Dmitry Chernikov’s Blog

The question of what should and should not be taught in schools is best settled by fully and immediately privatizing every school in the US and (why stop there?) the world. But suppose that people are nuts, and government schools are here to stay. We may admit that Christian dogma ought not to be taught [...]

To help you the next time you forget to turn off your car’s headlights or the ceiling light for an extended period of time after you stop the engine, and the car’s battery gets completely drained. Just make sure you don’t forget to keep it charged (charge it once every three months, according to the [...]

I don’t find the idea of skepticism so scandalous. So what if I don’t know that the sun will rise tomorrow or that I remember the previous steps in my deductive proofs? In practice, in real life I have no doubt that the sun will rise and that I do remember how I reached the [...]

The following letter was sent some time in the previous century. Dear Mr. Carson, I’d like to recommend an addition to your list of Films on Liberty and the State on the Mises Institute site. Kiss Me Deadly, a 1955 film noir, has struck me as a very ingenious commentary on the nature of the [...]

Doesn’t it sounds not a little obscene? It’s like they are going to strap electrodes to your genitals and stimulate them. Doesn’t matter how tired you are, you’re getting a hard-on and using it, too!

It’s one thing to call NPR state media, because they are financed in part by the feds. But what is the rationale for labeling your normal mainstream media “state”? The reason is simply that the members of the MSM all worship the state. They are the faithful and at the same time the low-level priests [...]

They have turned against the own kind and betrayed their own species. They hate prosperity, progress, and human happiness. As such, environmentalists are enemies of mankind, pests to be hunted down and destroyed (intellectually). It is not humans who are cancer on the planet; it is the environmentalists — or, to be precise, their ideas [...]

The most astounding thing about watching the thusly named program on CNN the other day was the contrast between the content of the broadcast and the commercials. The killing, the blood and gore, the destruction, the fanaticism of the state and its terrorist cousins was every few minutes interrupted by a message of what some [...]

I have indicated what I mean by transcendentals here. However, I failed to realize at that time that the 4 transcendentals, though they indeed correspond to the 4 temperaments, do not nevertheless take their character from the 4 moral virtues. Instead, they are aspects of wisdom. In fact, all three of the intellectual virtues — [...]

1. It appears that in the Middle Ages interest-paying transactions were outlawed as “usury” or, at least, severely frowned upon. Yet there was a loophole in the laws, namely that if a banker could not return a deposit that was due to his customer on demand, then he was punished by being required by law [...]

The 14th. Bah. It’s worthless. You can’t use the federal government to help enforce liberty, free markets, etc. against state encroachments. Cato even contradicts itself: in “Guns and Federalism,” part of Cato’s quixotic Handbook for Congress, they state very clearly that Members of Congress who support gun rights are currently engaged in a dubious tradeoff: [...]

It would seem that they do; e.g., my cat “knows” where his food is. But let’s define knowledge as JTB. It seems that animals are not so much justified in their beliefs as they are successful in their actions, simply because beliefs must be stated in language, and animals don’t use language; they don’t “talk [...]

Here is a typical statement from A Whore in the Temple of Reason: “Mankind is likely to ‘peter out’ before too much longer as a result of our environmental depredations.” What environmentalists envision as an ecological ideal is a kind of an “evenly rotating ecosystem” (a play on Mises’s evenly rotating economy), in which there [...]

The proprietor of One Fewer God writes: There’s been severe flooding here in Britain, Gloucestershire has been worst affected. Don’t worry though, the Bishop of Gloucester has written a special prayer for the flood victims. There’s 250,000 without clean drinking water, many thousands have had their homes and all their possessions ruined, but thanks to [...]

The evil collectivism of the belief that the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan are “ours” has always outraged me. In fact: The troops belong to the federal government, not you. The government does not do what you want it to do, nor does it listen to your advice. The troops don’t obey your orders. The [...]

“They” are trying to turn us into obedient slaves! Well, not exactly, and there are easier ways. (Write columns for the NY Times, for example.) But here is an example of a private company blowing the lid off the problems with government water which, according at least to the NYC government, “continues to meet all [...]

I argued previously that government should not have a scope larger than that of a county or a town. But what makes a town special? Why not go below it and talk about independent town districts and neighborhoods and condo associations and finally private properties? It seems to me that the naturalness of a town [...]

The essence of a thing is defined as what that thing is. So, given an arbitrary thing, what is it? What it is, I’d like to argue, is a set of its powers. These powers can be both passive, corresponding to a thing’s potentialities, and active, corresponding to its actualities. The powers are not limited [...]

We can distinguish four kinds of moral perfection: of obedience: legal, perfect obedience to (a) God’s will or (b) the law, either natural or divine; of being: virtuous character, sharp identity, nothing about oneself which one hates or is ashamed of; of deeds: works of mercy, successful entrepreneurship; of becoming: having no obstacles to one’s [...]

IV. Assault on Hillsbrad Now that the Armada is well supplied with the precious black substance that your Tankers have amassed, Doomhammer feels it is time to make a gruesome example of Hillsbrad. With the aid of new Foundry sites that allow you to construct more advanced ships, you may build Transports to deliver your [...]