The League of Ordinary Gentlemen

Let’s say you and I are sitting at lunch and you get up to use the restroom. Uninvited, I grab your cell phone and start paging through your text messages and your directory and whatever else might be there. Are you legitimately upset with me for doing this? Have I done something wrong? Yes, and [...]

Our estimable host Erik Kain has invited me to be part of the main page. It seems to be a tradition for people to drop their nicknames and adopt a more formal full name. Pat Calahan became Patrick. RTod became Tod Kelly and so on. My full name is Anantharaman Muralidharan. Given that my name is so long, [...]

So the way my father used to tell it, my parents’ second date went something like this: My father was positively smitten after his blind date with my mother, and wanting to spend as much time with her as possible made sure that the activity for date number two was an all-day event. This being [...]

My co-blogger has some excellent thoughts up about online univerisities and non-traditional students. I think it’s front page material. Please take a visit to Not A Potted Plant and give him your thoughts and feedback.

It remains to be seen how effective the Occupy Wall Street folks will be. (We should see some more specific demands out of the occupiers in the coming weeks and months.) I tend to think some of the criticism from the left has been valid. But for all the flak they’ve received, it’s still spread [...]

More capable legal minds have already written adroitly about the civil liberties nightmare that this due-process-less killing was. Consequently, I won’t delve too deeply into the legal (or moral) ramifications of granting the president the power to unilaterally authorize the killing of an American citizen. Suffice to say that the al-Awlaki precedent—and I have no [...]

Charlie Whittington owns the Kwik Kar Lube & Service in Plano, Texas, and he circulated a coupon giving any customer who recites John 3:16 a discount on an oil change. Marshall Wei, although aware of the discount, declined to recite the bible verse and wound up paying $46 for the same oil change other customers [...]

One thing libertarians talk about a lot is coercion. If you really peel back libertarian philosophy, that word looms just about as large as “liberty” or “freedom”. Coercion can take a bunch of different shapes. Taxes are coercion. Democracy is coercion. Unions are coercion. Anything that represents the will of the collective over the will [...]

Michael Tracy has an article up at The American Conservative on Ralph Nader’s quest to get progressives to align with libertarians like Ron Paul. For those with a longstanding interest in left-libertarian coalition-building, there’s not a ton of new information in the piece. As he’s argued in other venues, Nader sees felicitous convergence between libertarians [...]