Archives for July 2006

We’re here. Directly south of that location is Le Louvre, and directly west, L’Arc de Triomphe. Le Tour Eiffel is a bit to the southwest. If you zoom in and cebter on it, you can see people, the image is so clear.

Braved the traffic in Paris. Took a while, but I finally located the hotel and, and we’ve had a few hours sleep. About 8 pm local, so we’re headed out to roam around.

More later.

Three weeks in Europe: France, Spain, and Italy, to be exact. Our ride:

Boarding momentarily. Looks like an on-time departure. San Fran to Paris in a bit more than 9 hours. I’m looking forward. In my experience past, the French do air travel right.

Updates, pics, and travel log to follow. Stay tuned.

So I finally, finally closed on that project. The land and its Grapes of Wrath style apartments are mine. Here’s what it looks like now:

And here’s what it will look like in about a year’s time (same architect, same design, though probably a different color, eh). In the immediate, I’ve got to spend about the next six months in supplication to the various local commissars — seeing as they are doubtless all very wise, experienced and successful real estate developers themselves.

Progress reports to follow.

It bears repeating.

Billy sends out an email on something "profoundly simple and simply profound," i.e., on the essence and nature of man’s natural rights.

This turns on the fact that our minds are our unique and exclusive mode
and method of our survival. Look: we don’t have wings, or dominating
natural weapons like claws or fangs or poisons, or enormous speed and
agility. We’re not like other animals, equipped in such ways for
survival. Because of what we are, we have to think
our way through the world. We have to identify by a process of reason
the values that sustain and further our lives. There are, however, two
crucial aspects of this on which are founded the entire domain of
politics — which is nothing more or less than the study of how to
treat each other in social contexts:

1) Reason is not autonomic.  It doesn’t work except by a deliberately self-initiated process.

2) It is not infallible.  It can and does fail, sometimes.

Neither of these two things relieves us of the responsibility to think at all times to the best of our ability.

Here’s the thing: some people are sometimes better at it than others.
However, it is precisely because the implications and consequences of
success or failure are uniquely personal to each individual that each individual must be left free to make up his or her own mind about to conduct his or her own life.

That moral sanction to exercise full authority (with commensurate
responsibility) over one’s own life in a social context including other
human beings — that thing is what’s called a "right". Nobody who is
forcibly constrained by someone else’s judgement can be said to be able
to conduct his own life. That violates the nature of the entity that we’re talking about: the one that doesn’t have wings, speed, claws, etc., but only a mind.

Please keep in mind that this is a bi-lateral concept running to and from all human beings to all others: "full authority over one’s own life" does not imply a moral sanction to dispose of others’ lives, because — by their nature — they have the very same requirement for survival and flourishing.

That’s why we require rights.  It is because of what we are.  There is nothing more or less to it.

Nothing. It is the simple fact of our natures that we must choose whether or not to pursue the values necessary for our survival. That choice is entirely one given by our nature as humans, and implicit in that natural choice is the right to make the choice.

It is neither by creation, nor by design. As Billy says in a subsequent email, "Nobody seriously asks, ‘Well, who made it so that two plus two equals four…?’"

Now, the reason this is so important ought to be clear enough. Everybody — certainly most, anyway — believes that rights are important. The problem is: virtually nobody knows what the hell they are talking about: from the bum on the street, all the way up — blowing right past the effete intellectuals — to the occupant of The White House and its equivalents worldwide.

They all know rights are necessary as a matter of practicality — so much so that they codify "rights" in law all over. In the first place, natural rights need no more affirmation in law than does two plus two require a statute proclaiming that it’s four. It’s just mindless nonsense, and it leads to the sort of disaster where the natural rights that are consequence of the fact of our existence are trampled in the obscene pursuit of "entitlements," euphemized as "rights." The result is that the actual rights of some are sacrificed for the unjust benefit of others — and it’s all called an exercise in justice, a recognition and enforcement of rights. Such insolent dishonesty goes to the heart of what this civilization and culture are becoming.

And very few even see through it all, anymore.

Those who pay attention; like, to this blog, for instance, ought to see this theme throughout. Very nearly everything of a serious nature that’s posted here reflects an uncompromising, fully integrated and consistent view of natural rights.