Atheism and Unalienable Rights by Robert E. Meyer (also cited today on RRND):

Skeptics want to deny that rights come from God, but if they are correct, then there is no sound philosophical footings undergirding their perpetual claim to any rights. They are walking on a tenuous tightrope of conceptual fiat. Obviously they have not thought this issue through very carefully. . . .

In other words, atheists who speak of rights are guilty of what Ayn Rand (an atheist) called “the fallacy of the stolen concept”. Obviously Meyer has not taken the time to find a libertarian atheist (how hard can it be?) and ask a few questions. It would be amusing – for a few minutes – to hear him and an Objectivist debate the roots of rights. ( . . more . . )

Goodies from today’s Rational Review News Digest:

“Statist Joe” by Gil Guillory, a response to “Conservative Joe”, a Progressive satire that has been going around and is included as a footnote.

He fills his pot full of good clean drinking water which he bought from Ozarka, because the local government monopoly of water supply bears the comforting designation of “accepted” and also tastes funny.

He thinks back to going to church on Sunday. He is happy to have a community where he can participate with other like-minded people in ceremony. This was made possible by the long struggle to disentangle church and state, and his church enjoys the absence of taxation. He wishes other aspects of his life could be so free.

“Still the City Upon a Hill” by Olaf Gersemann

But the European model provides more fairness, more equal opportunity, right? Wrong. More than anything else, equal opportunity means equal access to education and the labor market. In both cases, the United States might not do as well as one might wish. But continental Europe’s Big Three are certainly doing considerably worse.

Michael Bradshaw: The House of Repeals

Suppose we launch a self-replicating system of robots that look for asteroids that might hit Earth, land on them and build engines to steer them into Earth-avoiding orbits.

Megayears later, might we find the biosphere depleted of some trace element that was heretofore supplied by meteors?

Logging this so I can find it later: a favorite parable of private-sector conservation is that of William Beck’s Ravenna Park in Seattle.

2006: that link has gone bad, but here’s another.

Mars has a crater named Vishniac. If you’re anything like me, you’re curious about the etymology of such a name: it doesn’t fit the spelling and morphology of any language that comes to mind.

Ephraim Vishniac tells all.

What d’ya know, there is a commercial Vomit Comet.