Imagine This . . .

Imagine that you get hired to do a job. Any job. Might be as low as being a garbage collector, oops, excuse me, a sanitation worker. I understand that expectations in such a job may not be very high by the worker. It's a dirty job, but somebody has to do it and it doesn't pay very much. Do I really need to tell you all the things that suck about being someone who collects garbage? Sucky job. Bet you want to work your way up into a better job. But at the same time you are glad as can be that there are people who need a job and need to start out by being garbage collectors until they work their way up the system. I want you to think about how many jobs you have ever had where you could miss four out of ten days of work over a one year period and still expect to get paid for your so-called job. Anybody? Yeah. I didn't think so. Now, that's just talking about any old body who misses work. Imagine yourself a "rich" person who owns a McDonald's franchise and you employ 30 or 40 people. You work on a budget that allows for about a 6% profit. How many people can you afford to hire who just show up to clock in and then spend 60% of their time doing nothing but personal stuff. Golfing, laundry, emailing friends, whatever. You wouldn't tolerate it for several reasons. First, you can't afford to. One employee goofing off half the time would eat up most of your slim profit margin. If you tolerate it with one employee, pretty soon other employees will be doing it as well, and then you would be going bankrupt. It wouldn't be fair to the employees who do their jobs and they would get frustrated and quit to work someplace else. Now imagine that it wasn't just an employee, but the manager you hired to run the place. How do you think that would work out? What if your manager never showed up for half of the planning meetings that were scheduled as a necessary part of running the business? So, we have this story: http://www.infowars.com/report-obama-has-missed-over-half-his-second-term-daily-intel-briefings/

A new Government Accountability Institute (GAI)report reveals that President Barack Obama has attended only 42.1% of his daily intelligence briefings (known officially as the Presidential Daily Brief, or PDB) in the 2,079 days of his presidency through September 29, 2014. The GAI report also included a breakdown of Obama’s PDB attendance record between terms; he attended 42.4% of his PDBs in his first term and 41.3% in his second. The GAI’s alarming findings come on the heels of Obama’s 60 Minutes comments on Sunday, wherein the president laid the blame for the Islamic State’s (ISIS) rapid rise squarely at the feet of his Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. “I think our head of the intelligence community, Jim Clapper, has acknowledged that I think they underestimated what had been taking place in Syria,” said Obama.

Who is really running the show? Who is making decisions about the stuff in those intelligence briefings? Just thought I'd ask.

The Bigger Problem

"Miseducation is harder to overcome than ignorance." 
             -- Francis W. Porretto

Once again I run across a tidbit from Liberty's Torch that becomes the seed for a post here. Francis managed to encapsulate an idea in just seven words.  Sometimes, really great quotes don't get the appreciation they deserve. Maybe this one little sentence struck me so significantly because I have enough worldly experience.

Maybe it set off bells and whistles in my head because I've had to deal with the truth of that statement so much lately.

At the risk of boring my more intelligent readers, I feel like expounding on the quote above. I guess another reason for this is that I've got several decades of experience that growing older does not guarantee growing wiser; at least not in a society that coddles ignorance and stupidity.  Recently I've had to encounter the most egregious sin of stupidity.  Willful ignorance.  While lately I have seen this attitude most irritatingly in people quite older than myself, I try to mitigate my angst by seeing an underlying attitude of: "I'm old, I've paid my dues, and I'm not long for this world anyway."

Believe it or not, I've spent enough time thinking about this that I now have two categories of willful ignorance. In the first kind, the subject is confronted with facts that are so upsetting to his worldview, that he dismisses the new information and quickly moves on to something else that distracts him from having to really ruminate on it.  It may be in the back of his mind, able to resurface later if brought about by another event.  But the subject sort of subconsciously suppresses it because the cognitive dissonance is just too uncomfortable to deal with presently.  In this primary level, at least there is hope that the subject will accept the truth in the future.  When I encounter this in an individual, I can easily smile and drop the subject, thinking to myself, "It's okay, he/she's just not ready yet."

But the second level of willful ignorance is where I have to fight the demons that set my blood to boiling. It's when the subject makes clear and very declarative statements to the effect of: "I don't WANT to know." And more importantly, the statements are made with a smile and a smugness as if delivering divine wisdom from on high.  This is where I DO need grace from the Almighty, because I feel like slapping the ever-loving shit out of the jerk.

Getting back to the main idea; both of the levels of ignorance above are most often born out of miseducation.  Ignorance in its pure form simply means that you don't know, but you have not been indoctrinated in any particular direction, like a juror in a fresh venue with no prior knowledge of the case.  The problem comes from being purposely "educated" to believe things that seem very plausible, have been seemingly accepted by the vast majority, and are typically very difficult and time consuming to falsify or prove on one's own. Amusement of all kinds is the modern American sport. Ignorance is bliss. "I'll take the blue pill."

Why?  Well, as much as I don't like leftist/progressives, I'll quote one here.  Gloria Steinem said, "The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off."  Of course, truth won't piss you off until you are forced to come to grips with it.  It's like the child of any age who's parents finally throw him out of the house to go fend for his self. The Eastern Airlines employee or air traffic controller who finds out that the union doesn't really have his best interests at heart. The college graduate who finds out that there is no one looking to hire someone with a masters degree in "Graffiti's Social Importance."
So many more examples I would like to give here, but I'll move on.

People don't cling to false things they believe to be true because of evidence or logic.  They cling to those things because of their emotions.  Kevin Baker over at The Smallest Minority has many uberposts on his blog, along with some long-running exchanges with hoplophobes that help prove this point.  I remember sifting through long threads on his site as well as others, and being dumbfounded at the extremes to which anti-gunners will go to defend their position against all evidence and logic which demonstrates their position to be blatantly stupid.

One reason emotion is such a big issue is because nobody likes to find out they've fallen for a lie.  Short-term lies on the personal level are one thing. Someone in your personal world lies to you, but you eventually find out. Most of your anger can be righteously directed at them, and once you've calmed down you can at least feel good about yourself for discovering the truth.  But the big lies that will really rock your world are just too painful to deal with for a lot of people. Big lies that you find out you actually talked yourself into because they sounded so good.  But it was wrong.  And in the realization it was wrong you become angry. You are angry because it made you feel stupid.

The bigger the lie, the more stupid you feel, and thus the angrier you get.  The force multiplier to the tune of 10X is the fact that you have no one to blame but yourself.  There's not one individual you can blame for knowingly defrauding you.  If you got taken in by Bernie Madoff, you've got someone you can focus your anger on.  But who are you going to take to court or see in shackles over the Social Security Ponzi scheme?

Nothing perpetuates and protects ignorance as much as believing that you already know the truth. Oh, I believe that there are indeed absolute truths. But they are the things which I am always willing to put to the test.  Any test. Over and over.  But when you've come to the conclusion that "the argument/debate is over," then the only thing you have proven is your ignorance. 



Minor Rabbit Trail:  It's so easy to be like one of the sheep in this parade.  It's cool to feel like you are connected with a popular movie star.  It's so easy to let people like Leo and Algore and Bernie the Commie Sanders do your thinking for you, instead of asking the epistemological question: Are they right? How do they know?  What are the arguments on the other side?  If the argument is over, why the need for the march?  Back to my screed.

The things I am willing to argue passionately for are the things I am sure are true, with the caveat that I know I am human and that there may be information yet that I do not have.  But show me someone who is unwilling to entertain a reasonable and intelligent argument, and I'll show you a willfully ignorant and downright stupid fool.

Social Justice II

When you hear the words "Social Justice" juxtaposed together, remember that is just Marxist code for spreading the misery and reducing everyone down to a subsistence level or worse.

Just keep in mind that in every communist regime since 1900, the answer to food production problems and the resulting unrest was to cut off any food supply and starve the problem to death.

Wanna see what we are headed for if people don't wake up?  Go look at Zimbabwe.
THAT's "social justice."

Knowing Is Hard

Seems like Twyla and I are always saying that it is hard to know the truth when there is so much ignorance out there.  We don't live like elite people, don't want to live that way, or seem that way to others. But, dammit, I get really tired of hearing people parrot the propaganda that they've been fed by the dominant media that is just flat-out false.  I don't want to talk down to people or purposely make them feel stupid.  I feel like I did when I was fueling my truck one day and this young girl pulls up to the pump next to me and with a lit cigarette in her hand, proceeds to swipe her card, pull the nozzle, open her tank cap and shove the nozzle in.  She was at first shocked when I started shouting at her, and then giggled when she realized why I was shouting.

And I'm really sick and tired of people not being willing to take the time to actually find out the truth about issues that really effect their lives.  I pause here to interject a quote that I got from Belmont Club:

Part of the problem with politics is the problem of datasets. Soap opera issues — like sex and petty abuse of power — are popular with the viewers and newspaper readers because they are the only issues that everybody down to the least educated can understand. They are discussions at the lowest common denominator of human nature. Death and sex are what the King and the King’s chambermaid have in common. Editors know that if “it bleeds, it leads” because everybody bleeds.
Readers who are unable to grasp complexities of the deficit, the War Powers act, or the intricacies of quantitative easing are still able to comprehend that it isn’t kosher for a California governor to cuckold the maid’s husband, for a powerful banker to chase a chambermaid around a hotel room, for a President to hit on an intern or for a Presidential candidate to maintain a mistress with campaign funds while his wife is dying of cancer. They understand that because they can understand that. It is an available dataset to them. Creepy behavior is something they can grasp without a college degree. The same thing is true for gut issues like gas prices and inflation at the supermarket. People who don’t know how the fiscal system or the financial markets work still sense when their wallet is empty. Having an empty wallet not be the most theoretically important economic issue around but it is the dataset available to the average Joe.

I was talking to a friend the other day at a garage sale.  He and his wife don't have a computer and get all their news from the idiot box.  On most accounts, he sees through the leftist crap and seems like a conservative on most issues. But then he says, with total derision and disgust snarling from his mouth, "And what about that, . . . that . . what's his name . . . Paul guy?"
"You mean Ron Paul?"
"No, no, ah . . . "  Fingers snapping.
"Rand Paul?"
"No, no, uh,  Paul something. . . "
"Paul Ryan?"
"Yeah, geeze, what an asshole!"
"What?  Why would you say that?"
"He want's to get rid of medicare."
"Really?  What do you know about his plan?"
"Something about vouchers."

I won't go on with the conversation mode, but I'll admit to being obviously pissed off in front of my friend and then asking him if he actually read anything about Paul Ryan's plan.  No, he hadn't.  All he knew was what the TV told him as if Jon Stewart had written the script.  And when I explained to him the brief, true, and salient points about Ryan's plan, he agreed that he'd been totally misled and that Ryan's plan made perfect sense.

If you think it's more important to pay attention to who is dancing with who, who's getting kicked off the island, who's going to win a contest, how your sports team is doing, and you just can't be bothered to study some issues because it's boring and not any fun, then you deserve what you get when your quality of life goes into the toilet.  The problem is, such people drag the rest of society down into the septic tank with them.

When it all goes to hell and there are people who either sit around wondering what happened, it's going to be hard to feel any pity for them.  And God forbid I should encounter anyone who will say that it's the fault of Wall Street, or Big Oil, or Big corporations or Wal-Mart or any such nonsense because it will take much restraint to keep from beating the hell out of them.  The people who make the law and hold the badges and the guns are the ones who made Wall Street, Big Oil and all the rest do all the things they did.

And no, it's not all Obama's fault.  In fact, only a small fraction is Obama's fault.  Those of us who have been conservatives for decades have known this all along.  We are the ones who have been railing against the crap that led us to this point ever since Tip O'Niel for crying out loud.  The problem is the voters who buy into the crap about "fairness" and "tolerance" and "social justice" and the amorphous, undefinable "Hopey, Changey" pathway to social and economic collapse.  We real conservatives are pissed off that you didn't want to listen to reason and see through the lies when Bill Clinton slicked his way into the White House.  Now we are even more doubly pissed off that you didn't listen or pay attention when BO told you the unvarnished truth about what he wanted to do as president and you voted for him anyway.

Okay, post is long enough and I have a lot of stuff to do today.

Shalom Y'all

Politics Still Boring You?

It was in the mid 1990s.  At that time, I was driving an 18 wheeler from Tampa to Orlando at night. Shuttling freight there and back for a single company between warehouses. It was at the time when the Tampa Bay Buccaneers had been sold, and they were a losing team.  They were actually the most losing team in the NFL.  The new owners were "threatening" to find a new home for the team if they didn't get a new stadium courtesy of the taxpayers.

I had to avoid getting into arguments with the idiots who bought the lies about fiscal impact of having an NFL team.  I say professional sports is no different from museums or performing arts.  Either they produce something people want and can survive or thrive in a free market, or they deserve to dissolve.  Cut and dried.  Want to find the ugliest crap that is supposed to pass for art, but that nobody would allow on their own property let alone pay for?  Go find a government building.

I arrived at the dock in Orlando the night that it was announced by the front office of the Bucs, that Orlando was making overtures about luring the team there.  A warehouse worker approached me like a 12 year old on a playground to ask, "What you gonna do if you lose the Bucs to US?!?"

"Nothing."
"Whaddya mean, nothing?"  From the look on his face, you'd have thought that I had turned down a chance to have sex with the entire Swedish Bikini Team.  Oh, I understood where he was coming from, and it made me angry, but I did my best to stay calm.

"Who is your congressman?" I asked.
"Huh?"  His face was contorted as if he'd just discovered an ice chest of fish that he'd forgotten about from last summer.
"Do you know which congressional district you live in?"
[blank stare, crickets chirping]
"Do you know who your Senators are that represent you in Washington?"
"What the hell does that have to do with football?"
"Nothing.  And that's the point.  The Bucs could disappear off the planet tomorrow and it won't effect my life one iota.  Yet there are people who gain political office, and make decisions every chance they get, which have direct and very negative impacts on my life."

As if I had just spoken in Mandarin Chinese, he picked up the conversation.

"You guys are gonna be so sorry that you lost the Bucs when Orlando gets them."

"I don't think you understood my point. I don't care if the Bucs move to Orlando.  You see, nobody at One Buccaneer Plaza employs me, or signs my paychecks, or is helping me get my college education or pay my mortgage.  Meanwhile, people like you help allow politicians to steal more of my money and liberty, because you don't care enough to pay attention to what they are doing. You have no idea who is making the laws and spending a hefty part of your paycheck, because you are more concerned with knowing the entire starting lineups of the offense, defense, and special teams for at least a half dozen NFL franchises."

"What are you talking about?  I've gotten money back from the IRS almost every year."

"Thank you for helping to prove my point.  How much did they keep?"

"Who?"
"The IRS."
"I said they gave me a refund."
"They gave you back a portion of the money that they overtaxed you."

Getting him to actually look at his paystubs and do the math was interesting.  It was priceless to see him find out that all the FICA was separate and not considered part of the income tax.

Why do I bring up this example?  It may be unlikely that someone who has been coming to my blog is as clueless as that guy, but in case someone is coming here relatively lately, I want you to learn something.

There are some clichés and sayings that are very true and have stood the test of time.  There are some that are true and valid depending on the context, and it is a wise person who can recognize the difference.  For example: "What you don't know, can't hurt you."  That might be true if it describes the fact that your co-workers are jealous of you and hate your guts, but they can't really do anything to sabotage your work.  But when it comes to the populace and politics, it's a big lie.

There is another saying:  People get the government that they deserve.  Supposedly de Toqueville said it about democracy, but nobody is sure.  It is true, nonetheless.  It doesn't matter if you are a soccer mom or a warehouse worker who loves football, or you are a college professor with lots of hobbies.  If you choose to take the attitude that politics is boring, or that you don't see any difference between the parties, or "Why vote, nothing ever changes."  You are just as much a part of the problem as the people who are actively trying to transform our society under the phony, slick, Madison Avenue, "Hope and Change" crap, into a quasi slave state.

There are very soon to be people who are going to be crying and gnashing their teeth, scared to death, wondering how they are going to afford their cable and internet service, cell phone service, and groceries.  They are going to be dumbfounded when they need medical care and find out that a third to half of the physicians who could, have already retired or just closed down, or just won't take Medicare or Medicaid unless it is at the point of a gun.  They will get to see,  just like already in England, women will be having babies in the corridors of the hospitals if they are lucky enough to get there in the first place.  We already know that people in several northern states are facing 30% fuel oil increases as winter is just getting started.  This is at the same time there is a moratorium by the administration on pumping, not drilling new wells, mind you, but pumping existing wells off the coast, and we are sitting on vast reserves of oil under the great plains and under Alaska.  We haven't built any new nuclear power plants in over 30 years, while France has raced ahead building perfectly safe, modern design reactors and produces 90% of their electricity this way.

While you were busy watching "Survivor," "Dancing with the Stars," "American Idol," "Monday Night Football," or any number of amusing things, your only considered thought on serious political issues came from the 10 second sound bites you got from the mainstream TV and radio, while the decisions on how to handle those issues were coming to dramatically affect or destroy your way of life.

When California, New York, and Illinois default and admit it, and the riots start here like they are happening in Greece and soon to be in Spain and Italy, and people are sitting here wondering how we got to this point,  I'll be telling my story from the top of this post.  That's how we got here.

You preferred bread and circuses over the tedious business of understanding politics and how it can and WILL effect your life.  You chose to abdicate your responsibility for your own life and put the decision making into the hands of others and as long as what they said sounded good, such as "caring" and "fair" and was "for the children." They could pretty much do what ever the hell they wanted to as long as they didn't preempt your soap operas or your game shows.  A lot of people are going to find out the hard way, that there are deep, far-reaching consequences for the decisions one makes or refuses to make.

I remember going to a Saturday "townhall" meeting in the summer of 1994. It was just before the voters gave the Republicans a chance to reign in some of the out of control crap that Bill and Hillary Clinton and the Democrats were trying to foist on the United States.  Pretty much the same crap that the Democrats have illegally done in the past 24 months.  About a quarter of the 60 or so attendees of this meeting, called by then Congressman Sam Gibbons D - Tampa, were there to petition for reigning in a lot of the unconstitutional garbage, and to see just how much the democrat congressman realized that his job was in danger.  But about a third of the people there were fawning over Sam and asking him how much more bacon he was going to bring to the district, without realizing that the hogs were there in attendance, and we were pissed.

It made me frustrated and angry that those people standing there with their proverbial hands out, couldn't comprehend that government doesn't have anything unless it first takes it away from somebody else.

Politics is like a dangerous predator in the jungle, it would prefer that it be able to stalk you while you are distracted by a host of other things. You ignore that subtle whiff of scent that you know doesn't belong.  You shrug off that shadow you "thought" you saw in the corner of your eye.  Some of us in the herd, the sheepdogs, barked and growled, but the majority of the herd told us to be quiet and not disturb their grazing.  Then before you know it, you are left with nothing but a look of horror on your face and the words, "Awww Sh%$#@% . . . " coming out of your mouth, as you realize too late that you should have taken this stuff more seriously.

Oh well.  Time to go work out my frustrations by making preparations to ride out this winter and think about what food I'll be growing in the spring.

They Wanted What?

If I had a time machine and could transport you back to some time in 1938 -1944, I would do it. I would love to be able to take you to 1938 Germany and let you witness the rise of Hitler and his national socialist party.  I'd love to let you hear people in America, who, even during the war, didn't think Hitler was wrong at all, knowing full well about his pogrom of genocide on the Jews.  What is called the "Shoa."   I would be so grateful to show someone first hand how willfully ignorant the general populace can be when it comes to evil.  Especially the evil of the statists.  People who believe a big, all encompassing nanny state government system that provides everything for you is somehow the answer to all of our problems.

I'm always amazed by the people who think that what happened in Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia can't happen here.  As if there are not many people who actually believe that they could create a socialist utopia if THEY were in charge.  In other words, Stalin and Hitler and Mao and Pol Pot and Castro and Che had the right idea, they just didn't implement it the right way.  Ronald Reagan said that we are always only one generation away from losing freedom.

If you don't know who Professor William Ayers is, I suggest you google his name.  Bear in mind that Obama launched his senatorial bid from Ayer's home in Chicago. Note that Obama's career is based on Saul Alinsky's book: Rules for Radicals.  Note that when Bill Ayers was asked about his own terrorist activities after escaping prosecution due to technicalities, he said he was only sorry that he didn't do more.

Bill Ayers was a major leader in the Weather Underground. Maybe he still is.  Now watch the following video and tell me how much you like "Hope and Change."