So Verizon finally got me a phone line. But they still haven’t managed to send me the DSL package, even though the DSL line is working, and I can’t seem to get it working with the old DSL modem I had lying around. Who would’ve thought that a company could manage to display so many […]

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Fudging Fair Use So you’ve probably run across someone at some point who has the sort of fuzzy understanding of the Bill of Rights that leads ’em to complain that “their First Amendment rights have been violated” whenever the moderator of an online forum won’t let them post something, or the NY Times won’t run […]

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Tribal Freak-Out Another interesting insight from the Cosmides lecture, which I forgot to mention. We evolved in social groups of about two-hundred at the absolute maximum. If you live in an urban area, or even a fair sized town, you probably see more human beings in a day than our tribal ancestors did in their […]

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Stealth Politics Political movements of all stripes expend lots of mental energy, and even more ink, agonizing over the question: “How can we bring the public around to our side?” Among libertarians, there are groups like the Advocates for Self Government which advise us on rhetorical strategies for the conversion of our friends and neighbors, […]

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The seminar is getting away from areas I’m already sorta familiar with — public choice, voting paradoxes, development economics — and into areas where I’m more ignorant. Which is great, because the lectures become much more information-dense for me. The lecture/discussion by Leda Cosmides sparked a lot of thought still in process… but I thought […]

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Looks like there is, in fact, a computer room at the IHS Workshop. What’s more, the dorms we’re staying in appear to have ethernet jacks in the room. Which means all I need to do is find an ethernet cable (I foolishly neglected to bring mine), and I can hook my laptop up there. Sweeet. […]

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Woah. So überlibertarian Declan McCullagh has just left Wired News for CNET. My reality tunnel is spinning. In other news, I’ll be away at IHS’s Social Change Workshop until the evening of Friday the 21st. But Verizon swears (I’ve heard THAT before) that my phone and DSL lines will be operative by then, so my […]

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Comic Books for Grown-Ups Like many adolescent boys, I spent way too much of my time between the ages of 10 and 13 reading comic books. I followed Spider Man (in his Amazing, Spectacular, and adjectiveless manifestations), the X-Men, X-Force, Batman, Spawn, anything I could find featuring Dr. Doom, and a whole bevy of other […]

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I’ve been remiss in neglecting to mention the surprisingly fun Kalorama Blogorama, as Will Wilkinson termed it. “Surprising” only because if you’d told me in advance that a group of right-leaning political wonks who, oh yeah, spend inordinate amounts of time on the Internet, would be a blast when squeezed into a bar… well, let’s […]

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Keystone Terrorists for Keystone Cops I’m not sure whether to laugh or cry about this article on ABC News. Ok, that’s not quite right: I laughed, then felt vaguely guilty about it. Y’see, it appears that Mohammed Atta and some of his compatriots had, despite their savage hatred for things like “Western civilization,” been infected […]

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