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I have very few pictures from my past. I save few mementos, at least not in an organized fashion. I have boxes of junk that I’ve pulled out of desk drawers when I’ve moved in the past, but only because I haven’t gotten around to discarding the 99 percent of it that’s junk.

When I talk to others about their past, they frequently pull out photo albums or scrapbooks. I have very little like that to show. If you want to travel through my past, my bookshelves are the place to start.

I spent an hour Monday night idly looking through my books. I wasn’t looking for something to read. I wasn’t even opening them. But spending time looking through books I haven’t read in years — just touching them and reading the titles — is a bit like time travel. Even if I never read a book again, it seems to carry a bit of me in it — whatever I was like when I experienced the book the first time.

This German history book takes me back to when I was a 19-year-old sophomore at the University of Alabama. I was taking a class covering the development of modern Germany starting in the 19th century and looking at how Hitler eventually came to power. Each Monday afternoon, I spent three hours listening to Dr. David McElroy lecture in a dry but informative voice on the third floor of ten Hoor Hall. (We shared more than our names. Oddly, Dr. McElroy and I also drove identical cars.)

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If you missed my  appearance Saturday on local talk radio in Fairbanks, Alaska, I now have links to the archive of the broadcast. The first hour is here and the second hour is here. Both files are MP3s, so they’re suitable for listening to in your browser or downloading to save for posterity.

Hosts Josh Bennett and Steve Floyd were gracious enough to keep me around for both hours, and we had a very wide-ranging and laid-back conversation about why the coercive state is a bad idea. We also touched on issues related to what those of us who oppose the state should be doing in the meantime. (Spoiler: My answer is that we have to simply get ourselves prepared and wait for the right opportunity when it comes along. I wish I had a magic bullet.)

I just got around to listening to the entire thing Monday afternoon and it reminds me that I need to do more of this for practice. I can hear times when my mental gears are grinding and I’m thinking, “What in the world did I intend to say when I started this answer 15 seconds ago?”

Overall, it was a lot of fun for me. It’s long, but if you’re interested, please take a listen.

Charging someone with racism has become the ultimate trump card for almost anyone in modern American society. So what do we do when the person playing the race card is simply a moron who’s seeing something that isn’t there?

In the case of the University of Alabama’s student newspaper, the answer was to apologize anyway and promise to be even more un-racist. In doing so, the paper is bowing to idiots and promising to self-censor in an effort to make it harder for morons to misunderstand what they’re looking at.

Let me back up.

After Alabama’s last-second loss to hated arch-rival Auburn in a football game nine days ago, the Crimson-White ran an editorial cartoon that satirizes the current tendency by many to blame the president for anything that goes wrong. The cartoon shows an Alabama player tripping while an Auburn player races by to score the winning touchdown. The caption says, “This is what happens in Obama’s America.” It’s clearly a parody of the graphic memes that say, “Thanks, Obama,” any time something goes wrong in the country.

I don’t think it’s an especially funny cartoon, but it’s probably no worse than what many college-level cartoonists produce. (When I was on staff at the CW many years ago, we had a couple of really excellent cartoonists, so the current work looks amateurish and lazy to me, but that’s a different issue.) Even though I don’t find the cartoon funny, it’s impossible to find racism in the art unless you’re determined to see something that isn’t there.

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