Larrey Anderson remarks on a dearth of thinkers in America and recommends Paul Johnson’s book, Intellectuals. “Our present situation is not good for the Republic,” he writes. “By selling feel good snake oil intellectualism, we have polarized America into unwavering ideological camps, each camp filled with phony sophisticates. How we got ourselves into this pickle is an interesting story.”

Anderson says we’ve been teaching relative values in our society for at least fifty years, but I believe I read Mortimer Adler say in an essay he wrote in 1940s that we’ve been teaching relative values since the late 1800s.

The new head of the National Endowment for the Arts reveals something of his perspective–Peoria is small potatoes; the NEA is about real venues.

I hear Margaret Thatcher said, “The trouble with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.” This is why health care reform, if it is a method for reducing some people’s medical bills by giving them the taxes taken from others, is only another problem, not a solution. Why do anti-trust laws not apply to insurance companies? Why are those companies bound by state lines? Is that not a tax-free way to increase competition, if that is the goal for health care reform?

But about socialism, here’s another good critique from the former prime minister:

Portraying Mr. Obama as The Joker from the most recent Batman movie is racist and hateful. The same of Mr. Bush, not so much. I wonder if it would be worth the effort to compose (being respectful of copyright) a variety of politicians as villains. Throwing all ideology aside, there could be Barney Frank as Stephen King’s Pennywise, John McCain as Norman Bates (done as a movie poster so the connection could be made), Arlan Specter as Two-Face, and Rahm Emanuel as Alex de Large.

Course, I usually just think of these things and don’t act on them.