On Depressed Intellectuals

Of course, it is true that "only boring people get bored," but what about the hyper intellectuals--those who pursue a tangent to its tangent without finding a center towards which to gravitate? (What's their end?)

I guess this link may help some understand my question:

http://similarminds.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=286

But what is "intellectual stimulation"?

Thomas Szasz: Straight Talk about Suicide

The Slings and Arrows of Outrageous Fortune: Among all of our other newly born "rights," what happened to our right to life that implies a right to voluntary death?

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Patrick J. Buchanan: Another Neocon in Political Office

Buchanan, a name I use to fear but am now beginning to like.

Pat Buchanan is able to thicken the division line between conservatives and neocons (like Randy Scheunemann).

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Why (do) we hate us(?)

In response to the author, Dick Meyer, of Why We Hate Us: American Discontent in the New Millennium:

The root cause of mass discontentment in modern society is the Centralization (or de-localization) of political power. As the Federal Government grows, the political leverage of the individual decreases. This is obvious proportionally (individual:state vs. individual:nation). The individual has less political power in a larger population. The ideal, then, is complete localization (however impossible this may be).

As Aristotle recognized in the fourth century BC, Athens was too large to be a socially stable polis.

What is Property?

Property is simply a socially-assured directive that designates the ownership of something by an individual (i.e. a contract or patent).

For example, nothing physical happens to a car when you stop calling it yours, and I start calling it mine; only on the social level does the ownership of the car change from you to me.

Reason Magazine on Bob Barr's Historic Nomination

With Bob Barr's nomination, the Libertarian Party is threatening to achieve historical relevance. A third party president would further threaten the Republican-Democrat duopoly on government and would render the duopoly's barriers to entry nigh useless.

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Mark Twain Speaks for the Future

Mark Twain on Imperialism:

I left these shores, at Vancouver, a red-hot imperialist. I wanted the American eagle to go screaming into the Pacific ...Why not spread its wings over the Philippines, I asked myself? ... I said to myself, Here are a people who have suffered for three centuries. We can make them as free as ourselves, give them a government and country of their own, put a miniature of the American Constitution afloat in the Pacific, start a brand new republic to take its place among the free nations of the world. It seemed to me a great task to which we had addressed ourselves. But I have thought some more, since then, and I have read carefully the treaty of Paris, and I have seen that we do not intend to free, but to subjugate the people of the Philippines. We have gone there to conquer, not to redeem. It should, it seems to me, be our pleasure and duty to make those people free, and let them deal with their own domestic questions in their own way. And so I am an anti-imperialist. I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land.


— Mark Twain, New York Herald [1900]