Imagine yourself in a small, rural town, like those that speckle the back roads of our fair country from sea to shining sea. One stoplight, two gas stations, a high school with, say, 300 students--even if you've never lived there, chances are you drove through on your way somewhere more exciting. Half the town lives in the local trailer park. The other half, in cabins up yonder.

As a rule, I stay out of economic policy discussions. I am not an economist. I have my doubts as to how many professed economists actually know anything themselves, because as often as not their predictive powers are about as reliable as entrail-readings, but I tend to assume (for the sake of argument) that they at least know more than I do about the subject.

I think I've started this entry six times now. I wanted it to be inspiring, I wanted it to be well-considered... I even hoped it might be persuasive. In the end, I've settled for thorough. Sorry.

I've always thought of myself as an "issues" voter. It makes a certain visceral sense, after all--vote for the guy whose policies are most in line with your own, and you're more likely to see your pet policies implemented, right? But what do you do when no viable candidate represents you on a majority of the issues?

(Warning: This is a long one.)

Interesting article on National Review about waterboarding. Part of me still thinks it's got to be a parody, but no... Deroy Murdock falls into a familiar trap, justifying torture--sorry, interrogation methods--based on their theoretical success in deterring terror.

I saw this interesting story on an increasingly common practice--the examination of receipts when exiting a retail store. The gentleman in question refused to show his receipt when leaving a Circuit City, which resulted in the manager preventing him from leaving the premises--but refusing to accuse him of anything (this will be important in a moment).

While I'm sure every "blawg" out there will be posting on this little matter of race and education, I'm mostly posting about it because it gives me an excuse to post the work I did for the Write-on Competition. The casenote all us hapless 1Ls had to write was actually about controlling precedent in one of today's Supreme Court decisions.

My father pointed me to this Douglas Kern article over at National Review. It's a good read. As usual, I would also like to poke a few holes in it, but one paragraph in particular is worth quoting:

The other day, my wife asked, "So, would you say you are a liberal conservative, or a conservative liberal?"

To this I could only respond, "I am a philosopher."

Disclaimer: this entry juts dangerously into the roaring sea of speculative fiction. In this fabulous smörgåsbord of an entry I'm going to hit overpopulation, space travel, transhumanism, millennial eschatology, the American two-party political system and more, all the while maintaining a uniform direction in argument. Not only that, it's going to flow so smoothly that you'll never question my decision to incorporate such a ridiculous number of facially divergent topics into one brilliantly executed essay. All will be clear by the end.

I promise.

Well, the race for the White House has begun in earnest. We're not even halfway through 2007 and the 2008 election season is fully upon us. This should probably surprise me less than it does. At any rate, I would like to take a moment to express my extreme disappointment in Mitt Romney and the comments he made tonight. I will also rant a bit about this election cycle.