I’ve been doing a lot of thinking – far too much, actually – about this election. I am not going to blog here about the relative merits of each candidate – anyone undecided between these two extremely different candidates at this point hasn’t been paying attention. In fact, this will probably be my last election-related [...]

We voted. Have you?
Fair warning: if you go wearing a propaganda T-shirt and try to start a riot in line about whether or not this is the kind of country where people want to live, yes, you will get to meet a nice member of the HPD. (Apparently, not everyone got that memo…)

“It was during the first period of this constitution that the Athenians appear to have enjoyed the best government that they ever did, at least in my time. For the fusion of the high and low was effected with judgment, and this was what first enabled the state to raise up her head after her [...]

Greg Mankiw’s new post on his personal work incentives is required reading for anyone who wants to discuss taxes in this election cycle.
The idea is simple: our tax system uses marginal rates, meaning one rate applies to the first dollar earned and different rates kick in at different thresholds. (That is, unless you’re so economically [...]

I offer a final thought for the evening. Last night, a dear friend and I were discussing the state of the world and the nation, particularly with reference to some of the more extreme economic proposals made by politicians and pundits of varying degrees of skill. My friend is one of the most intelligent, well-educated, [...]

Sometime in the last few generations, logic started getting short shrift. I don’t mean logic as a concept; plenty of people can, and do, invoke “logic” as a defense for completely absurd arguments. No, I mean LOGIC, the formal subject of study, the one involving formal concepts like “and,” “or,” and “xor,” as well as [...]

I stumbled across a page earlier – I don’t even remember what site, now – that referred to a “bold-faced lie.” This is another one of those phrases that have evolved to the point that there are now at least a few variants, but little certainty on the “correct” (i.e., earliest or original) variant.
See, I [...]

“Hope, danger’s comforter, may be indulged in by those who have abundant resources, if not without loss at all events without ruin; but its nature is to be extravagant, and those who go so far as to put their all upon the venture see it in its true colours only when they are ruined; but [...]

“Hope is a good breakfast, but it is a bad supper.”
- Sir Francis Bacon

Remember last week, when I wondered who puts trash in a neighbor’s trash cans immediately after the garbage truck comes by? The question this week is who manages to fill every trash can in sight to the point of overflowing with wet, stinking, mostly-unsacked garbage immediately after pickup? That’s what happened on our street, yesterday. [...]