The CIA

My sympathy for the bereaved families is as sincere as humanly possible.

And so is my feeling that things just took a sharp turn for the worse in Afghanistan. The stiff personal pride of the agency and its well-known appetite for revenge are now important ingredients in the Mulligan stew of the Middle East.

Happy New Year; Now Let's Get Organized

A.D. 2009 was what it was, and the chore now is to manage A.D. 2010. I just re-read my greeting from a year ago, and it still seems pertinent .

There's a good deal of plain wise-assery in The McGee Reader, and no change is foreseen. But crude and vulgar bile promulgated to the public should rest on some kind of philosophical and intellectual basis, to wit:

Three kinds of people exist.

(1) authoritarians -- the stunted cretins who wish to use government to dictate the manner in which you live your life

(2) libertarians -- the opposite, believers in personal sovereignty who suspect that things like the United States Constitution mean pretty much what they say

(3) inerts -- those who, in return for potted chickens, put authoritarians in power

Happy New Year, friends.

The Obamian Mindset

A number of writing techniques can be effective in trying to keep Our Leaders honest, from the short and snarky clipped phrase to the long and elegant and closely reasoned essays we sometimes see in the blog world and the non-statist press.

The snark prevalent in this gunny corner of blogville is the most fun for most of us, but sometimes I welcome an extended treatment of the current disorder, and so I suggest you trot over to the Old Grouch corner for his relay of a take on our current leadership as the spawn of a not-very-thoughtful protest culture.

(I can't seem to isolate the post, so the link gets you to the top of the blog. The item referred to is at the moment the third one down, introduced by OG as from the comments section of still another blog.)

Idly posted

Hey kids, next time you're waiting in line at the airport and telling your buddy about your new super streamliner motorcycle, I strongly suggest you do not refer it it as a crotch rocket.