Today’s Thoughts . . . Oct. 19, 2013

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This is my least-favorite thing to bring up – but bring it up I must. Like trying to keep a soggy log burning, I’ve got to periodically mention the money thing. Donations have fallen off a bit. The first post-Google month, when we thought we might have to bag it, the people of EPautos responded beyond anything I thought likely or even possible. We made up for the losses incurred during the previous months, after Google de-listed (new people, see here for the full story about that) us and killed off our Adsense income. The second month, we had enough coming in to break even, to cover the servers/fees and put some kibble in my bowl and Dom’s. But this month isn’t looking so hot so far – which is why I’m posting this note today.monkey pic

To keep the cylinders pumping, we need your support. Especially newcomers, who’ve just stumbled onto us. If you like what you see, please consider supporting this site. Your donation will not only help keep us around, it’ll help keep this site free of the commercial flotsam that clogs up so many sites. We don’t publish “guest posts” that are nothing more than ads in mufti. Nor do we insert SEO buzzwords into text. Things are straight here – at least in the sense that we’re not trying to sell you anything except ideas.

The link to our “donate” button is here.

Thanks in advance for your support!

13 COMMENTS

  1. Click here partisans! Voluntary Payment is Mandatory AmeriKan Komrade. Your zeal is appreciated! . Without this site you won’t know what to think! Thank you for supporting the glorious cause! Kredit Kommisar now extracting repayment from capitalistpigcriminal #438.

    https://www.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_flow&SESSION=jqlHioiz_JwYyejLOlLLZ6G4n3kGwlzLwW6ENzz_3pTDQLGzDt7eRlx27ge&dispatch=5885d80a13c0db1f8e263663d3faee8def8934b92a630e40b7fef61ab7e9fe63

    http://ericpetersautos.com/2013/08/16/epautos-is-deay-ud/

  2. Florida Woman Arrested In Squirt Gun Attack
    http://www.wptv.com/dpp/news/region_st_lucie_county/port_st_lucie/giovanna-borge-woman-jailed-in-squirt-gun-attack-in-port-st-lucie

    American Stasi Mailing Prostitute Letters To Homes Because A Vehicle Passed Through A Known Prostitute Area
    http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/360688

    How To Be An Agorist and Fight the State

    1 Buy Used
    2 Use an Alternative Currency
    3 Grow your Own
    4 Get off the Grid
    5 Quit Your Job.
    6 Peaceful Duplication
    7 Ditch Consumerism

    http://anarchobjectivist.wordpress.com/2013/10/23/how-to-become-an-agorist-and-fight-the-state-in-7-easy-steps/

    Your politics need not be pure. You need not have any politics at all. Many of us are panarchists, traditionalists, conservatives, libertarians, market-anarchists, and agorists sometimes at the same time.

    If you are are a Walking Dead parasite, that’s not ok. Stop being that way. Dabble in living through force too much, it becomes a habit.Eventually find yourself trapped on the wrong side of the prison fence for the rest of your miserable life.

  3. Charlie Chaplin. An ethical individualist. A knowing doer. Rule-breaker. Misfit. Troublemaker. Free-spirit. Pioneer.

    Greatest Speech Ever Made

    Individualist ethics is characterized by the emphasis on moral existential individualism. Rather than seeking the “highest good” that is universal, individualists find means for themselves as an individual to find the highest good for them, regardless of whether it might ever apply to anyone else at any other time.

    A basic flaw of Western moral philosophy has been the attempt to construct a one-size-fits-all moral system that allows people at all times and in all situations to be able to figure out what they should do morally and why. Various philosophers have postulated some “highest moral good” that would be the same for everyone: pleasure, happiness, obedience to God, etc.

    What works better, is to seek out and to surround yourself with others who morality is similar to your own. You need only concern yourself with building local voluntary codes for like-minded members of your chosen associates, rather than try to create something that is all things to everyone. And then concocting some kind of authority to enforce this creation on everyone in your group.

    Concerning oneself with the development of a philosophical system for everyone is counterproductive. Systems are by their very nature abstract, failing to take into account the unique features of your individual life and individual situation. You should reject all a priori systems of ethics that need to be imposed on you by some external authority “for your own good.”

    It is important to focus on the subjective, personal life of you and those you associate with as individual human beings. There is no basic and given “human nature” that is common to all people you know, each person in your life must define what humanity means to them and what values or purpose they choose to dominate their lives.

    What is Ethical Individualism? – Rudolf Steiner

    Wayseer Manifesto

    Attention: All you rule-breakers, you misfits & troublemakers, all you free-spirits & pioneers… Everything the establishment has told you is wrong with you – is actually what’s right with you…

    Other well-known ethical individualists. Walt Whitman. Henry Fold. H.L. Mencken. Walt Disney. L. Ron Hubbard. Ayn Rand. Evel Knievel. Hugh Hefner. Jimi Hendrix. Joseph Smith. Hunter S. Thompson. Kim Dotcom. Julian Assange. Howard Hughes. George Lucas.

      • Sorry 8 muh bad.

        Are you any relation to 8Mile-MNM?
        http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBCXWdL7Wb8

        Look, if you had one shot, or one opportunity|To seize everything you ever wanted. one moment|Would you capture it or just let it slip?|His palms are sweaty, knees weak, arms are heavy|There’s vomit on his sweater already, mom’s spaghetti|He’s nervous, but on the surface he looks calm and ready to drop bombs,|But he keeps on forgetting what he wrote down,|The whole crowd goes so loud|He opens his mouth, but the words won’t come out|He’s choking how, everybody’s joking now|The clock’s run out, time’s up, over!

        Turn Your Smart Phone Into A Microscope With 175X Magnification Power
        http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=b2f_1382125886

        Use the magnifier to check yourself for morgellons
        http://www.morgellonsexposed.com/

        • Tor, thanks a lot for the morgellon website. I have never seen the MNM movie since I don’t enjoy rap. I say rap isn’t music but don’t deny it’s art, just too old to have been caught up in it I guess.
          I had seen the morgellon phenomena before and forgotten it. I will be keeping the site and checking it out. I am a believer in not being able to see, hear or detect countless things that exist. I can’t see germs but wouldn’t deny their existence. It’s little minds who are afraid of the unknown. While I don’t have a website for you, I have been watching new and old research that confirms what I have maintained for over 40 years, that psychedelics make you smarter, give you extra powers and if people say you are spaced out, it’s generally a sign you are on to something they can’t, won’t or don’t understand. Not everybody has(thankfully) a closed mind to these things though and research is beginning to show my theories were correct. So many times I’ve heard people say that young people are too susceptible to them but I say they are less afraid for the most part. Now we see people with Alzheimer like symptoms being helped, some parts of their minds rejuvenated by psychedelics, people who didn’t respond to vitamin or other types of drug treatment. Who is one person to say what’s real for someone else?
          I have a couple of friends who observed what appeared to be an extra-terrestrial ship one night, followed it for hours in a car. It was the old classic round craft with lights that changed. They might have been stoned and drunk to begin with but they were very sober long before it was over. That reminds me, I need to question them further before we’re all dead. Thanks for reminding me of that too.

          • Metascience is every bit as important as science.

            The War On Consciousness – Graham Hancock
            http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKHMH4FfWrw

            From 12:58 to the end is the best part
            Partial transcription:

            Winners and losers

            Who benefits from this colossal stupidity and systematic wickedness?
            And who loses? The beneficiaries are easy to spot.
            First, the large and ever-expanding armed bureaucracies,
            funded with large and ever-growing sums of public money to
            suppress the use of drugs, have benefited enormously.

            Everyone who works for them, including the PR people and
            spin merchants who concoct the propaganda used to sell their
            policies to us, including their subcontractors both public and
            private, and including the (often privately run) prisons stuffed
            to bursting point with their victims, are the beneficiaries of this
            catastrophic failure on the part of our governments to think
            laterally, generously, and creatively. Whether you are a Drug
            Enforcement Administration agent or a prison guard, you naturally
            have a deeply vested interest in maintaining the miserable
            status quo, justified by the “War on Drugs,” that keeps you in
            your job, that ensures your monthly paychecks continue to
            come in, and that continuously expands your budgets.
            The second main category of beneficiaries is—of course!—the
            criminal gangs and cartels that the present misguided official
            policies have empowered as the sole source of drugs in our societies.

            Over the past 40-plus years they have earned countless
            billions of dollars from the sale of illegal drugs which, had they
            only been legal, would not have earned them a single penny.
            Who are the losers? First and most directly those millions upon
            millions of good, nonviolent people in our societies who have
            been jailed or otherwise punished for the possession and use
            of drugs.

            And second (regardless of whether or not they use
            illegal drugs themselves), virtually everyone else in our societies as well.
            For the quality of life of all of us has been diminished by the growth of the
            police state and by the murderous activities of the criminal gangs
            enfranchised, and kept in business, by the blind and mindless
            perpetuation of this failed and bankrupt “War on Drugs.”

            So, in summary, the criminalization of drug use has brought no
            positive effects, only negative ones, and it has not stopped or even
            reduced the use of dangerous and harmful drugs. On the contrary,
            we have been so little “saved from ourselves” by this phony war
            that the use of almost all illegal drugs, far from decreasing, has
            dramatically increased during the past 40 years.

            Learning from tobacco

            A contrary example, but one that is most instructive, concerns
            the use of tobacco in our societies.
            Tobacco has never been illegal; far from that, its use has been
            actively encouraged by clever advertising campaigns mounted
            by the multibillion-dollar tobacco industry. But the use of
            tobacco does undoubtedly lead to great harms, both for the
            It appears to be a natural human urge, as deep-rooted as our
            urges for food, sex, and nurturing relationships, to seek out
            and explore such “altered states of consciousness.”

            Freedom of consciousness

            What is Western civilization all about? What are its greatest
            achievements and highest aspirations?

            It’s my guess that most people’s replies to these questions
            would touch—before all the other splendid achievements of
            science, literature, technology, and the economy—on the nurture
            and growth of freedom. Individual freedom. Including, but not
            limited to freedom from the unruly power of monarchs,
            freedom from the unwarranted intrusions of the
            state and its agents into our personal lives, freedom from the
            tyranny of the Church and its Inquisition, freedom from hunger
            and want, freedom from slavery and servitude, freedom of
            conscience, freedom of religion, freedom of thought and
            speech, freedom of assembly, freedom to elect our own
            leaders, freedom to be homosexual—and so on and so forth.

            The list of freedoms we enjoy today that were not enjoyed by
            our ancestors is indeed a long and impressive one. It is
            therefore exceedingly strange that Western civilization in the
            twenty-first century enjoys no real freedom of consciousness.

            So it has to be highly significant that, far from encouraging
            freedom of consciousness, our societies in fact violently deny
            our right to sovereignty in this intensely personal area, and
            have effectively outlawed all states of consciousness other
            than those on a very narrowly defined and officially approved
            list.

            The “War on Drugs” has thus unexpectedly succeeded in
            engineering a stark reversal of the true direction of Western
            history by empowering faceless bureaucratic authorities to
            send armed agents to break into our homes, arrest us, throw
            us into prison, and deprive us of our income and reputation
            simply because we wish to explore the sometimes radical,
            though always temporary, alterations in our own
            consciousness that drugs facilitate.

            Other than being against arbitrary rules that the state has
            imposed on us, personal drug use by adults is not a “crime” in
            any true moral or ethical sense and usually takes place in the
            privacy of our own homes, where it cannot possibly do any
            harm to others. For some it is a simple lifestyle choice. For
            The reason the anti-marijuana campaigns have failed is that
            millions of users know from their own direct, long-term experience
            that marijuana does not do them any great harm and
            (with reference to the most recent anti-marijuana propaganda)
            most definitely does not drive them mad.

            others, particularly where the hallucinogens such as LSD,
            psilocybin, and DMT are concerned, it is a means to make
            contact with alternate realms and parallel dimensions, and
            perhaps even with the divine. For some, drugs are an aid to creativity
            and focussed mental effort. For others they are a means to
            tune out for a while from everyday cares and worries. But in all
            cases it seems probable that the drive to alter consciousness,
            from which all drug use stems, has deep genetic roots.
            Other adult lifestyle choices with deep genetic roots also used
            to be violently persecuted by our societies.

            A notable example is homosexuality, once punishable by death
            or long periods of imprisonment, which is now entirely legal
            between consenting adults—and fully recognized as being
            none of the state’s business—in all Western cultures. (Although
            approximately thirteen US states have “anti-sodomy” laws
            outlawing homosexuality, these statutes have rarely been
            enforced in recent years, and in 2003 the US Supreme Court
            invalidated those laws.) The legalization of homosexuality lifted
            a huge burden of human misery, secretiveness, paranoia, and
            genuine fear from our societies, and at the same time not a
            single one of the homophobic lobby’s fire-and-brimstone
            predictions about the end of Western civilization came true.

            Likewise, it was not so long ago that natural seers, mediums,
            and healers who felt the calling to become “witches” were
            burned at the stake for “crimes” that we
            now look back on as harmless eccentricities at worst.
            Perhaps it will be the same with drugs?

            Perhaps in a century or two, if we have not
            destroyed human civilization by then, our
            descendants will look back with disgust on
            the barbaric laws of our time that punished a minority so
            harshly (with imprisonment, financial ruin, and worse) for
            responsibly, quietly, and in the privacy of their own homes
            seeking alterations in their own consciousness through the use
            of drugs. Perhaps we will even end up looking back on the
            persecution of drug users with the same sense of shame and
            horror that we now view the persecution of gays and lesbians,
            the burning of “witches,” and the imposition of slavery on
            others.

            Meanwhile it’s no accident that the “War on Drugs” has been
            accompanied by an unprecedented expansion of
            governmental power into the previously inviolable inner sanctum
            of individual consciousness. On the contrary, it seems to me
            that the state’s urge to power has all along been the real reason for this
            “war”—not an honest desire on the part of the authorities to
            rescue society and the individual from the harms caused by
            drugs, but the thin of a wedge intended to legitimize increasing
            bureaucratic control and intervention in almost every other
            area of our lives as well.

            This is the way freedom is hijacked—not all at once, out in the
            open, but stealthily, little by little, behind closed doors, and with
            our own agreement . How will we be able to resist when so
            many of us have already willingly handed over the keys to our
            own consciousness to the state and accepted without protest
            that it is OK to be told what we may and may not do, what we
            may and may not explore, even what we may and may not
            experience , with this most precious, sapient, unique, and
            individual part of ourselves? If we are willing to accept that
            then we can be persuaded to accept anything.

    • Dear Eric,

      I daily read most of the articles on LewRockwell.com to learn as much as I possibly can, since I am relatively new to the libertarian persuasion.

      I realize that in some ways I have been a “statheist” much of my life.

      But I have also bucked the system many in ways. And I have always admired the independent thinker — the principled thinker.

      In reading Rockwell, I came across the EPA articles, and at first just read a few of your articles, since I’m not really “into” cars.

      But then I realized that the great service of EPA is found in the discussions of libertarian principles, as even the retorts to “Clover” have helped in educating me. Now I can see the fallacy of many of my former statist opinions.

      The clear, principled reasoning which is in most comments on this website is very appealing to me. I am learning so much.

      Naturally I read most of what is published on EPA everyday. It resonates with me.

      I am a better person for having read EPA. I am more in touch with my logical, honest core beliefs, like personal responsibility and/or treating others as precious individuals, deserving not to be lumped into a collective group. (I have to admit to still harboring ill thoughts about the “overlords”.)

      Because I am being tutored by not just Eric, but the entire group of regular commentors here, I have made a donation to EPA.

      This forum is different from any others I have visited. You all actually discuss current events in great detail and frequently from differing views. Where else would I learn from such an informed collection of rugged individualists?

      I would hate to see my schooling terminated, especially since I am just starting to get a decent understanding of what liberty and freedom is all about.

      Very Sincerely Yours,
      Linda

      • Thank you for the kind words, Linda!

        I think EPautos will endure. We just have to periodically make these fund-raising appeals. It’s the nature of the beast, I guess.

        The upside is we have a more direct feedback loop from people such as yourself. And of course, the site is “cleaner” now that it’s free of all those obnoxious Google ads!

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