From CNN: “Beheaded Vikings found at Olympic site”

“To find out that the young men executed were Vikings is a thrilling development…”

It occurs to me, despite the likelihood that the young men were criminal invaders, they were still human beings….

Nick Hogan is free….but we want him not only to be free from jail, but a free man, without fear of idiotic “laws” dictating whether people may smoke in his pub. And without having to pay ransom to the state for his freedom.

Bravo!!!!! I am so pleased by this. Congratulations to Mr. Hogan and to Old Holborn.

My response (“Liberty is Liberty“) to the provocative essay (“Conceptions of Freedom“) by David Schmidtz and Jason Brennan is now online.

I’m mostly through their very interesting (not in the British sense of the word, but the American sense) book A Brief History of Liberty. I disagree robustly with the thesis of the essay in Cato Unbound (which is drawn from the introduction to A Brief History of Liberty), which does not stop me from enjoying thoroughly their book.

March 10Rasmussen Report

Just 23% of voters say they prefer a more active government with more services and higher taxes over one with fewer services and lower taxes. This finding has remained fairly consistent since regular tracking on this question began in November 2006.

I managed to catch up on some sleep, but my body says I need more. (And the fact that it’s also telling me it’s kinda 12:45 am isn’t helping.)

I’ll give a talk this afternoon on “Peace and Freedom in the Age of Obama” at the Fatih University today, sponsored by the 3H (Freedom, Tolerance, Rule of Law) Movement. And I’ll continue to struggle with the spotty internet reception at the hotel.

My response to the lead essay by David Schmidtz and Jason Brennan on “Liberty: Positive and Negative” at Cato Unbound should be up some time today. Feedback invited!

The new Cato Unbound is focused on the nature of liberty. The lead essay (“The Big Myth About Liberty“) by David Schmidtz and Jason Brennan is quite provocative. My response essay will run on Friday, followed by the responses from John Christman and Philip Pettit, and then a discussion among all of us. I hope to learn from the discussion.

ISFLC Introduction Video from Students For Liberty on Vimeo.

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(Click on the Octopus….)

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Third Wheel, by Prabodh.

From my presentation on Saturday at McGill University in Montréal on the history of liberty. (Sponsored by the outstanding Institute for Liberal Studies.)

I finished and submitted my review of James C. Scott’s The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia and now I’m working on my response to an essay by David Schmidtz and Jason Brennan on “Conceptions of Freedom,” which is drawn from their quite provocative new book A Brief History of Liberty and will be run this week in Cato Unbound. Then I will return to reviewing the copy-editing for my article on “Poverty and Morality” for the volume Poverty and Morality: Religious and Secular Perspectives, ed. by William A. Galston and Peter Hoffenberg (set for release September 30, 2010, by Cambridge University Press). Assuming I am not laid low by a cold (horrible sore throat now), I’m off to Istanbul, Ankara, and Sofia on Wednesday.

One of my favorite video clips…

The paper at Wabash College interviewed me to the famous Goodrich Room at the college before a very nice dinner with students and my lecture, which was sponsored by the Wabash Conservative Union. I had agreed to speak on the condition that I get a guided tour of the Goodrich Room, which was endowed and designed by Pierre F. Goodrich, the founder of the Liberty Fund.

The resulting interview is a reasonably clear statement of my beliefs (but with a few tiny errors and bits of awkward phrasing that are hard to avoid when talking into a mike!): “LIBERTY UNBOUND: AN INTERVIEW WITH DR. TOM PALMER”

(Among the errors, note my confused comment that “I don’t know if James Madison ever read Gilgamesh,” which is certainly unlikely, as the text was not rediscovered until the mid 19th century.)

After a great visit and a really wonderful seminar at McGill University organized by the Institute for Liberal Studies (and visits with some of our good friends at L’Institut économique de Montréal and with some dear friends I’d not seen in a while), I’m heading back to D.C.

I’m off in a few hours to Montreal for the Institute for Liberal Studies conference on “Politics & Society,” then back for a bit, after which I’ll fly to Istanbul and then on to Ankara for university lectures and meetings with the 3H Movement (3 H’s: Freedom, Toleration, Rule of Law), and the Association for Liberal Thinking, then to Sofia for more talks and meetings with the Institute for Market Economics.

“Bearing Arms in D.C.“

“Carry On: Does the Second Amendment Apply Outside the Home?”

UPDATE: Another fine Reason commentary on the right to keep and bear arms, this one focusing on the 14th Amendment and the McDonald case: Damon Root on “Getting the 14th Amendment Right:
The Chicago gun case and the fight for economic liberty“

Reuters: “Top court considers reach of gun rights”

Alan Gura, an attorney representing four Chicago-area residents and two gun rights groups, argued the individual right to own guns, which was found in the 2008 ruling on the Second Amendment, also extended to states and cities.

I’ll be in Montreal, PQ this weekend to speak at a seminar on Politics & Society at McGill University. It’s being organized by the Institute for Liberal Studies, which is a really first rate group. I spoke in 2008 (quite by accident!) at one of their conferences in Toronto. I was in town for another conference and blogged about it, only to be informed that ILS was holding a conference across town. I raced over during an afternoon break to see the conference and was invited to give a quick talk. It was a hoot.

Yesterday on the radio I heard an interview with Cheye Calvo, mayor of Berwyn Heights, Maryland, who recounted his family’s nightmare as they were attacked by a SWAT (Special Weapons and Tactics) team, which assaulted them, abused them, and killed their dogs. It was chilling. Radley Balko of Reason covers the story; “4.5 SWAT Raids Per Day”

After some shocking numbers about the huge numbers of SWAT attacks, Balko notes,

Worse even than those dreary numbers is the fact that more than half of the county’s SWAT deployments were for misdemeanors and nonserious felonies. That means more than 100 times last year Prince George’s County brought state-sanctioned violence to confront people suspected of nonviolent crimes. And that’s just one county in Maryland. These outrageous numbers should provide a long-overdue wake-up call to public officials about how far the pendulum has swung toward institutionalized police brutality against its citizenry, usually in the name of the drug war.

Three Women Who Launched a Movement