“In individuals, insanity is rare. But in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.” — Friedrich Nietzsche

“The timing of the Hunter Biden tax indictment is one more sign that the deep state is planning to sideline Biden & pick a new puppet for 2024, all the while using this indictment as a perfect fig leaf to claim that the Trump prosecutions aren’t politically motivated. Kills two birds with one stone,” Republican entrepreneur and presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy wrote in a post on X.

Sound theory. So we may be looking at President Michelle Obama or President Gavin Newsom in 2025. Puppet replacement a possibility.

When the government loses all credibility and moral stature in the eyes of a majority of the people, it’s no longer a sustainable government. It’s a tyranny. Control over reluctant or unwilling participants is all it has left.

Biden is a puppet, and a joke. He and his depraved ruling family are a mockery of not only the U.S. Constitution, but of civilization itself. 53 percent now view the FBI as a politicized Gestapo, which it is. The military openly helps the other side, as in the unspeakable Afghanistan withdrawal fiasco, and opts for the elevation of drag queens over military preparedness. The government is tens of trillions in exponentially increasing debt, electronically printing fiat currency like a banana republic.

The American republic is beyond repair and has lost credibility. Wherever it goes from here — it will not go on as it is.

Excellent summary of the Trump phenomenon from a reader comment at AmericanThinker.com:

If Trump spoke like any other milquetoast politician he would never have received as much attention. Inciting the Left made them reckless and the masks came off. They are now in a full blown mode of screeching madly at the sky. They have become unhinged. Everything about Trump triggers them, and the crazier they get, the more Trump appears to be the only sane one.

It seems like a dangerous game, since the Left’s desperation to Stop Trump will drive them to do something truly radical and horrific. I pray to God he has superior protection because they will stop at nothing. When they say “Our Democracy” is at stake, they mean Their Tyranny and stranglehold over the country.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

A Delaware Coast Press reader writes that her father died almost 20 years ago. She considers herself fully recovered, but when something reminds her of him, the feelings come rushing back. She asks me if she needs medication to keep her from falling back into mourning.

This is my answer to her: A major loss is not something you ever fully get over. You just get used to it. When your father died, you felt the loss every day. As time passed, you didn’t think about it as often, but when you do, you feel it just as strongly. No, you’re not fully over it – and why should you be? There’s nothing wrong with feeling loss. If you couldn’t function during your unhappiness, that would be one thing. But to feel it after all these years is normal.

In his online article “Getting Over a Loved One’s Death,” Rodney Grubbs writes, “Having a hard time getting over the loved one is completely natural …. As a general observation, the stronger the love, the longer it takes to get over them. And quite frankly, I’m not sure what ‘getting over them’ really means. If you truly loved them, you will never completely get over it. What you will do is learn to live with it from a different perspective. Then you’ll feel better about moving on with your life.”

You don’t need medication for these occasional feelings. Medication is for people who are unable to cope, i.e., unable to handle the basic activities of daily living without significant disruption. When it comes to medication, there are two schools of thought, and both are wrong. Some people feel it’s wrong to take medication because it’s a sign of weakness. Nonsense. If your functioning can actually be improved with medication, then what moral reason is there not to do so? We don’t refuse medication for high blood pressure or diabetes on the basis of moral weakness, so why this?

The other common mistake is that people see medication as a cure. It’s not, especially for something like depression over a personal loss. When anti-anxiety or anti-depressant medication does work, it treats only the symptoms. But so do a lot of medications. There are many problems for which there are no known causes, and people take medication to address the symptoms. With grief and loss, it’s OK to take medication if you find that you just can’t function. Why not try to relieve some of that suffering? At the same time, no pill can make you bypass the natural process of grief. To escape the grief of having lost a loved one, you’d have to escape the experience of ever having loved them. That doesn’t make any sense.

Look at grief as normal. Tell yourself, “This is healthy. It means I loved him and that he was, indeed, the wonderful person I perceived him to be. I’m crying not only because he’s not here, but also because he was a great person to have loved.” Talk the feelings out with someone who experienced the loss along with you, or maybe even a counselor or a therapist. Don’t bottle everything up in the name of “getting over it.” It doesn’t work.

There are different kinds of losses. Losing a parent can be difficult, but it’s expected. There’s usually not the feeling of “falling through space” that comes with the loss of a spouse or a child. But loss is loss, and you’ll still feel it years after the fact. The challenge is not to get over it; the challenge is to reintegrate yourself back into a new and different life without your loved one.

Try to get back to your daily activities. Take on new goals to fill the void. If your loss is a major one, you’ll most likely need six months to a year for the process to unfold naturally and comfortably.

You can’t replace your loved one, but little by little you can resume your activities and routines, adding new experiences and memories to the ones you both enjoyed before. Your new life is not required to be better or worse than the old one. It will just be different.

Michael J. Hurd, Life’s a Beach

“Before President Biden took office, it was virtually impossible for eligible borrowers to access the student debt relief they rightfully earned,” U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona said in a statement.

How does one “rightfully earn” forgiveness of a debt into which one voluntarily entered?

What entitles one group of people to eradication of debt, and not another? I paid my student loans off in 2001. Why am I not getting a refund on tuition? Why am I NOT rightfully entitled while another is?

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

There will never be a really free and enlightened State until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly. I please myself with imagining a State at last which can afford to be just to all men, and to treat the individual with respect as a neighbor; which even would not think it inconsistent with its own repose if a few went to live aloof from it, not meddling with it, nor embraced by it, who fulfilled all the duties of neighbors and fellow-men. A State which bore this kind of fruit, and suffered it to drop off as fast as it ripened, would prepare the way for a still more perfect and glorious State, which also I have imagined, but not yet anywhere seen.

– Henry David Thoreau, “Civil Disobedience” [1849]

A two-year oldRussian piano prodigy.

November 28 marks the 1894 birth of one of American history’s most prolific public intellectuals—Henry Hazlitt (1894-1993). According to Lew Rockwell, he “was familiar with the work of every important thinker in nearly every field,” and he “wrote in every important public forum of his day.” His published work as a journalist, literary critic, philosopher, and economist ran to roughly 10 million words before his death in 1993, including perhaps the most popular economics book ever written: Economics in One Lesson.

In that vast output, perhaps Hazlitt’s most important contribution was his consistent defense of the central importance of liberty in American life, even though it lost him more than one job. At a time when real commitment to liberty is scarce, Americans need to remember his wisdom.

“Liberty is the essential basis, the sine qua non, of morality. Morality can only exist in a free society, it can exist to the extent freedom exists.”

“‘Freedom to’” is a guarantee that no one, including the government, will be allowed to interfere with one’s freedom.”

“The future of human liberty…means the future of civilization.”

“The State, of course, is absolutely indispensable to the preservation of law and order, and the promotion of peace and social cooperation. What is unnecessary and evil, what abridges the liberty and therefore the true welfare of the individual, is the State that has usurped excessive powers and grown beyond its legitimate function.”

“True adherents of liberty…[believe] in limited government, in the maximization of liberty for the individual and the minimization of the coercion to the lowest point compatible with law and order…we believe in free trade, free markets, free enterprise, private property.”

“Capitalism will continue to eliminate mass poverty in more and more places and to an increasingly marked extent if it is merely permitted to do so.”

“The ‘private sector’ of the economy is, in fact, the voluntary sector…the ‘public sector’ is, in fact, the coercive sector.”

“Capitalism, the system of private property and free markets, is not only a system of freedom and of natural justice—which tends…to distribute rewards in accordance with production—but it is a great co-operative and creative system that has produced…affluence that our ancestors did not dare dream of.”

“The superior freedom of the capitalist system, its superior justice, and its superior productivity are not three superiorities, but one. The justice follows from the freedom and the productivity follows from the freedom and the justice.”

“Government can’t give anything without depriving us of something else.”

“When your money is taken by a thief, you get nothing in return. When your money is taken through taxes to support needless bureaucrats, precisely the same situation exists.”

“Only if the modern state can be held within a strictly limited agenda…can it be prevented from regimenting, conquering, and ultimately devouring the society which gave it birth.”

“Liberty is so precious an end in itself that Lord Acton was moved to declare that it is ‘not a means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end.’ Yet though liberty is beyond doubt an end in itself, it is also of the highest value…as a means to most of our other ends. We can pursue not only our economic but our intellectual and spiritual goals only if we are free to do so.”

“Moral rules which forbid mankind to hurt one another…include wrongful interference with each other’s freedom.”

“Many of today’s writers who are most eloquent in their arguments for liberty in fact preach philosophies that would destroy it.”

“In a thousand fields the welfarists, statists, socialists, and inverventionists are daily driving for more restrictions on individual liberty.”

“The solution to our problems is not more paternalism, laws, decrees, or controls, but the restoration of liberty and free enterprise.”

“The crying need today is not for more laws, but for fewer. If the friends of liberty and law could have only one slogan it should be: Stop the remedies!”

“Our intelligentsia….misprize economic liberty because…they lack the knowledge or understanding to recognize that when economic liberties are abridged or destroyed, all other liberties are abridged or destroyed with them.”

“Liberty is a whole, and to deny economic liberty is finally to destroy all liberty.”

“When Alexander the Great visited the philosopher Diogenes and asked whether he could do anything for him, Diogenes is said to have replied: ‘Yes, stand a little less between me and the sun.’ It is what every citizen is entitled to ask of his government.”

Henry Hazlitt recognized liberty as the only moral system and economic liberty, or capitalism, as the only means of organizing society that can benefit all. And he defended that position powerfully against many attacks. As Ludwig von Mises described him, “in this age of great struggle in favor of freedom and the social system in which men can live as free men, you…are the economic conscience of our country.”

During his life, Hazlitt saw America taking the opposite course, prompting him to conclude that “So far as the politicians are concerned, the lesson…does not seem to have been learned anywhere.”

Now, with far more resources forcibly taken from some for whatever and whoever the government decides, his insights are more important than ever.

Gary Galles

Republicans did nothing about Bill Clinton flying to islands with minors

Republicans did nothing about Hillary Clinton smashing devices

Republicans did nothing about James Comey brazenly lying

Republicans did nothing about Andy McCabe plotting a silent coup against a sitting President

Republicans did nothing about BLM raising $100 million and breaking charitable giving laws

Republicans in Florida did nothing about James Biden’s alleged fraud scheme involving a hospital system

Republicans in Arkansas did nothing about Hunter Biden’s myriad crimes

Republicans have done nothing against ANTIFA and their interstate RICO operations

Republicans have done nothing against Fauci, EcoHealth Alliance, or the other fake scientists who promoted lies about Covid’s origins to hide their own culpability

Why would Democrats be afraid of us? They run the country while Republican AGs and DAs quiver in fear and run for the hills.

Charlie Kirk

Stop fixating on the 2024 election. You will be disappointed, frustrated and angry — again. I stand by my prediction that they will imprison Trump. And when his supporters protest, they will be imprisoned too. It will be a gigantic January 6. Watch.

Bigger picture: Freedom loving Americans must figure out ways to break with the nasty, psychotic and authoritarian federal regime. DeSantis is a hugely talented Governor of a robust, growing state. He should concentrate on establishing a republic of Florida. Perhaps South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi and Georgia (minus Atlanta) could join. Offer peace with the federal government. Peace and trade treaties, and the like. Let New York, DC, San Francisco, Chicago and all the deep blue territories have their socialism. Let’s stop fighting, and simply leave them. Have real police, and a real military. Let the drag queen, woke military defend Manhattan.

I cannot design all the specifics for you. I can only tell you that the left-right differences are no longer sustainable. The left understands this. That’s why they impose an increasingly totalitarian net around our lives. The right just keeps promising a modern day Reagan Revolution. It’s too late for that. Way too late. Stop assuming there’s a majority who want freedom under the original American model. Do you actually know any leftists? They do not want ANYTHING you want. And they will stand by and let the government do anything it wishes to you, so long as the government is “progressive.” There are 70 and 80 percent majorities of leftists in some areas. They are not friendly and they are no more peaceful than Hamas and the Palestinians. They are mean, brutal, irrational and intolerant.

Move on, conservatives. It’s too late for reconciliation. A better world is possible, but NOT on our present course.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

Sixty years ago today, I was in Mrs. Isles’ fifth-grade class on Friday afternoon at Boothwyn Elementary School in Pennsylvania when we got the news: President John F. Kennedy had been assassinated in Dallas, Texas. They sent us home immediately and the next several days were consumed with the killing and its aftermath.

First, there was the arrest of Lee Harvey Oswald, who was accused of shooting the president from a sniper’s perch on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository, which was located by the presidential motorcade route. Two days later, Oswald himself was shot to death by Jack Ruby, a Dallas nightclub owner who managed to slip into police headquarters with a gun when authorities were transferring him from the Dallas city jail to the county jail.

Finally, on Monday, there was the funeral, which I watched with one of my friends on his black and white TV at his house on Meetinghouse Road. I was only 10 years old but knew that something momentous had happened. I didn’t realize that it would be a watershed event.

Much has been written about the events of November 22, 1963, and six decades later, there is much disagreement with the government’s official story that Oswald was the lone shooter. Most people, to be honest, don’t buy the government’s account, which is summed up by the Warren Commission Report.

There is a veritable industry of writing and speculation about the assassination, and perhaps no one has been more dogged than Jacob Hornberger of the Future of Freedom Foundation. With each major anniversary of the assassination, new information seems to come out about the case, and the FFF site has linked two accounts, one involving medical professionals who saw the president’s fatal wounds, and one from the Kennedy Beacon blog. They make for compelling reading.

According to Hornberger, the Kennedy assassination was an inside job with the CIA taking out the president because he wanted to end American involvement in Vietnam and pursue a more vigorous course of détente with the Soviet Union, as well as dismantling at least part of the developing national security state. Certainly, others who closely follow the various conspiracy theories associated with the assassination have different variations, but most agree that it is unlikely that the angry loner Oswald did all of the killing himself – or was even directly involved.

I see myself as unqualified to make a judgment on these theories, although there is nothing implausible with the account that Hornberger has created these past several years. Too many things happened after the shooting with too many witnesses to debunk them. If Hornberger’s viewpoints are correct – and I, for one, believe they are plausible – then America as we have known it died that day at Dealy Plaza.

The government’s actions after Kennedy’s assassination from the US escalation of the Vietnam War to the development of the vast national security state has eroded liberty and empowered the American state. Whatever hopes there were to preserve the constitutional republic known as the United States of America ended with the death of John F. Kennedy.

As for the state, it never entered an Athenian’s head that it could interfere with his private life: that it could see, for instance, that his children were taught to be patriotic, or limit the amount of liquor he could buy, or compel him to save for his old age. Everything like that a citizen of Athens had to decide himself and take full responsibility for.
 

Edith Hamilton, The Greek Way (1930)