List of Observations.

 (Some appeared in an earlier list)

There is no more certain avenue for disappointment than looking to a politician for moral and ethical guidance.

At its core the powers controlling a real world communist nation are the embodiment of the ideal corporate capitalist as there is no more powerful monopoly than the unopposed government.

In any political system it is a virtual certainty that the same types of people will acquire bureaucratic power. The only safeguard that the public has is the foresight of those who anticipated this eventuality, to have put in place, the necessary stop gaps.

To those in power the constitution is at best an inconvenience.

False Messiahs are never in short supply.

Beware of politicians who promise change. What they inevitably fail to mention is that change need not be positive.

The stock market thrives on natural and artificially created uncertainty and is driven by expectations that often detach themselves from reality. It is consequently a poor judge of the overall state of the economy in the short run.

There is nothing more expensive than a government program that promises something for free.

Civilizations prosper when responsibility exceeds entitlement. They atrophy when the balance flips the other way.

You can bury any reasonable conclusion under a statistical mudslide.

The surest sign that a civilization is in decline is the deterioration of the quality of art and the excess in excuses for it offered by the creative class.

The reality is that ignorance is a source of comfort for many.

A great deal of evil can be committed in the name of community safety.

The more you alleviate danger the greater the public propensity to fear the irrational.

Very few people are as great as their resume would have you believe.

Institutional survivability selects for grafters.

Any large organization will eventually collapse under its own weight.

The problem with all ideals is that they are without exception predicated on a misunderstanding of human nature.

There is perhaps nothing as toxic as distorting the gift of science to march head first off a cliff while claiming to advance the greater good.

The world itself is most in need of a serious dose of humility.

Avoid the temptation to marinate in your own propaganda.

Most system critiques far exceed in quality the counter solutions that they propose.

A great deal of government folly is driven by the need to push ahead with absolute certainty into a milieu that is ridiculous at best.

Most problems that exist are a function of an over correction somewhere down the line.

Given enough time and any system will become corrupt