The current (Aug. 30) New Yorker has an exposé (sort of) on the Koch brothers. As you’d expect from such a piece, it largely criticises the Kochs for their virtues while giving them a pass for their sins; but anyway, libertarians will find it interesting even though it mostly misses the point.
8th from the 90s
Owing to complex IP issues, the 1996 Doctor Who tv-movie – featuring the one and only tv appearance of the 8th Doctor – has long been unavailable here in Region 1. (Well, I say unavailable … of course there are region-free bootleg copies of the Region 2 disk floating around, but their picture quality is not great.) But it looks like the legal obstacles to a Region 1 dvd are finally being cleared away.
The tv-movie, a failed pilot for the first attempt at a Who revival, isn’t as good as the revived series that would eventually succeed a decade later; for one thing, it’s too oriented (or orientated, as our transoceanic cousins would say) toward American audiences to feel quite authentic. (The Master with an American accent? Really? It makes me tremble for Torchwood.) Still, this was the first time that Who was presented with modern production values and a decent sfx budget, and it serves as an interesting bridge between the classic show and the new one.
Up With Teleology! Down With Anarchy! Sideways with the Hypothetical Calculus!
Ludwig Boltzmann
Three more blasts from the past (all a bit more recent than my blast from Oscarville):
First, two papers I wrote for a science course in college: “The Temptation of Ludwig Boltzmann” (a short sf story exploring the implications of Boltzmannian probability theory – though Amazon thinks it’s something else) and “Evolution: Chance or Teleology?” (an essay on the spontaneous growth of physical order).
Next, a blast from my statist past: “Financing the Non-Coercive State,” an essay I wrote in (though not for) grad school, in which I decisively refute free-market anarchism!
Mosquerade
The next time you hear someone say, “It’s disrespectful to the victims of 9/11 to build near Ground Zero a monument to the religious ideas that motivated their murder,” tell them: “Darn right, we shouldn’t have any mosques or churches or synagogues in the area – it’s an insult to those victims of monotheist ideology.”
Mosque of the Red Death
Ron Paul vs. Rand Paul on the non-Ground-Zero non-mosque.
How come whenever Rand Paul deviates from Ron Paul it’s always in the wrong direction?
This is Your Brain on Stateless News
Some C4SS-related items worth checking out: [Note that this does not mean that other C4SS-related items not listed here are not worth checking out!]
- Kevin Carson on The Cognitive Biases of Hierarchy. (Turns out that power makes you stupid.)
- Charles Johnson on Is the Problem Really Too Little Trust in Government? (Can you guess the answer?)
- The C4SS’s pocket subversion edition of Lysander Spooner’s Constitution of No Authority, with a talk by me as the appendix.
- Several C4SS folks, myself included, will be speaking at Libertopia in October.
- News on other C4SS doings (and how you can help) in Brad Spangler’s July-August fundraiser announcement and Tom Knapp’s 8/13 and 8/20 media outreach updates.
Please support the Center’s work if you can. $5 here and $10 there can be a lifesaver.