Author Archive

So, the National Enquirer reports that it caught 2004 Democrat Vice Presidential candidate Senator John Edwards with a mistress and a love child. In the article, Edwards denies the allegation in a way that sets up an old joke:

Edwards responded: “The story is false. It’s completely untrue, ridiculous,” adding: “Anyone who knows me knows that I have been in love with the same woman for 30-plus years.”

Too bad he didn’t finish with, “and if my wife finds out about her she will kill me.”

It would have wrecked his life but how often does a set up like that come along?

I made one of my long comments over on Reason’s Hit&Run so I thought I would turn into post here.

The economics of child raising is the ultimate driver of the welfare state. That makes it a matter of key importance to libertarians. If libertarians cannot create a free market system which provides for the material resources needed to turn a zygote into an engineer, then we will never see the end of the massively invasive state.

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Over at Reason, Steve Chapman rather sneeringly suggests that we should have the people of Iraq vote on whether to continue our military presence in their country.

I think this is a fantastic idea, because I know exactly how they will vote.

Opponents of supporting Iraqi democracy like to forget several key facts:

• Iraq has been a sovereign nation since 2004
• Iraq’s government is recognized by the UN
• Iraq’s government is a democracy elected in a massively observed free election

and, oh yes…

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In any bookstore or library you can find the subject area of “popular science”. No bookstore or library has a subject area of “popular intellectualism” or anything similar. That absence explains all I find dishonest and vacuous about the modern intelligentsia.

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If you love Art Deco influenced science fiction art, you’ll love the Retropolis Transit Authority, a T-shirt company with several dozen nifty and useful designs.

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A Vacuum Airship

I love this stuff.

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Over at Reason, the Libertarian Party of California is quoted as saying:

There’s no reason why consenting adults should not be allowed to marry so long as their arrangement doesn’t interfere with any other individual’s ability to live their life in any way they want to.

Aye, there’s the rub. With the contemporary culture of the invasive nanny state, we do not let people suffer the consequences of their own mistakes.

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According to a NY Times story:

According to roughly a dozen recent studies, executions save lives. For each inmate put to death, the studies say, 3 to 18 murders are prevented. The effect is most pronounced, according to some studies, in Texas and other states that execute condemned inmates relatively often and relatively quickly.

I can only say one thing: ROFLe3!

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The hook, the curled trailing edge of thunderstorms that can spiral up to form a tornado, passed right over our house. My son and I stood in our front yard watching lightning lit clouds on the south side of the sky going east while those on the north went west. In the center, a clear tube ran up into the darkness of the sky. It was very quiet and still with only the low rumble of nearly continuous distant thunder. The immense energy of the storm felt palpable, like that part in a sci-fi movie where the giant space ship moves slowly over head.

It’s that time of year.

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The video is underlit. Just listen to it.

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One Time’s site, Romesh Ratnesar argues we should consider invading Burma in order to head off a humanitarian disaster that could claim upwards of a million lives.

It’s not a bad idea except it is at least 6 months too late.

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Way back in 2004 I wrote about how the lack of an intuitive sense of scale prevented many people from viewing the Lancet Iraqi Mortality survey with skepticism. The same lack of sense of scale shows up in other areas such as in this article (via Megan McArdle) about ending subsidies to the oil industry instead of levying a windfall-profits tax.

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Megan McArdle’s post on the resurgence of measles due to a lack of vaccinations prompted me to think about the modern moral and legal ramifications of someone choosing to go about unvaccinated.

When a person becomes infected with a lethal contagious disease, the disease microbe turns their body into a biological warfare factory churning out billions of weapons which automatically seek out and attack other people. If a person infected themself on purpose and then went about their daily life, we would regard it as a form of lethal violence against everyone they came in contact with. How then should we regard those who fail to take simple, cheap and low-risk steps to prevent such an occurrence by accident?

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Okay, in a nutshell this is the real problem that Obama has with the unrepentant ex-terrorist Bill Ayers:

Ayers is Klan and nobody around Obama seems to care.

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Call me old fashioned, but I preferreds the good old days when artists were driven insane by syphilis instead of politics.

In the ongoing debate about the Wright/Obama relationship, I am most concerned about the apparently widespread idea that we should not hold African-Americans to the same intellectual and moral standards to which we hold white Americans.

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Pizza Hut seems poised to fire the delivery driver who defended himself against an armed robber using the handgun he was legally permitted to carry. A Pizza Hut spokesperson stated that company policy forbade employees from being armed.

Most companies have such policies, and I think the reason for such policies easy to discern: An employee or customer murdered by a criminal costs the company far less than a lawsuit caused by an employee defending himself.

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I think I have posted on this subject before but this gruesome story from Kerry Howley at Reason about the damage done in Africa by the the western hysteria over genetically modified food leads me to comment again.

The most hilarious thing to me about the entire anti-GM food craze is that people seem perfectly content to eat foods randomly mutated by radiation and chemicals and that consequently contain dozens, if not hundreds, of randomly mutated genes whose effects have never been tested for.

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The recent revelation that Saddam Hussein covertly paid for the pre-Liberation trip of U.S. Congress members Jim McDermott, David Bonior and and Mike Thompson, highlights a question that I think more leftists should ask themselves.

To whit: Why do the foreign-policy proposals of the American Left so often agree with and reinforce the naked self-interest of murderous despots and autocrats?

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I love that joke.

It’s very simple and elegant in form (if somewhat morbid in subject). Unlike an ordinary joke it has no setup i.e. it does not create an expectation and then break it. Classic one liners are usually just aphorisms that don’t evoke a story. They just restate something that people already believe true in an interesting way. In this joke, a single continuous sentence causes an entire scene to unfold in the listeners mind.

Can anyone think of a similar joke? I’m starting a collection.