As the deficit blooms to the largest in history and Bush signs into law new mortgage relief measures (which aren’t counted in that deficit figure), and congress contemplates yet another economic stimulus package, I wonder…
At what point does the benefit to our economy of stimulus packages and mortgage packages get outweighed by the harm [...]

The MPAA rating system is broken. I guess I’ve known this for a long time, but it was driven home with brutal force yesterday.
I went to see The Dark Knight yesterday. It’s a great movie, in my opinion, and it deserves all the accolades it has received. My problem is with the [...]

Drug legalization (and I will include the addictive mood altering chemicals tobacco and alcohol here as well) is a hard question. On the one hand, it’s not really government’s job to protect people from themselves. On the other hand, issues like addiction, second-hand smoke, “roid rage”, public financing of emergency rooms, drunk driving, [...]

I’m back!
I’ll have a longer post later, but for now I wanted to note a minor campaign absurdity. Campaign commentators are complaining about the supposedly unfair treatment that the networks are bestowing on the Obama campaign. And let’s be honest here: they have a point. I don’t want to get into a [...]

There is an old joke that an optimist is someone who believes that things can’t possibly get any worse than they already are. I was reminded of that today, reading this article on patriotism. It’s a moderately interesting article in which the author argues that as part of his campaign Obama ought to [...]

I just ran across this post on a washingtonpost.com blog. The author, a prominent Jewish Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz, argues that the Pew Forum survey on religion overestimates the number of atheists in the United States (they estimate about 1.6% of Americans). Rabbi Steinsaltz argues that “true atheists” have two rare qualities: 1) an [...]

McCain has promised to balance the budget by the end of his first term. How, you may ask? Well, its simple:
In the long-term, the only way to keep the budget balanced is successful reform of the large spending pressures in Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid,” the McCain campaign says in a policy paper [...]

I found this article on the nuances of censorship on the internet to be quite interesting. As a libertarian, my primary concern is that the government doesn’t get involved - because that would make a real mess of things. As it stands, I think the market will sort itself out - if companies [...]

Right now, the United States is an active participant in two civil wars: Iraq and Afghanistan.

How much is a human life worth?
I’m reminded of that question again, because of this case out of Pasadena, TX (a relatively poor suburb of Houston). Here’s what happened: