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.