Piracy is thriving at the beginning of the twenty-first century—and no, I’m not talking about people playing fast and loose with intellectual property rights by illegally downloading music, films, or software. The past few years have seen a resurgence of actual, honest-to-goodness armed pirates terrorizing the high seas. They may have traded in their peg legs and eye patches for assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenade launchers, but other than that, they’re back to their old tricks. Incidents of piracy have been increasing for three straight years, according to the Piracy Reporting Centre of the International Maritime Bureau (IMB), with the global total shooting up to 406 in 2009, from 263 in 2008. Somali pirates accounted for over half of the 2009 incidents, including 47 of the 49 hijackings and 867 of the 1052 crew members taken hostage. On January 18 of this year, the Greek supertanker Maran Centaurus was released by Somali pirates in exchange for a $9 million ransom, according to a report by Agence France-Presse. Why, in this modern world of ours, has piracy managed to stage such an impressive comeback?
The Atlas Society has now launched its ground-breaking Business Rights Center, headed by the brilliant editor, writer, and business analyst Roger Donway. The Business Rights Center (BRC) is dedicated to defending businessmen who are wrongly defamed by the media and unjustly prosecuted by the government. The BRC also strives to expose and challenge the false premises of today’s post-Enlightenment, anti-business intelligentsia.
The Atlas Society Free Minds 2010 Summer Seminar is a week-long extravaganza of brilliant speakers and enthusiastic participants from all over the country, who come together to learn and to share the good life: the life of reason, freedom, and individualism--all within minutes of downtown Washington, D.C. When: June 30-July 8 Where: Embassy Suites, 1900 Diagonal Rd, Alexandria, Virginia (just across the Potomac from Washington, D.C.) Who: The impressive line-up of speakers and topics includes: Anne C. Heller, author of Ayn Rand and the World She Made. Ayn Rand collaborator and author Nathaniel Branden, on "The Missing Link in Objectivism," Henry Mark Holzer and Erika Holzer will be speaking on "Life and Work wih Ayn Rand." Computer scientist Peter Voss will speak on "Advances and Applications of Objectivism in Artificial Intelligence." Neera K. Badhwar on "Analyzing Ayn Rand's Ethics." Law professor David N. Mayer on "Rediscovering Freedom's Constitution" Nigel Ashford on "Changing the World for Liberty." David Boaz of the Cato Institute on "Ayn Rand, Cato, and the Battle for Reason and Freedom." ....and more.
This award-winning documentary was directed by Latvian filmmaker, Edvīns Šnore, and debuted to considerable acclaim at film festivals
Front, my side (call us the “Alliance for Choice”) was recently crushed by the Egalitarian Axis in the Battle of the Universal Pre-K Lottery
When economic crises hit, politicians of both parties are demanding more regulation of the economy. Failures in banking and finance...
German Chancellor Angela Merkel is not returning U.S. President Barack Obama's calls. I'm being theatrical. Obama is demanding that Germany
“I’m really looking forward to hearing a speech by someone who is involved in innovation, knows America’s place in the world market and has
In 1917, Bolsheviks under Lenin seized control of Russia in the famous October revolution, ending a short-lived experiment with .....
If socialism were a respectable affiliation, Progressives would probably call themselves “democratic socialists.”But socialism died as a....
June 28, 2010 -- The new Atlas Society site is now live. Yes, we threw the switch and nothing blew up. We're delighted to be able to better serve our constantly growing web audience with a new clutter-free website. simple navigation, and streamlined architecture. Not to mention offering new tools like auto-podcasting and interactive webinars. For the remainder of the year new features and functionalities will be released. These include (but are not limited to): A much-improved online store (opening August 15th). For the first time, you'll be able to download mp3 files directly from the site. The product rollouts for the store will come in several waves, and the audio portion will steadily grow larger as we continue to convert classic lectures to digital format. Additional search functionalities. Video programs including live streaming.
Before philosophy for tens of thousands of years, human beings did not see the world as we see it. Why did the Nile rise and flood the field
Epistemology is the branch of philosophy that investigates the basic nature of knowledge, including its sources and validation...
The big news of the day, clearly, is that the U.S. Supreme Court has struck down the current, extremely broad interpretation of the "honest services" doctrine, under which Conrad Black and Jeff Skilling were convicted. Congratulations to our friends at the Pacific Research Institute (Timothy Sandefur) and the Cato Institute (Timothy Lynch), who filed an amicus brief in the case. A lot more comment tomorrow.
Al Gore’s Praise for Capitalism. If you want to hear it, why here it is . Personalizing Responsibility. Google and YouTube win a lawsuit against Viacom. A federal judge says it is enough that they strive to remove copyright-infringing material when they are made aware of it and ban infringers after three offences. The companies are not liable for providing a service that allows people to infringe copyright.
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. William McGurn offers the basis for a presidential speech on the subject: “Think of these bad loans as a nasty leak polluting our financial system.” The Gulf Spill. A federal district judge has blocked the administration’s six-month drilling ban. At a quick glance, it appears that the judge is saying that “the precautionary principle” is not a valid basis for such an action.
Like the pastoralists’ suit against the Industrial Revolution, Comer v. Murphy, the paternalists at the Ralph Nader–spawned Center for Science in the Public Interest [sic] have launched a bizarre lawsuit against parenthood, based on similar Rube Goldberg–reasoning. “By advertising that Happy Meals include toys, McDonald’s unfairly and deceptively markets directly to children. When McDonald’s bombards children with advertisements or other marketing for Happy Meals with toys, many children will pester their parents to take them to McDonald’s. Once there, they are more than likely to receive a meal that is too high in calories, saturated fat, added sugars, and sodium, and devoid of whole grains. Developing a lifelong habit of eating unhealthy meals is likely to promote obesity, heart disease, diabetes, and other life-threatening or debilitating diet-related diseases.”
Victimless Antitrust? Wasn't the original idea of antitrust that people could be harmed, economically, by acts that did not amount to coercion, most particularly when “monopolists” engaged in “anticompetitive behavior”? Of course, with the rise of the “law and economics” movement, the Left faced sophisticated opponents who were prepared to argue that in many cases no harm was being done to consumers. Solution? Eliminate the harm requirement. That, apparently, is the genius idea behind the Obama administration’s attempt to “reinvigorate” antitrust.
According to Lynnley Browning’s story in the NYT, Switzerland has agreed to hand over information about bank accounts at UBS that may be used by Americans avoiding taxes. Inasmuch as I do not condone tax cheats, I should not care about this. And yet I find that I do. On one level, lawbreaking is just lawbreaking. And I favor the rule of law. People who disagree with laws should work to overturn them, not violate them.
hopes will help stem the thousands of barrels escaping from its damaged well in the Gulf of Mexico, an amount that scientists said could be as high as 60,000 barrels a day. The company is siphoning the oil through a series of pipes and hoses to a ship, which will then clean and burn the oil and gas mixture in a processing device.”
Piracy is thriving at the beginning of the twenty-first century—and no, I’m not talking about people playing fast and loose with intellectual property rights by illegally downloading music, films, or software. The past few years have seen a resurgence of actual, honest-to-goodness armed pirates terrorizing the high seas. They may have traded in their peg legs and eye patches for assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenade launchers, but other than that, they’re back to their old tricks. Incidents of piracy have been increasing for three straight years, according to the Piracy Reporting Centre of the International Maritime Bureau (IMB), with the global total shooting up to 406 in 2009, from 263 in 2008. Somali pirates accounted for over half of the 2009 incidents, including 47 of the 49 hijackings and 867 of the 1052 crew members taken hostage. On January 18 of this year, the Greek supertanker Maran Centaurus was released by Somali pirates in exchange for a $9 million ransom, according to a report by Agence France-Presse. Why, in this modern world of ours, has piracy managed to stage such an impressive comeback?
The Atlas Society has now launched its ground-breaking Business Rights Center, headed by the brilliant editor, writer, and business analyst Roger Donway. The Business Rights Center (BRC) is dedicated to defending businessmen who are wrongly defamed by the media and unjustly prosecuted by the government. The BRC also strives to expose and challenge the false premises of today’s post-Enlightenment, anti-business intelligentsia.
The Atlas Society Free Minds 2010 Summer Seminar is a week-long extravaganza of brilliant speakers and enthusiastic participants from all over the country, who come together to learn and to share the good life: the life of reason, freedom, and individualism--all within minutes of downtown Washington, D.C. When: June 30-July 8 Where: Embassy Suites, 1900 Diagonal Rd, Alexandria, Virginia (just across the Potomac from Washington, D.C.) Who: The impressive line-up of speakers and topics includes: Anne C. Heller, author of Ayn Rand and the World She Made. Ayn Rand collaborator and author Nathaniel Branden, on "The Missing Link in Objectivism," Henry Mark Holzer and Erika Holzer will be speaking on "Life and Work wih Ayn Rand." Computer scientist Peter Voss will speak on "Advances and Applications of Objectivism in Artificial Intelligence." Neera K. Badhwar on "Analyzing Ayn Rand's Ethics." Law professor David N. Mayer on "Rediscovering Freedom's Constitution" Nigel Ashford on "Changing the World for Liberty." David Boaz of the Cato Institute on "Ayn Rand, Cato, and the Battle for Reason and Freedom." ....and more.
This award-winning documentary was directed by Latvian filmmaker, Edvīns Šnore, and debuted to considerable acclaim at film festivals
Front, my side (call us the “Alliance for Choice”) was recently crushed by the Egalitarian Axis in the Battle of the Universal Pre-K Lottery
When economic crises hit, politicians of both parties are demanding more regulation of the economy. Failures in banking and finance...
German Chancellor Angela Merkel is not returning U.S. President Barack Obama's calls. I'm being theatrical. Obama is demanding that Germany
“I’m really looking forward to hearing a speech by someone who is involved in innovation, knows America’s place in the world market and has
In 1917, Bolsheviks under Lenin seized control of Russia in the famous October revolution, ending a short-lived experiment with .....
If socialism were a respectable affiliation, Progressives would probably call themselves “democratic socialists.”But socialism died as a....
June 28, 2010 -- The new Atlas Society site is now live. Yes, we threw the switch and nothing blew up. We're delighted to be able to better serve our constantly growing web audience with a new clutter-free website. simple navigation, and streamlined architecture. Not to mention offering new tools like auto-podcasting and interactive webinars. For the remainder of the year new features and functionalities will be released. These include (but are not limited to): A much-improved online store (opening August 15th). For the first time, you'll be able to download mp3 files directly from the site. The product rollouts for the store will come in several waves, and the audio portion will steadily grow larger as we continue to convert classic lectures to digital format. Additional search functionalities. Video programs including live streaming.
Before philosophy for tens of thousands of years, human beings did not see the world as we see it. Why did the Nile rise and flood the field
Epistemology is the branch of philosophy that investigates the basic nature of knowledge, including its sources and validation...
The big news of the day, clearly, is that the U.S. Supreme Court has struck down the current, extremely broad interpretation of the "honest services" doctrine, under which Conrad Black and Jeff Skilling were convicted. Congratulations to our friends at the Pacific Research Institute (Timothy Sandefur) and the Cato Institute (Timothy Lynch), who filed an amicus brief in the case. A lot more comment tomorrow.
Al Gore’s Praise for Capitalism. If you want to hear it, why here it is . Personalizing Responsibility. Google and YouTube win a lawsuit against Viacom. A federal judge says it is enough that they strive to remove copyright-infringing material when they are made aware of it and ban infringers after three offences. The companies are not liable for providing a service that allows people to infringe copyright.
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. William McGurn offers the basis for a presidential speech on the subject: “Think of these bad loans as a nasty leak polluting our financial system.” The Gulf Spill. A federal district judge has blocked the administration’s six-month drilling ban. At a quick glance, it appears that the judge is saying that “the precautionary principle” is not a valid basis for such an action.
Like the pastoralists’ suit against the Industrial Revolution, Comer v. Murphy, the paternalists at the Ralph Nader–spawned Center for Science in the Public Interest [sic] have launched a bizarre lawsuit against parenthood, based on similar Rube Goldberg–reasoning. “By advertising that Happy Meals include toys, McDonald’s unfairly and deceptively markets directly to children. When McDonald’s bombards children with advertisements or other marketing for Happy Meals with toys, many children will pester their parents to take them to McDonald’s. Once there, they are more than likely to receive a meal that is too high in calories, saturated fat, added sugars, and sodium, and devoid of whole grains. Developing a lifelong habit of eating unhealthy meals is likely to promote obesity, heart disease, diabetes, and other life-threatening or debilitating diet-related diseases.”
Victimless Antitrust? Wasn't the original idea of antitrust that people could be harmed, economically, by acts that did not amount to coercion, most particularly when “monopolists” engaged in “anticompetitive behavior”? Of course, with the rise of the “law and economics” movement, the Left faced sophisticated opponents who were prepared to argue that in many cases no harm was being done to consumers. Solution? Eliminate the harm requirement. That, apparently, is the genius idea behind the Obama administration’s attempt to “reinvigorate” antitrust.
According to Lynnley Browning’s story in the NYT, Switzerland has agreed to hand over information about bank accounts at UBS that may be used by Americans avoiding taxes. Inasmuch as I do not condone tax cheats, I should not care about this. And yet I find that I do. On one level, lawbreaking is just lawbreaking. And I favor the rule of law. People who disagree with laws should work to overturn them, not violate them.
hopes will help stem the thousands of barrels escaping from its damaged well in the Gulf of Mexico, an amount that scientists said could be as high as 60,000 barrels a day. The company is siphoning the oil through a series of pipes and hoses to a ship, which will then clean and burn the oil and gas mixture in a processing device.”