Away for the next five days

I will be off on a camping trip to Death Valley National Park for the next five days. We leave tomorrow morning. There is no internet there, so this is going to be the last post till the 31st.
Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays. Come back next week.

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Online gambling and the UIGEA

Even in the context of American style conservative nanny-statism, the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (UIGEA) is an extraordinary law. A direct offspring of the  ”American Values Agenda”, this law, passed in 2006, in combination with the Wire Act effectively prohibits any kind of internet gambling operation in America. The law outlaws games of pure [...]

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The worst article on the economy you will ever read

Arianna Huffington’s latest article condemning laissez-faire as a failed philosophy hits all the right lefty notes. Parts of it almost seem lifted from Obama’s election rhetoric. Not wholly unexpected from a woman who once proclaimed that she only texts three people: her two teenage children and Barack Obama.
Actually, Huffington’s piece is so bad that it [...]

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The Dnepropetrovsk Maniacs

The bizarre story of three young serial killers who tortured and killed 21 people and took live videos of their gruesome murders on cellphone camera. They did it as a ‘hobby’, so that they could have interesting memories when they grew old.
The thee youths dubbed themselves The Dnepropetrovsk Maniacs.
By all accounts, each victim came about [...]

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Christian Domestic Discipline

I came across this remarkable site today. It is about a lifestyle in which the wife willingly submits to the husband and gives him authority to discipline her by spanking her on the buttocks from time to time. Spankings can range from mild to painful. 
A domestic discipline marriage is one in which one partner in [...]

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The personal is not the political, contd.

(Post updated)
In my earlier post on this theme, I expressed my opposition to using coercive legal means to advance social goals and my moral abhorrence for laws which censor expression, ban consensual behavior or limit freedom of association. I wrote:
Any rational system of morality that makes the basic libertarian distinction between the personal and the [...]

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Sullivan on gay rights and freedom

Popular blogger and premier gay rights activist Andrew Sullivan writes:
So I oppose hate crime laws because they walk too close to the line of trying to police people’s thoughts. I support the right of various religious associations to discriminate against homosexuals in employment. I support the right of the most fanatical Christianist to spread the [...]

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Fortune telling — free speech or fraud?

A fortune teller in Montgomery county went to court to try and overturn a local ban on fortune telling. The fortune teller claimed his free speech rights were being hindered. The county claimed they were justified in having a law to prevent fraud.  The county won, as you might have expected (unlike in movies, the [...]

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If you wish to donate for liberty, where should you?

If you wish to effectively advance liberty — yes the kind of liberty that I talk about in this blog — or just make a real difference to the life of someone in need, who should you donate to?
Check out this great list by Radley Balko. Liberty can thrive only if people who care enough [...]

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We Indians are an emotional lot

I fully agree with all those people who think captured terrorist Ajmal Amir should not be have the right to a lawyer or a proper trial.
Rights like these might make sense in countries with an excess of freedom but they have no place in our nation. There may be some people who believe that the [...]

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Another policy change

I have changed the Creative Commons license that governs the content of this blog. In plain English, the change amounts to the following — now you can quote, republish, adapt or otherwise use any part of this blog for non-commercial purposes, provided you attribute me  as the original source. This is more restrictive than my [...]

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Arne Duncan as Secretary of Education

Jim Lindgren thinks he is a great choice.

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You should be opposed to an auto bailout irrespective of your ideology

My position on the auto bailout is simple. The big three should be allowed to go bankrupt. This is true even if one ignores the moral hazard and other intrinsic costs of bailing out private firms.
Bankruptcy now is, quite simply, the best course of action not just for the taxpayer and the rest of the [...]

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Comment policy

Here’s a simple question — who owns the comment you post on someone else’s blog?
One view is that the blog is the blog owner’s property and he owns all the content on it — including the comments — and has the right to do whatever he wants with them. Thus he may choose to publish [...]

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Two countries, different attitudes.

I came across this interesting news article today about how liberal prostitution laws are encouraging young Swedes to make a short trip to Denmark.
In Sweden paying for sex is a crime punishable with a possible six-month jail sentence or a hefty income-linked fine. Perhaps the worst penalty for errant Swedish males is the official court [...]

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