I am catching up on writing my award-winning treatise on practical politics. Here are three general principles about politics on which I have been musing. First, there is no doubt about the governing classes. They have a unique way of staying in power and intimidating the rest of us. One of the ways they do that is to throw words around to obfuscate and confuse us and to give the impression that they have everything under control when it is plain that they do not.