As Gary North noted in M.I.T. Calls Academia’s Bluff,

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has begun the most revolutionary experiment in the history of education, stretching all the way back to the pharaohs. It now gives away its curriculum to anyone smart enough to learn it. It has posted its curriculum on-line for free. These days, this means a staggering 1900 courses. This number will grow.

It’s now available on iTunes U. This is so amazingly incredible.
[LRC cross-post]

Very nice list by Techdirt’s Mike Masnick:

Techdirt Book Reading List 2009

from the food-for-thought dept

A couple years ago, after completing my series of posts on the economics of ideas and infinite goods, I wrote up a reading list of books that were useful in thinking about all of this. With our recent launch of a book version of that series, called Approaching Infinity, I updated that list with a bunch of more recent books (basically, the books sitting on my desk again…), and wanted to share them here. For this post, I’m only writing up short reviews, but plan to revisit some of these books with much more detailed reviews, in the future. Not surprisingly, we’ll kick it off with four of the books that I feel are the most important for anyone to read if they’re interested in these things. Together, they make up the four books that you can get together (all signed by their authors!) in the Techdirt Book Club package. [continue reading…]

Interesting post from The Voluntary Exchange

The Conscience of a Libertarian: Respect Others’ Choices

By voluntaryexchange

I’d like to share an observation I made this week: libertarians spend so much time defending their rights and the rights of others that they rarely engage in discussions about what they find truly valuable.

Consistent libertarians (i.e. anarcho-capitalists) are particularly adept at identifying weaknesses in policy proposals which rely on the threat or application of force. All that needs to be done is reduce any ostensibly complex problem to one of property rights, show that coercion necessarily infringes upon somebody’s right to their bodies or property and what generally remains is either enslavement, expropriation of property, or both. (Of course, inexplicably, most people are rarely convinced by a logically consistent counter-argument, but I’ll leave that discussion for another day!) [continue reading…]

Incisive comment made by one Charles Anderson on a Facebook page: “The U.S. troops in Iraq & Afghanistan must be home now. How else to explain the silence of Miss Garafalo, Mr. Springsteen, and Mr. Penn?”

Update: Jonathan Shusta writes:

Also in the same vein as Garafalo et al. is the lesser known internet comic “get your war on” by David Rees. It began on october 9, 2001; guess what day it went silent? January 20, 2009.

Spencer Hahn writes:

Although I am not shocked by the silence of the celebrities and politicians who vociferously opposed the war when it was headed by Bush, I am pleased to see that the World Can’t Wait — which has protested against the Afghan and Iraq wars since the beginning — continues to oppose what are now Obama’s wars.

Please give them the publicity that they deserve, and be on the lookout for them on October 5th, when they will hold a “Protest at the White House against Obama’s Wars.”

P.S. I’m proud to say that I had the honor of successfully defending (pro bono) one of the WCW’s protesters in Portland, Oregon, after a trumped up series of arrests a few years ago at the October 5th protest.  The nearly dozen co-defendants all won their cases after nearly 18 months of waiting for their day in court.

[LRC cross-post]

My 6 year old asked me today what the date was. Recalling yesterday was 9/11, I told him today was the 12th. I then asked him if he knew what yesterday was. As he tried to figure out what I was getting at, he said, “…. a … holiday?” I said, no, not exactly. Then, he remembered: “Oh! When the tourists knocked down the Twin Towers!”

[LRC cross-post]

Stephen Metcalf of Slate’s Culture Gabfest is right–this is a great Beatles song and performance.

As reported in Pro-Business Ruling Likely in High Court Campaign Finance Case, it appears likely the U.S. Supreme Court will overturn some federal laws that ban corporate and union expenditures in election campaigns, and some older caselaw that permitted such legislation. Libertarians, and some conservatives, typically have a kneejerk opposition to such regulations based on the argument that such action is protected as “free speech.” In my view, it’s a stretch to classify money donations as “free speech.” Come on. It’s not speech, it’s money. Not that this should matter–it’s not relevant whether the First Amendment includes the “right to donate campaign money” or not–the Ninth Amendment prohibits an implication that just because a right is not included in the Bill of Rights means it is not a right. Further, the primary protection of rights from invasion by the feds was the enumerated and limited powers scheme of the federal government: there is no grant of power to Congress to censor speech, nor to regulate money-donations. [continue reading…]

Latest pretentious terms from today’s Slate Political Gabfest (feel free to email me suggestions or leave them in the comments to the main page):

• risible [Dickerson, pronounced oh-so-correctly]

In this week’s Culture Gabfest, about 3 French words were used, some more than once IIRC, and pronounced oh-so-correctly, such as “oeuvre,” “milieu,” and maybe another that I’ve forgotten.

In the Fall 2009 issue of LSU Alumni Magazine, “Tigers in Print” section.

Great post:

Open Letter to Linux Geeks

Just came across this in an old file: On the Fourth Amendment, my letter to the editor to Chronicles magazine (March 1996), regarding Larry Pratt’s comments on the exclusionary rule. My letter’s text is below; Pratt’s response is in the pdf:

In his December essay, “The Mark of the Beast,” Larry Pratt implies that those who oppose unconstitutional searches and seizures by the government should be in favor of the exclusionary rule.  But such a rule, whereby probative (i.e., valid) evidence may not be introduced in court if it was obtained in violation of the Fourth Amendment, is not required by the Constitution, nor was it favored by the Founders, as Pratt  intimates.  In fact, not until 1914, in the Supreme Court case Weeks v. United States, was an exclusionary sanction applied to evidence obtained in violation of the Fourth Amendment, and this case involved federal criminal litigation.  It was not until 1952 that the Supreme Court imposed a federal constitutional exclusionary requirement on the states.  The exclusionary rule is simply not required by the Constitution, nor is it implied by rules prohibiting certain types of searches and seizures.

Whether the Constitution ought to provide for the exclusion of illegally-obtained evidence  is another matter.  In my view it should not, because it does not violate the rights of truly guilty criminals to convict them with any probative evidence, no matter how obtained, and because there are better ways to sanction errant police than to let criminals go free.  For example, any individual subject to an illegal search or seizure who is not proved guilty should have a cause of action for damages against the police and the state, and the policemen involved ought to be subject to criminal action, if warranted.  Further, no advocate of federalism should support federal imposition of an exclusionary rule on states, no matter what one’s view of the merits of the exclusionary rule.

–Stephan Kinsella, Philadelphia

For more on this, see In Defense of Evidence: Against the Exclusionary Rule and Against Libertarian Centralism, with Patrick Tinsley, November 1, 2003, LewRockwell.com; Tinsley, Patrick, Stephan Kinsella and Walter Block. “In Defense of Evidence and Against the Exclusionary Rule: A Libertarian Approach,” Southern University Law Review, Vol. 32.1 (2004), pp. 63-80.