Author Archive
African nature preserves and the tragedy of the commons
Tuesday, July 8th, 2008In the July 4, 2008 issue of Science, there was a news & views article about over-hunting and poaching of animals on nature preserves in Africa, due to the large increase in human populations surrounding the preserves. It seems the establishment of nature preserves attracts people to settle around them, ...
Artificial intelligence is dangerous in State, not private, hands
Monday, July 7th, 2008I was reading about the Three Laws of Robotics at Wikipedia, and for anyone who hasn't read any Isaac Asimov, I highly encourage you to start with I, Robot and go all the way through Foundation and Earth. That's 12 books altogether: five robot novels and seven Foundation novels, which ...
Female bishops
Saturday, July 5th, 2008From ifeminists.net I saw a link to this column advocating the ordainment of female bishops in the Church of England and, in principle, the Roman Catholic Church too. Well, I don't know, I think allowing women to become bishops won't help them move forward, only diagonally.
DWI arrest at BAC 0%
Saturday, July 5th, 2008Radley Balko blags about an Arizona designated driver who was arrested for DWI with a blood-alcohol content of 0%. Balko and the newspaper columnist he cites both thought the arresting officer might have been getting back at the designated driver's husband, a lawyer who defeated the officer in a DWI ...
Kill switches and remote control
Friday, July 4th, 2008Bruce Schneier, the computer-security guru whom Brad at WendyMcElroy.com often links to, wrote a pretty chilling post on kill switches and remote control. This type of technology is an example of why government is not your only enemy, but its creation of the national-security state enables private companies and individuals ...
Lynch mobs, stones, and glass houses
Friday, July 4th, 2008I urge you to read this column published at Wendy McElroy's website ifeminists.net, written by one WolfmanMac, about the increasing criminalization of being male: Lynch mobs, stones, and glass houses. The nuanced insight and analysis of one man's child-porn charges in particular and society's attitude about sexual predators in general ...
America! Fuck yeah!
Thursday, July 3rd, 2008The Onion's AV Club has a funny list of the most hilariously hyperbolic pro-America songs. Of course, the most hilariously hyperbolic pro-America song of all time is "America! (Fuck Yeah!)" from the movie Team America: World Police, but, then, it was trying to be hyperbolic. I love the list of ...
Moderate voters tough for both McCain and Obama to win
Thursday, July 3rd, 2008The AP reports that self-described "moderate" voters will be hard for both McCain and Obama to win in this presidential election. It reminds me of the line from Brian on "Family Guy": "Undecided voters are the biggest idiots on the planet."
An anecdotal story about incompetent police and gun control
Thursday, July 3rd, 2008On the WRIF-Detroit morning show I heard a story from a caller about a ridiculous ordeal he went through as a result of his attempts to protect his next-door neighbor's property. He called in response to the show's discussion about Joe Horn, a 61-year-old Texas man (not an Atlanta Falcons ...
Sarbanes-Oxley: helps big businesses, stifles small ones
Wednesday, July 2nd, 2008This is my second post in one night about how, (1) governmental regulations that were meant to help and protect...someone, presumably...actually only help big, wealthy businesses, and, (2) their supporters never actually expected them to do any good for the general public, to begin with. B.K. Marcus writes about "putting the ...
California’s ban on individual genetic risk assessment
Wednesday, July 2nd, 2008The state of California is attempting to shut down direct-to-consumer genetic testing. Now, this is just bizarre. I don't even know what to say about it, but I felt I had to condemn it on my web page because it is just so stupid. It is also so typical of ...
Brave Statists on Mises.org
Wednesday, July 2nd, 2008As wrong as they are, I am quite impressed with several of the non-libertarians—and in fact outright socialists—who frequent the Mises blag discussion threads and offer their input as to why a Mises columnist or blagger was way off and why government is actually not so bad, and is necessary, ...
David Z. on District of Columbia vs. Heller, Second Amendment
Tuesday, July 1st, 2008David Z. at No Third Solution had some excellent commentary on the recent ruling by the Supreme Court that (as I understand) Washington, D.C.'s gun-control laws were unconstitutional. It is the type of in-depth and thoughtful commentary that has been missing from our web page for a few weeks, which ...
Two Mises columns that expose economic follies
Tuesday, June 24th, 2008Thomas DiLorenzo exposes the moranic follies and the total immorality contained in a ludicrous article in Time magazine about how the next president should fix our economy. I have a feeling that if I had read the vacuous Time article without knowing where it came from, without knowing it was ...
I don’t believe him
Tuesday, June 24th, 2008After saying, "What color is he?... Oh, okay, there you go," regarding Adam "Pacman" Jones's criminal record, Don Imus defends his comment by saying, "I meant that he was being picked on because he's black." It was supposed to be sarcastic, because everyone knows he's black and everyone knows blacks ...
European research needs a dash of anarchy
Saturday, June 21st, 2008Such was the title of a letter to the editor of Nature in the June 12, 2008 edition of the journal, written by Theo Walliman of Zurich, Switzerland. I thought it was pretty neat and quite refreshing to see such a sentiment expressed in Statolatrist Nature, even though it can't ...
Inside the Statolatrist mind
Saturday, June 21st, 2008In New Scientist magazine, Owen Flanagan reviews the book The Political Mind by George Lakoff. Flanagan provides a surprising and refreshing non-Statolatrist perspective on science and politics in this review, but that might be typical in New Scientist—it certainly isn't in primary scientific journals. Flanagan is especially skeptical of this ...
It must suck to be Matt Moore
Saturday, June 21st, 2008I know this is nearly one-month-old news, but I have been too busy to blag much lately, as you can tell. Fear not, I'll be back in full force soon. I have been meaning to blag about this for a while because it is so stupid and so maddening. Radley ...
Funny, scathing review of Love Guru
Thursday, June 19th, 2008Dana Stevens of Slate magazine pans Mike Myers's latest movie. It sounds like the movie was about as funny as we all expected it to be. This review is probably much funnier than the movie. It's kind of funny: the funnier the review, the worse the movie probably is.
Gonzalo Guizan: another death by drug war
Friday, June 13th, 2008Radley Balko writes of another victim of the paramilitary-style drug raids that Republocrats and their myrmidon voters continue to support in the name of protecting our liberties or our morals or some such. On May 18, police in Easton, Connecticut conducted a heavily-armed drug raid on the home of Ronald Terebesi, ...
Wendy McElroy: the State discourages helpfulness and decency
Sunday, June 8th, 2008Many libertarians have come to consider the police and other law-enforcement divisions of the State as the most directly vicious and physically dangerous branches of the State to deal with. Wendy McElroy wrote about why you should never voluntarily talk to agents of the State or offer them any unnecessary ...
Why I oppose monopolistic justice (sic) systems
Thursday, June 5th, 2008The only remaining halfway-decent argument against the unregulated free market that I've encountered is that private police, courts, and retribution systems would be unaccountable to the actual justice of natural law and result in an increase in unchecked use of force against innocents. This would happen, they say, because there ...
Francois Tremblay: Agorism, not political action
Wednesday, June 4th, 2008Francois Tremblay wrote an excellent open letter to all Libertarians, and that's with a capital L, meaning the ones who think of themselves as members of the Libertarian Party and act mainly to promote LP candidates. Typically capital-L Libertarians are minarchists who believe in the Constitution or some such. This ...
Bob Murphy on oil prices and scapegoats
Tuesday, June 3rd, 2008A few days ago, Bob Murphy asked his readers at Crash Landing what they'd like to see more of on the blag. I responded with: more clear, simple, step-by-step examples of how markets work and how governmental solutions to perceived market problems (or problems created by prior State interference) lead ...
15th monthly market anarchist blag carnival
Sunday, June 1st, 2008The 15th monthly market anarchist blag carnival is up at Hellbound Alleee. I had never been to that site before, nor to several of the websites that had entries this month. Pretty sweet. I submitted my brief insights on California's gay-marriage decision and the relationship between marriage the State in ...
Obligatory post about Memorial Day
Monday, May 26th, 2008MSN has a quiz about "military myths"; hmmm, I wonder why they left out the one about wars and military interventions protecting our freedoms or doing anything else good for the country. Jacob G. Hornberger wrote the definitive short essay about why the troops and the military of the Imperial Federal ...
Why the State is different
Saturday, May 24th, 2008...there are two general means whereby human beings can satisfy their needs and desires. One is by work—i.e., by applying labor and capital to natural resources for the production of wealth, or to facilitating the exchange of labor-products. This is called the economic means. The other is by robbery—i.e., the ...
In which John violates Godwin’s Rule in the interest of history
Saturday, May 24th, 2008Those familiar with Godwin's Law might be able to guess why I usually refer to it as Godwin's Rule: the Rule is that you shouldn't break Godwin's Law by comparing any person, group, ideas, or practices to Hitler or the Nazis, lest your argument be delegitimized immediately. Well, when the ...
Child faces prosecution for calling the Cult of Scientology a cult
Saturday, May 24th, 2008Jacob Sullum reports at Reason's Hit and Run that a British teenager has been summoned to court and faces a fine (and, presumably, a mark on his criminal record) for holding a sign outside of the Cult of Scientology London headquarters with the word "cult" on it. I don't understand ...
Inflation in Zimbabwe
Saturday, May 24th, 2008Maybe you're familiar with Zimbabwe's brutal racist dictatorship commanded by Robert Mugabe, its runaway inflation, its millions of starved and murdered people, and its hotly contested recent elections. Well, at least there's some humor to be had in all this, at least from our perspective as comfortable Westerners. One Ian ...
What if climate-change alarmists are right?
Friday, May 23rd, 2008Max Borders presents a pretty good case as to why State solutions to those problems are worse than the problems themselves.
Juror conscription is not a civic duty
Friday, May 23rd, 2008I wonder if anyone but myself, who is pretty thoroughly obsessed with quotations from famous figures throughout history, enjoys our random quote generator that Kel put at the top of our page. (He didn't write the code, he just put it up there; the plugin is by Dustin Barnes.) I ...
Ron Paul and Obama on USSR, Iran
Friday, May 23rd, 2008Hey, Will Bunch: since you are probably still concerned with the reasons intelligent, informed Americans hold stupid, State-loving journalists like yourself in such low esteem, here is yet another example for you: Who said the following: Here’s the truth: the Soviet Union had thousands of nuclear weapons, and Iran doesn’t have a ...
To the Home Office, everyone is a terrorist suspect
Thursday, May 22nd, 2008It's a shame George Orwell didn't foresee the advent of computers and the computer age because if he had, 1984 would have been so much more frightening. The Home Office of Great Britain plans to create "Big brother" database for phones calls, emails and web use. This fascism hasn't been ...
Libertarian Party nomination
Wednesday, May 21st, 2008Link-and-run time: I agree with pretty much every word of this post by Roderick Long, who, despite his agorist commitments, endorses anarcho-capitalist Mary Ruwart for the LP nomination.
Protest = Terrorism
Tuesday, May 20th, 2008That's the point we're coming to under this national-security state in 21st-century America. Republicans and Democrats and the people who continue to support them like a battered wife who won't leave her abusive husband are to blame. Karen De Coster on the LRC blag: If you are going to St. ...
Tyrannicide
Saturday, May 17th, 2008Last night I finished watching the first season of the HBO historical drama Rome, on DVD. It was absolutely fantastic and I highly recommend it to anyone and everyone. The DVD set is worth almost any price they are likely to charge. They only made two seasons and won't make ...
Federalism and gay marriage
Saturday, May 17th, 2008I came across a blag that supports the Libertarian Party in the name of gay, lesbian, and bixexual rights, Outright Libertarians, and its proprietor, Brian Miller, has been writing a lot about the ruling by the California Supreme Court that California's illegalization of gay marriages was unconstitutional. In an example ...
Anarchy and law and order
Saturday, May 17th, 2008That's it. Anthony Gregory is my favorite political writer. Living, that is. I mean, no one could ever surpass Bastiat, Mencken, and Rothbard. His latest achievement is a beautiful explanation of how anarchy would promote order and natural law better than Statism does. I urge everyone of every political variety to ...
THAT is real journalism!
Saturday, May 17th, 2008Keith Olbermann gets a bad rap from libertarians because of his left-liberal socialism and the rarity of a dissenting commentator ever appearing as a guest on his show. Not having watched or heard much from him, I can't back up the latter accusation, but I've watched enough to know the ...
They graciously hand down our rights
Thursday, May 15th, 2008We should…be able to see that our interest would be best served not by asking the state to promulgate our values but by forbidding the state to promulgate any values at all. If the state can espouse some value that we love, it can, with equal justice, espouse others we ...
Genetic-discrimination legislation scares me
Sunday, May 11th, 2008The journal Nature had a news story about the bill prohibiting genetic discrimination that breezed through the Senate and that will undoubtedly become law very shortly. Since you'd have to have access to the full content of the Nature website to read it, I will paste the text of the ...
Shoddy but equal
Sunday, May 11th, 2008In the UK, hospital maternity wards have been rejecting pregnant women because they are full. Well, it's something to look forward to here.
Happy Mother’s Day
Sunday, May 11th, 2008It was considered a pretty stupid idea back when it was introduced as a potential official holiday in the Senate.
Coercion, not persuasion or enterprise, is the answer
Saturday, May 10th, 2008for environmentalists, claims Ann Pettifor on the BBC website. Paul Hawken, author of Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being, writes that "there are over one - maybe even two - million organisations (worldwide) working toward ecological sustainability and social justice". And yet... and yet... there ...
The economy is worse than you know
Saturday, May 10th, 2008I must offer a small retraction and an apology to at least a small number of MSM-print journalists out there because apparently some of them still do some worthy political commentating and question the establishment on serious matters. Kevin Phillips of Harper's Magazine wrote sort of an exposé on the ...
Defeating their own arguments
Saturday, May 10th, 2008I'm surprised I haven't blagged about any of the posts on one of my new favorite libertarian sites, Rad Geek People's Daily, Charles Johnson's blag. He wrote a long and entertaining post about three rural-Minnesota 8th-graders who were suspended for sitting during the Pledge of Allegiance. My favorite part of ...
Libertarian lyrics
Saturday, May 10th, 2008I think the Eagles, like most music artists, and particularly their main songwriters, Don Henley and Glenn Frey, have the reputation of being quite liberal. For instance, Don Henley founded the Walden Woods Project, a non-profit effort to buy land in and around Walden Pond to preserve it from development. ...