The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen. A friend recommended this book by philosopher and cultural theorist Kwame Anthony Appiah. Here’s the book’s home page with links to interviews with the author. And here my Amazon link to the book. Appiah is no libertarian purist (and may be no libertarian at all), but he makes a case about moral and social change that probably rings true with a lot of us. If a practice is widespread, generally accepted, but becomes objectionable (foot-binding in China, dueling in Europe, female genital mutilation or honor killings in Muslim countries, etc.), governments may fail…
Category: Books and Movies
I think it was a book. Might have been a novella. Definitely not a short story. In any case, it was delightful, but I read it so many years ago that I can’t remember the author or the title. Can you help me find it? Joel blogging about the mysterious causes of World War I — ultimately tracing back to the personal quirks and insecurities of the so-called leaders — got me started & you’ll see why. The plot: Aliens crash-land on earth near the beginning of the twentieth century, A crucial part on their ship is damaged (I’ll call…
Excellent idea from Top of the Chain via Borepatch: a BUYcott to support Travis Corcoran, aka TJIC. Top of the Chain sez: Massachussetts has arbitrarily decided that the writer of a blog, in exercising his First Amendment right to infringe on his Second Amendment right by disarming him. Travis is going to need money for the legal bills that are sure to follow. He runs an online comic book store. There are already comic book artists that are speaking out against him. What sweet irony would it be to buy something from Travis to help him make a living, that…
Hey. I just noticed that BHM webmaster Oliver Del Signore has been blogging up a storm since just before Christmas. (And apparently blogging a big enough storm to dent in the top of his car.) I can’t imagine how he finds the time to say so much and say it so well, since I knew he was already working 12 hour days before he started blogging so prolifically. I confess to being the friend that he refers to in his blogs on Terry Pratchett Discworld books (there; Oliver and I now have dueling Amazon links) and the Judy Holliday movie…
Borepatch contributes this fine graphic to the cause of Travis Corcoran, the victim of Massachusetts hysteria who lost his first and second amendment rights this week: Turns out Corcoran’s blog is the fairly well-known “Dispatches from TJICistan” (now taken down by its owner — temporarily, we can hope). Here’s Borepatch’s eloquent take on the case. The graphic is for the use of anyone who’d like to support Corcoran. And if anybody here doesn’t understand its meaning, or would just like to see one of the all-time great movie scenes (Borepatch also has the clip, but it bears endless repeating): (Tip…
I’m a little late getting to this, but for your weekend viewing pleasure: The entire film Guns and Weed (whose creators I interviewed earlier this month) is now on YouTube. No more need to deal with Pirate Bay and BitTorrent clients.
I must apologize. The creative juices are flowing about as fast as wet cement this week. Multitudes of distracting things going on. In addition to helping screen adopters for a litter of pups being fostered by another volunteer, I’ve acquired a foster puppy of my own (dumped in my neighborhood on a sub-freezing night and rescued by some alert children) and have been following her around all week with paper towels and a bottle of Nature’s Miracle. And today’s the day — tada! — that the kitchen finally gets a new floor. So the refrigerator’s in the living room, the…
Kewl. Freedomista cartoonist Scott Bieser has a new online graphic novel. His first solo effort. Even in this era of manipulative bill-naming, this pretty much takes the cake. I wish ’em well. But sheesh, grownups don’t need propaganda names like that. Former presidential aide murdered and dumped. Okay, it’s not likely to be another Vince Foster case. Still. It’s getting weirder and weirder. So Obama is for “change.” And he’s trying to project a more pro-business image (yeah, right). The answer? Well, according to a lot of high-level speculation that means putting another Chicago pol and banker in a top…
This is the conclusion of my interview with Michael W. Dean and Neema Vedadi, creators of the film Guns and Weed: The Road to Freedom. Part I. Part II. —– We pick up in the midst of Michael’s answer to yesterday’s question about the challenge of finding actors and others to appear onscreen in Guns and Weed. MICHAEL DEAN: We did a lot of things ourselves, to solve problems. There aren’t a lot of good actors in Casper, so Neema and I played multiple parts. I’d thought of asking Boston [T. Party] to play the bad cop, Sergeant Dan Banning.…
This is the second of a three-part interview with Michael W. Dean and Neema Vedadi, the creators of the new film “Guns and Weed: The Road to Freedom.” Part I is here. CLAIRE WOLFE: How did you two work together on this project? MICHAEL DEAN: It was a great working relationship for many reasons, but mainly because our skill sets overlapped a lot, and also, each guy had the needed skills the other guy didn’t have. Even philosophically: Neema is a lot more well-read than I with libertarian theory, but I taught him the basic truth that if you don’t…