The Weekly Rundown

Here are a few things I'm onto this week.

I finally remembered to check out Michael Lewis' Vanity Fair story on Obama. It's 9 pages and I have things to do, so I'm plodding along. 

Here's a new blog I came across that I really enjoy, called Adam Smith's Lost Legacy. It follows modern and relevant takes on Smith's seminal work and adds some good commentary. It seems like the writer is a genuine Smithophile (Did I just coin that?) and really adds some good insights. I particularly liked the entry "Another Poor Darwinian Application," regarding a paper that attempts to put Smith's work in the context of Darwinism. 

The Everyday Economist is a good blog I check out pretty frequently. I suggest comparing his entry about this platinum coin business to Krugman's perspective on the issue. 

And, here is my favorite tidbit from the week and the reason why I like ultra-conservatives. Listening to guys like Alex Jones is like gorging yourself with candy. It's delightful. It's also terribly unwise. Here's a clip of Jones on Piers Morgan, erm, "talking" about guns. A few comments on this one:

• The fact that Alex Jones is allowed to own a gun is perhaps the most persuasive argument for stricter gun control. 

• Apes will most likely take over the planet before the Associated Press does.  

• Jones mentions (forcefully asserts) that the government is buying 1.6 billion bullets and building high-tech predator drones to possibly use against US citizens, a la Mao's Great Leap Forward. So, according to Jones, we better be armed to fight them off! 1.) That's a little too far-fetch to dignify a drawn out response about why that won't happen and, 2.) if the government decided to unleash its Navy Seals, F 16s, Predator Drones and whatever other high-tech Batman-esque weaponry they have, a bunch of hicks with guns won't make much of a dent in terms of fending them off or serving as a deterrent.   

• In my article "The Cost of the Second Amendment" I made it clear that I'm not in favor of banning guns. What I'm against is the unfettered access to semi-automatic firearms, which were not even a speck on the horizon when the founders composed the second amendment. Overextending the definition of "arms" is a constitutional travesty, which undermines our founding document.