StephanKinsella.com

In my October 2001 LewRockwell.com article, New Israel: A Win-Win-Win Proposal, I proposed relocating Israel to U.S. public lands such as Utah or the Anwar area of Alaska. As I’ve previously blogged, Ken Layne subsequently published a similar proposal on FoxNews.com, How ‘Bout Relocating Israel to Mexico?.

Now come two more: “Fight World War IV” – Or Let Israelis Immigrate?, by Paul Craig Roberts, VDARE; and from a perhaps more Biblical perspective: Israel’s end-times gamble, by Gary DeMar, WorldNetDaily.com. Hmm. Does this idea have legs?

Funny pop-culture website, JumptheShark.com, chronicles the moment when your favorite TV show has reached its peak and it’s all downhill from here. “The term ‘jump the shark’ […] refers to the telltale sign of the demise of Happy Days, our favorite example, when Fonzie actually ‘jumped the shark.'” For Star Trek, there are votes for “Spock’s brain is taken” and also for “Singing (Spock and the space hippies)”.

For those with a legal bent, I’ve recently posted an e-version of my 1994 Louisiana Law Review article A Civil Law to Common Law Dictionary. For more theoretical musings on civil law and common law, see my Legislation and the Discovery of Law in a Free Society, from the Summer 1995 issue of the Journal of Libertarian Studies.

My latest article is Defending Argumentation Ethics: Reply to Murphy & Callahan, Anti-state.com (Sept. 19, 2002). In this article I defend Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s argumentation ethics, in response to Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s Argumentation Ethic: A Critique, by Bob Murphy and Gene Callahan. The debate can be discussed in this forum.

Great new feature on LewRockwell.com: THE PASSING SCENE, a paleoblog of sorts, edited by Mises Institute senior fellow Ralph Raico. It’s sure to become a huge hit in the paleo/libertarian/conservative movement.

Updated in this post.

Off-topic, I know, but Enstrom‘s Almond Toffee is so good I busted my weight-watchers diet for it yesterday. Some evil friend sent it to me as a gift. Makes a great gift. Jesus, it’s good. And no, I don’t own stock in them.

MSNBC report on a fascinating experiment scheduled for this Sunday to measure the speed of gravity. Writes Alan Boyle, of MSNBC’s “Cosmic Log”:

How fast is gravity? The question seems so simple, but it actually generates a cosmic debate inside and outside the scientific mainstream. This weekend, astronomers will take a big step toward calculating the speed of gravity.

Relativity theory dictates that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, and that such a cosmic speed limit would apply to gravitational influences as well. But there’s never been a definitive experimental test of that claim.

As it so happens, a line-of-sight encounter between Jupiter and a distant quasar at 12:30 p.m. ET Sunday represents the best opportunity in a decade for such a test, according to Sergei Kopeikin of the University of Missouri at Columbia and Ed Fomalont of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory.

The astronomers expect their data to confirm that gravitational effects move at the speed of light — and they hope to have the results ready to present to the American Astronomical Society in January. But if they come up with an unexpected answer, it could send shock waves through the scientific community and beyond. […]

There are other facets to the “speed of gravity” debate that may not be settled even if Kopeikin and Fomalont come up with the expected results. Iconoclastic physicist Tom Van Flandern has been saying for years that gravitational force acts at velocities far faster than the speed of light, and he engaged Kopeikin in a rather technical discussion of the quasar experiment. Suffice it to say that Van Flandern thinks this weekend’s observations won’t address his central claims.

This whole exercise isn’t merely a dry classroom debate over Lorentzian vs. Einsteinian relativity: Any evidence that gravity works faster than the speed of light would be seized upon by creationists to bolster their claim that the universe really could have been created 6,000 years ago. We saw this debate flare up in the wake of suggestions that the speed of light might have been faster in the distant past.

Click here for other “revisionist physics” links.

Fascinating new paper attempting to elaborate and extend Hoppe’s argumentation ethics defense of individual rights and its relation to Rothbardian Austrian economics, praxeology, and libertarian theory: Hopp(e)ing Onto New Ground: A Rothbardian Proposal for Thomistic Natural Law as the Basis for Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s Praxeological Defense of Private Property, by Jude Chua Soo Meng.

If you are not familiar with the works of Hans-Hermann Hoppe–well, you should be, as he is the leading social theorist, economist, and libertarian philosopher of our time (IMHO). Check out these classics: his tour de force Book Review of Man, Economy, and Liberty: Essays in Honor of Murray N. Rothbard, published back in 1989, when he was just bursting onto the Austrian-libertarian scene; his Introduction to his latest blockbuster work, Democracy: The God That Failed; his summary of Rothbardian Ethics; a ringing defense of the justice and feasibility of anarchy, The Private Production of Defense; and brilliant sociological-historical-economic analysis, Banking, Nation States and International Politics: A Sociological Reconstruction of the Present Economic Order.

Also not to be missed are Hoppe’s radical, realist, neo-Kantian/Misesian epistemological views, e.g. in Economic Science and the Austrian Method; In Defense of Extreme Rationalism; and On Certainty and Uncertainty, Or: How Rational Can Our Expectations Be?. And last, but certainly not least, his groundbreaking apriori, praxeological defense of libertarian rights, in his “argumentation ethics“.

Crude, but funny Movementarian spoof article, along the lines of The Onion articles.