I like this holiday wish from Adventures in Editing:

May all wordsmiths be blessed with inspiration to craft stories of peace, understanding, and growth,

May all word mechanics and book doctors be blessed with discipline and insight to perfect those stories and let the authors’ voices sing,

And may all readers be blessed with open minds and imaginations to allow themselves to journey to beautiful realms full of possibilities and the promise of new life.

With people falling into the familiar annual complaint about the secularization of Christmas, the commercialization of Christmas, etc., it's time to promote my favorite Christmas program:

Christmas Unwrapped: The History of Christmas Part 1 of 5 (~ 10 min) Part 2 of 5 (~ 10 min) Part 3 of 5 (~ 10 min) Part 4 of 5 (~ 10 min) Part 5 of 5 (~  5 min) History Channel Product Page Classroom Questions

I share this with you just so I can know I'm not the only one who's gritting his teeth over it:

When I was a kid, I learned not to ask too many questions. The most polite answer I could usually expect was, Look it up!

Man, how I hated that answer.

Now I wish I had taken it seriously and bothered to learn to use dictionaries, encyclopedias, and other reference books. As it was, I never did become any good with any of those things, and had some of my curiosity stomped down.

But now I look everything up, because there's so much information available online, if not via Google, then via one of the online references I use professionally. Now I find myself in the position of at least thinking, Why don't you just look it up? whenever someone asks a certain kind of question. I'm referring to adults. Not everyone has developed the look-it-up reflex. We didn't grow up with it.

I wonder if my son will have a hard time imagining a time before you could so easily look everything up.

My wife brought home a club sandwich for my lunch. I had never heard of a club sandwich before freshman year in college, when all my friends seemed to order it at the diner we went to regularly. I've wondered for the past 20-odd years why cold poultry slices with bacon (or sometimes ham) stacked between 2 or 3 slices of toasted bread should be called a "club." Today is the first time it occurred to me that I could just look it up:

How is this different from what the Fed does?

(That's not a rhetorical question: it's more similar than different, but there is, I believe, an important practical difference, if not an ethical one. Hint: think Cantillon effects.)

Black Bloke points out that the "generation graft" cartoon is from Fox & Forkum.

Their featured cartoon today is great:

via Tim Swanson

via Gary North

"The Revolt of Mattathias" (1 Macc. 2:24) by Gustave Doré

From Asimov's Guide to the Bible, pp. 717–8, on the Maccabees*:

The spark that initiated the Jewish rebellion against the Seleucids was set off by an officer of Antiochus who came to Modin to enforce the new laws. He asked Mattathias, as a prominent Jewish leader, to set a good example and to carry through a sacrifice in the manner required by law. To Mattathias, this was idolatry and he refused.

However, there were other Jews who were not so insistent on the old ways. The Seleucid officer, in asking Mattathias to perform the sacrifice, pointed out that it was being done by the Jews generally:

1 Maccabees 2:18. …fulfil the king's commandment, like … the men of Juda … and such as remain at Jerusalem…

In this, he was probably telling the truth. In aftertimes, a successful revolution is looked back upon as the rising of a united nation or group, but most of that is the patriotic gilding of memory, and it is not so. In all revolutions, those who ardently pursue the fight to the death are in the minority and there are usually at least as many who are ardently anti-revolutionary, plus an actual majority that is apathetic and will go where they are led (in either direction), if necessary, but who best prefer to be left alone.

Our own Revolutionary War was conducted by a minority of Rebels who faced not only the British, but Tories who were at least equal in numbers to themselves. And most colonists did not incline strongly to either side. And today the Civil Rights movement among Negroes has, as one of its problems, the apathy of most Negroes.

So it must have been that the Jews in the time of Antiochus were by no means all bitterly anti-Seleucid. Many were willing to conform; perhaps even eager, in their pro-Greek views, to do so. Thus, when Mattathias refused the sacrifice, someone else quickly stepped up to perform it, either out of conviction or, perhaps, out of the thought that unless someone did, the entire town would be massacred.

1 Maccabees 2:23. …there came one of the Jews in the sight of all to sacrifice on the altar … according to the king's commandment.

At seeing this, Mattathias flew into a rage, slew the Jew and the Seleucid officer. That was the Lexington-and-Concord of the Jewish rebellion. Mattathias and his sons had to flee to the hills, and around them they began to collect other rebels.

* These books are "deuterocanonical," meaning that they are part of the Old Testament for Catholics and Orthodox Christians, but not for Jews or Protestants. The King James Bible lists these books in the Apocrypha.

And speaking of economic fascism, today's article at Mises.org, "The Back Door to Socialism," by Chris Brown is about Obama's plans

to initiate public-private partnerships (PPPs) on a grand scale. … PPPs are essentially contracts between a public agency and a private company where assets, risks, and rewards are shared in providing a good or service to the public.

Sound familiar?

Brown's analysis borrows appropriately from Murray Rothbard's "The Myth of Efficient Government," an excerpt from Man, Economy, and State.