Administrative Note

The author apologizes for the two-week silence on these pages; other matters took priority. One shall endeavor to avoid such long droughtsIf anybody can be said to have thirsted for further pearls of wisdom from this dubious source. by greater diligence and pre-scheduling of any of the few dozen semi-finished (and in some cases long-promised) posts during any unavoidable absence. In the meantime, the RSS feeds and e-mail subscriptions available in the right-hand sidebar can spare any reader the need to regularly visit these pages only to be disappointed at the lack of new content.

A Personal Plea to Readers

While one is rather pleased with the quality of the readers of these pages, one feels—perhaps incorrectly—that the quantity is not quite as large as the number of those who might enjoy occasionally perusing them. So if any gentle reader is pleased, entertained, or amused by anything here and perhaps feels somewhat positively inclined toward the author, he would consider a personal favor if the reader pressed on the various Facebook, Twitter, or Google Plus buttons at the bottom of every post. Or if the reader has a blog or similar forum of his or her own, a link—complimentary, critical, or non-committal—would also be much appreciated. Needless to say any such connection could not be deemed the reader’s blanket endorsement of everything written here for not even the author would go that far.

Moreover it is conceivable that given the wide range of subjects covered in these pages some readers might only be interested in some of them, while being bored or worse by others. To the attention of such readers the labels on the right-hand side of this page are commended. Using them it is easy to read only the posts on subjects of interest, while filtering out all others.

An Invitation to Frequent Visitors

The server logs of this site show a number of frequent visitors from around the world. But while some comment, others just read. One looks in the direction of Miami, Rochester, Austin, Woodbridge, Abingdon, Jefferson City, Jo'burg, Richmond, Helsinki, Wall Street, a certain vehicle management company, and elsewhere. As one is tempted into some disreputable tactics to gain traffic, all of your reading is much appreciated, even if you choose to remain silent. But if you are so inclined, why not introduce yourself in comments to this post?

Note on Pseudonymity

A number of interesting pseudonymous commenters have sufficiently piqued the author’s curiosity that he performed a few googles and in several cases was pleasantly surprised to find that they most likely belong to fine people he happens to know personally or professionally. Needless to say the author will not allow this pleasure to cause him to publicly penetrate their pseudonymity which they may have chosen for reasons as good or the same as he did. To anybody he gave any reason to fear that he’d be so rude, he apologizes. The author trusts that commenters will likewise refrain from posting the author’s legal name which also can easily be discovered with a few googles based on hints from these pages.If anybody does, the author will read their guesses in personal communication with amusement.

Recommended Past Topics

While the author is temporarily preoccupied with a suddenly urgent matterQuite fascinating and perhaps subject of a future post. he recommends to the attention of readers looking for new content three older groups of posts:

• In the Racial Profiling Done Right posts, the author recommends a better way to perform racial profiling which strangely has not been taken up.
• In the Kelo posts, the author disagrees with many of his ideological fellow-travelers and defends the outcome of the Kelo decision, despised by populists across the political spectrum.
• In Drunk Driving Licenses, the author suggests a concept, perhaps unsound, but amusing to reason about.

Comments welcome.And be not surprised if suddenly a lot of older comments on these posts show up. The author has almost finished debugging the code to import the old, currently invisible, Blogger comments to the new Disqus forums without the aid of either Blogger or Disqus.

Administrative Notes

1. Comments on the blog were shifted from Blogger to the more capable Disqus some months ago. After an apparently brief and unintentional regression, they seem to have stuck with Disqus for the desktop site. However, some viewers of the mobile site apparently still got Blogger comments, which is a pity as those comments became essentially invisible to other readers. This appears to have been fixed now, but not before another batch of comments went invisible. As the Blogger to Disqus comment export mechanism is currently broken, transferring all the Blogger comments requires some doing and the author promises to accomplish it as soon as he finds time.

2. Speaking of comments, they are very much welcomed and preferred even over e-mails (unless they concern a non-public matter of course). The author reads all comments diligently and, at least until such time as there are enough commenters to sustain a conversation without him will at least try to respond to most of them.

3. Finally, the author is sometimes asked along these lines: Why does the author refer to himself in the third person? Who does he think he is? Bob Dole? The author—as was perhaps Mr. Dole—was at an impressionable age firmly instructed that the use of the first person pronoun is the hallmark of teenage girl (or perhaps the President giving the eulogy of a person barely known or remembered). Serious people do not use them, except perhaps sparingly in unrecorded, personal conversation with intimates. This discomfort with the first-person pronouns has become too deeply ingrained to be readily discarded. Sadly, there is too much of the teenage girl (or perhaps the Presidential) in the author. So as an expedient designed to maintain at least the façade of dignity, the author has adopted the transparent fig leaf of speaking merely of the author and never himself.

Just Write!

Common-place, yet one thought sound, advice frequently given to aspiring authors:

Just write! Put words on paper or screen and share them with whoever may be willing to read them.

Do not allow yourself to be worried about imperfection. For that will only ensure that you never write.

Perfection, should that ever become a necessity, can wait until such time.

Such advice is more readily dispensed than followed. But the volume and imperfection of these pages in recent weeks should attest that the author at least made a valiant attempt to do so.

Administrative Notes

A few changes have been made to this blog that may be of interest:

1. Readers interested in the content of the blog, but understandably unwilling to check the page frequently to discover when there has been one of the admittedly sporadic additions, can now subscribe via e-mail on the form in the right column. In addition, readers have always been able to subscribe to the full RSS feed.Caveat to readers using either e-mail subscription or RSS feed: The blog often contains typographical features, like equations or footnotes, which do not translate well into those formats and may appear as gobbledygook. Also, the author frequently edits posts after publication: to correct orthographical errors or solecisms, or to add explanatory footnotes or illustrations (but never to retract statements; in retraction is called-for, it will be in a new post). In those cases, it is recommended that the reader visit the actual blog where things display correctly and completely. E-mail and RSS subscriptions are still perfectly useful for other posts or as notifications that something new has been added.
2. There is now a blogroll, also in the right column. Listing of a blog there indicates no more or less than that the author regularly reads it and recommends it to his readers. It does not imply that the author endorses all, or even most, of what is posted there.
3. As part of these changes to the blog layout, the blog appears to have switched back to Blogger, rather than Disqus, comments. That was not the author's intention and comments appear to have returned to Disqus now. The author apologises to any commenters whose words were misdirected to Blogger comments and are now invisible. The author is diligently working on a solution to transfer all of these Blogger comments to Disqus.

Whose Side Are You On, Anyway?

Recent comments on abortion have provoked friends, acquaintances, and strangers alike to make the above inquiry and—in some of the less friendly instances—to imply that one is a renegade from a cause previously believed to have been shared. In the past, comments on climate change, immigration, homosexuality, crime, religion, and others, have caused similar responses.

One could, perhaps, just state one's ultimate conclusions—of which the author is in ample supply—add some venomous barbs for all who do not share them, and consider the job well done. Indeed, most commentary seems to fall squarely within that category.¹

Why Sub Specie Æternitatis?

In order to indulge my vanitysatisfy the insatiable curiosity of the clamoring masses, let me briefly explain why I chose this particular pseudonym. (The reason this blog is weakly pseudonymous was given below.) The author would like to say that it was his profound engagement with the thought of Aquinas, Spinoza, and Wittgenstein which inspired him to pick this particular nom de cyber. Sadly that would be a lie.

Comments Shifted from Blogger to Disqus

I am experimenting with switching from the Google/Blogger comment system to the Disqus system, which in my experience as a commenter is quite superior.

One consequence is that the old comments have disappeared—worry not, your words have not joined Lois Lerner's e-mails. They just don't show up as Disqus comments because the software to export Blogger comments to Disqus is currently broken. As soon as that problem has been alleviated they will show up in the Disqus system.

Comments on comments very welcome.

Changes on Comment Moderation and Twitter Feed

Two small changes, one hopes improvements, to the blog:

1. Comment Moderation. It has been turned off for recent posts. I thought everybody in the world had a Google Account or other OpenID, so the previous policy was a costless way to prevent blog spam. However, I'm authoritatively informed that this was a mistaken impression. Still, users identified by Google Account or other OpenID might be safer from automatic spam moderation and enjoy other benefits under Google's blog commenting software.

2. Twitter Feed. This apparently is de rigueur for all the With-It bloggers, so there is one for this blog now. Find it at @subspecie. New posts should show up on it automatically.

A Note on Pseudonymity

This blog is blatantly and openly pseudonymous. Blatant because it is published and written under a name obviously different than the author's legal name. Open because anybody with even a smidgen of Internet know-how (and many without) can figure out the legal name of the author with a few minutes snooping at most.

So why bother with this semi-anonymity?

• Truly pseudonymous blogging can and has been done, but is far more trouble than it is worth to the author. Ever increasing precautions against discovery by ever more sophisticated methods would in this case be a symptom of either paranoia or delusions of grandeur. The author tries to avoid both.
• The author, while glad to defend his writings here to anybody interested, would just as soon not impose his boring obsessions on anybody who just innocently googles his name.
• Finally, the author has used the same pseudonym more or less consistently all over the net and elsewhere for a decade or two and is loathe to part with it entirely.

Hence, Sub Specie Æternitatis lives.

A Motto for this Blog

Until further notice, I pick my oft-repeated observation that We are ruled by children … malicious children.

Needless to say, this motto was itself inspired by the observation that giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys. P.J. O'Rourke, Parliament of Whores: A Lone Humorist Attempts to Explain the Entire U.S. Government xxiv (ed. 2003) (1991).