The tree in the back yard apparently took out our DSL Monday, meaning I had to go to (one of the three) Starbucks half a mile from home to get email, which meant that blog reading and writing was light. I also had some other writing to do that I couldn’t because of lack of connectivity, so I’m starting the week behinder than ususal.

I’m struggling with a response to Quiggin – as usual, I’m loading too much into it and need to cut it back, which I’m working on now.

And I picked up Tim Power’s book, Declare, and didn’t get much else done – I’m blaming Powers for my lack of productivity.Verizon customer service was good enough to have me wondering if this is the same company that I used to hate, and eighteen hours after I first called them, we have connectivity again.

So I connect, get a trackback from Laughing Wolf, and see that he thinks I’m Hillary Clinton. He’s wrong.

He’s actually wrong on two counts; first in assuming that I’m surprised when people as individuals do the right thing without the guidance of Big Brother. Almost everything I’ve written on the subject (and it’s getting to be a lot, so I don’t blame him for not having read it, but here’s an example) says otherwise. He’s also wrong in denigrating the role of government, however.

It’s a fairly common error in certain conservatives and libertarians, who assume that government is, at best, a parasite – it’s actually a symbiote.

Looking back on U.S. (and to an extent, Western) history, very little would have been accomplished without either government or individual intelligence and energy. As Sondheim says, “It Takes Two”. The issue is finding and maintaining a balance between these.

But that’s another story, as the Witch says. We’ll talk about that later; there’s work to do now.