The Cato Blog Mafia (viz., Brink Lindsey, Radley Balko, and Gene Healy) proudly present… Blogorama II: The Legend Continues. You, your blogger friends, your blog-reading friends, and any sexy people you can drag along are invited to appear on Thursday, September 19 at 7pm. The blog bash will, once again, take place at the Rendezvous […]

[Read more →]

Since I’ve already wasted some of your precious neurons on my comic book preferences, here are some other things I’ve been into lately. Text Systems of Survivial (Jane Jacobs) : Polished this one off last week; the always intriguing Jacobs purports to identify two moral “syndromes,” corresponding to the arenas of commercial and “guardian” life […]

[Read more →]

So by now, everyone’s heard about the ludicrous case of the butterball who’s suing the fast food industry because they failed to inform him that shoving lots of cheeseburgers down your gullet will make you a very large and blubbery boy. (He thought “100% beef” meant it was healthy, y’see.) This is, of course, the […]

[Read more →]

In NY this weekend, I stopped into Forbidden Planet — a comic shop — for the first time in a while. Upon returning, I showed up late to the unfolding of a brilliant online comic. So it seems like an appropriate time to vent my supressed comic geek. Spiders gives signs of being influenced by […]

[Read more →]

I hate to rag on Norah Vincent after she graciously linked to my “Dextrophobia” column, but goddamn does she get things 180-degrees wrong in her recent L.A. Times piece on smoking. A self-described libertarian, Vincent thinks opponents of Mike Bloomberg’s proposed smoking ban are abusing and misusing libertarian argument. Well, let’s see, shall we? Let’s […]

[Read more →]

Apologies to non-Cato readers, to whom this is doubtless not at all funny.

[Read more →]

Interesting debate on Iraq between Cato’s Gene Healy and Brink Lindsey. I’ll probably weigh in later today.

[Read more →]

In the early 60s, a group called Young Americans for Freedom was formed at the instigation of conservative grand-don William F. Buckley, Jr. Conservatives and libertarians came together through YAF, primarily for the purpose of student activism in support of shared goals. But as the Vietnam War heated up, debates over foreign policy and the […]

[Read more →]

Courtesy of Aaron — This excellent lecture will, it seems, be among the last of this sort given by the sharp and articulate Lawrence Lessig. I’ll confess I’m still somewhat agnostic on the subject of intellectual property, but whatever the status of the general principle, it’s clear that the lobbying power of copyright holders has […]

[Read more →]

After two years off, Phish is getting back together. Fortunately, they’re only doing a few shows in winter thus far, so I don’t have to quit my job and get a van. Still, it’ll be fun to see ’em again after so long. Given the likely crush for tickets, I may have to wait for […]

[Read more →]