So, I’m enjoying the opportunity to start doing some freelancing and probably going to take a couple more weeks enjoying the liberty to do a bunch of that. But fairly soon, I’m probably going to have to start looking for something a bit more stable. Since I’m already in DC, since this is where I […]

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Apparently Sonia Sotomayor’s membership in the Belizean Grove women’s club is turning into some kind of issue—with some wags purporting that it runs afoul of the canons of judicial ethics. Now, several other Supreme Court justices, male and female, have been members of men’s or women’s clubs, and it doesn’t seem to have been a […]

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As you may have noticed, domestic hawks spent much of the weekend loudly demanding that Barack Obama, on behalf of the United States, bluntly take sides in a foreign electoral controversy. Victor David Hanson, without a trace of irony, tries to explain why this would be just dandy with some examples that are perhaps a […]

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I’m flattered to learn, via Techdirt, that Rep. Robert Wexler—by which I mean, in all likelihood, a 20-something staffer in his office—is among the readers of this humble blog. I’m slightly chagrined to see the idea of the “one-way hash argument” invoked on behalf of copyright maximalism: Julian Sanchez from CATO has discussed this exact […]

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Everywhere in politics, but in discussions of healthcare in particular, there is a powerful bipartisan impulse to insist that tradeoffs are illusory—infinite ponies can now be yours! Progressives are too eager to believe that national health care will make it possible to expand coverage while reducing costs—reducing deficits, even!—apparently because all those costs are in […]

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Via the magic of an alert for inbound links, I find an artblogger riffing on a recent post here who, oddly enough, brings up that old game theory classic the Snowdrift Game: The situation of the Snowdrift game involves two drivers who are trapped on opposite sides of a snowdrift. Each has the option of […]

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This weekend I got to seriously considering whether perhaps I hadn’t better just pack it in and make a fresh start in some less doomed, more remunerative industry—which at present is pretty much anything short of buggy-whip manufacture. Maybe it’s failure of imagination, but to my own astonishment, I realized I was hard pressed to […]

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Since when do New York Times op-ed writers sound like Parade rejects? I would ask: What did you say or do as the shooters retreated into their xenophobic silo and consumed the bile slouching about the Internet? What did you say or do as the darkness in their hearts obscured the light of their reasoning, […]

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And now, for no reason at all except that it sort of amused me, Vanilla Ice takes a bat to an MTV set as a shocked Jon Stewart, Jeaneane Garofalo, Chris Kattan, and Dennis Leary look on (at around 8 minutes).

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Reason‘s gallery of the ten most absurd moral panics to make Time cover stories is a joy to behold. The infamous mid-90s “cyberporn” cover—a perfect storm of Internet FUD for the tech-illiterate and “won’t someone think of the children” hysteria—has long been synonymous with the very concept of “moral panic” in my mind, but it […]

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