HEREIN IS EXPLAINED why you may not hear from me about various previously-discussed work or social plans (ones for which no contract, promise, or precise date was made, I mean) — since I really need to focus on writing a book first planned back in 1997 (eleven embarrassing years ago), even if it means much […]
With William F. Buckley now dead, Bush unpopular, and McCain’s conservative credentials contested, there’s a lot of debate over how to define “conservative” (indeed, I’ll be blogging about that question throughout March, in my “Month Without Buckley,” after my atheism-promoting “Month Without God” ends tomorrow) — and one of the most divisive issues among conservatives, […]
My cover article about nanotech, which as the title says, will turn us into “Neither Gods Nor Goo” anytime in the foreseeable future, is now up on Reason magazine’s website (and is in their March print issue, as noted before), almost exactly one year after the junket to Scotland that forms part of the story […]
Founder of modern conservatism William F. Buckley has passed away at 82 (as if conservatism didn’t have enough problems at this juncture in history) — and as if that weren’t painful enough, my “no” debater for next week’s Debate at Lolita Bar (on the question “Should We Deport All the Illegal Aliens?”), libertarian Greg Rehmke, […]
ToddSeavey.com Book Selection of the Month (Fourth of Four): The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell
The perfect long-flight read, this unusually “literary” sci-fi novel depicts the preparations for, initial success of, and harrowing denouement of a Jesuit-led space mission to a planet orbiting Alpha Centauri, where humanity makes first contact with aliens, and things don’t go […]
So, if all is going according to plan as you read this in the future, today I’m flying back toward the Big Apple after a weekend in Vegas. Did I spend the weekend praying or having fun? Going to a skepticism-filled Penn and Teller show or gambling away all my money using a […]
I think the Vegas vibe — like Frank Sinatra — holds greater and greater appeal as one ages because it is an aesthetic that does not demand youth and energy and athleticism, only the ability to slouch, look bleary-eyed, hold your liquor with expertise born of experience, and have enough money in the bank to […]
If all went according to plan (this post having been written a couple days in advance), as you read this, yesterday I flew to Vegas and sometime around today I may even be touring the (awe-inspiring — but artlessly water-carved) Grand Canyon in a helicopter.
And both those things entail risk, baby, like Vegas itself. If […]
Don’t be fooled by my talk of Vegas into thinking that I am some libertine. Although I’ve been criticizing religion on epistemological grounds this month, I don’t much object to the ethos of self-discipline and sexual restraint it helps spread. (My position is thus the opposite of a lot of modern American critics of religion: […]
In late 1996, the John Stossel team at ABC News was preparing the Freeloaders broadcast that I recently mentioned, a look at forms of parasitism large and small, from petty con men and self-confessed lazy homeless men all the way up to corporations receiving subsidies and favors from the government, specifically the Archer Daniels Midland […]
You can tease out the contradictions in people’s thinking, as every good philosophy class aims to do, or you can of course just gloss over disagreements to keep the peace. I usually do the former, but there’s something to be said for the latter, especially in a world where drawing attention to differences is […]
It crosses my mind that the opening sequence (which I merely stumbled across while channel-flipping) of at least one season of the now fifteen-year-old Mighty Morphin Power Rangers series is a good example of how backwards and irrational our culture’s instincts are, from my perspective.
Realizing that the Earth is imperiled, a giant head/mentor figure in […]
In a Response thread to a prior entry, I was asked — I think — to make sense of the whole universe, evolution and all, without God, the apparent implication being that if I fail to satisfy, religion stands vindicated. That’s a tall order — in principle spanning everything from tonight’s lunar eclipse on […]
I had the odd experience of being told by one of my fellow Phillips Foundation Fellows (many of them more religion-friendly than I, most of us being conservative or libertarian writers, recipients of Phillips grants) at one of our thrice-annual meetings this past weekend that lacking religion, he fears, I may eventually go mad — […]
Hey, as it happens, the morning after blogging about TMZ mocking the homeless, I was awakened by my alarm clock radio playing another reference to the homeless that always makes me laugh, simply because it’s so intensely dated: Canadian Neil Young’s lines “We’ve got a thousand points of light/ For the homeless man/ We got […]
