How could early 16th century Portugal, a tiny country of less than a million people, sitting on the edge of the civilized world, forge a global empire that rivaled that of England and Spain? The answer is brains, guts, determination, and a beckoning open expanse of restless ocean at its doorstep.

Sleek caravels of oak with shallow draft
Dropped down the Tejus on the King’s command
With iron-hard crews that knew their ancient craft
And to the sea and out of sight of land
They hugged the ragged, fetid Guinea coast
As step by step they journeyed further south
At headlands planted there a stone milepost
And mapped the rivers upstream from the mouth
In time they found the southernmost land’s end
Of Africa, and then sailed grimly on
To the unknown where strong trade winds would send
The ships to India one fated dawn
The riches of the fabled East went home
To Portugal where spices, silver, gold
Not seen since the far distant days of Rome
Were brought ashore to gloried stories told
Diaz, da Gama took their fragile ships
So fragile even for their early day
On voyages that ever would eclipse
All other journeys ever underway

Time is an illusion. With one stroke of a brush or pen time can be reversed and dreams and journeys renewed.

Built I a silver ship with one brush stroke
A caravel of olden tales well told
Her keel of hardened iron and burnished oak
Her parchment sails embossed with gleaming gold
At anchor on the lake she calmly rests
Adventure standing quiet by her side
The darkened starlit sky holds many tests
And sailed we on the swiftly running tide
The stars laid out for us a southern course
With dark red Betelgeuse to steer upon
We crossed the glittered snows of the fierce Norse
And to the golden land of Prester John
Where shining in the still and darkened night
The palaces of marbled polished stone
Shown with a ghostly mist of golden light
As if the time and world were theirs alone
Across the deep black sea we quickly sailed
Edirne, Ottoman, Sultan Mehmet
Constantinople, free, as yet unquailed
Yet in the dawn a shadowed minaret
The rising of the sun saw us near home
Below us tiny ships set sail from Tyre
Unknowing that one sorrowed day would Rome
Extinguish them with blood stained sword and fire
Sweet morning light crept softly through my room
And lilting birdsong lifted me awake
The caravel now tied up to the boom
At rest upon the placid silver lake

The collapse of socialist countries like Venezuela, which not so long ago was the richest country in South America with enormous oil wealth, are always explained away by the economists as “The curse of plenty,” in which countries that rely on natural resource exports may tend to neglect education because they see no immediate need for it. Economists explain further that resource-poor economies like Singapore, Taiwan or South Korea, by contrast, spent enormous efforts on education. No one will say the obvious, that it is not abundant natural resources that leads to neglecting education, it is the lack of abundant brains that results in, not leads to, a neglect of education. Why is North and South America, south of the United States, traditionally poor and poorly educated, despite abundant natural resources? It is because the people are descended from two cultures that were still in the Stone Age when they were chanced upon by advanced Europeans – indigenous Amerindians and Central Africans who were brought to the Americas as slaves, and these two Stone Age peoples intermarried to produce the majority population of Central and South America. Are all cultures equal? No. To say that Singapore, Taiwan and South Korea emphasized education because they were resource poor is absurd. They emphasized education because that is what First World people do. Venezuela did not emphasize education because they were resource rich but because that is what Third World people do.

The Renaissance in Europe
Art and science were the rage
While Aztecs, Incas, Bantus
Lived their lives in the Stone Age
Knots on rope a written message
Captives murdered to please god
That they tend to lag behind us
Is in fact not very odd
But of course it isn’t their fault
For the white man did them in
We debased their shining culture
And now wallow in our sin

In 1853, in the run-up to the Crimean War, London‘s music halls rang with a rollicking and defiant song, with the crowd standing and roaring the tag line, “The Russians Shall Not Have Constantinople!” It is ludicrous to think of a present day London theater crowd standing and roaring defiance at anything at all. Nor will there be defiance from an American audience so long as Obama is president.

The music hall, the Internet
Are really just the same
A place where sober people met
To plan and play the game
For those who owned the music halls
And told us what to sing
And those who made the midnight calls
And told us what to bring
The game was capturing the flag
A small step will be fine
And if the Other seems to lag
Then it is Auld Lang Syne
Miscalculation can ensue
The game is always fraught
And then the piper’s pay is due
For lessons now untaught

I spoke to a recent college graduate today, asking about the wisdom of allowing grown men who claim they believe they are a little girl to use the school shower facilities with little girls. Her mind having been freshly ploughed at great cost by a prestigious university, she was astonished that I would find something wrong with that, and fairly screamed,

A person has a right to be
Whatever gender he or she
Decides is best for him or her
And there’s no reason why a stir
Be made because a male who’s nude
Bathes with girls, that’s why a prude
Like you should be ashamed to show
Your face and just to let you know
I’m boiling mad to hear such hate
And furthermore just let me state
The courts en banc ruled just today
Identity is what you say
You are in fact whate’er you wish
A polar bear, a petri dish
A teapot or a childlike gnome
I’m so upset, dad, take me home

The United States Justice Department is threatening the State of North Carolina because of a North Carolina rule that says public bathrooms and school and college restroom and shower facilities are to be used by people whose gender is written on their birth certificates. The Justice Department insists that grown men have a civil right to use the same bathroom and shower facility as little girls. A biological male wrote on the door of a stall in an Obama mandated all gender bathroom, “I hate grils.” Underneath that someone wrote, “What’s wrong with us grils?”

No longer is one’s gender fixed in place
Biology is roughly overturned
One’s gender is a choice as much as race
The Left is getting what it much has yearned
Destruction of the norms of Western life
The turning over all we once held dear
A man can take a husband, woman, wife
To question is to live a life in fear
Retaliation is both sure and swift
The loss of fortune, children taken, job
The Left sees loss of liberty a gift
They’ve given to the unwashed stupid mob

With Donald Trump’s smashing victory in Indiana and the suspension of the campaigns of Cruz and Kasich, Trump is now the presumptive nominee of the Republican Party, though many in the Republican hierarchy are very unhappy. In the meantime, Hillary Clinton, anointed by the Democrat establishment, cannot put away Bernie Sanders, a 74 year old Socialist who spent his honeymoon in the Soviet Union and proudly says he is not a Democrat. Hillary, in addition to being the most robotic and insincere candidate in recent memory, is waiting to hear from the FBI about the mafia-like machinations of the Clinton Foundation and her mishandling, either purposeful or accidental, of classified and top secret material that endangered the security of the United States. It seems a slam dunk she will be indicted and perhaps tried, but this is politics and you never know. In any event it would seem to guarantee an interesting if not exciting summer leading up to the conventions, where we might very well be astonished at the outcomes.

The gavel quiets down the hall
And speakers rise to speak
We tune it out, we’ve heard it all
Yet we will watch all week
Because a frisson of unknown
Will keep us glued to sets
In both conventions what is shown
Is as good as it gets
For when surprises are in style
Will Hillary be there
Or will she be in durance vile
And if so will you care
And as for Donald will the Pubs
Deny him what he won
And rig the vote so that the scrubs
Have their day in the sun
What happens when the pictures show
When all the votes are in
The smiling face of Rubio
And Biden’s goofy grin

Hillary Clinton has been bothered with a hacking cough for some time, and while it seems of little concern to some, it is of much concern to me. It isn’t the cough that bothers me, it’s the hacking. The best thing about computer voting, according to a Democrat friend, is that the votes are there to be counted any way you want them counted, so easy it is to break into the servers and manipulate the totals. He winked and said, “But of course we would never do such a sneaky, underhanded thing.”

The Dems come out attacking
The guy the Pubs are backing
Though venom they are lacking
Because they know the score
Adept at vote hijacking
In ballot boxes packing
In recent years it’s hacking
That wins the race for sure
The server locks they’re cracking
They’ve ducks lined up and quacking
Pub totals they’re unstacking
And placed in the Dem store
The RNC is wracking
Their brains at the shellacking
And cry as they’re unpacking
Their victory once more

We have lost something very special, something wonderful. We have lost the American dream. It was not Obama alone who took the dream from us, it was decades of leftist ideology that prepared the way. And yet the dream is only lost, not dead. We shall, out of love for our country, of love for liberty, again climb that hill where sits the shining city of remembered dreams.

I dreamed we walked together
Through a glowing golden mist
We thought would last forever
And all tyranny resist
We walked through cool green clover
To the hills so far away
But the dream by then was over
And alone in dark I lay
Thinking that the dream was real and
You were yet my country still
And my heart and soul would heal and
We would reach that far off hill
When again we’d walk in dream mist
Over cool green clovered fields
Toward the hills so far and sun kissed
And the golden dream glow yields
To the land we walked together
In the distant wondrous time
When we promised that forever
To the highest hill we’d climb
This short dream will soon be ending
For you’re with us every day
And the future we’ll be spending
On that hilltop far away

When I was a boy, several millennia ago, I, like most of my compatriots, had a box of lead soldiers, but we all called them tin soldiers. It would seem that the guys in NATO headquarters in Brussels also have tin soldiers, though in a much bigger box, a box on which Putin is about to close the lid.

Ukraine is such a sorry mess
What happens next is just a guess
We know it’s just a stepping stone
We know it’s not Ukraine alone
It’s not just Lithuania
The man just has a mania
To recreate USSR
The Near Abroad and Near Afar
Warm water ports and ice free seas
Murmansk is nice but Riga please
He knows that NATO is so weak
The politicians mild and meek
It doesn’t take a sly old fox
To put tin soldiers in a box