Archive for the 'Announcements' Category

Thanks to the site administrators, this long-time Chicago Boyz reader has joined the roster of authors. Perhaps a brief introduction is in order before I begin posting in earnest.

My earliest exposure to Chicago Boyz dates back to 2003 (with a tip of the hat to Jay Manifold), when Jim Bennett and Michael Lotus were actively exploring the ideas that would lead to the publication of their most excellent and still underrated book America 3.0. The very concept of the Anglosphere was deeply enlightening to me, and inspired a great deal of further reading on my part. Their focus on both the historical realities and the lofty ideals of the Anglo-American tradition has continued to inspire my own thinking to this day. Other perspectives I hope to bring to Chicago Boyz include ancient philosophy (thus the pseudonym Lucretius), Austrian-school economics, civilizational history, Internet technology (my current profession), personal finance and preparedness, contemporary culture, and the arts and sciences.

If you must pin me down politically I suppose I would say I’m a moderate libertarian, a classical liberal, or even a Jeffersonian; however, it seems to me that America and the world have a whole raft of systemic problems for which political activity is not the answer but instead one of the many causes. My goal here is to steer clear of both the ideological and the quotidian to elucidate what my Roman namesake in his great philosophical poem called The Nature of Things. At least we can aim high, can’t we?

“We are great and we are grand, we make bombs beneath our stands!”

I have decided to attend various events around the 75th anniversary of Chicago Pile-1 and will therefore be in Hyde Park for about 48 hours, from late afternoon Thursday 30 November to late afternoon Saturday 2 December. As of now, the one known gathering is lunch at Valois, 1518 E 53rd (Harper Court, just west of Lake Park and the Metra Electric tracks), at 1 PM on Saturday.

Others are possible, however. I will be at the physics colloquium on Thursday afternoon in Kersten (SW corner of 57th & Ellis) and was thinking vaguely of pizza at Giordano’s (on Blackstone just south of 53rd) afterward, which means 6-ish. I expect to spend much of both Friday and Saturday mornings prowling the bookstores on 57th, and should also be free after around 7 Friday evening, when what seems to be the main event wraps up at Mandel Hall.

In general, respond in comments, and graze (Midwesterners don’t surf) around here for official events.

Ongoing at Zenpundit.

Recently I became “Carl from Portland” with a move from living in downtown Chicago to the West Coast. It has taken me a while to get settled but I wanted to say hello to my friends at Chicago Boyz.

Originally I started taking pictures of all the weird people I saw in Portland – guys wearing kilts or fishnets, girls dressed up like bumblebees with ukuleles, and all manner of tattoos, nose rings and piercings. But then I realized – hey – that’s like taking a picture of a drunk, fat guy at a Bears game. Unless you can go beyond the obvious, don’t do it at all. Or maybe that is grist for a future post.

First the highlights – Portland has an incredible location. Not only does the city offer everything you’d expect in a big city (restaurants, concerts, cool stores, ability to walk around, nightlife) – they have little to no crime (when compared to ChiRaq) – but you can go about an hour and a half and be on the Pacific Ocean, or about an hour and a half the other way and be hiking in real mountains. Here is a photo I took at Cannon Beach when I went there early in April for an unseasonably warm and beautiful day (I’m told). Below is a photo of Mount Hood from a recent hike we took last weekend.

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Sycophants, satellites, holobionts, camp followers, groupies, collaborators, stalkers, uncommitted delegates, and newsletter subscribers are invited to check your privilege and join me and a few others in a series of environments where you can be without fear of being made to feel uncomfortable, unwelcome or challenged on account of biological sex, race/ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, cultural background, age, or physical or mental ability. Well, OK, maybe not all of those, but age, certainly, and physical/mental ability after stuffing yourself with pizza and ingesting ethanol, will have protected status. Join for any or all of the following itinerary. For IFF purposes, I’ll wear something distinctive (ie, not maroon-and-white), which will be announced in this forum by late Friday the 8th.
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Seth will be speaking at the Federalist Society conference tomorrow (Friday), January 08, 2016, at around 11:00 AM at the Sheraton NY Times Square Hotel. Subject: Seth Barrett Tillman, Ex parte Merryman: Myth, History, and Scholarship, Military Law Review (forthcoming circa Summer 2016) (peer reviewed), available at http://ssrn.com/abstract=2646888

I know that I have not been posting much lately – here or anywhere else lately; just the bare minimum of commenting on other people’s posts and other people’s blogs and websites, but I had a couple of projects for the Tiny Publishing Bidness to work on, and then the two major projects to finish, format and upload to various platforms. Yes, I decided to go all-out and finish two books in time for the Christmas marketing season this year. Amazingly, neither one was the one that I had declared at the beginning of the year that I would have all done and ready to launch by this time  … yes, the adventures of young Fredi Steinmetz in Gold Rush-era California is rolled back another year. Sigh. I still have to do an epic-truck-load of reading of contemporary accounts and skull out a plot sufficient and historically-accurate to fill the last half of the book; which so far in my head will include a stint in San Francisco the year of the epically well-organized Vigilante organization, encounters with various historic personages, to include William T. Sherman, Lotta Crabtree and her formidable mother, some murderous claim-jumpers and a young woman seeking justice – while disguised as a boy. So, yes I will get on to that presently. After all The Quivera Trail was held at a third completed while I worked on Daughter of Texas and Deep in the Heart, and it didn’t seem to do any harm in the long-run.
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In addition to a restored comment preview feature, Chicago Boyz now has a WordPress plugin that lets anyone subscribe to email alerts. Enter your email address in the blog’s upper right sidebar, click Subscribe, then every time there’s a new post you’ll get an email with a post excerpt. If you find that you don’t like receiving such emails you can unsubscribe at any time with one click.

I’ve restored the comment preview feature that this blog once had but that stopped working after a WordPress upgrade. The new comment preview works as the old one did. Your comment displays under the comment entry box as you type it and as it will look after you publish it.

A frequent commenter complained to me that he had tried to post comments and the comments either didn’t appear or he received a WordPress error message telling him that he had tried to post a duplicate comment. I’ve had similar problems myself once or twice. Is anyone else experiencing such issues? Please let me know if you are. There may be a tech issue, perhaps with our WordPress plugins. In that case it would help if I knew the scope of the problem so that I could find its cause.

Thanks.

UPDATE: The problem appears to be a browser issue.

Obama has announced that he will not only end the trade embargo with Cuba but establish full diplomatic relations.

President Obama, as he has shown all year, isn’t about to go quietly into the lame-duck night, even with Republicans ready to take full power down the street. With the stunning announcement Wednesday that the United States is set to normalize relations with Cuba, the president is closing his self-termed “Year of Action” with a thunderclap.

In doing so, Obama is serving notice to new Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell that a sitting president trumps a Congress divided both along party lines and within them. The shift comes about a month after the last time the president thrust his stick into the GOP’s eye, when Obama announced he was unilaterally providing widespread deportation relief to as many as 5 million illegal immigrants.

I have no objection to ending the embargo, which has been mostly symbolic for years.

Diplomatic relations is another matter.

Even the Argentine Pope is involved apparently. Certainly, there is no reason why the Pope should recognize real democracy and freedom after a lifetime in Argentina.

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Chicago Boyz is an Amazon and B&H affiliate.

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(Bumped.)

Chicagoboyz contributors should reset their passwords per the email link everyone will receive. Please contact me if you do not receive a link or have any questions or problems. Thanks.

Chicago Boyz has been around since 2001 (2003 in its current form) and has thousands of archived posts on all kinds of topics from an unusually diverse and thoughtful group of contributors. Many of these archived posts are still worth reading.

The problem is that the blog format is poorly suited for organizing information. Once it’s off the front page it tends to disappear. Information may want to be free but first you need to be able to find it.

What to do? Manually creating, updating and occasionally reorganizing a table of contents is more work than I want, and I don’t think there’s a good way to automate it. Some of our contributors occasionally re-post outstanding examples of their own older posts, for which many thanks (and please keep doing it). Categorization of posts helps a bit. There’s a Google search box that works pretty well as an index if you know what you are looking for. I maintain a list of links on the blog’s right sidebar to a very few of our most interesting discussions. There’s also this new post that I have permalinked on the upper right sidebar where I hope readers will see it.

Maybe there are additional things that we can do to make the gold in archived Chicago Boyz posts more accessible. Please feel free to chime in in the comments if you have any thoughts.

Below is a list of the books, ebooks, music and videos ordered in August 2014 by Chicago Boyz readers via Amazon links on this blog. (A cumulative list of Chicago Boyz readers’ Amazon book purchases is here.)

Your book and non-book Amazon purchases help to support this blog via the Amazon Associates affiliate program. Chicago Boyz earns a percentage on all of your Amazon purchases as long as you enter the Amazon site via the Amazon links on this blog (even Amazon links other than for the products you are buying).

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Here is a list of the books, ebooks, music and videos ordered in August 2014 by Chicago Boyz readers via the links on this blog.

Please make your Amazon purchases via the links below or elsewhere on this blog. Chicago Boyz earns a percentage on all of your Amazon purchases as long as you enter the Amazon site via the Amazon links here (even Amazon links other than for the product you are buying).

A cumulative list of Chicago Boyz readers’ Amazon purchases is here.

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Chicago Boyz was down for a while between around 6:00 and 7:00 PM CST due to a problem at our hosting company. Apologies for the inconvenience.

Twenty-four years after the release of his first feature, “Metropolitan,” and two years after the release of his fourth, “Damsels in Distress,” Whit Stillman—the cinema’s novelist of manners, who reveals deep and enduring patterns beneath the shimmer of apparent frivolities—has written, directed, and produced the twenty-six-minute pilot of a TV-like series, “The Cosmopolitans,” for Amazon (where it premières tomorrow). It has a classical setup—Americans and other foreigners, members of a self-anointed social whirl, tripping through Paris—that, from the start, Stillman makes entirely his own, rendering it both contemporary and anachronistic, of the moment and rooted in time.

Link

This will be an excellent event. Deirdre McCloskey talking about her most recent book, Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World.

Her topic: How the rich got rich and how everyone else will too.

Get tickets here.

This is the message of America 3.0 as well, though we have our own spin.

The Illinois Policy Institute always puts on good events — including a modest charge for a great event and a very nice open bar.

This Wednesday, August 14, 2004, 6-8 p.m.

I hope to see you there.

Here is a short video of Deirdre McCloskey speaking, as a teaser trailer for the event.

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Mike Lotus Speaking to the Indianapolis Federalist Society Lawyers Chapter about America 3.0 on August 14, 2014

I will be speaking about America 3.0 to the Indianapolis Federalist Society Lawyers Chapter on August 14, 2014.

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Here’s a list of the books, ebooks and videos purchased through this blog on Amazon last month. I’m going to try to post updated versions of this list regularly as it seems to be something that would interest many of us. I’ll stick this post to the top of the page for a few days.
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I will be speaking about America 3.0 to the Indianapolis Federalist Society Lawyers Chapter on August 14, 2014.

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I will be speaking at the AFEA (The French Association for American Studies, Association Française d’Études Américaines) 2014 Conference. The title of the conference is The USA: Models, Counter-Models, The End of Models?

I will participate in a panel entitled “American Politics: What future model for political America: manifestly gridlocked destiny or reinvented union?” The panel will be at 8:15 to 11:45 a.m. on May 23, 2014. The venue is Université Paris 3 Sorbonne Nouvelle (13 rue Santeuil).

The panel will consist of Jérôme Noirot, of the Ecole Centrale, Lyon, the organizer of the panel, myself, and the following distinguished persons, speaking on the following subjects:

Ashley Byock (Edgewood College), « The Bonded/Resistant Slave Body and The Emergence of Neoliberalism in the U.S. Context  ».

Jérôme Viala-Gaudefroy (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris 3), «American Mythology in Presidential Discourse : National Shared Values or Political Partisanship ?».

François Vergniollle de Chantal (Université Paris Diderot),  «Polarized  politics under President Obama».

I will speak on “America 3.0, Decentralization and the Tenth Amendment.”

(Don’t tell anyone, but I am currently mugging up on the Tenth Amendment!)

Immense thanks to Jérôme Noirot for this invitation. Initially Jim Bennett was the invitee, but Jim could not make it. So I am pinch hitting for the maestro!

I also offer my heartfelt thanks to two very good friends whose financial support helped to make this trip possible, and two a third old friend who kindly offered to let me stay at his home in Paris.

A detailed description of the issues to be raised in the panel discussion is below the fold.
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I will be speaking about America 3.0 at the beautiful Oak Park Public Library on Wednesday, April 9, 2014. I hope you can join me.

Special thanks to Centuries and Sleuths Bookstore for making copies of America 3.0 available for sale at the event.

Above is the Window display for America 3.0 at Centuries & Sleuths.

I will be speaking about America 3.0 at the beautiful Oak Park Public Library on Wednesday, April 9, 2014. I hope you can join me.

Special thanks to Centuries and Sleuths Bookstore for making copies of America 3.0 available for sale at the event.

Special thanks also to Jim Bowman for his piece in the Oak Park Wednesday Journal, A library book-talk you don’t want to miss: Rebooting American prosperity.

The flyer for the event is below the fold.

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