Author Archive | Tyler Cowen

The AP writes about Justice Scalia’s response to the Boston Herald story: Scalia said in the letter, written to Executive Editor Kenneth Chandler, that the reporter leapt to conclusions that it was offensive because he initially explained his gesture by saying, ‘That’s Sicilian.’” “From watching too many episodes of the Sopranos, your staff seems to […]

we Jews can be pretty dumb where politics is concerned. (See also The Tale of the Two Brothers.) UPDATE: Just to make clear, I’m referring — as the links suggest — to what strikes me as the disproportionate Jewish propensity for Socialism (see the Related Posts below), which I’m quite willing to call a dumb […]

The New York Times reports on the Afghan reaction to Western objections to the Abdul Rahman prosecution. Rahman, you may recall, faces death for converting from Islam to Christianity: The case had fueled feelings among many here of a sense of assault against Islam worldwide, coming after widely publicized cases involving the desecration of the […]

The striking thing about the Abdul Rahman prosecution — in which an Afghanistan court is considering whether to execute Rahman because he converted from Islam to Christianity — is how Establishment the prosecution is. The case is before an official Afghani court. The death sentence is, to my knowlege, authorized by official Afghani law. The […]

The Boston Herald reports: A judge who figures prominently in a Methuen father’s new book about losing custody of his child issued an order yesterday on whether sales of Kevin Thompson’s tell-all should be banned. But you won’t read all about it here because Essex Probate and Family Court Justice Mary McCauley Manzi impounded her […]

As the English version of Pravda (a leading Russian newspaper) reports, Russia’s Federal Security Service closes down Pravda.Ru’s Russian version over Danish caricatures The visitors of Pravda.Ru website have been deprived of a possibility to access the website and its materials today. The main Russian version of the Pravda.Ru portal has been closed today. The […]

Pretty appalling. I’m glad that the U.S. government is pressuring the Afghan government to rescind this, and I hope that the behind-the-scenes pressure is more serious than the public pressure; according to the Chicago Tribune, “The Bush administration issued a subdued appeal Tuesday to Afghanistan to permit a Christian convert on trial for his life […]

some ask in response to my post about the “I don’t support conservatism …, and I support black conservatives even less” article — and especially to my cross-post at Huffington Post. They really do seem genuinely shocked at the prospect that any decent, intelligent black person would take such a ridiculous position. How about the […]

Orin is right, as is commenter Huh?, and I’m wrong. I let myself get suckered by the plaintiff’s complaint in DiMemo v. Max, which asserts that the anonymous annoying speech ban is enforceable in civil lawsuits by private parties. In fact, as Orin points out, the ban is an amendment to a criminal statute (47 […]

A new column by Glenn Reynolds, in the Guardian (U.K.), of all places. A British newspaper’s Web site entertaining the notion that “the right of people to be armed to resist genocide should perhaps be regarded as the next international human right” — shocking.

That, I kid you not, is precisely what an L.A. Times op-ed from last week says. Black conservatives are bad, the theory goes; also, being conservative is spiritually bad for blacks; and that helps explain why White House adviser Claude Allen committed fraud: “It’s hard to imagine that such compromises and cognitive dissonance don’t exact […]

My judgment that you need to see the Mohammed cartoons to really understand the controversy — and that verbal descriptions of the cartoons can’t explain the matter well enough — reminds me of this similar tidbit about poetry (see Edward de Grazia, Girls Lean Back Everywhere 335-36 (1992)). In the late 1950s, California prosecutors brought […]

That’s the title of an article in the April 2006 Reason (not online yet, apparently), and its premise is that, despite claims to the contrary, “Americans are more likely than ever to stay put.” I looked up the census data that the article points to, and it seems to support the article’s assertion: In 1947-48, […]

Seipp follows up on aspects of Walkout that the movie — which is about a 1968 walkout by Hispanic students protesting L.A. education policies — somehow leaves out, especially the legacy of “bilingual education” that seems to have on balance been a disaster for Hispanic students. Here’s an excerpt, though the whole piece is much […]

for ‘copulate,’ of possible Scandinavian origin (see Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary (1977) p. 463, col. 2) appears frequently in the record along with its gerundive and a related noun involving the maternal parent,” says footnote 1 of this California Court of Appeal opinion. Thanks to How Appealing for the pointer.