I can’t help but take something akin to hometown pride in seeing that the hostage situation being described on the news as I type this is occurring at Hillary Clinton campaign HQ in the cozy little New Hampshire town where my father grew up and where is located the house in which he did so, [...]
There are times that encourage conspiracy theories — times of our lives (or rather, I suspect, psychological developmental stages) as well as points in history.
College kids, or perhaps people in their early twenties or so generally, love conspiracies — perhaps because the brain, having newly turned its attention to the confusing kaleidoscope of [...]
Yesterday, in plugging the debate I’m hosting next week about the military, I explained that military and security matters don’t really decide my vote, so I don’t have a strong Bush-vs.-Paul or Giuliani-vs.-Paul preference on that basis alone. Let’s assume you’re with me that far.
Lest, though, any libertarians think that casting military/security matters aside [...]
VS.
YES: Former Clinton White House intern (and soon, business consultant to the French) Sarah Federman.
NO: Former Pat Buchanan campaigner (and now Ron Paul sympathizer) John Carney.
The battle will be joined next week on Wednesday, Dec. 5 (at 8pm) on the basement level of Lolita Bar (266 Broome [...]
No, I haven’t finished writing a book (though Conservatism for Punks will exist eventually, sooner rather than later, I hope — and for a little right/left remixing in the interim, check out what’s on deck for our Dec. 5 Debate at Lolita Bar, now that I’ve found a hawk and dove to spar). However, [...]
Living as the one third-year student amidst a nice bunch of freshmen in early 1990, I felt fairly at home in the role of pseudo-old-man. One freshman, Naomi Camilleri, introduced me to Flaming Carrot comics, leading me to trend weird-ward in my comics reading after the preceding decade and a half of sticking almost [...]
…not to a non-existent God, mind you, but to the purely material circumstances that led to these things, in deterministic fashion (since I don’t believe in free will either, in the strict philosophical sense of the phrase):
•Talented British r&b singer Amy Winehouse is not yet dead or in prison, against all odds, though “You Know [...]
I mentioned in my most recent Retro-Journal entry knowing two unrelated women at Brown named Caldwell (one of them now Christine Ames, also goaded in yesterday’s regular entry).
That reminds me that, on a more fully homonymous note, I spoke at the last CitizenJoe.org event to David Bernstein — not the Yale/Volokh.com David Bernstein but the [...]
Paul Jacob, who I’ve had the pleasure of meeting and who has several friends in common with me (including Heather Wilhelm, who I mentioned in my prior blog entry), was the subject of the top editorial in Monday’s Wall Street Journal. He is threatened with up to ten years in prison for the horrific [...]
All right, not a great week for liberty — at least not compared to last week, with Ron Paul’s record-breaking fundraising on the Fifth of November. This week, by contrast:
•The feds raided the man behind the Liberty Dollars that bear Ron Paul’s visage, either because they threaten to become a private currency or because [...]
Moderately awful — that’s the only way to describe Huckabee’s bland (yet wrong) defense of farm subsidies, new taxes that would no doubt end up imposed atop the old (albeit framed in anti-tax rhetoric), intelligent design (albeit without banishing evolution from classrooms), and near-meaningless invocations of “vertical” (as opposed to left-right) politics.
Unfortunately, he is the [...]
How could one not turn into a libertarian under the circumstances I faced in the second half of 1989?
My summer vacation reading list, gradually written up as a result of my growing curiosity about the tension between the collectivism touted at Brown and individual liberty, sounds almost excessive in retrospect. While some people have [...]
This week, in 2007, I’ve just seen a Marxist acquaintance argue in a debate that the government knew in advance about 9/11 — and I’ve seen the New York Times print a notice about the fact that a letter they had run contained plagiarized material — by a plagiarist who is a student at Brown [...]
No time for analysis! Must fight!!
•••Tonight’s 9/11 did-government-know debate, with Sander Hicks vs. Karol Sheinin (I’m goin’ — heck, I’m hostin’)
•••Video of Rev. Jen vs. Katherine Taylor from one of our prior debates — complete with me asking a vocal 9/11 activist to leave [UPDATE 11/8/07: But last night went smoothly, so no complaints] [...]
Tonight at 6:30, Pagan Kennedy reads at the Mid-Manhattan Library (40th and Fifth) from her book The First Man-Made Man (which was winner of the prestigious ToddSeavey.com Book Selection of the Month for April 2007), about the first woman to become a man through surgery.
As I’ve alluded to before, Pagan has written nine books (ranging [...]