The Republican Party: A Few Million Gun-toting,

People Tend To Judge Presidents On How The Economy Performs, And Yet We Don't Expect Them To Have The Power To Do Much About It. Or We Don't Want Them To Exercise That Power, If They Were To Have It.

However And Wherever War Begins, It Persists, It Spreads, It Propagates Itself Through Time And Across Space With The Terrifying Tenacity Of A Beast Attached To The Neck Of Living Prey. This Is Not An Idly Chosen Figure Of Speech. War Spreads And Perpetuates Itself Through A Dynamic That Often Seems Independent Of Human Will. It Has, As We Like To Say Of Things We Do Not Fully Understand, 'a Life Of Its Own.

The Internet Was Supposed To Make This Whole Business Of Job Searching Rational And Simple. You Could Post Your Resume And Companies Would Search Them And They'd Find You. It Doesn't Seem To Work That Way. There Aren't Enough Jobs For Experienced, College Educated Managers And Professionals.

It's A Glorious Universe The Positive Thinkers Have Come Up With, A Vast, Shimmering Aurora Borealis In Which Desires Mingle Freely With Their Realizations. ... Dreams Go Out And Fulfill Themselves; Wishes Need Only To Be Articulated.

Human Intellectual Progress, Such As It Has Been, Results From Our Long Struggle To See Things 'as They Are,' Or In The Most Universally Comprehensible Way, And Not As Projections Of Our Own Emotions. Thunder Is Not A Tantrum In The Sky, Disease Is Not A Divine Punishment, And Not Every Death Or Accident Results From Witchcraft. What We Call The Enlightenment And Hold On To Only Tenuously, By Our Fingernails, Is The Slow-dawning Understanding That The World Is Unfolding According To Its Own Inner Algorithms Of Cause And Effect, Probability And Chance, Without Any Regard For Human Feelings.