is going to be dropping by the Labadie Collection in a couple of weeks. If you have anything you need looked up there that I might be able to help you out with, drop me a line and I’ll see what I can do.

had to explain the ins and outs of Rage Against the Machine’s internal band politics to someone the other day. I begin to feel old.

From a mostly OK article on indigenous land rights at Mises.com: “As the legendary libertarian writer Murray Rothbard explains …” “Legendary?” Seriously?

I mean, I guess if anyone who ever said anything right-on about anything you care about is “heroic,” calling your favorite writer the stuff of legend is the next logical step. But how do you even write this shit without falling over laughing? Like, “And his bowtie of garnet was forged and made by Telchar in the fires of Nogrod. And the Collectivists saw it, and the terrible light of his glance glinted in his spectacles. And he cried out the names of sages of the glorious natural rights tradition, and they fled in fear before his countenance.”

Nerd grouching for the day: if you’re comparing two fixed quantities X and Y, X cannot be “exponentially larger” than Y. Even if X is overwhelmingly larger than Y is. “Exponentially” refers to the rate of growth of a function over a range of fixed values, and does not apply to a pairwise comparison of two fixed values. It doesn’t just mean “lots bigger.”

is awaiting an Inter-Library Loan request for Fred Schulder’s “The Relation of Anarchism to Organization” (1899). Fingers crossed….

is printing up Market Anarchy zines for a full-print-run order to ship out this morning. Still queued up: “A Plea for Public Property” and “Libertarian Anarchism: Responses to Ten Common Objections” by Roderick Tracy Long, “Where Are The Specifics?” by Karl Hess, “Woman Vs. The Nation-State” by Carol Moore, “The Attitude of Anarchism Towards Industrial Combinations” by Benjamin Tucker, and a couple essays on privatization and individualist anarchism by some dude named Charles Johnson.

“From the conservative position comes the position of libertarian reformism. It holds that, since there is a good base to build upon—the at least lip-service traditions of liberty in this country, for instance—that the way to avoid the dangers that might lurk on the other side of revolutionary change is to opt for evolutionary change. The repeal of certain laws is, in this position, held as crucial and, of course, it probably is true that if the withholding tax were repealed that the government would be bankrupted as millions of taxpayers simply found themselves unable to pay up.

“That is, this situation might be true if it were not for the amazing ingenuity of American state-monopoly-capitalism. Few if any corporation heads would stand idly by and see the source of their prosperity—a partnership with the state—seriously jeopardized. One can imagine a ‘voluntary’ tax withholding system going into effect which, if anything, might be more effective than the state system which, after all, is operated by businessmen anyway even though with a lot of wasteful bureaucratic interference. Same with the voluntary or even ‘corporate’ military concepts. A libertarian should be the first to recognize that such systems would, if anything, make imperialism more effective by making its military machine more efficient. Such reforms, in short, would not necessarily end injustices but might merely streamline them.

“More pertinent is the central error of reformism as a possible instrument of change. To reform a system you must, first of all, preserve it against attacks more precipitous than those called for in the reformist timetable. This position not only makes neutrality impossible, it makes siding with the system (the state) unavoidable in the long run.”

• Karl Hess, “Conservative Libertarianism” (Libertarian Forum, October 1, 1969, p. 2)

Ah, migrating computers: “Dropbox 1.4.12. Downloading 155,721 files. (40.5 kB/sec, 32 days left).”

Well, I hope it doesn’t really take quite that long. But probably at this point I should turn off the lights and leave it running overnight.

In more uplifting news, I found the proper bibliographical source, and the correct wording, for an unsourced Karl Hess quote that I’ve been chasing for 9 months. This is extremely exciting.

is prepping an old Ubuntu machine to be reformatted and migrated to Windows Vista. I have my reasons, but I can’t help but find the whole process a bit demoralizing.