Freespace

Athens by David Landrum

An usually good poem.

David Boaz on the French Revolution

Some excellent comments on How Libertarians Ought To Think About The French Revolution. I'm reminded of a passage from Mark Twain:

There were two "Reigns of Terror," if we would but remember it and consider it: the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death on ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the horrors of the minor Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty and heartbreak? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror, which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over, but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.

One less man Missing In America

Ater 28 years, Raymond Culp is finally laid to rest.

Skinning Shakespeare

The Royal Shakespeare Company has removed from its production of As You Like It a scene in which a character skins and beheads the carcass of a rabbit. No such stage direction appears in the original. (c/o Culture Monster)

A hilarious email

You'll recall my prediction that caffeine might be the target of the next frivolous mass tort lawsuit. I received the following email this weekend:

I had a caffeine induced psychosis drinking Starbucks espresso on ice.  21 shots per day after their promotion of a free shot added to your order.  It resulted in a mental breakdown for me which led to my arrest for grand theft auto.  I went nuts from caffeine.  I have no mental or criminal history and once I mentioned my caffeine intake to doctors they said it is "very likely" caffeine was responsible for my break from reality.  I am suing Starbucks.  Caffeine is dangerous in large amounts and as you said there is no warning.  Starbucks is very strong stuff and people are in and out of there all day as I was.  Three 7 ounces shots of espresso on ice per day and I landed in a mental hospital.

thanks for the read,
[Name withheld]

Seen at Powell's Books last weekend

My Americanness isn't a government program

John Pike of globalsecurity.org is quoted in this Fox News report saying that NASA's manned space program is such a fundamental expression of the pioneering spirit "that the country would be impoverished [without a manned space program] and we'd really have to reexamine what it is to be Americans."

Excuse me? I love space exploration, and greatly admire the technological accomplishments we've made, but there is almost no sense in which a government-run, coercively-funded, expensive, inefficient, and obsolete space bureaucracy contributes to my sense of what it means to be an American. On the contrary; the American pioneer spirit has traditionally been based on the principles of individualism, self-reliance, independence, and personal risk-taking, not on forcing hardworking taxpayers to fund Senatorial junkets to Low Earth Orbit.

What it means to be an American is infinitely better represented by Space Ship One than by a bureaucratic machine that is in many ways stuck in the 60s--and that takes money by force from people who would much rather spend it supporting themselves and their families than paying astronauts to ratchet down solar panels in free fall. Space exploration is very cool, but its civilian benefits are vastly exaggerated; it's a big government corporate welfare scheme--not an essential principle of my Americanness.

Sad news for economic liberty in Missouri

An unfortunate, if temporary setback, in my economic liberty lawsuit in Missouri.

From the Commonplace Book

I think that when Rousseau transferred the concept of original sin from man to society, he was responsible for a lot of misguided social thinking which followed. I don’t think that man is what he is because of an imperfectly structured society, but rather that society is imperfectly structured because of the nature of man. No philosophy based on an incorrect view of the nature of man is likely to produce social good.

 --Stanley Kubrick (c/o)

The Constitution and Individual Liberty in 2011

...will be the subject of my talk at the Free Minds 2011 seminar on Saturday in Orange County. More info here.