A reader recently posted the following comment on another thread: The reason people are required to wear seat belts is the high public cost of injuries. If you get hurt in an accident it can cost me either in direct public subsidy of your medical bills or in an increase in the cost of private insura...

The AFP reports: A bishop under fire for denying the Holocaust wants to examine the historical evidence before any possible renunciation of his belief that not a single Jew died in Nazi gas chambers, a report said. “If I find proof I would rectify (earlier statements)… But all that will ...

Outraged at the (UK) University of Leeds for inadvertently throwing away a 77 pound bag containing his “treasured, seven year collection of lizard dung,” graduate student Daniel Bennett has rejected a $750 compensation offer and “will see them in court.” Yes, that’s rig...

Yesterday a man just beginning philosophy told me that he had said to a friend: ‘Some philosophers don’t believe in material things and I am not not sure that I do.‘ His friend said, taking hold of the table, ‘You don’t believe there’s a table here? You’re m...

Newsweek, the magazine for people who like their news, fashion news included, neatly summarized a week at a time, informs me indirectly that I’m suddenly fashionable again. Well, not me, but a good swath of my wardrobe, anyway. I’m sitting here at the word processor wearing a Pendleton w...

While Mr. Rowe continues to keep the assertions, arguments and blandishments of the Christian Nation crowd at bay, he and Mr. Babka and I got into a bit of a digression regarding whether the existence of God in some sense is necessary to the existence of natural rights and / or whether the latter is...

The best thing to be said about the $819 billion dollar ’stimulus’ bill passed by the House of Representatives is that the vote was entirely partisan. Passing 244 to 188 with one abstention, not a single Republican voted for H.R. 1, while no fewer than 11 (Blue Dog) Democrats also though...

In an interesting article entitled “Google & the Future of Books,” Robert Darnton writes: Along the way [between the dawn of the Enlightenment and the age of the Internet], professional journals sprouted throughout the fields, subfields, and sub-subfields. The learned societies prod...

Aristotle correctly observed that human beings are by nature gregarious. That is to say, they naturally seek community and only in community can they flourish. Self-sufficiency, then, given this entirely contingent but morally significant fact of nature, is less about doing without others than it is...

You know, like the kind being blown up the asses of New York Times readers here?...