A friend of mine (the ‘sum bitch won’t let me use his name) has a brood of kids. He does not let them use computer or watch TV much. I asked if his kids are smart. He says, “Just the usual 99.5 percentile stuff.”
“Really?,” I reply.
“Hey, it’s genes,” he replies. “We forget how smart all of us are. We essentially have no contact with stupid people. Go to a county fair–you will see.”
Funny!
Because of the stupid gift-buying issues. Because of the subtle pressure to mail out Christmas cards ever year. Well I have refused the latter for many years now, and have gotten over my guilt. I’ll never again send Christmas cards. What a stupid tradition.
As for gifts, it’s the same every year–start worrying about it in November, call up relatives ask them what they “want”. I wish there was a way out of it.
Peggy Noonan is such a good writer on occasion, even if she is a warmongerer. Great title–“He’s Got Two of ‘Em” (i.e., balls); and these comments seem like pretty good analysis of why Bush won:
I think Mr. Bush, the better man in terms of character, was also the more normal man. And we like normal. He loves sports and business and politics, and speaks their language. Normal. His wife is important to him, and his kids seem a bit of a mystery to him, and perhaps even to some degree intimidating. Normal. He thinks if bad guys attack New York City and the Pentagon, we go after them and kill them–normal. He thinks marriage is between a man and a woman–normal. He thinks if Baptist preachers in a suburb of Louisville have an after-school plan that has an excellent record of turning kids from juvenile delinquency to thinking about college, those Baptist preachers should be helped and encouraged every way we can, and it has nothing to do with “church and state.” Normal. He thinks if there’s an old plaque bearing the Ten Commandments on the wall of the courthouse you should leave it alone–it can’t hurt, and it might help. Normal.
Plus, she’s kinda hot.
To the Bloglet subscribers to my site–Bloglet is old tech. I now have a site feed, which you can subscribe to with any RSS or Atom feed news aggregator. I highly recommend you unsubscribe from Bloglet and instead use some aggregator, such as SharpReader, which is great. Get an aggregator and subscribe to my Atom feed, the link to which is here: https://stephankinsella.com/atom.xml.
After this post, the old RSS feed will be deleted. THE NEW FEED IS AN ATOM FEED: https://stephankinsella.com/atom.xml. Please subscribe to this instead the old RSS feed.
Latest article: “Causation and Aggression” (co-authored with Patrick Tinsley), in The Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics, vol. 7, no. 4 (winter 2004): 97-112, a special Reinach symposium issue (based on the Reinach and Rothbard: An International Symposium, Ludwig von Mises Institute, Auburn, Alabama, March 29-30, 2001).
Update: See also Adolf Reinach, J. N. Mohanty, “Kant’s Interpretation of Hume’s Problem,” The Southwestern Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 7, No. 2, HUME ISSUE (SUMMER, 1976), pp. 161-188 (twitter: “Reinach wrote an essay that explains Hume as coherent with rationalism in the same way Mises was, a non-Kantian (i.e. non-transcendental) rationalist.”)
Sometimes you ask someone a question and they diplomatically answer, “Well, I would think that…” I want to interrupt and say, “‘Would’? You ‘would‘ think that, if what?” Would is conditional; if you were to do this, then I would do that.
Even worse is “should”–“I should think that…” Should is normative; obligatory. Nobody cares what you should think; say what you do think.
It’s a pretentious Britishism, sort of like saying “he was graduated from Harvard” instead of saying “he graduated from Harvard” or “when I was at university” instead of “when I was in college”.
And most of these, the indefatigable Jeff Tucker told me about! Also increasingly useful: Skype, with its free Internet telephony; and AIM, which also now has Internet telephony and even video (which I have not tried yet).
I just spoke (free–via Skype) to a Dutch attorney friend. He said the headlines over there are all about the murder of filmmaker Theo Van Gogh, the great-grandnephew of painter Vincent van Gogh. Apparently he was killed by a muslim angry about a film of Van Gogh’s critical of Islam’s treatment of women.
My friend told me two interesting things. First, that at least the headlines of the murder will trump all the US election headlines that would otherwise take center stage. Second, that most Dutch seem hostile to the idea that it was a Muslim who killed Van Gogh. Jeez, I didn’t realize the Europeans were as politically correct as we are.
In a recent chat with a friend he wrote:
Why is it that foreign sites are never worth linking to? Their URLS are always breaking. These bastards don’t pay their bills or what?
Europe is one big pile of shit so far as the web is concerned. A well known webmaster refuses to link to anything in Europe. First they steal all our graphics and code, then they don’t pay their bills.
In response to a previous request for gmail (Google mail) invites on the LewRockwell.com blog, I received a bunch–more than I need. Some of the senders agreed to offer them to the LRC community (or others, presumably). Their email addresses and messages or invites are listed below:
p.s.: if you don’t know what gmail is you probably don’t need it!
Finally starting to notice signs of age (I’m now 39). In addition to fading hair and expanding gut, I noticed a year or so ago that I would doze off in the easy chair while watching tv or reading a book at night. And lately, on occasion, while I am up late on the PC, fighting sleepiness, I will actually dodder off to sleep in the desk chair with my fingers on the keyboard. Pathetic.
Stephan Kinsella is a libertarian writer and retired patent attorney in Houston, Texas. He has published widely on various areas of libertarian legal theory and on legal topics such as intellectual property law and international law. His publications include Legal Foundations of a Free Society (Papinian Press, 2023), Against Intellectual Property (Mises Institute, 2008), International Investment, Political Risk, and Dispute Resolution: A Practitioner’s Guide (Oxford, 2020), and The Universal Principles of Liberty (2025).
My Failed Libertarian Speaking Hiatus; Memories of Mises Institute and Other Events, 1988–20192025
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