Holiday Season

It looks like the Holiday season is upon us. Time to enjoy family, friends, football and fine food. I am looking forward to spending time with my wonderful grandchildren this coming week. A few days off work does a body good. Especially good if it keeps your mind off the economy and the fact that work is experiencing a slight downturn. It'll give me a little time to work on my projects

PEST (post election stress syndrome)

Thank goodness! The election is finally over! Now we can get back to the real world. Well, at least for a little while until the hoopla that will inevitably popup when the inaguration takes place and at least for the first few weeks after the new president takes charge.

Now is the time to get back to the personal problems we all have and our methods of dealing with them. Try to avoid watching all the gloom and doom on the news networks, pick back up your hobbies, if you don't have one, get one. 

It's Iowa weather as usual at it's best this time of year... snow and cold one day, 60 degrees the next, sunshine and 30 Monday, rainy and 50 on Tuesday. This time of the yeat that old saying is really true... "don't like the weather, wait a minute, it'll change!"

Anyway I'm going to try to lighten up a little. I've been told my posts are a little depressing. It's going to be hard but I'll try.

Things to ponder:

Way back in 1787 a Scottish history professor, Alexander Tyler wrote this about the fall of the Athenian Republic, the first real democracy in human history....
"A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government"
"A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury"
"From that moment on, the majority will always vote for the candidates who will promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship."
"The average age of the world's greatest civilizations from the beginning of history, has been about 200 years"
"During those 200 years, those nations always progressed through the following sequence:
1. From bondage to spiritual faith;
2. From spiritual faith to great courage;
3. From courage to liberty;
4. From liberty to abundance;
5. From abundance to complacency;
6. From complacency to apathy;
7. From apathy to dependence;
8. From dependence back into bondage"
That was 221 years ago, so we're already 21 years past the average. How much time left do we really have as a free people? Perhaps as someone just said maybe it's "time to cling to our guns and religion!"