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The Long View 2005-11-05: Happy Guy Fawkes Day

I've always found the co-option of Guy Fawkes, Catholic terrorist, by anarchists to be a bit funny. If there is any religion that is absolutely incompatible with that philosophy, it Catholic Christianity. Happy Guy Fawkes Day Readers of The Screwtape Letters will recall that infernal bureaucrat Screwtape once

The Long View 2005-11-03: Taxes, Techno-Libs, Intifada

The same basic plan for fixing the US Federal tax system keeps coming up: get rid of deductions, and make the rates lower so the change is revenue neutral. And, it will always never happen, because far too many voters and donors have lots of long-term economic decisions made with

The Long View: The Menace of Multiculturalism in America

Seeing this book had a foreword by Dinesh D'Souza, who has descended into hackery in the twenty years since this review was written, made me think of the fantastic Twitter exchange above. The book John reviews here isn't very good, but his discussion of the issues

The Long View 2005-10-30: Libby, Noonan, & Scalia

John was broadly on the same side as Antonin Scalia on most subjects, but he didn't think textualism was accurate in the American legal system. Libby, Noonan, & Scalia The interesting point about the indictment of Lewis Libby is the political nature of the process. This is not

The Long View 2005-10-27: Nominations & Indictments

We are up and running again. Back to our regularly scheduled program of revisiting the mistakes of the past! Even as I write this, I learn that Miers Withdraws Supreme Court Nomination. No one said that Miers was stupid. Maybe next time the boss has a bright idea she will

AI Winter

Scott Locklin shares my general dubiousness about artificial intelligence in general, and trendy analysis techniques in particular. He suggests that the surfeit of gassy marketing claims about machine learning techniques will eventually kill any actual technological progress in the field by making everything disreputable. Lest you think Locklin and I

Repost: The Long View: An End to Evil

On the sixteenth anniversary of 9/11, it is worth reflecting on what happened, and what we did in response. This is Exhibit A in the story of what went wrong during George W. Bush's response to 9/11. In retrospect, I see both how it seemed emotionally