So, conventional wisdom has it that ceding to terrorist demands in the face of attacks—the popular, if oversimplified, gloss being put on the results of the Spanish elections—is poor strategy: It only shows that terrorism is an effective way of getting what you want, inviting more attacks. Well, maybe. If there are a large number […]

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I’ve just gotten back from a trip to Guatemala, where Liberty Fund was holding a conference on Robert Nozick at the gorgeous Casa Santo Domingo, a converted monestary. So I expect to be posting fairly regularly again henceforth—ideally far more regularly than over the past few months. For those of you in D.C., I’ll be […]

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I knew her only slightly when I was at Cato, but Corrine Schillings was obviously one of the good ones. Radley, who knew her much better than I did, conveys better than I could what an awful, pointless, stupid loss her death is.

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An old colleague from my debate days has a post on his site that illustrates the need to keep some important distinctions at the forefront of ones mind. Libertarianism is a set of policy prescriptions; a theory about the proper scope of government. It is not a comprehensive moral theory, even though arguments in its […]

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Firefly movie’s a go.

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I’m anxiously awaiting the arrival of a largish print by Seattle photographer Phil Banko. I think it captures the feeling of being a libertarian journalist in DC well enough…

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I see via Crescat Sententia that a few people have taken my little one-liner squib on the phrase “unborn children” below for an argument and gone out to rebut it. First, it wasn’t really. It was a point about semiotics and the way the phrase either assumes that the fetus is already one kind of […]

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A surprising number of people I know appear to have seen a thoroughly mediocre film called The Ninth Gate—a film that would be much less disappointing if it hadn’t been directed by Roman Polanski and starred Johnny Depp and Frank Langella, who I usually like. Problem is, it’s a severely mutilated adaptation of a much […]

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I was noticing that the current crop of Samuel Adams commercials seem to be geared toward folks tormented by the “paradox of choice.” One that’s been running a lot shows a couple of guys looking at a dictionary-sized menu as a haughty waitress with an Austrian accent tells them how many different beers from different […]

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I was summoned for jury duty today and had the vertiginous experience of reading Discipline and Punish in the Jurors’ Lounge as I waited to hear “Sanchez-499” on the list of names and numbers they were rattling off. I was called down after a few hours, waited perhaps 45 minutes with fellow prospective jurors while […]

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