Pun Salad

… you need a reason to move:

• Jeff at Protein Wisdom likes this definition offered by Carlo Cardasco, European director of Students for Liberty, and I guess I do too:

  Being a classical liberal means being a conservative when you need to preserve liberties you already have, a radical when you have to gain liberties you don't have yet, a reactionary when you need to regain liberties you've lost, and a revolutionary when you can't be free any other way. And always progressive, because without liberty, there can be no progress.

  The only downside of calling yourself a "classical liberal" is people not knowing what you're talking about. But if you have the above printed out on a small laminated card, you can hand it out.

• Plan B is is from Hayek:

  Whiggism is historically the correct name for the ideas in which I believe. The more I learn about the evolution of ideas, the more I have become aware that I am simply an unrepentant Old Whig - with the stress on the "old."

  Downside: "old whig" is even less recognizable than "classical liberal". (Or maybe that's an upside, come to think about it.) And instead of a small laminated card, I think you'd have to pass out copies of The Constitution of Liberty.

• In our occasional Aieeee, We're All Gonna Die Department, check out Pauli Poisuo at Cracked, who describes "7 Horrible Ways The Universe Can Destroy Us Without Warning". As always, kids, Cracked articles are full of bad words, so ask your parents if it's OK first. But you can learn stuff about, for example, the vacuum metastability event:

  … which is what happens when the energy levels of our particular universe's vacuum go sour. Should this happen, the ensuing collapse would level Earth with a light-speed blast before any of us even had time to blink. It's probably a good thing that we don't survive long, because after that, things get really bad. All the laws of physics will go psychedelic on your poor, obliterated ass, until they eventually mutate into a completely new, improved set. There will still be a universe, just not the universe. In time, there may even be life -- just not the sort we'd be able to comprehend, even if our brains hadn't been smashed into inverted color parties riding the crest of an infinite mathwave.

  On the plus side, however, we wouldn't need to worry about whether to call ourselves classical liberals or old whigs.