Monthly Archives: May 2012

A free-wheeling anthropological history of the idea of conservatism — the fanatical preservation of the status quo — illustrating why you will not be released from your self-imposed bondage by anyone but your self. In other words, a typically light-hearted … Continue reading →

My first exposure to the Khan Academy was a John Stossel video in which a public school teacher was bragging that her students were actually excelling in math, now that she was no longer boring them with her ed-school-cultivated ignorance. … Continue reading →

One of our cats scratched me on the nose about a week ago and I ignored the wound until it turned into impetigo. Consequently, I’m not all that pleasant to gaze upon, just now. I thought about doing an audio-only … Continue reading →

From this week’s videocast, a short discussion of the nature of groups and why they are most fundamentally anti-self, and that a person seeking the benefits of self-adoration must anticipate that most groups will strive to frustrate that objective.

Just a couple of topics this week. The idea of dead-end teleologies is vital I think. If your philosophical claims about human behavior are in conflict with your actual everyday existential behavior, the intellectual error can cascade into a self-destructive … Continue reading →

Henry Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson is a classic of freedom-seeking economic writing. Starting with Frédéric Bastiat’s idea of the seen and the unseen, Hazlitt takes the reader through one economic fallacy after another. It’s a wonderful book, a priceless … Continue reading →

Richard Nikoley, owner of premier paleo-blog FreeTheAnimal.com, totally gets Man Alive! In consequence, Richard’s review of the book is full of interesting insights. Richard made a Skype video of the two of us talking about the book. I think the … Continue reading →

This is the first of the Skype video interviews I plan to do. In this videocast, I talk with Brian Brady, a California Tea Party activist and Ron Paul supporter, about a wide range of strategies for achieving greater political … Continue reading →

A short clip from this week’s videocast. This segment evangelizes your ego.

There is no subject on earth so obvious that an academic won’t study it — on someone else’s dime, of course. In the weekly videocast a few weeks ago, I mentioned that dogs dream, jokingly suggesting that this could be … Continue reading →

This week’s video and podcast are linked below. The headline summarizes the content fairly badly, but that’s your incentive to watch the video, ain’t it? The audio-only version of this video is linked below, or you can find it on … Continue reading →

[I grew up in a grimy little industrial town called Danville, Illinois. It wasn’t until I was four years old that I stumbled onto an atlas and discovered why I had felt so much out of place from the day … Continue reading →

If you can’t indulge your self, who can you indulge? It’s not mine. Frank Zappa has it with yourself as one word. But it seems like a fine idea to me, in every respect. I’ll give you the best of … Continue reading →

Jim Klein asks libertarians, conservatives and especially philosophers, Where is Man Alive! wrong? I have posted my own challenges, including this one, still unanswered. Meanwhile, in the world of newspaper news, Paul Ryan cannot run fast enough to get away … Continue reading →

Money quote: “Five hundred days from today, we could be living in a different world.” This is more from this week’s video/podcast. In this clip, I discuss the idea of evangelizing egoism. Here’s why it matters: The typical libertarian/conservative strategy … Continue reading →