Archive for December, 2006

Wait for the Box Set

Wednesday, December 27th, 2006

Rather interesting piece in the Guardian on the phenomenon taking off in the UK (and here, as the DVD shelves in the big stores attest) of watching television in the form of DVD box sets rather than episodic broadcasts.  I’m probably obsessive-compulsive enough to fall into that kind of habit, but I haven’t yet: I’m [...]

Hammer Time

Wednesday, December 27th, 2006

Wired has some advice for fixing the leaky RFID in passports issued by the U.S. State Department after Jan. 1.
I really wish I had replaced my passport this year, so I could avoid the RFID peril for a decade, by which time maybe they’ll have moved on to the next privacy-invasion scheme instead.  As it [...]

If Bohm-Bawerk Had Given Us a Reading List, We Would Have Thrown It Back At Him

Wednesday, December 20th, 2006

Henry Regnery’s Memoirs of a Dissident Publisher show a side of Austrian-born economist Joseph Schumpeter seldom seen elsewhere:
At an early lecture he gave us a reading list, with the remark, “If one of our professors at the University of Vienna, Bohm-Bawerk, for example, had given us a reading list, we would have thrown it back [...]

The Wacky World of Jim Gilmore

Wednesday, December 20th, 2006

Former Virginia gov and RNC chief Jim Gilmore is thinking about running for the Republican nomination in ‘08. He’s best known for abolishing cutting the car tax, which is something. But who can take seriously someone whose Iraq policy sounds like this:
He did say he would not support an increase in troop strength [...]

If you like Albert Jay Nock…

Monday, December 18th, 2006

…take a look at some of the things the Mises Institute has been putting on-line: not just his better known works (Memoirs of a Superfluous Man; Our Enemy, the State) but also some hard-to-find volumes, including The Book of Journeyman, a collection of many of his short pieces for the New Freeman. I set [...]

Antleview

Sunday, December 17th, 2006

EnterStageRight’s Bernard Chapin interviews my old colleague Jim Antle.

The Life of a Book Review Editor

Saturday, December 16th, 2006

Sam Tanenhaus of the New York Times Book Review answers readers’ questions. As a literary editor at TAC, I didn’t worry aobut whether we were reviewing enough nonfiction by women (why doesn’t Tanenhaus simply point out that much more nonfiction is written by men anyway, which at least seems to be the case), but otherwise [...]

The Wanderer Looks At “GOP And Man at Yale”

Saturday, December 16th, 2006

A friend brings to my notice this piece (originally from the Wanderer) which comments on my “GOP and Man at Yale” article from a few months back. It’s a fair piece, but it misses an important point: the difference between talk-radio conservatism and the political philosophies of a Kirk or a Weaver is not [...]

Russell Kirk on War for Oil (and more)

Saturday, December 16th, 2006

A week or two back I was asked if I knew where to find an on-line copy of Russell Kirk’s 1991 Heritage Foundation talk in which he more or less directly called the first Gulf War a war for oil. Well, it turns out that Wes McDonald has put it up here. It’s worth [...]

Trust, Don’t Verify

Tuesday, December 12th, 2006

That seems to be Ramesh Ponnuru’s advice to social conservatives concerning Mitt Romney. My former colleague Jim Antle begs to differ.
There was a time — a long time ago now — when even movement conservatives were willing to hold off on throwing their support behind a candidate like Romney; when they would try very hard [...]