• Google Goggles Searches by Camphone Photo. Smarterware (2010-01-04). Technological civilization is awesome. (Cont’d.) (Linked Monday 2010-01-04.)
• Belated Austro-Athenian Plug. Roderick, Austro-Athenian Empire (2010-01-05). This news is nearly a year old now, but Geoff Plauché's excellent dissertation is online. It combines Aristotelean eudaimonism, Austrian praxeology, dialectical libertarianism, Ayn Rand, New Left anti-corporatism, and free-market anarchism. (So, nothing that would interest any readers of this blog ....) (Linked Tuesday 2010-01-05.)

• C4SS Welcomes Darian Worden, Promotes Tom Knapp. Roderick, Austro-Athenian Empire (2010-01-01). FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE C4SS announces additional staff member and a promotion. Darian Worden and Tom Knapp AUBURN, ALABAMA – January 1, 2010 – Center for a Stateless Society – The Center for a Stateless Society announced personnel changes today, with the addition of Darian Worden as the third C4SS News… (Linked Friday 2010-01-01.)
• Market Reform as a Spontaneous Order. Jesse Walker, Jesse Walker: Reason Magazine articles and blog posts. (2009-12-31). Paul Gregory and Kate Zhou have written an interesting revisionist account of market reforms in China and Russia. Pushing against the idea that "China succeeded because a wise party leadership deliberately chose gradualism, retained the monopoly of the Communist Party after rebuffing democracy at Tiananmen Square, and carefully guided the… (Linked Friday 2010-01-01.)
• Getting Lost Outside America. ongoing (2010-01-03). If you’re outside the US, piracy is often the only way to route around the damage copyright does to international culture. (Linked Sunday 2010-01-03.)
• from the la weekly (thanks, adam!) as i've said many times, Captain Capitulation, eye of the storm (2009-12-17). from the la weekly (thanks, adam!) as i've said many times, barack obama is martin luther king…with a world-annihilating nuclear arsenal, predator drones, the greatest miltary the world has ever known, a sprawling prison system, etc. (Linked Sunday 2010-01-03.)
• It Takes a Village Atheist. Kerry Howley, Kerry Howley: Reason Magazine articles and blog posts. (2009-12-28). Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America, by Barbara Ehrenreich, New York: Metropolitan Books, 256 pages, $23 One of my earliest memories is no more than a command: "Smile." The directive was delivered by my father, standing over me in a church pew, definitely not smiling…. (Linked Sunday 2010-01-03.)
• Bummer. Anarchoblogs in English (2010-01-03). “It is fashionable to get worked up about the shackling of pregnant mothers giving birth in prison, or to advocate reform of "the system" ad nauseum. These are topics to get worked up about, but the proposed solutions are usually little better than bandaids. If people focused on ending the prosecution of victimless crimes–prostitution, drug use–a lot of nonviolent women (and men) would be free to deal only with our screwed-up society, not our screwed-up society plus the horrors of prison.” (Linked Sunday 2010-01-03.)

This new decade will be a decade of Shamelessness.

Happy Sunday, y’all, and welcome to the first Shameless Self-promotion Sunday of the teens; I’m back in Vegas — but only for about a week. After which I’m off to Hawaii with L. for the Hawaii International Conference on Arts & Humanities. L. will be presenting a paper about collaborative fiction, sarcasm and fan-snark communities. I’ll be presenting an essay based closely on Women and the Invisible Fist. And we’ll be spending a lot of time by the water.

And you? What have you been up to this week? Write anything? Leave a link and a short description for your post in the comments. Or fire away about anything else you might want to talk about.

• Photographer beaten, detained in London for being "cocky" to policeman who implies she is a terrorist. Boing Boing (2009-12-30). Since the collapse of the Iron Curtain, it’s fallen to the Western nations to take up the banner of the War on Photography, formerly a stereotypically East German sort of preoccupation for the Securitate. Here, a gang of about ten cops in the London city government’s police force beat up and arrest a photographer for taking pictures of a building and getting “cocky” (that is, for asserting some minimal dignity and individual liberty) when she refuses to turn her film over to agents of the State on their demand. (Linked Wednesday 2009-12-30.)
• Ostrom in Boston. joshmccabe, The Sociological Imagination (2009-12-21). No, she's not actually there, but a great illustration of her work takes place every winter in the city. On-street parking seems like it would be the mother of all tragedies of the commons. This is especially true after it snows. You spend all morning shoveling out your car (especially… (Linked Thursday 2009-12-31.)
• Why Kant Was Smarter Than Behavioral Economists. Mario Rizzo, ThinkMarkets (2009-12-18). by Mario Rizzo Â  Behavioral economists who like to indulge in normative pronouncements have decided that quasi-hyperbolic discounting violates rationality. In other words, suppose a person decides today that he will give up the hamburgers he loves beginning in 2010 (because of the high fat content). But then when 2010 arrives… (Linked Friday 2010-01-01.)

• timbray: Some travel-biz group should start organizing civil disobedience. Polite firm en-masse refusal to go along with security theatre. Twitter / timbray (2009-12-28). timbray: Some travel-biz group should start organizing civil disobedience. Polite firm en-masse refusal to go along with security theatre. (Linked Tuesday 2009-12-29.)
• How Automakers Abuse Intellectual Property Laws To Force You To Pay More For Repairs. Techdirt (2009-12-29). “… as cars become more sophisticated and computerized, automakers are locking up access to those computers, and claiming that access is protected by copyrights. Mechanics are told they can only access the necessary diagnostics if they pay huge sums — meaning that many mechanics simply can’t repair certain cars, and car owners are forced to go to dealers, who charge significantly higher fees. There is no legitimate basis for this at all. It’s a clear misuse of intellectual property laws — which were never designed for this sort of thing — to prevent independent auto mechanics from repairing newer cars.” [R.G.: Right on, except that it’s not a “misuse.” The whole point of Intellectual Protectionism always has been to lock out independents from peacefully competing with privileged incumbents. The thing itself is the abuse.] (Linked Tuesday 2009-12-29.)
• Touché mesofunny, Epic Win FTW (2009-12-20). Submitted by: dunno source via Submission Page (Linked Tuesday 2009-12-29.)
• Advisor: Deleting emails could make you happier. Lisa Katayama, Boing Boing (2009-12-03). If people were just more aggressive about deleting irrelevant things and relevant things aren’t that important, they would probably be happier. Because I’m happier. So there must be something to it. Emails only take up virtual space, not literal square footage, so it’s easy to let them pile up. But… (Linked Tuesday 2009-12-29.)
• RIAA, MPAA and US Chamber of Commerce declare war on blind and disabled people. Boing Boing (2009-12-29). Intellectual Protectionism Vs. Technological Civilization and Accessibility for the Disabled (Linked Tuesday 2009-12-29.)