A solar-powered plane has just completed a 26-hour flight, the nighttime portion of the flight being powered by the daytime portion – with power to spare. With an average speed of 25 mph, solar-powered flight isn’t quite ready to render jet fuel obsolete; but it’s nice to see some progress on the power-sources-that-aren’t-depleted-by-use-and-don’t-cause-so-much-collateral-damage front.
From the “you can’t make this stuff up” department: [BP CEO Tony] Hayward took a break from overseeing the energy giant’s efforts to contain the undersea leak so he could watch his 52-foot yacht “Bob” participate in the J. P. Morgan Asset Management Round the Island Race. If you put that description in fiction people [...]
The next time someone tells you that the BP oil spill shows the dangers of a free market and/or the necessity of government intervention, send them to: Darian Worden here, Sheldon Richman here, Gary Chartier here, Alex Knight here, and Kevin Carson here, here, and here. Please let me know in the comments section about [...]
Oops! British Petroleum sends its flunkies to the Gulf of Mexico to carry out a dangerous and ill-conceived project without adequate safeguards, and a disaster results that claims eleven lives. British Petroleum gets a stern lecture from our President Incarnate. Oops! Our President Incarnate sends his flunkies to Afghanistan to carry out a dangerous and [...]
The (or a) UK Green Party has “changed [its] approach to science,” according to this story. (CHT Ken MacLeod.) The changes look to me to be a mixed bag. There are some good things – most notably, the Greens have backed away from the idea of having scientists be legally required to swear an Oath [...]
Check out Kevin Carson on Rachel Carson, DDT, and global warming. (And don’t miss ex-agorist J. Neil Schulman’s creative interpretive stylings in the comments section.)
Libertarians are divided on Avatar (which I haven’t seen yet); check out Peter Suderman, Stephan Kinsella, Peter Klein, David Kramer, and Lester Hunt. Lester writes, inter alia: What makes the business corporation in this movie so evil? Well, it engages in the following practices: using military force to invade and conquer foreign lands, slaughtering wholesale [...]
Apparently the statist Right is exercised because Avatar is an “America-hating, PC revenge fantasy,” a “thinly disguised, heavy-handed and simplistic sci-fi fantasy/allegory critical of America from our founding straight through to the Iraq War.” So hey, another reason to see it.
As a global-warming agnostic – not having had the time or the inclination to study the issue closely enough to feel competent to address it – I have no particular comment or opinion on the recent leaked-email flap, so I won’t endorse this piece (CHT Ken MacLeod), but it’s certainly worth a read.
Everyone’s pointing out that this ad – created to be pitched to, but never approved by, the World Wildlife Fund – is tasteless and offensive. (Click the pic below to enlarge it, or click here to seriously supersize it.) Well, duh. But what I’ve yet to see anyone point out is how counterproductive the ad’s [...]
The Empirical Me
I’m Roderick T. Long, Professor of Philosophy at Auburn University. I’m an Aristotelean/Wittgensteinian in philosophy and a left-libertarian market anarchist in social theory. (More about me here.) This blog, Austro-Athenian Empire, is a continuation of my earlier blog, archived here.
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