Walking through Barnes & Noble today, one of the things that most struck me was how so many non-fiction books are published to confirm the sentiments of the people who buy them.  Obviously, people buying Ann Coulter or Frank Rich’s books are already aware that they will pretty much agree with the author before they read word one.  Other books, such as “What’s The Matter With California” are obviously aimed at confirming the views of the only people who would pick up such a tome in the first place.

Which leads me to wonder about what blogs we honestly read, on a weekly basis.  Not the ones we admire and will check on sometimes, but the ones we open almost every day, and read nearly every post from.  My list is below the fold.

Not including this site or dKos, these are my weekly reads:

Hit and Run – the blog of Reason Magazine

Radley Balko’s The Agitator, which is on our blogroll and is the best blog for my money online

Andrew Sullivan – sometimes awful, but strangely compelling.  I think it is largely because he is a writer, and the quality of writing shines through.

Unqualified Offerings – it is Jim Henley’s blog, and he’s great, but the gem here is co-blogger Thoreau

Marginal Revolution and Cafe Hayek – both blogs are from members of the George Mason Economics department, and are both largely to the right of me.  Yet both are filled with fascinating insights and information, even when I disagree.  Also, great food reviews.

Megan McArdle – what I love most about Megan is that she is willing to ask “dumb” questions and seek their answers, a thing most of us are too cowardly to do.  Also often disagreed with, but provocative.  And no one is as good, IMHO, at taking Ezra Klein down a notch.

Clearly, there is some bias in what I read.  Strangely, nearly all my weekly reads are to my political right, which is something I find curious (although this site and DK are much further to my left).  How about you?

(Iglesia is a serialized novel, published on Tuesdays and Saturdays at midnight ET, you can read all of the episodes by clicking on the tag.)

Previous Episode

As the helicopters swooped past above him, his heart pulled him forward through the jungle. His body did all it could to keep up, running faster then he had ever run in his short life. He knew who they were and he knew what they wanted. The village he had grown up in  was not a hunting village or a farm village or a fishing village….it was a village whose only industry was information. Black Market information.

His Mom was a Pirate. The whole village was, it had been trucked in years ago, a piece or two at a time. Satellite dishes and trailers and computers and the band of Pirates that used them. The dishes had been camouflaged at the edge of the tree line and the computer trailers covered with thatch roofs in the traditional shapes that the locals used. The entire village had been designed to not be detected by satellites, but no one had ever really fooled themselves that they were undetectable, they had all lived in fear of this moment, and it had finally come…’they’ had finally gotten around to taking them out. There had even been a lot of talk around the village recently about moving the whole operation, they had been here for so long that it had begun to feel like it was just a matter of time.

They did after all, traffic in the most valuable commodity on earth. They were always surprised when they heard….and they heard everything about a big drug bust. Or another round of scruffy wannabe terrorists presented as the real thing. Drugs and terrorism were small potatoes as far as societal disruption and instability went, compared to the damage to the system they did here. But they also knew that the big commando style drug and teen terrorist busts served their purpose. Entertainment for the masses wrapped in the illusion of security and control. Big brother was protecting them and was omniscient and omnipresent and the bad guys always got caught, so don’t even try it. Homeland Security at its finest, with semi-staged production numbers tailor made for…in fact filmed and produced for…the Evening News. Selling the myth of the systems own infallibility to the inhabitants of the system. The only problem was, it was getting more true.

Here, in his little village, were the true subversives. The real enemies to the system. Here, they pulled data out of the air. Everything. As much as they could process with their ranks of old television satellite dishes and their banks of old PCs. They were InfoPirates, and they pulled and sifted and sold…presumably as part of a bigger network…but nobody talked about that, and nobody asked, there in the village. They, knowing what they knew, could see and understand the damage that their product did. So they swaggered like Pirates and there was something fiercely romantic in the air. The scent of sedition, the romance of revolution. It was thick…..one guy even had a real eyepatch. The fact that they were mostly hyper-intelligent misfit computer geeks objectively both added to and detracted from their macho revolutionary self-image. But the additional fact that they were in the middle of the jungle with no normal people around for miles and miles to judge them, tilted the scales dramatically towards a self-righteous revolutionary swagger. It was all he had ever known though, so at the time he had no way to judge that…all he knew was that growing up he had access to every movie ever made…and he and the rest of the villasge liked Pirate movies a lot.

He heart had pulled his running body up to the ring of small camouflaged satellite dishes that ringed the village and he burst out of the jungle just as the black helicopters landed in the village circle, and the black clad men with their black guns poured out of them and spread out through the village. The village was explicitly unarmed and the invaders seemed to know this. As he stupidly but helplessly ran closer, he saw the black clad men enter his home and a minute later saw them drag his Mom out the door by her hair.

He had never really remembered this next part, and was now sure that he had blocked it from his memories….but he saw it now. And as he watched it unfold he remembered that the only other time he had ever talk about or thought about or tried to recall the scene was when he had been being “alternatively interrogated” afterwards…at The Center. When they kept asking him over and over, presumably for exculpatory reasons and on camera….if he hadn’t heard them saying that they would kill his Mom if he didn’t let go of their comrades throat…