You can catch an earlier interview of mine with the Daily Bell here. There’s also this radio interview with Jack Hunter from last week — a commenter says its from my Glenn Beck range, presumably because it references the progressives. Beck is half-right about the progressives, for what it’s worth. (Gottfried tackles his wrong half here.)

Somewhat to my surprise, I stumble into 2011 with three or four essays of mine in bound form. There’s the new piece “Willmoore Kendall, Man of the People” in The Dilemmas of American Conservatism, three previously published items in the invaluable antiwar reader ComeHomeAmerica.us, and a personal piece originally from LewRockwell.com in Walter Block’s anthology of libertarian autobiographies, I Chose Liberty.

Next month I’ll be delivering a paper on Kendall’s and M.E. Bradford’s views of Lincoln — with excursions into Jaffa, Strauss, and Richard Weaver — at the ninth annual Abbeville Institute scholar’s conference. This year’s gathering takes place in Wilmington, N.C., and has as its theme “The South and America’s Wars” — specifically, Southern opposition to those wars. Student scholarships may still be available.

Part 2. Part 3.

I’ll be watching Bob Barr react in real time to the candidates’ clash (again, assuming it happens) at Reason‘s debate-watch party.

After seven months, I’ve finally decided to get an internet hookup for my apartment. Until now, I was getting by on my connection at work and on the WiFi available at the mall a few blocks from where I live. Balancing out the inconvenience of not having internet at home was the convenience of not paying Comcast $60 a month. But now I’ve broken down and made a deal with the cable-monopoly devil. The company should have a technician coming by on Tuesday, even though I would have preferred to install the thing myself. (I already have the cable, the modem, and everything else I need, and I absolutely don’t want any of the bloatware the Comcast goons might want to install on my computers. But they’re coming anyway…)

Several projects will keep me busy during the TAC break. On Sunday, I’m giving a talk to the Leadership Institute’s Student Publications School. (I’ll be doing that again on Aug. 4-5, for LI’s Advanced Student Publications School.) Around the same time, I have to send in a review for a forthcoming issue of the University Bookman, and there are a few other essays and reviews I ought to finish by early next week. I have a bigger project or two to work on as well, but mum’s the word on those for now. And if all goes well with my Comcast installation on Tuesday, I may even pick up the pace of blogging. Stay tuned.

It was an ecumenical event, as Naomi Wolf’s talk might suggest. Video below, via Going Down Bitter in the Hinterlands. (Content warning: there was just one homemade sign during the whole event with a vulgarity scrawled on it, and unfortunately it pops up this this YouTube footage. Several people tried telling the guy with the “F— Your Government” sign to get rid of it, since this was a family event. Perhaps he was an agent provocateur.)

Naomi Wolf speaking to several thousand constitutionalists and libertarians. That’s not something you see every day. I’m charmed by the whole thing.

(Googling around a bit, I see that the video was shot by Charles Davis, whose blog about the event is here.)

H. L. Mencken, America’s greatest journalist and critic, wrote Notes on Democracy more than eighty years ago. His era—the years of World War I, Prohibition, and the Scopes trial—was strikingly like our own. Notes isn’t just a provocative and funny blast from the past, but also a perceptive and unsentimental report on contemporary life.

In time for the 2008 presidential race, Dissident Books will reintroduce readers to this gem of cynicism and clear thinking. Mencken scholar Marion Elizabeth Rodgers’s introduction and annotations put Mencken’s words in context and expose fascinating details and nuances. The new edition also includes an afterword by two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Anthony Lewis.

And on November 21, I’m tentatively scheduled to give a talk on Mencken and the Old Right at a meeting (in Mencken’s native Baltimore, appropriately enough) of a new conservative/libertarian organization named for the man himself, the H.L. Mencken Club. More details on that in a few weeks.

Here’s Southern Avenger Jack Hunter’s three-part radio interview with Conley:

Part 2. Part 3.

About three-quarters of the TAC office trekked down to the event, where we found, as expected, a great many familiar faces: Jeremy Lott and Stacy McCain of the American Spectator, Jesse Walker of Reason, my Robert Taft Club associates Richard Spencer and Marcus Epstein, Twilight at Monticello scribe Alan Crawford, as well as Cato’s own Justin Logan and Gene Healy, and many others. Lots of people Dick Cheney would like to see in Gitmo, in other words.

What’s a Kochtopus, you ask? David Gordon answers.