Did you know 2012 is the centenary of Charles Dickens’s birth? Dickens is often lumped with Carlyle, Shaw, Ruskin, etc. as a Romantic, Victorian, literary anti-capitalist. (Carlyle indeed disliked capitalism, but not for the usual reasons.) But Dickens, as I originally learned from Paul Cantor, was a wildly successful capitalist and entrepreneur, a driving force behind the...
Read More »

I posted earlier about the provisions of the New Years Eve-signed National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) a/k/a the “Homeland Battlefield Bill,” allowing the President of the U.S., at his or her sole discretion, to order the indefinite detention of any U.S. citizen, with no burden of proof whatsoever, and no recourse for the detainee—in...
Read More »

As if the climate alarmist scams revealed in Climategate I and Climategate II were not enough, not to mention the deliberate misrepresentations in Al Gore’s propaganda film, An Inconvenient Truth, we now learn that the BBC faked a key scene in the £16 million, seven-part TV series, Frozen Planet, in which polar bears were...
Read More »

Comedy Central’s Stephen Colbert “takes on” Occupy Wall Street in a hilarious yet actual segment with protest representatives from “the consensus within the press group,” Justin (“a male-bodied person”) and “Ketchup” (“a female-bodied person”), in a “Co-Optportunity” with what Colbert calls a cult, oh sorry, I mean “movement”.

How are the big-hair rock band’s contractual prohibitions against brown M&M’s similar to the Third Amendment’s limitations on the quartering of soldiers? Professor Tom W. Bell of Chapman University School of Law explains: In the grand struggle to protect individual rights against government trespass, the Third Amendment plays a role akin to the provision,...
Read More »

In the new hit album by pop-singer “Weird Al” Yankovic, Alpocalypse, he includes the song, “Party in the C.I.A.”, which is a parody of the hit song by Miley Cyrus, “Party in the U.S.A.”

When I grew up in the 1970s and 1980s, the stereotypical bowdlerizers of speech–the people excising “offensive” lyrics and literature—were the uptight blue-nosed sort who feared that “someone, somewhere, was having fun.” (H.L. Mencken). Now, the “progressive” Left has replaced the Puritanical Right as the great policer of speech. “Progressives” have always policed speech...
Read More »

Aasif Mandvi from The Daily Show with Jon Stewart on Comedy Central hilariously skewers the hypocrisy, authoritarianism, and foolishness of “progressive” San Francisco’s Nanny-State ban of Happy Meals at McDonald’s restaurants in the city. The Daily Show With Jon Stewart Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c The Daily Show on Facebook HT: Carl Haberberger

On November 13, 2010, unsuspecting shoppers got a big surprise while enjoying their lunch at the Welland Seaway Mall in Welland, Ontario, Canada. More than 100 members of the Christmas Flash Mob broke out to sing the “Hallelujah Chorus,” from George Frideric Handel’s oratorio “Messiah.” This YouTube video of the event has now also...
Read More »

The 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature awarded to my father, Mario Vargas Llosa, is great news for those of us who value freedom. His work, as the Swedish Academy recognized in its public statement, explores the oppressive structures of power and the plight of the individual who rebels against them. His novels examine this...
Read More »