"We have given you a Republic, if you can keep it."

This is an excellent article by CK MacLeod posted at Hot Air with equally excellent comments.

FTA Quoting Jim Manzi: We can be confident that humanity will face many difficulties in the upcoming century, as it has in every century. We just don’t know which ones they will be. This implies that the correct grand strategy for meeting them is to maximize total technical capabilities in the context of a market-oriented economy that can integrate highly unstructured information, and, most importantly, to maintain a democratic political culture that can face facts and respond to threats as they develop.

Articulates my thinking beautifully, almost as beautifully as the document above.