SciFi is running a restored version of the schlock-classic Esperanto film Incubus, which starred a young, pre-Kirk William Shatner. It’s sort of bizarre watching a movie in which all of the actors have the awkward diction of someone delivering lines in an unfamiliar language… and it’s compounded by the fact that since Esperanto’s not a […]

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I’ve been meaning to make a few comments with respect to Jim Antle’s recent TCS piece on the right’s internal schisms. Except that instead of a thoughtful, well-structured consideration, I fear that at this hour I’m only up for a core-dump of free associations on the topic. I think I first wrote about it here, […]

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In the midst of an interesting post on IQ and Headstart, Mark A. R. Kleiman writes: The more general point is that the ‘heritability’ of a trait is not a constant across environments, and that the attempt to parse all differences into an environmental component and a genetic component whose coefficients sum to unity — […]

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In a new piece up at Reason, I take aim at proponents of the view that civil libertarian concerns about the PATRIOT Act represent a form of Chicken Little–style hysteria.

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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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