Regrouping

I am nearly at Pittsburgh, PA, my hometown. It's been a grueling two- day bus ride. I'll post updates soon. Cheers!

Lies All The Way Down

Samuel Johnson's words in the Idler, betwixt 1758 and 1760, still hold; Truth is still the first casualty of war - or of politics, that ritualized form of overt warfare; the institutionalization of organized and sanctioned violence between and against members of a polity, rather than between separate political organizations. When a politician declares a…

Malthusian Misery Versus Abundance

I most gladly thank Jerry Bowyer for tipping me to the real target of Charles Dickens' ire in his famous Christmas Carol. When Ebenezer Scrooge said "If they would rather die, they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population," he was parroting the idea of Thomas Mathus: that there are not enough resources…

Shan Gao, Huangdi Yuan

Some folks believe that we can't possibly have liberty unless we somehow push a button and make all governments vanish. But why limit our imagination to those stifled and over-governed experiences which most of us in "developed" countries have inured ourselves? Of the seven billion people on this earth, perhaps five billion live in places…

Change Change Change

A popular song released in 1964 captured the spirit of the times: Come writers and critics Who prophesize with your pen And keep your eyes wide The chance won't come again And don't speak too soon For the wheel's still in spin And there's no telling who that it's naming For the loser now will…

News Fakery

With all the attention paid to "fake news," it is well to remember that an astonishingly large amount of news is, if not outright fakery, of very low quality. Michael Chrichton lamented this in his Why Speculate? speech. Media carries with it a credibility that is totally undeserved. You have all experienced this, in what…