Month: July 2005

Over at Bioethics Blog there’s a longish post addressing some longstanding peeves of mine. The entire thing is well worth your time, but I would never ever do that to you. No, no, never that. I’ll just give you most of it. Say, around ninety percent. Let’s start with the obligatory bona fides. My name…

Now that I?m on the way back and headed in a southerly direction, the dysfunctional satellite internet connection (on this ship) is starting to work. Places like Finland, Estonia, Russia, Sweden, Norway are, they say, just too far north for a reliable connection. I tend to believe that, because Clarke?s Belt hovers over the Equator…

I hope you’ve enjoyed “Rose Wilder Lane Week” these past few days. Her refreshingly direct love of country struck me as being perfectly suited, thematically, to the Fourth of July holiday. Nevertheless, “all good things,” eh? I have to say, it was harder for me than I expected, moderating the amount of her work that…

It’s an old chestnut, but still worth hauling out and dusting off…now and then. Actually, I never tire of it. Truly great writing is timeless, don’t you think? I root for hurricanes. When, courtesy of the Weather Channel, I see one forming in the ocean off the coast of Africa, I find myself longing for…

Probably because C.S. Lewis and Star Trek are so much easier… Via the invaluable and tireless Reason at Fight Aging, comes this interesting news from Dr. Rafal Smigrodski… Today our team confirmed our previous preliminary data showing that we can achieve robust mitochondrial transfection and protein expression in mitochondria of live rats, after an injection…

Why not ask instead, ‘why don’t the rest of them hate us?’ Anne Applebaum seeks out Pro-Americanism in Foreign Policy: Even the most damning evidence, such as the BBC poll quoted above, also reveals that some percentage of the population of even the most anti?American countries in Europe and Latin America remains pro?American. Some 38…

The following photo from weather.com does not, as some readers might hope, have anything to do with me: Still, I can’t say it didn’t feel a bit personal.

An article by Ron Bailey at Reason brought Elusys to my attention a few years back. They were a biotech research company with a novel idea. On a whim, I checked out their website the other day to see how they were progressing. Huh. Things are just perking along. This news release was from late…

New tyrants, defending the ancient tyranny, intend to destroy utterly this new idea that men are free. They do not believe it. As firmly as Lycurgus or Nebuchadnezzar, they believe that all men are naturally subject to Authority (all but themselves.) Government, they believe is Authority; they are Government. They accept that responsibility. They believe…

Peace Now, God be thanked Who has matched us with His hour, And caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping, With hand made sure, clear eye, and sharpened power, To turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping, Glad from a world grown old and cold and weary, Leave the sick hearts that honour could not…

via ALDaily, Julian Baggini makes an urgent plea at BBC Radio 4 that David Hume be crowned the greatest philosopher of all time: The lessons he taught are desperately relevant today, when certainty is only found in religious fundamentalism, yet uncertainty risks a descent into postmodern relativism and intellectual anarchy. In this climate, how do…

I’ve never been to London. It’s been on my to do list for a while . Seeing it on TV just now reminded me what a fragile treasure a city is. The people who did this thing aren’t really human in my book. Not where it counts. They may think they are, but they’re really…

After a night of drinking with an old friend I awaken to read something truly sobering: terrorism in the city of London. There really isn’t much a guy like me can say right now. I am puzzled by the refusal of several in the media to call anything terrorism any more. Even now many resort…

I usually leave the political and topical stuff to Eric. He enjoys it, I don’t, and the resulting complementarity seems to work well for both of us. That being said, sometimes a political event takes place that cries out for attention, an event so shockingly conspicuous that even a confirmed politics-ducker like myself can’t help…

It’s still “Rose Wilder Lane Week” here at Classical Values. I hope you’re as pleased reading these selections as I am presenting them. One thing I’ve noticed about “The Discovery of Freedom” is that no matter how many inaccuracies I find in it, none detract from the central argument. I hope the rest of you…

You might be surprised… Michael Moore’s Farenheit 9-11 was doing a brisk business for the 10p.m. show at the local cineplex Sunday night, which tells me that the public is hungry for someone to make sense of the events of recent years. It’s too bad that Moore has been annointed the Great Explainer because he…

der Spiegel’s English site has a piece on aid for Africa which flies in the face of the ‘common sense’ approach, i.e., throw money, problem gone. The piece opens in Rumbek in the south of Sudan where the ‘aid workers are thirsty and the beer is flowing,’ a place which threatens to become a bitter…

Independence Day plus one and I’m still feeling a warm love-of-country glow. I thought it would be appropriate to let today’s selection from Mrs. Lane reflect that. What follows is a consideration of American exceptionalism, written in 1943. Mrs. Lane was of the opinion that too much government can be harmful to freedom and the…

Just in case the “chickenhawk” argument should twitch, or even draw a tremulous breath in your presence, you’ll be wanting a handy refuting reference. The following, from One Hand Clapping, should fill the bill nicely… Here are my questions for Duncan Black: My son is a lance corporal in the US Marine Corps. He will…

I’ve been observing Independence Day this year by re-reading “The Discovery of Freedom” by Rose Wilder Lane. And eating too much barbeque. It’s an interesting little book, full of hits and misses. Lane herself was not entirely satisfied with it. As she grew older she became aware of certain factual errors in the text, errors…