Esteemed Operative and Powerful Minion BG writes in with a lament:

I used to explain to people why America was different from Europe. It was because our ancestors got fed up and left. They were warned that they knew no one in America. They didn’t care. They didn’t have a job. They didn’t care – they’d find one or make one. They didn’t know the language or the culture. They didn’t care – they’d learn it. They’d be leaving their friends behind, even their families. They didn’t care – friends and family were welcome to come with them.

In short, the people who weren’t afraid to cross the ocean to an unknown land – or who WERE afraid but went anyway – came here. They left behind the princes and dukes, the comfortable, and the fearful. They worked hard in America, and passed on their values to their children and grandchildren, while their European relations sat comfortably or fearfully where they were, and passed on THEIR values.

One of the most important values our ancestors passed on was that government was the servant, not the ruler, not the parent, of the people, and that they were responsible for their own well-being. In Europe, the value passed on was that people were subjects of the government, that their rights and well-being came from the government.

And we saw socialism’s creeping poison weaken Europe to the point where it is today a continent of infants sucking greedily at the government teat, while resentful Muslims move in and begin to impose THEIR values on the culture that gave mankind Shakespeare and Beethoven and Newton and Galileo.

That poison found its way across the ocean in 1964, when Lyndon Johnson announced we were going to eliminate poverty by making more and more people dependent on the government for survival. And it has been spreading ever since. And we see now that it hasn’t been stopped; one could even argue that the poison’s effect is accelerating.

It’s all downhill from here. The day will inevitably come when our overdrawn account comes due, and government finally tells us that it can’t cut national defense any more because we’ve mothballed all our aircraft carriers, so we’re going to have to cut government employee salaries, Social Security, Medicare, food stamps, and all the other free stuff people have fallen in love with.

It will be riots like Greece, except that Greece doesn’t have a Second Amendment.

Send your thoughts; we will publish them.

The Czar of Muscovy

Божію Поспѣшествующею Милостію Мы, Дима Грозный Императоръ и Самодержецъ Всероссiйскiй, цѣсарь Московскiй. The Czar was born in the steppes of Russia in 1267, and was cheated out of total control of all Russia upon the death of Boris Mikhailovich, who replaced Alexander Yaroslav Nevsky in 1263. However, in 1283, our Czar was passed over due to a clerical error and the rule of all Russia went to his second cousin Daniil (Даниил Александрович), whom Czar still resents. As a half-hearted apology, the Czar was awarded control over Muscovy, inconveniently located 5,000 miles away just outside Chicago. He now spends his time seething about this and writing about other stuff that bothers him.