The conference schedule for next week’s Alabama Philosophical Society is now online. This year it’s up at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, where I’ve actually never been before, despite having friends in the area.
I’m giving a paper on how Aristoteleans can avoid the twin pitfalls of making the concept of happiness include everything worth wanting (thus rendering happiness unattainable) and making it include only everything worth choosing (thus making it too easily attainable, since whatever’s currently unattainable is currently not worth choosing). (This sort of topic makes it all too obvious, to Greek philosophy specialists anyway, whose student I was at Cornell.) Anyway, my paper overlaps heavily with my APEE paper and Mises seminar.
Fellow Molinarian Charles Johnson is also scheduled to be there, defending Francis Hutcheson on the psychology and epistemology of ethics.
For too long libertarians, and I mean anarchist libertarians, have treated market anarchism almost as an “esoteric doctrine” to which one is introduced only after one has thoroughly assimilated some more moderate form of libertarianism – as though anarchism were an impediment rather than an asset in making the case for liberty.
Molinari Institute President 
I recently came across a story (if that’s the right word for it) that I wrote when I was around nine years old. It presents itself as being part of a series, but I have no idea whether I wrote any of the other installments listed.
Now Galactica’s third season begins with a situation analogous to the Iraq crisis, as the Cylons who’ve come to impose their conception of order on the human colonists face insurgents and suicide bombers, and joke bitterly about their earlier expectations of being greeted as liberators. (Leoben’s attempt to brainwash Starbuck into loving him recreates the same dynamic on an individual level.) Neither side is presented monolithically: we see the humans disagreeing with one another about the legitimacy of terrorist tactics, while the Cylons likewise disagree with each other about what’s permissible in combating such tactics. But the Bush approach is clearly presented as a disaster – and a predictable disaster.
Free books! I love ’em.
More Galactica news! Those folks at Scifi.com are tricksy; check out this hidden Easter egg (or Life Day egg, or whatever the Colonial equivalent is):