Today's Politicos vs The Words and Deeds of The Founders

This was just another one of those fun things to post on a Saturday.

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Here is something unexpected from Richard Dreyfuss.

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A few years ago I spent some time trying to understand Plato's Republic, and jotted down some of my thoughts.

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Scientists have discovered that a protein encoded by a gene called KL-VS may boost an individual’s IQ by six points. That is really good news since we’ve been looking for a way to get a few points back that we lost while thumbing through a recent issue of People Magazine. We probably have no hope of repairing the damage caused from the fifteen minutes tuned in to Hardball on MSNBC last week. Upon hearing the news of the KL-VS gene, Joe Biden wondered if he could get it in a smoothie. Um, Joe, you’d better ask for an extra-large.

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Congressman Trey Gowdy has some questions for the gallant members of our press. As he suggests, draw your own conclusions.

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In the second chapter of The Ethics of Rhetoric, Richard Weaver uses the “Scopes Monkey Trial” (although he refers to it as The Scopes Evolution Trial), to demonstrate the uses of rhetorical and dialectical argument.

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Author Scott Martelle’s account of the efforts to find the body of John Paul Jones and the man chiefly responsible doing so, is fascinating and thorough. He manages to incorporate many interesting anecdotes and historical details along the way, all of which add color and texture to the tale, and it’s a tale worth reading.

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Another weekend post from the lighter side. While visiting a family member in the Mayo clinic, the following conversation was recorded in the elevator.

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Inventing Freedom elaborates on the themes in Daniel Hannan’s “The New Road to Serfdom.” The earlier book, subtitled “A Letter of Warning to America,” is exactly that. In it Hannan sounded the alarm against forsaking our political inheritance and following Europe into “uniformity, socialism and insolvency: “The New Road to Serfdom. Inventing Freedom identifies the pilots who would take us there, but not until the closing chapters.

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Whether you are serious scholar, a devotee of naval history, or just like a good book, Sloop of War does not disappoint. The amount of research done by author Ian McLaughlan and Derek Andrews, to whom the book is dedicated, is simply astounding. Inspired by a feeling that the literature was lacking on this unappreciated class of sailing ship, McLaughlan made it his mission to give the sloop its due.

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