“Did you know

“Did you know that Pres. Obama, at his town hall meeting about racism in America, showed a run-of-the-mill porno film to prove that there is virtually NO racism in America?”  

“When man loses sight of his moral ends, his degradation commences.” Russell Kirk

2016, the struggle to sustain the permanent things never ceases.

“The greatest happiness of the greatest number ... has come to mean the greatest idleness of the largest possible population. ...The populace is manipulated by the press, closed with every variety of superstition, bullied by the advertiser and propagandist. …Social radicalism is in the American’s blood, although because of his individualism and rough comradeship, it will take some hammering to drive a coddling socialism into America. … After World War I, America still can’t shake three social impulses that conservatives detest:  the conversion of political power to the ends of a leveling humanitarianism, the development of a new and complex American imperialism, and the infection of all segments of society by a gross hedonism.”  George Santayana

George Orwell describes “the classes and occupations from which the managers and planners of the new absolute state are being recruited: bureaucrats, scientists, technicians, trade-union organizers, publicity experts, sociologists, teachers, journalists, and professional politicians.”

“When man loses sight of his moral ends, his degradation commences.”  Russell Kirk      

Feelings rule today; is liberty dead?

“…there is none sadder or more striking than this, that you may make everything else out of the passions of men except a political system that will work, and that there is nothing so pitilessly and unconsciously cruel as sincerity formulated into dogma.”  James Russell Lowell

“It is honour, justice, culture, that make liberty invaluable, else worse than worthless if it means only freedom to be base and brutal.” James Russell Lowell

Feelings rule today; is liberty dead?

…”Modern populations are resolved to extend the functions of government immeasurable beyond its old duties of defense and maintenance of internal order; for the public is now fascinated with the possibility of obtaining necessities and comforts through action of the state…”  Henry Adams

“Corrupt and stupid governments may be tolerated when their activities are confined by prescription to a small and certain sphere; in this age of aggrandizement, however, corrupt and stupid governments deliver us up precipitately to class warfare and international anarchy.”  Henry Adams

“The causes of the dissatisfaction of the masses with their condition … will be always laid on those who have a larger share of the world’s goods than others.”  Henry Adams

Turn of the century observations are depressing, right?  

Reflect, ye on Dallas, ye savage nation.

True civilization does not lie in progress or steam or table turning.  It lies in the diminution of the marks of original sin.”  (Baudelaire). 

“The impulses toward cruelty, the destruction, and ruthless self-gratification that forever are fighting to master our inner nature – the man whose psychology ignores these, corrupts society and himself.”   (Hawthorne).

Reflect, ye on Dallas, ye savage nation.    

lingering agony of a exhausted country

However pure may be a social system, or a religion, in the commencement of its power, the possession of an undisputed ascendency lures all alike into excesses fatal consistency, to justice, and to truth. (James Fenimore Cooper).

It is difficult to conceive any more painful than of a great man condemned to watch the lingering agony of a exhausted country, to tend it during the alternate fits of stupefaction and raving which precede its dissolution, and to see the symptoms of its vitality disappear one by one til nothing is left but coldness, darkness and corruption. (John Randolph).

That men are kept in perpetual childhood – that is spirit, they never become full human beings – seems no great loss to a generation of thinkers accustomed to compulsory schooling, compulsory insurance, compulsory military service, and even compulsory voting.  A world of uniform compulsion is death to variety and the life of the mind…   (Russell Kirk).   

Three thoughts after the Dallas, TX. ( protest ) massacre last night, 7/7/16.

define the ruling class.

Marxism is “Utilitarianism flavored with Hegel and converted to the uses of the revolutionary proletariat…. The Utilitarians and New Whigs, despite all their professions of worldly wisdom, have no notion of the troubles they have excited nor of how to govern the industrial masses of emancipated individualism which they praise.”  Substitute ‘liberals, progressives or leftists in 2016, and we define the ruling class.   

Close the Schools

“Immensely expensive systems of state schooling have not succeeded in repairing the damage to private character and public life that was done when personal judgment began to supplant traditional opinion.”  I print this truth today, 7/5/16, but it’s from Edmund Burke’s “Reflections on the Revolution in France” in 1790.  Nothing’s fixed yet.   

Never listen to experts?

Never listen to experts? Learned your lesson? An expert from the Highway Patrol says one of his jobs is to “make sure what they’re ( truckers) telling the truth is correct.”  Expert testimony verbatim, I swear.  Furthermore, I swear I heard this morning from experts on their need to follow regulations (and lots of them).  Lastly, safety will be a high priority at airports this July 4^th weekend, with extra “behavior detection specialists” visibility on hand.  Lesson over.