Attribute to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

Huh! Yet another free book for our subscribers. This time it is Aristotle on Human Activity, a 3-volumes in 1 collection of Nichomachean Ethics, Politics (the sequal to Ethics) and Rhetoric (on the art of persuasion).

The first two are from the old Everyman's Library editions, with excellent introductions and translations. The Rhetoric from the Loeb Classical Library Greek/English version from 1926. (The Greek version has been left out, but the extensive notes are included.)

Aristotle functions more as a historian and analyst here, describing rather than prescribing. Many works on ethics tell people what the author thinks they should think and do; here the author describes what the people of his time and place considered the right things to think and do. In Politics he analyses the kinds of government various peoples have had and how well they allowed people to live ethically.

Rhetoric is about how in practical politics one needs to persuade people who can not or will not be guided by reason. “Yet,” as I often note, “We let them vote!”

 

From a Futureist mailing list, we find:

RUSSIA IS WORKING ON ITS OWN PLAN TO BLOW UP KILLER ASTEROIDS
by Kristin Houser

Russian space agency Roscosmos is creating a center devoted to monitoring meteors, comets, and asteroids to ensure they don’t collide with Earth — even it means having to blow them up in space.

[Read More]

I'm glad somebody is.

 

I see Radio Shack has a micro-USB cable that's also a bottle opener. I kid you not. [Link]

 

And yet again, it is the sun that makes climates change:

Solar Variability And Climate – Prof. Joanna D. Haigh
a top UK physics professor, on the role of solar variability on climate.
[Watch the video]

 

In case you missed it, it seems that the diabetes drug metformin turns out to be somewhat of a “cures old-age” drug. Excited researchers are going full steam ahead on this. [Read More] Lots of links to more info at the bottom of that page. too. As an old person, I look at this kind of thing with … interest.

 

That's all I got. Stay deplorable, my friends.