November 2001

Slate’s Jacob Weisberg sensibly (thought weakly) opposes new calls for conscription, but he wrongly plumps for an enlarged AmeriCorps. It’s voluntary, and we can use it to reap some of the cohesive benefits of war time, he says. Weisberg’s all kinds of supportive for the McCain/Bayh bill that will quintuple AmeriCorps. He writes:This approach avoids [...]

Ken Layne mentions The Fly Bottle on his top-notch blog at KenLayne.com Thanks Ken! He labels us a “war blog” and well… it’s true! The Fly Bottle contains multitudes. And yes, Instapundit must be a twelve acre farm of networked massively parallel processing supercomputers, much as Kurt Warner (my University of Northern Iowa schoolmate — [...]

Lovely defense of materialism and individualism as the source of American generosity by Lawrence Lindsay (economic advisor to Bush) at Declan McCullagh’s Politech. Especially cool: Lindsay gives props to Frank O’Connor (i.e., Ayn Rand’s wife), and dwells on skyscraper symbolism.

Another reason for dropping an MTV bomb on the middle east: Mary-Kate and Ashley Olson! Just saw the Full House twins on MTV’s Fake ID Club, and oh my… our babies are all growed up! The fifteen year-old nascent ultra-babes stand atop a media empire worth close to $1 billion! Have you seen the Mary-Kate [...]

Very nice obituary at the Guardian of David Lewis, the Princeton metaphysician famous (for a philosopher) for his stalwart defense of the existence of real, live alternative dimensions. On Lewis’s theory, any state of affairs that is possible is actual on some world or other that differs from this one only in not being this [...]

I hereby innaugarate my new weblog, The Fly Bottle. The title comes from Wittgenstein’s statement that the aim of his philosophy was to show the fly the way from the fly bottle. What can this possibly mean? Well, Wittgenstein was weird. We’re flies. When we philosophize we buzz around bumping into an unseen enclosing barrier, [...]