Neverfox at Instead of a Blog (not to be confused with Wirkman Virkkala’s blog of the same name – which once upon a time was also the name of my own blog) has made this Obama poster of me, along with some others.
Tag Archives | Left-Libertarian
Support C4SS
Captain America and the Falcon are right – growing the new society within the shell of the old takes money! If you can, please support the Center for a Stateless Society’s fundraiser.
Here’s Mud In Your Eye
Pete Seeger wrote this song as an allegory for LBJ and the Vietnam War. But it applies just as well to Bush and Iraq – or to Obama and the Stimulus.
Cato Namecheck
Hey, I’m quoted on p. 15 of the latest (Jan./Feb. ’09) Cato Policy Report, in a brief reference to the conflation debate – which I really do mean to get back to ….
I’ll Take Manhattan
I’m watching Maddow interviewing Pelosi on security briefings that Pelosi received but was not allowed to reveal.
Pelosi says that thanks to security requirements, she could not speak out against policies she disapproved of. Duh, of course she could. Has she never heard of civil disobedience?
Maddow compares Pelosi to Spider-man and Dr. Manhattan, both lonely because they cannot reveal their secret identities to anyone. Okay, Maddow wins a point for the Watchmen reference (though she would have earned more points if she’d made it a year ago) – but loses two points because, um, Dr. Manhattan’s identity is never secret.
Brainiac versus the Toyman
Here’s a piece of both comic-book trivia and IP trivia that I didn’t previously know: the DC character Brainiac – humanoid computer and frequent Superman antagonist – originally was just some green alien guy 
and (despite his computer-sounding name) not a computer at all. But when the prior inventor of a toy computer likewise named Brainiac raised legal objections to the use of the name, DC and the inventor reached an imaginative win-win compromise: DC made their Brainiac more (rather than less) like the original they were accused of infringing – i.e., made him a computer – thus turning the character into an ad for the toy and so obviating the toymaker’s objections. The issue of Superman that inaugurated this compromise even parodied the rights dispute on its cover by having Brainiac and Lex Luthor debating which of them has a better right to kill Superman. Details here.