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The Return Monday

I've returned from vacation. Same as every year: Houghton Lake (Michigan's largest inland lake) for a week with Marie, seven kids, and 40 in-laws. It's a pleasant time, and it leaves a ton of time for reading. It's the only time of the year that I actually get tired of reading because there's pretty much nothing else to do. Except drink, of course, which I do liberally as well. For variety, I drink and read at the same time, with some jotting and writing thrown in for good measure.

My summer reading list got derailed a bit, though. I've made good headway with the two Popper books, the two Nock books, and re-reading The Black Swan, but the others have been cast aside in favor of Terry Teachout's excellent biography of H.L. Mencken (which you can buy for one cent, plus $3.99 s/h, at Amazon) and Daniel Kahneman's astounding Thinking Fast and Slow. More on the books at a later date, but even though I'm not even halfway done with either of them, I enthusiastically recommend both.

Russell Taleb

Speaking of Taleb, I listened to a BBC podcast about him while driving back on Saturday. Taleb has had a huge influence on David Cameron, so Britain is understandably curious about him.

The BBC has nervously concluded that Taleb is a traditional conservative, in the tradition of Edmund Burke, a guy who believes in the principle of subsidiarity (though the podcast producers don't use that phrase, instead emphasizing that Taleb believes bigness produces fragility and smallness produces robustness, and, therefore, small is beautiful and big government is an abomination).

I honestly don't recall Taleb ever mentioning Burke, and I never considered Taleb a traditional conservative in the vein of Russell Kirk (for starters, Kirk hated Popper and Taleb worships him). But everything on the podcast made sense. Perhaps I found a kindred spirit without even trying.

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