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Paul Caron has compiled Thanksgiving Proclamations through the years.

On Thanksgiving, I thought I would link to two posts from earlier years on the 1621 Thanksgiving and the Pilgrims’ attitudes toward food in the New World. In 2004, I posted an account of the Massachusetts Pilgrims’ first Thanksgiving in 1621. We set the last spring some twenty acres of Indian corn, and sowed some […]

So we’ve seen that there are as many squares as there are positive integers, and as many rational numbers as there are positive integers. That’s because infinity is infinity, right? All infinite sets are infinite and therefore equal in size? The answer, it turns out, is no. Georg Cantor, in fact, provided a simple and […]

So says the L.A. Times. But the National Crime Victimization Survey for 2005 (PDF page 81) reports that handguns are used in fewer than 8% of all crimes of violence. This doesn’t include homicide, but homicides are fewer than 0.5% of all crimes of violence, so even if one includes homicides the answer would be […]

I asked that near the end of my previous post; and the answer, counterintuitively, is that these two sets are also equally big. Remember that the standard definition we’re working with is that two sets are equally big if there’s a way of mapping each element of the first to precisely one element of the […]

Is Social Security in trouble? If you’re talking to Paul Krugman, it would depend on when you asked him, as Ruth Marcus documents in this column. It’s almost enough to make one think Krugman’s become a crude partisan. UPDATE: Krugman responds to Marcus here. Mark Thoma thinks Krugman has a good defense. Ramesh Ponnuru less […]

Yesterday, Senator Fred Thompson issued a statement on the Supreme Court’s decision to grant certiorari in the District of Columbia gun ban case. It reads, in part: I’ve always understood the Second Amendment to mean what it says – it guarantees a citizen the right to “keep and bear” firearms, and that’s why I’ve been […]

A recent conversation reminded me that many of my lawyer friends don’t know these really cool mathematical items, but enjoy them when they learn about them. I thought, then, that I’d quickly go through them; I’m no math maven these days, but I think I can get them right, substantively even if not with the […]

reports a BBC caption. Uh, no: According to the Justice Department’s National Crime Victimization Survey (2005 data), table 66, handguns are used in 5.4% of U.S. assaults and 26.3% of robberies. Thanks to Charles Curley for the pointer. I’ve e-mailed BBC with the correction; please let me know if you see them making it. UPDATE: […]

From 10:06 to 11 Pacific this morning, I’ll be on KPCC-FM (89.3), a local public radio station, talking about the Second Amendment with the host, Larry Mantle, and Erwin Chemerinsky, who’ll be on the other side. (Someone else will be filling in for Erwin after the half hour.) The show will be taking listener calls, […]

The Supreme Court is about to fill in (whether rightly or wrongly) one of the last blank spots on the constitutional map. This means law professors are about to lose one of the few areas where they can get their students to discuss an exciting constitutional rights issue by talking about text, structure, history, and […]

Paul Gowder makes the case here. I think Paul gives short thrift to practicing criminal law, though. You won’t make a ton of money as a prosecutor or defense attorney, but it avoids a lot of the problems he mentions.   UPDATE: I should add, in response to some of the thoughtful comments, that I gather […]

Several Paul supporters have pointed me to the Paul campaign’s official statement on racism, which they say makes it clear that Paul is against racism, and doesn’t want the support of racists. Color me unimpressed and unpersuaded, at least on the latter point. Here is the statement, with my comments in bold: A nation that […]

Today also seemed like a good day to reprint my 2002 item on the Second Amendment and the living Constitution: [Some ask]: Shouldn’t courts read the Second Amendment as part of an evolving Constitution? Say the Ninth Circuit was wrong, last year’s Emerson decision from the Fifth Circuit was right, and the Framers thought of […]

Various people have asked me what I think of Ron Paul’s presidential campaign, and whether it will be good for libertarianism. Here’s my take: Ron Paul deserves credit for his strong commitment to limited government on many issues, including taxes, regulation, federal spending, and federalism-based limits on federal government power. Nonetheless, I am skeptical that […]