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If you’re looking for a book about politics that isn’t just a regurgitation of things you already know or so topical that you can throw it out in a couple of years, I would not hesitate to recommend “The Tyranny of Cliches” to you. It covers timeless subject matter, the research is outstanding, and Goldberg’s a clever writer who keeps the book moving.

What follows is a slightly edited transcript of our conversation.

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You know Glenn Reynolds makes a good point when he says the people who say they’re spiritual, but not religious are basically giving license to their instincts. They’re basically saying that if it feels good do it. I want to pursue my own gut desires or sexual desires and religion works exactly the opposite way. Religion serves to constrain the excesses of human nature, to make us better than just animals walking upright.

And every so often you find in popular culture this whole idea that spirituality is something to extol and explore and celebrate and it’s wonderful and karma and crystals and reincarnation and all these wonderful things that are in tune with nature. At the same time, the same people who buy all this stuff say, “Oh, I don’t understand why those Catholics are so superstitious. I don’t understand why those Christians believe that crazy stuff.” What’s so infuriating about it is that Christianity and certainly Judaism has spent a long time thinking through spirituality and trying to codify it and understand it and channel it to make men better than they were born to be. Yet, there is a smug, self-satisfaction among the champions of spirituality who think that all of these people who came before them and dedicated their lives to thinking these issues through were idiots. They think they can figure it all out if they just sit in a yoga position.

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One Friday afternoon recently, about 50 fans and friends of the band String Cheese Incident took $20,000 in cash to the Greek Theater in Los Angeles to take a small stand against the system — in this case, Ticketmaster.

With money advanced by the band, each person had enough to buy eight tickets at $49.95 apiece for the group’s show in July. Once all tickets were in hand, almost 400 of them, they were carried back to String Cheese headquarters in Colorado and put on sale again through the group’s Web site — for $49.95.

“We’re scalping our own tickets at no service charge,” Mike Luba, one of the group’s managers, explained in an interview last week. “It’s ridiculous.”

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“It costs us money to sell the tickets,” Keith Moseley, the band’s bassist, said. “But we are going to eat that cost this summer in order to make a better deal for our fans and let them know how much we appreciate them.”

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California state teachers are the highest paid teachers in the country, with an average salary of $68,000. The typical pension plan allows them to retire after 30 years with 75% of their salary intact. It's no coincidence that the California State Teachers Retirement System has a $65 billion unfunded liability.

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