Category Archives: Splendor

The greatest risk of resurrgent statism is that we will forsake the unalienable right to the pursuit of happiness…

Arthur C. Brooks of the American Enterprise Institute in The Washington Post: The new statism in America, made possible by years of drift and accelerated by the panic over the economic crisis, threatens to make us permanently poorer. But that is not the greatest danger. The real risk is that in the new culture war, […] Continue reading

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Everything the ancient Greeks warned us about democracy has come true in modern Greece — and right here in River City as well

Mark Steyn in Macleans: Traditionally, a bank is a means by which old people with capital lend to young people with ideas. But the advanced democracies with their mountains of sovereign debt are in effect old people who’ve blown through their capital and are all out of ideas looking for young people flush enough to […] Continue reading

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Rand Paul’s take on private property rights is correct — and daring to tell unfamiliar, uncomfortable truths to voters is laudable.

Well. I’m thinking that “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day” has brought us a nearly universal display of cowardice from the RE.net. If I am mistaken in this, I will happily amend my error with a link and a courtly bow. But I expect there is even more room for quivering, quibbling, cowering, caviling cowardice on this […] Continue reading

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This oil spill and the government’s belated response to it do not prove the value and efficacy of the government, but precisely the opposite.

So I had a spam email from a state-worshipping zealot I’ve never met named Sara P. Miller. Apparently Sara P. Miller is the modern-age equivalent of those noxious creeps you used to find preaching the gospel of Jheeezuhs! on buses and subway trains, self-imprisoned in a never-silent pantomime of exhibitionism and self-loathing. I cannot be […] Continue reading

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It looks like the dam is finally bursting on politicaly-correct self-censorship in behalf of Islamofascist rageaholics.

You bastards! The essence of Political Correctness is to get people to volunteer for their own self-imprisonment. In fear of offending some perpetually-offended jackass, the victims of Political Correctness come to be stunted, stilted, stifled — and ultimately silenced. But, alas, they never, ever manage to escape the snide, sneering insults of all those perpetually-offended […] Continue reading

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Mark Steyn: “We are now not merely disincentivizing economic energy but actively waging war on it.”

Shrug, Atlas, shrug. Mark Steyn from Investors’ Business Daily: In less than a quarter-millennium, the American Revolution will have evolved from “No taxation without representation” to representation without taxation. We have bigger government, bigger bureaucracy, bigger spending, bigger deficits, bigger debt, and yet an ever smaller proportion of citizens paying for it. The top 5% […] Continue reading

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SplendorQuest: Loving Cathleen…

Cathleen and I have been on a love jag, lately, and I cannot begin to tell you how beneficial it’s been. A very simple idea: We added spending time alone together every day as a part of our goal-getting regimen. This turns out to have been an inspired idea, although I did not foresee that […] Continue reading

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SplendorQuest: Redemption is egoism in action

This is clipped from a book I wrote in 1988 — a book I really need to write anew. It’s an epistolary novel, so the writing is kind of affected. I expect you can worry your way through it. “Madness,” as the term is used here, is an attempt to claim, as knowledge, a proposition […] Continue reading

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SplendorQuest: My plan to stage a graceful exit from life when the pursuit of Splendor has become impossible to me

Under the wide and starry sky, Dig the grave and let me lie. Glad did I live and gladly die, And I laid me down with a will. This be the verse you grave for me: ‘Here he lies where he longed to be; Home is the sailor, home from sea, And the hunter home […] Continue reading

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My kind of doctor: “I am responding to the situation created by this new law by exercising my right not to participate in any health insurance program.”

A letter from a sane doctor, posted at The Corner on NationalReview.com: March 23, 2010 My Dear Patient, As you must know, Congress has just passed extensive legislation governing health care delivery and insurance systems. Whether you agree with what it does or not, we are all now subject to this law and its sweeping […] Continue reading

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