Congrats to Brink on winning a 2003 Fisher Award for his excellent book Against the Dead Hand.

[Read more →]

Slate’s Will Saletan reminds us of some of the unsavory features of incest laws: According to the court’s statement of facts, the appellant, Ami Smith, “was involved in an incestuous relationship with her paternal uncle,” which “began while [she] was still a minor.” She “was eighteen years old when charged,” “entered a guilty plea to […]

[Read more →]

Tacitus writes that the anti-war side shouldn’t feel vindicated by this ABC News story, which quotes administration officials acknowledging that they didn’t particularly think Iraq was such a threat, but the WMD rationale was played up in order to get allies (and the domestic population) to play along with a bit of “muscle flexing.” (Link […]

[Read more →]

No idea how long it’ll take them to fix this, but the front page at NRO currently reads: Hacked by DarkHunter … Freedom for palestian and Iraq … gr33tz to #USG and #teso channels

[Read more →]

The New York Times Magazine this week has a piece worth reading on “the fluttering swallows,” North Korean’s who manage to escape from that prison country and encounter a new set of problems assimilating in the South.

[Read more →]

Tim Lambert reports on some new trouble for John Lott. Back when I was writing about the survey and pseudonym hubbub, I tried to stress that Lott’s major conclusion—that concealed carry laws reduce crime—wasn’t really undermined by either issue, even if they might legitimately give rise to doubts about his general reliability. Well, now there […]

[Read more →]

Clayton Cramer’s claim to “libertarian sympathies” is becoming as embarassing as it is palpably false, following this post on sodomy laws, which is skewered by AgendaBender. There’s an even more noxious follow-up here. There is a small object lesson here, though: when you socialize the costs of something, people will eventually demand that control over […]

[Read more →]

This piece is deeply infuriating. Administration officials are now basically saying, if not in so many words: “Yeah; we didn’t really think Iraq was a threat. We just wanted to invade someone to “flex muscle” and show we were serious about fighting terrorism. Iraq seemed as good a place as any.”

[Read more →]

While most folks are busy castigating Sen. Rick Santorum for comparing homosexuality to incest and pedophilia (criticism he clearly deserves), the libertarian wing of the blogosphere has stopped to ask: why shouldn’t the right to sexual privacy protect consensual incest between adults? Fellow ex-debate-geeks Glen Whitman and Amy Phillips have weighed in, as has Eugene […]

[Read more →]

If you’ve been following the John Lott bruhaha, this is pretty damn funny. Via Atrios.

[Read more →]