economic and political philosophy
Book Notes – Liar’s Poker
Cover via Amazon
Michael Lewis, freshly graduated with a Master’s degree in economics from LSU, got a job working for investment bank Salomon Brothers in 1984 (how he got the job is a story to itself; as encouragement to read this witty book, I’ll just tell you it involves the late Queen Mother). Salomon Brothers expanded [...]
Book Notes – Deschooling Society (2)
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Following on…
For most men the right to learn is curtailed by the obligation to attend school. ((From the introduction.)
the existence of the university is necessary to guarantee continued social criticism (p. 37)
The man addicted to being taught seeks his security in compulsive teaching. (p. 39)
once the self-taught man or woman has been discredited, [...]
Book notes – The Shadow University
Cover via Amazon
I heard about this book and was inspired to read it by a speech given by Ralph Raico on the occasion of his being awarded the Gary G. Schlarbaum Prize for Lifetime Achievement in the Cause of Liberty. (Read the speech on the Mises Institute website.) Here’s the relevant section from the [...]
Book Notes – Deschooling society
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Here are some quotes from chapter 1 of Ivan Illich’s classic Deschooling Society, which I recently re-read. The quotes are sentences or ideas that caught my attention. They are not necessarily representative, either of the book itself, nor of Illich’s or my thinking; that is, you won’t get an objective summary of the [...]
“The students will not tolerate the teacher having power in the classroom”
This is a reply to a comment kindly left by OldAndrew of Scenes from the Battleground blog, which was a reply to this blog entry. I originally just replied to OldAndrew’s comment in a comment, but my reply got too long for a comment.
if students object to the very idea of the teacher being in [...]
Why I don’t read newspapers
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More specifically, I don’t read opinion pieces. Here’s an example of why I don’t. In the Dec. 24th edition of the Financial Times, Harry Eyres wrote in a piece called Human beings or human resources?
… the Enlightenment project of raising human reason to god-like power has had disturbing results. These can be seen [...]
The beginning of the end of the airline industry in the US? Or “why I won’t fly to the US”
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Update: The Daily Kos has this comment:
Improvements in airport security have historically not worked. Yet, in response to a failed terrorism attempt, a struggling industry in a struggling economy, and the poor saps stuck as its customers, will have to deal with more restrictions imposed not because there’s any empirical support for their [...]
Changing a country’s population
Cover of All Must Have Prizes
Back in October, 2009, British journalist Melanie Phillips (author of All Must Have Prizesthe Mail Online that the Labour government had plotted to transform the entire make-up of Britain by deliberately allowing a huge number of immigrants into Britain:
Some 2.3million migrants have been added to the population since 2001. Since [...]
British banks caught overextended again
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According to the British newspaper, the Daily Mail Online,
Today it emerged that:
Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) was Dubai World’s biggest loan arranger since January 2007, according to JP Morgan
HSBC has an estimated £9.6billion in loans and advances to UAE customers
Barclays has an exposure of around £3billion
And, according to a recent newsletter from Amnesty [...]
Learning from history
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Does history repeat itself? Can we learn anything from ancient civilizations, especially the ones that declined and fell? Nah!
Thanks to scribd, I’m reading Ayn Rand-contemporary, Isabel Paterson’s “The God of the Machine”, which begins with a brief history of the Phoenicians, the Greeks and the Romans, and asks, for instance, why the Romans [...]
