Thanks, two pings a day keeps socialism at bay. Anything that comes from mentor noumenon rises to the top of my heap.
Thanks for the kind words, folks. The final paragraphs of Muravchik's epilogue to
Heaven On Earth are perhaps the clearest take on the failures and eh ultimate evil inherent in the ideas that are the foundation of socialism. There is no more destructive, no more murderous, no more evil world view than that of the utopians who would refashion Man in the image of their ideals. Wel lover a hundred million souls were fed to the bonfire of socialist vanity. Hundreds of millions more had the lights of their hearts, minds and souls extinguished; hundreds of millions more lived lives of servitude and impoverishment.
Given the stark, unyielding quality of the evidence provided by the historical record, socialism and its outcomes could only be embraced by the willfully ignorant, the evil or the insane. Although we hope and pray for a peaceful resolution to this millenia-old conflict, deep down, we know that that is simply not possible. We can only preapre ourselves and our children for the reckoning that's coming.