A few (final?) words about the election… Or pop culture. Same thing. It's a shout-out to my depressed conservative comrades still moping around, muttering, "the country is over." My response to you: yeah, it is.

I'm not trying to construct a clever political argument. I'm just looking at the day to day functions of the central government, the one founded with a charter to do some very specific things. We must now forget those things; government's two self-assigned functions today are welfare and industrial planning. That's it. Everything else is subservient to those power sources. National security, criminal justice, accountability to the people -- to say they take a backseat understates how they've been co-opted.

I'll leave it to others to wax philosophical about the enormity of the slow-motion coup. The practical upshot is enough to prove the case: our ingenious original framework is out, replaced with… red tape... and unlimited welfare.

Restoration is going to be a steep uphill climb. It won't be televised. Our every effort will be denounced angrily. That part will be televised. Middle ground is vanishingly small. Bitterness is baked into the cake now, so stop expecting otherwise.

Anyway, that's how things look from the vantage point of the sovereign republic of Berea Rose. Foreign relations are tense, but the state of this nation is strong.