Failure is learned by experience. This is a truth. If something fails, whatever that may be, such as a simple cake recipe, well, it fails. The end product once brought out of the oven will look bad-burnt, fallen or misshapen, or it will taste bad, and tasting bad is ‘tasting bad', there's no halfway on that.

This simple example of failure can be applied to anything, at any stage in life, to any activity or plan, and the experience of that failure, generally, is an experience learned by every common man and woman. Also with that experience comes the general practice that the failure is to be avoided in the future, near or distant.

Going back to the cake recipe and the blob which was removed from the oven, most people would look at the blackened, oozy or dried mass, and maybe utter a few vulgarities, which wouldn't be surprising. Sort of a ‘get thee behind me, Satan,' partly because we know we read the baking instructions and we should've gotten it right-we know that.

But all the same, again, the preparations are begun as a renewed effort to bake a cake. Why? Because we know sooner or later the cake will be made-it will come out all right, because it has before for many other bakers, and for hundreds of years. Even in those pioneering days, out on the plains, where Betty Crocker wasn't even thought of let alone printed on the side of a box, cakes were baked from scratch and not poured out of a plastic bag into a non-stick pan.

We know this to be true and it works, and we learned from experience, so sooner or later our personal failure does turn into self-congratulations and feeling of success, truly deserved.

So, we can not only learn by experience, but we can learn from history! Isn't that wonderful! I think it is!

People can learn. But, I dare say, there is a point of order, which I must bring up and that is, people learn, except if they are of the political Left; that would include the progressive and all the associated ‘isms' of Marxism as well.

First, and for the most part, the American republic has worked. The ideas, the documents are sound, except when the Left has ‘fiddled' with American government and the American way of life, and tossed in some nasty germs into the Petri dish which is the American experiment, a successful experiment at that.

Insidious Progressive meddling introduced numerous failures to the American system. These elements are part of something we all know as Socialism, and Socialism doesn't work. Matter of fact, the root political thought, known as Marxism doesn't work. History has shown it doesn't work. The USSR is gone, China is using free market principles, and socialist Europe is moving as fast as its debt-bloated corpulence can go.

But you can't tell the American Left that. Well, you could, but they don't listen, they don't care, and hence, they don't learn.

Yes, I'm describing a two year-old. The problem with this two year-old is that it's in an adult body, and can't even learn how to bake a cake.