Month: August 2007

August 06, 2007

Debunking the ‘Eat Local’ Myth

An op-ed in today’s NYT by James E. McWilliams, “Food That Travels Well,” articulates some of the suspicions I’ve had about the whole “eat local” phenomenon. It seems to me that duplicating the kind of infrastructure necessary to sustain a great variety of food production every hundred miles or so is grossly inefficient. Continue Reading...
August 03, 2007

“We Doubt, We’re Out, Get Used to It”

Hey everybody, Richard Dawkins is selling T-shirts! Get ’em while they’re hot! One of my favorite bloggers, Allahpundit (who just happens to be an athiest himself), calls this “…a new stage in the transformation of ‘new atheism’ from rational argument to aggrieved identity group,” and has this to say about the t-shirts themselves Some of our commenters call this sort of thing evangelical atheism but a moron with a scarlet “A” on his chest really isn’t trying to convert you. Continue Reading...
August 03, 2007

‘I Am Not Afraid of Death’

Alexander Solzhenitsyn Der Spiegel has published a far ranging interview with Alexander Solzhenitsyn in which the great writer “discusses Russia’s turbulent history, Putin’s version of democracy and his attitude to life and death.” Continue Reading...
August 03, 2007

Romney’s Religion

Michael Gerson’s “What Matters About Romney’s Religion” in today’s Washington Post: There is a long tradition of American leaders who believe that religion is so personal it shouldn’t even affect their private lives. Continue Reading...
August 03, 2007

Economics and Happiness

Chuck Colson locates the perennial problem of human unhappiness with the inability to perceive where happiness truly comes from. There’s the economic argument that while “increased prosperity can’t make you happy, it can, ironically, contribute to unhappiness,” an argument which Colson says, “doesn’t tell us anything about what makes people happy in the first place. Continue Reading...
August 02, 2007

Bulgaria embraces flat tax and freedom

The speaker for the Seventeenth Acton Institute Annual Dinner is former Estonian Prime Minister, Dr. Mart Laar. One of the economic reforms Laar implemented in Estonia was a flat tax. After what was described as a brilliant economic turnaround, other countries have followed Estonia’s lead on flat tax policies and free market policies in general. Continue Reading...
August 02, 2007

Acton Media Update

Dr. Jay Richards made an appearance on the Steve Deace show yesterday on central Iowa’s 50,000 watt blowtorch of a radio station, WHO in Des Moines. The topic of conversation was climate change, and you can listen to the interview by clicking right here (3.2 mb mp3 file). Continue Reading...
August 02, 2007

Our Counter-Majoritarian Constitution

In his review of Sanford Levinson’s Our Undemocratic Constitution: Where the Constitution Goes Wrong (And How We the People Can Correct It) in the Claremont Review of Books, Randy Barnett highlights some of the same features of the US political structure as particularly unique that Lord Acton emphasized. Continue Reading...