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The sixth U.S. president, John Quincy Adams, once said America should not go abroad “in search of monsters to destroy.’‘ Reflecting on these words in his brilliant 1991 profile of Noriega in Vanity Fair, the late foreign correspondent T.D. Allman posited that attempts to free others by force would “insensibly’‘ tend toward the corruption of our own freedoms and free institutions. “Adams’s argument was subtle and complex,” wrote Allman. “But he foresaw what events in our own time have demonstrated—how a war to impose freedom on Vietnam insensibly leads to Watergate; how turning Colonel Oliver North loose on the Sandinistas leads to the Iran-contra scandal.”

We have yet to find out what violent unconsidered forces will be unleashed by the dawn raid on a sleeping Venezuelan despot on the third day of 2026. —Tina Brown, Fresh Hell

https://tinabrown.substack.com/p/is-the-maduro-rai...

Thanks for the link to a good article. And yes "the center cannot hold."

https://youtu.be/f1j0j4r_gnw?si=86Ix9DJZaVCDpZYF
Joni Mitchell's song "Slouching Toward Bethlehem" is her musical interpretation of Yeats' poem "The Second Coming."

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43290/the-s...
The Second Coming
BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

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