To All My Readers Across The Globe.

Firstly I want to thank you all for you repeated visits, and especially those of you who take the time to leave a comment. (I wish there were more and I'd love to start conversations, especially with those in some of the more far flung corners of the world).  A special thanks to some of my fellow bloggers who have been so kind as to link and/or repost some of my humble tomes.

All that said as we get ready here in the States to sit down with family and friends for a sumptuous Thanksgiving meal, you are all in my thought and prayers.  I hope you all have a happy Christmas season and that you will join me in hope and prayer for a better new year.

Liberty and Democracy

"Liberty and democracy are eternal enemies, and every one knows it who has ever given any sober reflection to the matter. A democratic state may profess to venerate the name, and even pass laws making it officially sacred, but it simply cannot tolerate the thing. In order to keep any coherence in the governmental process, to prevent the wildest anarchy in thought and act, the government must put limits upon the free play of opinion. In part, it can reach that end by mere propaganda, by the bald force of its authority — that is, by making certain doctrines officially infamous. But in part it must resort to force, i.e., to law. One of the main purposes of laws in a democratic society is to put burdens upon intelligence and reduce it to impotence. Ostensibly, their aim is to penalize anti-social acts; actually their aim is to penalize heretical opinions. At least ninety-five Americans out of every 100 believe that this process is honest and even laudable; it is practically impossible to convince them that there is anything evil in it. In other words, they cannot grasp the concept of liberty. Always they condition it with the doctrine that the state, i.e., the majority, has a sort of right of eminent domain in acts, and even in ideas — that it is perfectly free, whenever it is so disposed, to forbid a man to say what he honestly believes. Whenever his notions show signs of becoming "dangerous," ie, of being heard and attended to, it exercises that prerogative. And the overwhelming majority of citizens believe in supporting it in the outrage. Including especially the Liberals, who pretend — and often quite honestly believe — that they are hot for liberty. They never really are. Deep down in their hearts they know, as good democrats, that liberty would be fatal to democracy — that a government based upon shifting and irrational opinion must keep it within bounds or run a constant risk of disaster. They themselves, as a practical matter, advocate only certain narrow kinds of liberty — liberty, that is, for the persons they happen to favor. The rights of other persons do not seem to interest them. If a law were passed tomorrow taking away the property of a large group of presumably well-to-do persons — say, bondholders of the railroads — without compensation and without even colorable reason, they would not oppose it; they would be in favor of it. The liberty to have and hold property is not one they recognize. They believe only in the liberty to envy, hate and loot the man who has it.

-- "Liberty and Democracy" in the Baltimore Evening Sun (13 April 1925), also in A Second Mencken Chrestomathy : New Selections from the Writings of America's Legendary Editor, Critic, and Wit (1994) edited by Terry Teachout, p. 35

JFK Rolls Over In His Grave

"Ask not what you country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country" has metastasized into Ask not what you can do for your country, ask what your country can do for you. The status quo won last night.  Nothing will be fixed.  Nothing will change except for the worse.  A new debt ceiling vote will still come up in December.  The fiscal cliff is still there. Sequestration and massive layoff still loom.

Europe is still a disaster tettering on the edge of a collapse that can push the whole world into a depression where the only survivors will be the politicians and the bankers and those few who prepared for the inevitable. The Middle East is still a powder keg awaiting a Franz Ferdinand moment that will drive oil prices through the roof and crush the none existent recovery into dust.  Even absent some dramatic event what is already a bad situation will continue to deteriorate.  There is no plan to address the massive unfunded liabilities of endless entitlements and interest on the debt.  There is no plan to deal with state and local governments going bankrupt left and right.  There is no plan to deal with an entire world drowning in debt.  The only solutions are so-called leaders propose is piles of new debt and austerity to pretend we are paying off the old piles of debt. These non-solutions will only crush the human spirit and the rob from generations unborn so that politicians and bankers can survive to propose more useless solutions.

The winter of the fourth turning is upon us. No thanks to government mis-education the vast majority both left and right can't see it. The 80 year cycle is about to reach its nadir and there is no guarantee that what will arise from it will be good.

Time To Go Long On The Oil Of Champhor

Well the Benghazigate scandal iterations were weekly, then they went to every fourth day and then every other day and now they are going almost every half day.  Earlier today came the revelation of emails from Ambassador Stevens stating that the Consulate could not withstand a sustained attack.  The newest story is that two large media outlets have the documented evidence of just who it was that issued the "stand down" orders that ultimately resulted in four dead Americans and they are sitting on the information for the political purpose of running cover for the administration.

There is a leak somewhere. Whether it's coming from CIA or the State Department or the Pentagon doesn't much matter.  I would suspect that Obama's statement that he had ordered everything possible be done to protect the personnel in Benghazi cheesed somebody off who had the evidence to the contrary.

Seems someone around here warned that the media's shameless bias on this scandal was going to result in the stench rubbing off on them.  Do these fools honestly think that they are the only ones that have it or that there aren't others who will deliberately use it to make sure that the stink get soaked into their credibility as well as the administration's if they don't release it?  The only question that remains is will the media throw Obama under the bus to try and save themselves? Jackals have been know to eat their own in the midst of a feeding frenzy.  This will only get more interesting from here.