The New York Times Magazine this week has a piece worth reading on “the fluttering swallows,” North Korean’s who manage to escape from that prison country and encounter a new set of problems assimilating in the South.

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Tim Lambert reports on some new trouble for John Lott. Back when I was writing about the survey and pseudonym hubbub, I tried to stress that Lott’s major conclusion—that concealed carry laws reduce crime—wasn’t really undermined by either issue, even if they might legitimately give rise to doubts about his general reliability. Well, now there […]

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Clayton Cramer’s claim to “libertarian sympathies” is becoming as embarassing as it is palpably false, following this post on sodomy laws, which is skewered by AgendaBender. There’s an even more noxious follow-up here. There is a small object lesson here, though: when you socialize the costs of something, people will eventually demand that control over […]

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This piece is deeply infuriating. Administration officials are now basically saying, if not in so many words: “Yeah; we didn’t really think Iraq was a threat. We just wanted to invade someone to “flex muscle” and show we were serious about fighting terrorism. Iraq seemed as good a place as any.”

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While most folks are busy castigating Sen. Rick Santorum for comparing homosexuality to incest and pedophilia (criticism he clearly deserves), the libertarian wing of the blogosphere has stopped to ask: why shouldn’t the right to sexual privacy protect consensual incest between adults? Fellow ex-debate-geeks Glen Whitman and Amy Phillips have weighed in, as has Eugene […]

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If you’ve been following the John Lott bruhaha, this is pretty damn funny. Via Atrios.

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If John Derbyshire didn’t exist, I might have to invent him. In a recent column, Derb reveals the psychological roots in his British childhood of his vehement, bilious loathing for the left, bristles at the “snobbery” of people who think education is better that ignorance, and he doesn’t care if his president is insanely out […]

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There are many reasons to be glad war is over. A fairly minor one is that I find I can read Andrew Sullivan again. Not that I agree with everything now, but for a few months the effect on my blood pressure made it positively unhealthy.

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Nina Simone, one of the greatest jazz singers ever, has died.

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