It is a little difficult to square the Christmas message of peace on earth ... and the body bags arriving from Mosul. The rise of Christianity was, as is true with all innovations, spiritual or material, a reaction to a bankrupt & intolerable status quo. Do we consider ourselves so unimportant or helpless that we can't imagine that it is within your power to rearrange the status quo, making the world more sensible place to live? Do we think ourself to be so unaware and undiscerning that we let creative destruction just happen to us? Sir Karl Popper: Conjectures and Refutations
Eye on Politics & Law Lords: THE EMPIRE HAS NO CLOTHES
As psychologist Victor Frankl observed concerning Hitler's concentration camps. They, even the SS, cannot steal your ability to choose the attitude with which you will address the day.
The average taxpayer -- whether a hawk, a dove, or somewhere in between -- should ask how these white elephants are contributing to countering the main threat--al Qaeda. They don't.
They merely provide welfare for constituent industries and unions that are far from poor. In fact, buying these unneeded systems takes money away from less glamorous, but more urgent, security needs-for example, armor for personnel and vehicles.... Merely throwing wads of cash at the politicized security bureaucracies does not ensure that the troops or the nation is protected.
• SECURITY NOT MEASURED BY MILITARY SPENDING Greater Government Spending Has Not Enhanced National Security [To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all One Christian feeling hijacked by politics ]
• · Ken Mehlman, Bush campaign manager, reveals the bottom-line marketing strategy that led him to victory. It's the exact same strategy that sells cars: market segmentation. If you drive a Volvo and you do yoga, you are pretty much a Democrat," Mr. Mehlman told an assembly of the nation's Republican governors here. "If you drive a Lincoln or a BMW and you own a gun, you're voting for George Bush We are Volvo v. Lincoln nation
• · · A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War
• · · · The last personality cults: Self-obsessed despots are out of fashion in most places, but not in North Korea, Turkmenistan and Togo Toughs at the top ; [Nahr al-Bard: Well on March 2nd, 1973, Yasser Arafat transmitted by shortwave radio orders to eight Black September operatives who were holding Ambassador Noel and his deputy Curt Moore hostage in the basement of the Saudi Arabian embassy in Khartoum, Sudan. He issued orders to murder them under the code name Cold River twice I Call Him the World's Longest-Living Terrorist]
• · · · · If the price of liberty is eternal vigilance, then it is necessary to take a step back from the transient issues of the day, which so often transfix our capital city, and assess the state of liberty in America. Is American Liberty Imperiled? ; [The Voting Booth Project: Where Art and Democracy Meet? Anatomy of a Vote: A barrel of monkeys, a barrel of fun ]
• · · · · · Call it the law of political gravity: What goes down (an economy, a president’s stature) must go up. So why are we always shocked when it happens? Reversal of Riches
