Matt Welch makes a super-important point about the Kelo decision in this L.A. Times column: In California, private-property eminent domain transfers must be conducted under the legal cover of “blight,” which has come to mean “prime real estate in a rapidly gentrifying area.” Recall that New London’s argument in Kelo hinged in part on the […]

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Yes, this is actually a real ad campaign for the priesthood:

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In a very good anti-ID cover story in the current New Republic, scientist Jerry Coyne describes the “wedge strategy” motivating ID advocacy: [The strategy] begins with the adoption of intelligent design as an alternative theory to evolution, after which ID will edge out evolution until it is the only view left, after which it will […]

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Noting the flap about the new Rolling Stones tune “Sweet Neo Con,” Radley Balko complains about the general paucity of good protest music coming out of the Iraq war. I expressed a similar sentiment in this Reason piece about a year back, though I did note a couple of exceptions to the general rule. One […]

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I have vague memories of seeing a story sometime in the past 6 months or so about a search technology that picks up and analyzes genetic materials from stray cells as people walk through it, without ever physically touching the person. Does anyone know what I’m talking about? I’d be grateful if anyone else remembers […]

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Writing at Slate, Jacob Weisberg dissents from the chorus of culture war peacemakers asserting that theology and evolution can be friends. It probably is better in in the short term if religious people think that the two are compatible so they stop trying to torpedo public school science curricula (pending the move to a fully […]

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Well, this is handy: There’s apparently a blogger living within a few blocks of me who does restaurant and nightlife reviews. Maybe I’ll go check out this place Tabaq tonight…

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In my Foucault post below, I mentioned Louis Crompton’s Homosexuality and Civilization, which argues against the Foucauldian view that the notion of a homosexual identity (as opposed to homosexual behavior, which has been around longer than humans) originated in the 19th century. I suggested there that the book may actually supply a point in favor […]

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As long as I’m taking shots at the National Review crowd, let me say that this attack by Armando at Daily Kos on one of their guys seems misplaced. NR‘s Ed Whelan wants to argue that the Constituion is “neutral” vis a vis abortion—by which he means that it leaves it to the states to […]

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Sometime Reason contributor John Hood stirs up a tizzy on The Corner with the radical notion that, since it’s the human mind (as opposed to some kind of magic fairy dust sprinked on the 2 percent of our DNA separating us from chimps) that all our ordinary moral categories implicitly recognize as the wellspring of […]

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