Wednesday, September 1, 2010
There has been a lot of uproar recently regarding the proposed "Ground Zero mosque". I agree that there are plenty of questions that need to be answered, such as where the money is coming from, but should the failure to answer those questions stop the construction of that mosque? In my opinion, no. There are [...]
Wednesday, September 1, 2010
On September 1, 2006, four years ago this day, my grandfather passed away at the age of 72. He was one of the persons after whom I was named: Kenneth Lee Ballard. I don’t share his middle name, but there are a few other things about him I do share. Like my father, I share [...]
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What do John Stagliano, Lizzy Borden, and Rob Zicari have in common? All three were prosecuted under Federal obscenity laws. Lizzy Borden and Rob Zicari were sentenced to 1-year prison terms while Stagliano’s indictment was dropped by the Court. ReasonTV recently did a story on the idea of obscenity: The idea of obscenity is, in [...]
Men donate sperm for one of any number of reasons, and likely the top reason is simply money since sperm banks tend to pay their donors. A lot of the samples are likely to be discarded: they were either not viable to begin with, or they aren’t used within their viability period. But for the [...]
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Censorship with the vintage Tom and Jerry cartoons is a horse beaten so far beyond death that flies are buzzing around horse pulp instead of a carcass. As such, I’m not going to discuss the censorship per se, but instead provide some information for collectors. I have all three volumes of the Tom and Jerry [...]
Saturday, August 14, 2010
Earlier in my life, I knew my late grandfather was a libertarian. Back then, before I got my head on straight, I thought that libertarianism was on par with anarchism — completely anti-government, not just wanting the government to leave you alone. Now I’m sure we’ve all taken those political alignment quizzes that try to [...]
Here’s an interesting question that no one seems to be asking in this enormous debate on gay marriage: do you have a right to get married? Now if we were to go by the definition of a right that I have presented several times1, the answer is a definite No, you don’t have a right [...]
Who grants you your rights? This is one question that is an argument of the pious. It’s similar to questions like "who created life". The idea behind the question is that without God you don’t have rights, kind of like without God you have no morality. Not true. Let me submit this question for your [...]
I typically don’t talk much about energy efficiency. Living in an apartment, unless you can negotiate with the property management about your appliances, you typically have to take what you’ve got. This means that the options to living more energy efficient are limited. Now there are some cheap methods you can use to reduce how [...]
It’s become something of a reflex for me. Whenever I part company with someone, I tend to almost instinctively say "drive safe", or something like that. I started doing that while in college, and I’ll explain why, but I want you to watch this video first if you haven’t already seen it: Thanks to my [...]
