Progress in Venezuela

Back in the late 1990s when I was still living in Florida, I went to church with a family that had fled from Venezuela after Hugo Chavez had come to power.  They left a lot of extended family and friends behind and did their best to keep in touch. 

They were quite willing to talk about the horrific conditions of life down there. Terrible inflation, rampant and very blatant crime, thugs doing strong arm robberies in broad daylight, murder and mayhem.  A common denominator of the criminal thugs was that they not only supported Hugo Chavez, but they were his enforcers at the polling places. 

The immigrants were willing to admit that the things they saw in the SEIU here in America looked frighteningly close to what they left in Venezuela.  I say all that to introduce this from Joe Huffman's blog:

                               Quote of the Day
"We are building peace from within, and for that, you need disarmament.
Let us chase after the dream, after the utopia, the utopia of a Venezuela in peace." Nicolas Maduro      [the new dictator who replaced Hugo Chavez]
September 23, 2014

Venezuela’s Maduro launches $47M plan to disarm civilians
[How’s that dream chasing working out for the Marxists?]  -- Joe Huffman
Private gun ownership in Venezuela was banned in 2012. Yet the country has the second highest murder rate in the world.
Venezuela is also nearing default on its debt, the economy is a disaster, people can’t get toilet paper and many other basic goods, and now they want to spend tens of millions of dollars to “build dozens of new disarmament centers for civilians to surrender their weapons”.

So what happens when the powers that be decide to try that here in the U.S.?

Vote Fraud in Scotland

I began telling everyone I knew over ten years ago.  When we began to see all the computerized voting machines appearing all over the United States, I knew that we would never see a fair election ever again.

Don't even start with the luddite talk.  I love my technology as much as the next guy.  But nothing is perfect.  Of course, nothing is so damn perfect for making vote fraud invisible to the public as eliminating paper ballots.  The powerful elite can too easily bribe or coerce the results in electronic balloting because just one tech savvy person is all you need to insure that you get the result you want with no tangible evidence that the average person can see, let alone understand.

Check this out.  Via Infowars.com



If we survive the fiscal and societal meltdown and get the chance to start over, one thing that would have to happen is the enshrinement of one basic principle of elections: paper balloting.  This is so important that whatever new Constitution was created, it would have as an un-repealable law that anyone who suggests any form of electronic balloting will forfeit the privilege of voting permanently.  Anyone caught tampering with paper ballots will be sentenced to having a special mark tattooed on the hand or arm so they can never be anywhere near a polling place again.

Ain't Gonna Happen

First of all, Scotland's recent (Sept. 18, 2014) referendum proves it won't happen in America.

No, we are not Scotland, those people tend to be way more socialist than Americans are.  That just more than doubly proves my point.  Up until Sept.17, 2014, the vote was close, and at one point the secessionist vote was slightly ahead, but they still couldn't do it.  If a territory of people who mostly like big government and all that comes with it could only come close to a simple majority, then there's no way a land that ostensibly prides itself in "God, guns, and guts," but can only muster a bare 14% of strong support for seceding from the Union,  is going to pull away.

We are like the typical 14-year-old who wants to stomp our feet and demand to be treated like an adult when we want our way, but ten minutes later we are excusing our fear or stupid behavior by saying, "But I'm only a kid!"  The bottom 50% of income earners in the U.S. not only do not pay any income tax, but most of them are likely to get the "Earned Income Tax Credit."  Not the Orwellian title.  Then note that probably better than 15% of the people who are ostensibly working to earn a paycheck now are doing so by working for some government agency.  No, that's not an exaggeration. Take into account city, county, state and federal.  It really is that high.  But we can't just take into account the direct employees of government.  Think about all of the businesses that depend on government contracts to be in business.  Defense contractors.  Infrastructure. Welfare. Subsidies for business and farms.  The social security Ponzi scheme.  True free-enterprise has not existed unfettered since we got three things:  An income tax, a private central bank called the Federal Reserve, and Social Security.

The people who make up those percentages on the map above are rugged individuals who want to be free to succeed and be left alone.  But the vast majority don't care what government does as long as they can have their booze, drugs, cigarettes, sports or other mindless TV programming.  Politics is boring, dontcha know?  Until, that is, that the system implodes due to a collapsed, worthless dollar, and the sheep who survived the first couple of waves of riots over food and other necessities get herded into the FEMA camps.

Nope.  Americans haven't felt near enough pain yet to even start thinking about taking back control of the government, let alone learn the names of their congressmen or what the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution says.

And you also have to remember that there are way too many examples of this in the United States:

Origin of Government

Morgan over at House of Eratosthenes got me going on this subject with this post.

My perspective on this is so divergent from his that I decided to make it my own stand alone post on my blog here.  I couldn't just comment on his blog.

For the purpose of this discussion, trying to keep it in as narrow and controllable forum as possible, I'm going to define Column A and Column B in my own terms and maybe give them catchier names.

Severian says Column A people are:  "A group of individuals, each as sovereign as his physical power can make him, agree to cede some of their rights to a collective, in order to better secure their remaining rights. The key player here is the individual."   The only problem I have with that definition is that there is no need to cede any rights.  This is a misconception that has crept into our republican society.  Just because I agree with forming a local government with a police force and courts does not mean that I cede any rights or any sovereignty.  I simply LEND my authority to those entities as a matter of convenience.  I refuse to give up or cede anything to government.  To do so would be to misunderstand and negate the very words of the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights. Until I come up with something better, I'll call the Column A group, "Indies."

The Column B group is made up of people who cover a wide range, as surprising as that may seem.  At the worst end of the spectrum are those who are ravenously power hungry and mean to rule others. Such people have learned to parlay their narcissism and sociopathy into lucrative careers. At the mildest end of the spectrum are those who desire to be ruled under the guise of having security and believe that all others should feel the same way, believe the same way, and by God we will give whatever power necessary to our champions to enforce it.  Probably the greatest rallying cry of this crowd is; "There Ought To Be A Law."  So, I'll call them the TOTBALS.  The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.  If it protects ONE child . . .  Such are the self-proclaimed "liberals" who justify the most intolerant, totalitarian government for the purpose of enforcing what they believe is best for everybody at the point of a gun.  And yes, there are more than enough of such people proudly bearing the labels of Republican and Conservative.  They are just as bad.  Don't talk to me about how evil abortion is and then in the next breath defend the so-called "war on drugs."  Shut. UP.  Don't you dare defend subsidies for industries and corporations and even farmers and then gripe about WIC and food stamps.  All of the policies and bloated bureaucracies of government need to be destroyed or scaled back to make none of those things necessary.

The Indies are those who would love to not need any courts or any police or any government, except for the fact that they recognize that human nature won't allow it.  Indies recognize that anarchy is not viable because there will always be evil people who mean to abuse other people, innocent people, and so we must establish and ordain at least some limited form of government in order to restrain the evil.
The biggest problem in this scenario is that the true-to-the-core Indies who would be the best and most trustworthy at executing that role don't really want the job.  They just want to be left alone to pursue a multitude of worthwhile goals and just taking care of themselves and their loved ones.

Unfortunately, the kind of people who actively seek to get the jobs in government are the TOTBALS.  And they actually think of themselves as really good people who are doing us a favor by sacrificing and working for far less than they are actually worth.

I get extremely irritated by anyone who thinks that the American Revolution and the French Revolution had anything remotely in common.  Even if you don't want to study them in depth, at least read "A Tale of Two Cities" by Charles Dickens.  The former was a righteous attempt to redress grievances and establish a proper government.  The latter was just an excuse to go on a cathartic blood-bath over a corrupt Church-monarchy cabal.

I don't know if there is much more that I should add to this post.  Let me know.

Worse Than Stupid

Yep.  They think you are worse than stupid.  If you come from flyover country, the parts of the United States that lie between the metropolitan areas of the east and west coasts, the leftist elites think you are some kind of evolutionary throwback.  You are not just ignorant, you don't even have the intellectual capacity to learn to become as sophisticated as they are.

Just go to this site and play the video.  It's barely 3 minutes.

What makes this even worse is that Chris Christie is not really even a conservative.  Christie is actually a liberal who sought a job in power and when he got there, he got mugged by the hard, cold reality that New Jersey is in a financial mess and he had enough intelligence to know that, as he responded to a union goon teacher, the State of New Jersey, unlike the Federal government, can't print money.  Bill Maher and company are the true believers in State control of everything except personally perverse lifestyles.

Honor The King

UPDATED: 09:00 EDT/ GMT -4  on Monday, June 13, 2011

In conversation amongst Bible believers and at the same time contemplating current events and outrageous behavior by government (I know, I know; when does that not happen?), it seems inevitable that the Scriptural admonition to obey the rulers appointed over us comes into play.

Not that I have any illusions that folks so inclined to study only that which they want to, and believe that which they want to, are going to be swayed by anything I have to say on the matter, I've stewed over this issue in my mind and prayed about it for a couple of weeks now, wanting to be sure that I wasn't letting my own desire cloud my judgment regarding this matter.

I will continue to think on it long and hard and always be open to deeper truth about it, but right now, I'm ready to hold court.

There are several verses in the Bible regarding obedience to authority, but the one that gets misused and abused the most by Christians is Paul's admonition to the congregation in Rome; specifically in chapter thirteen.  Yet they take his words and not only do they isolate them from all the rest of the text of Scripture but they isolate the first part from the rest of the context in which Paul places it.

"Let every person be in subjection to the governing authorities.  For there is no authority except from God, an those which exist are established by God. Therefore he who resists authority has opposed the ordinance of God; and they who have opposed will receive condemnation upon themselves.  For rulers are not a cause of fear for good behavior, but for evil.  Do you want to have no fear of authority?  Do what is good, and you will have praise from the same; for it is a minister of God to you for good.  But if you do what is evil, be afraid; for it does not bear the sword for nothing; for it is a minister of God, an avenger who brings wrath upon the one who practices evil. . . ."  Romans 13:1-5 (NASB)

I say this verse gets misused and abused because, going back to Bill Clinton, when the sitting president was doing things that were blatantly wrong, unlawful, and in direct violation of the Constitution and I expressed my disgust over such actions, I was admonished with the verse above.  When I have said that I have nothing but utter contempt for the president, be he Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter, George W. Bush or the current golfer using the People's House, I have had Christians react as if I was doing something I should repent of and be ashamed for doing.  Truly wishing to do the right thing and honor the ultimate authority, the Creator of the universe, I've prayed for wisdom in this regard.  Following my own admonitions to take the entire Bible as my counsel, I will lay out the case in my defense.

God repeatedly warned His people that they should not want a king. He expressly warned them in 1 Samuel chapter 8 that requesting a king would result in lots of bad stuff.  The irony was that the people were asking for a king "like the other nations" because the sons of the priest Eli were corrupt.  But rather than pray to Adonai for deliverance, they choose to jump from the frying pan into the fire by asking for someone who would have greater, consolidated power over them to oppress them even more.  Go figure.  The bottom line is that those who ask for a human king are rejecting God.  What I have learned from this that when I talk to those who express concern over showing respect and deference to human rulers, I often find a corresponding lack of respect and concern for God's Word.  Perhaps I can delve more deeply into examples of that later, but the short of it is that I see many examples of Christians who will disobey God's direct commandments because they can use the cover of obeying man-made law.

God had rules for the king that He appointed.  When that king got out of line, God sent a prophet to give correction.  This scenario is repeated enough throughout the Bible that I shouldn't need to cite examples.  The text of Romans 13 quoted above has been abused for centuries, outside of the theocratic/monarchy of Israel, and is known as "divine right of kings" justifying monarchies in doing any damnable and horrific thing they wanted to do. Yet, if you read what Paul writes in whole and in context, the assumption is that our obedience is in the mundane, benign and beneficial aspects.  The instruction of Romans 13 is not to obey everything and in all circumstances.  Once again, in taking the whole counsel of the Bible, I can cite Peter in Acts, after having been commanded by the Sanhedrin to never preach about Yeshua/Jesus again, that the Apostles must obey God rather than men.  Yet here was a body of rulers who had the ostensible authority of God Himself.  And let's not forget that Yeshua Himself had told the disciples that those religious leaders sat in Moses' seat and had the authority to declare halakhah (the right way to do things).


In other words, we are called to obey when the rulers are ruling in the right way and demanding good behavior, but when the rulers are demanding that we directly disobey God, we have no choice but to rebel.
What I find very interesting in my own case is that I have not rebelled against any authority of the president of the United States.  I have merely expressed my contempt for the president and many members of congress showing flagrant disregard for the Law and the Constitution, appointing others who do the same and proceeding to destroy the United States of America.

Somehow this erroneous thinking has crept into the minds of Americans that we have a government system that is something like a monarchy or oligarchy.  This is wrong.  The founding fathers debated, argued and reasoned out that nothing good could possibly come from two forms of government: democracy and oligarchy.

Let me pause here to say that I am using oligarchy very broadly.  Elected representatives come and go, but the idea is that a group of people are ruling us and not representing us or following the supreme law of the land, the Constitution.  The whole purpose of creating a Constitution was to put chains on government.  To protect the individual as a sovereign entity, able to follow the dictates of his own conscience to follow God.  And do not make the mistake of leaving off the very important words "to follow God."  John Adams put it best when he said that the Constitution was designed for the governance of a religious and moral people and that it was wholly inadequate for any other.  Check the sidebar for my page on other essential quotes.

On the flip side of the coin, our founders totally detested the idea of democracy.  Yes, I said that correctly.  Yes, I do know what I'm talking about.  The proof of what I write is in the history, debates, writings, minutes of the meetings of Congress, the federalist and anti-federalist papers.  The founders loathed the idea of democracy.  It was a pleasure to find that idea expressed in the movie, "The Patriot" by Mel Gibson:

"Tell me, sir, why should I trade one tyrant 3,000 miles away for 3,000 tyrants one mile away?  A legislature can trample a man's rights just as easily as a king can."

But I digress.  The founding fathers did not want a king and they didn't want an oligarchy, and to try to prevent that from happening, they created a Constitution that was purposely designed to make it very hard and cumbersome to pass laws or do anything to rule over the people.  In fact, the founders created our form of government with the express idea that we DON'T HAVE RULERS.  We are supposed to have elected public servants who are supposed to understand that the power to administer only those things that are necessary to an orderly society, borrow their power from the sovereign people.  When you see members of Congress, or the Executive branch, or even the Supreme Court as rulers, you have fallen into a dangerous trap.  You have gotten stuck on stupid.  You deserve to be told what to do by people who think there are 57 States, vote on 2,000 page bills that create dictatorial power for bureaucrats, and send lewd and obscene pictures of themselves over the internet.  You need a first lady to be your nanny and tell you what to eat.



As another example of how evil it can be to carry the passage from Romans 13 to absurd extreme; what if you were living in Germany under Adolf Hitler after he acquired all the dictatorial control of the country?  Would you have quoted Romans 13 to Dietrich Boenhoffer or Corrie Ten Boom?  Would you have cooperated in revealing the hiding places of Jews or gone out to help round them up?

As a Christian in today's United States, would you work in an abortion mill?  It's the law of the land, right?  Five out of nine justices on the Supreme Court in 1973 said that the right to kill a baby in the womb was something that existed in the Constitution.  Right there.  In invisible ink.  Between the lines of other black marks. Somewhere.  It's there, just trust us.  We went to law school.

If you were a Christian during the civil rights movement in the sixties, how would you have felt if someone quoted Romans 13 to you in an effort to make you sit down and shut up while black people were being persecuted and denied their rights to equal treatment under the law?

It would be bad enough for so-called believers in God to try to correct me with Scriptures such as Romans 13 if we lived in an actual monarchy when the king or queen was doing things that were blatantly against God's law,  or even against plain decency and common morality.  But it truly makes me sick when they use Romans 13 as if it even remotely applies to an administration or congress or even the Supreme court that is openly and flagrantly violating the ultimate and supreme law of the land, and expects me to show respect for it.

I don't think so, Sparky.

The only thing necessary for evil to succeed is for good men to do nothing.  So I will continue to express the reasons why the president and many members of congress are fully deserving of contempt and derision for violating their oaths of office; for entering into their positions with the full intention of violating that oath and doing the things they do in order to "transform" this society.

You people who like to quote Romans 13 need to go look at the exchange between Paul and the high priest in the Temple in Acts 23. Ananias unrighteously orders that Paul be struck. When Paul calls him on his evil act, Ananias appeals to his own position of Kohen Gadol.  But Paul, in so many words, corrects that error by pointing out that the man's unlawful use of his power rendered his position meaningless.  I don't need to engage in any deep midrashic thought to understand the lesson there for myself as a believer.  It means that God does not condemn me for expressing contempt for those who abuse their position or authority.

Paul wrote that passage above because this radical new idea of freedom in Messiah was already being abused by some people as an excuse to not follow any law or earthly authority.  Such thinking needed to be corrected.

If we are never supposed to criticize anyone in authority, you need to explain to me why Yeshua said what He said to the Pharisees and Sadduccees.  I'm going to give you the same advice that Messiah gave to those same religious leaders:  "Stop judging by mere appearances and make a right judgment."

Another Example

Hopefully it will warm up some more this afternoon, and I will be able to get back outside and work on some gardening.  We woke up to 42° F this morning.  That's just ten degrees above freezing.  I can almost hear my tomatoes and peppers shouting that they are on strike right now.

In the meantime, I came across this story over at Bayou Renaissance Man's blog, and I see it as another example of what happens in a command economy; a communist, totalitarian, we-are-experts-simply-because-we-conned-the-sheeple-into-voting-for-us example of why we need less government, not more.

In countries with various degrees of centralized government, some bureaucrat or official by whatever name, who has never had any experience in the field to which he has been put in charge, will make decisions that impact thousands, tens of thousands or even millions of people in one fell swoop.

If you don't understand what I mean, let me be clear.  Imagine a country with a billion people where they are free to make their own decisions what to grow and how to grow it based on the demand from the people who want their produce, their own experience and expertise, and the motive that the better a job they do, the more profit they will make from it.

On the other hand, imagine millions of people who will see their food costs skyrocket because someone, who won't suffer even a little bit, decides to order things be done a certain way whether it makes sense to the majority of people or even one individual who knows better.

Now imagine a bureaucrat like that, in an office thousands of miles away, who doesn't know you and doesn't have any reason to care about you, making decisions about what kind of medical care you get, what kind of food you can eat, and whether or not you will pay $2.50 for a gallon of gas or $5.50 or $8.

The bigger the government, the smaller the citizen.

Rights? Not According To The FDA

If you somehow thought that you lived in a free country (meaning the United States of America), you've got another thing coming.  The Federal Food and Drug Administration would like to disabuse you of the notion that you can decide what food you would like to ingest.

And doesn't it seem ironic when the "progressives" of the Democrat party tell everyone that there is a right to medical care while at the same time the FDA is saying, "there is no generalized right to bodily and physical health."   Somebody got some 'splainin' to do.

Learn more:http://www.naturalnews.com/031934_FDA_food_freedom.html#ixzz1JGgweONY
That's right.  The bureaucrats at the FDA think that all that stuff in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution about the purpose of government being about protecting the God-given rights of the people is really just a bunch of crap.  They are your superiors and they'll tell you what you can eat.

Don't believe it?  Go read this article.  If you can find any evidence that it's a hoax, let me know.  Make sure you read the contents of Senate bill 510 that passed earlier this year as well.

Isn't that the kind of "Hope and Change" you can believe in?

The Buzz About Bees

I've posted a couple of times about how government is never the solution, it is usually the problem.  Ah, wait, that's too soft.  Basically everything government gets involved in, it turns to crap.

I've also made it very clear that big corporations tend to behave like and then get in bed with big government because such a relationship is much like prostitution.  Exciting, instantly gratifying to the flesh, but in the long term, very costly and destructive.  Even to innocent parties on the outside.

It tends to be very, very hard to get urbanized, college educated, crap-for-brains lefties to understand why we conservatives think the way we do about government and massive corporations, because, well, it requires a lot more than stage one thought.  Farmers, hunters, fisherman, of the small, family size variety tend to be solidly in the conservative camp.  Some of them probably prefer to be called libertarian.  Please see the glossary before you start foaming at the mouth and spitting at your screen.

I'll stop right here and define something, rather than sending you to the glossary because it's important for you to understand, especially if you are the urban or suburban type, or if you come here from another country and American English is not your first language.  When I use the term "farmer," I'm not talking about big agribusiness.  I'm not talking about big corporations that drive 30 foot wide combines to harvest corn or feed lots that stuff corn into cattle that end up at McDonald's.  I'm not talking about enormous dark caves that house thousands of chickens too stuffed with hormones laying in their own poop that end up in Tyson or Perdue plastic bags.  I'm talking about families that grow a wide variety of crops and livestock and do it in a self-sustaining, healthy way.  Real farmers who see the big picture of entire biological systems and the benefits of not introducing or relying on laboratory developed chemicals to create, or maintain production levels.
Real farmers can see how, if you just raise one thing, you can get tunnel vision.  You will just care about the easiest most efficient way to raise that one thing, and lose sight of the effect it can have on everything else.  Real farmers who live and work close to the earth understand that there are consequences to just adopting anything without asking questions and thinking long and hard.

I wish I had another word for the kind of person I'm thinking about; this farmer type.  Too many people will have a picture in their head that doesn't really fit what I'm talking about.  I include hunters and fisherman in this as well.  Maybe what I mean is frontiersman, even though you'd probably get the wrong idea there too.  I suppose frontiersman popped into my head because it's the same kind of bold, independent spirit that it takes to "rough it," or to go against the mainstream that everybody else has accepted.  The kind of person I'm thinking about grows stuff out of the soil and knows that natural animal and plant waste will always beat some factory produced "fertilizer."  He's also a hunter.  And I mean a real hunter, not some caricature dreamed up by Hollywood types.  People who live with the very animals they kill for food and understand the relationship between the animals and the land.  People who actually KNOW that there is an overpopulation of deer and that such an imbalance is destructive to a wide range of flora and even the deer themselves. People who know that if you over harvest any animal, you won't have any more of them to eat when you need them.

I have very little patience with people who's only knowledge of wildlife comes from PETA or the Sierra Club or some such.  People who first of all have nothing but contempt for the Creator and demonstrate it by worshiping created beings and elevating animals to the same status as humans.

I got started on this rant because I came across this video at Theo Spark's website.  Proving again that government bureaucracies are just big stinking holes in which taxpayer dollars disappear, and actually do more harm than good.  Nobody at the EPA is going to have to suffer any consequences for approving something that could end up doing tremendous damage to the honey supply and the supply of food crops.

Must Be On Drugs . . .

. . .  to believe that we need more bureaucracy.

Over at Bayou Renaissance Man, there is another new post about the shenanigans of the incestuous relationship between government and the pharmaceutical companies.  Oh, it isn't labeled as such, and I'm quite sure that the average person reading the story will come away with the idea that, "Big Pharma bad, Big Government punishing  Big Pharma good, let's go eat at McDonald's."

I know that what I'm about to say is just so foreign to most people because we've lived for several generations now with the idea that government is supposed to be like a parent to us, but just in case someone wanders by here and might be open to some radically OLD ideas that go back thousands of years, mainly because they worked and made sense, read on.

If you ask the average person if they think there should be a Food and Drug Administration, I'm sure they would naturally answer, "Of course."  If you asked them why, you might get some vague answer about protecting the public.  Now this may seem really strange to switch gears on you so drastically now, but do you think that the purpose of law enforcement agencies are to protect the public?  If you answered yes, you'd be wrong. The Supreme Court has ruled more than once that it is not even the purpose of law enforcement agencies to be preemptive.  They make very logical arguments for why that is so. People have tried to sue various law enforcement agencies for failing to protect them from criminals, and it was explained to them that that's not how government works.  Now I ask you, what in the world makes anyone think that other bureaucracies can be held accountable for protecting us from anything else?

Americans, and most citizens of modern countries operate under the silly notion that we need the vast bureaucracies to "protect" us from the big impersonal corporations, keeping them from foisting products on us that might kill or injure us. Before you go thinking that I'm some big lover of corporations, you need to read my previous post on this matter.  Do I think that all big corporations are out to kill and injure people in order to make a profit?  No.  Why not? Because it would be stupid.  Especially in a truly free market, companies are extremely sensitive to competitive pressure and guarding their market share.  I remember in 1982, someone had taken bottles of Tylenol and put poison in them, it created a crisis for the company. Even though it wasn't their fault, their sales plummeted.  Could the FDA have done anything about that?  No.  It was just in 2009 that we had an even worse event with people dying of salmonella poisoning, not because of tampering at the retail end of the supply, but because of contamination at the source of production.  You would have thought that the FDA was supposed to be on top of things, but no.  The evidence available to the public seemed to show a picture of corporate officers who had a callous disregard for consumer safety.

Should those responsible at the company be punished accordingly?  Only an idiot would disagree.  But why no outrage when the reaction at the FDA is to request even more money to hire more bureaucrats?  Are you kidding me?  You see, it turns out that the FDA had at least some idea that something was going on at the plant that was producing bad product going back to 2007, according to this article in the NY Times.  Once enough cases of salmonella had been reported and enough people died, we find out that everybody that worked in the plant knew how shoddy and unsanitary the conditions were.  Are you telling me that just a brief walk-through by some FDA or USDA inspector wouldn't have raised some red flags?  Why aren't we asking why some bureaucrats at the FDA aren't getting perp-walked to a jail cell over this?

But that's not really what I want.  I just want all the useless, black-hole-for-tax-dollars agencies abolished and the power-hungry, do-nothing, paper-pushing weasels bureaucrats to have to get real jobs in the productive areas of society.

UPDATE:  Over at Samizdata, there was a recent post about regulation on the airlines and how it was more about limiting competition, but of course the safety issue came up.  Even a man I once admired for his often staunch defenses of liberty took me by surprise by his defense of regulation, proving that even the best of us don't often think things through well enough.  Better minds on this topic prevailed on the comment thread and it is so useful to my points here that I lifted some of it for you to see below.

The moderate view:

The uncomfortable reality of the market is that someone can ALWAYS find a cheaper way to offer a product, but the other uncomfortable reality is that this discount has to come at the expense of one of the legs of the Iron Triangle (cost, quality, time). Once the efficiency curve has flattened, as it must, one of the three is ALWAYS compromised for the sake of market share.

I'm not a huge fan of government regulation: quite often, the regulations are gamed by the major players to their own advantage.

But I'm absolutely in favor of SOME government regulation. If the No-Regulation Fairy waved her magic wand tomorrow and made all government regulations disappear, planes would be falling out of the skies like hailstones within a matter of months, once the finance departments started running their little actuarial scenarios which triangulate the risk/reward/cost/benefit factors.

The only people who would benefit greatly would be the tort lawyers, and who wants to give THEM more money/influence?

As with all things, the trick is determining where on the "Over-Regulation/No Regulation" line one has to set the optimum, because neither extreme is desirable. Letting "the market" set the optimum is not desirable, because, as noted above, there are always people (and I mean passengers) who are prepared to risk their own safety for the sake of accessibility, cost or circumstance. And as long as there are those people, 'the market" will find a way to accommodate them.

 The intelligent, freedom view:

It's not a new argument; it's trotted out all the time by authoritarians and their apologists. And despite its presentation here as an undeniable truth, it's palpably false. As has already been noted by others in this thread, private certification bodies would most certainly take over the job, as they did in the days before the professional busybodies started their radical expansion of government and its regulatory powers.

What is also invariably overlooked by fans of government regulation is that regulatory agencies are invariably captured by the industry they purport to monitor. The same is not true of private certification bodies, who have a vested (read: financial) interest in doing a good job. Government bureaucrats have no such direct, personal interest in the quality of their work; their incentives lie completely elsewhere.

Kim du Toit is just wrong, on several levels. First of all, in the absence of government regulation planes would most certainly not be "falling out of the skies like hailstones within a matter of months." It's just not good business, as even the much-vilified finance departments would recognize. Second, even assuming that were true, and accepting his dictum that "there are always people (and I mean passengers) who are prepared to risk their own safety for the sake of accessibility, cost or circumstance," by what right does he (or anyone else) deny them that choice? Whose business is it if I want to assume greater risk in exchange for a lower price or more convenience?

In the end, government handles regulation just as it does everything else it attempts: poorly, inefficiently, and at high cost (both direct and indirect). If this quote is representative of the book it's a poor inducement for me to read it. I expect that I'll pass.

Another person in that same comment thread brought up something I wish I had thought of earlier.  His whole comment was: "Two words: Underwriters' Laboratories."    Bingo.

Now that I think of it, I can't remember the last time I saw a UL logo on a product. But apparently they are still in business.  Government still can't do the job they do.  Underwriters' Laboratories was started by insurance companies because they wanted a non biased way to estimate whether or not it was worth it to them to insure various products.  So, some enterprising engineers and such saw a need and filled it.  They set up facilities to throughly test everything from kitchen gadgets to hand tools to make sure that they had no inherent defects to make them unsafe for the purpose they were designed for.  The folks at UL knew that they needed to take their testing seriously because if they didn't, in a free market, some other company could rise up and take the business away from them.  And if they were negligent enough, they could be sued.  Neither of those two things apply to government agencies.



You see, as we've allowed the liberals/progressive/leftist/statist types to gradually wean us off of the concepts of caveat emptor and personal responsibility and into the idea that government is there to coddle us and oversee every aspect of our lives, from how much water goes through our toilet, to the idea that we shouldn't need to be armed against criminals, we've become like little children.  "Why, I shouldn't have to think about eating a balanced diet of healthy and nutritious food.  Why should I read labels and think about what kinds of ingredients or chemicals are being processed into my food?  If the government thinks it's okay, it must be fine."

Meanwhile, pharmaceutical companies look for every possible avenue to do what any and all companies in business do, from the mom & pop hardware store or restaurant to Microsoft: increase profits. Nothing at all wrong with that per se. However, big corporations have the money and resources to lobby legislators to get regulation that favors them whenever possible.  Worse than that, when companies get big enough, certain things become normal in the cost of doing business.  Like retaining enormous staffs of lawyers to fight off lawsuits that may or may not have any merit and reserving enormous amounts of cash for paying fines when it makes more sense to risk breaking the rules and get caught, instead of doing what's best for the consumer.

The public takes the ignorant attitude that the government will act like a conscientious watch-dog on their behalf.  What if that's not in the best interest of the bureaucracy?  What if the powers in control of the bureaucracy stop and think:  "It's not such a bad thing to have billions of dollars rolling in from fines and penalties from these companies."    Think about it.  Even if the bureaucracy doesn't directly receive the money from penalties, they can still go to the legislators and justify ever increasing budgets by pointing to revenue that they helped bring in. The salmonella in peanut products fiasco proved that the FDA is willing to let a lot of stuff slide until some people die, and then take advantage of that fact to ask for even more money.

Every single government bureaucracy, whether it's city, county, state, or federal, lives by two over-arching rules:  1. Protect the bureaucracy.  2. Grow the bureaucracy.  All other considerations are subservient to those two rules.  That's why, at the end of the fiscal year, heads of agencies scramble to spend every last cent in their accounts whether they need to or not, so they can claim that they didn't have enough money to do all the things that needed to be done. Never mind that they spent the money on new desks, chairs, carpeting, re-decorating, and all kinds of things that really didn't have to be replaced.

Ultimately, what thinking people in a free society need to understand is that we don't need 90% of the bureaucracies that exist now.  Does it make you feel good to know that the person that cuts or styles your hair has a license?  Why?  Are you not capable of discerning whether or not someone has a track record of doing good work?  If somebody does botch the job, do you pay them and then recommend them to your friends and acquaintances?

Why do you need a local "Health Department" to inspect restaurants?  Seriously.  I've walked into several eating establishments and after about five minutes had enough visual information to decide it wasn't worth the risk, in spite of the licenses and inspection certificates on the wall.  I've seen places where I wondered if a broom or mop had touched the floor in days, let alone since the last shift. Restaurants go out of business all the time because customers vote with their dollars and their feet; not because some bureaucrat was doing his job.  And when some major outbreak of food borne illness happens, it's the CDC that is playing detective agency to figure out where it came from, not the FDA or the USDA.  Leaving the intelligent person to ask: "What the hell good are you?"

Why even license doctors?  There are lots of great doctors, and I've talked to a lot of them in various specialties.  It usually takes me about five minutes of talking to them to figure out whether or not I'd put my life or my health care in their hands.  And while I think that there are many cases of ambulance chasing low-life lawyers like John Edwards bringing worse than frivolous lawsuits, I also know of plenty of cases of unconscionable malpractice.  Did licensing ever prevent a case of malpractice?  If you are a lousy doctor who didn't get weeded out during medical school or during internship, why would licensing matter?

When I was a licensed mortgage broker in the State of Florida in the late 1980s, I learned the dirty little secret about licensing.  A big part of the licensing test for becoming a broker involved a set of complicated math equations that made the quadratic equation look simple by comparison. I had been working as a loan processor and doing truth-in-lending statements and all kinds of calculations for mortgage files, and none of the math required for that was even vaguely similar.  I asked the VP of the company I was working for why we need to learn all of these equations for this test when none of it was ever used in finances or the mortgage industry.  He laughed.  Then he told me how, when the existing big dogs in the mortgage industry figured out that licensing would be great way to cull a lot of the competition, they went to a math professor in the State University system and asked him to come up with these convoluted formulas to make it very hard for anyone to pass the licensing test.

Two things came to light in my research over that.  Existing industries always lobbied the politicians to introduce licensing under the guise of protecting the public while they themselves would be "grandfathered" in, only needing to pay the fee.  Secondly, I discovered that the lawyers who made up the Florida legislature always put a paragraph in at the end of a law that exempted lawyers from the requirements and regulations of the bill itself.  The more I investigated the more I uncovered that this was true in almost every industry.  Then I realized that it didn't matter how much training or expertise I had in any field; if I wanted to open any kind of business and be immune from the licensing requirements, all I had to do was go to law school and pass the Florida bar.  How many other States are that way?

Licensing does nothing to protect the public from negligence or incompetence, and it certainly does nothing to protect against fraud.  There is no magic fairy dust that gets sprinkled on someone when they pay the government for a license. They can rip you off just as easily as another guy. I know first hand.  I've had it happen to me, and I was there during the 1987 housing bubble bust.  We in the mortgage business then knew that it was due to changes in the Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae underwriting rules.  It made it too easy to create borderline fraudulent loans or loans that would be too susceptible to default.

 But there is another way that licensed professionals can subtly take extra money from you.  Most of the people in a specialized, licensed profession have a vested interest in forming clubs, societies, associations, call it what you will.  Then they all informally talk amongst each other to come to a loose consensus of what the going rates for products and services ought to be.  One guy might be dedicated to performing his service with the highest of standards, while somebody else in that trade association does "the same basic thing," but cuts a lot of corners or uses cheaper, substandard materials.  If you as the consumer don't know the difference, you can pay a lot more for less, just because you relied on licensing and maybe some kind of trade membership, rather than doing your homework for referrals and such.

The advent of consumer clubs have arisen out of the need for something better, thereby proving the point that government licensing does nothing more than raise revenue for the government and help the businesses limit their own competition.

Quit buying into the idea that government is there to protect you.  Government helps create and perpetuate the problems and the ultimate victimization of the people.  First, don't be intellectually lazy.  It's not that hard be careful about spending your money.  The reason medical care is so outrageously expensive is a confluence of two things. The gradual indoctrination of society to believe that medical insurance or somebody else paying for your medical care is some kind of right, and the fraud that results from disrupting the free market system, and the interference of government making laws to fix problems that wouldn't exist if it was a free market.

That's an entire blog post by itself.  But I can state briefly that if government didn't regulate insurance companies, which they have no Constitutional right to do anyway, everybody would buy  insurance on the basis of need and affordability.  It would be treated like car insurance.  You would take a keen interest in how much value you were getting for your dollar and you wouldn't let a doctor run tests you don't need.  More people would have to think twice about how much and what they ate and whether or not that smoking habit was really worth it if the insurance companies could base their rates on your lifestyle choices.  You can live your life any way you want, but I shouldn't have to subsidize your risky behavior by paying higher premiums out of some sense of "fairness" or "wealth redistribution."

Just eliminate half of the cabinet positions in the Federal government and in thirty days you would see an economic boom that would shake the world, and we would be so much better off.

You Took An Oath

I will try not to simply use this blog to link to other blogs and let other people do all the writing.  I'd like to always have good ideas and write original stuff, but nobody is that good all the time.  So, I will proudly link to and highly recommend that you go read this post, which was so good that it is a requested repost.

Assuming that you either went and read it, or that you will read it when you leave here, let me say that it gives me no joy to have to think of the people who carry guns and badges as just a smarter class of criminal because they just figured out that if they did what was necessary to get the badges, they could get away with a lot of stuff.

I'm sure that there are still some good police in various places, but I've personally seen enough up close and personal to know that more than half of the LEOs out there, especially in the big "blue" cities share the following traits:

1. They see themselves not as civilian peace officers, but as some kind of paramilitary organization and the rest of us are "civilians."  They see themselves as a separate and distinct class of people.
2.  The oath they took to uphold the Constitution, or the law, or whatever they take an oath to, is nothing but a formality of getting the job.  You are either the predator or the prey.
3. Everything is political, and if you have to play politics to get ahead, and that means schmoozing whoever you have to, then so be it.
4. Carrying out orders and doing what it takes to get promoted is far more important than supporting and defending the Constitution and protecting the public from an overreaching and tyrannical government.

If you are one of the good cops, you know it's true as well and it grieves you as well.  Maybe you stay in the profession because if all of the good guys abandon it, then only the rotten SOBs will have the badges and superior firepower.  Maybe you even have to keep quiet about how you really think because it wouldn't be safe to speak your mind.  If that's the case, I pray for you and your safety.

But the ones who fit the profile that I numbered above are in it for the adrenaline rush and the power trip and think that all of the rest of us should just shut up and be thankful that they are keeping the streets safe.  "You don't need a gun, that's what we are here for."

No Reverence For Men

Leftists continue to amaze me with their penchant for projection and utter lack of self awareness.  This is most evident when it comes to glorifying men. It is really disgusting when it comes to them glorifying themselves as individuals.  Robert C. Byrd being a great example of this. That man makes me embarrassed to admit that my parents came from the State of West Virginia. When it comes to praising the people that they consider heroes, the sky is the limit.  The reverse side of that coin is that they accuse conservatives of putting our heroes on pedestals beyond reproach.  Are there people within our ranks who do that sort of thing?  Of course, but they are a small minority.

I was prompted to write about this today because of the flap over the reading of the Constitution on the House floor.  From Ezra Klein to Joy Behar, the left has no shortage of folks that love to shower scorn and derision on those of us who see the Constitution as one of the finest documents ever written.  Of course we see it as an ironclad contract designed to protect the people by putting chains on government.

The left sees the Constitution as an archaic bit of history written by patriarchal slaveholders who couldn't possibly have anything to benefit society today were they alive now, and so that stupid old document is nothing more than a hinderance to the progressive ideas of "Hope and Change."

Because they don't actually read the Constitution, leftists like Bill Press make idiotic statements about what the document says about the right to privacy while on the Joy Behar show.  I think he found it next to the part about the right to abortion.  I forgot which article it appears in, so you will have to go look it up yourself.  And because they don't read the document or the Federalist Papers or the Congressional records of the time, they don't comprehend the idea that we conservatives hold the ideals and principles of the document in high esteem, while understanding that the men who contributed to it all had serious flaws.

Benjamin Franklin was a brilliant man and a darn good scientist, but his hedonistic lifestyle would have made me blush.  Thomas Jefferson's ownership of slaves is nothing to be proud of, but more than that I am ashamed of Jefferson championing the French Revolution as if it was on the same moral level as our own.  Nothing could be farther from the truth.  Thank goodness Jefferson fought valiantly against Hamilton when it came to the idea of a central bank.  John Adams had much to commend about him.  He held honesty and truth in high regard to the point of defending British troops on a charge of murder even though it was incredibly unpopular to do so, and he also was in favor of self rule by the colonies. But Adams was also very outspoken and not much for tact.  He also fought hard for the idea that the titles of the President smack of Royalty.  That hardly made any sense.  George Washington's own handling of the Whiskey Rebellion tells me that he was no saint.

Were they great men?  Yes.  Were they perfect? No.  It is in their demonstrable failings that they proved the necessity of a Constitution that denied the ability of any one man, or even a group of men from wielding too much power.  We are supposed to be a nation governed by a contract of law, not by people who feel some sort of anointing to tell us how to live for our own good.

We have traveled so far from the original intent of the Constitution that it is no wonder this country is so messed up and that so few citizens really know anything about the Constitution.

Here is a list of myths that a lot of Americans believe which are directly contrary to what the Constitution says or allows:

1. If the economy suffers or improves, it is because of the policies of the president.
2. The Senate is one half of the Congress that represents the people.
3. The Supreme Court's job is to interpret the Constitution.
4. The Constitution determines what rights the people and the States have.
5. Every citizen in the United States has a right to vote in presidential elections.
6. If there are enough votes in both houses of Congress to override a presidential veto, a bill should become law.
7. Prior to the war between the States, the Constitution considered negroes or slaves to only be three-fifths of a person.
8. The fourteenth amendment to the Constitution automatically makes anyone born in the United States a citizen with all the rights and privileges thereof.
9. Anyone arrested on U.S. soil, regardless of national origin is subject to all rights guaranteed to a citizen by the Constitution.
10. The United States of America was founded as one country to free us from the British.

Anyone want to answer why the above statements are provably false?

Representative Government

It still makes me cringe like fingernails on a chalkboard when I hear anyone refer to the U.S. as a democracy, but this latest post by a contributor to The Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler reminded me of a couple of things about our republic, and I thought of something he didn't even mention which I think is more important than all of his points put together.

What if every bill proposed in the House or the Senate had to pass a test to see whether or not the Constitution authorized it?

The 112th Congress is about to convene and the collective mouthpiece for the socialist administration and supporters is just going nuts over the fact that they plan on reading the Constitution.  I tend to think it it is only going to be something to laugh at in sad derision since the GOP leadership makes me think it is nothing more than window dressing.

I could be wasting my time writing about this because I don't know how many people come here and read this stuff, but venting about it makes me feel better.  I wonder how much Eric Hoffer thought about the impact his writing might have. Since the inevitable crash is upon us, why not try to educate as many people as possible in case we can try to rebuild something out of the ashes and rubble while we are waiting for Messiah to return?  Some of my fellow believer's may think I should focus only on winning souls for God, but I think all of this stuff, every aspect of life and living, are interwoven.  How you think about certain political issues will quickly tell me whether you are a believer or not.  That's just the fact.

I remember when the democrats howled (Hillary Clinton) over the false accusations that Republicans were questioning the patriotism of the left, or according to her own labeling, progressives, even when it wasn't happening.  Much to my chagrin.  I certainly wish that the GOP leadership did have the gonads to publicly question the left's patriotism.  For decades those on the left with the "D" behind their name have been relentlessly and systematically working to destroy the Constitution, and since the Clinton's occupied the White House, we have enough quotes from their own mouths to prove it.  I don't have to try to convince you based on a nuanced action here, or some vague reference over there.  The cat's been out of the bag in plain view for quite a while.

The reason I think that the reading of the Constitution on the House floor is mostly window dressing is because the only bills that should be coming to the floor for a vote are bills that defund and abolish every federal agency that cannot be justified by a plain reading of the Constitution.  In other words, there would be no time on the agenda to take up any new bills regarding non-existing laws for the next five years or more.

Even before a bill is passed that simply states that the previous "Health Care Reform" act is immediately rendered null and void, The House should pass a resolution that freezes all funding to the following agencies, pending further legislation that abolishes the agencies themselves and directs what is to be done with the property and assets of those agencies.  I'll spell them out for a reason.  This is just the short list.

Environmental Protection Agency.  (EPA)  They don't exist to protect any environment.  They exist to make it prohibitively expensive to manufacture or process any goods, because the main enemy of "progress" for the left is free-market capitalism.

Food & Drug Administration. (FDA)  Exists to siphon off billions of dollars from the drug companies in the form of campaign contributions, and at the same time guarantee that drug companies have a virtual monopoly on medicine that can be patented, while at the same time scaring the public into thinking that natural herbs and foods are dangerous.  Nanny government must protect you.

National Endowment for the Arts  (NEA)  When's the last time you dressed up and went to a symphony?  When's the last time you went to an art museum or gallery?  I'm sure you have been throwing lots of disposable income around on various art projects.  That's why the federal government sees no problem in taking away your money to fund buying millions of dollars worth of incomprehensible statuary to stand outside of government buildings, to fund performance artists who do things that you not only wouldn't watch, but if your child did them you would beat or disown them.

Department of Education.  Created by Jimmy Carter in 1979.  Prior to that, there was very little education going on in the United States.  Engineering, math and science were struggling along without direction or purpose because there was no centralized government agency to look to.  There are rumors that we landed men on the moon using slide rules, because the digital calculator hadn't been invented yet. Can you see how much this country failed to accomplish because we had to wait for a visionary like Jimmy Carter to show up?
Now you can go into many fast food restaurants witness the mathematical prowess of high school graduates making change.  You can go on Facebook and read the most stunning literary prose of the average American teenager and marvel.

Department of Energy.  While France, a country which has led the way in showing Muslims that their country need not be conquered using conventional arms and warfare, has built enough high technology nuclear reactors that their country safely gets 90% of it's energy that way, our DOE has been regulating what little nuclear capability we have nearly out of existence.  At the same time, the DOE has been making any building or modernization of Petroleum processing prohibitively expensive or impossible due to unnecessary regulation.  How much energy does the DOE produce?  None.

This is how modern government works.  It would almost be funny if I could say that you can take the name of a government agency, and whatever that name is, that's what they don't do, or don't produce.  But, alas, it is worse than that.  Whatever the name of the agency is, that's what they are out to destroy.

Don't believe me?  Just look at the list.

Internal Revenue Service.  Granted they don't actually write the tax law that taxes income, but they administer the Income Tax.  Does the IRS promote income?  No.  They destroy it.

Department of Agriculture (USDA)  How many times have you heard of family farms going under; if not for the cost of regulation of farming, then because of the death tax.  How many of you know that Corporations like Monsanto and other huge agribusinesses use their lobbying power to put small competitors out of business?  The USDA is all about making life hard for small farms and the people who want their products.

Department of Transportation.  Just go talk to any truck driver, especially if he's an owner.  The next time you are stuck on a very large expanse of concrete and/or asphalt, knowing that you will never get that time back, or contemplating how much it will cost you to repair the damage that was caused by road conditions that should have been repaired months ago, remember that it's called an expressway because it gives you lots of time and reasons to express yourself.

I could go on, but you get the point.  The fact of the matter is that since about 1913, about 90% of all the legislation passed and signed into law has been unconstitutional.  Let me restate that.  Most of that law has been downright illegal.  Congresses have just taken the attitude: "We don't care if the Constitution doesn't give us the authority to do this, we want it, and some of our constituents want it, so, there!"

When the people who themselves are supposed to be the guardians of the law become completely lawless themselves, thinking themselves above and outside the law, why should they expect any respect, let alone obedience to their own dictates?

Is there a single person reading this who voted for somebody with the idea in mind that you know that you are just too stupid to decide how best to live your own life; that the supreme law of the land is just too archaic today?  Are you the voter who was thinking:  "Please, Congressperson, pass whatever law you think best as long as it makes me believe that you will provide housing and jobs and medical care and won't let anybody besides athletes and movie stars make too much money."

A Form of Sacrifice

No, this post has absolutely nothing to do with religion.

This post was prompted by a post I read over at Questions and Observations.  The post is titled "The major tasks for the incoming GOP House."  It might be helpful for you to go read the brief post before continuing on here, but I trust what I have to say can stand on its own.

Before I go on, I need to stop and define who I'm talking to. Conservative voters.  All of my instruction and cajoling is directed at you.  If you are a leftist drone or someone who has given up on voting, you are welcome to stay, but I can't imagine why.

We the people who are not going to Washington to legislate have this terrible habit of merely showing up at the polls, holding our noses and voting for the lesser of two or three evils, and then doing little or nothing beyond that, other than complaining loudly about how the GOP sucks, and even then, we only do it with others who think the way we do.  While at parties or church or any other social setting, with rare exceptions, we will smile and nod and keep to safe topics of conversation for fear of getting that wilting look or sharp elbow from a spouse who doesn't want to risk being thought of badly by anybody in the room.

It has been my experience that the leftist drones and such have no qualms about speaking up at parties.  I can't count the number of times I've experienced this personally. I was married to a government school teacher for 21 years and saw it a lot, and most of the time I let her reign me in, and when I didn't "heel" I typically paid for my indiscretion for days afterward.  I even remember attending a wedding shower where there was a woman that I had once considered a friend, the wife of an Episcopal priest.  This was near the end of Bill Clinton's second term, when it was well established that the man was a womanizer, a rapist, and a pathological liar, and yet here was this woman talking about how great a man he was.  Three people who knew me well immediately turned in my direction, I presume to see if I was about to explode. Because it was a wedding shower, and out of respect for the guests of honor, I simply left the room.  I was told later that the mother of the bride made it clear she didn't want to hear Bill Clinton's name mentioned again.

There is a time and place for engaging in political debate, but I don't go looking for it where it doesn't belong. Now that we are over the cliff and dropping into the pit of hell known as socialism, the time for showing polite deference to people like my former friend is now well past.  Of course I have to admit that I've moved up into the mountains and so my exposure to such people in person is limited.  When we go to the feed store or such places as are frequented by folks who cherish freedom and self-sufficiency, it's doubtful that we are going to encounter those who are champions of the involuntary collective.  But if it happens, I will NOT be quiet.  Most of the people that I share DNA with really won't have anything to do with me for that reason.

How many of you know that the revolution that brought about this once great republic was really only supported by about a third of the population or less?  How many know that Benjamin Franklin saw his own son deported to England after the war for being a loyalist to the British crown?  Don't you think there was much anguish and tears in that relationship?  I can't see how any decent father would find any pleasure in being so estranged by his own son.

If there is to be any hope left that we can still live in a free republic, enjoying individual liberty under a rule of constitutional law rather than the whims of a ruling political elite, those of us who claim to be conservators of the principles that this country was founded on are going to have to shed our desire to be liked by those who would go along with a socialist agenda.  We are going to have to speak up.  We are going to have to learn to argue and debate and point out the flaws of the collectivist voodoo ideology that insists that a man-made Utopia can be created.

Don't you wait for the Rand Pauls and Marco Rubios to make the case for truth in the media.  You get in the fray.  Obama instructed his myrmidons to get in the faces of "our enemies."  Well, let's take them on where were we can't be edited like so much video on TV.  Ask your left leaning friends and family who still seem to have a couple of brain cells to rub together, why they think the methods and ideologies that created the conditions in North Korea, Zimbabwe, Cuba, Venezuela, Spain, and Greece will somehow magically work here.

Don't expect incoming Speaker Boehner to use his position to champion true conservatism.  He's already proven that isn't going to happen by how he handled the tax deal he did with Obama.  Boehner is just more of the same, lame, ostensibly loyal opposition to the hard left communist democrats.  Boehner believes that if he just seems to throw an occasional bone in the direction of the majority of GOP voters, they'll quiet down and go back to watching football or American Idol or whatever.  And I fear he may be right.

It isn't just about negative harping either.  The new guys that got elected by conservatives need to hear from you as well, because the media is going to constantly demagogue the issues as if to tell them they were wrong about why they got elected.  Let them know when they are getting it right.

Rights? Only If We Feel Like It

If you wish to fly commercially, you will surrender any notions of having your rights protected by the Constitution.

The Feds have decided that you who are willing to fly are too damned stupid to care that you will allow yourself to subjected to things that used to only happen to prisoners in maximum security prisons.  But now, not only are you denied your second and fourth amendment rights, but the first amendment is out of the question as well.

That's right.  You'll do exactly as we tell you, and you'll shut up about it. Capice?

BP and Blame

The central point to this whole issue, which Daphne and others are missing, is that BP, while culpable for their part, should not be the focus in determining what went wrong.  Before I go further, let me make it clear that I don't champion big corporations who indulge in "crony capitalism."  BP is on record for having given millions to Obama's campaign, and they bought into the global warming hoax when it came to advertising to consumers.  BP might be much better off going through bankruptcy and getting all new management.  The point here is to not be conned into letting BP be the sole scapegoat.

That is the heart of it.  If we had to distribute blame according to who contributed the most to not only the accident itself, but the incredibly unnecessary aftermath, it goes something like 20% BP, 50% Federal Government, 30% American people.

First, there is no good reason for BP to have to be drilling that far off shore, that deep, where the problems and risks of drilling aren't just more, they are exponentially more.  This is in light of the fact that we have tremendous amounts of oil we could be getting from under ANWR with minimal risk.  This goes double for the oil sitting under the plains States in the central U.S.  And NIMBY problems don't apply, because we are talking about areas that you'd have to fly to or take all terrain vehicles to.

Second: The emergency response legislation was already on the books giving the Feds the power to respond quickly and decisively to contain and clean up the spill.  It didn't happen.  As if the Obama Administration purposely wanted the spill to become an outrageous disaster, all kinds of equipment and help were turned away under the guise of union protection law, EPA mandates of "perfect or not at all" standards for cleanup.  This is all a matter of public record now.

Third: The sheeple of the United States letting the Enviro-Whacko crowd and the socialist greenie bureaucrats and politicians enact or create by fiat, laws to make it ridiculously costly and difficult to build or modernize refineries or their capacity, and more importantly, build the kinds of state-of-the-art nuclear reactors like what France is using to drastically cut down on the amount of fossil fuel we need to generate electricity.

I agree with Mark for the most part.  But what I actually see is another example of the leftists not letting another good crisis go to waste.  Anything that bolsters in the mind of John Q. Public that corporations are bad, and government needs to protect us from corporations, even if that means full-blown fascism, bring it on.  The people just keep falling for the same old "management-by-crisis" methods that keep consolidating and concentrating power in the hands of the self-anointed political class.

Blaming BP exclusively for the far reaching effects of the spill is like blaming a ten-year-old for causing a pile up on the freeway after his parents bought him a big, powerful Escalade and handed him the keys.

S510 Passes

And a bunch of Repugnicans sold you and your freedom down the river.  Just voting for someone with an R behind there name isn't going to solve our problems.

Even if "Cap and Trade" doesn't pass, you are about to see more food businesses fold or jack up their prices to cover the cost.

One of the best quotes concerning this bill is from Right Condition:  "At the heart of the debate is granting the FDA additional powers to regulate and control food in the name of safety, which is akin to appointing Wikileaks to manage secret Government communications."    Go there to read more.

Go to this site to get a lot more details.

Who Really Pays?

Leftists and statists live in a world of non-reality where they think they can believe in stuff that isn't true until the whole system comes crashing down on them.  The problem is, they want to drag everybody else down with them.

Maybe it's news to you, but corporations or companies, don't pay taxes.  Never have, never will. You can create the illusion that they do on paper, but it's an accounting gimmick that masks the reality of what is actually happening.

Milton Friedman explains it well.  I wish I had the entire lecture.

Learning The Hard Way

I have so much to be thankful for.  An awareness of The Almighty God and His salvation, Yeshua.  My wife. This plot of ground and the health to work it.  Relative peace amidst a world of chaos.  Too much to list here.

If there is one thing I have to be thankful for at this time of year, it is the re-appearance of the true stories from this country's history that prove that my reason and epistemology are intact.  What God's Word says about human nature, and the laws of economics, are proven over and over again.  This proof comes in the micro and in the macro.  Scale does not change the outcome.  It can be a group of five survivors on an island or a billion Chinese.  The intentions of the participants, especially the leadership, doesn't matter.  When you work with, and put to use the laws of human nature and economics, you get mostly good results, and when you try to deny those laws and work against them, you get disaster.  John Stossel reminds of this lesson here, and following is the meat of his article.

The Pilgrims at Plymouth Colony organized their farm economy along communal lines. The goal was to share the work and produce equally.

That's why they nearly all starved.

When people can get the same return with less effort, most people make less effort. Plymouth settlers faked illness rather than working the common property. Some even stole, despite their Puritan convictions. Total production was too meager to support the population, and famine resulted. This went on for two years.

"So as it well appeared that famine must still ensue the next year also, if not some way prevented," wrote Gov. William Bradford in his diary. The colonists, he said, "began to think how they might raise as much corn as they could, and obtain a better crop than they had done, that they might not still thus languish in misery. At length after much debate of things, (I) (with the advice of the chiefest among them) gave way that they should set corn every man for his own particular, and in that regard trust to themselves. And so assigned to every family a parcel of land."

In other words, the people of Plymouth moved from socialism to private farming. The results were dramatic.

"This had very good success," Bradford wrote, "for it made all hands very industrious, so as much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been. By this time harvest was come, and instead of famine, now God gave them plenty, and the face of things was changed, to the rejoicing of the hearts of many."  

Capitalism and free enterprise are not perfect, but only because human beings are not perfect.  The reason free enterprise -- which includes private property rights -- works, is because it works with, not against, human nature.  I've debated this issue with believers in communism or some variant thereof.  It always comes down to the fact that any form of collectivism requires force to make people conform to the ideals of that economy, thus enslaving the very people that the idea is supposed to help.  Free enterprise is completely voluntary and requires no one to participate against their will.  Their consequences are entirely of their own making.

Of course, that means they are free to fail.  It is this certainty that drives the left into fits of moonbat madness. Reality has no feelings. The laws of economics have no feelings.  They will be obeyed eventually.  You can work with them and get the most optimal outcome for the greatest average of people, or you can fight against them and end up with a horrific disaster that drags everybody down with it.

You see, soup kitchens, homeless shelters, food pantries, hospitals, The Red Cross, orphanages, and other such institutions are not started, maintained, or supported by governments, or otherwise talented or productive people who have been reduced to being slaves of the state by the "good intentions" of those who believe in socialist utopias or the fantasy of any inherent goodness of mankind.

Believers in socialism can't seem to comprehend that there will always be leaders, and that unchecked power corrupts.  They further don't understand that those who desire and strive to have the positions of power do so for their own self interest, first and foremost. The moment you forget that, you are on your way to being a slave.  The moment you fall for someone who says, "Give me this power, and I will see to it that you get this or that,"  you've begun to lose your dignity, the respect of respectable people, and your freedom.

I do understand Aesop's Fable about the dog in the manger.  I'll bet they don't touch that one in the government schools with a ten foot pole.  There really are people in this society who will gladly suffer under state imposed poverty as long as others are not allowed to become "rich."

Enough for now, I need to work on preparations for the coming economic collapse.  The people of the State of California have proved to me that it is inevitable.

We Told You So

I remember being laughed at and called an alarmist going back 15 years, when I would say that Social Security was a Ponzi scheme and that the funds weren't really there, meaning that there was no isolated account even remotely called a "trust fund."  Oh sure, there are some ledgers with entries in them that show figures being moved here and there, but there is no real money.

Lo and behold, it has taken about the last five years for mainstream conservatives to find some fortitude to speak up about it in spite of what liberals and leftists might say.

But now, even the left wing NPR has discovered that what true conservatives have always said is actually true, and they are even explaining how it happened and that it's a trainwreck waiting to finally crash.

If a private securities firm, insurance company or stock broker even attempted to do what the SSA has done over the years, they would be tarred and feathered by the media and sentenced to a thousand years in Federal prison.  The house of cards is coming down, and it's coming down soon.

Hat tip to Jaded Haven.