Yesterday’s post was some railing against greedy artists who imagine that the copyright law gives them some right to force others to pay them undue tribute. I admit, this stuff pisses me off. I do realize, however, that many people are simply ignorant of the principles behind copyright and patent law and have no means [...]
After yesterday’s internet black out, I realized that more clarification is needed about the “copyright” part of the so-called “intellectual property.” Why the quotes? Well, because the concepts are faulty and I frankly don’t want to give them any respect. I recently explained my views on patents in my open letter in response to Professor [...]
A few years ago I wrote a letter to the editor of Bioscience Hypotheses, a journal in which, shortly before, I had published an article speculating on the cause of Bee Colony Collapse. One of the reasons I chose that forum for my editorial was that it seemed to me (and it still does) that [...]
The mass market paperback is dead and Winston Smith never dreamed how easy his job could be.
Okay, so the title of this post isn’t exactly correct. I’m not going to discuss the marketing of establishment propaganda per se. I am going to discuss one of the methods used to maintain it, however. Recently, a friend of mine, knowing that I run with an “alternative” crowd sent me a post by author [...]
The concepts of rights is confusing to a lot of people. You can’t see them, you can’t feel them, and they are very often violated. As far as most people are concerned they simply don’t exist. Or, if they do, they are only something that the government “grants” and as such they can be “taken [...]
There are quite a few so-called “libertarian” groups touting so-called “anarcho-capitalism”. To my mind this term is nothing but an oxymoron that serves to confuse people who have otherwise correct instincts. This might be because one of the apparent proponents of the idea was none other than Murray Rothbard. It’s possible, then, that this is [...]
One of the virtues of being a generalist is the ease with which one can often detect a con. While the specialist examines the bark of a single tree, the generalist sees the forest for the trees. The generalist’s overall knowledge of surrounding area often gives him vital clues, even before any specialized investigation begins. [...]
In a previous post I suggested that when you eat an apple you might want to also eat the seeds which contain amygdalin, a substance that inhibits the growth of cancer cells. Recently, I came across an article published this year in the Internet Journal of Alternative Medicine entitled Inaccurate Reporting of the Effects of Laetrile: [...]
This post is again inspired by an article from The Freeman, the magazine for the Foundation for Economic Education. In thinking about it now, I imagine that today I would disagree on some level with a great many of the articles published in the Freeman over the years. Some ideas are more distressing than others, [...]
This is a just pet-peeve of mine. I sometimes hear arguments regarding the ‘consent’ clause of the Declaration of Independence that seem to imply that one must consent to a just government and from that follows the idea that anything goes as long as one consents. I have to weigh in on this. In a [...]
From The Ayn Rand Lexicon: Prior Certainty of Consciousness: Descartes began with the basic epistemological premise of every Witch Doctor (a premise he shared explicitly with Augustine): “the prior certainty of consciousness,” the belief that the existence of an external world is not self-evident, but must be proved by deduction from the contents of one’s [...]
Recently I wrote a post called Pondering the Universe in which I laid out some ideas regarding consciousness and metaphysics that I have been examining. In that post, I mention Descartes’ views about the nature of consciousness or the ‘soul’. To get a better idea of exactly what his views are on this topic, I [...]
The Freeman is a magazine published by the Foundation for Economic Education, a non-profit organization founded by Leonard Read in 1946. I’ve attended lectures at the Foundation’s mansion in Irvington-on-Hudson, NY since 2002. Lately, however, I have been a little bit disappointed with some of the things I’ve been reading in the Freeman. I’m not [...]
The death of a loved one can send you into a metaphysical tailspin, so to speak. You want so much to believe that you will one day see them again. At the same time, if you’re like me, you want to puzzle it out with reason. But this is a question that is pretty close [...]