So today on the C-Train I met a guy who was fresh out of prison, for failing to produce a valid token to the Train Cops.

“Nice boots,” he said, after sitting down next to me. “Looks like they’re good for riding.”

“Thanks, that what I use them for.” I said, eyeing him up.  There was something nervous and juvenile looking about him – though I guessed his age to be somewhere in the late twenties.  Part of it was the baseball cap, but there was something about his posture.

He fidgeted a bit as the conversation died down, then he barked out a dry laugh. “Never going to trust my wife again,” he said.

“Oh yeah?  What happened?”

I expected a story along the lines of domestic spat-turned Protect and Serve, but instead he told me, “She didn’t wake me up and I fell asleep on the train.”

“Heh,” I chuckled.

Again our conversation died down.  It’d been a long day and I didn’t have much to say, but after a few seconds he broke the silence.

“So I just got out of jail,” he blurted out. “They caught me sneaking onto a train.”

“Jesus Christ,” I said, my lips curling, “Listen, this is my stop – but you hang in there, alright pal?  Take care of yourself.”

Disgusting, I thought, as I stepped onto the platform.  Locking a man up in a cage like a goddamned animal, all because he was too broke to afford the $2.75 fare – or the $150 fine he got stuck with.  If I were him, I wouldn’t trust my old lady either.

Now I gotta say, given the stop where he’d got on, there was a decent chance he’d actually only been in the Downtown holding cell – not the Remand Centre, or prison proper – but the cold, dank rooms there had clearly been enought to put the Fear into him.  And no sane person could blame the poor guy.  It’s one thing being paraded around as an enemy POW.  That at least has got some dignity to it.  But when the local gang of Dudley Do-Rights slaps the bracelets on you and starts telling you where to stand, it’s pretty clear that you ain’t nothing but a hound dog.

You know, I always hear the same old refrain from the upper classes about how Poor People are such useless failures.  They like to pretend as if the Free Market would just eat these jokers up and spit out the piercings, but for the Tax Payer’s magnanimity that keeps a roof over their heads.  Welfare Queens and Dead Beats, the lot of ‘em, am I right?

But here’s what’s really going on.

Sure, society likes to hand out all sorts of unasked for shit to these guys – and you’re damned right that they take what’s offered, seldom with a nod of gratitude – but not fifteen minutes after coming home with their welfare check, these guys gotta deal with a harassing call from the Government demanding they go and pay their speeding fine.  After that they gotta drop another $100 on a safety and emissions check for their vehicle.  Then $800 for repairs, which is more than they paid for the damned thing in the first place.

They get kicked out of apartments they can’t afford, because the landlord has to insulate the walls against a fire that’ll never happen, and they get tossed into shitty government projects, where the Number One cause of high-crime is the number of cops sniffing around for an excuse to kick down a door.

And let’s not even talk about cigarette- and liquor taxes, let alone Government run lotteries.

Every day of their lives, these guys have to deal with The Man hoofing them in the nuts – and then the suit-wearing pricks downtown, who wouldn’t dirty their hands with the Police Department’s violence any more than they’d butcher their own meat, look down their noses at ‘em, and hand over a charity cheque.

Do the poor bastards ever complain?  Of course not.  This has been going on their whole lives, it’s the Standard Operating Procedure, the normal state of affairs.  So why question it?

You know, this guy called Hegel once wrote something about the Master-Slave Diabetic… but like I said, it’s been a long day, and I don’t feel like looking it up right now.  But I wonder what he’d say, if he ever saw how fucked up this world is?

Hell, he’d probably just sit in Starbucks and download music from the iStore.  That’s what Deep Thinkers do nowadays, after all.

I don’t got much to add to this – better folks than I have gone on at length.

For a good aggregate site, go here: I found the link through Peter Schiff’s youtube channel, and I’m currently watching an old 1990 news program from there, on BPs culpability in the Exxon Valdez disaster.

All I’ve got to say is this: [...]

My father once said to me, “Son… I’ve always had a strong sense of Justice.  And I think that you have that too.”

He was right.  But when you care about Justice, you’re forced to seek after something more, something indispensable to it.  Before you can find Justice, you need to find Truth.

I’ve always believed in an Objective Reality.  That outside of oneself, things are the way they are, without regard for our beliefs or opinions.  And that the first step in achieving Grace, or Honour, or Nobility, or whatever you want to call it, is to go out there and discover how the ground lies.  To make a map that reflects the territory.  I’ve never had much tolerance for Relatavism, or Post Modernism, or Solipsism, or any other ideology that says you should believe whatever you want to believe.

And Politics, if it matters as all, is equally bound to whatever Truths are manifest by our innate social- and moral natures.  The so-called Politics of Age, Class, or Ethnicity are ugly perversions.

“You shouldn’t be so Conservative,” she said as we held each other in the post-coital afterglow. “You’re only twenty-one.  Everyone knows that you’re supposed to be Liberal when you’re young and Conservative when you’re older.  It’s more fun that way.”

“So you’re saying you’ll change your mind and agree with me when you turn thirty?”

“Not me,” she said, stroking my chest, “I’m Arab.  That’s like being Black in 1970.  I’ll always vote Liberal.”

I’d be lying if I said my politics hadn’t changed over the years – truly contemptible is the creature whose mind cannot be changed, after all.  During High School I’d spout facile arguments against Wal-Mart.  In University I became a sort of SXE-Capitalist.  Then I became vehemently pro-drug, began to see the ugly Will to Power most of our Leaders embody, and realized that all of our Great Institutions are little more than Bureaucracies, rife with all the petty, endemic problems of our old-enemy’s Politburo.

The older I get, the more Anarchist I become.

Of all the schools of political though, Anarchism is the least understood.  Imagine if you locked John Locke and Adam Smith together in a room for  three days straight.  You give them nothing to eat or drink but high-protein Kobe steaks, two or three handles whiskey, and a half-kilo of Crystal-Meth.  You leave a few copies of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen lying around, and play Lynyrd Skynyrd, The Doors, and Rage Against the Machine on repeat, then blend until homogenous.

At the end of it you get Anarchism.

The basic idea is that people – write this down – are perfectly fine on their own.  We don’t need no education to save us from ourselves, and we don’t need no thought control to tell us how to live.  A Free Man surrounded by a community of Free Men is going to be the most wildly productive and peaceful force on the face of the planet – they’ll be living for themselves according to their innate Human Virtue.  No rulers or tyrants to dictate who does what or who goes where – no do-gooder mobs, stealing your dollars at gun-point for some lobby group’s cause – no gangs of men with Boots and Sticks to lock you in a cage.  Just Free Men of Clean Conscience contracting with one another voluntarily, and building a better world for their children.

Oh it’s a pipe dream, more likely than not.  Day-to-day I’m more worried about what can be done, not idealized futurist fantasies.  Even if some group of Founding Fathers built the perfect Anarchist society – Sea Steaders perhaps, or maybe the Scientist-Explorers who colonize Mars – it wouldn’t last two generations before the Evil Mutants and Human Viruses appeared and began slithering through the loopholes.  And even if that didn’t happen, Freedom, sadly, places demands on the individual which few of us can bear; far too many people enjoy slavery for us to ever eliminate it.

But it’s a beautiful concept, isn’t it?

It’s a much cleaner life, living by Anarchist principles.  If you’re willing to trust the government with your moral culpability – if you trust them to murder, steal, and imprison on your behalf – that’s your business.  As for me, I go to bed with a clean conscience and wake up to a face that I can look at in the mirror.  And even if the goal is an unattainable Utopia, I can still go out there every day and try and make the world a little bit more Free, and a little bit happier.

So with all that said, I hope you understand the absolute revulsion I feel when I read something like Lino D’s excellent piece about the so-called Anarcho-Communists protesting the G20.  Now I don’t want to get too involved with the Conference itself – it’s a complex issue, and besides, Lino’s in the right part of the country to actually get his foot on the ground and cover it properly.  But as for the character of these protesters, I can sum it up in two words: Freeloading Scum.

You see, these people buy into the image, they wear the logo tees, and they frame their arguments in the context of moral outrage – but their root motivation is nothing but vicious envy.  They claim that:

Anarchism will be created by the class struggle between the vast majority of society and the tiny minority that currently rule… The methods of struggle that we promote are a preparation for the running of society along anarchist and communist lines after the revolution.

And never the twain shall meet…

Folks, Communism is the fundamental opposite of Anarchism, pure and simple.  While Anarchism holds up the Free Man as its ideal, Communism teaches that the community comes first – that each individual is owned by the majority; their land, their money, their very lives.  It is precisely this ugly totalitarianism that true Anarchists are appalled by.

For them to protest the “ruling minority’ while advocating Community Ownership of the individual speaks to their motives.  If Dagny Taggart herself walked before them, they’d tear her down with spades and clawed hands.  They’d tear down Henry Roarke’s buildings for disrespecting Women, or Africa, or Something.  Their anger is targeted at the individuals holding the wealth – not the means by which the wealth was acquired.  In their vision of the world, all preordained enemies would be toppled and a new elite – themselves – would take their place, handing down ‘fairness’ and ‘justice’ as befits their emotionally-derived ideological commitments.

The label of Anarchist is a sham – nowhere do they acknowledge the stark, terrifying levels of responsibility that Freedom places on a Man.  Instead, when they say Anarchy, they mean Licence – the ‘freedom’ to do as they wish, without consequence or responsibility, not even those imposed upon them by cold and cruel Nature.  A welfare state, then – steal the wealth and redistribute it, so that all might become Trust Fund Babies, able to do as they wish in some meaningless, catharsis-free world in imitation of Second Life.

These Anarcho-Communists are children raised in the most opulent society which ever existed.  Spoilt and privileged, even the poorest among them owns devices as amazing as a Genie.  Magic boxes, divorced in their minds from the hands that built them.  These children were weaned in a socialized system, never realizing that the Baby Bonus was bled out of the Workers they claim to support, they take advantage of every Entitlement and Affirmative Action Initiative to give themselves an unfair advantage over those that toil.

These callow youths disgust me, and it will be cold comfort indeed should they get their way.  For when they receive their just desserts of an impoverished economy and a bankrupt government, I know that even then their response will be to blame the Capitalists who could have saved them.  And their only solution will be to steal even more, and borrow what they can never pay back.  After all, isn’t that what the last generation of rebels has done?

But I’m going to keep living the honest life of a Free Man, untroubled by the treacherous vermin who claim to be my friends.  I’ll keep fighting the good fight everyday, whether or not I live to see victory.  I’ll stand there and watch the sun set, smoke my cigarettes, and know that I lived a good life.  I’ll know I stood up for Truth, and did my best to pursue Justice.  And in the end that’s all that matters.

Imagine a bunch of Doctor Caricatures – giant heads,  reflector and stethescopes strapped on, and black shiny boots – they’re jabbering wildly with pointed teeth, smiling and promising that they’re here to help while they stick sharp needles in your belly–

That’s what it feels like when you read the Ontario Human Rights Commission’s website.

For those of you still under the delusion that you live in a free country, the Human Rights Commissions are a group of government run secret courts where the presumption is guilt until you can prove innocence.  They’re premised on the Third-Wave-Feminist concept of Institutional Violence, which posits as an article of faith that the sole reason women and minorities have trouble achieving social parity with the Rich White Male over-class, was that the world had been built from the ground-up with malicious intent and latent sadism.

Which is all well and good on it’s own – I’m never one to discount a good Conspiracy Theory, not with the sick lunatics we have running the show, but the solution they crafted was bent three ways left of sideways.  Instead of tearing down the establishment through patriotic acts of the old Ultraviolence their foremothers had believed in, the third-wave Tank Girls instead chose to hire groups of thuggish bureaucrats to hammer down on errant nails until everybody was equal.

So now the joke’s on them.  To quote from Jean Toomer

We’re all niggers now-get me?
Black niggers, white niggers, -take your choice.

Ann Coulter’s going to get censored, and Rap’s going to get banned.  It doesn’t matter who you are anymore, the Human Rights Tribunal is going to enforce their version of equality whether you like it or not.

An article from June 7th caught my eye, “Understanding human rights in Canada has become easier”.  Funny that, I thought, I never figured Human Rights were all that difficult to understand – the basic idea is that, what with you being a Free Man and all, you can pretty much do whatever you want as long as you don’t walk over to my house and take a shit on my lawn.  Sure, things can get a bit confusing when you try and explain why you’re defending Fred Phelps or a group of peaceful Skinheads – but on the whole I didn’t really think Human Rights were the sort of things that needed explaining – wikipedia pretty much has the market cornered on that produce.

Except what they’re talking about isn’t Human Rights – not that any Frenchman living two-hundred years ago would recognize, anyway.  What they’re really talking about is your ‘Right’ not to be offended – not to be put off, or made uncomfortable by any number of things.  Remember folks, we’re not talking about Jim Crow laws here – sunset clauses or not – we’re talking purely about emotions.  And if someone had a problem, don’t expect your day in court, or some slap on the wrist – expect to show up to a closed-door tribunal that winds up costing you tens of thousands of dollars, and ruins your business.

What, you don’t believe me?  Just ask this guy.

Oh, but the Fuckery doesn’t end there.  Their latest newsbulletin stated: “The OHRC introduces a new resource for human rights and mental health.”

Now my problem here isn’t that I’m going to have to work alongside a manic-depressive borderline who can’t be fired.  Hell, with the way my personal life has been going lately, that’d feel perfectly normal.  No, the problem here is that they are decreeing – remember, these bastards decree, stronger than any legislator – that Mental Illness is now a Thing.  It’s now a label – to be put onto your Universal ID along with your Race, Blood Type, and Religious Preference (you know – all those things that are the Government’s Business).

Only this one’s worse.  Your race is self-evident, and it’s going to fuck you over or benefit you depending on the situation.  But being labelled as Crazy?  Now that’s a terrifying prospect.  You see, Crazy people – much like women who suffer ‘False Consciousness‘ – aren’t entitled to the full Rights of a Citizen.  They’re even worse off than criminals – once they get that label, they become permanent Wards of the State.  I honestly can’t think of a more terrifying prospect.

So one last story from this site, just in case your stomach isn’t churning.  This one from the Province where I reside:

On June 27, Albertans will join their fellow Canadians to reflect on our country’s rich diversity. Canadian Multiculturalism Day encourages Albertans to honour our shared commitment to democracy, equality, mutual respect and understanding, and the important role Albertans from all national and cultural backgrounds play in helping to promote these key civic values.

Emphasis mine, but you get the point.

I gotta say, that bit about ‘mutual respect’ really rubs me the wrong way.  Where I come from, respect has always been something you earned – not something handed away freely, at gunpoint.  The poison here seems to stem from that ugly bit of folk-wisdom “Judge not lest ye be judged.”

Fuck. That. Noise.

Judge – and be prepared for the Judgement of others.  A Free Man lives with pride and dignity – not the mewling prostrations of a slave or infant.  And something that calls itself The Human Rights Tribunal has no business degrading people like this.

I can already hear what Jesse’s gonna say about all of this:

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.

.

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Yo – this shit is Kafkaesque, bitch!

.

A good friend of mine Lino D, Conservative most of his life, has recently grown disillusioned with their politics and begun to turn to a more Federalist philosophy.  He’s started up a blog on issues in Canadian Governance, which I will be writing for.  I just tossed up my first article today concerning the problems with newspaper nowadays, how it’s more about sloganeering than reporting.

Go check it out here.

And for the Patriots among you who like desktop backgrounds, he tossed this little image together (left-click for the full size version).

I guess I can’t really blame my neighbour for what happened.

You see, I’d been out of town for the past week, and the endless crying in The Human Centipede is rather convincing (the plot and dialogue are another matter).  As far as my neighbour knew, my girlfriend had been home alone when the screaming started, and can you really expect a single mother to intervene?

And I guess I can’t really blame the police, either.  As far as cops go they were decent enough.  Of course they took the throwing star my brother given me the day before, fresh off the plane from Japan, and left on the coffee table next to me (restricted weapons, I guess, though I don’t really know why) but they didn’t charge me for it.  And yeah, one of them threatened to cap my ass while I was getting him my ID (“Sir, if you pull a throwing star out of that pocket I will shoot you”), but there was no real malice in his voice.  And of course – once they’d realized all this was just a misunderstanding – they proceeded to snoop around with their flashlights, and run our names to look for some sort of crime to arrest us for – but once again, they didn’t do this any more roughly than was necessary.  No tearing apart books or knocking things off the shelves.  Just a methodical investigation of all our personal belongings.

So in the end, I really shouldn’t be so upset.

But sometimes I dream of a different sort of Police Department.  One that isn’t just another gang, granted privilege by our rulers, but a Department that is part of, representative of, and answerable to the citizens.  I can imagine last night in my head. “Ah, sorry for interrupting your evening Mr Aurini.  Glad we got it all sorted out.  I’m Officer Dalidowicz, by the way, and this is my beat.  If you ever need any help you know who to call.” And then my girlfriend and I would have made a new friend, our neighbourhood would have had a new face – and I’d still have my suriken.

You see, here’s the thing about heuristics/methodologies: they only measure what they’re intended to measure.  And when you try and appraises them by asking how many times they measure whatever criteria they’re programmed to measure, all you’re really testing for is laziness in your agents.

The way things go right now, the Police department takes every opportunity to troll for minor crimes; for anything short of murder, their interest is going to be focused on the victim and what they can get them for; finding the person who stole your bike or laptop would take a different approach, something wholly alien to the current process.  And by threatening us bottom feeders with minor offences – things that shouldn’t be illegal, or ‘tax collector’ crimes such as most traffic tickets – they occasionally find a path to move up on the big fish.

This is the world we’re living in.  Where each and everyone of us is a suspect, a potential provocateur, a troublemaker who is to be roped in and coerced any time we cross paths with the boys in blue.  Never a citizen, an agent of Canada, building this country, or a member of a community.  It’s a different sort of surveillance state we’ve got going here, where you’re potentially subject to analysis at the drop of a hat – but at least they don’t violate your ‘Rights’.

Two lessons, then, I guess:

1. Don’t watch The Human Centipede.  At best you’ll waste an hour and a half of your life, at worst you suffer a police raid.

2. Don’t be poor.  That never helps.  Especially not in Calgary, the Heart of the New West.

So I’ve been hanging out at the government run Health and Wellness Centres lately.

Not for any sort of legitimate reason, mind you, I just lounge in the waiting area so-as to upset the squares and remind them of what a Free Man looks like.  Anyway I was reading The Party Line, a free magazine for the Canadian Mental Health Association, when I came across the following quotes:

The WHO ranks mental disorders as the number one disability claim in Canada, with depression being the most common.  These disability claims have been on the rise for the last 10 years… “While we don’t have the data to say why, we know that most people are suffering from mental health problems and going off work because of it.”

and:

Alberta’s Institute of Health Economics found Canada lags behind most developed countries in the amount of money it spends treating mental illness… Some hope lies with the creation of the Canadian Mental Health Comission in 2007, charged with improving and standardizing care for Canadians dealing with mental illness…

Wonderful. “We don’t know what’s causing the problem, we don’t even really know what the problem is, but we know for a fact that throwing money at it is the solution.” Here’s a free tip: more studies aren’t going to tell you what’s happening.  To understand that you need to look at your methodology.  And as for more funding, dollars to donuts says that’ll only cause the levels to rise even faster.

The problem with Psychology is that there’s too much vagueness, too much room for variation.  Let’s take ADHD.  The criteria for Diagnosis are:

Six or more of the following symptoms of inattention have persisted for at least six months to a degree that is maladaptive and inconsistent with the developmental level:

1. often fails to give close attention to details or makes careless mistakes in schoolwork, work, or other activities
2. often has difficulty sustaining attention in tasks or play activities
3. often does not seem to listen when spoken to directly
4. often does not follow through on instructions and fails to finish schoolwork, chores, or duties in the workplace (not due to oppositional behaviour or failure of comprehension)
5. often has difficulty organizing tasks and activities
6. often avoids, dislikes, or is reluctant to engage in tasks that require sustained mental effort (such as schoolwork or homework)
7. often loses things necessary for tasks or activites at school or at home (e.g. toys, pencils, books, assignments)
8. is often easily distracted by extraneous stimuli
9. if often forgetful in daily activities

**Actually, it’s a little more complex, but don’t worry about that right now.**

The first problem is obvious.  ‘Often’ isn’t really a thing. It isn’t really a criteria.  Heinlein once said “Anything that can’t be expressed in numbers is just an opinion.” You can just tell that he would have loved these guys.

But at least it gives us some structure, right?  A language we can use to discuss these things, subjective though they may be. ‘Bipolar’ might be more a question of degree, rather than a black-or-white quality, but when we can isolate different conditions such as Depression, Schizophrenia, Narcissism, and ADHD from, say, Tourette’s -

1. Both multiple motor and one or more vocal tics have been present at some time during the illness, although not necessarily concurrently. (A tic is a sudden, rapid, recurrent, nonrhythmic, stereotyped motor movement or vocalization.)
2. The tics occur many times a day (usually in bouts) nearly every day or intermittently throughout a period of more than 1 year, and during this period there was never a tic-free period of more than 3 consecutive months.
3. The disturbance causes marked distress or significant impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning.
4. The onset is before age 18 years.
5. The disturbance is not due to the direct physiological effects of a substance (e.g., stimulants) or a general medical condition (e.g., Huntington’s disease or postviral encephalitis).

Well goddamn.  Guess they’re not really all that distinct, are they?

Part of the problem is that Psychology is a ‘high level’ science.  Unlike Physic or Chemistry – or even Neurology – Psychology deals with complex patterns occurring in variable environments.  Figuring out a good hypothesis is bad enough, trying to test it is going to be even worse.  But just because something’s hard, doesn’t mean you get to fall back on Opinion.  Meteorology’s hard too, but when a Meteorologist calls something a Cumulus cloud, he’s not only referring to a distinct and actual phenomenon – he’s also making predictions.

Yeah, we all like to complain about the weather forecast, but what those guys do is still pretty phenomenal [science pun].  Sure as hell beats the pants off of any tribal Shaman’s guess.  And as if that’s not enough, they’re humble enough to assign percentages to their predictions – a tacit admission that they could be wrong.

The Psychologist, on the other hand, makes statements that are both arrogantly certain and uselessly vague – he definitely has this disorder, and he’ll probably reoffend – while at the same time refusing to offer an empirical basis for these claims.

Q: What’s the difference between the DSM IV and the DSM I?

A: The former has enough disorders to cover everybody, while the latter existed during an era when classifying Homosexuality as a disorder was socially acceptable. (What, you thought they performed an experiment to prove it wasn’t?)

Q: What’s the difference between the DSM IV and Freud?

A: Penises.

And as if the Psychologists weren’t bad enough, you’ve got the meat fuckers Psychiatrists riding in on their coattails, shoving snake oil and placebos down the mouths of the faithful, a shiny new colour for every shiny new disorder.  I’m not going to go into tons of detail here, since I usually try and avoid legal drugs, but feel free to check out The Last Psychiatrist’s thoughts on the matter (yes Corman, I know you hate him, and I agree that he needs to stop saying that everything’s Narcissism, but when it comes to drugs he knows his shit).

To be clear, I’m not saying anything against guys like Dr. Rob (who is awesome) – any Brain Doctor with an ounce of smarts and a sliver of soul will figure out how to counsel people at some point… but then, so will Priests, and so will Astrologers.

You know, if they kept their pseudo-science out in the fringe I’d tolerate it, same as palm readers, or people who talk about ‘energy’.  But these folks are vying to be our new Lords and Masters, deciding who’s fit and who isn’t to live with the rest of us lab rats, recreating the Rights of Man in their own image.

So what’re you supposed to do if your brain doesn’t work?  Personally I just hacked mine, turned off all the emotional dip-swithes aside from “Angry” and “Hungry”.. but if you don’t feel like doing that, there’s another option.  Ironically enough, the meat fuckers did manage to create a drug that worked, one with a thoroughly proven track record of improving quality of life, which has no long-term side-effects when used correctly… and that was the problem.  It worked.  Didn’t last 20 years before they banned it.

So do what you can, ask around, and try and find yourselves some LSD.

Vaya con Dios, folks.

For those of you unfamiliar with the event in question, which occurred at the start of the long weekend, Thunderfoot’s video will get you up to speed.

Standing up for free speech and pissing off religious zealots are always Epic Win in my book – I’m just sorry I didn’t get my drawing of Slayer, Alice Cooper, Satan, and Bon Jovi rescuing 6 year old Aysha done in time.  Guys like Thunderfoot are doing a great job of promoting Classical Liberal values in a society where Tolerance is far too often conflated with Respect, resulting in a black and vile mixture which labels Truth as Ugliness.

But at the end of the day, how much was really accomplished?

[...]

One of the many reasons I can’t stand the Insane Clown Posse is that I’m a Big-Into-Science kind of guy. I can say things like “allele variation over generations in a changing environment” without stumbling, I can explain exactly why the Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics is bullshit, and one time I choked a guy half-to-death for daring to utter words in my house which were deeply anti-science.

“Do you have any idea,” I whispered, staring into eyes full of white-terror, my hands squeezing his trachea, “just how badly I’ve always wanted to kill a man? And how goddamn tempting you’re making it right now?”

Let’s just say that I’m no tenderfoot when it comes to Thermodynamics.

I tell you all this, gentle reader, so that can you understand how hurt I was when I received this well-sourced comment earlier in the week: [...]

It’s been a while since I posted.  Last month was awful, and it was capped off with a trip through Canada’s socialized medical system. After my friend got a referral from an outside Expert, I arrived with him at the Emergency Room of one our nation’s Fine Hospitals. 9 hours later he was finally admitted, and they began a rigorous course of testing for Heart Disease and Swine Flu – neither of which were the reasons he’d come there in the first place.

At first I kept myself amused by playing with any of the equipment I could get my hands on, and then by casing the security systems and examining the door locks, but the security guards – complete with tazers, handcuffs, and multitools (they were far better equipped than the old men you see guarding our military bases; the closest thing they have to a weapon is a radar gun) were quick to notice a Free Man standing in their midst, and ordered me to head across the street to the bar, where my drinks were served by a young Asian girl in a bikini. [...]