Unless one of my colleagues beats me to it, I’m thinking of crafting a reply to Rich Lowry’s recent column on PATRIOT Act “hysteria” if I have time. One of the problems here is that Lowry challenges us to identify civil liberties infringed under the act, when one of the act’s features is what it […]

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I arbitrarily came across this on the web and sorta dug it: Don’t listen to punk music just because it was revolutionary and tell yourself it is good. Listen to punk music because it was revolutionary and revel in how bad it really is and how that’s fine because it’s the point. And at a […]

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Whoever’s responsible for my not having encountered the band Spoon before now has some serious explaining to do. No, really, now: These guys have been around for ages. Their first 7″ was out almost a decade ago now, and their first full album dates from ’96. And with the exception of Interpol, about whom I’m […]

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I’m watching some halfwitted escapee from a 1950s lawnmower ad speaking in Alabama on the 10 Commandments issue. He’s arguing that Moore’s actions aren’t “Congress making a law,” which, he says, is all that’s prohibited under the First Amendment. The mind boggles. I know that there are some (a minority) who don’t think the 14th […]

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I got to thinking today about that old myth that we only use ten percent of our brains, and it occured to me that evolutionary thinking is actually pretty useful for combatting superstitions other than the religious sort. How long, after all, would this notion have stuck around if people thought about it in Darwinian […]

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Intrigued by a post at the new Team Agitator, I decided to take a look around WriteAPrisoner.com. Since it allows you to search by religion, I was curious to see how many atheists were listed in the system (not many of us, apparently), and came upon an unusual gentleman by the name of Leo Sabra […]

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In light of this Dan Drezner post, a better way to phrase one of my points in the “Do Not Call” post below occurs to me. If you apply a stripped down version of the Coase Theorem to this case, and (just work with me for a second) assume away transaction costs, it actually shouldn’t […]

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For those of you out there who’ve had a longstanding desire to constantly monitor my life (c’mon, admit it), I’ve installed a little javascript gadget on the left-hand toolbar that’s the equivalent of an aural webcam. Which is to say, it’ll display the last track I had loaded up in Winamp.

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I recently happened upon a website run by the family of Terri Schindler-Schiavo, who are trying to prevent her husband from having her feeding tube removed. (She’s been in a quasi-vegetative state for over a decade.) I have no particular opinion on the specific case, partly because I haven’t taken the time to read all […]

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One of the things that’s a bit vexing about the debate over copyright and MP3 file trading is how polarized it is. You get the Valenti crowd claiming that IP is exactly like ordinary tangible property, and that downloading a song is precisely the same, morally speaking, as shoplifting a CD. (That’s never quite held […]

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