I am striking a better balance now between online and offline. Having taken a blogging break after my Great American Tour, I have returned to a slimmed-down daily diet of blogs old and new, but am restricting consumption to once a day. This, and a serious attempt to get back to regular sleeping habits has helped a lot. I now find I am reading "real" books with pleasure again, without straining to concentrate.

I re-read The Lord of the Rings over the weekend. It's the only novel I have ever returned to more than twice and I long ago lost count of how many times I have re-read it. An index of my success in retraining my concentration is that I found myself looking up a "new" word that I have clearly read umpteen times without noticing; "thrawn". It's a useful one too; very applicable to our modern rulers.

The book seems to have fallen out of favour with the current generation. The Misses Paine cordially dislike it. Nor was their view changed by Peter Jackson's films. They tolerated the first one, but found The Two Towers tedious. I love it myself but acknowledge they have a point. Jackson clearly got carried away with the powers granted him by CGI; manouevering more armies than Tolkien ever did - and marching legions of photogenic elves that never featured in the original.

I read each book and watched each film in turn and noticed all the ways in which Jackson strayed - sometimes justifiably and sometimes not - from his text. For example "The Scouring of the Shire" is one of my favourite chapters of the book but he omits it from the film; his hobbits return to a Shire unaffected by the great events of the story.

In Tolkien's version, of course, the Shire had been much affected. I had forgotten just how out of step with current political "thought" (if mindless conventionalism can be dignified as such) Tolkien's account is. Perhaps one reason why modern social democrats (as most Brits now are) do not take to Tolkien's masterpiece is his account of the practical effects of "Sarumanism" on the hobbits' homeland.

    'I am sorry, Mr Merry,' said Hob, 'but it isn't allowed.'

    'What isn't allowed?'

    'Taking in folk off-hand like, and eating extra food, and all that,' said Hob.

    'What's the matter with the place?' said Merry. 'Has it been a bad year, or what? I thought it had been a fine summer and harvest.'

    'Well no, the year's been good enough,' said Hob. 'We grows a lot of food, but we don't rightly know what becomes of it. It's all these "gatherers" and "sharers", I reckon, going around counting and measuring and taking off to storage. They do more gathering than sharing, and we never see most of the stuff again.'

Or how about the career of a "Shirriff" (hobbit policeman) under the new regime?

    'We're the First Eastfarthing Troop now. There's hundreds of Shirriffs all told, and they want more, with all these new rules. Most of them are in it against their will, but not all. Even in the Shire there are some as like minding other folk's business and talking big. And there's worse than that: there's a few as does spy-work for the Chief and his Men.'

It strikes me that this chapter of The Lord of the Rings gives as good an account as could be hoped for in modern literature of what it would be like to roll back a social-democratic state. In the story, most hobbits welcome the return of their old freedoms and are happy to be released from the burden of snooping, spying and busybodying. But of course their "gathering/sharing" regime has been in place less than a year. It would be a far more difficult task in the England on which the Shire was so clearly based.

Can readers suggest other passages in modern literature that are as clearly anti-statist?

Or alternatively, head over to The Guardian's "Comment is Free" section to vote for sanity in the face of this madness.

Having recently attended the Goodwood Festival of Speed and having heard reports from relatives who visited CarFest last weekend - not to mention the popularity of Top Gear with everyone worthy of the name of Briton - I don't think the LibDems could be more out of sync than this. They clearly hanker for the irresponsible joys of political oblivion.

Here's a fact for the benefit of any politicians who like winning elections. We love our cars. We love them far more than we love you. You will have to prise our steering wheels from our cold, dead hands.

I began by being annoyed by this latest assault on liberty and civilisation, but I am actually quite delighted on reflection. Sadly I cannot trust my fellow citizens to rise in defence of habeas corpus, but this is quite another matter. Keep it up, Guardianisti.

The great secret about the National Insurance fund is that there ain't no fund

I place economy among the first and most important of republican virtues, and public debt as the greatest of the dangers to be feared.

What is prudence in the conduct of every private family can scarce be folly in that of a great kingdom

Black worker awarded £27,000 after hearing colleague referred to as golliwog - Telegraph.

In order to be "good" we must be making a choice - a choice based upon logical, higher-order thought as opposed to instinctive reaction/habit/lower level heuristic thought. Most of the time, we do not make choices - we act from habit, we react in accordance to the rules of lower-level thought. It is often difficult to make a choice.

People respond to incentives. Actions which are a response to physical incentives cannot themselves be considered good. The incentive for a good action must come from elsewhere. It is therefore not possible for us to force people to be good directly - but it is possible for us to use force to compel the lower order mind into creating the conditions in which thought and goodness are possible/easier.

For while responding to physical incentives is not good, it does not follow that we should constantly fight our lower level mind. It is not necessary for us all to be ascetics. Further, without certain social and physical conditions, thought itself is impossible.

So violence can make us good in the sense that; our actions are not totally (or even largely) based on rationality, that the conditions surrounding us affect our ability to be rational, that the conditions surrounding us are largely determined by other people and that unthinking people can be affected by both positive and negative (violent) incentives.