Richard G. Rieben

Beau Cain, a technical writer and college teacher, author, traveling lecturer and writing consultant, till recently a Director on the Board of the international non-profit organization Society for Technical Communication (STC), now Secretary of the Libertarian Party of California (and national Treasurer of Outright Libertarians) is someone so knowledgeable about language and communication that I cannot remember anyone as much an expert in the field as he so often shows to be. For my website officially called "The Exterritorial Imperative" with its domain name Butterbach.Net he had once coined the name "Christian Butterbach's network." This is a totally appropriate way to call it, all things considered, but it had never occurred to me that way till he spelled it out somewhere on the Web. To me the ".net" previously had had a purely technical meaning, not so much a human one. Which, considering the number of email messages I have to deal with daily, can become somewhat appalling and finally generate the wish that the virtual world of cyber space will become more often replaced and compensated by meetings in flesh (honi soit qui mal y pense). Beau and I did meet in person though, maybe twice, over a period of decades, but that is another story.

What's this long introduction good for? Well, maybe to postpone my painful need today to again apologize to my "network" for still not having put online my several times promised more extensive obituary and homage to my magnificent friend and author of this site Richard Rieben, the great philosopher and genius of liberty, which the world, my network, this site and I have so sadly and so prematurely lost. A consolation can only be that what he wrote will continue to live and hopefully improve, if not the world, at least the life of an ever larger number of people. Those who know his work are still too few and among those who have read it, too few have understood it. Most likely because they did not have the wealth of experience Richard had.

Now, Richard's brother William came to my help by sending me the obituary he has written, which was still unpublished. I am very grateful to him for this and you can read this tribute of a brother containing first hand information and wonderful thoughts and advice here: