Christmas Eve at Waialea Beach

'Twas a lovely day for the beach. Water was warm enough for a little swim, and the young ladies enjoyed soaking up a little sun.

Christmas Dinner?

The neighborhood turkeys just keep coming back. They're looking better and better! Don't think I've ever seen a turkey fan its tail until these came along. Real show-offs!

Le Plus Ca Change ...

William Sumner, commenting on do-gooders, wrote in 1883: "They see wealth and poverty side by side. They note great inequality of social position and social chances. They eagerly set about the attempt to account for what they see, and to devise schemes for remedying what they do not like. In their eagerness to recommend the less fortunate classes to pity and consideration, they forget all about the rights of other classes, they gloss over the faults of the classes in question, and they exaggerate their misfortunes and their virtues. They invent new theories of property, distorting rights and perpetuating injustice, as anyone is sure to do who sets about the readjustment of social relations with the interests of one group distinctly before his mind, and the interests of all other groups thrown into the background. When I have read certain of these discussions, I have thought that it must be quite disreputable to be respectable, quite dishonest to own property, quite unjust to go one's own way and earn one's own living, and that the only really admirable person was the good-for-nothing."

The reformers, he said, were constantly hatching plans to employ the power of government on behalf of their favored victims. "Their schemes, therefore, may always be reduced to this type -- that A and B decide what C shall do for D." A and B were the reformers; they derived power and self-satisfaction from this arrangement. D, the object of their concern, received material benefits. C, whom Sumner called the "Forgotten Man," unwillingly supported the others. "We should get a new maxim of judicious living," Sumner said sarcastically: "Poverty is the best policy. If you get wealth, you will have to support other people; if you do not get wealth, it will be the duty of other people to support you."

From Brands' "American Colossus"