While watching Andor and Cars of the People, I have been noodling on how large bureaucratic tyrannies fail. Because fail, they do. The Stasi and KGB and other deeply invasive and evil regimes had countless ways to torture and dominate the populace, but they also eventually fell apart and collapsed. And in the lessons of those failures, I think there are some pointers for how our very own Deep State can be undermined and destroyed.

We find ourselves in a regime that has enough “Gotcha!” laws to ensure that none of us is safe. Others have pointed out that the average American professional commits three felonies a day. Crime Squad!

Here’s a hoot, and some chainshot in response:

We have all received the Jehovah’s Witness knock at the door. The timing is usually perfect with dropping a glass of milk or sitting down to eat. They have every right to practice their religion as they see fit. If spreading the Word is part of their faith, I am okay with that too, in a general sense.

My driveway is ¼ mile. It is obscure by design. In the driveway of a farmhouse there is a delivery box with my house number. I want to make it easy for drivers, especially Amazon, to deliver their parcels. Next to the delivery box, there is a path into the woods. It is thick and overgrown for a reason. It then opens to a big field. Through the field and back into the woods, you would find my house at the end.

I built the house three years ago on the farm I grew up on here in central Massachusetts. It is as far back as I could possibly build, and I am surrounded by hundreds of acres of conservation land. A great deal of that is swamp.

The last few years of the American populist movement and the great reveal provided by the threat posed to the established order by our last President have given me a new perspective on the life I have experienced and the days I have left.

Some parts of my early life, including the years of my marriage with my wife rearing our three children, were hard. But the rewards associated with successful achievement of goals were spectacular.

Ladies and gentlemen, your kind attention, please! Thanksgiving just happened, and it’s time for Christmas music! (Unless you started the day after Halloween like I did.)

I request your assistance in a modest contribution to Ricochet camaraderie and Christmas joy: a Ricochet fight club over Christmas music!  Like the Ricochet Movie Fight Club of happy memory and the Ricochet Dueling Book Club, the Ricochet Christmas Music Fight Club is a place for fighting to the death over who has the best answer to a selected question of the week.  I plan to post the RCMFC around Friday or Saturday each week until Christmas.  Whoever’s answer gets the most likes wins!  The winner of the first four fights will select the question for the next week.

I’m a big believer in the adage, “you are what you consume.” It’s why I’ve only read some things about Saul Alinsky and have avoided reading his oft-cited book, Rules for Radicals. I’m not reading any book dedicated to “the very first radical,” Lucifer (despite what Snopes says about said dedication being “mostly false” — look at an image of the text and judge for yourself).

Now I’m reading about Bella Dodd and her communist infiltration of the Catholic church into seminaries and the education establishment on the pages of CRISIS Magazine in the article, The Roots of Woke: The Devil and Bella Dodd.

Ready for another Tocquevillian reflection on America through cinema–after yesterday’s Avalon? Over at the Acton Institute, I have an essay on the best John Hughes movie, the one about adults.

Thanksgiving is a distinctively American holiday, unlike Christmas, & yet we have very few popular movies about it. Maybe this is a good thing—it’s a family affair, not necessarily a public spectacle. But it might be a bad thing—there’s something about giving thanks that we don’t quite grasp & it might be that nobody feels up to the task of letting us know. Certainly, back when presidents called for a day of thanksgiving through public proclamations, it was supposed to bring the nation together, & when’s the last time America came together?

A recent posting about “homeless” being replaced by “houseless” and its comments brought back a memory.

I was sitting at the kitchen table with my aunt, Raffaela, the “General Pershing” of the large, extended family with whom I had grown up, and her sister-in-law, Anna. My aunt was describing her experience with her grown children.

Our elections are an embarrassing third-world mess.

On top of that, there’s no mechanism to test or improve the accuracy of elections. Nobody’s even talking about improving them.  And every change that gets implemented makes the system more susceptible to fraud.  (Like that wasn’t the whole point.)

The Silicon Valley entrepreneur in me sees every problem as a business opportunity.  I’ve posted twice before about a potential voting machine startup company, first as an application for blockchain technology, and second as a voting system that uses software technology to verify accuracy.

It has pleased Almighty God to prolong our national life another year, defending us with His guardian care against unfriendly designs from abroad and vouchsafing to us in His mercy many and signal victories over the enemy, who is of our own household. It has also pleased our Heavenly Father to favor as well our citizens in their homes as our soldiers in their camps and our sailors on the rivers and seas with unusual health. He has largely augmented our free population by emancipation and by immigration, while He has opened to us new sources of wealth and has crowned the labor of our workingmen in every department of industry with abundant rewards. Moreover, He has been pleased to animate and inspire our minds and hearts with fortitude, courage, and resolution sufficient for the great trial of civil war into which we have been brought by our adherence as a nation to the cause of freedom and humanity, and to afford to us reasonable hopes of an ultimate and happy deliverance from all our dangers and afflictions:

Now, therefore, I, Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States, do hereby appoint and set apart the last Thursday in November next as a day which I desire to be observed by all my fellow-citizens, wherever they may then be, as a day of thanksgiving and praise to Almighty God, the beneficent Creator and Ruler of the Universe. And I do further recommend to my fellow-citizens aforesaid that on that occasion they do reverently humble themselves in the dust and from thence offer up penitent and fervent prayers and supplications to the Great Disposer of Events for a return of the inestimable blessings of peace, union, and harmony throughout the land which it has pleased Him to assign as a dwelling place for ourselves and for our posterity throughout all generations.

In testimony whereof I have hereunto set my hand and caused the seal of the United States to be affixed.