Going through old papers I find this gem from my Randian past: a very short sf story that I wrote in (but not for) college, titled “Under the Violet Sun.”

Some of my stories actually had plots (hopefully I’ll dig them up eventually). This one, not so much.

You can also hear a clip from Kevin Carson being interviewed by Iranian Press TV here, on the role of big business in war. Those of us who have long suspected that Kevin Carson and Walter Block are the same person will find vindication in the graphic that Press TV chose to represent Kevin’s face.

In related news, Homer Simpson endorses Kevin’s “Labor Struggle: A Free Market Model”:

Lisa, if you don’t like your job you don’t strike. You just go in every day and do it really half-assed. That’s the American way.

Cory Maye, about whose case I’ve blogged previously (here, here, here, and here), is finally due to be released. (CHT Sheldon.) It falls short of what he deserves – he was required to plead guilty to manslaughter for exercising his right to defend himself and his family, and he’s being offered no compensation for the unjust treatment he has received – but it beats being murdered by the state or spending the rest of his life in a cage, the two fates that judges had previously chosen for him.

All honour to Radley Balko for his untiring efforts to keep this case before the public!

Addendum:

If you’re interested in donating to help Maye get his life back together, Radley has details.

C. S. Lewis’s article “The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment” is simultaneously an excellent argument against the rehabilitative or therapeutic approach to punishment, and a lousy argument in favour of the retributive approach to punishment. Lewis makes a compelling and eloquent proto-Szaszian case for the thesis that punishment not based on responsibility is wrong; but, never examining his implicit premise that punishment must be justified somehow or other, he then slides without much reflection into the conclusion that punishment based on responsibility must be right. So when I read this article I’m cheering half the time and tearing my hair out the other half.

Of course that’s often my reaction when reading Lewis – as when reading Nietzsche, another writer who to my mind tends to mix together equal parts of the magnificently right and the horribly wrong (though his points of rightness and wrongness seldom coincide with Lewis’s). Anyway, Lewis, like Nietzsche, is generally worth reading even when he’s wrong.

While we’re at it, here’s another fine Lewis piece, “The Inner Ring,” that has a good deal less wrong in it.

Notice how his attorney assures us that the legal system is much better nowadays – he’d probably only receive ten or fifteen years (!).

In related news, see Jeff Tucker on the Madoff case and the perversity of the prison system.