I’ve had this post in the draft folder for a few days, intending it as a response to John Regan’s comment on my last post quoting Max Stirner. John wrote: I never cared much for Nietzsche, but the similarity of Stirner (with whom I am not at all familiar up to this point) is pretty […]

If religion has set up the proposition that we are sinners altogether, I set over against it the other: we are perfect altogether! For we are, every moment, all that we can be; and we never need be more. Since no defect cleaves to us, sin has no meaning either. Show me a sinner in […]

Dr. J. L. Walker wrote in his Introduction to the 1907 English translation of Max Stirner’s “The Ego and His Own”: We owe to Dr. Eduard von Hartmann the unquestionable service which he rendered by directing attention to this book in his “Philosophie des Unbewußten,” the first edition of which was published in 1869, and […]

A few posts ago I noted that Ernst Juenger, in defining the difference between the anarch and the forest-goer (aka the forest fleer) in his novel Eumeswil, defined both of these figures in opposition to “society”: The difference is that the forest fleer has been expelled from society, while the anarch has expelled society from […]

That’s Douglas Berman, Ohio State law prof and author of the Sentencing Law and Policy blog, as quoted in the NYT in a story titled Obama Commutes a Prisoner’s Sentence, Lengthened More Than 3 Years by a Typo. “It’s a shame that we need presidential action to take care of something everybody agrees was a […]

It turns out that upon closer examination that Indiana Court of Appeals opinion I wrote about a couple posts ago is even worse than I thought. Take a look at these sentences from the opinion, in a case which is all about the defendant’s right to a speedy trial: Here, _____ was charged on July […]

I hate to say it, but I prefer this old anonymous partial translation of Ernst Juenger’s The Forest Passage (1951) over the new complete translation by Thomas Friese from Telos Press. I hate to say it, because Friese has done the world a big favor by making the entirety of this great work available to […]

Some state appellate courts have for years posted on their website not only their written opinions but also the briefs filed by the parties in the appellate court. See, e.g., on the North Dakota Supreme Court’s website, the briefs I filed in 2003 in Kjolsrud v. MKB Management dba Red River Women’s Clinic, a false […]

So wrote Nebraska federal district judge Richard Kopf in his farewell blog post yesterday. I could say the same about this blog. For example, was I really constrained to write a few posts ago: “I’m constrained to say . . . that no one should be a cop, a prosecutor, or a judge in the […]

A recent criminal case out of the County to our East has attracted national attention: In October 2012, 16-year-olds Blake Layman and Jose Quiroz, 17-year-old Levi Sparks, 18-year-old Anthony Sharp, and 21-year-old Danzele Johnson broke into a house in Elkhart, Ind. The five were not armed and thought the house was vacant. Tragically, not only […]

Via the Legal Profession Blog, this disciplinary case out of Illinois, in which the review board has recommended suspending an attorney for three years and until further order of the court, and found his statements not protected by the First Amendment, caught my attention: Respondent continues, even with the benefit  of hindsight, to stand by […]

. . . and Redemption: Not long ago, Mr. Barbaro, 85, decided to contact the lawyer for the man, Donald Kagan. He got a transcript of the trial, during which Mr. Kagan had waived his right to a jury and put his fate in Judge Barbaro’s hands. “As I read it, I couldn’t believe my […]

It seems to me that probably my favorite novel of all time, Eumeswil, by Ernst Juenger, is half Utopia and half The Prince. The narrator, who calls himself an anarch rather than an anarchist, tends the night bar in the castle of Eumeswil’s ruler, the Condor. During his interview for this job, under the influence […]

Albert Jay Nock wrote in the third paragraph of Our Enemy, the State (1935): [W]ith any exercise of State power, not only the exercise of social power in the same direction, but the disposition to exercise it in that direction, tends to dwindle. Mayor Gaynor astonished the whole of New York when he pointed out […]

- Friedrich Nietzsche, The New Idol I’ve got to get around to revising my Definitions page. One change I need to make is from George Washington’s “Government is force” to Isabel Paterson’s “Force is what is governed,” quoted in my last post. Another is to subtract my assertion that “ruling is itself intrinsically criminal, and […]

For some months now this blog has been “resting.” During this time I’ve instead probably spent as much time and energy tweeting as I ever did blogging, though in the last couple weeks I’ve been resting from Twitter too. Last week I had the unusual experience of being cross-examined at length by the State on […]

Robert Anton Wilson and Karl Hess: Subversion for Fun and Profit: http://t.co/vMMuxdPN69 via @youtube

I am testing with this and following tweets this Twitter to WordPress plugin: http://t.co/SStoLWmiAM.

I’ve now read virtually everything by Ernst Juenger that’s been translated into English, except for the last half of The Adventurous Heart (1938), which I’m still reading, and Copse 125: A Chronicle from the Trench Warfare of 1918 (1925), which arrived in the mail today. Albert Hofmann, the inventor of LSD, had this to say […]

I was formerly perplexed by these passages in Ernst Juenger’s Eumeswil (1977), as translated by Joachjm Neugroschel: The positive counterpart of the anarchist is the anarch. The latter is not the adversary of the monarch but his antipode, untouched by him, though also dangerous. He is not the opponent of the monarch, but his pendant. […]

From my post yesterday quoting Ernst Jünger’s Eumeswil (1977): It is not only the fit who survive, but also the honest. The fact that these two survivals do not coincide in time goes back once more to Genesis, to the separation of the Tree of Life from the Tree of Knowledge. * Needless to say, […]

From Eumeswil: After I have stood behind the bar all night, it may already be light out, often close to noon, by the time I awaken – but I am still lying in the dark, for I sleep behind a thick curtain in the alcove. I then spend another quarter hour in bed before getting […]

Since my last post over a month ago, I have spent the time I could have been blogging reading or rereading The Only One and His Own, Angelus Silesius, Storm of Steel, The Glass Bees, and Characters and Characteristics of William Law: Nonjuror and Mystic. I would have liked to disparage Orin Kerr’s second of […]

Norm Pattis asks you to “imagine how you’d react if you walked into a courtroom to face a jury of 12 souls with skins as dark as my client’s. Some part of you would feel betrayed, I am sure of it.” (You are presumably white.) I’m white. Back in law school at the University of […]

I just finished reading Juenger’s novella On the Marble Cliffs (1939) yesterday. Published when he was 44 or so, it’s a great book, although unsurprisingly not as great as Eumeswil (1977), which was published when he was about 82. (He died more than 20 years later, in 1998, at the age of 102.) Next I […]

The following thoughts are “final” not in the sense that I’m promising not to write anything else about this great novel by an extraordinary man, but in the sense that they relate to a couple interesting things Juenger did in its closing pages. So, ​Spoiler Alert!, although this is the kind of novel that I […]

From Eumeswil: There are jurists and even theologians who advocate capital punishment as the last resort of justice. Others reject it as immoral. Both sides have good reasons. Both call upon statistics, which, as usual, can be exploited every which way. Numbers should be kept aloof. This controversy passes the anarch by. For him, the […]

In reply to a comment here by the owner of the blog Ernst Juenger – Anarch, I wrote [links added]: While the distinction between the anarchist and the anarch is critical, I don’t necessarily think it’s that stark. I see similarities between Juenger’s concept of the anarch and the concept of the Remnant set forth […]

In the past I’ve said that what makes a Christian a Christian is not believing that Jesus rose from the dead and/or is the Son of God, but rather adhering to what Jesus himself said was the greatest commandment: to love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind and soul; and your neighbor […]