I used to say that when I die and go to hell, I’ll have to make a connecting flight in Atlanta, which would make my destination that much more bearable. These days it seems that after discarding my belief in… Continue Reading
Mastery of the art of quenching red hot iron in water to make steel weapons and tools about 3,000 years ago made possible construction of qanats and aqueducts, which reliably conveyed enough freshwater to sustain the rise of the great… Continue Reading
I’ve been in Huntsville, Alabama for most of the past week. I’ll write about the medical issue that brought me here later; suffice to say that things are significantly better right now, although there are still issues to resolve. If… Continue Reading
The “propensity to truck, barter and exchange” identified by Adam Smith is not a natural instinct that will simply flourish unless quashed by the heavy hand of the state. It requires support from a wide range of social and political… Continue Reading
True beauty is to be found in natural forms. The more we magnify, and the closer we examine, the works of Artifice, the grosser and stupider they seem. But if we magnify the natural world it only becomes more intricate… Continue Reading
I’m away from my regular life right now, attending to a very serious illness within my family. I don’t know if I’m getting a good feel for northern Alabama on this visit, but then again maybe I am. From what… Continue Reading
Yet the dreamer, the story-teller, was there still, waiting for his opportunity amidst the busy preoccupations, the comings and goings, the wars and processions, the castle building and cathedral building, the arts and loves, the small diplomacies and incurable feuds,… Continue Reading
There are croakers in every country, always boding its ruin. – Benjamin Franklin
We are a culture that has been denied, or has passively given up, the linguistic and intellectual tools to cope with complexity, to separate illustion from reality. We have traded the printed word for the gleaming image. Public rhetoric is… Continue Reading
The porn industry is quick to raise the First Amendment as its primary argument against governmental intervention of any sort. And not without justification — governments from the Feds down to municipalities are notoriously hostile to pornography. Which is odd,… Continue Reading