Politics

Before heading home after a recent family visit to attend the Philadelphia Flower Show, we stopped to see the Liberty Bell. One of the most interesting aspects of the bell’s history (which I hadn’t fully appreciated before my visit) is that for almost the first hundred years of its life (it was cast in 1753) it didn’t really serve as a symbol of liberty or freedom, despite the quote from Leviticus 25:10 (“Proclaim LIBERTY throughout all the Land unto all the Inhabitants thereof”) inscribed on the bell. It was simply the bell that hung in the Pennsylvania State House and was rung on special occasions, including possibly on July 8, 1776, to mark the reading of the Declaration of Independence. ...

I’m still enjoying reading and commenting on the Bleeding Heart Libertarians blog. Today while reading a post on the “deserving” vs. the “undeserving” poor a commenter brought up that perennial topic, is taxation theft? More specifically, many (but not necessarily all) libertarians believe that the state has no valid claim to extract taxes from people (backed up by the implied threat of physical force), and in that sense even a democratically-elected government is nevertheless the moral equivalent of Tony Soprano and his crew. ...

For those of you who haven’t heard, the Howard County local blogosphere has a new entrant, as Corey Andrews has started a new “HoCoLibertarian” blog, “to get a foot in the door for libertarians and libertarian-leaning conservatives in Howard County.” (Note that Andrews is also planning to run for the Board of Education in 2012; for more information see his campaign blog.) To help welcome his new blog I’m going to devote this blog post to libertarians, more specifically to Bleeding Heart Libertarians, a great new group blog I’ve been following avidly (and occasionally commenting on). ...

A while back I lost a fair amount of weight and got back into the “normal” range of BMI. Since then I’ve regained some of the weight and am now just a tad above the normal range. I’ve been trying to get back down to where I was before, with not much luck. So I’ve decided to try something different: I’m entering into a “commitment contract,” a concept that’s been the subject of academic research and is being commercialized by StickK. StickK itself sounds like an interesting service, but since I have a blog I figured I could do this myself. ...

I’m interrupting my blog hiatus to discuss direct-to-consumer (or DTC) genetic testing, an issue that has recently become a cause célèbre (at least among the relatively small group of people concerned about it) and that I think deserves wider attention, as it’s an early indicator of some of the disruption that will occur around health care in the 21st century. In recent years the cost of sequencing human genomes (i.e., the DNA information that makes you you) has been dropping like a rock. While getting your complete personal genomic data is still relatively expensive (thousands of dollars), the cost of getting less complete data is now at the point where it’s almost an impulse purchase; for example, the startup company 23andme offers a service for $199 plus $5 per month that provides information on various places where your genome might differ from other peoples (“single nucleotide polymorphisms” or “SNPs,” pronounced “snips”) and some interpretation on what such differences might mean. ...