Gmail Sweepstake -- OK. The great gmail giveaway continues. Can't seem to get rid of these things. I've got six accounts to give away. If you want one, you got it. Email me willwilkinson at gmail dot, you know, com.

[UPDATE: All gone! Thanks for playing.]

Social Change Workshop for Graduate Students -- You'll have noticed that I've been rather lax with the blog. Well, I've been busy organizing this year's IHS Social Change Workshop for Graduate Students. I'll be driving down to Charlottesville tomorrow to set things up, and then running the Workshop all next week. Check out the list of lectures, and seminar and workshop sessions. I think you'd be hard-pressed to find a more intellectually stimulating week anywhere. This is where it's happenin', folks.

After that, I'll be sitting in on a Mercatus Center Social Change Project discussion of John Nye's long-awaited manuscript on the War, Wine, and Taxes and the emergence of free-trade in the 19th century (it turns out that France is a better than you think, and England is worse). It has been one of the great luxuries of my short intellectual life to have the opportunity to hang out with Doug North, Barry Weingast, Avner Greif, Joel Mokyr and their ilk at these Mercatus workshops. I'll return in a little over week exhausted, but very, very intellectually satisfied.

Alternative History -- Reading about the 10 plane al Qaeda plot, I wonder what would have happened had AQ had their shit together. Imagine if the dome of the US Capitol had been imploded by a jetliner! I think this would have been the single most rousing target. The Capitol represents the American democracy, and hence the American people, far more vividly than, say, the White House (or the Pentagon or the WTC). I shudder to think of the vengeance we might have blindly wrought had the terrorists struck such a main nerve. Can you IMAGINE the truculence of Congress? Can you imagine what would have got in to the Patriot Act? Would Aghanistan exist?