Monthly Archive: November 2010
Training the Mind
Newsweek has an interesting article showing Sam Harris to be more religious than you’d expect. I remember, a little while back, a few of his right wing Christian critics uncovered his affinity for Eastern...
Malkin Award Nominee: Andrew Sullivan
[updated – I, II] Andrew Sullivan has an odd post up about the debt and Obama. First, he confuses the proposed federal wage freeze with some other program that will actually help combat the...
Jack London, the socialist Ayn Rand
Last night I was researching early dystopian fiction for some reason when I came across a reference to Jack London’s 1907 novel The Iron Heel, which concerns a worldwide struggle between oligarchs – the modern...
Secrecy and the state
“If secrecy is necessary for national security and effective diplomacy, it is also inevitable that the prerogative of secrecy will be used to hide the misdeeds of the permanent state and its privileged agents....
Talking past one another on partisanship
Okay. So everyone is right and everyone is talking past one another. I responded to James Fallows yesterday, who was responding to Ross Douthat on his column about partisanship. Daniel Larison weighed in twice...
A Book Club in Winter
League alumnus Freddie deBoer is hosting a book club on Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose: First published in English translation in 1983, it is an incredibly well-realized piece of historical fiction, a...
Yuan Denominated Assets
We sell to China a lot more than they buy from us (the US for our foreign readers). They finance a lot of our debt. Hence they hold a lot of US dollars. They...
Ultimate Beliefs
If you push long enough in the direction of a person’s ultimate beliefs, sooner or later you will always reach something tremendously silly. This might be the best explanation I know of for religion:...
The Nation Apologizes….Sorta
Katrina vanden Heuvel offers a non-apology apology to John Tyner for allowing her magazine to smear him. By non-apology apology I mean that rather than acknowledge the innuendo in the piece was an outright slander...
Fallows on Douthat
Commenter Geoff Arnolds points us to this James Fallows piece. Fallows takes issue with the Douthat column I linked to earlier. Interestingly, in the entirety of the arguments laid out by Fallows, he somehow...
The will of the people and other illusions
“It’s important to remember, though, that we’ve empowered the government to do this. We’ve decided, collectively, that our fears override our common sense, and we’ve accepted every step-up in security up to this point....
Profiling, Political Correctness, and Airport Security
I must take issue with Erik’s recent post on airport security in which he argued for abolishing the TSA, replacing it with privatized airport security, and adopting an Israeli “profiling” approach to airport security. ...
Michael Kinsley Doesn’t Know the Difference Between a Leg and a Vagina
Michael Kinsley has a brilliant
In which I agree with Andy McCarthy
More often than not, Andy McCarthy and I simply don’t see eye to eye. For instance, his whole-hearted support of the War on Terror, his refusal to call torture for what it is, and...
The New York Times scrubs article in favor of FBI
Glenn Greenwald has a piece up regarding the latest instance of the FBI’s bizarre and unconscionable practice of convincing disturbed Muslim youths to carry out what they believe to be terrorist attacks over the...
Wikileaks release begins; Updated with raw info
NOFORN UPDATE LOL I’m going though the raw cables now and will put interesting things up here as I find them. There’s not a whole lot available at this point which merits much attention,...
Are Substantial Improvements in Air Passenger Security Readily Available?
In my vigorous debate with Michael Heath (both here and elsewhere) about the value and legitimacy of the Transportation Security Agency’s new backscatter scanners and the enhanced pat downs for those who opt-out of...
Airport Security Alternatives
I’m not interested in contesting the constitutionality of the new TSA protocols. In part this is because I’m shamelessly self-taught in constitutional law, and this is one of the areas I haven’t read about...
Is the DOI a “Christian” Document?
Of course the answer depends on what the meaning of the term “Christian” is. Here is my post where I explained how libertarians ought to view the religious aspects of the DOI. I wrote:
