This is the fifth anthology of commentaries and essays collected from Rule of Reason and other weblogs over the years. They focus on current politics, Islam, freedom of speech, various cultural issues, and miscellaneous subjects. The startling and unexpected reelection of Barack Obama in 2012 for another four years to continue what frankly should be deemed a nihilist campaign to "deconstruct" America should cause anyone who values his freedom and his life to enter into a state of permanent trepidation. Much has happened since the publication of the last volume: the Boston Marathon bombing; revelations of the extent of government spying on American citizens and even foreign leaders by the National Security Agency; a continuing assault on gun ownership and on freedom of speech, in violation of the Second and First Amendments; the ever-mounting multi-trillion dollar federal debt, which can never be paid; and the penchant of the reelected president to rule by "executive order," which obviates one check on federal power so carefully and conscientiously devised by the Founders as a check on tyranny; and finally, the official but disastrous "rollout" of ObamaCare and its website, a disaster excused by Obama and the administration with the usual bundle of lies, deceptions, and evasions. The title of this volume is taken from the term letter of marque, which originally meant the granting by a government of a license to a private individual to raid and capture the merchant vessels of an enemy nation. Beat to Quarters was a drum signal to a warship's crew to prepare for battle. In the context of contemporary politics, I employ the terms in the spirit of a private individual granting himself the "license" to critique government and cultural policies and trends. I am not the first to turn this notion on its head. Ayn Rand, in her prophetic novel Atlas Shrugged, featured among its heroes Ragnar Danneskjold, a "pirate" who seizes government relief ships. In one instance he sinks a ship loaded with copper ore, and in another reduces a steel mill of a crony "capitalist" to rubble. My purposes are no less destructive. One of them is to help reduce our looting welfare state to rubble. I am ably assisted in this campaign by reality.

From the "crow's nest" of my own ship of life - not for me a comfortable billet below decks, snoozing with others in our swaying hammocks - I gain a long-range perspective on what is before me, around and below me, and what is on the horizon. This is the sixth anthology of commentaries and essays collected from Rule of Reason and other weblogs over the years. They focus on current politics, Islam, freedom of speech, various cultural issues, and miscellaneous subjects. The startling and unexpected reelection of Barack Obama in 2012, in spite of all the evidence of all his policy failures, abuses of executive power, and threats and tantrums, for another four years - against all reason - to continue what frankly should be deemed a nihilist campaign to "deconstruct" America, should cause anyone who values his freedom and his life to enter into a state of permanent trepidation. For a while, I had contemplated titling this volume There is only the fight to recover what has been lost...," cadging a line from T.S. Eliot' s1940 poem Four Quartets. The sentiment would have been appropriate, because most of the articles here are about what has been lost or demolished in contemporary politics and culture. But, I too much associated that line with that political harridan, Hillary D. Rodham (Clinton), and her 1969 Wellesley College senior thesis, "There is Only the Fight...: An Analysis of the Alinsky Model." She quoted the line at the end of a long chunk of Eliot's poem, "East Coker," which I have read and was consequently depressed by its intrinsic and gloomy determinism. Her thesis is an encomium of Saul Alinsky, the Chicago theoretician and socialist political strategist and advocate of "community organizing." Unfortunately, Clinton, Alinsky, and Eliot were too intimately linked in my mind to everything I detest in "practical politics," so I chucked the idea ofo appropriating the line for myself.