Interesting Reading in the Interweb Tubes
- The Reign Of Morons Is Here (“We have elected an ungovernable collection of snake-handlers, Bible-bangers, ignorami, bagmen and outright frauds, a collection so ungovernable that it insists the nation be ungovernable, too.”)
- The price of free speech (“If the First Amendment did not protect offensive expression, why would we need it?”)
- Mark Twain hated God (“We call Him the source of morals, while we know by His history and by His daily conduct, as perceived with our own senses, that He is totally destitute of anything resembling morals.”)
Blog Headline of the Week
Bookish Linkage
- Reading literature boosts our “capacity to identify and understand others’ subjective states”
- Censorship has evolved with digital media
- The case against the global novel (via)
- The most accurate commentary on Tom Clancy’s death
- Things not to do in a bookstore
- Despite being a fan of foreign lit, I’ve only read two of the books on this suggested literature in translation starter kit
- Seven books that would have been even better if they had been set during a government shutdown
- Ten books that shocked the world
Nonbookish Linkage
- I say send Selina to talk to Congress
- Has “objective journalism” contributed to a political circus?
- Our surveillance state doesn’t like criticism of surveillance states so it barred a German author from entering the country
- Ten ways in which the U.S. is “exceptional”
- Taxes are leading expatriate Americans to give up their citizenship
- I knew it! You can be allergic to running (via)
The theory behind representative government is that superior men-or at least men not inferior to the average in ability and integrity-are chosen to manage the public business, and that they carry on this work with reasonable intelligence and honest. There is little support for that theory in known facts.
H.L. Mencken, Minority Report
