A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, r. Dec. 2013

p. 102 ... for it is good to be children sometimes, and never better than at Christmas, when its mighty Founder was a child himself.

From Chris Stohs' Facebook wall, r. Dec. 2013

A fellow named Joe Long said this "I find it striking how 'change' is viewed in the abstract as a positive. 'I just want my children to Change the World' is an unquestioned cliché, a bit of happy-talk; but I think it a far finer thing to identify things worth preserving and perpetuation. It's hard, but it's more of an achievement. Change, like another well-know by-product of life functions, just happens. Leave things alone and they will change: They will break down and rot. Ah, but to fight, sometimes even briefly to reverse decay: That is a task worthy of a hero."

The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut, r. Dec. 2013

p. 89 The reason I told Ransom K. Fern to give you this letter only if your luck turned bad is that nobody thinks or notices anything as long as his luck is good. Why should he?

p. 124 The questions are important. I have thought harder about them than I have the answers I already have. That is the first thing I know for sure: (1.) If the questions don't make sense, neither will the answers.

p. 126 Unk had no way of judging the quality of the information contained in the letter. He accepted it all hungrily, uncritically. And, in accepting it, Unk gained an understanding of life that was identical with the writer's understanding of life. Unk wolfed down a philosophy.

p. 185 Not to be lonely, not to be scared - Boaz had decided that those were the important things in life. A real buddy could help more than anything.

p. 205 "I don't know what's going on," said Boaz in his thoughts, "and I'm probably not smart enough to understand if somebody was to explain it to me. All I know is we're being tested somehow, by somebody or some thing a whole lot smarter than us, and all I can do is be friendly and keep calm and try and have a nice time till it's over."

p. 265 The sermon of the panorama was that even a man without a friend in the Universe could still find his home planet mysteriously, heartbreakingly beautiful.

p. 315 " 'I would be the last to deny,' " sad Beatrice, reading her own work out loud, " 'that the forces of Tralfamadore have had something to do with the affairs of Earth. However, those persons who have served the interests of Tralfamadore have served them in such highly personalized ways that Tralfamadore can be said to have had practically nothing to do with the case.' "

p. 317 "The worst thing that could possibly happen to anybody," she said, "would be to not be used for anything by anybody."

p. 320 "You finally fell in love, I see," said Salo. "Only an Earthling year ago," said Constant. "It took us that long to realize that a purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved."

Budget Battles and the Growth of the Administrative State (Imprimis) by John Marini, r. Dec. 2013

John Locke, the most important political theorist of the American Founding era, described laws as a community's "standing rules, indifferent, and the same to all parties." None of these elements are to be found in the Affordable Care Act. As Charles Kesler noted in the Claremont Review of Books, such laws "start not from equal rights but from equal (and often unequal) privileges, the favors or benefits that government may bestow on or withhold from its clients. The whole point is to empower government officials, usually unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats, to bless or curse your petitions as they see fit, guided, of course, by their expertness in a law so vast, so intricate, and so capricious that it could justify a hundred different outcomes in the same case. When law ceases to be a common standard of right and wrong and a common measure to decide all controversies, then the rule of law ceases to be republican and becomes despotic. Freedom itself ceases to be a right and becomes a gift, or the fruit of a corrupt bargain, because in such degraded regimes are those who are close to and connected with the ruling class have special privileges.