Quick Hitts

Amateur evil villains construct elaborate plans that require dozens of complex capers to work flawlessly. The best evil villains are far more subtle. They reach their goal with one single action, one domino they flick, almost casually, before sitting back to watch events inevitably tumble into completing their master plan. Perhaps it was just luck, [...]

Many years ago some of us were sounding the warning that once the Nicotine Nazis mastered their blueprint for vilifying and marginalizing smokers, other nannies, with different agendas, would use that blueprint to force compliance with their cause. Those predictions have come true, and now the country’s foremost nanny movement wants to control our diets. [...]

The Water Of Love Method My kids inherited my dislike of getting up in the morning. When they were little getting them out of bed for school was a daily battle. It started with me opening their bedroom doors and telling them to get out of bed. It usually ended with everyone yelling at each [...]

Novice artists are often appalled by the idea of constraints. “I’m going to ignore the rules and create something completely outside the box!” (A cliché that reveals a complete lack of creativity.) They don’t realize the boxes are there for a reason, and working within them could make them more creative, not less. For instance, [...]

I built my first website in the mid 90′s. It was a single page containing a list of local dial-up BBSs, with mine, Electric Avenue, at the top of the list. (Ponder the awesomeness of that business model – advertising a dial-up BBS on a web page. Ugh.) Before building it I sought out the [...]

After being more or less ignored by the masses during his last two presidential bids, Ron Paul is now getting some real traction, which scares a lot of people. He scares lefties, who love Big Huge Government. He scares the right-wingers who, despite their claims to the contrary, also love Big Huge Government. He scares [...]

Our world is full pseudo-intellectuals, like Chomsky and Krugman and Gingrich and that loud-talker two tables over at lunch yesterday who just would not shut the fuck up. Real intellectuals, the people who force us to challenge not just our assumptions but our most deeply held beliefs, who make us think in ways we’ve never [...]