Thoreau the libertarian

I've never read much (like any) Thoreau.  I understand Walden Pond was like 1.5 miles from his house, so On Walden Pond as a definitive treatise on back-to-nature is a bit, well, overblown. That said, this quote is supposed to come from him, which raises him up in my estimation:

There will never be a really free and enlightened State until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly.

 --American author and poet Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

Mixed feelings

I saw a guy on a street corner socializing his "dog" on my way into work this morning.  The pup was wanting to run and hide as each car came by, and the guy would bring it back (it was leashed) and reassure it.  As I drove by I saw that it was a wolf pup, probably 6 months old.

My first thought was "you dickwad, wait until that twitchy animal is 120 lbs, still twitchy, and you can't control it".  My vision was of someone's 5 year old kid running by that wolf, surprising it, and the wolf removing the kids face with one bite.

That said, I'm generally opposed to people putting their noses in where they aren't involved.  So now I'm conflicted.  Is it OK for that f'n genius to raise a wolf in town or not?  My gut very much says no, its not OK, but I'm trying to reconcile that rationally.

Quote of the day

Quote of the day, from Richard Fernandez :

Nils Pratley at the Guardian is impressed. “Bailouts in the eurozone used to generate relief rallies that lasted at least a week. The Spanish version couldn’t even manage a full morning.”

The yield on 10-year Spanish government debt, which had fallen to 6% soon after the start of trading, ended the day at 6.5% – an astonishing turnaround. Worse, Italian bonds followed the same pattern, closing a whisker above 6%, the highest since January. Far from calming nerves, the grant of €100bn (£81bn) or so of cheap loans for Spanish banks seems only to have hardened investors’ analysis that the eurozone debt crisis is getting worse.

 ...

The bitter truth is that the European collapse is simply the consequence of Leftist fantasy politics.  It is what happens when people realize that the ‘paradise’ they’ve been building is nothing but a deconstructed, demographically collapsing, hollowed-out and bankrupt shell of lies.

Pax Americana is not the way the world normally operates

Richard Fernandez gets it right again:

The idea that the office on the corner will always be able to dispense Government Cheese does not reflect the normal historical experience. Rather it reflects that peculiar period of stability and prosperity which followed the end of the Second World War: the Pax Americana, which the Left hates. Our civilizational attitudes have been formed on the basis of the exception, not the rule.

We in the first world have been on a global vacation from history since the 1960's.  I fear its time to get back to work.

Whole article here.