Live Free - Die Free
Ratiocinations by George Mikos

 

 

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. -- That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, -- That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it.

 

Charles Beard: One of the best ways to get yourself a reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating the very phrases which our founding fathers used in the great struggle for independence.

 

Justice Louis D. Brandeis: The makers of our constitution … conferred, as against the government, the right to be let alone -- the most comprehensive of the rights and the right most valued by civilized men.

Justice William O. Douglas: The right to be let alone is indeed the beginning of all freedom.

Epictetus: Is freedom anything else than the right to live as we wish? Nothing else.

Victor Frankel: The last of the human freedoms -- to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.

Arthur Schopenhauer: He who does not enjoy solitude will not love freedom.

Jimmy Durante: Why doesn't everybody leave everybody else the hell alone?

 

Samuel Adams: Among the natural rights of the colonists are these: first, a right to life; secondly, to liberty; thirdly to property; together with the right to support and defend them in the best manner they can.

Walter Lippmann: Private property was the original source of freedom. It still is its main bulwark.

John Locke: Government has no other end than the preservation of property.

William Howard Taft: Next to the right of liberty, the right of property is the most important individual right guaranteed by the Constitution and the one which, united with that of personal liberty, has contributed more to the growth of civilization than any other institution established by the human race.

 

Calvin Coolidge: Liberty is not collective, it is personal. All liberty is individual liberty.

Judge Learned Hand: Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no Constitution, no court, can ever do much to help it.

Frederick Douglass: I know no class of my fellowmen, however just, enlightened, and humane, which can be wisely and safely trusted absolutely with the liberties of any other class.

C.P. Snow: No one is fit to be trusted with power… No one… Any man who has lived at all knows the follies and wickedness he's capable of… And if he does know it, he knows also that neither he nor any man ought to be allowed to decide a single human fate.

Thomas Cooper: The law, unfortunately, has always been retained on the side of power; laws have uniformly been enacted for the protection and perpetuation of power.

Milton Friedman: A society that puts equality … ahead of freedom will end up with neither equality nor freedom.

Paul Harvey: They have gun control in Cuba. They have universal health care in Cuba. So why do they want to come here?

Fredrich August von Hayek: I am certain that nothing has done so much to destroy the juridical safeguards of individual freedom as the striving after this mirage of social justice.

Ronald Reagan: Our natural, inalienable rights are now considered to be a dispensation from government, and freedom has never been so fragile, so close to slipping from our grasp as it is at this moment.

 

Cicero: We are in bondage to the law in order that we may be free.

 

The savage ratiocinating in Brave New World:

“But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.”

“In fact,” said Mustapha Mond, “you're claiming the right to be unhappy.”

“All right then,” said the savage defiantly, “I'm claiming the right to be unhappy.”

“Not to mention the right the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat; the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen tomorrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind”. There was a long silence.

“I claim them all,” said the savage at last.

Introduction

Thanks to Liberty-Tree.ca for the above quotes.

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I --
I took off obliquely through the underbrush
And that has made all the difference

Version 2.0

The site's underlying software technology has been upgraded from HTML to XHTML. For more info, please see the entirely rewritten Web Publishing section.

Political Essays

What inspires the left, especially the radical left? What do they accept as true on faith alone? What are their a priori assumptions? What is their ethos?

Imagine there's no heaven,
It's easy if you try,
No hell below us,
Above us only sky,
Imagine all the people
living for today...

Imagine there's no countries,
It isn't hard to do,
Nothing to kill or die for,
No religion too,
Imagine all the people
living life in peace...

Imagine no possessions,
I wonder if you can,
No need for greed or hunger,
A brotherhood of man,
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world...

You may say I'm a dreamer,
but I'm not the only one,
I hope some day you'll join us,
And the world will live as one.

Is it this simple? Do leftists renounce religion, country, and possessions, while conservatives embrace them?

Broadly, yes. Imagine certainly expresses the ethos of the radical left. “No religion, no country, and no possessions” could be its motto, while “God, USA, and private property” could be the conservative motto.

But, what about leftists of the non-radical kind? What about garden-variety liberals? Are their beliefs somewhere midway between the 2 mottos? Do they quasi-embrace but quasi-renounce God, USA, and private property?

Before you answer, consider this. In general, liberals are secular, pro-UN, and champion socialism over capitalism. Now, compare those liberal beliefs to the 2 mottos. Then, answer this question: How close are those classic, mainstream liberal beliefs to the beliefs of the radical left?

Has Liberalism become its extremes?

Since extremism is the last line of defense in the inner redoubt of any belief system, is leftism itself dead?

Finally, the last question: When and why did leftism die?

George Bernard Shaw: No question is so difficult to answer as that to which the answer is obvious.

In my political essays, I joyously answer all these questions. If you deduced that the questions imply the answers, you would be correct.

Menu Navigation

A few words on menu navigation.

The menu for this Home Page appears at the top left of this page, and looks like this:

This menu tree is displayed vertically. On all other pages, the menu tree is displayed horizontally at the top of the page. For example, the first-level Web Publishing menu looks like this:

Menus are hierarchical. Menu items with a right triangle or a downwards triangle have menu sub-items.

The real value of this menu system is the quick navigation it facilitates via the expansion of the menu. For example, the following display examples an access to a menu item 3 levels deeper than the Home Page:

A few other points on menu navigation:

    The page you're currently on is bolded (eg, “Home Page”).

Menu items in lower case (eg, ‘blogs’ in the Home Page menu) indicate an item without a corresponding page; ie, the NNW mouse pointer will not change to a hand indicating a link when you move your mouse pointer over that menu item.

If you click either a lower-case or bolded menu item, nothing happens. In the former case, there is no associated link, and in the latter, a short anecdote is in order. One personality in an individual with Multiple Personality Disorder is arguing with another personality. This argumentative personality becomes enraged, and says, “If you don't shut the hell up, I'm going to kick my ass”. (Thanks to son Ryan for this gem). After all, a bolded item indicates you're already on that page.

    Most long documents are bookmarked. If they are, they'll have a bookmarks menu item.

    The auxiliary documents menu item links to mostly technical documents whose purpose is often not intuitively obvious. In this case, you'll need to read the explanatory verbiage in the referring document to understand what the purpose and value of these auxiliary documents are.

The menu navigation system is neat, clean, and intuitive, but don't thank me. Thank Ger Versluis for this Navigation Menu JavaScript code, available on the Dynamic Drive Web site as HV Menu.

Thanks also to Idocs for their Back Link JavaScript code. This script is widely implemented, most usefully in the Economics section where bottom-of-page navigation is associated with images: Back Top and Next . The Back Link script is associated with the left arrow image.

And another heartfelt tip-of-the-hat to Walter Zorn for his Tooltip JavaScript code. This script is used to good effect in the 2000 VNS and 2004 NEP Exit Polling Data document of the 2004 Presidential Election. Moving the mouse pointer over any state in a 50-state map displays 2000 and 2004 Presidential election exit polling data for that state in an information pop-up box. To view a demo, click the Tooltip Demo: Map URL. This script is also used in the Various and Sundry document of the Web Publishing section: The information pop-up box displays the actual XHTML markup associated with each individual cell in an HTML table. To view a demo, click the Tooltip Demo: HTML Table URL

Finally, humble gratitudes to Dynamic Web Coding for their Change Text Size OnClick JavaScript code. This script is demoed in the Change Table Font Size document of the Web Publishing section.

Yea, I've written some original JavaScript code, too, but why reinvent the wheel when the Web abounds with masters?