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video

George Orwell 1984

On this day sixty-two years ago, George Orwell passed away, soon after the publication of his final novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, an ugly glimpse at a dystopian future where the world is run by totalitarian regimes.

At the end of the novel, the torturer O’Brien tells Smith that, “If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever.” O’Brien goes on to argue that “the individual is only a cell, Winston, and the weariness of the cell is the vigor of the organism.”

“You’ll fail,” Winston responds. “Something will defeat you. . . . some spirit . . . the spirit of man.”

In Orwell’s book, the spirit of man is defeated, destroyed. Thankfully, in our lives, we can write our own ending.


“The real division is not between conservatives and revolutionaries but between authoritarians and libertarians.”

—George Orwell, Letter to Malcolm Muggeridge (4 December 1948), quoted in Malcolm Muggeridge: A Life (1980) by Ian Hunter

 

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folly video

How to increase your debt limit

The debt limit is in the news again, so this satire, from a few months back, remains timely:

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too much government video

Video: No Child Left Behind

It’s been ten years. Federal government intervention into America’s local-and-state-run public schools has spent a lot of money, but not resulted in much good, down at the student level:

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video

Tom Sowell on warm, fuzzy words and phrases

Punching fog, warming up fuzzy phrases, and understanding “social justice”:

“Society” is neither omniscient nor omnipotent. The justice society can provide cannot require either complete knowledge or total power. Pretending it can, or should, is pure folly.

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too much government U.S. Constitution video

Video: What If?

Judge Andrew Napolitano has a few questions:

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initiative, referendum, and recall video

Video: Music Man?

Last year at this time, I was in Omaha, Nebraska, testifying at a court challenge to the petition drive I had run to put a recall of Omaha Mayor Jim Suttle on the ballot. Recall opponents had hurled baseless charges of “fraud” throughout our signature drive, an increasingly common smear used by the professional left. In the court case, their attorney also tried the old racist tactic of demonizing me as an evil outside agitator. The judge found their charges meritless, writing in his opinion, “Plaintiff introduced evidence to attack the credibility of certain circulators and a Paul Jacob, the coordinator for the paid circulators. . . . This Court found Paul Jacob credible and accepted his testimony as truthful.”

Those powerful political forces opposed to citizens having a say on the ballot, whether through recalls or initiatives or referendums, have made a habit of using nasty, scorched-earth, character-assassinating tactics. They think they can keep good, decent people away from any effort to hold government accountable by being especially dishonest and despicable. We have to prove them wrong at every turn – as we did in Omaha last year.