I’m normally a big fan of John Stewart, and I also generally have a lot of respect for Ted Koppel. But I was bothered by something that the two of them said yesterday during Koppel’s appearance on The Daily Show. Koppel was promoting a Discovery Channel special that has yet to air on [...]

The Supreme Court of the United States today struck down a Washington, DC ban on all handguns. I can’t say it’s one of the worst Supreme Court decisions ever, but it’s surely a bad one–both in content and in language. First, the amendment in question:
“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security [...]

My wife just sent me a fascinating article on Slate that I thought I would share with you. Some geneticists recently completed a study on how genes for homosexuality could continue to exist given that homosexual men tend not to procreate. They tested a number of theories against the data, and discovered that [...]

The GOP is trying to turn this election, in part, into a referendum on President Bush’s handling of the War on Terror. In particular, conservative pundits (cheered by both the White House and the McCain campaign) have attacked Obama for praising the response to the first World Trade Center attacks, bringing back the charge [...]

I was reading an article in the National Review today, that really made me aware about a fundamental divide in this country. The article (predictably) argues against Obama. But it does so by putting forth 10 reasons to be wary of Obama. Of them, I found 4 to be strong arguments FOR [...]

There seems to be a lot of confusion out there between “moderation” and “compromise”. On the one hand, people assume that those who are either extremely liberal or extremely conservative are unable to compromise. On the other hand, there is an assumption that moderates want compromise. In fact, neither of these things [...]

Energy policy is one of those tough topics to talk about intelligently. The problem is that everybody knows what the problems are (fossil fuels are bad for the environment and have a finite supply), everybody agrees what the ultimate solution has to be (we need to find new sources of cheap, plentiful energy), and [...]

When Al Gore ran for president in 2000, he told us that experience matters. After all, he had twenty years of Washington experience to build on. George W. Bush, on the other hand, had been a politician for exactly six years, all of it as Governor of Texas, and before that the highlight [...]

Due to illness and work, I’ve been reading quite a lot of history lately: Guns, Germs, and Steel; a book on the Vikings; and another on the Hapsburgs. And it occurs to me that one of the great fallacies of mankind is that we always think that time is slowing down and that we [...]

As a libertarian, I’m of course against this policy, but I nonetheless find it interesting. Japan has recently set legal limits on waistlines. (I thought it would be fun to post on Japan, because our resident expert on Japanese culture has absolutely nothing else that she should be devoting her time to these days [...]