Color me suspicious

All 148 passengers and crew perished when chartered Egyptian Air Flash airliner crashed in Red Sea Saturday minutes after takeoff from Sharm el-Sheikh. Plane carrying mostly French tourists and 13-man crew was bound for Paris via Cairo. No signal from pilot before plane disappeared from radar screens 11 km south of Sharm airport.

Although Egyptians say cause was mechanical fault, French justice minister Perben asked for preliminary inquiry into manslaughter. DEBKAfile raises 8 points below to explain why it is too soon to eliminate terror as cause of Egyptian air crash

The Egyptians claimed that the crash of a Boeing 737, operated by the Egyptian company Flash Airlines, was “absolutely not the result of a terrorist act but is linked to a technical failure of the plane. DEBKAfile’s aviation experts say the investigators will be called upon to consider a host of anomalies and enigmas before they reach any such definite conclusion.

I should hope so. Interesting that they can say "absolutely not" before they've even begun to look into it. Sure, it's possible, but this appears to be a case of the Egyptian lady protesting too much, too fast. You certainly won't catch me flying Air Egypt.

The Alliance it is

After a perusal of a number of blogs, I have elected to join The Alliance of Free Blogs, for as one reader wrote, "What are you if not a free blogger?" Nor was he the only one to support The Alliance; the vote was unanimous. Also, I like the Physics Geek and he's an Alliance member. It is done.

INSTAPUNDO DELENDA EST!

What is a dollar?

The Spanish milled dollar was made the unit or standard for all foreign silver coins in the American colonies in 1704 by Queen Anne (there was a Parliamentary statute in 1707). It was made the standard for the United States by the Continental Congress under the Articles of Confederation, before the Constitution was even written. So in fact the dollar preceded the writing of the Constitution. It preceded the ratification of the Constitution. It preceded the first Congress, the first President, the first Supreme Court, the Federal Reserve Board, and everything else. Do you think it might be independent of all those things, having preceded them?

As a historical fact, the dollar is independent of the Constitution. The father of the dollar, in our system, was Thomas Jefferson. He was the one who proposed it to the Continental Congress. In the first government under the Constitution, Jefferson was Secretary of State, and Alexander Hamilton was Secretary of the Treasury. They didn't agree on very much, if anything, except this: They both agreed on the monetary system. The Federalists and the Anti-federalists were in complete agreement. And what did Congress and the Treasury do in 1792 with the first coinage act? They went out to determine what the value of this "dollar" was.

How did they do that? They went to the marketplace. In what we would call statistical analysis, they collected a large sampling of Spanish milled dollars that were circulating, and they did a chemical analysis of them to determine on average how much silver they contained. This appears in the Coinage Act of 1792 where they wrote: "The Dollar or Unit shall be of the value of a Spanish milled dollar as the same is now current, that is, running in the market, to wit, three hundred and seventy-one and one-quarter grains of silver."

Now you know something that 99.999% of Americans do not know, and probably a higher percentage of lawyers. The "dollar" is a silver coin containing three hundred and seventy-one and one-quarter grains of silver and it cannot be changed by constitutional amendment, definitionally, any more than the term "year" can.

How much is a dollar worth today? 371.25 grains is .7796 troy ounces*. Silver closed at 5.95 per troy ounce yesterday, so that means one dollar equals 4.64 Federal Reserve Notes. That's only 364 percent inflation in 202 years, or 1.8 percent a year. However, the US silver dollar coin consisted of 416 grains (.8736 troy ounces) until 1878, then was debased to 412.5 grains (.8663 troy ounces) until production was stopped in 1964. This suggests that the bulk of the inflation happened after 1964, since what was a silver dollar coin worth FRN 1 (and 1.11 dollars) is now worth FRN 5.15. That's 415 percent inflation in 40 years, or 10.38 percent per year. What happened? The answer is simple. Bretton Woods and the imperial global reserve dollar.

This inflation looks a lot worse when measured in gold terms, however. The same dollar was also defined as 24.75 grains of gold, or .052 troy ounces. Yesterday's gold closed at 416.10, which indicates that that same 1792 dollar also equals FRN 21.63. This gives us 2063 percent inflation over 202 years, or 10.21 percent a year. This suggests that silver is probably undervalued and repeats the ancient lesson that one is foolish to put much hope in any economy based upon the long term health of paper money.

*Thanks to GD, for catching my conversion into the wrong measure, which led to an absurd conclusion.

Ask the Razor

The Internal Revenue Service has identified 800 employees whose tax returns will face closer scrutiny, part of an effort to make sure IRS employees are filing truthful returns and complying with tax laws. The agency said Friday that these employees "face an examination on Schedule C issues, most of which are already under way." A Schedule C deals with reporting profits or losses from a business and is filed if the taxpayer or his or her spouse runs a business.

An IRS spokesman declined to say precisely what prompted the IRS to flag the employees for review, but said that the agency had some questions about their returns. The 800 employees are just a fraction of the 115,000 full- and part-time employed by the IRS. IRS Commissioner Mark Everson said the agency is taking extra steps to make sure IRS employees are following the law. "The multistep initiative will include a new review of tax behavior of IRS employees, a deeper IRS compliance and auditing effort for employees and an expanded education and outreach effort inside the agency," the IRS said. Earlier this year, a review found that "about half of the 25 employees identified had tax compliance issues following an investigation of their Schedule C filings," the IRS said. "Several employees in the inquiry have already lost their jobs."

So, are people who run their own businesses generally more or less intelligent than the norm? And would a full-time IRS employee be likely to know the tax law better or worse than the average American? There are two possibilities. One is that two-thirds of one percent of the IRS staff are both smart enough to be entrepeneurial and stupid enough to blatantly cheat. The other is that these IRS employees know perfectly well that the very foundation of the IRS is a charade and behave accordingly. Both are possible, but Occam's Razor favors the latter, even if one ignores the evidence provided by other IRS agents who are openly condemning their lawless former employer.

I never thought much about the IRS one way or the other until they accidentally took money out of my bank account for a return I'd already paid. It wasn't much, but I called them and told them that they'd made a mistake and asked for the money back. The IRS agent admitted the mistake after looking things up, then told me to take that amount off next year's return without accounting for it. Incredulous, I asked him why they didn't just put the money back. "Oh, we don't do that," he said. Thus began my journey into the bowels of the federal income tax charade.

This should be interesting

Robert Novak reports: The Bush administration is bracing for the first hostile book written by a former official in January when Paul O'Neill publishes an account of his two years as secretary of the treasury. Pittsburgh industrialist O'Neill left Washington angrily after being fired Dec. 6, 2002, and began work on a book. The White House fears the worst from his insider's account.

They have something to fear. This economic boomlet of the last six months has the same cause as most modern booms - expansion of the money supply, which is also known as inflation. According to the Fed, M1 is up 7.2 percent in 2003 and M3 is up 4.6 percent, while the economy grew 2.9 percent in the last year. There's all of your GDP "growth" right there, and then some, the literally unbelievable Q3 jump notwithstanding. Cliff Droke writes: The dominant theme in 2003, especially the last nine months of the year, was inflation. Not inflation in the economic sense but inflation in the sense of rising prices across-the-board for equities, commodities, and real estate due to massive injections of liquidity into the U.S. financial system.

It's strange, considering the championing of this so-called "inflation free" boom, that cattle prices have risen 36% in the last 12 months, scrap steel is up 42 percent and gold is up from $278 to $416 in only two years.

I'll be checking out O'Neill's book. I suspect he knows what the inevitable consequences of this insane monetary policy is, even if Larry Kudlow doesn't. Consider this: after two years of bear action followed by an almost unprecedented bull run, the NASDAQ is up 1.3 percent. But the dollar is down 40 percent in that same period. It may not matter to the US investor, but I don't think a lot of foreign investors are excited with that performance. Richard Russell suggests that the US economy will be continued to be propped up as China buys time by continuing to purchase dollars until its infrastructure is in place to replace the USA as the global economic center.

This is a credible scenario - it mirrors one that I'd separately developed for a novel I'm currently writing - far more so than those who worry about competition from a moribund and dying Europe or believe that the current financial regime can be sustained indefinitely. What is ominous is that China is starting to permit and encourage both individual gold accumulation and entrepeneurialism - someone's been reading the Austrians, I suspect. Once you begin to hear noises about an official abjuring of the Communist creed, be prepared for fireworks of several kinds. Empires, financial and otherwise, don't tend to go peacefully into the gentle night of history.

The Grip Tightens

NRO's Andrew Stuttaford points out: The new European arrest warrant came into force yesterday, allowing British citizens to be extradited under a fast-track process even if their actions do not constitute an offence in Britain.

I find it interesting that all those who mock my insistence that the UN poses a grave threat to humanity and US national sovereignty are now strangely silent about the example set by the European Union. They always used to insist that the Common Market was nothing but a trade federation too. It's now very clear to everyone that they were completely wrong about the nature of the budding European state, and I guarantee that they'll be proven to have been hopelessly naive about the nature of the United Nations as well.

It's not revisionism

TZ writes: The two myths I detest most by revisionist historians are 1. Our founding fathers were all deists or unitarians, and 2. The "civil war" (or whatever you want to call it) wasn't about slavery.

I agree with TZ on the deist thing, which is obviously not true given even a small amount of research. But is it reasonable to suggest that the Union would have permitted states to leave peacefully if the Southern states had wished to secede over tariffs, or anything else? I think the notion is absurd.

Slavery was why the Southern states wished to secede. The war was fought, however, over whether states had the right to secede or not. In other words, whether national sovereignty lay with the states or with the Federal government. War is usually about power, not the justifications given.

Does anyone seriously suggest that the North would have invaded the South had the Southern states chosen to keep slaves and stay within the Union? It had not done so for 87 years, after all. Is the war in Chechnya fought over slavery? Was the Eritrean war fought over slavery? Despite the omnipresence of slavery throughout history, there has not been a single war fought over it anywhere in the world that I recall, but many, many wars fought by people who wish to secede and a government that does not wish to permit them to do so.

TZ's position, however mainstream, appears almost bizarre when seen from the perspective of military history. The Civil War was by no means unique.

The Sports Guy knows

When the NFL Channel counts down "The Top 500 Toughest Regular-Season Losses" this summer, the Vikes probably clinched the No. 1 spot with that Arizona loss. Seriously, what was worse? Minutes away from a playoff berth, they gave up a touchdown, onside kick, wacky pass interference penalty, then a pseudo-Hail Mary on the final play ... and they lost to a team with a rookie QB and a lame-duck coach, a team that was one more incompletion away from drafting first in April. And it was a bogus call to boot -- really, does anyone think Poole would have gotten that second foot in?

Throw in their tragic history -- Nate Wright, Gary Anderson, Darrin Nelson, four Super Bowl losses and everything else, and, yes, I'm well aware of this stuff since the best friend is a die-hard Vikes fan -- and this was a Second-Degree Stomach Punch Game for the poor Minnesota fans

The Sports Guy is right. It wasn't a Third-Degree deal. Our expectations were way too low this season Like Big Chilly said, there was no way we were going to do anything in the playoffs anyhow. It's technically worthy of a Stomach Punch because of how it all came about but it felt more like the 2001 NFC championship game when we were destroyed by the Giants 41-0; we were just surprised the team was in the hunt at all. I would argue that the Dallas game was a That Game, however. I'm still upset about it. I'm more upset about that then I am about the stupid Arizona game. I'm upset right now. The Darrin Nelson drop against the Redskins was up there too. I don't know. Go away. I can't talk about it right now.

More importantly, that was the fourth Stomach Punch game for the Vikes in less than 30 years. Even the Sox didn't have that many over that same span. And yet you would never see a documentary about Vikings fans, a passionate group who have to rank among the most tortured fans in sports. Apparently media-related curses and sweeping self-importance is much more interesting on a national level.

Vikings fans are great fans, if not in the same league as Green Bay fans, who we love to hate, except we really don't. Of course, we actually have other options besides ice fishing and counting up all the different kinds of cheese we've eaten. (Relax - Space Bunny's mom is a Packers owner.) The gang knows all the words to two of the Vikings three fight songs - the one Denny wrote is hopelessly cheesy, so no point. We sing it after every touchdown, in bars, at football parties, on trans-Atlantic phone calls together. The White Buffalo once taught an entire bar in Denver to sing "Vikings... the men of football fame" during a Monday Night football game against the 49ers, then called us so we hear it. The sports media suck. TV may revolve around New York City and Los Angeles, but the world of sports most emphatically does not.

Trying it again, take 2

I'm having a third whack at that little referrer script. This time I've posted it at the very bottom of the main section. We'll see if that works.

By the way, you do realize that Global Citizen is a joke, right? I'm not chipping anything, not even my dog.

The Great Blog War

I'm considering taking sides. The question is, do I join The Alliance of Free Blogs, The Axis of Naughty or The Blogdom of God? I'd consider The League of Liberals but I rather doubt they'd have me.

Not much is at stake. ONLY THE FATE OF THE INTERNET AS WE KNOW IT!

If you hear a noise, that would be the sound of the gravitas-meter dropping. Va bene. I'd be bored out of my skull if I had to take myself seriously all the time.

That would be nice

GH wants to bet: I bet you a case of beer your blog gets over a million hits this year

I'm hardly going to bet against myself now, am I? According to Sitemeter - which is totally inaccurate, but it serves - I'm on pace for about 295,000 right now. So, it is possible, I guess.

The Blogger King, Instapundit, does around 26 million per year. Surpassing him is my ultimate goal for Vox Popoli, despite my great admiration for a man who joins the conspiracy against himself.

GH also mentions the Simkanin injustice as one that perhaps should have made WND's most spiked list. I don't think so, because the media seldom covers this sort of case before the trial. At this point, it's nothing but dog-bites-man to say that the IRS-Federal Court cabal is wrongly persecuting someone who has violated no law. If he wins - as he should - and the story is still ignored, that will make it a spiked story for 2004.

The Librodium

As you may know, I do not mind being criticized. I believe that constant criticism sharpens your mind, and has the long-term effect of strengthening your arguments. Big Chilly, who has been my best friend since our days on Big Wheels together, has always taken a perverse pleasure in playing devil's advocate, and one of the reasons I don't intellectually fear anyone is that thanks to him I have had a genius-level IQ slashing away at my every assertion for more than two decades. Being stripped down to the bone on occasion is a good thing for any would-be intellectual.

I also believe that one of the great weaknesses of the Left is its total ignorance of the philosophy of the Right due to its ironically anti-intellectual tendencies as well as its fear of being exposed. So, as I have become aware of a site or two that appear to show some degree of interest in following my columns and attempting - rather unsuccessfully from what I've seen thus far - to lampoon them, I was wondering if regular readers might have an interest in my adding a special blogroll for such sites as they spring into existence during my slow, but inevitable march towards universal acknowledgment as the One True Heir of William F. Buckley and George Will?

There's one in particular that amused me, not so much for what it had written about me, but about the delightful Miss Coulter. Anyhow, let me know what you think, as I'm still undecided. It seems strange to contemplate what will probably amount to tripling the traffic of one's self-appointed enemies, but on the other hand, it might make for interesting and amusing reading at times. As for me, well, no one who competes in an all-male fantasy football league can possibly be afraid of being called a few names.

"Oh, I almost forgot about revenge upon my enemies! May they die like pigs in Hell!" - Steve Martin, A Christmas Wish

The Simkanin Charade

So, you're really confident that you owe those federal income taxes? That the law requires your employer to withhold them from your paycheck? Then it might trouble you to know that Texas businessman Dick Simkanin has been indicted four separate times by grand juries that have not heard ANY testimony from him, he's had one jury vote 11-1 not guilty, and he's STILL in jail after seven months of being convicted of nothing. You can rape a woman and get less time. Somebody is worried....

In that trial, an IRS legal expert had to recant his prior testimony regarding the definition of the critical legal term “employee” and the judge refused, after a specific request by the jurors, to provide them with a copy of the law that required Simkanin to withhold.

This week, Judge McBryde granted a DOJ motion to deny Dick the ability to present any of the evidentiary exhibits upon which he relied to form his beliefs about the tax code. This ruling by Judge McBryde effectively denies Dick the ability to defend against one of the separate, foundational elements of the alleged crimes, i.e., “willfulness.”

McBryde also granted a DOJ motion regarding “Jury Security” in effect, keeping the jury in complete isolation from the public during (and before) jury selection and during Simkanin's trial. The order included provisions to conduct the jury selection process in private, with no public witnesses. Potential jurors are being directed to meet at a "secret location" and will then be bussed to the federal courthouse in downtown Fort Worth, and ushered inside for the proceedings. According to the order, jurors will not even be able to use the same hallways or bathrooms used by the general public during the trial.

Here's a pretty simple question. If the government's case is so strong, so obvious, why are they forced to resort to such monstrous and unjust shenanigans? Apply Occam's Razor and the answer is clear. The law is not what you think it is, nor what the government pretends it to be. Our forefathers didn't stand for such injustice, and certainly neither can we.

Considering the deception, violations of the Constitution and federal rules of court procedure, a railroaded guilty verdict won't change my opinion in the least. But the vindication of a not guilty verdict in the face of a stacked deck should make a real difference to the average American.

More on war

From the Mises Institute: With regard to war, Hobbes asserted three principal causes, "First, competition; secondly, diffidence; thirdly, glory. The first maketh men invade for gain; the second, for safety; the third, for reputation."

Hmmm, I don't see much related to religion there. Obviously that Hobbes guy had no idea what he was talking about. If only he'd heard of the Crusades, the Thirty Years War and the Spanish Inquisition, I'm sure he would have had a much different list of principal causes.

I do think the Mises Institute has it wrong with regards to the current war. They see it as a war for reputation, I think it is primarily number two, a war for safety. It may be as much in protection of the imperial dollar as it is of the American people - their physical safety if not their liberty - but it doesn't strike me as a glorious enterprise.

Like rain on your wedding day

Mensa sends the following: Hello, American Mensa has a technical inconstancy with their bylaws and need your help. We are collecting proxies for this vote at the Annual Business Meeting in July 2004. Your proxy will be used for this matter and this manner only. Either call 1-877-MYPROXY (1-877-697-7690) or use your computer and go to: http://proxy.us.mensa.org - you'll need your membership number and password issued at the last dues renewal for this process.

Intelligence, it seems, is not to be considered synonymous with mastery of grammar. One would be disappointed if one's wife was inconstant, even if she were only technical or inconsistent about it. Also, being singular, American Mensa would conventionally be expected to use the third person singular conjugation of the verb "to need", which is to say he/she/it needs.

There are many reasons why the intellectual elite should not be permitted to run society as in The Republic. This isn't one of them, but it does strike me as amusing. Thank goodness I'm only "claiming" to be a member of Mensa, so I can safely ignore this nonsense. In any case, a small, but vital component of my philosophy is to ignore any sentence that contains the words "proxy" or "bylaw".

UPDATE: PM corrects MY grammar: Yep, you've got it. The subjunctive...the forgotten tense. I actually smiled when I read your posting in question and thought it wouldhave warmed the very soul of Reinhold Niebuhr (perhaps my very favorite American theologian - but then I'm an agnostic gnostic so I probably shouldn't be trusted) - a man long obsessed with the overarching irony of American history and religion.

There were so many levels of irony in that post of yours that I very nearly had a transcendent spiritual experience myself! But then, seeing as I'm a self-proclaimed agnostic gnostic, I probably would have discounted said experience (had it actually occurred) as the unknowable forced heresy of unseen and malicious powers, chalked the whole experience up to the effects of day-old asparagus, and written a secretive and rambling discourse on the TRUE meaning of the 4-3 defensive set. Anyway, other than an occasional 'the' or 'it' (and on rarer occasions,'his') I seldom agree with a word you say. But you keep me reading...I'll give you that. I never miss a column!

Now, you see, THAT'S an ideal critique! I don't know about the true meaning of the 4-3, but I did nearly burst something laughing this week when one of the Sports Illustrated writers retroactively defended, on the grounds of a shoddy Buffalo offense, Buddy Ryan's punching of Kevin Gilbride. Anyhow, the sentence should have been written: "One would be disappointed if one's wife were to be inconstant...." Guilty as charged - in pleading for clemency, however, I suggest that such an offense is minor in comparison with a) not knowing the difference between inconsistent and inconstant; and b) improperly conjugating "to need". Clearly this blog need an editor.

Damning the State in 3 easy lessons

Mr. Rockwell writes an excellent explanation of the State and its inherent characteristics, using the new anti-spam law to demonstrate the foundational principles. The entire article, entitled Why the State is Different is at the Mises Institute.

"Lesson One in the uniqueness of the state: the state has one tool, and one tool only, at its disposal: force. Now, imagine if a private enterprise tried that same approach. Let's say that Acme Anti-Spam puts out a product that would tag spammers, loot their bank accounts, and hold them in captivity for a period of time, and shoot spammers dead should they attempt to evade or escape. What's more, the company doesn't propose to test this approach on the market and seek subscribers, but rather force every last email user to subscribe. How will Acme Anti-Spam make money at its operation? It won't. It will fund its activities by taking money from your bank account whether you like it or not. They say that they can do this simply because they can, and if you try to stop it, you too will be fined, imprisoned, or shot. The company further claims that it is serving society.Such a company would be immediately decried as heartless, antisocial, and essentially deranged. At the very least it would be considered uncreative and dangerous, if not outright criminal. Its very existence would be a scandal, and the people who dreamed up such a company and tried to manage it would be seen as psychopaths or just evil. Everyone would see through the motivation: they are using a real problem that exists in society as a means to get money without our permission, and to exercise authority that should belong to no one.

Lesson Two presents itself: the state is the only institution in society that can impose itself on all of society without asking the permission of anyone in particular. You can't opt out. A seemingly peculiar aspect of the anti-spam law is that the government exempts itself from having to adhere to its own law. Politicians routinely buy up email addresses from commercial companies and send out unsolicited email. They defend this practice on grounds that they are not pushing a commercial service and that doing so is cheaper than sending regular mail, and hence saves taxpayer money. It is not spam, they say, but constituent service. We all laugh at the political class for its hypocrisy in this, and yet the exemption draws attention to:

Lesson Three: the state is exempt from the laws it claims to enforce, and manages this exemption by redefining its criminality as public service. What is considered theft in the private sector is "taxation" when done by the state. What is kidnapping in the private sector is "selective service" in the public sector. What is counterfeiting when done it he private sector is "monetary policy" when done by the public sector. What is mass murder in the private sector is "foreign policy" in the public sector. This tendency to break laws and redefine that infraction is a universal feature of the state. When cops zoom by we don't think of them as speeding but merely being on the chase. Killing innocents is dismissed as inevitable civilian casualties. So it should hardly surprise us that the state rarely or even never catches itself in the webs it weaves. Of course it exempts itself from its anti-spam law. The state is above the law."

Fifty thousand

50,000 visits since this blog began on October 8th. Not exactly Instapundit territory, but it's been quite a success in my opinion. Thanks to all the regulars stopping by, and I hope you'll all continue to do so in 2004. I've very much enjoyed the experience, and I have no intention of stopping anytime soon.

Have a happy and joyful new year.

Mowbray gang agley

Joel Mowbray writes: Technically, the former head of the Central Command in the Middle East didn’t say “Jews.” He instead used a term that has become a new favorite for anti-Semites: “neoconservatives.” As the name implies, “neoconservative” was originally meant to denote someone who is a newcomer to the right. In the 90’s, many people self-identified themselves as “neocons,” but today that term has become synonymous with “Jews.”

Joel Mowbray has done some yeoman's work on Saudi Arabia in the last year, but he's seriously smoking crack if he thinks that neoconservative is synonymous with Jew. A neoconservative is someone who pretends to be a conservative, but supports a Wilsonian foreign policy. Alternatively, a big government conservative. In either case, a left-moderate in conservative clothes.

There may be many Jewish neoconservatives these days, as their formerly beloved Marxists and left-liberals have turned on them with a vengeance over Israel. Unfortunately, they haven't abandoned many of their anti-conservative positions. If they had, there would be no need for the adjective "neo" now, would there. I am opposed to neoconservatives. I also defend the Jewish people and Israel at every opportunity. Am I, too, an anti-semite? The fraudulent manufacture of verbal offense via code word is much better left to the anti-intellectual vocabulary perverters of the Left.

Zinni hasn't tarnished his reputation. Mowbray, sadly, has.

Shut up, TMQ, we know

In fact, by Monday that page [at NFL.com] opened with, "The football gods must have something against the Vikings."

Clearly, it's time for Ragnar to execute the blood eagle on representatives from the Dallas Cowboys, the Washington Redskins, the Atlanta Falcons and now the Arizona Cardinals. Why do I have the feeling that there's a lot of Redskins' fans who'd like to nominate Steve Spurrier?

Mailbox: the vanity of virtue

JX writes: Yeah, Vox. Slice and dice those morally self-righteous liberals. Sometimes it's like picturing a primetime fight between Lennox Lewis and Rosie O'Donnell. I have an important question:How do you deal with those people around you who accuse you of being 'better' than they for your choices? I've come across that lately, some people I used to hang with back in my secular days referred to me as Mr. X in the street instead of my first name in order to diss me, and their sly assaults on my character are making me madder than I should be. How would you go about attacking this?

Well, first, I don't get a lot of this, if any. I've made some impressively bad choices in my day, so the notion of portraying myself as some sort of behavioral exemplary would strike a lot of those who know me well as being more than a little humorous. Your problem is that you are still too concerned with what the world thinks of you. Who cares? And what is important to keep in mind is that even as they are mocking you, they are watching your behavior. It's good that they have noticed a difference - a very minor, but totally uncharacteristic change in the White Buffalo's behavior was integral to my reassessment of Christianity - so you should not be angered by their taunts, you should be pleased. If you are greeted as Mr. X, then smile, give them a little mock bow, greet them with a friendly "Mr. Y" and let it slide. Don't attack it, ever. Eventually, one of them will probably approach you quietly and want to talk in depth about the changes in your life.

What is this, an advice column today? Where's the hate?