As in past breaks, please enjoy all the previous posts.
Short observation of the announced Executive Action on Immigration Reform: Pass a bill. Yes, at 844 pages, Senate Bill 744 is a hefty thing, but that's why you hire staff to read it and give you the "Cliff Notes" summary. It would also help if the congress worked a sizable amount of a year like every other American. I don't expect the bill's current form to survive a House committee without amendments. Its form will naturally change.
That's politics: the art of compromise that through social media atomizing us into the very factions George Washington warned about in his 1796 Farewell Address has become lost. We've become tribal, "E pluribus unum" a quaint Latin phrase; "United States" oxymoron and national poetry, not reality.
We see, therefore, that war is not merely an act of policy but a true political instrument, a continuation of political intercourse carried on with other means. What remains peculiar to war is simply the peculiar nature of its means.
Chapter 1, Section 24, in the Princeton University Press translation (1976)
Variant translation: War is merely the continuation of politics by other means. Carl von Clausewitz, "On War," Source: Wikiquote
Horror vacui: "nature abhors a vacuum" and so does politics in this post "Citizens United" and McCutcheon oxymoronic era. We're making fascism inevitable and "rational"; Oligarchy a natural progression from our laziness as an electorate to be informed; to participate and to actually shape the agendas of the "collectivist conspiracy" also known as self-government.
Spending time with friends and family. Blogging will resume 3 December. Peace.
