Enough already.

The big news lately in my neck of the woods is that they're shutting down about half of the inner-city public schools in Kansas City, Missouri.

Distributism is, basically, the doctrine that "ownership of the means of production should be spread as widely as possible among the general populace, rather than being centralized under the control of the state (state socialism) or a few large businesses or wealthy private individuals (plutarchic capitalism)."

Congressman Alan Grayson (D-FL) introduced yesterday H.R. 4789, a bill amending the Social Security Act Title XVIII, Health Insurance for the Aged and Disabled (Medicare). If we won't get a public option through reconciliation, if the public polls are showing overwhelming support for a public option, and if we want to avoid creating a new agency, then let's open up Medicare in its own act and make some progress regardless of what happens with the HCR mess.

In his response to my "Reply to Unz," Ron Unz gets one thing right, a bunch of things wrong, and simply ignores the most damning part of my reply.

(1) He begins by complaining that I argue "at great length [!] that federal inmates should be included in the incarceration estimate."

Well, the wheels of right-wing publication may or may not grind exceeding fine, but there's no doubt that they grind exceeding slow.

And I'm sick of waiting for people to get back to me - so here's my "Reply to Unz," in all its final, conclusive, devastating glory:

Foxconn has been in the labour news for awhile.

China Labour Watch, thus.

I've had, ever more, in mind, lately, Dr. Johnson's maxim:

"No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money."

So here are the first fruits of this new attitude of mine:

It was the excellent philosophy instructor Dr. Scott D. Wilson, who taught our friendly author about the idea of objective reality and thick illusions. A thick illusion, as described by Dr. Wilson, was essentially The Matrix; the true nature of the universe is shielded from us by some means, and there is no way that we can ever know this nature because of the illusion. If an illusion is thick and there really is no way out, for all practical purposes, the illusion is reality.

Joe Stack apparently thought his suicide attack on the IRS was a blow struck for freedom.