For my review of this book, click: Continue reading…
I have a bit of a twitter problem–it keeps me up way past my bedtime and delays me from starting my day’s work. I’m not sure whether or not to feel guilty about this. Am I educating myself or amusing myself? Does this count as work or leisure? Is following twitter the future equivalent of reading the newspaper everyday, or is it merely a narcissistic distraction? Well, this morning decided the issue: I happened upon a tweet by @libertarianmike: “The chances of being harmed by terrorists are mathematically minute. The chance of being robbed by your own govt? That’s easy:100%–J.Sobran.” I recalled that my father (a Classical Liberal like Ron Paul) loved Joe Sobran, but I still pegged Sobran for a neo-con, so complete had I thought was that sect’s dominance of
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Sometimes talk radio makes me crazy! It didn’t always, though. As a matter of fact, I used to find great comfort in listening to my favorite hosts when I lived in Southern California. During those years, there were several hosts I relied on to keep me sane, one in particular I dubbed “the Voice of Reason.” These hosts’ rational arguments against the false hope of entitlements and the impossibility of a centrally-controlled economy provided me a constant palliative to all the liberal rhetoric to which I was daily exposed in LA. I sloughed off the growing social agenda these hosts seemed to be pushing and also decided to give the benefit of the doubt to Bush & Co. on invading Iraq–who was I to presume to understand the complexities of geopolitics? Eventually, however, I stopped listening to
Piers Morgan asks Ron Paul what he thinks about Rick Santorum calling him “disgusting.” Also, toward the end of the interview, Morgan accuses Paul of being “completely unaware of what your staff are doing half the time” because a tweet dissing Jon Huntsman went out without Paul’s prior approval and was later deleted. In a slimy move, Morgan has Huntsman on a split screen watching Paul’s reaction. (The tweet is actually pretty funny: “@JonHuntsman, we found your one Iowa voter, he’s in Linn precinct 5 you might want to call him and say thanks.”) To his credit, Huntsman is a good sport, responding, “I have to tell you, at the end of the day, I actually found it to be pretty humorous.
I recently found Our Enemy the State, by Albert Jay Nock, under a chair in my kids’ playroom–I must have bought it long ago and misplaced it. I flipped the book open to a chapter: “Politics and Other Fetiches,” and despite the unpromising chapter heading I was immediately riveted. Although written in 1935, Our Enemy (more…)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z9CYtfqG20o&feature=youtube_gdata