No, I'm not reading a book that has placed its conclusion on the dust jacket.

I have better things to do than to court irritation, which still doesn't explain why I come here.

I've read your sentence before. The title of the article from which it's excerpted says it all, thank you. I like jazz, and I also like some rap.

If you agree that we have "need for limited government and for the individual's freedom from the state", why aren't you even annoyed at the Patriot Acts? Or does freedom only apply to certain groups -- "people like me" -- and not to "people like them"?

I have also never understood why it's OK to accept homelessness and indigence in our community while asserting that everyone has a right to property. If everyone has a right to life, that means no one has the right to take it away. If everyone has the right to property, why can some people take other people's property away? Or are some people's rights more important than others'? If the government takes property from people, there's all hellfire and damnation to pay on the Right. If a bank does it, it's just business. If people lose their investments because of bad or criminal business practices, that's considered the price of doing business. Even if the loss was due to crime, the property is seldom returned. If property loss happens during a court settlement, that's just the way the cookie crumbles. The party with the sharper lawyer wins.

If the right to property is mutable, I see no reason to place it with the inalienable rights: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. If it's inalienable, then let's see its proponents get behind some serious redistribution of property so everyone has some, in exercise of this "right". No to both? Then it's just privilege protecting itself.

Tell me about book audiences. Do you know the single biggest circulating genre there is? Romance. The Goosebumps series was consumed by profoundly safe suburban children longing for a little scare. Girls reading horse stories don't own one. People with horses are too busy living the horse story to read them. I read a lot of mythology because I don't expect to meet God. I have observed that people who concentrate their reading on a particular subject unrelated to their work tend to read about what they don't have, and don't expect to get.

Regards--
Mary Anne