I am trying out a bit of a change in my posting schedule and moving my podcast round-up to the end of the week to hopefully free up the early part of the week for posts I want to spend more time writing on over my weekend. It also gives me time to catch up on the podcasts I am not able to listen to live using the Player FM app for my Android devices.

Podcasts

Don’t Let it Go … Unheard – Hosts Amy Peikoff and Bosch Fawstin spent the bulk of this week’s episode discussing the vote by the FCC Committee to regulate broadband internet as a public utility under Title II, the same rules that apply to phone companies. They quoted quite a bit from a six-page dissenting opinion by Ajit Pai, a member of the committee. In the last 30 minutes or so they talked about the latest foolishness from Vice-President Joe Biden, the fight in Connecticut over Tesla auto sales, good and interesting news out of Oklahoma, and a great quote from the finale of Agent Carter. This was a great show and you can find Amy’s show notes here.

Yaron Brook Show – Yaron did a special Friday of his show from CPAC in Washington D.C. with a format quite a bit different from his usual time slot. He started off discussing his overall impressions of CPAC and what conservatives are focusing, the main observation being the lack of good, principled ideas and why that costs Republicans. Most of the show was filled with short interviews with Grover Norquist on the positives he sees today, Peter Schwartz on his new book on selfishness, former Ambassador John Bolton on the situation in the Middle East, Adam Mossoff on property rights and more. In the early part of the show, Yaron mentions a talk by Ayn Rand on her views of conservatives. He said it was on Youtube but I could not find it there. I did find the audio recording on the Ayn Rand Institute Soundcloud channel.

Philosophy in Action – This week Diana Hsieh and Greg Perkins answered questions on the nature of character, revenge porn, and coming out as an athiest. I found the discussion on what elements form a person’s character quite fascinating.

Peikoff.com Episode 362 – This week Leonard Peikoff announced that he is taking a break from the podcast until summertime. In the meantime Yaron Brook will still be answering questions on alternate weeks, while Leonard’s weeks will be filled with episodes taken from his radio program. This week Yaron Brook answered questions on inequality, vaccinations, why Objectivists have different opinions on immigration, supporting allies, and measuring value in terms of currency.

Yaron Brook Show – I really enjoyed Yaron’s show in his regular time on Monday’s at 11:00am eastern time. The theme of the show was applying principles to politics and he started off breaking down two concretes, opinion pieces from Barney Frank and Paul Krugman. He worked his way through elements of both pieces in turn and demonstrating how you stop and think about what is written and how you can apply principles to understand what it actually means. The second hour was a more abstract discussion on principles. His first discussed the fact that the principle of individual rights as the basis for proper government. An interesting comment he made in regards to individual rights is that it allows you to know whether a government program is good or bad, even if you cannot explain what a proper program would be. The second example was the principle of the rule of law which he related to the, at the time, upcoming Supreme Court case, King v. Burwell. He points out the same issue I blogged about in this post, that if the Supreme Court finds in favor of the government they are basically changing the United States from the rule of law to the rule of men.

And more

I have started making more of an effort to start my day off on the right foot. To that end I am trying to get up, do a bit of exercise, riding my bike on my trainer, and do something mentally stimulating and educating. This week that has been listening to Harry Binswanger’s lecture series on Logical Thinking. This is proving very interesting as, at least as far as I have gotten so far, it is presenting in a different format the same information that is presented in his book How We Know.

When I am not listening to the podcasts at work, I have also been listening to Leonard Peikoff’s lecture series on the Art of Thinking. This was actually the first thing I bought from the Ayn Rand E-store more than 2 years ago. I think I have right around 100 titles downloaded at this point.