Monthly Archive: July 2011
Welcome aboard!
Longtime commenter Pat Cahalan (aka Patrick) has teamed up with Jaybird over at Mindless Diversions. His intro post is here. Please welcome him to the circus.
Cutting Jobs Instead of Bombs
I don’t understand our political leaders. They’re so interested in cutting spending on healthcare and retirement – even the Democratic president is eager to start hacking away at entitlements – yet almost none of...
Rawlsekianism Reloaded Part IIa: The argument for Maximin (or Leximin)
by Murali By popular demand, I am back with part 2 where I derive the principles of justice. Unfortunately, part 2 started to take up lots of space and had to be split up....
Libertarianism & Power
Freddie reads this post by Nick Gillespie on the arrest of a Reason reporter at a D.C. taxi public forum and writes: In a poor, majority-black city with a long history of drugs, crime,...
Map of the Day: The Seven Kingdoms of Westeros
This is pretty awesome: See a larger version here. (Via) I know we have fallen behind in our book club. Time is tight. I’m behind on reading. I figure many of you are as...
Homer without the Gods (or, the Nihilism of Cormac McCarthy)
The man therefore who does what he ought moves steadily towards his fate and his death. It is defeat and not victory that lies at the end. To understand this is itself a virtue;...
The Conscience of a Liberal
Despite modern liberalism’s sweeping scope, no one seems to know quite what it is. Liberalism appeared somewhere in the sixteenth century—“St. George, in the guise of Rationality,” as Kenneth Minogue puts it—to slay the...
Quick question…
I spent about 20 minutes today going back-and-forth with the girlfriend as to what Geithner and the President could be talking about when they speak of restoring confidence to the markets. We’re more or...
A Decade of Decriminalization
Ten years ago, Portugal decriminalized drugs, including “hard” drugs like cocaine and heroin. Since then, drug-related crime is down substantially, addiction is down, and drug-related health problems (i.e., infections from unsterilized heroin needles) are...
Quick Introduction and Statement of Purpose
Greetings, fellow ordinaries. Many of you know me as a frequent guest poster and relatively neutral member of the commentariat. Here is my back story: I was born in 1984, grew up outside Boston,...
Redlining the Declaration
Those who are interested in such things are welcome to persue my annual meditation on the United States’ Declaration of Independence.
2011 Time Capsule
Now is as good a time as any for us to make our predictions (otherwise known as projecting our hopes and dreams into the future) about what’s going to happen in November of 2012....
Experimentation and Policy
I spent the past three days at the New Zealand Association of Economists annual conference where I got to hobnob with my fellow practitioners of the Dismal Science. I attended a number of interesting...
Scandinavian Reality Blindness
In Norway, teachers are trained and encouraged to teach non-traditional gender roles to four-year-olds. This includes the use of books that caused tremendous controversy here in the USA, like “King and King.” Generally this...
The problem with tasers
Let’s have a law and order open thread. Over at Forbes I talk about the latest in police-taser abuses (hat-tip to Patrick at Popehat for that one). It’s one of those stories you wish...
Gold and Bacon and Libertarians Oh My!
I see Jason has already gotten to this over at Cato but I want to chime in. I heard this report on “libertarian summer camp” while driving this morning. NPR Correspondent Robert Smith visits...
On the value of higher education
Here’s James Poulos on higher education, claiming things like: We fixate on higher education as the key to employment because no other institution but college really acculturates Americans into “legitimate” society. Those who do...
Who’s at the table
As the political media has increasingly come to focus exclusively and obsessively on the latest twists and turns of the debt ceiling crisis, I find myself more alienated from and disgusted with politics than...
Clarification Given
For the last little while, a number of officials have been asking Obama’s Department of Justice to clarify its stance on Medical Marijuana. Yesterday (Wednesday), Deputy Attorney General James M. Cole released a memo...
