According to Ars Technica, the state of Illinois had to pull about a million dollars from its public health and welfare departments to bankroll failed litigation to defend a plainly unconstitutional law that sought to restrict violent or sexually explicit video games. Or, to put it melodramatically: (Protecting poor kids from malnutrition and disease) < […]

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A couple people have taken up my invitation to analyze their writing in search of recurring stock phrases or constructions as a means of keeping their prose fresh. I’ll add links as I notice them if anyone else jumps on board. Charles G. Hill Jane Galt

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My blogging is already unpredictable enough that I seldom feel the need to post one of those “blogging may be light” warnings when I’m on vacation. But since I’m down at the Outer Banks with a posse of bloggers, it may actually get heavier: We seem to have set aside a dedicated hour-of-blogging each morning […]

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John Tabin thinks that the case of Swissair Flight 330 “put paid to the naive notion that we can count on terrorists to leave us alone as long we leave them alone.” This is silly. First, I don’t think anyone has ever literally claimed that non-intervention was some kind of foolproof guarantee that one would […]

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Orwell’s classic “Politics and the English Language” was an assault on “ready-made phrases,” those clichés and dead metaphors that spring so readily to the writer’s mind, sparing him (and his readers) the trouble of thinking. But it occurs to me that in addition to the phrases at large in the written culture of the society, […]

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About a week after 9/11, I was walking around Greenwich Village with my then-girlfriend (an anarcho-capitalist, no less!) talking about, well, the only thing there was to talk about. She fell silent for a moment, then sort of tentatively offered: “I think I wish Clinton were still president.” I whipped my head around, prepared to […]

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Put me in Kevin Drum’s camp on the much-decried ABC News report of a covert American program to “destabilize” Iran’s government: It reeks to high heaven of a deliberate administration plant. ABC insists it gave the White House and CIA a chance to object to the story if reporting it would endanger operatives in the […]

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They’re finally turning Neuromancer into a film and all I can summon is a sort of dull horror—a feeling not unlike a television tuned to a dead channel (back before that meant serene blue). J. Random Hack Jr. is slated to direct. Hope springs eternal, though: Gibson himself won’t buy that it’s happening until he […]

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If you happen to be planning to head off to the beach for the weekend, perhaps with a freshly repaired iPod, pop by Librivox and pick up a few free audiobooks, recorded from public domain texts by volunteers. It never hurts to run through On Liberty again. Be warned, however, that the guy who records […]

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HT: Boing Boing. I’m a little impressed that this sort of thing was being aired on broadcast television almost 40 years ago.

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