• TS Eliot concludes “The Hollow Men” with a world ending whimper versus a bang; is a better Third-Degree concluding choice to tie things up properly with an op-ed length denouement, capturing certain themes from the many Sundays and providing pathway?
• Hardly playing possum, did Pogo warn us of enemies lurking in the shared mirror?
• Are the enemies as plentiful as the stars, those who pontificate and those that shine and the burnt-out ones too?
• Have Walt Kelly’s satirical Pogo cartoons faded but his 1970/71, Earth Day adapted, Commodore Perry words endure: “We have met the enemy and he is us”?
• Has frenzy diminished from those first Earth Days so laden with multiple and dire “settled science” end of the world warnings of imminent famine and the coming ice age?
• Does it take today’s post COVID revelations to put up warning signs about “settled science”, especially when it and its high priests achieve religious cult status?
• Do paychecks, political power and reputations combine to make global warming and climate change God written gospel, hence, to many, unchallengeable?
• To you?
• When SecDef Austin affirmed Climate Change to be enemy number one echoing “existential” Biden, now resting up, sunbathing legacy, in the Caribbean, hopefully not plotting more outrage, what’s the takeaway?
• Do we recoil as governments spend hundreds of Billions to chase green new deal ghosts with no effect and hear the clamor for Trillions more with the always effective UN leading the charge but asking good old USA (except when we back Israel) to pick up 1/3 of the total UN budget?
• For cringe worthy fact checking, check out the new 94 nation UN framework group, aptly acronymic, FCCC?
• Will people the world over continue the quest for affordable, available and secure energy in order to ensure economic progress, transportation ease and temperature control of personal environment?
• Can common sense and market demand, that’s us, that’s pocketbook democracy, trump the profligate and the phony?
• What else should we be demanding?
• How about fixing, after sunk billions, the new American homeless record of 771,000 on the streets?
• Should we emulate the California, greasy, Newsom record of failure and spend our way to the promised land?
• Does national compassion allow for an immediate cash grant of say $200,000 per homeless person per year to house, feed, clothe, provide medical and mental support and otherwise care for the unfortunate (provide drugs and booze)?
• That’s only 154 Billion a year which we can cut in half should we just send them all to Harvard and other progressive universities to provide diversity?
• Downside is watch where you step in Harvard Yard…and that’s today?
• How about ending racism by ending racism for money and political and pundit power but more for mutual, earned and deserved, personal dignity and respect?
• Did Obama and Biden make racial matters better or worse?
• Do DEI and ESG destroy E Pluribus Unum by exploiting manipulative language, fallacious guilt, combative intersectionality plus race and gender to pit us one against the other?
• Worse, are we swept away by DEI/ESG tides of definitional obfuscation, idealistic ignorance or avoidance while our burdened, but still functioning, economy and cherished freedoms are the real targets?
• Can mindless and endless friction and fiction crumble the nation or will mutual will of endless achievement win out again and again knowing of losses along the way?
• If responsible, are we all, essentially, libertarian: “Leave me and my family alone?”
• Is real choice indispensable to real freedom: Physical, Mental, Spiritual, Educational and Political?
• Can the fiscal and monetary leviathan be tamed, and our future rescued from sure disaster?
• Given the bloated size and inefficiency of government, can form and content be streamlined? How? Should speed of action and result be prized?
• Can gerrymandering be a priority fix by mandating four straight sided Congressional districts and demanding voluntary, if not mandatory, term limits?
• Is sanctity of the electoral process essential versus ease and error?
• Can a new manifest destiny take hold at home, in North and South America, elsewhere?
• If war comes to the doorstep, did we fail up the street?
• Must we be masters of the high ground?
• Is space a place for offensive and defensive capability including space to earth firepower? If we don’t and they do, then what?
• Despite all the impediments, has America achieved much, fought hard, if not always wisely, to build the most advanced and envied civilization in history? Are we done with that? Hardly?
• As we embark on a New Year of promise and problems facing the wind and going on alone, yet, perforce, together with toughened constitution (including irreverent humor) and The Constitution and the available blessings of this bountiful land for all our joined people, I offer, with no bangs, whimpers or embellishment, just a valedictory, Thank You to you, for you.

Ever onward, Keep Marching!

Socrates reminds: “The unexamined life is not worth living. “ The answers and actions are yours.

• Does “next to last” have a seasonally deficient, defeatist ring to it while definitionally definite “penultimate ” provides a certain, syntactic elegance to the Third Degree wrapping up process?
• So be it?
• Is it impossible to forget the Clinton, Monica, sex question response: “It depends on what is is” (or was) as we almost wrap it up, the five-year weekly journey of imperative inquiry, with an “it” excursion?
• Is “it” context dependent?
• Is there an it magnitude of meaning appropriate to the season and wrapping things up?
• Why is it that women possess an order of magnitude wrapping talent denied to men?
• Does semi-cultural anthropologist Lily Tomlin shed light noting that men should have tactile advantage after choosing to walk on two legs rather than all fours? Is it true?
• That stipulated as settled science, does it explain distaff sex willingness to please plus the power of the little finger?
• Happily wrapped round it are the men (most of the time)?
• Did Clara Bow, the original “It” girl set the stage, so to speak, for future generations of girls who have it or want it?
• Confusing isn’t it, or is it?
• Does it say something about XX and XY chromosomes and baby making in terms of glorious differences between and definitions of men and women?
• Isn’t it a simple question for future Supreme Court justices, notwithstanding the Ketanji jink around at confirmation?
• Is it OK, for men to play in women’s sports?
• Is it an obvious answer that the insouciant head of the NCAA ducked? Is it a problem?
• Has “Keep It Simple” been a worthwhile axiom of action and wisdom over the years but bloated generations of politicians and staff hide behind and thrive on complex and ponderous procedure?
• Size, is it, in large measure, the problem, be it programs or people?
• Not counting elected officials (512,000 nationwide), plus many millions more on their staffs, their count also excluded by law (FLSA), is it tip of the iceberg, to note a countable 2.3 million civilians working for the Feds and 20 million more at state and local levels, almost all hard to fire, especially if public union types?
• Do we cheer or jeer the President elect, Elon, and Vivek for taking it all on?
• Will it ever be a wrap, certainly not a pretty one?
• For us, for now, shall we put a bow on it and see you next week when it’s really a wrap?
• Merry Christmas, certainly, it is, no question about it.

Socrates reminds: “The unexamined life is not worth living. “ The answers and actions are yours.

• With 10 day to Christmas, six more to the New Year and inauguration, January 20th, are gifts, the getting and the giving, a big part of the deal?
• Is it truly a time of joy and hope or one of depression and pessimism?
• Will a gift of opportunity fix the latter? Is there a catch?
• Is an article of faith “It’s better to give than receive?” Is there a catch?
• Does it, in part, depend on who is doing the giving and who is doing the getting?
• If the government is giving or, more likely, promising to give, or de-gifting for that matter, is there a catch?
• Can you gift self-esteem or self-confidence?
• Are the best gifts the ones you earn and deserve?
• Is it all about success?
• Was Henry Ford right in defining success as doing more for the world than the world does for you?
• Does “life’s persistent and most urgent question, what are you doing for others” (Martin Luther King Jr.), have an urgent counterpart, what are the others doing to take advantage of the “doing” other than taking advantage?
• Is tough love a gift? Should it be given more often?
• Do we dare improve on Churchill’s: “We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give?”
• Should we add: “And how we give it and to what result?”
• Does Picasso create beauty with paint (on occasion) and words often: “If the meaning of life is to find your gift, isn’t the purpose to give it away?”
• Are love of beauty plus good manners, including reasoned exchange, in so far as we can, gifts that standout like beacons in the night?
• Do we act like the Prophet speaks when we give not of stuff but of self and find faith and warmth in a hug and a thank you well meant?
• Do we assess, then, the better giving than getting article of faith to be worthy?

Socrates reminds: “The unexamined life is not worth living. “ The answers and actions are yours.

• ‘Tis the season, why do the holidays, especially in election years, drive people bananas?
• Is “eat my bananas anyway” the spoiled fruit syndrome of loser denial?
• Was it rejection of tribal, racial, gender, economic, green new deal, weaponized weather, illegal alien, DEI and intersectional banana cream crap that sealed the deal?
• Don’t they get it that citizen consumers know personal and national needs and pick the best available top bananas?
• Meanwhile, affirming status, do the lost, the loathing, the so lacking joy and laughter (cackling doesn’t count), the so critical of others and unsure of self-crowd eat bananas like corn on the cob all hunkered down in banana country corners of their own making?
• Reliant on lies, did cloistered weekend retreats spawn announcements like “top of game”, “mentally and physically acute” “international and domestic conditions have never been better, “not running for office” (or being run out) and pardon galore gambits before fleeing the country?
• More black bananas coming over the next 42 days.
• Does the rotten banana diet include the “all politicians lie” staple?
• Why are we supposed to eat that when we can tell the difference between riff and rot?
• Don ‘t we know when to go with it, “peel” with laughter and when to spit it out?
• Where are the all very well-paid Carmen Miranda-like celebrities and in the tank media?
• Was support really all about harvesting bunches, many millions of spent, donor banana billions?
• Accounting 101 anyone?
• Transition promises aside, who is dropping deep state banana peels to slip up the new administration?
• Is it also ripe warning that a lot of bananas will be spoiled out of spite and malice over the next 42 days?
• Still, ready to go a bit bananas for love of family, and certainly, love of country?
• ‘Tis the season?

Socrates reminds: “The unexamined life is not worth living.” The answers and actions are yours.

• Is the march through human history a tragedy or a comedy, or a combination, deserving of derisive and/or uproarious laughter?
• American Thanksgiving over, if it ever should be, is it now an all-out dash to a good, old- fashioned, pagan holiday, season and spirit that morphed into Christmas (Festival of Nativity) in the fourth century by order of Pope Julius 1?
• Were Americans hesitant or hasty when Christmas, ever popular, except when and where banned, became a Federal Holiday in 1870?
• If Aristophanes, the creator of comedy, was walking the American, landscape today, would he feel estranged, at home, or maybe newly encouraged?
• Would he surely be laughing out loud at the frailty (and failure) of sophist supremacists claiming intersectional correctness over everything from weaponized weather/climate change (with its witless wonks), to welcoming men into women’s sports (and locker rooms)?
• Would stand-up comic/playwright Aristophanes embrace broad comedic themes reflecting human foibles, resilience, health and reason?
• Do such, and did his, comedy themes include: Pillorying all aspect sex, politics, religion, ethnicity, race, pain, pleasure, pedantry, posturing plus production of loud and olfactory noises as precursor to personal effluvium excretion?
• Is the latter an understandable, Buckeye reaction to the Michigan win over State yesterday?
• If the subject is spared, is the story spoiled, punch lines petrified?
• Can clever comedy, including the self-depreciating kind, carry us over the rough shoals of life and wash us up on the shores of laughter?
• Because we’re human, are we all worthy targets, recognizing defects around and about, especially those we carry?
• Is it preferable to LOL rather than cringe, stigmatize, get angry and cut off communication?
• Better to remember Proverbs 17:22 and Bennet Cerf’s “Laughter is the Best Medicine?”
• Can glad tidings from life’s comedy, even when they sting a bit, bring laughter and good health?

Socrates reminds: “The unexamined life is not worth living.” The answers and actions are yours.

• Has Thanksgiving been supplanted by too much early Christmas or are its facets of faith, favor, food, football and more still uniquely special?
• If Thanksgiving were crystalline, held up to the light, would we marvel as facets reflect captivating brilliance?
• Does a history of fact and fancy create ritual facets that endure?
• Given the 1621 Plymouth harvest celebration between the pilgrims and the disease decimated Wampanoag Tribe (People of the Frist Light), does it take 321 years before Federal Holiday Thanksgiving is established as the fourth Thursday in November?
• While black clad puritanical pilgrims and feathered Indian depictions are disputed, was the Tisquantum (called Squanto) story central to Pilgrim survival?
• While Washington issued a proclamation in 1789 recommending a day of Thanksgiving, did it take “Mary Had a Little Lamb” author, Sarah Hale’s influence with Lincoln to cause the first nationwide call for Thanksgiving in 1863 thereby establishing precedent?
• Did Sarah also popularize eating turkeys now to the tune of some 50 million each Thanksgiving?
• Is Macy’s parade an integral part of the day with The Rockettes and Santa’s arrival most important?
• Is individual expression of gratitude around the dinner table augmented by admissions like: ” I’m thankful that they didn’t find out?”
• Does crowded and loud family conviviality cause you to opine: “Of all my relatives, I really like myself the best?”
• Breaking through the hubbub, is the day redeemed by football?
• Is gratitude also measured by three games on the day plus a black Friday bonus?
• What if you could skip all the family stuff this year, with family blessing, and just you and the Mrs. go to a 25-degree (and windy) Lambeau for a Packers game?
• Is Christmas coming early (we’re in a suite) knowing all will be back and welcome in 26 days?
• Does it stun that an assumed Bear’s guy is also a Packer’s fan and confirm what some have observed all along….acute schizophrenia?
• So, does Happy Cheese Head Day also reflect this: Happy Thanksgiving?

Socrates reminds: “The unexamined life is not worth living.” The answers and actions are yours.

• Given so many, vexing, national problems, are oft-used political tactics, obfuscation, willful inattention, cover up or, to buy time, establish one or more commissions and hope the news cycle will hype it or kill it ?
• With the November election, has the country issued a directive, a commission, for another approach to fixing problems?
• Is it recognition that major organizational surgery is needed to cure the disease of too much and too invasive federal government?
• Is it scalpel or chain saw time?
• If up to you, what’s on the do list ?
• Write it out; how long a list before you tire of the effort?
• Does the Preamble, favored language of The Third Degree, provide comprehensive gradation of macro level things to do?
• Do economy and opportunity override all other priorities? Really?
• Is availability of abundant, cheap and resilient energy essential to most items on your to do list?
• Is there room on the list for the global warming/climate change kook agenda wanting over a trillion dollars a year to make noise but no difference other than vulnerability?
• In peace and war, is speed of result key?
• Does the Sir Francis Drake or Spanish Armada approach appeal?
• Swift, darting and risky versus ponderous plotting, plodding and still risky (despite words like deliberate, thoughtful, non-escalatory, etc.)?
• Will the lobbyists have a field day recalling that term originated with President Grant viewing the supplicant horde (nice word) in the lobby of the venerable, Washington, Willard Hotel?
• Can we expect the wringing of hands, wild charges and words anew, the gnashing of teeth and opinion faking as news whipping the winds?
• Whose do list is it anyway?
• And to address just one enormity, does the best bi-partisan commission report in generations languish after July release to the White House and Congress?
• Do the results of that sterling Commission on National Defense Strategy bring laser focus to choices avoided but now coming due?
• Is the nine-page executive summary riveting and the total 92 page report a pathway of national need?
• How do we pay for it?
• How do we not pay for it; shouldn’t it be on everyone’s do list while commissioning exploitation of asymmetry and using a high cost/low cost mix of capability, renewed will and speed?

Socrates reminds: “The unexamined life is not worth living.” The answers and actions are yours.

• Does 49 BC and Alea lacta Est, Caesar crossing the Rubicon, have application for America this post-election Sunday?
• Is it risible or right that the “cast die” meaning, metaphor and mental image of Trump crossing the river brings shivers of fear and foreboding?
• Is Trump really Charon (now there’s a missed epithet in the spate of name calling and labelling) ready to exact payment and transport democracy across the river to Hades?
• Worse than Hades, maybe Haiti, that island pearl of great price Americans have paid for repetitively over the years?
• Did you note opportunity but refusal to use the term refuse island?
• Anyway?
• On self-created, River Styx, shore Is the wailing of the waiting (late night hosts, unrepentant media generally, fight to the end Democrat governors, and Hollywooders, to name a few), in fact, risible?
• Was it manifold failure of performance and inability to convert an American majority to a government gospel seen as too expansive, expensive, and progressive in the worst sense of the word?
• Is it the great fear of the global warming/climate change, chicken little cohort, and the faithful, far left, plus controlling activists, ideologies and theologies, that they have been found out and found to be wanting?
• Worse, greater than their ceaseless dissatisfaction, angst, anger and criticism, is their greater fear, that somewhere out there someone actually may be having fun, able to take and make a non-pc joke and not require coddling?
• Is it risible or right that the Biden-Harris team will try to cement legacy over the next 71 days till they cross over the river, so to speak?
• What will that legacy enshrine that has not been rejected?
• Is it risible or right that the American river is at flood stage with swollen policies and personnel and to get the river under control, navigable for the nation, will be no easy task and take a strong hand on the tiller?
• For us in the boat, no joke, better buckle up and help row like hell?

Socrates reminds: “The unexamined life is not worth living.” The answers and actions are yours.

• With two days to go before election, is focus on Presidential introductory music instructive?
• Can we thank Sir Walter Scott and “Lady of the Lake” for genesis but the American adaptation over the years since the early 1800s provides for four ruffles and flourishes followed by 30 seconds or so of rousing music?
• What about the lyrics?

“Hail to the Chief we have chosen for the nation,
Hail to the Chief! We salute you, one and all.
Hail to the Chief, as we pledge cooperation,
In proud fulfillment of a great, noble call.

Yours is the aim to make this grand country grander,
This you will do, that is our strong, firm belief.
Hail to the one we selected as commander,
Hail to the President! Hail to the Chief!”

• In this paean of expectation and celebration, is the focus on making our grand country even grander for one and all?
• What elements of personality, policy and execution will enable such grandeur, such focus, and will we welcome and deserve it because we are tough enough and willing to pay for it?
• Does the sheer size, complexity and profligacy of government (Milton Friedman’s big problems) make solution impossible without annealing and cooperative political, monetary and fiscal forces and that of a willing people?
• After almost 250 years of constitutional government, are we so burdened that Thoreau’s ” life is frittered away by detail, Simplify, Simplify” falls on deaf and divided ears?
• Is the great and noble call then to focus on the Lincoln admonition that government should only do for the people what the people cannot responsibly do for themselves?
• Are the imperatives of the Preamble enough to keep focus on our great and noble call?
• Is it not an enduring and preeminent America?
• Hail to the Chief and we all who chose and elected opportunity for proud fulfillment?
• Stay focused?

Socrates reminds: “The unexamined life is not worth living.” The answers and actions are yours.

• Do Halloween and the coming election make for a scary time but set up dress-up opportunity?
• Are we talking language, shuddering, sanguinary words, as well as costumes?
• Have we noted any moderation or diminution of inflammatory rhetoric in recent days?
• Just the opposite? Scary time indeed?
• So, is it to be covers over the head, stay at home time, or venture forth, ready for Halloween and eager to vote?
• Do ghosts and goblins, young and the old, offend with culturally appropriated dress-up or does (even should) such assimilation just represent the welcome obvious?
• Do too many, ever manipulating, university ecosystems, (administrators, professors and students), recoil at such pseudo travesty and need stuffed animals and counselling to make it thru another day of payment, protest, drinking, sports and sex? And who pays?
• Do intersecting identities provide or reflect desired dress-up proclivities ?
• Can dress-up demonstrate allegiance or antipathy toward prominent people?
• By example, who, with gesticulatory fervor, inspires the extra-large Howdy Doody outfit or the pretend to be a combat soldier uniform?
• Does a hairy, up from the holler, country creature make a hillbilly costume attractive? Moonshine or Rip van Winkle wisdom, does it matter?
• Using a reptilian projectile tongue and prehensile tail, does a change colors as needed Chameleon slip-on, suitable for any occasion, any purpose, any promise satisfy or stupefy?
• Does the red tie and tailed, Orange hulk set sartorial example to share along with simultaneous intent to bust up and build up the whole neighborhood?
• Given ensuing turmoil, is such huge transformational dress-up appealing or necessary?
• Did the zombie costume, yesterday’s favorite, stumble through a damaged, and now, almost irrelevant, but expensive past, with its dead man walking routine?
• Is that too cruel or too true for zombies and their loyalists? Still want to suit-up?
• Does costume choice consume, concern, confuse, or even, cement convictions?
• But, carefully considering (Indeed sounding out) all the variations, is it: Trick and/or Trump or Trump and/or Treat?
• What happens when you substitute Kamala for Trump?
• How can one really assess this scary time and evaluate dress-up?
• Maybe by looking in the mirror on the wall? Question as you should?

Socrates reminds: “The unexamined life is not worth living.” The answers and actions are yours.