September 16, 2006

The right to bare arms

Posted by Hal Young at 8:45 PM

... Or bare hands. No Second Amendment issues involved, though apparently the man in custody either overestimated his service provider or underestimated his wife.

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Speaking of music and mascots

Posted by Hal Young at 12:10 AM

Was it my imagination, or didn't I hear Duran Duran's "Hungry Like The Wolf" at an N.C. State basketball game? It was several years ago.

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Leef on Fox

Posted by Jon Ham at 11:50 AM

George Leef will be on  Brian Wilson's show today at 1:50 p.m. to discuss the state of higher education. Be sure to Tivo and watch later if you're heading to a football game.

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Re: Tagged

Posted by Jon Sanders at 11:28 AM

1. One book that changed my life: Be Your Own Brand by David McNally and Karl Speak. It got me to give up trying to be a successful morning disc jockey, which was something I kept failing at, to becoming a talk show host, which up to now has worked wonderfully well. Know where you fit in, and stop being a round peg trying to get into a square hole.

2. One book I've read more than once: Goals by Brian Tracy. Knowing where you want to go is fine. How to get there? I mention this book on the air from time to time when in discussion about the "plight of the poor." The book is available for free at the library and likely to do you more good than another episode of Springer.

3. One book I'd want on a desert island: Surviving the Desert by Gregory J. Davenport. (I have not read it. Seems practical.)

4. One book that made me laugh: On Writing by Stephen King. Part autobiography, it is a wonderful text on the art of writing.

5. One book that made me cry: Mere Christianity by C. S. Lewis.

6. One book I wish had been written: A Return to a Sense of Shame by the NAACP. The biggest problem in the inner cities of America is out of wedlock births to teenage mothers. The cycle of poverty stems largly from that one issue. It became a plague about the time government decided to facilitate it rather than condemn it. I spoke to a columnist for the Kansas City Star about the problem and he talked of young girls he knew who had more than one baby. I asked whether he had ever said to them, "Shame on you. Shape up and start living your life right." I now have quite a collection of emails and phone messages calling me a racist. The babies keep on coming.

7. One book I wish had not been written: Tess of the D'Ubervilles by Thomas Hardy. What a turgid piece of crap to assign to a high school male. I got through it by going over to my best friend's house on the weekend and splitting up the chapters. We briefed each other on the details of what we had read, passed the test and burned the book (literally) while blasting Alice Cooper's "School's Out."

8. One book I am currently reading: George Washington and Benedict Arnold: A Tale of Two Patriots by Dave R. Palmer. It is fascinating to learn how similar the two men were in their person and their lives. As a Canadian I was fascinated to learn that Benedict Arnold attacked Canada - and lost! So apparantly he let the home team down more than once.

9. One book I've been meaning to read: The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand and Leanord Peikoff. I loved Atlas Shrugged, and everyone tells me to read this one. Someday I will.

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Conservative vs. liberal

Posted by Mitch Kokai at 11:05 AM

It's interesting at times to consider the ways in which the words "conservative" and "liberal" have changed.

I'm reading Russell Kirk's The Conservative Mind (the seventh revised edition of his original 1953 book), in which you learn that Kirk's conservative subjects had no love for John Locke.

Locke was -- as John Hood has reminded us -- a liberal in the true sense of the word, not a present-day statist. Through the passage of time, many of Locke's liberal ideals have now become tenets of modern conservative thought.

That observation aside, the real reason for this post is to highlight a great passage from Kirk's chapter on John Randolph of Roanoke and John Calhoun:

When a people begin to think that they can improve society infinitely by incessant alteration of positive law, nothing remains settled: every right, every bit of property, every one of those dear attachments to the permanence of family, home, and countryside is endangered. Such a people presume themselves to be omnicompetent, and the farther their affairs fall into confusion, the more enthusiastic they become for some legislative panacea which promises to cut all knots in Gordian fashion.

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