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The first time I ever saw Alex, he was lying next to a food bowl outside of the Winn-Dixie grocery store near my house.

He looked up at me with big sad eyes as I walked into the store one night. I didn’t know who he belonged to or what he was doing at the store, so I asked while I was checking out.

“He’s been here all day,” the cashier said. “Some woman put him out of the car this morning with that bowl and a ball. She took off and he’s been here ever since.”

On the way out the door, I stopped to visit him. He didn’t have a real tail, but he wagged a little stump of a tail at getting some attention. Another store employee told me that people had been petting the dog all day, but nobody was interested in taking him home.

As I was petting the dog and trying to figure out whether I could help him, a couple of other customers stopped to talk. They were both big animal lovers, they said, and they both expressed a willingness to help. Each said she knew someone who wanted a dog, but neither had a place to keep him that night.

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If you’re one of the millions of Americans who gets news and information from TV news, please read this and think about it every time you see someone on your screen shaping your opinions. Many of these people are simply performing.

Radley Balko has an amazing little nugget of information at his excellent Agitator blog today that you really need to see. Balko received an email from a TV producer with a promotional email from attorney Jeffrey Steinberger, who markets himself to stations as a “celebrity attorney” and legal analyst. Read the entire post, but here’s the key part:

“Attorney Steinberger is available to discuss all civil matters as well and any other legal matter not mentioned above.

“Attorney Steinberger is able to take a position on either side of any case– defense or prosecution.”

He brazenly admits that he’s willing to take either side — depending on which role the producers need him to fill. In other words, when you’re listening to him, you’re not listening to his opinion. Instead, you’re listening to him play a part assigned by a TV producer. He’s using his credibility as an attorney to gain your confidence and sell you a position. It’s dishonest.

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JASPER, Ala. — When my family moved to this little town when I was a kid, I thought we’d moved to the end of the world, because I’d never lived in a place this tiny. Although I came to appreciate some things about it by the time I left, I’ll always feel like a stranger in a strange land here. I’m just not a good match for the culture.

Jasper is the county seat of Walker County, about an hour northwest of Birmingham. That’s the county courthouse above, and the clock at the right is also located on the courthouse square. The city is home to roughly 15,000 people today, not much bigger than the 11,000 or so that it was when I moved here when I was 12 years old. After having spent my years before then moving around between somewhat bigger cities all over the South, it was a culture shock to me when we came to live in this place so that my father could take care of his aging parents. I stayed until I left to attend the University of Alabama and even came back to work briefly after that.

I came here today because I wanted to think about how people meld into cultures and how those cultures affect their political beliefs and actions. We like to think of ourselves as individuals — especially those of us who believe in individual freedom — but there’s something that happens to groups of people living and working and raising families together that shapes them in ways that are hard to understand.

More than we sometimes realize, much of what we are is a product of the culture in which we’re raised and in which we choose to live. This has implications for how we need to organize our societies.

I started thinking about this issue last weekend as I listened to a debate between interns from the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation about the differences between libertarians and conservatives. I was stunned at the final point of the opening remarks of the first Heritage debater representing the conservative position:

“Without a free society, you cannot have a free individual. But with an absolutely free individual, you cannot preserve a free society.”

My first emotional impulse was to call the guy an idiot for making such a bizarre and Orwellian assertion. But the more I listened to the speakers from the two sides talk as the debate went on, the more I realized that the differences between these people weren’t primarily their ideas. It was that they were part of very different cultures — and there’s no way to reconcile the two.

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