Author Archives: Joe
Adventures in Neocon Land
I am currently plowing my way through the fourth installment of David Weber’s Safehold series. For those of you not already involved in this particular method of wasting time and brain cells in equal measure, the basic plot…doesn’t really matter. It’s mostly all a setup to allow Weber to stage elaborate 18th-century naval battles (though maybe it’s early 19th? I’m … Continue reading
Angel in Mismatched Shoes
So, I’m riding the Metro home the other day, reading Facebook on my Droid (I live in the future!) when I come across Steve Johnson’s post celebrating “awkward and maladroit metaphors, like wild horses sneezing on the rocks.” As Steve invited others to join in, I spent a couple of entertaining stops writing up my metaphor. At this point in … Continue reading
Flashforward and Circular Logic
So, Caroline and I finally got around to watching Flashforward. We’d been TiVOing since ep. 2, but we missed the first episode. And ep. 1 disappeared from Hulu before either of us watched it. So we collected about 7 episodes before we actually started the season. Since then, we’ve watched almost all of them in short order. Actually, it’s probably … Continue reading
Terrorism, Acts of War, and Military Trials
As you’re probably already aware, there’s been some disagreement with the Obama administration’s plan to try alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in a New York civilian court. Among the objections is the claim that trying terrorists in civilian court commits one to a “law enforcement” view of terrorism rather than a “war on terrorism” approach. Now as a general … Continue reading
Robocalls
If you live in Virginia (or, I suppose in NJ or NY-23) and happen still to have a landline for whatever reason, then I’m sure you have a very special reason to be glad that election season is over for another year(ish). By the final week, Caroline and I were getting 3 or 4 robocalls a day (in our case, … Continue reading
Voting and Democracy
Some of you may remember that once upon a time, I was the token non-anarchocapitalist blogger at a place called Catallarchy. The old site has had a name change (it’s now The Distributed Republic), and it has reinvented itself as a community site. If you play nicely — and by that I mean say interesting things and refrain from acting … Continue reading
Bad Lectures
So I just got back from a lecture at Cato on James Bennett’s new book, Not Invited to the Party: How the Demopublicans Have Rigged the System and Left Independents Out in the Cold. (And, no, I’m not going to bother linking to the book, for reasons that will become clear in a moment.) Now probably I should have known … Continue reading
Reason on House
At Hit & Run, Reason’s Jacob Sullum takes issue with the first three episodes of season 6 of House. Now some of you probably already know of my unabashed love for House. Well, Jacob also manages to hit on another of my hobby-horses, namely, the stupid way in which Americans stigmatize drug use. (To be clear, I think that it’s … Continue reading
Words Have Meanings
So, I’ve been accused of writing a lot. But the truth is that I actually spend most of my days reading, rather than writing. Besides the (usually boring) stuff I read for work (texts of bills, transcripts of speeches, reports from think tanks, that sort of thing), there’s also the fiction I read for pleasure, the nonfiction I read as … Continue reading
Rights and Health Care
So, a week or so ago, I posted a half-snarky status message on Facebook poking a bit of fun at a then-popular meme about health care reform. Jim Arnold, who was good enough to give me a job a couple of years ago, and Mike Taylor, a career diplomat, both took some exception to my way-too-brief remarks. Their criticisms were … Continue reading