5 Blogs That Make Me Think

Recently, I was honored to be tagged by Jake Silver, our Missionary to the Frozen, Northern Wastelands and our Nun of the Above as a Thinking Blogger. Our Missionary, in his paean to The Scratching Post, even praised me with the endearing term, "infuriating."

Thanks, pal. Thank you too much. :-)

Having been tagged thusly, I've needed to name 5 blogs that make me think and after allowing much moss to grow under my feet, I think I've finally got my list. Here are the rules for those that are tagged.

1. If, and only if, you get tagged, write a post with links to 5 blogs that make you think

2. Link to this post so that people can easily find the exact origin of the meme

3. Optional: Proudly display the ‘Thinking Blogger Award’ with a link to the post that you wrote.

With the preliminaries done, here we go.

1. Our Monsignor of the Breweries, Ogre. I have to admit I don't get over to his site as much as I'd like, but I'm always intrigued by his dogged focus on the issues facing his native North Carolina. Lots of us write about Iraq or other national affairs, but in reality, we have minimal impact on those since our voices are so diluted. In local affairs, you can really make a splash. Local politics aren't nearly as sexy, though. Everyone wants to save the world, no one wants to take out the trash. Ogre really cares about North Carolina.

2. Skippy the Bush Kangaroo. I don't think that Skippy and I agree on anything. If we went out to dinner, I don't think we'd be able to pick a restaurant we both liked in anything less than half an hour. He does make me think, though. He and his partners write a lot of inside baseball posts about the machinations of the lefty blogosphere and the analysis is typically well-considered and thoughtful. They also post music videos that you might not otherwise see. It's a different view of the world and I'm better for reading it.

3. Blackprof.com. Blackprof is the World's Worst Blog, hands down. There's just no comparison to this hideous, racist, sophist piece of trash. After reading it for a while, however, you begin to understand a certain mindset within America, both within and without the black community. The authors are a collection of university professors from around the country. The posts are typically either obscure, cherry-picked examples of racism or utterly irrelevant history lessons on racism from 100 years ago. For example, in April, Major League Baseball spent millions of dollars celebrating Jackie Robinson. Every team in the league did something. Every sports talk radio station in the country, stations that are audio Mecca for white males, focused on Jackie Robinson and What He Meant for a full week. Meanwhile, Blackprof ignored this and wrote instead about the LA riots of 1992, how blacks should not snitch on each other to the police, and how that cultural bellweather of America, Turner County High School, didn't want multi-racial dancing at their prom. Blackprof is a view into a completely isolated world of paranoia and xenophobia. If you go through their posts and interchange the words "white" and "black", the blog reads like an ongoing KKK manifesto.

4. The Entrepreneurial Mind. This one is on my home-made portal as a link in the business section, but I have to admit I don't get to it as often as I should. Maybe including it here will push me to read it more often. Here's a sample from a post on why certain people become entrepreneurs.

four-in-ten (38%) respondents said the biggest influence in becoming an entrepreneur is passion. As an influence, passion. I tell aspiring entrepreneurs the importance of this all of the time. It is too hard and too much work being an entrepreneur to look for anything else as your main motivation.

Passion was followed distantly by natural entrepreneurial inclination (20%) and being "born into it" (18%).
Business owners are most passionate about building their customer base (34%).

Turning a profit (27%) and closing the deal (15%) were of less importance. This is also consistent with much of the research on entrepreneurial motivation. It ain't all about getting rich!

5. Another blog on my portal is Transterrestrial Musings by Rand Simberg. He's a futurist with an optimistic bent. He and I agree on quite a bit, but he always thinks several levels deeper than I do and my own thought processes are improved because of it.

Wow. That was harder than I had thought it would be. I tried to stay away from the big bloggers like Hugh Hewitt and Mark Steyn since they would be unlikely to respond. There were so many to choose from after that that picking just five was a tough call. Hopefully, they'll make you think, too.