Monthly Archives: September 2025

Reclaiming liberalism 2

This entry was posted in Commentary Personal and tagged liberalism liberty SanityProject on by

There’s no hope for a near-term turnaround in the US. If there were any decency left in America, Trump, Rubio, Homan, Leavitt, and the rest of the crowd would be climbing out of the Potomac, covered with tar and feathers. I’ve done what I can, pointing out one outrageous act after another. Nothing helps. The United States is a nation of cowards with a large minority that favors thuggish central rule and controls Congress.

Concentrating only on the short term leads to despair. Avoiding tyranny in the US — or recovering from it — requires understanding its causes and changing the intellectual climate. There can be a resurgence of the liberal ideal in America, but it will take time.
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Liberty Fund article on Faust

This entry was posted in My writing and tagged Faust writing on by

It’s been a while since my last Liberty Fund article, but I’ve got a new one on “Marlowe, Goethe, and the Faust Legend”. If you’ve read The Magic Battery or the related stories I’ve posted on this site, you know the Faust story fascinates me.

The story was posted to the Liberty Fund site about a month ago, after sitting with a promise of eventual publication since last year. I only found out when they paid me.

Tech buzzword panic

This entry was posted in Commentary and tagged language SanityProject technology usage on by

EFF has run a valuable campaign on the risks of leaking metadata to third parties. If you upload a photo to a public website, for instance, the file might contain information on exactly when and where you took the picture. A stalker can make use of the information, especially if you upload photographs wherever you go. If you make a phone call or text message, the associated metadata may get less privacy protection than the what you said or typed. The US government has claimed that warrantless searches of communication metadata, which might identify the sender, receiver, and time of a message, are OK. Unfortunately, this has led some people to think that metadata themselves (I’m standing by “data” as a plural) are evil.
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Tom Lehrer and Georg Kreisler

This entry was posted in Music and tagged music plagiarism satire on by

Tom Lehrer’s satirical songs are familiar to many of you, I’m sure. Not many of you will have heard of another satirical songwriter, Georg Kreisler, if only because he wrote in German. If you’re American and have heard of him, it’s probably because of the striking similarities between two of his songs and two of Lehrer’s. Let’s take a look at them.
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