I hope all have a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.
I'd like to finish the year leaving you with these two gems.
Courtesy of Maggie's Farm & Samizdata
Drake’s prayer, 1577, written in Portsmouth as he began his circumnavigation of the globe.
Disturb us, Lord, when
We are too pleased with ourselves,
When our dreams have come true
Because we dreamed too little,
When we arrived safely
Because we sailed too close to the shore.
Disturb us, Lord, when
with the abundance of things we possess
We have lost our thirst
For the waters of life;
Having fallen in love with life,
We have ceased to dream of eternity
And in our efforts to build a new earth,
We have allowed our vision
Of the new Heaven to dim.
Disturb us, Lord, to dare more boldly,
To venture on wilder seas
Where storms will show Your mastery;
Where losing sight of land,
We shall find the stars.
We ask you to push back
The horizons of our hopes;
And to push back the future
In strength, courage, hope, and love.
This we ask in the name of our Captain,
Who is Jesus Christ.
Though in other ways, we’re clearly in a new dark age. The fact that New York City is unable to conceive of building new bridges or subways or other infrastructure, and on the rare occasions when it tries to do so fails utterly, should tell us that. It’s like being a Roman in 500 AD and wondering at the giants of the past who built bridges and aqueducts, by then long lost technologies. I feel like I’m not just at the epicenter of capitalism here in Manhattan, but also at the epicenter of the cancer at the heart of it, to wit, the socialist destruction of the human will.
– Perry Metzger, in a private discussion
