Nearly every new law is bad, and nearly every old custom is good.
Jun 292022
Ruling
In ’37 Stalin made a hash
Of party loyalists and army brass.
Decimation: One in ten are shot.
What’s the word when one in ten are not?
Jun 282022
A time-honored tactic of the schoolyard bully, after he has ground your face into the dirt, is to release you on the condition that you mouth some humiliating absurdity. He does not want to convince you of its truth; he wants to see what you will swallow.
Jun 172022
Rules are made to be selectively enforced.
Jun 032022
Propaganda demands endless repetition, not just of the same ideas, but in the same words.
May 202022
Separation of powers: each bureaucrat gets a tiny bit.
May 192022
Deontology for thee, but not for me.
May 032022
The crisis is not that the press is distrusted: the press has always been distrusted. The crisis is that this has finally dawned on the press.
Apr 202022
We complain of government inefficiency and unaccountability, instead of government mass murder, wholesale theft, and miseducation of our children by force, which makes our own supine posture rather too apparent.
Apr 122022
A law is a metric, and like any other metric it can and will be gamed.
Apr 062022
Popular sovereignty in a democracy comes to resemble Swiss cheese, as ambitious men carve little chunks of political power out for themselves and proof them as best they can against the vagaries of elections. Eventually nothing is left but the holes.