I don’t know nearly as much about the years following the fall of Communism in the Soviet Union as I would like to. I know the basics: that Yeltsin won against Gorbachev and instituted free market reforms, and I know that most state industries came under the control of former Communist Party members, and it’s [...]
Monthly Archives: July 2008
What’s Right with Kansas: Kathleen Sebelius
Monday, July 28, 2008
Back in June, the Washington Post did a two-part series on Kathleen Sebelius as potential VP: The Case For and The Case Against. The case for Sebelius is pretty strong: she comes from the famous state that demographically “ought” to vote differently than it does, she’s managed to appeal to Republicans and independent voters during [...]
Sheldon Wolin’s Democracy Incorporated
Saturday, July 26, 2008
In the small corner of political philosophy I inhabit, Sheldon S. Wolin is a big name. His mammoth Politics and Vision is a breathtakingly systematic genealogy of political life, a Rosetta stone of political theory. His perpetual commitment to thinkers like Tocqueville and Montesquieu has kept interest in those figures alive during a period when [...]
Pre-9/11 FISA Violations and Retroactive Telecom Immunity
Sunday, July 20, 2008
I’ve not seen much mention of one of the most important complaints about the FISA reauthorization: the claim made by Joseph P. Nacchio and Qwest Communication International that the Bush administration sought the power to engage in warrantless wiretapping in February of 2001, seven months before the events of Semptember 11th and the Authorization for [...]
If I ran the zoo…
Friday, July 11, 2008
The National Association of Scholars is running a series on visions of the academy, amusingly based on the Dr. Seuss story about re-inventing a zoo.
Dr. Seuss’s protagonist, young Gerald McGrew, suffers none of his sophisticated contemporaries’s deadly contempt for life as it is, or for his social surroundings. His opening words are, “It’s a pretty [...]
Self-uniting marriage
Wednesday, July 9, 2008
Antoinette and I have decided to pursue a self-uniting marriage license. Basically, it allows a couple to get married without an officiant. I guess instead of ‘getting married’ it allows the couple to ‘marry themselves.’ It’s only available in Pennsylvania and Colorado, and at least in Pennsylvania it often goes by the title ‘Quaker marriage,’ [...]
Veterans return to the Academy
Tuesday, July 8, 2008
My friend Dr. J recently wrote about the various transitions in the faculty, and noted in passing that we should be careful not to push the 60’s era faculty out before we’ve had a chance to pick their brains on instructing war veterans.
I had a passel of veterans at MTSU (10-12?) and it was really [...]
Wendell Berry on Faustian Economics
Monday, July 7, 2008
Wendell Berry’s article in the May Harper’s is out from behind the paywall. It’s a really interesting attempt to take moderns to task for their conflation of freedom with limitlessness and infinite progress. (My Metafilter post on Wendell Berry is the most popular thing I’ve ever done there, so go check it out if you [...]
American Constitution Society’s SCOTUS Term Review
Sunday, July 6, 2008
Every year the ACS does a round table on the Supreme Court’s decisions at the end of the term. They’ve posted the roundtable from this year online, so you can listen to some of the leading lights in constitutional law analyze the cases. Here’s a direct link to the audio video. Here’s a page linking [...]
Peak Oil
Tuesday, July 1, 2008
There’s likely little doubt at this point, but I just wanted to point out that Peak Oil is mainstream consensus at this point. Buisnessweek has an article about Charles Maxwell, “the No. 1 analyst in his field [energy],” saying that “he now foresees unprecedented stress on the world economy as peak oil production arrives in [...]