Most of the changes I made there, I made here. There are a few exceptions since I don’t have quite the same setup as TLS. I have a separate front/landing page and blog page, whereas the blog page is the front page there. I don’t publish articles here. I use some sidebar widgets here that we don’t use on TLS, and vice versa. But you’ll notice I moved to a 2-column layout and added a Blog Archives page and a Tag Cloud page. I didn’t bother adding a Popular page, because I just don’t get enough traffic yet to justify it. Someday I might.
Sidebar widgets have been moved around, for the most part only appearing on pages in which they are relevant and useful for what the reader is presumably doing on said page. Hopefully, you’ll find the layout to be cleaner, more useful, and the site to load faster.
I still need to work on properly categorizing and tagging my old blogposts; the legacy of moving my blog from Blogger to self-hosted WordPress after several hundred posts. There are still many formerly-internal links in my old posts that link back to posts on my old Blogger blog, which I have set up to redirect back here. One day maybe I’ll get around to fixing them.
Anyway, I’ll continue to make minor changes and improvements over time, but the major ones have been accomplished. What do you think?
Declaration of Independence (1776): “That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it…”
A Pledge to America (GOP, 2010): “Whenever the agenda of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to institute a new governing agenda and set a different course.”
If this goes on, related fellow TLS blogger Daniel Coleman to me, in another 100 years it will be “Whenever a subpoint of policy within a government agenda becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to organize a committee to change those subpoints of policy and replace them with better subpoints.”
Liberty Central, the Establishment’s attempt to co-opt the Tea Party, has a poll asking us to grade the Pledge. Head on over there and tell them what you think of it. Fellow TLS blogger Jacob Huebert has a couple ofgood posts on LewRockwell.com about Liberty Central, the Tea Party, the Pledge, and Glenn Beck.
The Liberty Central poll only lets you grade the Pledge as a whole. Here is a quick graded breakdown of important aspects of the Pledge, with short reactions by me in parentheses:
Micah White at The Guardian writes of the growing danger of ecofascism or environmental authoritarianism. Some environmentalists, like James Lovelock and Pentti Linkola, want to put democracy on hold and/or return humanity world-wide to a primitive state of existence in order to combat global warming. Ironically, his proposal to fend off this growing danger is itself an example of the very thing he fears, though perhaps his proposal is motivated not entirely by environmental concerns but also by an independent dislike of consumerism.
White’s solution is to end the culture of rampant consumerism in the West. How does he propose to do this? Ah, now there’s the rub.
The song was written in 1971 by Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown, a long-time resident of Slidell, Louisiana.
Live 04/16/83 in Hamburg, Germany: Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown (guitar/vocals), Homer Brown (tenorsax), Bill Samuell (tenorsax), Joe Sunseri (baritonesax), Craig Wroten (piano), Miles Wright (bass), Robert Shipley (drums).
In a recent post at The Libertarian Standard, Akiva claimed that people (in general) get the government they deserve. The US is an imperial-warfare state and a growing surveillance-police state, not to mention a nanny-welfare state. Boston Legal’s left-liberal attorney Alan Shore echoes Akiva’s sentiments in a closing argument in defense of, oddly enough, a [...]
Hugh LaFollette, “Licensing Parents Revisited,” Journal of Applied Philosophy. The premise of his article is that the legitimacy of professional licensing is well-established and the practice should be expanded to parents. While one could argue that it doesn’t follow from professional licensing being applied to various professions that it should be expanded to parents, this [...]
The Obama Administration insists that “‘Piracy is flat, unadulterated theft,’ and it should be dealt with accordingly.” Nonsense, of course. Only scarce goods can be property and therefore only scarce goods can be stolen. Ideas or information patterns are nonscarce goods. If I take your bicycle, you don’t have it anymore. If I copy your [...]
In a series of Orwellian twists, the United States is pulling out (prematurely some say) “all” “combat” troops from Iraq but doubling down (for starters) on mercenaries. The Obama Administration gets away with “fulfilling” Obama’s promise to end US combat operations in Iraq by removing the last (officially-labeled) combat brigade from the country, yet 50,000 troops [...]
Political Science PhD
