -- this is a guess which I have not sufficient knowledge to verify -- that the German, Russian and Italian languages have all deteriorated in the last ten or fifteen years, as a result of dictatorship.

But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation even among people who should and do know better. The debased language that I have been discussing is in some ways very convenient. Phrases like a not unjustifiable assumption, leaves much to be desired, would serve no good purpose, a consideration which we should do well to bear in mind, are a continuous temptation, a packet of aspirins always at one's elbow. Look back through this essay, and for certain you will find that I have again and again committed the very faults I am protesting against.

[...]

I said earlier that the decadence of our language is probably curable. Those who deny this would argue, if they produced an argument at all, that language merely reflects existing social conditions, and that we cannot influence its development by any direct tinkering with words and constructions. So far as the general tone or spirit of a language goes, this may be true, but it is not true in detail. Silly words and expressions have often disappeared, not through any evolutionary process but owing to the conscious action of a minority. Two recent examples were explore every avenue and leave no stone unturned, which were killed by the jeers of a few journalists. There is a long list of flyblown metaphors which could similarly be got rid of if enough people would interest themselves in the job; and it should also be possible to laugh the not un- formation out of existence*, to reduce the amount of Latin and Greek in the average sentence, to drive out foreign phrases

(*One can cure oneself of the not un- formation by memorizing this sentence: A not unblack dog was chasing a not unsmall rabbit across a not ungreen field.)

and strayed scientific words, and, in general, to make pretentiousness unfashionable. But all these are minor points. The defense of the English language implies more than this, and perhaps it is best to start by saying what it does not imply.

To begin with it has nothing to do with archaism, with the salvaging of obsolete words and turns of speech, or with the setting up of a "standard English" which must never be departed from. On the contrary, it is especially concerned with the scrapping of every word or idiom which has outworn its usefulness. It has nothing to do with correct grammar and syntax, which are of no importance so long as one makes one's meaning clear, or with the avoidance of Americanisms, or with having what is called a "good prose style." On the other hand, it is not concerned with fake simplicity and the attempt to make written English colloquial.

[...]

(i) Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

(ii) Never us a long word where a short one will do.

(iii) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

(iv) Never use the passive where you can use the active.

(v) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

(vi) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

These rules sound elementary, and so they are, but they demand a deep change of attitude in anyone who has grown used to writing in the style now fashionable. One could keep all of them and still write bad English, but one could not write the kind of stuff that I quoted in those five specimens at the beginning of this article.

I have not here been considering the literary use of language, but merely language as an instrument for expressing and not for concealing or preventing thought. Stuart Chase and others have come near to claiming that all abstract words are meaningless, and have used this as a pretext for advocating a kind of political quietism. Since you don't know what Fascism is, how can you struggle against Fascism? One need not swallow such absurdities as this, but one ought to recognize that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end. If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy. You cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and when you make a stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself. Political language -- and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists -- is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least change one's own habits, and from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase -- some jackboot, Achilles' heel, hotbed, melting pot, acid test, veritable inferno, or other lump of verbal refuse -- into the dustbin, where it belongs.

For me, the only things that really count in language are sincerity and honesty. When people start nitpicking about truth, I usually just tune them out because, as far as I am concerned, there is only one truth. I'm not talking about metaphysical "Truth" whatever that might be. I simply mean being truthful and honest. The alternative is madness. I've actually known quite a number of people who have gone insane because they told too many lies. Yes, many of them were commies who lived in San Francisco.

My political evolution - part two

I first became aware of politics when I was a teenager. At that time I was in a Catholic boarding-school and sang in the choir. The boarding-school was in a small town in the middle of southern Zululand and every Sunday and on all the Catholic Holy Days, the choir would travel out into the boonies to sing at remote missions in Zululand. That was the first time that I saw how rural Zulus lived. Till then the only Zulus that I knew were urbanized and, although most were pretty ordinary decent people, there were quite a few urbanized Zulus who were not. Most of the crime was committed by them and black people were feared and hated by the whites who regarded them as uncivilized savages.

Travelling around to remote missions in Zululand in my teens showed me another side to Africa. There was no apartheid in the Catholic Church and I saw black and white priests, monks and nuns living together in harmony. I saw happy black people who were kind and warm and gentle. What I saw made me wonder why black people were so feared. I began to question apartheid.

I was told that apartheid was used not only to control crime but also to exclude blacks from white democracy and prevent the "natives" (as they were known in those days) from "taking over" and destroying white civilization. In the 1950s whites were outnumbered 5 to 1 by blacks; nowadays it is 10 to 1.

In those days each white household was only allowed to have two black servants living on the premises. All the other blacks who worked in the towns and cities had to go home at the end of the day. There was a curfew and no blacks were allowed on the streets of white areas after dark.

"Home" for the blacks were "locations," on the edge of the white towns and cities. The "locations" were basically sprawling townships of cinder-block houses built by the government. The houses, while they could not be owned by blacks, were rent-free. There was water but no electricity. Very basic free medical treatment and schooling were also provided by the government and paid for by white tax-payers. Taxes were very high for whites but blacks paid no taxes. (The very religious Calvinist Afrikaners took their obligations to blacks seriously. They saw blacks as the "white man's burden.") No whites, except government officials and missionaries, ever went to the "locations" because they were such dangerous places.

For over four decades apartheid was used to contain crime within the "locations" and away from white areas. For blacks, crime was something that they always lived with. When apartheid came to an end in the 1990s, crime became a fact of life for everybody and South Africa now has the worst crime rate in the world.

But 45 years ago I was an idealistic teen and saw only injustice. By the time that I was 18, I had become active in the anti-apartheid movement which was spear-headed by the "Liberal Party" one of whose leaders was Alan Paton, author of "Cry, the Beloved Country." I saw South Africa much the same way Paton did, with the eyes of a Christian missionary which is what Paton was.

During the next three years I was harassed and intimidated by the Secret Police. I was jailed, interrogated and threatened. A friend of mine who was the leader of the students' union at the local university was placed under house arrest and eventually given an "exit permit" which was a "one-way passport" with which you could leave South Africa but never return.

This friend of mine (I'll call him "Peter") had been accused of being a communist. The Communist Party of South Africa was the oldest CP in the world outside of Russia. It was founded in 1921 on direct orders from Lenin and was declared illegal in 1950. I asked Peter why he was leaving and not staying to fight. Why was he not denying the charges that he was a communist? After all, we were members of the Liberal Party which had a long tradition of fighting for freedom. That was when Peter told me that I was naive; that he was in fact a communist and that the Liberal Party had been taken over by the Communist Party in the 1950s when it was declared illegal.

Although Marx's books were banned in South Africa, there were contraband copies available inside the anti-apartheid movement and I had read them and decided that I did not like Marxism. From the time Peter told me that he (and most of the members of the Liberal Party) were communists, I was no longer comfortable. I began to realize that certain things that had disturbed me before about my fellow "freedom fighters" (such as their squelching of all dissent within their ranks) were because they were communists. I was more than disillusioned. I was devastated and could no longer work with them to end apartheid.

When I was 21 I received a small inheritance from a great aunt. I used it to buy a one-way ticket to the UK. For the next two years I steered clear of politics and instead jumped into the whole "flower-child" thing and took lots of drugs. Psychedelic drugs led me to Jnana Yoga. I stopped taking drugs and found a Hindu guru. For the next ten years I avoided politics and concentrated on bringing peace to the world by teaching people about meditation. In 1976 I moved back to South Africa believing that meditation could bring about peace there.

In 1977 I came to the USA to see my guru who had moved from India and now lived in the USA. As soon as I set foot in the US, I felt at home and made up my mind that I was going to come and live here. I returned to South Africa and worked hard and saved money so that I could immigrate to the USA. In 1978 I arrived in Miami where my guru was living at the time.

But something else happened when I came to the USA. I began to dislike the guru (and his devotees) and decided to move to Los Angeles where I had friends whom I had met in London. These friends lived in Hollywood and Malibu and worked as servants to movie stars. They also took a lot of drugs especially cocaine which I loathed. I realized that I had to get away from them and strike out on my own. I moved to San Francisco.

In my first few years of being in San Francisco, I still thought of myself as a bit of a hippie and definitely considered myself a "liberal" but the harder I worked and the richer and more successful I became, the more I began to see the hippies and "liberals" as lazy subversive bums. Then Reagan became President and the hippies and "liberals" hated him. That was when I realized that I was no longer a "liberal." I revered Reagan. He spoke my language. He stood for everything that I had always believed in but had never been able to articulate. When I became a citizen a few years later, I registered as a Republican.

Although I no longer mixed with hippies and "liberals," I did not hate them. I tolerated them and expected them to tolerate me but, during the Clinton years, the "liberals" became emboldened and arrogant and they began to hate me because I was a Republican. The only reason that I did not leave San Francisco at that time was because I had the best-paying job I had ever had in my life. I saved lots of money and bought a house and finally went into business on my own when I opened a South African restaurant. It became famous within three months and was a very satisfying experience at first.

But, when W became President, the "liberals' became insane with anger and hatred. I began to loathe "liberals" and eventually realized that I was no longer comfortable living in San Francisco. I used to pray for a civil war so that we could destroy the "liberals." I saw them as worse enemies to America than the jihadists. Yep, I had to get out of San Francisco before I ended up as nuts as the "liberals."

When I first came to live in rural Oregon in 2003, I still hated "liberals." Anyone who has read my blog over the past couple of years knows that I still longed for a civil war so that we could rid America of people whom I regarded as the most degraded type of Marxists - not even real Marxists. Lenin used to call people like our "liberals" "left-wing communists" and he regarded them as "useful idiots" just clever enough to help destroy capitalism but not intelligent enough to bring about communism.

To cut a long story short: it took a few years for me to calm down after moving back to the USA from the Peoples' Republic of San Francisco. But I have calmed down (it helps not to know any commies) and am no longer nearly as intolerant of "liberals" as I used to be and I have returned to my real political convictions: I am a real liberal; not a socialist or a communist but a liberal in the Whig tradition of our Founders. I'm back to my old easy-going, live-and-let-live self.

Most of my friends and neighbors are Republicans but most of my tenants are Democrats. Most of the Republicans are pretty conservative but some are more truly liberal (not socialist) than our local Blue Dog Democrats. There are a few moonbat Democrats even here in the sticks but they are not arrogant and angry and most of the Democrats here are Blue Dogs who voted for Bush twice. Some of them are even more conservative than many of my Republican friends.

I tolerate Blue Dog Democrats even though I think they are wrong to believe that socialism is the answer because we all share one thing in common: we love liberty and are Americans first and foremost even if our versions of America are a bit different. I can live with disagreement. I can even tolerate a bit of socialism. I just can't tolerate the angry narcissistic moonbat brigade. They are my enemies and I believe that we need a coalition of conservative independents, Democrats and Republicans to stand up to these subversives.

Just because I don't agree 100% with my all of neighbors doesn't mean that they are my enemies. Sure, I may disagree with some of them ideologically. I won't back down on my dislike of socialism and big government and will let them know that but I'm more pragmatic than ideological and can ally with people who share my basic values in resistance to those who want to destroy freedom, capitalism and common sense.

I no longer fantasize about a civil war against the moonbats (although I still think money spent on arms and ammo is money well-spent.) Anyway, I'm realistic and know that there will never be another civil war in the USA and I will just have to settle for some unfriendly political skirmishes. We can never turn the clock back to the Golden Age of the Republic not only because we are too far gone into socialism but also because I know that the Golden Age never really existed. Politics in America has always been seriously polarized and it's never been easy.

So, I'll settle for saving what little of the American Dream that is left and work to slow or hopefully stop our descent into European-style narcissistic socialism. I'll need all the allies I can get even if I don't agree with them 100%. That's why I am supporting Rudy Giuliani. I believe that he has the potential to unite the middle-class against the savage hordes of infantile socialists, uncivilized anarchists and hate-filled subversives. But I'll save the rest of my plug for Giuliani and the "Coalition of the Winning" till a later post.

Meantime here is what I have been reading for the past week since it was first published: Pew Research Center for The People & The Press, Trends in Political Values and Core Attitudes: 1987-2007 which is subtitled POLITICAL LANDSCAPE MORE FAVORABLE TO DEMOCRATS.(PDF)

I will be reviewing it later as it confirms my hunch that the USA has moved left (not much - but enough to make it necessary to soften my ideological fanaticism and ally myself with other "moderates" in order to preserve what little of liberty and sanity remains in the USA.)

Drugs

Alcohol, tobacco make top 10 list of risky drugs

New "landmark" research finds that alcohol and tobacco are more dangerous than some illegal drugs like marijuana or Ecstasy and should be classified as such in legal systems, according to a new British study.

In research published Friday in The Lancet magazine, Professor David Nutt of Britain's Bristol University and colleagues proposed a new framework for the classification of harmful substances, based on the actual risks posed to society. Their ranking listed alcohol and tobacco among the top 10 most dangerous substances.

Nutt and colleagues used three factors to determine the harm associated with any drug: the physical harm to the user, the drug's potential for addiction and the impact on society of drug use. The researchers asked two groups of experts — psychiatrists specializing in addiction and legal or police officials with scientific or medical expertise — to assign scores to 20 different drugs, including heroin, cocaine, Ecstasy, amphetamines and LSD.

Heroin and cocaine were ranked most dangerous, followed by barbiturates and street methadone. Alcohol was the fifth-most harmful drug and tobacco the ninth most harmful. Cannabis came in 11th, and near the bottom of the list was Ecstasy.

[...]

"The exclusion of alcohol and tobacco from the Misuse of Drugs Act is, from a scientific perspective, arbitrary," write Nutt and his colleagues in The Lancet.

Tobacco causes 40 percent of all hospital illnesses, while alcohol is blamed for more than half of all visits to hospital emergency rooms. The substances also harm society in other ways, damaging families and occupying police services.

This is how the Lancet study ranked the drugs:

1. Heroin
2. Cocaine
3. Barbiturates
4. Street methadone
5. Alcohol
6. Ketamine
7. Benzodiazepines
8. Amphetamine
9. Tobacco
10. Buprenorphine
11. Cannabis
12. Solvents
13. 4-MTA
14. LSD
15. Methylphenidate
16. Anabolic steroids
17. GHB
18. Ecstasy
19. Alkyl nitrates
20. Khat

Speaking as an expert on the subject having tried almost every drug available in the Sixties, I concur with these findings. Of the drugs on that list, I've taken heroine, cocaine, barbiturates, alcohol, benzodiazepines, (such as Valium, Halcion, Ativan etc) amphetamines, tobacco, cannabis, methylphenidate, (known as Ritalin which is prescribed for hyperactive kids) and alkyl nitrates (known as "poppers.") I've also taken drugs not on that list like opium, mescaline, magic mushrooms and MDA.

The first drug that I ever took was alcohol. I don't remember the exact age when I first tasted it but I do remember not liking it much. I was maybe ten or so when I was allowed to drink my first glass of wine. I disliked it so much that I would not drink wine for years after that. Of course it was not a good wine - just some cheap plonk that my Mom drank. I much preferred my Dad's choice of poison, brandy and coke - probably because it was sweeter - and used to sneak a sip from his glass now and then. As I got older, I was allowed to have a small glass of port or sweet sherry on holidays.

I never smoked as a kid. Both my parents did as did all of their friends and relatives. I loathed cigarets. To me they stank and I was never tempted until the night after I got my results from my first year of pharmacy school. I had passed with flying colors. That night I went out to celebrate with my friends in pharmacy school. They all smoked. I was 19 and it was just before Christmas in December of 1966. (The school year ends in December in South Africa.) That was the first time that I got drunk and the next thing I was accepting cigarets from my friends and feeling very grown-up and sophisticated.

That Christmas Eve I got drunk with my Dad for the first time. He was so proud of me for having having passed my exams. We were sitting on the steps leading from the kitchen door to the backyard drinking brandy and coke. I asked him for one of his cigarets. "Now you're a man," he said to me adding, "but you better start buying your own." A week later, on New Year's Eve, he died of a massive heart attack and hemorrhagic stroke brought about by too much booze and smoking. He was 57.

A few days later my friends decided to take me out to a movie to cheer me up. They had all taken some Ritalin to make them high and they gave me some too and we went to see "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad World." The Ritalin made me edgy and irritable and I could not concentrate on the movie. Later they started using amphetamines instead of Ritalin and of course I tried that too. I was hooked. I loved the rush of energy and how "speed" made my mind whirl with thoughts. I would party from Friday night till Sunday night and I began to drink like a fish.

The ampehtamines prevented me from sleeping properly so my friends advised me to take barbiturates to sleep. We all worked in drugstores part-time so getting drugs was easy. I spent the next two years addicted to amphetamines and barbiturates until one day I realized that the drugs were making me sick. I stopped cold-turkey and then really became sick. For two weeks I lay in bed sweating and vomitting until I de-toxed. Later I read that barbiturate withdrawal is just as bad as heroine withdrawal.

When I was 21, I went to live in the UK. There I discovered hashish. By now booze was beginning to give me terrible hangovers and hashish did not. I stopped drinking and did not touch alcohol again for about ten years. During those ten years I tried every hippie drug available: LSD, mescaline, magic mushrooms. I loved them all. Unlike booze, they made me feel alert and alive. I also tried cocaine but knew from the first sniff that it was addictive and deadly. Also I did not like cocaine users - they all seemed to be crazed megalomaniacs. I preferred potheads and trippers - they were nutty but mostly easy-going.

One day a friend of mine in London, "Peter," brought some heroine that he had gotten from an American. Peter and I had taken LSD together several time. He did not like LSD as it gave him horrible hallucinations and scared the hell out of him. We took the heroine. Peter was in heaven. He loved the euphoria. Meantime it made me itch and feel nauseous and it gave me horrible hallucinations. I hated it. Peter went on to become a heroine addict and, 40 years later he still is. He was one of the "lucky" ones who could function on heroine. He went on to become a famous dress-designer in spite of being addicted to heroine.

LSD and the other psychedelics showed me that "getting high" was probably all "in the mind." When I was 23 I stopped taking all drugs and started reading as much as I could about the ancient Eastern religions that promised "bliss." Buddhism called it "nirvana." Hinduism called it all sorts of things like "moksha" (liberation) and "satchitanand" (pure blissful consciousness.) This led me to a Hindu guru who taught raja yoga which is the original yoga from which all others came. I eventually broke from the guru but I still kept on doing raja yoga and I've been doing it for the past 34 years. "Getting high" on yoga is not as easy as doing drugs but at least it isn't making me sick or killing me.

There is no doubt in my mind that alcohol and tobacco were my "gateway" drugs. I still enjoy alcohol in moderation mostly in the form of wine with dinner ever since I discovered fine wines about 20 years ago. But I've seen more damage done by booze than any other drug except maybe crack cocaine and the latest killer drug, methamphetamine.

In my mind, the worst sin that I have ever committed was to start smoking. 30 odd years of smoking damaged my lungs, heart and arteries. We are not meant to inhale smoke into our lungs and that goes double for pot. Eating pot in brownies or drinking it as tea are a lot less dangerous than booze but smoking it does more damage to the lungs than cigarets.

I'm not suggesting that booze and tobacco be prohibited. Prohibition does not work. It doesn't work for the illicit drugs either. I don't know what the solution is but it would help if we were more honest about them and classify booze and tobacco with the other drugs.

Update

From the American Scientist: The Toxicity of Recreational Drugs

The Shuar tribes in Ecuador have for centuries used native plants to induce religious intoxication and to discipline recalcitrant children. By comparison, most North Americans know little about the mood-altering potential of the wild vegetation around them. And those who think they know something on this subject are often dangerously ignorant. Over a three-week period in 1983, for example, 22 Marines wanting to get high were hospitalized because they ate too many seeds of the jimsonweed plant (Datura stramonium), which they found growing wild near their base, Camp Pendleton in southern California.

A dozen seeds of jimsonweed contain about 1 gram of atropine, 10 grams of which can cause nausea, severe agitation, dilation of pupils, hallucinations, headache and delirium. Tribal groups in South America refer to datura plants as the "evil eagles." Of approximately 150 hallucinogenic plants that are routinely consumed around the world, those with atropine have the most pernicious reputation—something these Marines discovered the hard way.

[...]

The most toxic recreational drugs, such as GHB (gamma-hydroxybutyrate) and heroin, have a lethal dose less than 10 times their typical effective dose. The largest cluster of substances has a lethal dose that is 10 to 20 times the effective dose: These include cocaine, MDMA (methylenedioxymethamphetamine, often called "ecstasy") and alcohol. A less toxic group of substances, requiring 20 to 80 times the effective dose to cause death, include Rohypnol (flunitrazepam or "roofies") and mescaline (peyote cactus). The least physiologically toxic substances, those requiring 100 to 1,000 times the effective dose to cause death, include psilocybin mushrooms and marijuana, when ingested. I've found no published cases in the English language that document deaths from smoked marijuana, so the actual lethal dose is a mystery. My surmise is that smoking marijuana is more risky than eating it but still safer than getting drunk.

Alcohol thus ranks at the dangerous end of the toxicity spectrum. So despite the fact that about 75 percent of all adults in the United States enjoy an occasional drink, it must be remembered that alcohol is quite toxic. Indeed, if alcohol were a newly formulated beverage, its high toxicity and addiction potential would surely prevent it from being marketed as a food or drug. This conclusion runs counter to the common view that one's own use of alcohol is harmless.

Why I will never be an organ donor

From the Washington Post, March 18th, 2007:

New trend in organ donation raises questions

As alternative becomes more frequent, doctors worry it puts donors at risk

The number of kidneys, livers and other body parts surgeons are harvesting through a controversial approach to organ donation has started to rise rapidly, a trend that is saving the lives of more waiting patients but, some say, risks sacrificing the interests of the donors.

Under the procedure, surgeons are removing organs within minutes after the heart stops beating and doctors declare a patient dead. Since the 1970s, most organs have been removed only after doctors declared a patient brain dead.

Federal health officials, transplant surgeons and organ banks are promoting the alternative as a way to meet the increasing demand for organs and to give more dying patients and their families the solace of helping others.

Some doctors and bioethicists, however, say the practice raises the disturbing specter of transplant surgeons preying on dying patients for their organs, possibly pressuring doctors and families to discontinue treatment, adversely affecting donors' care in their final days and even hastening their deaths.

Nevertheless, the number of these donations is on the rise. It more than doubled from 268 in 2003 to at least 605 in 2006, enabling surgeons to transplant more than 1,200 additional kidneys, livers, lungs, hearts and other organs.

[...]

The trend is expected to accelerate this year. For the first time, the United Network for Organ Sharing, which oversees organ procurement, and the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations, which accredits hospitals, are requiring all hospitals to decide whether to allow the practice. In response, medical centers are scrambling to develop policies, sometimes sparking intense debate, especially at children's hospitals.

"It's an example of pushing the envelope to get more organs," said Stuart J. Youngner, a bioethicist at Case Western Reserve University. "Whenever we do that, we tend to step on various traditional social taboos."

[...]

Once the decision has been made, a transplant team waits nearby so surgeons can begin removing organs soon after the heart stops. Because the heart can sometimes restart spontaneously, doctors wait a few minutes after pronouncing death before allowing the surgeons to begin. If the heart does not stop quickly, usually within an hour, the procedure is aborted and the patient is taken back to his or her room until death comes.

The practice was the norm before brain death became the standard for pronouncing death in the early 1970s and surgeons began keeping the donor's body functioning with life-support machinery until transplantation could begin. When surgeons resurrected what was then called "non-beating heart" donation in the 1990s, critics called it ghoulish and said it raised a host of ethical questions. Some called it tantamount to murder.

The National Academy of Sciences' Institute of Medicine examined the practice, however, and concluded that it is ethical as long as strict guidelines are followed, including making sure that the decision to withdraw care is independent of the decision to donate organs and that surgeons wait at least five minutes after the heart stops.

[...]

While some doctors and ethicists who initially questioned the practice have become more comfortable with the procedure, others remain troubled.

"The image this creates is people hovering over the body trying to get organs any way they can," said Michael A. Grodin, who directs Boston University's Bioethics and Human Rights Program. "There's a kind of macabre flavor to it."

Some say the practice can interfere with patients' dying peacefully, surrounded by loved ones, and can deny the family sufficient time to grieve. Many hospitals have responded by withdrawing life-support devices and other care in the intensive-care unit or allowing families to accompany loved ones to the operating room so they can be at the bedside when death occurs.

But many experts remain concerned and worry that the practice blurs the definition of death.

"The person is not dead yet," said Jerry A. Menikoff, an associate professor of law, ethics and medicine at the University of Kansas. "They are going to be dead, but we should be honest and say that we're starting to remove the organs a few minutes before they meet the legal definition of death."

In response to such concerns, most doctors wait five minutes after the heart stops before pronouncing patients dead. But doctors at some hospitals wait three minutes, others two. In Denver, surgeons at Children's Hospital wait 75 seconds before starting to remove hearts from infants, to maximize the chances that the organs will be useable.

[...]

In addition to giving DCD donors morphine, valium and other drugs to make sure they do not suffer as life support is withdrawn, doctors often insert a large tube into an artery and inject drugs such as the blood thinner heparin to help preserve the organs. Some say those measures may hasten death.

Up until the advent of heart transplants, death was always defined as "when the heart stops beating." "Donation after cardiac death" (DCD) was replaced with DBD or "donation after brain death" in the early 1970s a few years after the South African surgeon, Christiaan Barnard, did the first heart transplant and the practice became widespread. Kidney transplants had almost become routine by then but, unlike hearts, kidneys could be packed in ice and did not need to be used immediately. Hearts need to be as fresh as possible and the standard practice was to remove the heart as soon as the donor was declared brain-dead even if the heart was still beating and transplant it into the donee immediately.

In California Organ Donor Cards are given out automatically every time you renew your driver's licence. I always refused to sign and carry one because, in the 30 years that I worked in hospital pharmacies, I heard too many horror stories such as donors opening their eyes just as their hearts were being cut out. I figured there is seldom smoke without fire and that was even before I saw my first transplant surgery. I'll tell you about that.

20 years ago the hospital that I worked at decided to do a very new procedure - liver transplants. A famous surgeon from Spain was hired and specially trained OR nurses were recruited. In those days liver transplant surgery could take up to 30 hours so it was always done at night when there was no rush to do as many surgeries as possible in the same OR. At that time I was doing my 8-year stint on night-shift. I was one of two people in the pharmacy on "graveyard shift" as it is commonly known.

Most transplant surgery requires a lot of IV drugs which we used to make up ahead of time and deliver to the OR but liver transplants were not yet routine and the surgeon did not always know exactly which drugs to order ahead of time. So we often had to make specialized IV drips which were not available commercially and deliver them to the OR during surgery. I had gotten used to the idea that we had to make antibiotic drips for donors to make sure that they did not develop infections prior to having their organs harvested but one night the surgeon ordered a dilaudid drip.

Most of the injectable opiates are made in IV bags commercially but not dilaudid. Apparently the donor was allergic to all opiates like morphine and demerol but not to dilaudid. Making antibiotic or heparin drips for soon-to-be-dead donors was bizarre enough but I was quite rattled by the idea that the donor needed a painkiller. I went to deliver the IV drip to the OR. Because dilaudid is a narcotic it must be delivered to and signed for by the doctor who ordered it. I had to wait (behind a glass partition because I was not sterile) for one of the assisting surgeons to do so. I watched until the surgeon came to get the dilaudid drip.

The OR was the largest one in the hospital but it was crowded. There were surgeons and nurses surrounding the donor harvesting his organs such as corneas and kidneys. The Spanish surgeon had just finished cutting the diseased liver out of the donee. As soon as all of the donor's organs (all except the heart - that had to be beating during the removal of the liver) had been harvested by the assisting surgeons, the liver was ready to be removed. Removing the liver took many hours because of the need to keep the blood vessels intact. That's what the dilaudid drip was for - to make sure that the donor did not feel any pain during the removal of his liver.

I knew that the donor had been pronounced brain-dead and was only breathing because of a respirator but watching his chest rise and fall with each breath as his organs were removed shook me up and made me even surer that I would never sign up to be an organ donor.

The new trend of using "heart death" as the definition of death instead of "brain death" is far too iffy for my tastes. If the brain is still alive, the heart can start beating even after it has stopped for a while. Of course after four minutes there will be brain damage due to lack of oxygen but I think I still would prefer to live with brain damage than to open my eyes and see a surgeon lifting my heart out of my rib-cage.

And now I'm going to do some transplanting of my own but I'm sticking to transplanting plants in my garden.

"The Father of the Constitution"

James Madison is often referred to as the "Father of the Constitution" for his role in its drafting and ratification. However, he protested that this title was "a credit to which I have no claim... The Constitution was not, like the fabled Goddess of Wisdom, the offspring of a single brain. It ought to be regarded as the work of many heads and many hands".

Madison was born on March 16, 1751. James' father had inherited some wealth and also acquired more when he married a tobacco heiress. James was a sickly boy from an early age and remained so till his death. Madison later described his illness as "epileptic fits" but it was probably what we would nowadays call "anxiety attacks." He was definitely a "worrier" and also seems to have been a bit of a "hypochondriac." He was a small man. At 5' 4" and weighing only 100 lbs, he was our smallest President.

Like many sickly kids, Madison was a bookworm from an early age and remained a scholar throughout his life. By the time he entered the College of New Jersey, which later became Princeton University, Madison had mastered Greek and Latin. He completed his college studies in two years but stayed on at Princeton for another term to tackle Hebrew and philosophy. When he returned to his family estate, Montpelier, in 1772, he studied law but had no taste for it which is ironic because he eventually became known as the "Great Legislator."

In 1776, at the age of 24, he became a delegate to the revolutionary Virginia Convention where he began a life-long friendship with Thomas Jefferson when they worked together to enact statutes on religious freedom and the disestablishment of the Church of England. In 1778 Madison was appointed to the Virginia Council of State, the governmental body that directed state affairs during the Revolutionary War. Jefferson served as governor of Virginia during the war years and, from that time until Jefferson's death in 1826, Madison was Jefferson's closest adviser and most devoted friend.

At age twenty-nine, Madison became the youngest member of the Continental Congress where he was the leading proponent of legislation to strengthen the loose confederacy of former colonies, contending that military victory required vesting power in a central government. He also worked to oppose Patrick Henry's proposals to tax citizens in support of the Christian religion and to establish religious tests for public office and to criminalize heresy.

Because Madison believed that weaknesses in the Articles of Confederation made the new Republic vulnerable to foreign enemies, he called for a national convention in Philadelphia "to render the constitution of the Federal Government adequate to the exigencies of the Union." Madison led the Virginia delegation to the Philadelphia meeting which began on May 14, 1787. He then proposed that General George Washington act as its chairman.

In 1788 Madison, along with Alexander Hamilton and John Jay, began to publish a series of newspaper essays that became known collectively as the Federalist Papers. Madison wrote twenty-nine of the eighty-five essays under the pseudonym "Publius." He also drafted many basic laws and was responsible for the first ten amendments to the Constitution, and is therefore also known as the "Father of the Bill of Rights." Madison believed that the new Republic needed checks and balances to limit the powers of special interests, which he called "factions."

As leader in the House of Representatives, Madison worked closely with President George Washington to organize the new federal government but, in 1791, he broke with Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton and he and Jefferson organized what they called the Republican Party (which later became the Democratic-Republican Party) to oppose the Federalists. (For years I mistakenly thought that this was the beginning of the GOP - and I sure wish it were so because Madison's ideals to me embody the best of republican and Republican virtues.)

In 1794 Aaron Burr introduced Madison to Dolley Payne Todd. Madison surprised even his closest friends when he married the lovely widow, who already had an infant son. Madison was 43 and Dolley was only 26. Although Dolley did not bear Madison any children, they were devoted to each other for the rest of their lives and Dolley even gave up her Quaker religion.

When Jefferson became President, he chose Madison to be his Secretary of State. In this capacity Madison oversaw the Louisiana Purchase, the war against the "Barbary pirates" (our first war against Muslim terrorists) and the embargo against Britain and France in response to their constant harassment of American ships and "impressment" of American sailors.

In 1809 Madison became the fourth president of the United States when Jefferson, like Washington before him, declined to run for a third term and endorsed Madison. I won't go into detail about Madison's presidency - you could write a whole book just about the War of 1812 - but there is one interesting little snippet about Madison's run for his second term. From Wiki:

A rebellious group of New York Democratic-Republicans who had participated in the caucus boycott supported the mayor of New York City, DeWitt Clinton, the nephew of former Vice President George Clinton, who had died in office. Clinton supporters hoped to forge a winning coalition among Republicans opposed to the coming war, Democratic-Republicans angry with Madison for not moving more decisively toward war, northerners weary of the Virginia dynasty and southern control of the White House, and disgruntled New Englanders who wanted almost anyone over Madison. Dismayed about the prospects of beating Madison, a group of top Federalists met with Clinton's supporters to discuss a unification strategy. Difficult as it was for them to join forces, this assembly of notables nominated Clinton for President and Jared Ingersoll, a Philadelphia lawyer, for vice president.

The Clintonians, who had no official party name, tailored their message to the region and the audience. They said one thing to war Democratic-Republicans, another to peace Democratic-Republicans, and something else again to antiwar Federalists. Their tactics turned the honorable John Quincy Adams, son of the former Federalist President John Adams, against his former party colleagues. The elder Adams, in fact, not only endorsed Madison but also agreed to head Madison's electoral ticket in his home district of Quincy, Massachusetts.

[...]

The Federalists had seriously weakened, if not completely destroyed, their status as an established party by their fusionist strategy. To be fair, it is unlikely that any other strategy would have achieved victory against a seated President waging what many at the time called the Second American Revolution...No incumbent wartime President before or since Madison has ever lost his bid for reelection.

Don't the Clintonian "fusionists" sound a bit like our Clintonistas - pure opportunists without any core principles and willing to say whatever is needed to get elected?

Like Washington and Jefferson, Madison left the presidency a poorer man unlike the Clintons who claimed that their net worth was $600,000 when they moved into the White House and are now worth 60 million or more.

Also like his predecessors, Madison was troubled by slavery and supported the American Colonization Society's plan to transport blacks back to Africa. He spent his final years in Montpelier, almost obsessively rewriting his papers. Despite being in poor health most of his life, he was 85 when he died in 1836.

My religion

My religion is to sing and dance with happiness whenever I can and to be cheerful and grateful the rest of the time; to enjoy life. I have complete faith that what is meant for me will be. I don't presume to know if I'm "saved" or if I will "go to heaven." All I can do is be in awe of this creation, of life and living creatures and especially humans because, unlike mere animals, we long to know our creator.

But I can't know God with my mind. I've tried that and failed. I can only know God when I have "the heart of a child" and you can't try that; it just happens when you least expect it. Blake wrote in Auguries of Innocence: "To see the world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wildflower." The "heart of a child" is a metaphor for innocence, faith, hope and love.

I have glimpses of the creator of this wonderful thing which we call "the world." I can see tiny indescribable inklings of the creative mirth, glee, joy, fun - whatever you want to call God's love - of which this miracle called "the world" is but a dull mirror image.

Everything after that is opinion as far as I'm concerned. Call it religion, theology, eschatology; it's just really "opinionology" to me. And the most opinionated "opinionological" speculation of all to me is the "theory" of atheism.

That's why I call myself a Deist. I can't call myself a Christian or a believer of any religion because I don't really believe in anything that I haven't seen with my own two eyes. The only thing that I believe in that cannot be seen with the eyes is something that is so perfect that the only name that I can give it is "God" because that word means "something to worship."

That's my religion; worship my creator. It's so tempting to use big words to convey some seriousness; words like infinite and ineffable. In fact I used to use such words to describe "God" when I first realized that I was a Deist at the age of 21 but they're a bit silly. I prefer the poetry of Blake or the Psalms any day.

My religion is very simple and is usually ruined the moment that I put my clumsy words on it. All I know for sure is that I was given everything that I need at birth - life, breath, a longing to know and an instinct to sing the praises of my creator. After that it's up to me.

Which brings me back down to earth. I may long for the "Kingdom of God within" but it is, after all, "within." It's not outside of me. Outside of me is nature which may be beautiful but can also be dangerous and deadly and then there's the world of people which is even more tricky and perilous even though we have come a long way since we use to bash each others' brains out over the slightest differences of opinion. Nowadays we behave a bit better and call it politics.

And politics doesn't work without ethics, morals or standards. I may not be a Christian but to me the "standard" of civilization is "love God with your whole heart and love your neighbor as you love yourself." And, to me, a "neighbor" is the kind and good person who comes to my aid in a time of need. Those who do not help me are not my "neighbors." They are my enemies. That's politics - which sometimes takes the form of war.

The world of humans is not perfect; it's definitely not the "Kingdom of God" and not even civilized politics will bring about a perfect paradise on earth. Expecting my "religion" to solve political problems is not sensible or practical. There's a delicate balance between experiencing "the Kingdom of God within" and enjoying the mixed blessings of nature and the world of mankind.

I know that my "religion" is subjective which is why I don't criticize other peoples' beliefs. We all have to dissolve and disappear from this world one day and we do that completely alone. How we face death is nobody else's business. How we face life is everybody's business so I try to be a good neighbor.

For my sister

[I am posting this picture of my mother because my sister, Maryann, does not get to see it anymore as she gave it to me when our mother died.]

Neva Joubert Conlon Gage, March 13th 1918 - December 31st 1998.























Maryann, let's think about all the good memories of Mom today, her birthday, when she would have been 89. She wasn't a perfect mother but she sure tried. Maybe you were too young to remember when Daddy first got sick and we were so poor that Mom used to give us food at night and tell us that she was going to eat later but she didn't because there was no food left for her.

You were old enough to see that she gave up and became deathly ill also when Dad finally died after his long illness. But she forced herself to go to work to feed us. She was a passionate woman and she had a terrible temper and she could be very hard on us but that's because she wanted us to be as tough as she was. She wanted us to survive and thrive and she succeeded in doing that.

And she was tough. She told me a year before her death that she was going to die when she was 80. I asked her why. She answered that she had had a good life and didn't want to be a burden on us when she became too frail to take care of herself. She didn't mention that she had congestive heart failure - well, she never drew attention to any of her health problems ever - but I knew that she had CHF because I recognized the symptoms. She told me not to tell you and I know it came as a surprise when she suddenly died in your arms on New Year's Eve, the same day that our father had died 32 years before.

Most of the years that she was married to our father were hard for her and I'm just glad that she had 30 good years with our stepfather, Tom Gage, before she died. I don't think that she ever imagined when she was growing up on the farm in the Orange Free State where she had been born that one day she would be rich and travel the world and see and do things that most people could only imagine.

And here's the pic of you with her on her 80th birthday.

Don't fence me in

When I first realized that I was not a leftist, I joined the Libertarian Party until the kookiness of it's members drove me into the stodgy but sane world of the GOP but I still have a strong libertarian streak insofar as the major tenets of libertarianism are based on the same Lockean liberal/Whig ideas of individual sovereignty that inspired the American Revolution.

Brian Doherty recently published a book called "Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement." Here are some excerpts from his latest essay, Libertarianism: Past and Prospects:

To the extent that libertarianism’s history has been told, it has mostly been treated as a weird, overenthusiastic little cousin to right-wing conservatism. Rescuing libertarianism from that sad fate was one of my purposes, and one of the reasons I put the word “radical” in its title—as part of a phrase invented by novelist and libertarian inspiration Ayn Rand to identify her own ideological mission.

[...]

I was obligated to wonder: did this libertarian movement—this tightly-knit group of economists, novelists, publishers, philosophers, think tankers, and politicians whose story I tell—actually accomplish anything of unquestionable significance?

That question has become particularly relevant, not only for the framing of Radicals for Capitalism, but in the larger world of libertarian discussion about the next appropriate, or likely, step in libertarian influence in actual politics and policy.

[...]

The extent to which major political parties ought to or must reach out to libertarians has become one of the hottest topics in libertarian discourse, just as my book debuts.

We have seen recently Ryan Sager’s theory from his book, "The Elephant in the Room: Evangelicals, Libertarians, and the Battle to Control the Republican Party," that Republicans are losing out, particularly in the Mountain West, because they have abandoned policies that appeal to the libertarian-leaning in favor of outreach to the evangelical religious right. The GOP, in Sager’s telling, especially after the apparent repudiation of Bushism in the 2006 elections, needs to heed and reach out to the libertarian voter.

Cato’s Brink Lindsey, initially in the pages of the New Republic, has taken a different tack, offering up the libertarian voting bloc to the Democratic Party. He’s argued that “A refashioned liberalism that incorporated key libertarian concerns and insights could make possible a truly progressive politics…that joins together under one banner the causes of both cultural and economic progress.” So far, some prominent Democratic partisans have been unreceptive to Lindsey’s offer, dismissing libertarians as opposed to the massive entitlement programs seen as non-negotiable central elements of the Democratic Party, and politically insignificant besides.

Buttressing the Sager and Lindsey message—that both major parties need to think about appealing to libertarians—is a body of research recently issued from Cato’s David Boaz and the American Future Foundation’s David Kirby. They find, analyzing survey data from Pew, Gallup, and the American National Election Studies, around 14 percent of American voters as recognizably libertarian, in the sense of embracing both fiscal conservatism and social liberalism.

The Libertarian Party no longer stands for the Lockean liberal idea that "government is a necessary evil" but has fallen under the control of the anarchist hippie peaceniks who are not much different from the anti-war Democrats like Cindy Sheehan yet there a whole lot of Americans who have a libertarian outlook on life but who probably would never use the word "libertarian" to describe themselves.

Western Republicans are still mostly libertarian. The rural west is still a little like the Wild West where justice was seen to be done instantly and enforced with guns. The Western libertarian "cowboy" philosophy is similar to the Southern "redneck" philosophy: live and let live; don't tread on me; give me lands lots of land, don't fence me in. Of course the Western cities are almost completely socialist but you can travel from the eastern parts of Washington, Oregon and California through the mountain states and the Southwest and find the libertarian "cowboy" mentality everywhere west of the Rockies.

Now, I've travelled across the USA by car six times and the thing is that I've seen that same mentality in small towns in every state that I've visited - even in the Bible Belt where the "rednecks" also have that "don't fence me in" libertarian mentality which was after all the driving force behind our War of Independence. Maybe there are fewer of us folks with the "cowboy" and "redneck" philosophy and more of those who want government to change their diapers and tell them what to think and do. But, as long as I'm alive, I'm sticking with my "don't tread on me" philosophy and I think a whole bunch of Americans think the same way. We don't like socialist nannies bossing us around anymore than we like prissy preachers and other nosy-parking busbodies telling us how to live.

Evangelicals and libertarians have one thing in common and it's the most basic tenet of the American Revolution: keep government out of our homes and familes; don't tell us how to raise and educate our kids; we can take care of ourselves and don't need any assistance from Big Brother, thank you. I know there are some evangelicals who would like to see government interfering in citizens' private lives but hopefully they are in the minority and most conservative Christians realize that a theocracy is a two-edged sword. Secularist atheism is also a religion and look what horrors their "atheocracy" has wrought over the past few decades. The best government is the least government.

American patriotism

There is a big difference between American patriotism and the patriotism of other nations. When other nations sing their anthems and hoist their flags, they are not only thinking about the geographical area in which they live but also of their kings and governments. Foremost they are thinking about their nationality, their race. That's why "patriotism" is a dirty word in Europe. European "patriotism" has led to centuries of warfare brought about by quarrelling kings and genocide caused by racism.

When Americans sing the anthem and honor the flag, we aren't thinking about kings or governments or about what race we are; we are thinking about our Revolution and our Constitution which created the first nation in the world to be ruled by all of its inhabitants through laws which applied to all. We're thinking about our families and friends and neighbors and about the beautiful land in which we live. Our flag is the symbol of our freedom and the Constitution which protects our individual sovereignty.

Our flag stands for the greatest experiment in the history of civilization and the rule of law guaranteed by the Constitution. It's the symbol of our individual dreams and hopes not our race. As I wrote below, "America is first and foremost simply a geographical area settled by like-minded people who believe that private property and individual sovereignty are the basis of civilization."

That's why Americans are not ashamed to be patritoic.

We hoist our flag with simple gratitude more than national pride.