I recently had a Facebook encounter with someone who objected to the use of the terms right to life and right to property because he felt these terms confused people into thinking that they had a right to life in the sense that if they couldn’t manage it, someone else
Tag: Articles
Total 29 Posts
Depending on your point of view, my title for this article either makes your blood boil, or else you are cheering. Good. Either way, that should keep you reading. A few days ago I noticed a tweet that posed the question of whether or not the states had the right
Yesterday’s post was some railing against greedy artists who imagine that the copyright law gives them some right to force others to pay them undue tribute. I admit, this stuff pisses me off. I do realize, however, that many people are simply ignorant of the principles behind copyright and patent
After yesterday’s internet black out, I realized that more clarification is needed about the “copyright” part of the so-called “intellectual property.” Why the quotes? Well, because the concepts are faulty and I frankly don’t want to give them any respect. I recently explained my views on patents in my open
A few years ago I wrote a letter to the editor of Bioscience Hypotheses, a journal in which, shortly before, I had published an article speculating on the cause of Bee Colony Collapse. One of the reasons I chose that forum for my editorial was that it seemed to me
The mass market paperback is dead and Winston Smith never dreamed how easy his job could be.
Okay, so the title of this post isn’t exactly correct. I’m not going to discuss the marketing of establishment propaganda per se. I am going to discuss one of the methods used to maintain it, however. Recently, a friend of mine, knowing that I run with an “alternative” crowd sent
The concepts of rights is confusing to a lot of people. You can’t see them, you can’t feel them, and they are very often violated. As far as most people are concerned they simply don’t exist. Or, if they do, they are only something that the government “grants” and as
There are quite a few so-called “libertarian” groups touting so-called “anarcho-capitalism”. To my mind this term is nothing but an oxymoron that serves to confuse people who have otherwise correct instincts. This might be because one of the apparent proponents of the idea was none other than Murray Rothbard. It’s
One of the virtues of being a generalist is the ease with which one can often detect a con. While the specialist examines the bark of a single tree, the generalist sees the forest for the trees. The generalist’s overall knowledge of surrounding area often gives him vital clues, even
In a previous post I suggested that when you eat an apple you might want to also eat the seeds which contain amygdalin, a substance that inhibits the growth of cancer cells. Recently, I came across an article published this year in the Internet Journal of Alternative Medicine entitled Inaccurate Reporting
This post is again inspired by an article from The Freeman, the magazine for the Foundation for Economic Education. In thinking about it now, I imagine that today I would disagree on some level with a great many of the articles published in the Freeman over the years. Some ideas
This is a just pet-peeve of mine. I sometimes hear arguments regarding the ‘consent’ clause of the Declaration of Independence that seem to imply that one must consent to a just government and from that follows the idea that anything goes as long as one consents. I have to weigh
From The Ayn Rand Lexicon: Prior Certainty of Consciousness: Descartes began with the basic epistemological premise of every Witch Doctor (a premise he shared explicitly with Augustine): “the prior certainty of consciousness,” the belief that the existence of an external world is not self-evident, but must be proved by deduction
Recently I wrote a post called Pondering the Universe in which I laid out some ideas regarding consciousness and metaphysics that I have been examining. In that post, I mention Descartes’ views about the nature of consciousness or the ‘soul’. To get a better idea of exactly what his views
