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My friend Richard Nikoley runs a very popular paleo-living blog, FreeTheAnimal.com. His main focus is diet and fitness, but he is also an anarcho-capitalist, his thought falling in the same general neighborhood as mine or Jim Klein’s, and this influences his writing in salutary ways. Human life is a gestalt, and all the healthy food in the world won’t save you if you fuel your mind with poisonous philosophy.

I encourage you to see Richard pushing that envelope in a post called “If You Want Someone Dead, Then Kill Them Yourself.” It’s not Murder by Numbers, very much the contrary:

There will always be killing and murder. Those who propose solutions that involve eradication are deluded, or worse, scamming you. Have you paid them anything or donated?

I have a modest proposal and it’s already in the title: if you want someone dead, then just kill them yourself.

You see, it’s very difficult for me to assume that many people don’t want one whole fuck of a lot of people dead. Isn’t that part of the reason why so many agitate, then stand in line at a voting booth, to vote death by proxy, “support the troops,” and all thayt? Do they go home (more…)

Do you want to experience a total commitment to what you’re doing while you’re doing it? Have an orgasm.

Do you want to live completely for your own values? Have an orgasm.

Men: Do you want to pioneer previously undiscovered territory in your marriage? Give your wife an orgasm — for an hour.

This is a doable proposition. You just have to learn how — both of you.

The good news for her? All she has to learn is how to get out of her own way — which gets easier and easier the greater her commitment, so to speak.

But you, Mister Man, have some learning to do. If y’all are like most couples, you’re weak on theory, strong on routine. Men’s Health magazine has some great ideas for you to explore. I’ve summarized them below, but do read the whole article: The advice they give is practical and detailed, a perfect how-to for a can-do guy like you.

I wanted to highlight this:

“As he’s thrusting, my guy presses hard with his hand right below my belly button. I have the most incredible orgasms.”

This is G-spot play, and it is really worth learning how to do. You can use your penis or your fingers or a (more…)

I’m a terrible friend. I never conceal this fact. I am blessed to have friends better than I deserve, but I only get away with that vanity because friend is a catch-all word that means two different things:

I am your friend.

Or:

You are my friend.

I know my wife is my friend. I hope I am hers — but I have good cause to doubt this. I plan to write a country hook-song for her: “You’re my heaven, I’m your hell.”

And I know I am nobody else’s friend. If I say something like this where people can answer back, they insist I am wrong. That’s sweet, but it’s incorrect. I know how I behave, a subject we will return to, and I know what I am not doing. I have not earned any credit for being a friend to anyone for a long time, and I don’t take things I haven’t earned.

But Jimmy Klein has been a good friend to me, much better than I have deserved, for the many years I have known him. One of my goals — one of my values — is to come to be a better friend to Jim.

Here is what I know about Jim Klein’s life: (more…)

I’m going to throw off a product idea in the hopes that someone builds it. I want this, but it’s more than I can take on on my own.

What is it? Think of a social CMS, a book that puts the reader’s understanding and participation before everything.

So start here: I used to say that the conversation of civilization is carried out in books — but then I stopped reading books.

It was software manuals, actually, that changed the way I read. They’re both too big and too arcane to be read cover-to-cover, so, instead, you go to them ad hoc, as needed, by way of the index.

That has all moved on-line, so searching is just that much easier. And, all thanks to Google, almost all reading has taken this form: You find exactly what you want and read only that.

Stuffy dinosaurs will lament the loss of libraries and the fondly-remembered aroma of dust-mite feces, but the simple truth is that the internet style of reading is massively more efficient.

But to lay one lily on the grave of the book: One thing you cannot have, right now, either directly on the internet or through any of the many eBook formats, is an annotated (more…)

We had a visit from an IRS agent last week.

I was tied up, so my wife Cathleen dealt with him: He needed either me or our accountant to contact him.

We’re five years behind in tax filings, but any attention the precious feds pay to us is a money-losing proposition — for them. We make money some months, lose money many others, but we have been unprofitable, year by year, since 2006. Whatever we might owe can’t amount to a fart in a gale of wind — and we can’t pay it anyway. There is no point in our filing returns, but, even if we wanted to, we couldn’t. We can either each work 100+ hours a week, thus to keep our business barely afloat, or we can do useless government paperwork and drown. I think we have made the wiser choice. To say the truth, I don’t give a rat’s ass if they throw me in jail, so it’s just as well I didn’t get a chance to meet the agent.

But afterward I was aware that Cathleen was totally freaked out. Thoughts racing, stomach churning, unable to get back to work. I couldn’t feel it, lucky me, but I could see (more…)

This is me looking back on looking back on a Labor Day a long time ago. The first extract was written on Labor Day, 2005, as the City of New Orleans was demonstrating for all of us that dependence on government is a fatal error. The second extract was written a year or two before that. And the Labor Day I am talking about there must have been eleven or twelve years ago. Even so, every bit of this is perfectly apposite to the world we live in now — more is the pity.

This is me from elsewhen. I think about this every year at Labor Day. I spent much of the weekend working on business planning issues, macro, micro and meta. I remember from the days when I had a job how much I relished long weekends, because I could build so much on vast tracts of uninterrupted time. I did a bunch of money work last week, but my weekend was virtually my own — to fill with the work that too often takes a back seat to money work. Off and on we had Fox News on in the office, and the whining, pissing and moaning was an (more…)

Me, at BloodhoundBlog:

You cannot both attract my attention and hide from me. I learn a lot about the people I see from every opportunity I have to observe them. I have done this for my entire adult life, and I know I am good at it. When I see you, even if you don’t know I am aware of you, I am figuring out everything I can about you, gleaning every implication I can from every action of yours I am aware of. I can do a plausible back-story on just about anyone, and if I take the time to think about you, any secrets you keep from me will be matters of meaningless detail. I will have inferred everything about you that matters to you.

That’s actually a fine reason to dismiss me: I am scary-good at “reading” people.

The essay in its entirety is much softer than the matter quoted above might imply, but it at least plausible to me that someone might regard this as a bogus justification to dismiss the arguments I am making.

From Technology Review:

Researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, and one of the largest manufacturers of computer memory, Samsung, have created a new kind of flash memory that uses graphene—atom-thick sheets of pure carbon—along with silicon to store information.

Incorporating graphene could help extend the viability of flash memory technology for years to come, and allow future portable electronics to store far more data.

Chipmakers pack increasing amounts of data in the same physical area by miniaturizing the memory cells used to store individual bits. Inside today’s flash drives, these cells are nanoscale “floating gate” transistors. Recent years have seen the rapid miniaturization of flash cells, enabling, for example, the iPhone 4 to store twice as much data as the iPhone 3. But below a certain cell size, silicon becomes less stable, and this has the potential to halt the march of miniaturization.

Graphene-based technology like that demonstrated the UCLA team and Samsung could let flash memory continue shrinking.

From The Wall Street Journal:

For as long as human beings have searched for the fountain of youth, they have also feared the consequences of extended life. Today we are on the cusp of a revolution that may finally resolve that tension: Advances in medicine and biotechnology will radically increase not just our life spans but also, crucially, our health spans.

The number of people living to advanced old age is already on the rise. There are some 5.7 million Americans age 85 and older, amounting to about 1.8% of the population, according to the Census Bureau. That is projected to rise to 19 million, or 4.34% of the population, by 2050, based on current trends. The percentage of Americans 100 and older is projected to rise from 0.03% today to 0.14% of the population in 2050. That’s a total of 601,000 centenarians.

But many scientists think that this is just the beginning; they are working furiously to make it possible for human beings to achieve Methuselah-like life spans. They are studying the aging process itself and experimenting with ways to slow it down by way of diet, drugs and genetic therapy. They are also working on new ways to replace worn-out organs—and even (more…)

From The Amerian Interest:

Toobin, who disagrees strongly with Thomas about most matters constitutional, political and cultural, does a good job of showing why Thomas is a formidable judicial thinker. The interpretative concept of “originalism” is sometimes confounded with a simplistic literal interpretation of the words of the Constitution. Thomas argues that to understand what the Constitution meant to the framers, one needs to do more than read the words on the page and look to see how Samuel Johnson and perhaps Noah Webster defined them in their dictionaries.

Thomas is not a fundamentalist reading the Constitution au pied de la lettre; the original intent of the founders can be established only after research and reflection. The Eighth Amendment ban on “cruel and unusual punishment” can only be understood if one understands the thought of the period, the types of punishment then widely used, and the political and cultural traditions that shaped the thinking of the founders on questions of justice and punishment. One then takes that understanding, however tentative, and applies it to the circumstances of a given case today.

It is not the only possible way to read the Constitution, but it is a very interesting one and (more…)