Jane Haddam

Lorenzo de Medici as a thug.  I say that because it’s true, but also because it at least implies the obvious–thug he might have been, but he was no Stalin.  If an artist willfully screwed up a commision, he might have had him brought up on charges of fraud–which is somsething you could do in the same…

Okay, color me stupid, but this confuses me: >>>Of course, Jane’s description effectively makes the literary novelists government employees, dependent more on taxpayer money (through a cutout or so) than on sales to the general public. >>> Where is the “government” coming from?  I said nothing about government funding of literary novelists–in fact, government funding…

Every once in a while, things come together sort of serendipitously, and oddly enough, they seem to have today. Let me start with  John’s question about whether “people who are good at English are also good at math,” or maybe the other way around.   It doesn’t matter. What does matter is how you’re defining “good…

So, John brought up Anarchy, State and Utopia, a book I sometimes suggest to people who know nothing about libertarianism and either can’t or won’t read Ayn Rand, but a book  I always recommend with mental reservations. I first heard of Robert Nozick in 1983.  I bought the book in London in 1984, going to…

So, Robert says: >>With due respect for Locke, he is NOT where rights begin. Try Runnymede, only they weren’t new then.<<< But  I didn’t say rights started with  Locke–in fact, I’ve said several times on th is blog that rights are not invented by human beings, but inhere in the person whether human beings choose…

First, conratulations to Lee.  I’m so used to thing of Derrida and company as plagues of the English Department that I forget that at least some of them started out as philosophers. It’s enough to make your head ache. As to the Founding Fathers of the United States, however, there is simply no way that…

So, my day started-well, it started before it was a day, actually, when the brownout hit around three o’clock.  The full scale power outage made it in at four thirty.  That last one was the kicker, because of course I  had a couple of freezers full of food, and the power company kept telling me…

There was supposed to be a post yesterday.  I even know what I  wanted to say in it.  I just wanted to write it on a better, and faster, computer than the one I have at home, so I put it off until I could run into school and get some time on the machines…

First, let’s start with Robert’s comment that the Ratchetts of this world are just the hippies’ enforcers. The Ratchetts are never anybody’s enforcers but their own.  Their interest is in personal, immediate and individual power.  They’ll use the language of hippies if that will get them where they want to go, or the language of…

No, I’m not about to go on a rant about global warming, for or against.  I’ll get to the reason for the title in a minute. Before then, it seems to me that we’re getting things a little confused, and since I was the one who started the confusion, I’d better be the one to…