Two hundred and thirty-five years ago today, these words were approved by the Continental Congress of the United States of America:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

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CNN announced some time back that the White House had released President Obama's birth certificate. Donald Trump claims that he was the one who pushed Obama over the edge, but that's neither here nor there. I mention the story because just yesterday, while browsing around the "Unqualified Reservations" blog, I came across this post from last summer by Mencius Moldbug, in which he proposes two new terms, "sealer" and "opener", to replace the traditional "birther" and "anti-birther". A "sealer", according to Moldbug, is someone who thinks Obama's birth documents should remain sealed.

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In a recent post, Eric Raymond describes an alternate history in which the Internet and the World Wide Web never happened. In this alternate timeline, the DARPA research that led to the Internet never got out of the "research curiosity" stage, and instead of having one Internet, we have multiple "walled gardens" like Compuserve and AOL. It's not a pretty picture: imagine not being able to email, text message, or Facebook a friend just because you and they have different ISPs. Imagine also that there is no Linux, no open source software, no way for anyone except a dedicated hobbyist to have a computer that doesn't run proprietary programs that you can't see the insides of. Not to mention that censorship would be a lot easier on networks that did not have infrastructure specifically designed to make that as difficult as possible.

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Quite a number of years ago now, I first read Daniel Dennett's book Darwin's Dangerous Idea. This post is not about the central topic of that book, which is evolution (I'm sure I'll get into posting about that on this blog in time, but for now you'll have to read this article on my old site if you want to see where I'm coming from). Instead, I want to talk about one particular claim Dennett makes in his book: that Stephen Jay Gould did not believe in Darwin's dangerous idea, the central premise of evolutionary theory.

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A post at "Stephensplatz" describes Tolkien's Lord of the Rings (LOTR) as "A Notable Work of Children's Fiction" (that's the title of the post). As someone who first read LOTR in seventh grade, and who has re-read it many times since, this naturally got my attention. And since reading Tolkien's writing was, in large part, what made me first think of writing myself, it's fitting that a discussion of his work gets the first "real" post on this blog.

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