(the following is an article from one of my favourite periodicals, foreign policy magazine, in which the author charles lane describes the surprising and often tragic differences between the treatment of state-sponsored murder on either side of the great pacific)

A View to a Kill
By Charles Lane
Unlike capital punishment in the United States, Japan’s death penalty is on the rise. Japanese officials keep state executions out of public view and shrouded in secrecy. Not even the condemned prisoners know the day they will die. Step inside the gallows for a rare look at how Japan takes a life.Tamaki Mitsui was a bit surprised one Friday when his boss gave him his instructions for the following Monday: to serve as a witness …

please. do yourself a favour and browse on over to freedom25.com. i can’t believe there’s actually a market for this stuff! just this evening, i was trying to register freedom25.com for myself, as a little “digital reminder” of my own early retirement, so i type in the site (just to be sure that it isn’t already taken…) and…viola! “now you can work on your own terms!” i don’t even know what to say. the 22 year old “woman” is a great first image for the homepage. and i mean that. reality does exist for a growing proportion of women, and men, within my same demographic range, that looks an awful lot like the women and children on that page. the …

So another Friday the 13th has come and gone, and as the superstitious among us refrain from changing their beds and hold their collective breath in cautious anticipation of every possible incarnation of earthly misfortune, I thought it might be a good time to actually explore why the world has come to fear this ominous calendar date.
Several theories have been proposed for this almost pathological interest in a combination of day and number which, by all accounts, is no different from any other. They range from the historical to the supernatural, and have inspired entire phobias (see triskaidekaphobia and paraskevidekatriaphobia) that can paralyze and demoralize its sufferers for no apparent reason (aside, of course, from the numerical date on the …

(the third in a series on the rights of the individual, this article examines the inherent legal and ethical challenges of granting a being “personhood“, also written during my first year in university)
Philosophy has long been concerned with the issue of personhood. In the world of Plato and Aristotle, simply being “human” was enough to qualify a creature as a person. Over time, however, numerous exceptions to that rule have been found, and other theories have quickly followed in this burgeoning field of philosophical study. This paper will focus on Frankfurt’s theory of personhood in particular, which despite its subtle imperfections gives us insight into what constitutes a person. His theory will then be compared and contrasted with …

(the second in a series of early university papers on ethics, this article once again explores the difficult task of finding any semblance of moral justification in the killing of an unborn child)
Abortion has been under intense moral scrutiny for quite some time. A number of philosophical theories have been presented to deal with this issue, each building upon the last in an effort to formulate a universal moral rule. Not surprisingly, all of these theories have come under some form of scrutiny, and the theory put forth by judith jarvis Thomson is no exception. Her paper entitled “a defense of abortion” is little more than an attempt to justify abortion in the cases of rape and self-defense. It does …

(the first in a series of early university papers on ethics, i originally wrote this article in the fall of 1997 to examine the basic morality of abortion)
Abortion is considered a proverbial “black hole” in today’s age of political correctness. politicians do not want to reveal their views on abortion for fear of voter reprisal, and consequently, lawmakers have avoided creating any new legislation regarding the legal status of the fetus. Philippa Foot alludes to this problem of fetal status in her landmark paper “abortion and the doctrine of double effect.” For foot, the bigger question is whether or not it is permissible to act in a particular fashion when the interests of persons are set against each other.
In order …

generation one: firepower
with the advent of gunpowder, modern military strategy made its impressive entrance into the arena of armed conflict resolution. can you imagine being a fighter in that very first army without guns, staring across the battlefield with your broadsword in hand at a wall of fully loaded muskets? in all likelihood, you wouldn’t even have time to spoil your polished chainmail britches before taking that first metal bullet in the face. as you can imagine, there weren’t many of these early lop-sided slaughters, but the resulting shift in combat tactics was actually quite enormous.
during that first generation of war, all that really mattered was: 1) access to gunpowder, and 2) access to manpower. the guy with the most …