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Civil War II: The Left’s Order of Battle

Wednesday, September 16th, 2020

The War Is Against You

Over the summer, we’ve been watching in growing angst as our country is devolving.  None of this is coincidental, and none of it is random or purposeless.  These are the opening salvos in an attack on the republic.  What we’re witnessing is very much like the beginning of the rise of the confederacy of the pre-Civil War South, but with a difference: This new foe is employing all the tactics of the various statist revolutions we witnessed in the early twentieth century.  A few months ago, I told you about the rise of the “Woke Supremacists.” Nothing has changed, except that they have become more organized and more virulent.  These are not peaceful protests, conceived in benevolent motives, but coincidentally escalating into riots.  These are riots, with a veneer of peaceful demonstrations lashed to their front, both as a disguise and as a shield for the vile onslaught only superficially concealed behind them.  Bricks have been pre-positioned. Frozen water bottles are filled in backpacks. Crude pyrotechnic devices are employed.  Guns and knives are concealed beneath shirts and jackets, and the grins of stone-cold killers are concealed behind the anarchists’ masks.  What is their purpose?  What are they after?  Who is funding them?  How are they coordinating their actions?  What is the ultimate goal?  Ladies and gentlemen, these are the cannon fodder in the globalists’ revolution against you.  Like the first rebellions of the Civil War in 1861, this is the launch of a Civil War against the United States of America, these are their foot-soldiers, and they are following orders.  It’s not about an election, except as a means to an end.  Their war is against you, and they won’t be satisfied until you are crushed beneath their feet.

They’re too stupid and too foolish to do anything but follow orders.  When you look at the people who are rioting, you realize that most are just more than children.  As ever, the leftists driving this have decided to use the vigorous young as their battlefield meat-shields.  Too inexperienced to understand how they’ve been manipulated, or that they will be discarded as soon as their masters no longer require their services, they line up in harried, emotional state to stand for the cause of BLM and/or ANTIFA.  They actually believe they’re fighting fascism, these poor, stupid young fools, but to watch the vacant, unthinking looks of bewilderment when asked a simple question by on-the-ground reporters is genuinely frightening.  They spout chants, but they don’t know the meaning and it’s clear they haven’t considered the consequences.  Just like in the 1960s when the hard-core radicals used the average college students who’d become caught up in the moment, the masters of this revolt are using today’s youth. They’ve never heard of Kent State, and they have no idea what could happen to them if events go even slightly off the rails.

The hard-core phalanx behind them is composed largely of career criminals, many the beneficiaries of the COVID prison releases.  One begins to wonder how many of those government officials who ordered the releases knew precisely that they had been effectively filling the ranks of the revolutionary force.  Now we see that they are employing the tactics first described by other historical radicals, using fire to spread terror all along the West coast states.  Now they’ve taken to attempting(and in a few cases succeeding at) the assassination of police officers, sheriff’s deputies, and federal agents.  This too has historical precedent.  Stand-down orders to police forces in some jurisdictions have become common.  Tying the hands of the police in the enforcement of our basic criminal law has become the norm.  Soros-backed district attorneys won’t file charges, and these monsters are re-released to set more fires, incite more rioting, create more mayhem, and to rape, pillage, plunder, and demolish the areas in which they operate.

These people are receiving orders.  They’re using encrypted on-line applications that provide them a platform to text back and forth to coordinate their plans.  Applications like Telegram, but predominately Signal, are the chosen method for communicating so that their words will likely never be discovered, and therefore, their premeditation and coordination will always remain obscured.  Government cannot penetrate the encryption, at least not yet, so that they will never be discovered.  More importantly, their masters will evade discovery and detection.  This permits them the plausible deniability and stealth that otherwise “respected public officials” would need to conceal their involvement from an unsuspecting public.  Have you noticed that when the first little police-involved incident occurs, whatever the locality, a mob suddenly forms?  Kenosha, Wisconsin.  Lancaster, Pennsylvania.  All of these are rapid-reaction teams secreted within communities to exploit any incident, no matter how innocent the police had been, nor how obvious the criminality of the allegedly aggrieved party had been.

In the Northwest, particularly in Oregon and Washington, fires are starting all over the map, usually a short way off of a major highway or thoroughfare.  To be blunt, these fires aren’t “starting” in some spontaneous lightning strike, or as the result of some other relatively innocuous cause. They’re being ignited.  They’re being started by arsonists who are trying literally to stoke the fires of the coming Civil War II.  All of this is being coordinated from highly-placed, but as yet unidentified operators coordinating with the Democrat Party, but also with foreign operators whose huge wealth is being brought to bear in a war on the United States.

The United States is the last free country, mostly, anywhere in the world.  All the rest have fallen to some degree.  We’re the last nation that enjoys a fundamental right to keep and bear arms.  We’re the last nation in which free speech and religious expression are almost entirely protected.  The globalists must change this, because we are the last obstacle to the global slave-state they envision.  To do that, they must reduce us under varying forms of arbitrary governmental power.  That means arbitrary government orders of all sorts, restricting what we do, where we do it, and how we do it.  Sound familiar?

Then comes the following disturbing tidbit from the 25th of October, 2019:

Imagine that! Joe Biden was warning about our relative unpreparedness for a pandemic in October 2019.  Does anybody believe he’s got a Nostradamus-like gift of foresight, or is it something else? What better way to get the populace accustomed to arbitrary governmental exercises of power?  What better way to bargain airfares to ferry the thugs back and forth across the country?  Ask yourself, now that a defecting Chinese virologist has alleged that the COVID19 was created in a Chinese laboratory in Wuhan: COVID19 is real, and it’s bad, but was it naturally occurring, or did it have “help” getting loose in the US?  How did Joe Biden know in October 2019?  There have long been stories that COVID19 was released in October of last year, and the pandemic may have begun as early as October 6th.  Does anybody believe this is mere coincidence?  Is it possible that Joe Biden would ‘just happen’ to mention our preparedness for a pandemic that, unbeknown to the rest of us, had already begun to spread from its source?  After all, in late 2019, there was a table-top exercise called Event201 in which a Coronavirus kills 65 million people.  Players included members of the last presidential administration.  While this exercise may have been purely coincidental, what’s odd is the timing.

Who’s driving this?  I can’t be certain, but I do know that the various district attorneys that George Soros had funded in their elections are playing a distinct role.  It’s also clear that certain mayors and governors are involved.  Given the apparent coordination, it’s fairly certain that the Biden/Harris campaign is involved, but I don’t think Joe Biden is running the show, and I don’t think Kamala Harris is very capable in this regard either.  We already know that the Clinton/Obama mobsters are somehow involved, and it’s no secret that Barack Obama has been running around the globe, either trailing or leading(or both) President Trump to virtually every locale to which the President flies.  It’s also clear that Obama has been operating some sort of shadow government, using people secreted within the government, who are still serving as holdovers in the Trump administration.  They infect most of the executive departments, particularly the law enforcement and intelligence agencies, along with the Department of State.

Some have asked what the motive driving all of this could be. I will tell you that it’s what it always is: The pursuit of naked political power, which means the power to compel and coerce you to their will.  For different segments of the people who will bring you Civil War II, there are differing and sometimes competitive variations on that theme.  The Washington DC establishment, controlled by the globalists, is only too happy to aid and abet this revolution. They will do anything to maintain their lock on power.  The street-level thugs simply want a paycheck and meal.  They’re being financially supported, and since mayhem is what they do best, it comes natural to them.  This sort of thuggery is their natural state.  The globalists driving this want a one-world government, and the control over all of it. Everything. Every where.  The less obvious segment that is staying mostly hidden are the field managers, those who directly control and deploy the street-level thugs. These are committed communists who believe they are going to get the kind of communist cesspool they desire, and expect to be elevated above their peers.  The intellectuals upon whom all of these committed communists rely are the most insulated, but they will also be among the first the field managers will later dispose.  The media is the last piece of this wheel of doom,  They think they will be insulated and treated better since they will tell the stories their masters demand in order to propagandize the people they expect to control. What they don’t understand is that once the communists have succeeded, the so-called “journalists” won’t be needed at all.  How many “journalists” work in Kim Jung Un’s slave-pit? In Mao’s? In Pol Pot’s? Once in control, the propaganda changes its aim, from the poor enslaved people, to the external world. It’s not as though they will any remaining need to “convince” anybody in the United States.

The order of battle, from the bottom up, beginning with the cannon-fodder, looks like this: Organized teams of garden-variety malcontents who have been convinced by their college professors or peers that they’re “changing the world.” These are the entirely disposable throngs of delusional twits who believe the lie of socialism, but absent the safety of the mob, wouldn’t be able to muster the fortitude to carry the trash to the curb.  They have no life experience of note, have never actually struggled for much of anything, and most will have come from middle-class to upper middle-class environments in which foolish parents who loved them had catered to their every whim.  These numbskulls actually have the most to lose if they succeed, but they’re too ignorant to know better. Their job is to be that “mostly peaceful” face, and act as a shield for the real thugs behind them. They are mostly in their early twenties.

The thugs are frequently longterm ne’er-do-wells, in and out of jail or prison, and often into their thirties or forties. Many are hardened, habitual criminals, who have been involved in various forms of mayhem for a long time. Many will have been let out of jail as part of the COVID 19 releases. These are the thugs who will actually attack police and others, and they’ve perfected their tactics, using improvised weapons but also carrying illegal firearms(either weapons that are illegal, or that because of their prior records, are illegal for them to possess.) These are the people who’ve been flown around the country, because they’re hard-core, experienced rioters and thugs.  They make for maximum mayhem, and are willing to commit any crime on the spur of the moment. These people are capable of murder, and they are the chief beneficiaries of the Soros district attorneys’ policies of letting lesser criminals go. Many of them are eligible for arrest as probation violators simply by their participation, but they’re hardened and don’t much care one way or the other.  Threats of arrest pose no deterrence for these thugs.

The field controllers are another case. These are apparatchiks of the first order. Their job is to be the on-scene or regional command for the various groups of thugs and cannon-fodder. They coordinate resources, and make sure that the various elements are deployed as needed.  These people are mostly invisible, but they’re constantly on their cellular devices, directing traffic. Their job is to make sure that elements fill in behind other elements, and to rotate people in and out of the front of the skirmishes.  These people virtually never participate directly in the riots.  Theirs is a job of coordination, and making sure the riot continues.  They don’t necessarily dictate the overall strategy, but they are empowered to shift people around within a particular scene as is needed to maximize their impact.  There may be several of these working a particular riot, and they will spend much of their time coordinating among themselves.

The regional controllers are above that. They’re responsible for making sure people are moved in and out of regions as needed to fulfill larger mission goals. For instance, these would be the people who make sure that if two dozen hardcore rioters are needed for the RNC in Washington, they’ll be tasked with shifting people and making sure the right people move. They’ll make sure that field controllers provide overall status reports, and they are also the folks who coordinate with legal teams to get arrested rioters released when possible.

As we go up the chain, things begin to get murky.  We know that there is a funding mechanism, and part of it runs right through the middle of the Democrat party and all its allied agitator groups. What becomes more difficult here is figuring out exactly who is pulling the strings. At this level, all communications are encrypted, or they’re otherwise disguised in plain sight. Twitter accounts are used for broadcasts using coded language.

The political hacks who collude with all this don’t know very many details. It’s all about plausible deniability. Politicians don’t need or want the details, because if this all goes badly, somehow, they want to be able to wash their hands of it and walk away.  They know what the globalists are doing, and they’re happy to facilitate it and capitalize on it. They have more to lose than almost anybody else, inasmuch as they’re more motivated to get rid of Donald Trump than almost anybody. Theirs are the dirty secrets that would wreck their careers. Theirs are the corruptions that would expose them to legal, never mind political catastrophe.

Like the politicians, the globalist funders of this civil war are deeply corrupt people.  Their interests are financial, but also egotistical.  They believe only they are qualified to direct your lives, and only they are smart enough to know how government(s) should operate.  These truly are fascists, inasmuch as they believe that governments should be controlled in coordination with large global corporate interests.  Their corporations, even if founded in America, have no loyalty to the United States.  They see themselves as bigger than any government, and ultimately, the people who drive government.  They want a one-world government they can easily control, complying only with a single set of laws they manage to put into place.  These people have aims that ultimately call for the reduction of the world’s population, and leave them in charge of the world’s assets.

It’s also critical to remember that this is about the coming election, and also all subsequent elections.  Their intent is to create a nationwide version of California, whereby there may be a few Republicans here or there, but they intend to rapidly nullify them and make of the country a one-party state. They even believe in the destruction of individual states, instead preferring to re-order things into regional governments. They envision ridding us even of municipal governments, simply making them departments within the larger regional or national government.  Theirs is the notion of consolidation, and they have no room for our quaint American views on federalism or local control.  They know that the people can most easily control the governments closest to home, so they intend to strip all of that away.  Sure, we may even have elections, but those elections will be impotent exercises in which the choice is between one statist dictator-in-waiting and the other dictator-to-be.  They have no interest in negotiations, or compromise.  They want power, and they intend to take it, whether you consent to be governed by them or not.

This Civil War had begun in 2009 with the ascension of Barack Obama to the presidency.  The rise of the Tea Party had been the first movement in opposition to it. Since then, it’s been a war between series of left-wing groups that acted as surrogates to create the bottom-up pressure all leftist movements need.  First, we had the occupiers of Wall Street.  BLM rose up, but after an associate assassinated police officers in Dallas, they took a huge PR hit.  Then we had the outlandish rise of the pink hat brigades.  After that, we have a series of others, including the rise of Antifa and other associated anarchists’ groups, and now they’re all banding together.

Before this election season is over, we will witness every manner of attack on this President, the country at large, and the American people. The Democrats have a long history of enmity to this country, beginning with the first US Civil War.  They spawned the KKK.  They instigated one series of radical, divisive attacks on our republic after the next. Now, they see their moment.  Now, they see a divided America they can attack openly and with little consequence.  Ladies and gentlemen, be prepared to defend your homes, your families, your lives, and your republic. It very well may come to that, as the subversive elements in the United States carry out their attacks, and the Democrats carry out their political and legal attacks on the republic and the polity of our nation in general.  The two deputies shot in the face in Los Angeles County are just the beginning.  It’s going to get worse, and it’s going to become more frequent. They want power, all of them, each for their peculiar reasons, but they’re willing to settle any squabbles among them after they’ve subjugated the American people.  It’s the way communists always operate. It’s what they do.

 

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Posted in Activism, America at the End, Anti-Capitalists, Civil Unrest, Civil War II, Coup d'etat, Donald Trump, Election 2020, Featured, Leftist Cabal, News, Politics, Terrorism, Treason | Comments Closed

The New Fascism: The Rise of the #WokeSupremacists

Tuesday, June 9th, 2020

Klan, Bolsheviks, Brownshirts, BLM, Antifa: Political Thugs in History – Lineage of the Woke Supremacists

One of the things about the statists of the left is that they will always seek to disguise what they’re doing by using mislabeling, often even resorting to complete opposites. When they create some new piece of legislation that will be expensive and wreck the nation’s healthcare funding systems, they call it the “Affordable Care Act.” In truth, there’s nothing affordable about it, nor could they give a damn about the results for the American people.  This is their pattern.  Take something egregious, give it a nice-sounding name, and try to push it as far as possible in the name of their agenda.  This is true of their cohorts in Antifa.  These cowardly thugs claim to be anti-fascists, but in truth, they are imposing their own brand of the doctrine.  All dissent will be demolished.  All dissenters will be attacked.  If you love your liberties, they will happily work like demons to strip you of them, all while claiming to act in the name of liberty.  It’s a cynical, worn-out ploy, but it’s effective because the media, largely staffed with their ideological brethren, are only too happy to give them cover in the press. This is why we’ve been pretending violent riots and looting were really just “mostly peaceful protests.” This is why we’re now being told that “some violence can be good.”  This Orwellian doublespeak is the norm for the raging left, but it has recently taken on a new dimension.  They are using the social media giants’ platforms, along with the public sphere generally, to spread a new form of fascism by social pressuring. While they’ll never admit that they’re instituting a new form of facism, in the disguise of being “Woke,” they are now demanding, often with violence, threats, and vandalism that you join them or face the consequences.  Their views are superior, don’t you know, and they’re happy to prod you, cajole you, and bludgeon you into joining their “Woke Supremacy.”

This isn’t the first time a form of supremacy has come to light. We’ve seen it all before. Most often, it’s been racially or ethnically defined.  Occasionally, it’s been religiously defined. There is always some radical group somewhere willing to use violence and its threat to gain compliance of populations.  Now is no different, except that in this case, it’s purely ideological.  Yes, they’re using race as one of their cudgels, but if you listen carefully, you’ll notice that much of what they’re talking about is “privilege.” Not simply “white privilege,” as you’ve undoubtedly heard, but “privilege” alone.  The irony to which so many of these violent-minded loons seem oblivious is that many of them, a horde of them, have arisen from privilege.  Many of them are college-educated, though they seemed to have skipped all classical aspects of an education.  They seem instead to have been indoctrinated with all the agenda-driven schools of thought so popular on today’s radical campuses.  The 1960s and 1970s produced many radical leftist professors, who now run our institutions of higher education, which they have converted into indoctrination camps for American youth.  Their work was completed when they succeeded in seeding this into primary education through the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s.  Public schools are now a cesspool of this kind of wretched, useless, non-educational “education.”

For two generations now, they have been building a new fascist model, by which universities have been converted from havens for free speech, expression and thought, to utter quagmires of doctrinaire submission to a new orthodoxy from which there is no feasible means of dissent but pure silence and complete avoidance. Even this last strategy is now failed for serious students on our wickedly corrupt campuses now.  What they’ve been taught is that to reject all privilege requires that they abandon all their freedoms, but demand the subservience of others.  Their leaders prescribe the solutions, and they dutifully carry them out. If you oppose them, they’ll first try simple peer-pressure tactics. Those will give way to more focused social-shunning, and eventually to isolation and attack. You can accept the “Woke” theory of the day, or you will be punished, sometimes with a brick to the head. They are willing to use violent, and while most of their number reduce themselves to the state of unthinking brutes who simply follow the mob and echo its sentiments, the truth is that there exists a radical core that is the leader of the foot-soldiers, who coordinate attacks, put forward strategies, and otherwise drive the mob. Most of these young people are simply naive, foolish tools.  They want so badly to be part of something, and tremble at the thought of exclusion and isolation that they’ll do anything for the mob to which they belong.

In the end though, it’s just the same as it’s ever been: They believe themselves superior, not by virtue of their race or their sex or their relative wealth, but by their willingness to serve the interests of the “Woke” mob. You’re being misled if you’ve come to believe this is a passing fad.  Just as Trump’s army of supporters is really an outgrowth of the Tea Party of a decade ago, so too is Antifa just an augmented, repurposed continuation of the Occupiers who arose soon after.  It’s really the same war, in one sense, though the left has managed to indoctrinate your children, sometimes to violence, but almost uniformly against you.  The day is coming, if these new Woke Supremacists have their way, that the war will be fought, young against old, with the simple aim of relieving you of your freedoms, your property and wealth, and ultimately your lives.  Take this threat seriously, because it is real, and it’s coming for you. It’s coming for those of your children they’ve not yet corrupted and indoctrinated.  If you love them, get them out of the public schools.  Get them away from these people who will use them to attack you.

This new brand of fascism, disguised as some sort of civil rights movement, is really just another adjunct of the radical left. I do not an cannot support Black Lives Matters because I believe all lives matter, and I believe that all lives are endowed with unalienable rights. This isn’t a game.  What these radicals now demand is a wholesale disassembly of our entire system of law and government.  I reject their demands, whether issued through a bullhorn, the waving of a club, or at the point of a gun.  If they wish to take our country from us, I for one will fight, and I will fight with all I have, and all I can muster, along with all my countrymen who will turn out to stand with me.  This is not a game, and despite their contentions, I have been “woke” for a very long time, though not in the way they intend it.  I will not submit.  I will not surrender.  I will not genuflect for thugs.  I will not lay down my arms, and I will not yield.  If those of you who beg for peace wish to pretend to yourselves that it can be had cheaply or without effort or risk, you have deluded yourselves.  It is time that you cast off the false “truths” these wretched monster utter, unthinkingly and and with undue venom.

Now, today, the Army has let it be known they are considering stripping the names of confederate heroes from Army bases, including Ft. Hood, Texas. I absolutely disagree with this, and while the confederacy served an unjust purpose, many of its warriors were valorous men, irrespective of what we might now think of the politics of the day.  The idea that we would now bend our knees to these sorts of demands are simply more symbolic gestures intended to mollify a crowd that will not be turned aside by such gestures. It’s time to understand that this new “Woke Supremacy” is just the same old tyranny and anarchy in disguise.  We must say no.  Not everything in our culture can be up for negotiation. No! NO!

People must steel themselves for what is to come. The statists now marching under the banners of BLM and Antifa are merely the brown-shirts of our age. You are right to fear them. They have their sights set on you, your freedoms, your property, and ultimately, your lives. Reject it.  Reject it at all costs. If your children are to endure, we must now act to save our nation, or lay down and submit, surrendering it for many generations.  This is the United States of America, and this, I’ll defend.

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Posted in Activism, Anti-Capitalists, Civil Unrest, Coup d'etat, Election 2020, Featured, Leftist Cabal, News, Occupiers, Politics, Statism, Terrorism, Youth | 1 Comment »

Ameriphobia

Friday, March 15th, 2019

Ameriphobia: The irrational fear and hatred of America and Americans

If you say the least little thing about Islam and its adherents, you are immediately labeled. It is said of this despicable attack on a New Zealand mosque that the killer had been motivated by Islamophobia, the irrational fear and resultant hatred of people of the Islamic tradition.  This we are told is the nature of the motive behind the maniac who undertook this attack, and as a result, they point to Donald Trump(and his supporters, and other conservatives) because he once called for a ban on some Muslim migrants. On September the 12th, 2001, elements in the media began to arise to warn us to avoid falling prey to Islamophobic sentiments. The smoke-clouds had not yet cleared, and the fires within the rubble-pile at ground zero was still burning as CNN’s website published an article telling us that hate-crimes against Muslims were on the rise in the wake of the attack. The actual death toll was still unknown, but we knew the attack had killed at least 2,500 people, mostly Americans, and CNN was worried about an alleged rise in hate-crimes.  Ladies and gentlemen, this is despicable, and what I want to know is when we are going to create a label of our own, for once and for all, to be applied equally to the 9/11 attackers and to CNN: These people who are consumed with an irrational fear and loathing of America must hereafter be known as Ameriphobes, and their affliction must be called what it is: Ameriphobia.

Ameriphobia is the irrational fear and the hatred it generates against America and Americans.  It’s been widespread through much of the world for most of the last one-hundred years, but until the last few decades, it prevailed mainly among our enemies. Now, like a cancer, it has spread into the homeland, into our culture, into academia, government, and especially the media.  Those who spew their hatred against America and Americans are responsible for the irrational fear that drives the anti-American killers. Think of it: The 9/11 attacks were carried out by people militantly radicalized against America and Americans.  The killers in San Bernandino, CA, were motivated by the same irrational fear and loathing. In 2016, this disease of Ameriphobia even led government agents to try to undermine the candidacy, and then the presidency, of the pro-American nominee in the race, attempting a bloodless coup d’etat against the legitimately elected President of the United States.

Worst of all, the Ameriphobes have now succeeded in recruiting Republican betrayers to the cause.  Driven by this same irrational fear, they now agitate in the United States Senate against the President of the United States.  Secretly, they call themselves #NeverTrumpers, because they oppose President Trump, the openly America-first President, but in truth, what they really are is #AmericaLasters. The idea of a sovereign America, with sovereign American citizens, is so frightening to them that they can conceive of no goal more important than to block open America’s borders so that Americans can be overrun and replaced. The Democrats are so consumed with Ameriphobia that they cannot conceal their hatred any longer.  They now openly agitate against resolutions condemning the idea that illegal aliens would be permitted to vote against Americans and America.

In the wake of the shooting in New Zealand, these media maniacs have become consumed with Ameriphobia. Now twenty-eight months into an unremitting hatred of President Trump,  and a fear that America will be made great again, they feel compelled to connect monstrous events that occurred half a world away in a foreign country to the President of the United States.  Think of the preposterously irrational emotions behinds such a ridiculous contrivance! What, other than pure and unadulterated Ameriphobia, could possibly drive such hatred?  Ladies, and gentlemen, we must call them out wherever and whenever we see it, and it must be plain for all to see: The irrational fear and hatred of America and Americans has gone so far that we now have self-hating Americans. Born to this country, raised in the swaddling of the liberty she provides, they have been brain-washed to perceive this gentle embrace as an attack. They are terrified. Freedom is awful, they have been convinced to believe. This is the deadly nature of Ameriphobia, and it must be defeated.  Only Americans who love lives and cherish their country will understand that fear and hatred of America and Americans is self-destructive disease of the mind.

It’s not too late. We can defeat Ameriphobia and Ameriphobes, but to do so, we will first need to acknowledge that this disease is real, dangerous. It poses an existential threat against all we love, whether its adherents are Muslims or Leftists or any other form of statist.  It doesn’t matter whether it arises abroad or upon our shores, we must combat it and reject it at every turn. It’s time to cast out Ameriphobes because we cannot bear their irrational hatred any longer, and we must not shrink from identifying it.  At every turn, we must condemn Ameriphobia.  Our survival depends on it.

See also: How Donald Trump Can Save the World(or at least the Internet)

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Posted in Ameriphobia, Anti-Capitalists, Featured, Global Jihad, Media, News, Philosophy | 1 Comment »

The War on America

Wednesday, June 21st, 2017

america_burning_ft

There have been a number of considerable turning points in American history, and I believe we have reached another.  After 9/11, one of the conclusions of the Commission set up to investigate the attack concluded, among other things, that one of the reasons the attackers had been successful is that while through the 1990s, al-Qaeda had been in an openly-declared war against the United States, for the most part, our government had conducted itself as though no war existed, taking little action against al-Qaeda despite a ratcheting escalation against our nation, with attacks at the Kobar Towers, The USS Cole, the embassies that came under attack in Africa, and numerous other less infamous attacks.  The critique of the 9/11 Commission on this point was correct, and in many ways, it should have served as a warning that history provides a nation for its future remembrance and consideration, but it seems the lesson is lost on our people and our politicians.  As bad as al-Qaeda or ISIS may be, and as mortifying as their campaign of terrorism and murderous intentions may be, I believe we now face a more virulent threat, one that threatens to destroy not only people and planes and buildings, but America itself.  Here, I do not mean “the United States,” but instead the very idea that is and has been “America,” writ large across history’s pages.  Most frightening of all, it seems too many Americans are blissfully unaware, but what we now face is an irrational enemy that rivals al-Qaeda in their evil intentions, and possesses one significant advantage in its war against us:  They are of us. They are among us.  They are everywhere around you, and their hatred of America is no less sincere, and no less vengeful.  Ladies and gentlemen, we are in a war undeclared in words, but a war nevertheless affirmed by their actions, and it is a war on everything we love. We must adopt the appropriate mindset.

I have cited here before the amazing and simultaneously terrifying similarities between the radical left and militant Islam.  In terms of the peculiarities of their respective grievances with America, it would seem at least superficially distinct, but upon closer examination, one begins to note that in truth, there are very few differences that amount to much.  One might argue, for instance, that the radical left supports extended special rights and protections for homosexuals, whereas militant Islam seems to be most comfortable when heaving homosexuals from rooftops, such that one would never think that the two groups could have much in common, but I beg you reconsider.  For the radical left, homosexuals are just another pressure group in their endless war of identity politics. The “LGBTQ community” is merely another vehicle for the advance of their deepest socio-political ambitions, which care not in the least for the actual people one whose behalf they claim to advocate.  Note instead that in a choice between supporting militant Islam and conservative Americans, the left gleefully chooses the former, since the latter is their true enemy.

In the same way, militant Islamists would seem to share no particular affinity for leftists, until you consider their ruling philosophy.  It is true that while the left is generally secularist in its thinking, and militant Islam is thoroughly religious on its face, both seek the same basic union: Leftists desire the aggregation of all power and law under a secular government, removing all individual discretion of any kind, including thought or expression, while Islamists seek to remove all obstacles to a theocracy that likewise eschews any notion of the individual human being.  Both claim the supremacy of their respective goals;  to carry out either ultimate plans requires the forceful subsumption of all human discretion under their immediate martial control.  In theory, this distinction between the secular and religious would seem a broad difference, but in practice, it requires the same ultimate series of oppressive undertakings, requiring the absolute suppression of the individual in any personal dimension.

We have arrived in a state of our culture in which the more committed radical leftists now take up arms to carry out their own sort of Jihad against Republican legislators.  What makes this different from the parade of political assassins of the left in times gone by is that here, the Jihadist didn’t care so much about a particular target, but was instead motivated by extraordinary hatred against the core ideas of America.  He shot Congressman Scalise, but Scalise wasn’t a specific target, except inasmuch as he happened to be a Republican.  What signals to me the onset of the open war against America is not merely the attack waged by this leftist goon, but instead the disgusting, despicable reaction of the whole leftist media and political establishment that immediately set out to justify and rationalize the attack, turning to blaming the victims of the attack, intimating that Scalise(and all Republicans) deserve what they get.

At the same time, the radical left, which is now nearly the whole body and appendages of the mainstream media and the government bureaucracy are now aligned to destroy President Donald Trump.  As you will have known, I am not Trump’s greatest advocate, but he is after all the duly elected President of the United States, is qualified to hold that office, and he seems to be setting about fulfilling his duties despite my sometimes significant disagreements with his policy preferences.  This circumstance is wholly unacceptable to the virulent radical left.  They will remove him from office, one way or the other, and indeed, any Republican who would follow him, not because he is all that far from the more moderate folk in their political party, but because he is of the opposition, and that he might manage a mildly conservative thing or two, and reverse some parts of the drive toward their ultimate goal: The complete subjugation of any remaining philosophically American people, and the unrelenting demolition of the underlying idea that had been Americanism.

The war being conducted against Trump is spawned of the radical left’s stranglehold on the mass media(not merely the news media,) and the stranglehold they have on the bureaucracy that is the deep state.  They are coordinating to destroy him, as evidenced and typified by Comey’s leak to his friend, and by the official state as made plain by the unmasking of Michael Flynn and unknown (as yet) others in and around the Trump campaign and administration.  None of this is accidental, and it all has the same underlying purpose: De-legitimize Trump in preparation for removing him from office, legally if possible, forcefully if they can provoke it among one of their more violent lunatics, or by political destruction in 2020 if nothing else succeeds.  They have the whole of the mass media, the news, and the entire extended welfare state and security bureaucracy of the government at their immediate disposal, and while Trump clearly knows he’s under attack, I don’t think he’s quite yet grasped how thorough his challenges are, or how even to begin fighting for his own survival.

This sickening, depraved assault on the Trump presidency is really just an extension of the radical left’s war on us.  He’s actually a proxy for the obstacle we present the left in their war on America and Americanism.  What Trump must now do, and I hope someone close to him will prevail upon him to recognize it, is to defend himself and the country with all the power of the presidency, by every available means.  Trump could be creative and intelligent in this respect, but he must find the right sort of strategic and tactical thinkers to carry it out. The executive branch is gigantic, and most agencies and departments of the US Federal Government fall under the President’s direct control.  If Trump wishes to win this war, he must begin where his power is strongest under our constitutional system, and that means making an all-out war against the bureaucracy and its innumerable hangers-on.

Hiring freezes are nice, but that’s barely a pimple on the behemoth’s backside.  His watchwords should be: “Reorganize and restructure.” At present, the bureaucracy of the whole Federal Government is structured in a manner optimal to its growth and further aggregation of power.  It is staffed with people who are most frequently hostile to the idea that is America, and the people throughout the country who still cling stubbornly to those ideals.  More, Trump is in a position to use the bureaucracy’s own arguments to demolish it.  Trump can do something none have ever dared to do before, and sweep out so much of the Federal leviathan.  You might ask how Trump could accomplish this. Here are just a few ideas:

  • Move whole departments and their headquarters of the Federal Government out of Washington DC and its immediate surrounds, justifying it as an example of trying to get all the nation’s most critical eggs out of the same vulnerable basket
  • Eliminate whole sections and sub-departments of various agencies on the basis of a “green” movement, trying to make the federal government more environmentally friendly by reducing its size and carbon footprint.
  • Instruct the bureaucracy to release Obama era working papers, various and sundry studies, and all manner of leftist undertaking all in the name of open, honest, and transparent government.  Consider even a campaign of declassifying information where it has no further relevance to national security
  • Replace every bureaucrat above the rank of janitor, driving them off with new policies justified in various ways, and removing perquisites where they exist.  Take away government-issued vehicles and issue bicycles. Take away work-owned cellular phones from all but the absolutely most critical personnel as a cost-saving measure.
  • Similarly, eliminate Internet access as both a security measure and a cost-saving measure except for those whose jobs absolutely require it.

Obviously, this is far from an exhaustive list, but you can let your imagination run away a little bit with these sorts of approaches. There’s no end to the ways in which the bureaucracy can be brought to heel, but it’s time, finally, for Trump to begin that job in earnest, if not as a purely utilitarian approach to government reform, then at least as a matter of his(and our) defense.

Donald Trump needs to recognize that the radical left is at war with America every bit as zealously as are al-Qaeda and ISIS.  Even now, their more virulently maniacal members are being motivated to real attacks and real violence against Americans and Americanism.  For precisely the same reason they help to cover up militant Islamists’ attacks in the media, and with the same undeniable political agenda, their intention is to conceal this war against America and Americans as long as possible.  The time is coming when this war may enter a new and more dangerous phase, when the violence will become increasingly routine and more accepted in the mass media, and if you watch what is happening in Europe with militant Islam, you begin to grasp what is afoot for America, now under attack by radical leftists.  Trump is the only person in a position in our government to openly oppose all of this, and while he may be active on Twitter, it’s time for him to become more activist in his defense and defense of the Republic.  After eight long years of a president openly hostile to America and Americans, and a media all too willing to redefine even what those words mean on his behalf, it’s time for President Trump to live up to his “America First” proclamation.  He’ll need our support if he’s to succeed, but first, it’s time for him to strike back, and the power of the presidency is a very nearly unlimited weapon in the fight against the colossus that is the Federal bureaucracy.

One might ask how going after the bureaucracy will stanch the radical left’s war on America, but the truth is that initially, it will cause them to react somewhat more reflexively and perhaps violently to the change, but if they are permitted to fester longer, it strengthens them, and it offers them comfort. The Federal government is their “safe space,” and it’s time to pull that particular rug from beneath them. Every time the deep state launches an attack on Trump or his administration, and each time some mad-cap leftist carries out an attack against peaceful Republicans, the virulent left is heartened. To win this war, Trump is going to need to break their spirit, and hearten the actual Americans who remain among us.  Taking on the bureaucracy is entirely within his constitutional scope.  Delaying this a moment longer is merely to yield more ground to an unrelenting, irrational evil.   When Trump pointed out that the news media are effectively an enemy of the people, he was right, and perhaps much more so than simplistic evaluations of his more bombastic proclamations reveal, but also, I fear, more than he knew at the time.  It isn’t just the media, however.  Specifically, it’s the radical leftist media, a near hegemony that is in league with the deep state, and indeed, the entire Washington DC establishment.

President Trump doesn’t need to openly declare war against the left, at least initially.  What this war against America requires is a substantive response, and that response should come in the form of a complete demolition of the deep state bureaucracy, shamelessly and tirelessly using the full palette of presidential powers contemplated by our constitution as the chief executive presiding over the executive branch. He won’t need to declare it, because the leftists will scream at the tops of their shrill little voices, and the remnant of America will understand the source of the noise, and be heartened.  It’s a war, and we ought to have such lesser skirmishes while it’s still possible in order to preclude the many deeper tragedies the left will beget if unopposed.  There is still time to save America, and it’s time for President Trump to launch the counteroffensive, as only the President has the authority to do.  If the left is not stopped soon, the disasters that will be visited upon the shrinking remnant of America will be more thorough than those that either al-Qaeda or ISIS can begin to realize. The radical left is every bit as dangerous as the militant element of Islam, and it’s time to do something about it.

 

 

 

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Posted in Anti-Capitalists, Deep State, Donald Trump, Featured, Global Jihad, Global Revolution, Leftist Cabal, Leftwing Media Loons, Politics, War, Welfare State | 2 Comments »

Amnesty:The Road to Hell

Thursday, June 13th, 2013

Whose “Good Intentions?”

It shouldn’t be a surprise that nearly seven in ten Americans who look at the immigration bill pending in the Senate as another sell-out of America, with that number arguing that we must enforce our borders immediately.  It’s also not a surprise that Senate Republicans are helping to support this bill despite the damage it will ultimately do to our nation. Twenty-eight Republicans decided to sell us out and join with the Democrats in bringing the Immigration bill to the Senate for action, and as is ever the case, when you see substantial percentages of the two parties cooperating on anything, you must also know that they are acting in the name of the Washington DC establishment, that cares genuinely for no party but for the non-stop celebration inside the DC beltway, bought and paid-for by we taxpayers.  Now, they’re galloping toward a so-called “Comprehensive Immigration Reform” bill that threatens to end the United States as you have known it.  The worst of it may be that while nearly three in four Americans realize this is a sell-out, and want to secure the border first, there are still one-fourth of Americans who actually think this amnesty plan is a good idea.

Imagine my surprise while talking to an SEIU member who thinks this bill is a boon to his prospects, and is four-square behind the bill, whatever may be in it, because he’s been told by union uppers that it’s important for the union, with the implication that what is good for the union will be good for him.  What the fellow doesn’t quite understand is that while this bill will certainly be  good for the union bosses, it will be devastating to his own life.  They’re being told that most of these legalized illegals will wind up as members of the union, but they do not question the veracity of the claim, or even whether if true, such a thing would be good for existing union members.  Instead, they’re given their marching orders, and they’ve been told to support the bill.  When twelve million illegals “step out of the shadows,” the first thing they’ll be looking for is legitimate, lawful employment.  Who will that hurt?  It will hurt every currently-employed person in the country, minus the politicians, who are insulated from market forces.  Are union bosses more like working folk, or more like politicians?

In much the same way, the libertarian sect that seems to follow anybody with the last name “Paul” continues to push the notion that this is an idea in favor of the free market.  In one sense, that is true, but it is an ideal to be pursued in the long run and not to be imposed by the registering of yeas and nays along with the sweep of a presidential pen.  You see, there can be no free market if there is no rule of law, or what would keep the market free?  A free market is only possible where there exists a framework of laws that protect the rights and properties of a society’s members.  There can be no protection of rights when lawlessness is the only rule, with the government imposing a legalized form of anarchy in place of the rule of law.  Without a thorough program in place to assimilate new would-be Americans, how is it expected that they would respect a rule of law in which they have no investment?

Ladies and gentlemen, we’re being shafted on a colossal scale, and every one of these politicians know it.  They’ve been bound and determined to shove this down the nation’s throat in a post-election environment for years, and now they have just the right mix of Democrats and Republicans, scoundrels all, to shove this down our throats.  The following 28 Republican Senators need never ask for my vote in any election, for any office, ever, and I don’t care who endorses them:

Alexander (R-TN), Ayotte (R-NH), Blunt (R-MO), Burr (R-NC), Chambliss (R-GA), Chiesa (R-NJ), Coats (R-IN), Cochran (R-MS), Collins (R-ME), Corker (R-TN), Cornyn (R-TX), Fischer (R-NE), Flake (R-AZ), Graham (R-SC), Hatch (R-UT), Heller (R-NV), Hoeven (R-ND), Isakson (R-GA), Johanns (R-NE), Johnson (R-WI), McConnell (R-KY), Moran (R-KS), Paul (R-KY), Portman (R-OH), Rubio (R-FL), Thune (R-SD), Toomey (R-PA), Wicker (R-MS)

These people are jackals and parasites who have sold out their respective electorates.  Don’t tell me how clever Rand Paul is, or how smart is Marco Rubio, or what a solid guy is John Cornyn.  (That last worthless weasel is up for re-election in my state next year, and I will vote for the devil himself if that’s what it takes to get Cornyn out of there. This is not the first time he has screwed the country in this fashion, and left in office, it won’t be the last.)

When all of this goes wrong, this same list of weasels, back-stabbers, fakes and flakes will claim that they had been voting with only the best of intentions.  No, they aren’t.  They’re participating in a gang-rape of the nation, and they’re quite pleased with themselves.  People may wonder why I’ve gone off the grid, and there’s no denying my various personal/health issues are the primary drivers, but this bunch – this gang – of America-hating corporatists are the primary reason.  They’re going to win if they have to immobilize the nation to have their way with her.

The most galling part may be that the few allies they have in the general populace are primarily the union workers who have been told by their alleged “leaders” that this is good for them, while their union bosses wine and dine at the White House with the President and the very captains of the industries who they tell their rank-and-file they are supposed to hate.  Both sides have been sold out by their respective parties, and both to the same cronies.

If we’re to have any chance to stop this, we will need to melt the phone lines, faxes, and in-boxes of every Republican in the House.  The Democrats are hopeless.  Most of the Republicans are treacherous.  We need something we do not now have, and that’s a voice.  If we do not find it, and soon, they’re going to break this country for all time by Labor Day, and there will be nothing that we will then do to stop this.

Remember, they have the magic formula all worked out: Get enough Republicans in the Senate to break the filibuster to let the bill come to the floor.  Then use the 60 rule to keep out amendments.  The bill will go to final passage, and then it’s off to the House, where Boehner will cobble together a gang of Republicans to join with the Democrats to pass a bill more than seventy percent of the American people oppose.  After that, it’s a Rose Garden signing ceremony at the White House, and the nation is finished.  That’s the procedure.  The only way that procedure can be stopped is to make a stand at every House Republican’s office, and even then, they won’t give a holy rip about what we think.

It’s time to end the poetic verbiage and simply state what is: These people, in both parties, are out to wreck the country and wreck it beyond retrieval.  There are undoubtedly a few in Congress who genuinely oppose this, but they are so few and so weakened that they afford little hope.  On the other hand, as somebody in Las Vegas recently reminded me, there’s always some hope, and some times, that’s all you have to hold.  We must push back with all we have or lose the country.  Hoping our best efforts will hold this bill back may be all we have left, but let this not deter us in that effort.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Posted in Anti-Capitalists, Featured, Illegal Immigration, Immigration, News, Politics | 3 Comments »

The One Failed War Leftists Won’t Quit

Friday, November 16th, 2012

War Without End

I was born in the 1960s, just as Congress and Lyndon Johnson launched a new war.  The war raged on, and the amount of money spent was unprecedented. Never before had so much money been thrown at a war, but the enemy refused to relent.  Money bled out of our treasury, and the futures of so many young Americans were wrecked.  The cost to the nation was measured in its tragic affects on our culture, as well as our financial standing, and since that war commenced, America has never been the same.  In most cases, the left can’t wait to shut down a failed war once it’s taken up by Republican Presidents, but this war was different.  This was a war they would continue to wage, despite all of the evidence that they were making no ground against an intransigent and intractable enemy. Failure didn’t matter.  Nothing mattered.  Infiltrations?  No matter.  Destroyed morale?  Just another burden to be borne by the American people.  Ladies and gentlemen, no war in history has cost so much or produced so little as the war commenced in earnest by President Johnson, and yet no war in American history has seen such a commitment of resources.  Naturally, I speak not of Vietnam that ended in the 1975, but instead of the counterproductive “war on poverty” that continues to this day, with no hint of success in sight.

In the five decades of the declared “War on Poverty,” there hasn’t been a President who hasn’t spurred it along, and there hasn’t been a Congress that did not act to expand it.  We have spent money in the range of some $15-20 Trillion on the various means-tested entitlement and welfare programs over that period.  It’s fair to say the number is at least on par with our current national debt, and yet for all the screaming by Democrats over the cost of the war in Iraq, and the war in Afghanistan, neither approach the colossal sum poured into the welfare systems and programs of this nation.  In fact, you can combine the total of defense and war spending over that same period and not arrive at an equal sum.  My question for Democrats, as well as for “compassionate conservatives” is simply this:  When do you admit that this war had been a complete and utter failure, more fruitless than any you’ve enlisted our country to fight?

At this late date, we have more people in poverty, and enrolled in these poverty programs than ever before.  If the purpose of these programs had been to give people a “hand up,” how long ago should we have expected them to take it?  One in six Americans is receiving food-stamps.  One in six!  One in seven is enrolled in Medicaid.  More than half the nation’s children receive free or reduced-price lunches and breakfasts at school, all funded by federal dollars.  The number of people living in government-furnished or government-financed housing is outrageous.  If the United States had been involved in a war stretching across the span of a half-century, yielding no improvement in the state of our security, the leftists in this nation would be terminally apoplectic.  We can’t so much as deploy troops to battle terrorists without the left losing its collective hive-mind.

If one were to view warfare as an investment in the future of a county, one could justify the first Gulf War on the basis that it at least restored the free flow of oil at market prices that permitted the nation to enjoy most of a decade of relative prosperity.  If you evaluate the so-called “War on Poverty” by the same criteria, a serious economist would note that it had only made the nation poorer.  In real terms, we have more people in poverty, and a system that is designed to increase the number who will languish in that state.  In truth, most of the people receiving the bounty of the welfare state are living as well as people who earn 150% of the poverty level, and we now provide hand-outs of every description to so many people that they have begun to outnumber producers.

If it is the standard policy of Democrats and their cohort leftist groups to abandon a failed war, why are they not protesting on the streets?  Why are they not screaming and chanting and having die-ins on the streets, not wearing the garb of massacred civilians, as is their usual ploy, but instead wearing the clothing of all those who work for a living?  That’s who they’re killing.  The people being rewarded by this system are not the people who’ve earned it.  Instead, the people who earned the bounty that is being redistributed are being victimized by the Democrats, but also by their friends who are the self-described “compassionate conservatives” in the Republican Party.  Is their compassion with the money of others so thoroughly blinding that they are now unable to see what it is they have wrought?  Rather than elevate people from poverty, giving them the needed “hand up,” what they have accomplished is to create a permanent underclass that largely only fits that definition to the extent of their earnings, but no longer by their standard of living.

The wretched tragedy of this failed War on Poverty might be forgiven if one were to believe it had been the accidental consequence of good intentions, but it is not.  No rational person can evaluate the failed results that have characterized our national effort to reduce poverty, ten years in, twenty years in, or thirty years in, somebody ought to have recognized that this is not working.  It can’t work, in fact, but if you support programs of this sort after you’ve watched their perennial failures for the span of a half-century, one can scarcely conclude that the advocates of such a system had been motivated by benevolence.  While the “War on Poverty” has been a thorough failure, their other war has been a rousing success:  The entirety of this system is part of the extended political warfare against the American people.  The idea is to break us, and it’s working, so that at long last, they have succeeded in making us vulnerable to every conceivable threat.  If the real goal isn’t to cure poverty, but instead to impoverish the American people both in material and liberty, the war of the statists against America has been a rousing success.  We believed they were fighting a war on poverty, but the lengthening line of economic corpses tells another story. There will be no flag-dropped coffins in this war, and no one will salutes its victims, eventually to be measured in the tens or hundreds of millions in shattered dreams and wasted lives.   Too generous and trusting to perceive the objective of their attackers, most Americans didn’t understand that all along, it had been a war for poverty.

Theirs.

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Posted in Anti-Capitalists, Civil Unrest, Conservatism, Featured, News, Politics, War, Welfare State | 4 Comments »

The Sovietization of America: It’s Over

Thursday, June 28th, 2012

Let's Adopt a Flag That Fits

In what can only be termed the greatest abandonment of our Constitution by a sitting Supreme Court, the Affordable Care Act was upheld.  This decision heralds the end of the Constitutional Republic, the rule of law, and the American way of life.  This decision is a treason against the Constitution, the American people, and the entire notion of liberty that had enabled our national development and prosperity.  No American is safe from government, under any conceivable circumstance, and none should falsely believe that they might find relief at the bar of justice in the United States any longer.  This decision announces a new form of anarchy, whereby the officials of government have become participants in lawless behavior, ruling in contravention of the founding supreme law of the land, while carrying on a grotesque charade by which they pretend to have followed a law that does not and has never existed.  The Supreme Court has upheld the mandate as a tax.

Chief Justice John Roberts has betrayed the Constitution.  At least he’ll be popular on the cocktail party circuit.

To understand what has happened, the individual mandate has been defeated as a command to individuals, but not as a tax on individuals.  In other words, the court has held that the mandate is a tax that can be levied on individuals, but individuals cannot be forced to buy health insurance.  Put another way, the Supreme Court has said that while you cannot be forced to purchase health insurance, but that you can be forced to pay more (extra) taxes if you do not.

The entire healthcare bill has otherwise been upheld.

In short, the country is dead.  They can force you to pay a tax for failing to purchase bubble-gum.  They can do anything they like.  Congress and the President can enact any law they please. You are now slaves, completely.  It’s time to become accustomed to it, and I am hearing conservatives who are surrendering even on the concept of repeal.

Rampage, or whimper? I suspect most will choose the latter.

I reject this opinion.  I reject this court.  I reject the entirety of this anarchical government.

 

 

 

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Posted in Anti-Capitalists, Breaking, Civil Unrest, Conservatism, Featured, Idiot Judges, Judicial Activism, Law, Politics, Supreme Court | 11 Comments »

Re-Building the Soviet State – One Law at a Time

Thursday, May 17th, 2012

Apparatchik

Senator Charles Schumer(D-NY) should be ejected from office, not merely by his fellow New Yorkers, but by the whole body of the Senate.  The trouble is, we’d need to eject more than “Chuck the Schmuck” in in order to effect such change.  Today, “Schmucky” introduced a law aimed at punishing people who renounce their citizenship in order to avoid taxation, and forbids them from ever returning, even as visitors.  This communist political hack from New York actually believes the problem is that guys like Eduardo Saverin leave the country, but not the fact that the confiscatory levels of taxation levied against Americans in this disastrous Obama economy drives them away.  Saverin renounced his US citizenship and lives in Singapore, and Schumer isn’t happy about it, since it means the government will not collect taxes from people like Saverin on investment income such as the Facebook IPO scheduled for tomorrow.  It’s like living in a time warp.  The law that Senator Schumer and his pal Bob Casey(D-PA) have introduced has precedent, although not in this country.  No, the bodies of law to which you must make reference in order to find a precedent are places like the former Soviet Union.

Schumer is a leftist troll, but he’s more dangerous than his superficial antics reveal.  Schumer is the quintessential NY politician, meaning he is a barely-disguised communist.  How long until this malevolent weasel decides to erect a physical wall, not to keep immigrants out as you might suppose, but instead to prevent people from leaving?  This law is merely the first logical step on that path, and if you don’t recognize it as such, you’ve forgotten history, and what it makes clear:  As communists and their socialist friends (not a dime’s worth of difference, in fact) begin to break a country down, first those with money, and then those with brains and ability, tend to flee.  They ultimately seek to stop the bleeding by such draconian measures, aimed at using the law as a restraint.  It’s their best attempt at keeping such people in the bonds of servitude to their disgusting slave-states.  It isn’t as though this will stop the bleeding, but you see, that fact will become the impetus, the casus belli for the ongoing class warfare they will escalate.  No matter how it starts, it always ends in physical restraints.

I suppose there are those who might ask why it is that I feel any sympathy for Saverin, or those like him, since they are, after all, abandoning the United States.  For those who think this way, I must ask:  Isn’t the United States abandoning them?  This was the nation in which one might have made a fortune and reaped a benefit, but willingly paid one’s taxes, but that time is over.  To be quite frank about it, if you raise my federal income taxes to nearly 40%, I’m going to leave too, and I will change the name of this site to MarkAmericaInExile.com.  The simple fact is that such a level of taxation is obscene and immoral.  There is no moral justification possible for taxing one citizen’s earnings at a different rate than another citizen’s income, and yet this has become the accepted norm since we adopted the progressive income tax early last century.

The progressive income tax is a notion right out of the mind of Karl Marx, and the very idea that Schumer is putting forward is that not only are you forbidden to keep the money you’ve earned, but that if you renounce your citizenship and he can in some way substantiate the fact that you’ve done so to avoid taxes, you must be punished.  I think Chuck Schumer should be punished.  I think if you introduce an openly communist law in the United States Congress, you should be thrown out of that body, placed on an airplane, and sent to live in Havana with that breathing corpse named Fidel.  The problem we have in this country is not that we have too many rich people fleeing the overbearing taxes, but that we have such outrageous taxation at all. I’m not a wealthy guy, by any stretch of the imagination, but I know that excrement rolls down hill, and I also know that there’s somebody with less than I might have, who will look at me with the same malignantly covetous eyes that Schmucky and his gaggle of communist pals leer at Eduardo Saverin.  No matter how poor you might consider yourself to be, there is always somebody in worse condition looking at you as though you’re a “fat-cat.”  Always.

Ladies and gentlemen, there’s no point belaboring the issue.  Chuck Schumer is a disgrace to the United States, and if the people of New York weren’t ruled by a majority of like-minded commies, they would toss him out.  Sadly, we’re stuck with this clown until he has his own twitter moment, or something along those lines, because there is no level of communism the majority of voters in that state will not endorse.  After all, they win, don’t they?  I have serious doubts as to whether this bill will make it over to the House, but if it does, I wonder what it will take for Boehner and the boys over in the House to surrender and go along.  Every last damned American ought to be outraged by this proposal of Schumer’s, but sadly, we now live in a country ripe for demagoguery of the sort Schumer is practicing.  At least he’s fully in the open now, because with this proposal, Schumer has moved from the rabid leftist column directly into the Stalinist column.  This must have been what it was like to live in Russia a century ago, as they agitated against the Tsars and the “merchant class.”  Most of those poor ignorant bastards had no idea with whom they had climbed into bed.

Some things never change.

 

Posted in Anti-Capitalists, Capitalism, Idiotic Politicians, Law, News, Politics | 5 Comments »

This is 1860, and Obama Isn’t Lincoln

Thursday, March 22nd, 2012

Who We Need

Our country is in crisis, but at present, we have no leader emerging to save the union, and it seems there will be no Abraham Lincoln to save the nation.  Barack Obama is more like his long-ago predecessor, James Buchanan, who was put in place by his party, the Democrats, to protect the institution of slavery.  Obama is in that position, as his job has been to protect and grow the welfare state, and in much the same way as Buchanan, it may be a case before the Supreme Court that defines his presidency.  If Barack Obama and the Democrats have their way, the Supreme Court will uphold the Affordable Care Act(Obama-care) thus defining the character and inevitable course of the nation, much as in 1857, Justice Taney’s ruling upholding slavery in the Dred Scott case set the nation on a course to civil war. The difference was that in 1857, the court held that federalism applied, and in 2012, Barack Obama’s justice department is demanding that the 10th Amendment and the entire notion of States’ rights be ignored. There may only be one way in which this issue is finally settled, and it may require war.

In 1860, the budding Republican party sought to set the question on slavery right, the abolitionists in the North propelling Abraham Lincoln to the presidency.  Lincoln had the distinction of overseeing the abolition of slavery, but to do so he would need to fight a war.  In much the same way, if Republicans are to begin abolishing the soft slavery of the welfare state, beginning with Obama-care, they will need to elect a leader prepared to wage war in defense of a principle.  After all, in 1860, the South was entrenched in the notion of keeping the institution of legal slavery, but the abolitionists knew that could not be permitted to stand.  In 2012, faced with a Supreme Court case that may well decide the future of the country, we wait to see if the court will act to save the country, or fail to defend the principles enshrined in the constitution as they did in the Dred Scott case one-hundred-fifty-five years ago.

People have falsely compared Obama to Lincoln, thinking his stance on the supremacy of the central government over the states is the most pressing comparison, but this simply isn’t the case.  What will save our republic now is not more government but less, and not fewer freedoms but more, and in this sense, Barack Obama has nothing in common with Abraham Lincoln.  Lincoln thought that it was impossible to better the lives of some men by subjecting other men to ruin:

“Property is the fruit of labor…property is desirable…is a positive good in the world. That some should be rich shows that others may become rich, and hence is just encouragement to industry and enterprise. Let not him who is houseless pull down the house of another; but let him labor diligently and build one for himself, thus by example assuring that his own shall be safe from violence when built.” The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln edited by Roy P. Basler, Volume VII, “Reply to New York Workingmen’s Democratic Republican Association” (March 21, 1864), pp. 259-260.

Clearly, Lincoln was not interested in Obama’s updated form of enslavement, and yet that is the central crisis that will confront this nation in the 2012 elections, and for some years to come.  Nobody can say with certainty what will be the final tipping point, but if this nation continues apace, it will plunge into anarchy and civil war, but this time, the government is likely to be on the side of the slavers.

There is something fundamentally flawed in the thinking of those who argue that this is just the natural progression of nations, because what they argue is that Americans are neither wise enough, nor even capable of sufficient self-control to attempt to restrain intemperate desires for wealth derived from naked expropriation, but I submit this is not true, at least not yet, and that we must not permit it to become true.  Once we cross that invisible plane, the ramifications will be known with little delay, as the country you had known and loved and labored to propel disappears into the fog of a war from which only savagery may emerge.

Let us not pretend that we can’t imagine what will happen in such a scenario, but let us not delude ourselves into the beautiful lie that tells us it will somehow resolve by other, less painful means.  Von Clauswitz said that war is politics by another means, and I am here to tell you that politics is just the precursor to war  in such a context as the one in which our nation now persists.  All of the political rancor we now experience would be replaced by open warfare, at least for a time, in the scenario I am describing.  That our slate of Republican candidates might not see this is disturbing enough, but that our front-runner intentionally avoids seeing it is frankly inexcusable.  Of those now in the nomination fight, I think Gingrich is most apt to understand what’s at stake, because his knowledge of history may permit him to see the warning signs with a clarity the others are neither inclined nor perhaps able to see.

Gingrich has a fine understanding of the Civil War, and he certainly knows the history of the period, and how the nation arrived in that predicament.  I think Gingrich also understands that our current predicament is in some ways worse, because whereas in 1861, Lincoln put the government in service of the proposition that all men were created equal, we now have a government committed to the notion that it is the job of government to compel an equality of results.

This is the nature of the grave danger we now face, and it is every bit as dangerous as 1860, but perhaps with the added danger that we now have  a president who is part of the problem.  Put another way, imagine that in 1861, it had been a President from the South who instead caused t he Northern delegations to Congress to walk out, and had engaged in a brutal war to compel Northern states to the “peculiar institution” that had been slavery.  That’s what we now face, as Barack Obama seeks to impose his own form of slavery on the American people.

This is why I insist that this election year is not like 1980, or even 1932.  This election is most like 1860, and if we don’t find a candidate with the common sense and righteous aims of Lincoln, it may have been in vain that we exercised our vote.  If we are to preserve this republic, we will need leaders who are willing to wage even war in defense of individual liberty.  That certainly won’t be Barack Obama, and it surely won’t be Mitt Romney, leaving us to ponder whether it is even possible to save our union once more.

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Posted in Anti-Capitalists, Barack Obama, Capitalism, Civil Unrest, Election 2012, News, Politics, War | 9 Comments »

Mark Levin Searches for a Word

Friday, March 16th, 2012

The Word The Left Already Knows

Listening to Mark Levin on the radio on Thursday, he was discussing the Obama administration’s predations upon our country, and all of the policies Obama has established that intentionally undermine the United States.  He wanted a new word to describe what Obama is doing, but he settled on an old one, and it’s close, but it isn’t quite right:  De-Industrialization.  Far be it from me to quibble over terminology with the brilliant and accomplished  Mark Levin, who has an audience that spans the nation, and with the Internet, really the entire English-speaking world.  He’s so frequently right, and so unfailingly prescient that I hesitate to offer him a ‘correction,’ but in this case, it’s so important that I believe I must, because as Sarah Palin pointed out Thursday in a Facebook note, Dr. Levin has done more to enlighten more people on the roots of our national disorder than any other person in our culture at present.

I feel it is important enough to risk his ire, and those of his many fans, and followers, some of whom also read this blog.  What Barack Obama is doing is much more fundamental to our national survival than  “de-Industrialization” might indicate.  If it were that, we could recover in a generation, but what Obama is doing threatens to undermine our nation for all times, and as Dr. Levin suspected, the word he seeks already exists, and it’s much more dire than you might imagine: Barack Obama is De-Capitalizing the United States.  It’s been the solitary goal of the left for a long time, and it’s Barack Obama’s method of culturally, financially, and materially destroying America.

How important is capital to a capitalist country?   It is everything we need, not merely to recover our economy, but to fuel it for generations, perhaps in perpetuity.  Capital helps establish even our moral basis, and undermining that basis leaves us to lie in supine servitude to whatever demagogue happens along.  Stealing America’s capital will crush the country, and remove from it the ability to recover, not only in the next decade or generation, but possibly ever.  Most people think of capital as money, and money is capital, but it’s not the only form, and not all money is capital in the most important sense.  Depending on how money is used, it can be capital, and that is surely an important part of the story you must understand to see not only why my term is the correct one, but also in order to see why Barack Obama is far worse, and far more dangerous than any of you may have imagined.

While others have been focused almost solely on the Republican horse-race, I have been covering the twists and turns of our dire national financial circumstances, and I have done so for a reason:  You must know what is being done, and how, if you’re to understand the threat we now face.  Our capital is being strip-mined from this nation in systematic fashion, and that which remains is being systematically devalued.  Let me explain how this is being done, starting with how our cash is being devalued.

First, you must understand our monetary system, and you must know that in order to devalue our money, all you need to do is create more of it than growth in our Gross Domestic Product(GDP) justifies.  Ben Bernanke has been complying with that plan, by creating more money out of nothing in order to lend it to many institutions, including primarily the US Treasury, but also to all of those banks that were “too big to fail” as well as Europe’s ailing financial sector in order to temporarily prop them up.  Governor Palin warned us about this in late 2010, as the Federal Reserve instituted QE2(Quantitative Easing round 2) that is really just a fancy title for more old-fashioned money-printing, now carried out primarily in digital form.

The more the Federal Reserve lends out of thin air, the less all previous dollars are worth, provided there’s no corresponding growth in production and wealth in the total system.  If production and wealth grows by some minor amount, but the printing(or digitizing) of money exceeds that amount, each additional dollar devalues all the rest.  Put another way, if you imagine the wealth of the nation as a giant pie, each time we print more money without growing the pie, what happens is the same as re-dividing the pie by the additional number of dollars.  What this means is that each slice shrinks, but since we’re talking about money, the medium by which we exchange goods and services, what it means is that each slice – each dollar – falls in value versus those goods and services.  You can buy less with the same number of dollars, or put another way, it takes more of your dollars to buy the same goods.  As Sarah Palin predicted nearly eighteen months ago, we have seen the prices of energy and food skyrocket.

You might say that this is all well and good, but Ben Bernanke – not Barack Obama – runs the Federal Reserve.  I agree, but let me tell you that Obama’s fiscal policies are the impetus for much of the money-printing.  Put another way, Barack Obama’s outrageous spending has accounted for four trillion dollars or more of all this money-printing madness.  This is because money isn’t printed and set on a shelf.  Instead, it is loaned into existence.  Once you realize this, you understand that without corresponding economic growth, this is merely funny money that is tantamount to counterfeiting.  Each time they devalue our currency by this procedure, your existing wealth is being stolen by some incremental amount.  That’s the real picture, but sadly, it doesn’t stop there.

Are you paying more for fuel?  To quote my favorite politician, “You betcha!”  Food? “Ditto!”  In fact, prices of almost everything is creeping  slowly upward.  Part of this is due to the re-division of the pie, as described above, but it’s also a result of something else:  The United States Federal government is spending more on redistributive programs than ever in history, and it now spends monies equivalent to 25% of the GDP.  Those dollars, poured into these redistributive programs, are now competing with your hard-earned dollars in the marketplace for goods and services.  When more people arrive in the market with dollars with which to demand more of a thing, but you’re not producing substantially more of it, either the prices will rise in response to the quantity demanded, or somebody else will need to supply the goods from some other place.

This results in an out-flow of cash.  It’s devalued cash, but it’s still landing in China and India, and anywhere else with which we do substantial commerce.  Some of that cash comes back in trade, but some of it does not.  While in ordinary times, I am not so concerned about the balance of trade, under this system at present, we are bleeding wealth and redistributing it globally.  For what?  The latest cellphone?  Produced where?  The latest television?  Produced where?  The simple fact is that while I support free trade, what I don’t support is free trade augmented by redistributive domestic programs.  What this means is that when you go to work, you’re going to produce wealth, some of which will be stolen in the next round of money-printing, and redistributed to some who do not work, to be spent on merchandise you would not buy, and without which the purchasers could easily live, all while pouring your wealth in a chain from your pocket to government to your government-supported neighbor to some state venture in the Republic of China, mostly for transient, non-durable merchandise that only detracts from available capital.

At the same time all of this goes on, productive enterprises have less money from which to draw.  Are you thinking of putting an addition on your home?  First, you might have to borrow the money, and if you do, you’ll find you’re in tougher competition for those dollars, and since fewer contractors are now in existence, you’ll pay a premium for any work you hire out.  Your money won’t go as far, because in construction, fuel is an important component from the production and transportation of raw materials, to the paychecks of workers who will now need more cash to make it to the job-site.  As all of this happens, you may have found that you needed a home equity loan to pay for the new construction, but alas, this too will be more difficult, since the value of your home and property has likely fallen.

Add to this the insane policy of permitting JP Morgan Chase and Bank of America, among others, to move risky European derivatives into coverage by the FDIC.  When the Euro-zone goes belly up, and don’t kid yourself, it will, you will be stuck with that bill too, and it may even collapse your currency altogether.  You might have heard that Wall Street is doing well, but that’s an illusion too.  Much of the growth on Wall Street has been financed with more loans from the Federal Reserve.  Meanwhile, you’re struggling to fill your fuel-tank, and while you do, the foreign powers who control much of the globe’s oil supply are getting wealthy while Barack Obama denies pipelines and drilling all over the United States.  He’s closing down coal-fired plants.  He’s using the EPA to regulate energy producers out of existence.  Slowly, we are being starved of the capital equipment with which we might hope to someday extract ourselves from this condition.   When he closed down Gulf drilling in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon incident, and refused to reopen it despite a federal court ruling, those drilling rigs and platforms left American waters on their way to places they can drill, like Brazil, where he sent billions of dollars to fund their oil industry, including Petrobras, in which his pal George Soros was a big investor.  Those platforms and rigs won’t be back.  You’ll need to raise the capital to build new ones.

Is your paycheck growing? A few may be, but most are not.  In fact, with skyrocketing costs as your money is devalued, even those who’ve managed to scratch out minimal raises are finding their increases are in no way covering their expenses.  With all this newly digitized and printed money, you’re not seeing anything but diminished value in your purchasing power.   You have little money to save or invest, because it’s all going up in smoke to support your basic energy and food expenses.  Any margin of error you may have had is now gone, and to do anything constructive, you’re having to borrow in some form.  You might sooth yourself with the idea that at least you’re contributing to a 401K, or other retirement program at work, but how much of the value of those investments is based on the bubble-building all on the back of these borrowed bucks.  They have the use of your slim capital at present, all on the promise that it’s a shelter.  It could also be a trap.

What all of this does, taken together as a vast picture of our national despair, is to deprive the country of capital from the most fundamental level to the top of the financial food-chain.  When, I repeat, when the Euro crashes, your dollar will follow along behind in short order.  Your financial institutions will be wrecked, and you will find out that there is no such thing as “too big to fail.”  When we are naked, starving, and unable to raise enough capital to fund the production of a pack of bubble-gum, you will see why this is more than mere de-industrialization.  Barack Obama is hard about the chore of de-capitalizing America, undercutting its wealth, and its ability to produce more wealth, on which our lives all depend.  The old saying is that “it takes money to make money,” and Barack Obama and his band of anti-capitalists know that this is true.  To destroy America, and to destroy the capitalism that has powered it through generations of ever-growing government, one must take away that seed that lays its foundations anew in each successive generation: Capital.

Of course, not all capital is about money.  Some economists count “human capital,” and here too, Obama is squandering a generation.  Our schools have become mosh-pits of leftist indoctrination, and our colleges and universities are populated by students many of whom believe it is proper to lobby for free contraception.  You see, capitalism requires a respect for what capital is in its naked essence:  It is the motive power of all new wealth, but what they now teach the nation’s children is that “stuff” is just material that is owned as a matter of legalized oppression of those with less money.  This undercuts the moral basis too, so that your human capital, your financial capital, and your moral capital are all being destroyed.

Barack Obama is literally an anti-capitalist, all the way to his core, and what he and his friends like George Soros do and have done in previous instances is to de-capitalize nations, and reduce them to stagnant, increasingly destitute corpses.  America had been the greatest and freest nation on the planet, because for a long time, it came closest to the capitalist ideal.  Slowly, for a century or more, we have been bleeding it dry.  Republicans and Democrats have participated, and all of them under the label of  “progressivism.”  Mitt Romney would do little different, except perhaps to better manage the collapse.  That won’t save us, and it can’t restore our country to its exceptional promise of years past.  We now stand on a societal precipice and Barack Obama has arrived at just the right time in our history to oversee the commencement of the final de-capitalization of America, shoving us over into an abyss from which the nation may not emerge.

Dr. Levin, respectfully, that is the word you were seeking.  The Left has known it and is practicing it with ardent fervor.

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Occupiers: No “True Democracy” While Capitalism Continues – They’re Right!

Wednesday, March 7th, 2012

Anti-Capitalist Stephen Lerner

Andrew Breitbart managed to get his hands on some video of an Occupy strategy session, and in this video, SEIU skunk Stephen Lerner says that there can be no co-existence of Capitalism and “True Democracy.” Here’s the problem, and it’s one patriotic Americans need to grasp: Occupy is right. Now, before you go off the deep end to suggest that I’m losing my mind, because in this case, I agree with Occupy Wall Street, I would like you to watch the video. It’s important to understand what they’re saying so I can explain to you why they are right.

Here’s the video:

The problem we have is that most Americans have been mis-educated to believe that the United States is a democracy. It’s not. It never has been, and it was never supposed to be a democracy. Democracy is merely organized mob-rule under color of law. The United States was constituted as a representative republic, as demonstrated by the words of our own founding document, the US Constitution, in Article IV, Section 1:

“The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government“(emphasis added)

This is a part of our constitution that is often ignored, and one that is often side-stepped by leftists because they cannot tolerate the notion that we have a republican form of government by design, and by the intentions of our framers. They understood that democracy was a horrid wrecking machine that destroys individual liberty, and is ever the precursor to tyranny. What a democracy ultimately permits, but what a representative republic is structured to forbid is the voting away of rights of some minority, including the smallest minority that is an individual. The whole purpose of the strong requirements on amending the constitution, or replacing it via a constitutional convention is specifically to make the destruction of individual rights exceedingly difficult.

What we have seen over the last century is a concerted effort to turn the US into a democracy of sorts. Capitalism cannot operate where there are not strong protections of individual rights, including the right to property, or one’s sovereignty in the marketplace. What Stephen Lerner and the rest of the Occupy Wall Street crowd understand is that there can be no “true democracy” while capitalism still lives. In short, it’s a recognition of the fact that the mob-rule that is implicit in democracy is prohibited in order to make capitalism possible.

What makes capitalism work is that you have the right to your property, exclusively, with no valid claim upon it by society at large. That’s why the income tax was pawned off on the American people with the 16th Amendment almost a century ago: The idea was to wreck your legitimate hold over your own property. In order to redistribute your wealth, they first needed the legal authority to take it, and that was the entire purpose of the 16th Amendment. Once they had a method by which to steal your wealth, they needed the ability to make it easier to redistribute it, and so the 17th Amendment was passed, providing for direct election of Senators, turning them into a more democratic institution. From that moment on, the character of American government began changing from a representative republic into a democracy as a precursor to a police-state.

What Lerner and the other Occupiers in this clip have understood is that in order to have the police and welfare state they want, they must first destroy your liberties, and that one of the reasons you will fight them is because you know that without them, capitalism, the means of your existence, cannot last. Last fall, I received a number of comments here from Occupy-sympathetic posters who assured me that OWS is not anti-capitalist. Guess again. This video proves it, and it does so very easily.

These are people who have a clear understanding of what they are after, and frankly, I think too many Americans have been intentionally mis-educated as to the proper form and function of our government precisely in order to permit these people to make such statements.  You see, they’re right, and while it may seem shocking to some who think there’s no difference, this is why Americans must begin to arm themselves with the truth.  These people are out to make us into a democracy, but that is not the form in which we were constituted.  Our nation is a constitutional, federal, representative republic.  Capitalism is only possible here because we adopted that form. This  has led to our great wealth and prosperity, but if we wish to grow it or even keep it, we will need to retain our constitutional form of government.  Occupy Wall Street understands the distinction, but if you wish to keep your country, you had better learn it, and fight for it too.

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Posted in Anti-Capitalists, Capitalism, Civil Unrest, Education, Media, News, Occupiers, Politics, Video | 7 Comments »

Occupiers Revealed: Common Criminals and Thugs

Sunday, March 4th, 2012

Occupying a Jail Cell

Three “Occupy” protesters were arrested and charged with hate crimes and robbery in Oakland on Friday after hurling epithets and generally battering a woman who asked them not to protest in her neighborhood.  They took her wallet, but she was able to break free from the thuggish threesome long enough to get away and call police, who arrested the assailants in short order.  While not clear from the Reuters article, it seems unlikely that the woman had been part of the “1%,” offering some substantiation of what has been alleged all along:  The Occupiers are nothing but garden variety hoodlums who have adopted a political excuse for their behavior.

According to the police:

“She was surrounded by three protestors and battered as they yelled vulgar epithets regarding their perception of her sexual orientation,” Oakland Police spokeswoman Johnna Watson said.

The female victim was not identified except as a 20-year resident of the neighborhood.

“Her wallet was taken during the crime,” Watson said. “The victim broke away from the group and called police, who were able to arrest one suspect near the scene.”

What this reveals is how the “Occupy Movement” has relied upon the recruitment of thugs to swell its ranks.  This isn’t a movement against the top one-percent in wealth, so much as a movement by the bottom one-percent in moral standing.  The Occupy movement has continued to lose the support of the American people as many more incidents of this sort have dominated the news from the various protest sites.  That fact may help to explain this, in the Reuters article:

“An Occupy Oakland organizer could not be reached for comment on Friday evening.”

The Occupiers have lost all ability to control their would-be movement.  Instead, due to the ugly behavior of its generally thuggish members, Occupy organizers are ducking the press. With a history of burglary, rape, sexual assault, robbery and murder, as well as rioting to their credit, they have finally begun to full reap what they have sewn in terms of public perceptions.  While there are plans for a repeat of Occupy come Summer, and into the Fall, it just may be that their time is up.

Most of the public seems to think so.

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Posted in Anti-Capitalists, Crime, News, Occupiers, Politics | 4 Comments »

What Hillary Revealed About Democrats’ Real Thoughts on Israel

Friday, March 2nd, 2012

Friend of Israel?

When America isn’t watching closely, or the event in question appears well away from the bulk of domestic media, occasionally one of the left’s officials will slip up and show their true face.  If you listen to what Democrats in Congress and in the Obama administration say about Israel, you would think they support Israel, and are fine friends of the Jewish state.  The lavish oaths of friendship upon Israel, and swear they have no bigger supporter than the Democrat Party.  That is, if you can believe them.  Ordinarily, it’s tough to prove, but in this case, one of their own has put her big foot in her mouth, all without the help of her slick former-President husband.  None other than Secretary of State Hillary Rodham-Clinton has made a statement that reveals the truth about her party.  Watch this short video:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4BpYSGfg9oU]

That’s right.  In this video, when asked by somebody in the audience about the state of politics in the US, and how it is that any Muslims from around the world could trust either party, since both seem to support their enemy, Israel, Mrs. Clinton gives a stunningly honest answer.  For those Americans of any persuasion who had thought the Democrats a friend of Israel, I want you to decipher her answer, because it was clearly intended to intimate a dark secret, and that is that what politicians say in public is one thing, but what they believe may be something else entirely.

Surely you understand that this confirms what I have told you about how the radical left has taken over the Democrat party, and how they now practice an institutional antisemitism that blows kisses to Jews in public, while undercutting Israel ferociously in private.  They view Israel as a problem to be dealt with, and if you’re wise, you’ll realize that historically, this is far from the first time the Jews have been regarded as a “problem” to be solved.  Let’s not beat around the bush about it:  The left hates Israel, and it’s partly because they see a potential ally in the Muslim world, and partly because they view Israel as the obstacle to that alliance.

Just as in the Cold War, Teddy Kennedy was willing to participate in secret talks with Soviet leaders in order to undercut President Reagan, the left will makes it friends anywhere they believe will advance their agenda.  Currently, they look to the Islamic world as another source of support, which is why they have linked up with militant Islamists in some cases, in the furtherance of the so-called “Arab Spring,” but also in support of the so-called “Palestineans.”  What Secretary Clinton describes in her too-candid answer is the mechanism of carrying out a ruse. In public, they must continue to support Israel, for now, but in terms of our actual foreign policy, we are currently very much pro-Islam.

The hardcore left has been pushing in this direction for many years, decades in fact, and what you quickly realize is that they have merely transformed their animosity.  These same America-hating leftists have simply identified Israel as a domino that must fall in order to finally vanquish America.  Once they realized this, it was only a matter of time until they began to form strategic alliances with a militant Islam that views Israel as the Lesser Satan and America as the Great one.  I read an interesting posting on Tammy Bruce’s site by a guest contributor named Shifra, self-described as a Jew who discovered the universe of leftists’ rage against Israel.

While I’m not Jewish, it comports well with my own knowledge and observations, but more importantly, it reveals how the American left has slowly adopted positions that are now not only antagonistic toward Israel, but hostile to Jewry in general.  For this reason, the only reason I am surprised about Hillary Clinton’s remark is that she would leave that implication hanging so publicly.  The institutional left, of which Hillary is the queen bee, with her Soros-funded career, and her Soros-funded boss, is armed to the teeth with a rage she dare not exhibit.  She can only make not-so-subtle intimations in public, but what is hidden behind the facial expression is the coldly-calculated leftist who knows what expressions in public are too much, and will hurt the cause.  Hillary walked all over that line here, but you should view it as an opportunity to demonstrate the point.

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Tea Party Vs. Occupy Wall Street

Monday, February 20th, 2012

The Undeniable Truth

It’s impossible to argue with a straight face that there’s any real similarities between the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street, and yet that is the contention of some who allege that both are protest movements aimed at reform.  If that’s the extent of their similarity, those who claim this as the basis for a relationship between the two are stuck in superficial characteristic that permit one to claim that an orange and a basketball are nearly the same.  The Tea Party is predicated on the idea that the best government is that which governs least, while the Occupiers, to the degree you can discern any central agenda, are concerned only with tearing portions of the private sector down.

It doesn’t take a genius to see the dissimilarities far outweigh superficial observations, yet this is the argument you get from leftist shills.  Other superficial differences include that the majority of both groups is Caucasian, and male, but in demographic terms, this is the end of similarities.  The Tea Party folks are somewhat older, and somewhat more settled in life, and have already engaged in productive activities for most of their lives, while it seems Occupiers seem to be those who haven’t quite yet figured out what they want to be when they finish growing up.  If that seems a bit condescending, I will confess that  I’m caught, but only because that is my own observation.

The key distinction between the two groups stems from this:  The Tea Party has a generic ideological and philosophical basis that its numbers understand, whereas the Occupiers seem to have a scatter-shot approach to issues, and if you examine any of them in isolation from the others, there’s no guarantee that you’ll be able to learn anything about the beliefs of the group, except perhaps that they all think they deserve something, somehow provided by others. They want their student loans forgiven, or they want banks closed down, or they want capitalism brought to heel under the boot of statism.  They abhor globalization, but simultaneously say they’re in favor of free trade.  They say they want opportunities, but they have squandered many by their own admissions.

In short, while it’s quite easy to make out what the Tea Party wants, it’s no so easy to understand anything about the Occupiers’ demands, because theirs are a moving target, and they seem to modify them daily.  They have no electoral agenda, except perhaps that they generically favor Obama, but none of them can tell you why with any sort of conviction.  In all, I find it odd that anybody would take serious such a comparison, until you understand how thoroughly the Occupiers failed.  They were ginned up to be the left’s answer to the Tea Party, but as the record shows, their behavior in public and private spaces brought them no shortage of negative coverage.  It’s so bad that they don’t even bother pretending there is a degree of moral superiority as occurred at the outset, but instead seek to improve their position by the comparison, attaching themselves to Tea Party by way of false claims of similar purpose.

Of course, now that they’ve seen how badly they’ve been received by the American people, a number of Occupiers are now, belatedly joining in on the anti-Obama bandwagon.  As Yahoo reported, Obama has brought the two groups together, but only because increasingly, both are now opposing him.  Even in this, however, they’re not really together, as the demands of Occupiers seems to be for the President to move even further left.  Clearly, that’s not a message the Tea Party will endorse.  It’s simply not true to say that the two groups are similar, and even the Yahoo article goes on to admit that this is the case.  Still, it’s interesting to watch the purveyors of leftwing propaganda try to paint the Occupy Wall Street movement as a younger, grungier Tea Party, but until its members learn how to find jobs and pay their own bills, never mind bath, it’s going to remain a hard sell.

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Posted in Activism, Anti-Capitalists, Capitalism, Civil Unrest, Conservatism, Media, News, Occupiers, Occupy Wall Street, Politics, Tea Party | 3 Comments »

How to Stop Barack Obama

Friday, February 17th, 2012

"Resist We Much"

We are under constant attack by Barack Obama’s administration.  He is rapidly converting the United States into a vulnerable, weak nation that cannot defend itself against external threats, but polices its own people with an iron fist.  Evidence of this thesis comes from all quarters, and conservatives are placing all their hopes in the coming presidential election.  The thinking is that if only we can get the right candidate, and if only we can nominate and elect that candidate, once in office, that person will change everything.  Ladies and gentlemen, if you believe it will be so simple, you’re sadly mistaken.  This isn’t going to be easy, and it’s not going to happen without pain, but if you want to defeat Barack Obama, you will need to learn one word, and make it stick for all times, irrespective of the cost.  You must learn to say “no.”

The Obama radicals intend to overturn 230 years of liberty.  They now inspect brown-bag lunches brought to school by small children, making sure the meal complies with the Department of Health and Human Services(or Michelle Obama.)  There is only one way to defeat such a thing, and parents in the country need to find some ‘intestinal fortitude’ and take ownership over the lives of their children, as should have been the case all along.  Say “No.” Don’t send your kids to these schools.  Organize sick-outs.  Organize whatever is needed.  All you need to do to stop this is to refuse to comply with it.  Refuse.

Obamacare can be defeated in exactly the same way.  Refuse.  Refuse to buy insurance.  Refuse to pay their fines.  Refuse. The only word you need is “no,” but saying it, and sticking to it is the harder part of the chore.  Everything the leftists do requires your participation and consent.  Don’t give it.  Don’t participate.  Then their only option is to round you all up, jail you, or kill you if you decline.  Let me ask you bluntly:  Do you favor life as a slave?  That is the only option remaining if you accept their assault on your life.  I’m not suggesting you do this all tomorrow, but you should begin to prepare to do it when the government finally, inevitably arrives at that line in the sand across which you will not step.

It’s time you begin to turn this around on the leftists.  Call them what they are:  Torturers and rapists and murderers.  All they have is naked force, and they’re not as frightened of using it as you are of refusing to comply.  When people of faith are told that they must fund contraception that violates their conscience, it’s time to admit that you have nothing but a shell to lose, but with Obamacare, even that will be theoretical.  Your wallet is not yours. Your home is not yours.  Your life is not yours.  One by one, bit by bit, the radical left is taking over.  They are preparing to sweep away all constitutional constraints upon their actions.  What are you doing to prepare?  How will you resist?  These are questions that you must confront.

Here’s the dirty secret none of them wish you to know, and it’s important to your frame of mind with respect to their attack on your values, your rights, and your lives.  What the left hides from you is that in order for them to have power, you must submit.  This is not the same submission to the laws you know and respect, that merely require you not do a wrong to others.  This is a submission to aggressive laws that demand performance of some sort by you.  This is the secret.  Their attacks on you via the law require you to act.  The laws you honor merely require that you not act in ways that cause harm to others.  You do not steal, nor do you defraud others, and you certainly don’t murder.  Their laws require you to take specific measures, to act on behalf of their policy agendas, either via your wallet, or via your compliance with their demands.

Therefore, this must be your standard in measuring which laws you must continue to obey, and which have only the power over you that you give them.  I am not advocating anarchy, but instead a careful examination of laws on the basis that they either do or do not comply with the context the framers of our constitution laid down as the basis for all our laws.  Again, I am asking you to think this through because the time will come when you will need to know, and you won’t necessarily have time to think it through later, or deliberate it much.  This is your time to prepare, but the preparations mustn’t be nearly those necessary to survive off the grid, but to survive resisting the tyranny that is now unfolding.

Just as in your personal life, where you must draw clear boundaries lest others run over you, in this sense you must also know what it is you will refuse to do when the law makes demands.  A number of Catholics and others of faith are now preparing to make such a stand.  They have decided on drawing a line, and I want to warn you that some will abandon the line they have drawn, but others will refuse to walk back the boundaries they have laid down.  This is the distinction, and it comes down to the principles you hold dear.

The left lives in fear of you discovering your own power.  The left lives in dread of waking up in a world where you have learned to say “no” and mean it.  That’s it.  That’s your power.  It is born of knowing what lines you will not cross no matter their threats and their coercion.  Once you know this, there is nothing they can do to you that you cannot resist.  I do not promise you painless resistance to tyranny, but I am telling you that it can be defeated.  Start small to learn how well it works.  Learn to make a fuss.  Learn to call attention to their aggression.  Learn to scream at the top of your lungs without shame “No means NO!”  Place them in their proper frame, as murders, as rapists, and as thieves.

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Posted in Anti-Capitalists, Barack Obama, Civil Unrest, Emergency Preparedness, Global Revolution, News, Politics | 15 Comments »

Mitt Romney Is Anti-Capitalist

Friday, February 3rd, 2012

Another "Mastermind"

Something is wrong with Mitt Romney, and it’s fundamental to his understanding of capitalism.  Here we have a man who governed what is arguably the most liberal state in the union, and he surely didn’t do so as a conservative, but now he’s demonstrating why liberal Republicans like him cannot win, and it comes down to the simplest of economics.  Thursday, Mitt Romney explained how he would index the minimum wage to automatically keep pace with inflation, proving that he has no Main street experience, but worse, that his alleged business sense is more about making deals than understanding economics.  Mitt Romney is no conservative, and by this pronouncement, we now know that neither is he a capitalist.

While it may appeal to some of the more ignorant in the electorate, and to the leftist intelligentsia, the simple truth is that a conservative who understands capitalism would be talking about eliminating the minimum wage laws.  Proving his expressions of Wednesday were statements of his true beliefs – that he is “not concerned about the very poor” – Romney advocates a system of wage controls that is economically inefficient, and immoral, but most importantly, in the context of his remarks Wednesday, actually disadvantages the poor, condemning them to perpetual poverty. Before you break out the torches and pitchforks to occupy my front porch in anger, let me explain to you the truth of the matter, and why it is that a minimum wage actually punishes the poor, but setting up a system to perpetually raise it guarantees increased unemployment and corresponding poverty.

In a free market unhampered by government mandates, wages are determined by negotiations between employers and employees.  That which sets the price is their mutual agreement to mutual advantage: Each believes he is getting the better of the deal.  In fact, in a free market, this is how all exchange is characterized, and it is the best determining factor available, because everybody walks away happy provided that the conditions on both sides of the deal are satisfied.  This requires no government involvement, and it requires no government coercion.  More, it is morally correct because it permits each party choice.

You might argue that the employer always wins, since he controls the purse strings.  I contend that this is not so, and cannot be, so long as men are free to choose.  If an employer makes unreasonable offers in payment for labor, he will be refused, and refused again, and this acts as the market’s signal to him.  If he does not respond, the labor will go undone, and he will lose the profit he might have made.  Since he is doubtless working for a customer, the impetus will be to complete the job to satisfy the deal he’s made with somebody else, and eventually, he will raise the wage he’s offering to get sufficient labor to fulfill his customer’s demand.

You might say “but he will only raise it enough to get a warm body,” and this could happen, but if it does, it may cost him more in the long run, because the labor will be poorly done, and perhaps have need to be re-done, or it might not be completed on time, or some variation on this general theme.  This too will act as a signal that higher wages are needed, and the under-performing employee will be dismissed and a higher wage paid to his replacement.  Notice that in this whole process, nobody has been coerced.  This is the moral superiority of the free market.

What Mitt Romney and the statist, anti-capitalist phalanx demands is a short-circuiting of this natural process.  What he contends more than anything is that you should not have the right to negotiate your own contracts in labor at a price you are willing to pay, or a wage you are willing to accept.  Imagine Newt Gingrich’s example of the kids who are paid a trivial wage for trivial chores at a school rather than to a full-time janitor at a much-inflated union wage.  That sort of thing mustn’t be ignored, because the janitor who is likely over-paid by the education bureaucracy in many jurisdictions probably produces less actual labor than the aggregate labor of the squad of wage-seeking children would accomplish in the same period.

Once upon a time, in a universe far away, as a young teenager, I got my father to co-sign with me on a contract.  It was my first crack at entrepreneurship, and it was with the local home-owners’ association to mow grass around the facilities made available to the residents by annual subscription fee.  Basketball courts, tennis courts, a baseball diamond, and a swimming pool, along with a fishing pond were all surrounded by acres of grass.  The bids were solicited on a per-cutting basis, with the President of the association to monitor and decide the frequency of the cuttings.  I came in at a bid that was a gold-mine to me, but far below any competitors.

Doing the math on how many hours it took me to complete a cutting, it was clear I was beneath the minimum wage even in that day.  Had they been forced to pay the minimum wage on an hourly basis, I would not have been able to compete, but because it was a per-job basis, I was able to bid what I thought was the minimum I could accept for my time.  I won the bidding, and that year I cut grass as my legs and arms and back muscles grew stronger under the beating sun. Mitt Romney wouldn’t understand this by any measure, but applying the minimum wage to that situation would have driven me out, because if you have to pay a minimum wage, who’s going to hire a fourteen year old rather than an adult?  One of the few virtues I had to offer apart from my eagerness had been that my low price allowed them to take a risk that at a higher price they could not have taken.

Under a minimum wage, the employee isn’t permitted to accept a lower wage so that the employer will take a risk on an inexperience though perhaps eager worker. This is the flip-side of the argument Frederic Bastiat would have called “that which is not seen.”  I don’t believe it is any government’s right to prescribe the upper limit of what I may earn, or the lower limit of what I will accept in payment for my labor.  That’s none of government’s business, and they ought to get out of it.

It has been shown repeatedly that a minimum wage increases unemployment by the process of making it too expensive for employers to try out new employees with little or no experience, or to take them on in a capacity to effectively serve as apprentices or trainees, but this is the leg up millions of Americans had used to obtain skills, prove workplace diligence and reliability, and otherwise promote themselves in an act of economic self-efficacy that fueled the growth of our nation.

These facts are well-known to economists, and well-known to all students of capitalism, and yet somewhere along the way, Mitt Romney has managed never to learn them, and I will tell you that it springs from the same place as his desire to “reform and strengthen the safety net:” A sense of collectivized charity rather than the honest desire to promote dignity of people in lifting themselves out of poverty.  The Club for Growth has taken on Romney’s suggested auto-indexing of the minimum wage on much the same basis.

The idea that Romney claims to be a capitalist has now been proven false. A capitalist would know that the minimum wage does more damage than good, and that the longterm result is inflationary pressure combined with increased unemployment among the young and the disadvantaged. Frankly, Romney should be ashamed of this pandering, but he needn’t fear because so many people suffer in economic ignorance that his tyrannical, big government idea will be seen as “compassionate” as it sentences more people to perpetual reliance upon the safety net he’s much too willing to strengthen.  Romney isn’t a capitalist, or a conservative, and he’s actually no better than Obama, and in some ways worse, because while I expect this sort of thing from a man who is not so ashamed to be tagged as a socialist, it is unforgivable from a man who claims he is not.

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Posted in Anti-Capitalists, Barack Obama, Business, Economics, Election 2012, Mitt Romney, News, Politics, Welfare State | 22 Comments »

New Gingrich Ad Goes Viral

Friday, February 3rd, 2012

Soros-Approved?

This one is pretty rough, and while there is one point about which some will quibble, because the clip depicts Romney during his gubernatorial run, and he has since allegedly changed his position on the issue of abortion, the truth is that the remainder of the ad is extraordinarily effective, even if you discount Romney’s change on the one issue. The rest is damning enough on its own:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wAkKl3Y8xmQ]

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Posted in Anti-Capitalists, Barack Obama, Campaigns, Election 2012, Mitt Romney, News, Politics, video | 5 Comments »

Oakland Occu-Pests Riot (Again)

Sunday, January 29th, 2012

Spoling for a Fight

It’s ridiculous. This is nothing but another sorry attempt to create civil unrest to the degree that the feds will have an excuse to become involved.  This is all being directed from the White House or its surrogates anyway, so there shouldn’t be any surprise. Isn’t Oakland the home turf to one Van Jones?  Yes, I think so, and I believe he was the one who told us that those at the bottom needed to rise up so that those at the top could clamp down, or something to that effect.  In any case, the Occupiers are rioting in Oakland again, and this time there was tear gas and more than othree hundred arrests.  Apparently, the scum burned a flag they stole from City Hall, so automatically, we can identify them as lefties, because only they and the Jihadists really go in for that sort of thing.  If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s an occupier.

This collection of mind-numbed dolts who fancy themselves some sort of latter-day French revolutionaries forgot their guillotine, but more than that, with their improvised shields, I think we should be up-front about their intentions.  You don’t cobble together shields or armor for a peaceful protest march, so let’s just knock off the pretense.  These dim-witted useful idiots still don’t understand that they’re going to be the sacrificial lambs, the patsies, in Obama’s move on freedom.  These morons think there is still something to discuss, but what they don’t understand is that most of the country would love to see them get busted up badly, and at this point, there are those in power who would love a good excuse for a crackdown.  These brainless drones of the left will be the immediate object of that crackdown.

As they spoil for a fight in what is likely to be Obama’s version of the burning of the Reichstag, these tent-dwelling morons are creating a dangerous situation.  I hope the local authorities contend with this before the feds get involved, but as it turns out, the feds may soon have operational control over Oakland PD due to a previous ruling against it.  That will be a recipe for full chaos. Perfect.

Here we go.

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Posted in Anti-Capitalists, Barack Obama, Global Revolution, News, Occupiers, Occupy Wall Street, Politics | 4 Comments »

On Health-Care Rationing

Friday, January 27th, 2012

Including Death Panels

As a fellow who is a student of economics, one  of my pet peeves is the confusion that often arises when economic concepts are misused out of context to justify political ends.  In the discussion and debate leading up to the passage of Obama-care, it was famously noted by Sarah Palin that “death panels” are a feature of that plan.  In short, the death panels would make “ethical decisions” based not on what was ethical with respect to individuals, but with respect to what was ethical in choosing on behalf of society at large, i.e, the government. The supporters of the Obama-care program maintained that “there were already death panels” imposed by insurers, and that in any event, rationing would always take place as a matter of economics.  In this last point, they were correct in the strictest terms, but they were wrong to compare government actions to the actions of individuals and private businesses in the free market.  This is one example of the abuse of economics by politicians, so let us examine it more closely.

In economics, everything is rationed, because it is assumed that there is a basic unlimited demand for all goods and services.  Since there exists no infinite supply of anything, it is necessarily true that all things are rationed in some fashion.  Gasoline is rationed.  It’s happening right this moment.  Food is rationed.  Housing is rationed.  There is no good or service that isn’t rationed, and the primary instrument for determining the allocation of the limited supply in a free market is money.  The smaller the supply of a thing, relative to the quantity demanded by the market, the greater will be the price.  This is the manner in which everything is rationed:  There is a only so much money, and he who possesses enough of it can tap into the limited supply.  This form of rationing is natural, or free market-based, meaning that this happens organically with or without formal rules, and always has, even before the notion of money as a medium of exchange had occurred to primitive cultures and barter systems still dominated commerce and trade.  Strictly speaking, in economic terms, it is true to say that all things are rationed somehow. This is how we reconcile the basic premise underlying modern economics as the study of an unlimited wishes in pursuit of finite supplies.

The question then arises whether natural allocation(or rationing) is “fair.”  Since fairness is a wholly subjective term, it cannot be answered in the realm of economics, but instead becomes a matter of politics.  This is where the trouble begins, because what politicians most frequently do is to apply their own subjective notions of what is fair in place of the much more objective standard of a natural market.   They concoct these notions to satisfy political constituencies, but the twist and turn in order to define the question as a matter of economics.  Inevitably, they do so by reducing the question to the subjective grounds of a particular individual, or group, and ask whether it is “fair” that so-and-so cannot afford such-and-such.  In this sense, the economics they are discussing are applicable to small groups, but not to the whole market.

What government schemers for socialized medicine have done is to insert government coercion into the place of the natural market allocation.  If you say to me, “It is sad that Johnny cannot get his surgery because he has not the money,” if my answer is based on the free market, I must say “it may be sad, but it is fair because he could have obtained the money by previous work, insurance, charity, or even credit.”  The fact that Johnny hadn’t the money for the surgery is not a justification to disclaim the objective fairness of the free market system, but sadly, that is how it is used by politicians.  Enter the statist, and he will proclaim that he can reintroduce “human fairness” or “social justice” or some such enfeebling concept by virtue of government coercion.  If Johnny hasn’t the money, the politician will take it from somebody else at gunpoint to pay for Johnny’s surgery, provided Johnny meets any requirements they may have enacted.

Perhaps the surgery Johnny needs is a kidney transplant, but rather than expend the resources, since Johnny is also a wheelchair-bound, elderly man, the government may say “You’re not worth saving.”  Worse, if the government denies Johnny the ability to obtain his own health-care by his own means outside the government system, what the government is doing is to pronounce a sentence of death on Johnny.  If Johnny happens to be a recent college graduate in his twenties, in otherwise good health, the government will view it as a good investment in many cases since he will pay much more in taxes over his expected lifetime than the surgery may cost.  Notice that the decision criteria is entirely social, and based on the economics of government expenditures, which actually means: Political considerations.  It is also the reason that every system of socialized medicine ultimately leads to many more people dying prematurely as they are denied treatments of which they would have availed themselves in an open market. If this were not true, we would not see so many from around the socialized world flocking here to pay cash for treatments they cannot obtain by any means in their home countries.

You might contend, as the leftists do, that this is done by private insurers routinely.  There is some truth to this, but it is also substantially dishonest.  As a participant in a free market system, you are free to choose an insurer and pay such premiums as you are willing and able, to cover everything to some gargantuan limit, or you may choose a policy less expensive, but also less thorough.  In this manner, the rationing occurs because you have enough money, or you don’t, but that is up to your own resourcefulness and diligence and all the factors that frequently make the difference between relative poverty and relative affluence.  You might decide at this point to take me back to the argument of the “unfairness of money,” but as I’ve already explained, in a free market, fairness is measured differently than in your subjective wishes.

If it was my choice as to which system I would endure, I would prefer to take my chances in the free market system, because I believe I can manage to afford the coverage I might need, but in a government system, no matter how diligent and efficacious had been my own labors, I might be told “sorry, you’re outside the limits established for this procedure,” and be denied treatment irrespective of my ability to pay.  I would always choose this latter option, because it affords me the greater measure of freedom, and if it winds up that I was unable to provide the coverage I actually wound up needing, at least I will have nobody else to blame. That’s where the politicians come in, again.

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Posted in Anti-Capitalists, Business, Capitalism, Economics, News | 5 Comments »

PIPA and SOPA: What’s The Problem?

Tuesday, January 24th, 2012

Intellectual Dishonesty?

I know a fair number of people are upset with the proposed Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Propery Act(PIPA) and Stop Online Piracy Act(SOPA) that have been under consideration in Congress, and I recognize there are reasons to stop this legislation, but I also know that there is good reason to believe that steps must be taken to arrest piracy of intellectual property.  It’s easy to get caught up in the public outcry, but it’s a different matter to admit the scope of the problem.  This has been an issue going back to the file-sharing sites that became popular in the late 1990s.  There can be no right to the intellectual property of others, and we have a generation composed of many young people who think they ought to be able to have whatever they want without paying for it.  It’s a mistake to indulge thieves, and to the degree people of this description are part of the outcry, I reject the idea that nothing should be done.  PIPA and SOPA  are probably not the correct legislative answers, but it remains essential that we enforce the law with respect to intellectual property rights.

Let me state from the outset that as a professional in the field of networks and network management, I am opposed to the idea of any authority being given to government to disrupt domain name resolution.  I don’t think that’s anything more than a band-aid, and I don’t suspect it will be effective once file-sharing services begin to change how they link material.  I don’t think the only effective way to deal with this is to find those whose sites are effectively clearing houses for what are stolen intellectual properties, issue cease and desist orders, and prosecute them under existing law.  We know this can be done already, as has been demonstrated by the case of MegaUpload.  The FBI went after this outfit because they were effectively trafficking in copyrighted materials, to the tune of a one-half billion dollars or more, and making a tidy haul of nearly two-hundred million.

There are those who have come to believe that this is fine, and that because they’ve now been deprived of a source for illegally copied materials, they have every right to whine, but I think the federal government should do something else in such cases: In addition to going after the file-sharing site, they should back-track via the ISPs every person who downloaded materials and prosecute them too.  This entire thing grew out of hand in the late 1990s when kids (and no small number of adults) began downloading illegal copies of music in the popular MP3 format from file-sharing sites all over the Internet, ignoring the entire concept of the property rights of the artists and publishers and all the others who would ordinarily gain their rightful profits from selling their property.  As available bandwidth has soared in many areas(but sadly, not in mine,) the same thing has happened with movies and videos and even operating systems.

I would like to talk about this aspect, because I want to remove any ambiguity from the discussion: What we’re discussing here is theft. We’re talking about aiding and abetting theft. We’re talking about scofflaws involved in the wholesale theft of the ideas, musical works, published and copyrighted material, and all manner of things by people who prefer not to pay for their own entertainment.  The fact that PIPA and SOPA may well go too far in the pursuit of this, or give the government an inappropriately excessive level of control and authority beyond what many think is already too much control is a good reason to write better laws, but this is not an excuse to simply ignore the issue to the extensive detriment of every creator of original materials on the planet, whether individual or corporate.

I realize that we have now a generation that has expectations of instant(and free) gratification of their entertainment desires, but the truth is that they too need to grow up.  There is every reason to believe that an unrestrained traffic in pirated materials will ultimately harm the creation of more, because after all, nobody can be expected to produce for free those things that in former generations you would otherwise have had to purchase.  Property rights is a concept that is the cornerstone of our free market, and while PIPA and SOPA may be the wrong vehicles for addressing this issue, it is nevertheless true that it must be addressed.  Pouting like spoiled brats because we could not get our free downloads of some pirated movies or music merely suggests that the problem lies with us.

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Posted in Anti-Capitalists, Business, Capitalism, Crime, Culture, Law, News, Politics | 5 Comments »

What The Media Talks About When You’re Not Looking

Saturday, January 21st, 2012

Dr. David Samadi - Regulating Life

Just a short while ago, I was retrieving a fresh cup of coffee, and I happened to hear something on the television that caused me to do a double-take.  FoxNews was on and America’s New Headquarters had a contributor on to talk about obesity in America, and the fact that obesity and even the classification “overweight” seem to have plateaued in the country.  The doctor, from Mt. Sinai in New York, a David Samadi, was discussing the implications of the new study showing this plateau.  The thing that caught my attention was not so much the discussion of obesity, but what this idiotic doctor was prescribing:  He wants new taxes, for instance, a “soda tax,” and he wants to reduce the number of fast-food outlets in the country. Excuse me?  Physician, heal thyself! This is the nature of the stories even allegedly “conservative” news outlets like FoxNews cover when most of us aren’t watching, and it almost always leans in the direction of socialism.

Let me say from the outset that like many Americans, I could stand to eat Five Guys burgers somewhat less frequently, but let me also suggest that it is none of this doctor’s business what I eat or drink, where I eat it or drink it, and most of all whether I am taxed for so doing.  Samadi’s view seems to be that he can issue prescriptions for three-hundred-million people, never having examined more than a few hands-full of them.  More, since he has no such authority or power or the ability to control, he exhorts government to do so on behalf of his preferred prescription for people the vast majority of whom he has never met, never mind examined or treated.  What sort of collectivized thinking permits this arrogant [expletive deleted] to sit there in a television studio and proclaim to all that he has the answers for your life, but that he needs government’s power to coerce and to tax in order to implement them?

There is something wicked about the minds of those who view their fellow men as cattle, to be poked and prodded and driven in a direction that they may not themselves wish to go.  It is born of a mindset that does not respect first and foremost the lives and rights of individual people. These people are those who I term “regulators,” who wish to regulate all persons in a given society of which they are members to conform to their view of what is right for all people.  Mayor Bloomberg’s various bans on salt or saturated fats in cooking oils are just two examples, but it is the mindset of a tyrant that is troubling in all of this.  I don’t need Mayor Bloomberg, Michelle Obama, or Dr. Samadi telling me what to eat, when to eat it, or whether I ought to have access to it at all.  It’s simply not their concern.  Or is it?

Now we arrive at the meat of this issue, because there is much more than burgers at stake here.  What is under examination is not whether they have the authority to control us, but how they derive such authority in the first place.  The answer is simple: They rely upon the faulty claims of the notion of “the public health.”  You may have noticed that they always portray this as a “public health crisis,” and as an “epidemic,” but this is a lie, and their authority in the matter only arises because of health-care, and the fact that government is the biggest player in that segment of the market.  They have routinely positioned the matter in such a way that they can make the claim that by virtue of governmental expenditures in this field, it therefore becomes an issue of public imperative.  Worse, by allowing their colossal medical expenditures and controls to grow out of all bounds, you have permitted them to enter this field, and thereby exert control over your breakfast, lunch, dinner, and evening snack besides.  More damaging still is the fact that the government is now the largest food provider on the planet. Again, I remind you: We have permitted this.

Here’s a basic rule of nature, and of civilization that the statists know and are now turning in their favor: If you are the provider of a thing, you can decide when to provide it, how to provide, how much of it to provide, and under what conditions you’ll provide it.  For instance, if I invite you to my home for a meal, since I am providing it, it is my natural right to determine all the particulars.  If you provide me a service without compensation, it is clear that I have no ethical or moral claim with respect to the manner in which you provide it. Only paying customers have any say-so in the matter.  The old adage “beggars can’t be choosers” should immediately leap into one’s mind.  That simple old adage merely paid homage to that which is self-evident, and yet it is this same concept that has been bent and twisted into the service of the state’s aggressive aggregation of power.  The strategy has been to blur the lines. Let’s see if we can reconstruct the approach.

First, we create simultaneously programs to:

  • Provide food to the poor
  • Provide health-care to the poor
  • Provide “health insurance” to the elderly

Do you see how this has mutated?  The idle poor are fed, but they are fed rations excessive for a person at hard labor, and we wonder why there is obesity? We then provide these same people health-care, and we wonder why there is a “public health crisis?”  Add to this that we simultaneous have a system of health “insurance” for our elderly that further obscures the difference between paying and non-paying, and at the other end of the spectrum, we now have federal food programs in schools, as the manner by which federal funds are dispersed and control exercised.

By exercising control over the disbursement of these commodities and services, the government is essentially putting itself in the position of the provider, and therefore has become the “chooser,” with all the beneficiaries effectively having been rendered “beggars.”  Those of us who are paying for this are the real providers, and yet we are now told it is a matter of “human rights” that we do this provisioning. Obamacare is simply the latest in this chain, but it’s hardly the only “improvement” to the system that has been foisted upon us in recent years, with the Bush Medicare Prescription Drugs program added to the mix.

With the government now being the largest payer in the health-care market, you can expect that it will naturally displace market imperatives in the delivery of health-care goods and services, and it will necessarily prioritize that delivery(death panels, for instance,) while reaching into unrelated markets to regulate those things that it will make the case as having some influence over the costs to government.

This then leads to the grotesque spectacle of Dr. Samadi appearing on FoxNews telling us what we can eat, where we can procure it, and what taxes we ought to pay along the way, as the whole miserable assembly comes lurching into plain sight.  You can be told what you can eat because you will [eventually] rely upon government to pay for your health-care.  The market can be told what it may provide, and how, because the government has an interest in reducing its costs.  The tax-payer can be told to shut up about it, since it’s virtually established as some sort of irreducible premise that every person ought to be somehow entitled to that which does not pour from the heavens, but must be obtained by human effort.  As you can therefore see, it is inevitable that government has now used this to become a dictator in every important facet of our lives, and all because somewhere along the march from our founding to present, we permitted them to make our needs the means to its ends.

When you consider that this is the sort of thing that is discussed on allegedly conservative media when most of the country isn’t watching, it ought to alert you to the underlying premises of the discussions in media many more of us witness.  What we should note is that in most every media outlet, there is a sort of inherent reverence for the state, and for the under-girding foundational constructs of collectivism, and we ought to be very careful not to ignore that these media outlets are fundamentally in favor of it, almost all of them, and widely across the board. It’s easy to dismiss this sort of news story as simple time-fillers on a weekend with no ongoing crisis-bound event on which to report, but I think we should be careful to see that is also a sign of what lies behind the blaring headlines, and it is key to understanding why the country continues to be dragged ceaselessly leftward.

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A Few Words About a Word: Greed

Thursday, January 12th, 2012

Caricature or Fact?

I think of all the words in the English language, the one we should live without for a while is the word “greed.” This word has so many vastly different meanings to so many people that it can mean anything and nothing, simultaneously.  It’s become much like the overuse of the term “Nazi” to describe anything and everything with which one might disagree in a moment of heated vehemence, and what it really serves to accomplish is to inject hyperbole and undue emotion into any argument.  Since there is no way to ban the use of a word(at least not in the US, yet,) I decided I might just as well give you my definition, so that on the rare occasion I toss it about, you will understand my usage.   Many consider the brand of “greed” as good as the mark of the beast, and properly defined, it might well be apt to view it in such light, but all too frequently, the word is used to smear something else, and frankly, I’m tired of it.

Greed is most commonly invoked at the thought of lust for money and wealth, but I submit to you that real greed is hardly confined to the gain of material riches.  I also submit to you that it is not merely the desire for riches that constitutes greed, but instead the desire for wealth in material or prestige to which one has no natural entitlement.   If you own a thing, and you came to own it by your own efforts, these are the fruits of your labors, and it was neither greed that gave them to you, nor greed that permits you to hold it.  It is your natural right to  your property that justifies your ownership, and no warrant of greed may be logically attached.

On the other hand, if you gain wealth by fraud or deception, or by theft most commonly of all, this along with your desire to keep it constitute actual greed.  A thief or an embezzler or a cheat is motivated by greed.  A person who demands the labors of others go to support him is motivated by greed.  In a civil society, this sort of greed is generally punished as crime, but no form of greed is greater than a society that collectively employs greed against a minority, however constituted.  Socialism, and indeed any form of statism is the greediest sort of system of all.  The notion that one is entitled to the fruits of a neighbor’s labors is abominable, and that there are laws to enforce it is the stuff of true greed.

Greed is commonly associated with the rich, but I tell you it is the manner in which wealth is gotten that answers the question as to whether there had been greed.  Was there coercion?  Was there monopoly or oligopoly?  Or was there merely the productive efforts of minds equal to the task of satisfying the wants of many people?

All too often, the word “greed” is substituted in place of another concept, precious to capitalism, called “rational self-interest.”  This is the motive power of capitalism, and it’s the reason most of you rise to work each day, toiling to earn your daily bread.  You do not work as a matter of charity to others.  You do not tote that barge or lift that bale in order to fill the bellies of your neighbors’ children, but your own.  The worst and most greedy amongst us are those who find one excuse after the other to lighten the burden of your wallet at the point of a gun in the interests of combating greed, and yet the truth is that none are greedier than these alleged agents of anti-greed.

You might well ask me what I had meant about those who seek an unearned prestige.  I will explain to you that these are the most dangerous of the lot, and none are more greedy than these parasites on human spirit.  These are the grand Utopians who claim not to want any reward for themselves, but instead seek your wealth as a matter of enriching their reputations as the doers of vast public good. If you wish to see a crowd of these in action, you need only tune in to C-SPAN when Congress is in session.  There, you will witness a freak-show of the greediest people on the planet, who hold in their hands the power to strip you of your wealth, all the while claiming the justification of some alleged “public interest.” Worst of all, as has recently come to light in such texts as “Throw Them All Out,” by Peter Schweizer, while they posture as the protectors of the downtrodden, they use the force of their legislation, and their inside knowledge about what it will do to markets in order to make profits they could not have made by any other means.  Who among you believes that most of these people so-engaged could make a fat nickel without the power over your purses and wallets, and the laws that govern your enterprises and corporations besides?

Of course, there are those who seek no immediate financial compensation for such efforts, but instead seek other forms of wealth, in the form of an undeserved prestige.  How many buildings, post offices, and lamp-posts in West Virginia bear the name of Robert Byrd?  He will have been in his grave one-hundred years, and still his name will curse the landscape of that state like a plague.  Sadly, some larger number of the people of that state afford him this prestige, because what he did to gain it was to redistribute money from others to their purposes and support.  Just as you can buy a good deal of welfare or votes, so too can you buy prestige in bulk with other peoples’ money.  The desire for that prestige is an insatiable greed that may stretch to the boundaries of one’s imagination, and more evil has been birthed by those seeking to build monuments to themselves in this fashion than by any pursuit of material wealth.

When people use the term “greed,” I listen carefully for the context, and the reason is simple: All too often, the term “greed” is thrown about with casual indifference to the actual meaning of the word.  When I see a businessman who has made his money by honest pursuit, the fact that he wishes to keep it or earn more does not describe greed, but when I see a petty shop-lifter who stuffs a pack of gum into his pocket at the check-out line, I know I am seeing the material form of greed in progress.   When I see a woman enjoying her retirement by spending some of her life-long savings and investments into something purely for her own pleasure or amusement, I do not see greed.  When I see men demanding a benefit to which they have no natural entitlement, I know I am seeing greed on a vast scale. When I see politicians offering the wealth of some to the pockets of others, in the name of some benevolent purpose he claims will be in the interests of all the people, I look at the ruined lives of the people from whom they will take the necessary cash, and know that I have witnessed a greedy monster.

When you hear the word “greed” you would do well to listen intently to discover the context and meaning of the speaker, so that you can discern his actual intent.  If what is being offered is really nothing more than a thinly veiled attack on property rights, you should run for the hills.  Statists love to use the word greed, because while many people have a sense of the word, few have spent much time considering its meaning.  A statist will argue that if you will not surrender your whole wealth and property and person to the state, it is because you are greedy, and the more wealth you obtain by natural rights, the louder their denouncements of your greed will become. Nobody is greedier than these, and the motive of their attack is to convince you to submit to their claims on your person.  These parasites know the difference between greed and rational self-interest, but they hope you do not.

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The Road to Hell

Thursday, December 15th, 2011

How "Good" Were Their Intentions?

All of my life, I have heard liberals go on about their good intentions despite the facts and laws of nature that confound them, and all along the way, I’ve heard conservatives lament this situation and chastise the liberals with the well-worn retort: “The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.”  I’ve always politely listened to this and nodded in agreement, considering all the ways in which the welfare-state has failed despite the alleged character of the intentions of those who had built it.  More recently I have realized that I had been mistaken about the value of the statement, in part because I now doubt whether the intentions of liberals had been good, but in greater measure because I now know the road to Hell is paved with broken, beaten, bloodied, human corpses, and yet the road to Hell is merely a sample of what statists intend.

There are those who will assail me for attacking the sincerity of the intentions or motives of our statist enemies.  In fact, there are those who would run from the notion of our political opponents as enemies.  “Say ‘Adversaries,’ Mark. ‘Enemies’ is much too inflammatory.”  Damn me to Hell, but I will not conceal it further:  The people against whom we now fight for control of this nation are not adversaries, or opponents, because what they intend is to overturn the system of government we had created in our former wisdom to protect us…against them.  What you have been witnessing is the slow-motion counter-revolution that intends to destroy the liberties our founders had enshrined.  Let’s not pretend any longer that these statists are like the opposing team in a football game, and that win, lose or draw, at the end of the game they’ll shake hands and say “good game” in an act of sportsmanlike conduct.  They will never afford it to you, and you should never afford it to them.

Our Congress voted to control your physical being in 2010, and your president happily signed the bill into law.  With this law, they will now control you, your body, and more of your income, as if the latter matters any longer given the former.  Under Obamacare, you will have become the property of the state inasmuch as they will control the manner in which you seek healthcare, at what price, from whom, and where.  Is this the action of an “adversary” or an “opponent?”  The manner of the implementation means that you won’t know it until after you’ve re-elected him, at least not by virtue of what it will deliver or demand.  Do you think such an implementation was born of good intentions?  If so, good by whose standards?  Yours? Or theirs?

Our so-called ‘opponents’ don’t play by the same rules by which you have been accustomed to playing.  It’s much like the matter of the Geneva conventions, the so-called “rules of war,” to which the United States has customarily and scrupulously remained in observance, but which our ‘adversaries’ frequently ignore.  The rules many of us were taught as soldiers tell us that we must observe these rules, even to our own tactical detriment, even when our enemy commits gross violations of them.  It has cost us dearly, in lives and treasure, and it has done nothing to improve our moral standing in the world, that now regards us as fools and suckers.

In politics, the rules are even more muddled, but once again, we conservatives feel duty-bound to observe the rules irrespective of the crossing of these not-so-bright lines by our so-called adversaries.  Does it ever hurt them?  Do they ever pay a penalty?  Do they ever face some sort of comeuppance?  No.  What does it benefit us to make peaceful overtures to them when we know already that they view us as their enemy?  None other than Chris Matthews told us after Obama spoke at West Point to the cadets that he had “gone to the enemy camp.”  Matthews came out with an apology, but who believes his apology given his record?  Who thinks Chris Matthews doesn’t view West Point cadets as the enemy?

Meanwhile, we are told to understand that so-called “liberals” have the best of intentions even if they’re occasionally misguided.  After all, they only want “what is best for the most people.” Best?  By whose accounting?  Well, theirs, of course.  How many among my admittedly conservative-leaning readership believe that when the left constructs their welfare programs, they have the “best for the most” in mind when they design these programs?  Do you instead believe, as I do, that the left intends to use these programs in order to increase their power and hold over the lives of the people?  Do you believe, as I do, that their first and last motive in every issue is the acquisition, enlargement and maintenance of power over the lives of most people?  If you believe the latter propositions, then how do you propose to argue that their intentions had been good?

Do you instead argue that while their leaders clearly exhibit an ill will toward liberty, that the ran-and-file are merely pawns, or “useful idiots,” who bear no evil intent?  This particular fallacious argument bothers me because it imbues them with an innocence their behaviors simply don’t warrant.  Can you tell me which among these “dupes” or “pawns” or “useful idiots” don’t think they will gain unearned loot or benefit from such a system?  Put another way, how many of these do you suppose go to the polls with any idea except how to carve another slice from your pie?  Are these the good intentions of which you would convince me?

You might ask me about my claim that the road to Hell is paved with human corpses.  After all, you might argue, they haven’t killed anyone yet.  Are you certain?  After all, these are the people who look at the notion of governance and conclude that “if you want to make an omelet…”  Tell that to the 46,000 or more people who have been killed on America’s roadways as a result of their CAFE standards for vehicles.  I suppose it’s far easier to write off those deaths, and the even more numerable serious injuries as long as it hadn’t been you or somebody you loved.

You might want to offer that their various welfare programs haven’t killed anybody, but in this too, I disagree. It kills both those taxed to provide it and those who become addicted to it, though by different means.  Money is a store of value for future expenditure under as-yet unknown conditions.  Each unit of money and value you are able to save is one more moment of life you can enjoy for your own pursuits. It’s one moment fewer that you must take orders from somebody else.  It’s one moment more of sleep, of dreaming, of relaxing, of discovering, or whatever it is you do that makes you happy.  It’s one more nice dinner to take your beloved, or one more family outing to share, but in all ways, money is used to purchase more of what you want to do and less of what you don’t.  In this sense, money really is time, and it’s yours, because you’ve earned it.  Each penny the government strips from your pocket is one more dollar you won’t have in forty years time.

The recipients of your money in all the various forms the welfare state delivers it also pay a penalty, because it permits them to stagnate and become comfortable in conditions you had been wise enough to avoid, or escape.  Their children are not burdens, except to you, and their poor decisions and judgments exact no immediate toll in the form of the natural relation between cause and effect.  In all ways but a few, they are indemnified against their own errors, because you carry the costs.  Still, with all of this, they suffer from obesity and all attending diseases at a higher rate than you.  Despite all you are compelled to provide, it turns out they’re being killed with kindness.  Do you say these are the ends achieved by the alleged good intentions, but despite knowing all of this, the purveyors demand still more?

I contend to you that the statists know all of this, and more, that the results one hundred years of “progressivism” have wrought nothing but misery at all levels.  Educational results are poorer.  Unemployment is higher. Poverty is more widespread.  Corruption is more frequent, and more severe. The measures by which our society has fallen are numerous, and those areas in which we have made actual progress are those less-regulated by government, but they will not remain that way for long as governments at all levels look to exploit the Internet.

You can claim that the road to Hell is paved with good intentions, but I submit to you that the evidence is precisely contrary to that claim:  There are no good intentions on the part of the statists, and what paves the road to Hell is the broken dreams and lives of generations of Americans.  The next time somebody offers you that old phrase, you might tell them otherwise.  Part of our error has been to project our good intentions onto their motives, despite all the evidence in controversy.  They tell us what they want is moral, but according to which moral standard? Whose?  Not ours, surely.  Too many among us have fallen into the belief that all morality equates to our morality, and they happily encourage the same among their flock, but the morality to which they adhere has no common ground with yours, and it’s long past time to realize it.  Good intentions?  By whose standards?

Not mine.

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Reality Check: Horses and Slaughter

Wednesday, November 30th, 2011

It's Time to Face Reality

I’ve had horses for a long time.  I love horses.  It’s fair to say that I know a good deal about them, and have successfully bred and raised them, and also taken mercy on horses by relieving them of undue suffering.  It’s also fair to say that one of the things I have learned in all my time with horses is that some people, most of whom have never owned a horse, have no idea what is entailed in the ownership, maintenance, and medical demands of a horse.  Too many people have a “happy-talk” view of horses that does not match reality.  Too many people believe that they shouldn’t ever be slaughtered, because it’s a fate too cruel to contemplate as some of the same people wolf down hamburgers or buckets of chicken.

The Congress has finally lifted an effective ban enacted five years ago on the slaughter of horses for human consumption here in the US, and the lifting  of this folly in law will finally permit some hope for an industry that has suffered grave harm because some in government have been listening to the well-meaning, but uninformed folks who believe that horses should be exempt from the same fate as other livestock.  Some of you are going to hate me after this post, but so be it.  If you’ve not yet tackled this truth, today is your day.  The truth is that with the glut of unwanted horses now flooding the market, all horses are suffering as a result.  More are being abandoned, and more are slowly starving, because owners have been deprived of one method of disposal because some people don’t like it.

People talk about the cruelty of horse slaughter, as if it is any more cruel for a horse than for a cow, pig, or sheep.  Newsflash:  It’s no different.  If you like bacon dressing your plate of eggs and hash, you’d better grip reality.  Slaughter is what it is.  I make no excuses for it, because it is necessary.  If you’re one of those “vegans” who believe that eating all meat is bad, congratulations on your philosophical consistency, but at the same time, I offer you my condolences since growing children need meat proteins and if you’re not providing them to children in your care because of your beliefs on slaughter or meat, I think you’re a blooming idiot.  The simple fact of the matter is that humans need meat in their diets.  You can murmur and whine all you like, and you can call me names until you’re blue in the face, but our nature is not that of a herbivore. Nature didn’t give you incisors to slice through veggies.  Deal with it.

Now as to the particulars of horses, let’s get something straight:  Long before mankind saddled up on horseback, early man was rubbing his belly after a fine meal of horse meat.  Horse is leaner than beef from cattle, and is every bit as nutritious.  In World War I, when most of the world still fought wars on foot and on horseback, the United States sent more than a million head of horse to Europe to fight the war.  None came home.  Most of the surviving horses went to feed a starving continent in the aftermath of that war, and millions of Frenchmen and Germans, among others, owed their survival to a diet of horse stew.  This was less than one-hundred years ago, meaning there are many still around who remember those days.  Check in with them before condemning horse slaughter.  It wasn’t only the meat that the Europeans used.  As in any such calamitous circumstance, almost every part of the horse was used, including the coats, from which winter clothing was made.  My wife still has a coat passed down to her through generations that finds its origin in that period.  She doesn’t wear it, but it remains as a reminder of her heritage and how her family like so many in Europe were forced to survive.

Having covered the purely practical questions, let’s move on to the economic ones.  Horse slaughter fulfills a vital function in the horse industry:  It puts to good use animals that would otherwise be dumped in landfills or buried in massive pits.  As it stands, we have a surplus of horses since the prohibition on federal funding of inspections of horses slaughtered for human consumption enacted through Congress five years ago.  It has long been true that excess horses found their way to slaughter because only the most useful animals are kept.  There are a few organizations that run horse rescue operations, but the truth is that those subsist almost entirely on charity, and in these hard economic times, they’ve been suffering, and a few have even gotten themselves into trouble, unable to feed or care for the growing number of discarded horses.  Too many people have come to the irrational view of horses as pets, but this is a nonsensical view that cannot be sustained in the real world.  Horses are livestock, and when treated as such in the market, the market handles the problems associated.

In days gone by, but thankfully perhaps now returning, horses past their usefulness went to “the glue factory,” as the euphemism promised.  Only the rare horse, perhaps famous for racing or other equestrian endeavor managed to avoid this fate.  The reason is simple enough to understand, and I know a thing or two about it:  Horses are expensive to maintain, feed, and pasture or stable, and because they are no longer a necessity of our culture, the demand for them comes only from entertainment, sports, and yes, that practice of slaughter for food and other byproducts. As a matter of economics, the lack of slaughter has devalued all  horses, because we now have a glut of unwanted horses too infirm from old injuries and old age to ever be of use other than as pasture ornaments.  Let’s conduct an economic exercise:  When slaughter was legal, we saw prices of nearly $0.60/lb. for horse on the hoof.  This meant that a 1000lb. horse could be expected to bring six-hundred dollars.  While that’s not a great deal of money, if the horse is fit for no other use, that’s the most the horse is worth.  You can attempt to attach non-market emotional value to the horse, but that’s a matter of subjective considerations that has nothing to do with the market.  Now, let’s take that same horse, and rather than slaughter, let’s euthanize the horse.  Depending on the veterinarian, that may cost anywhere from $100 to $300, or more.  Then you must dispose of the carcass.  Yes, horses go somewhere, and most of them end up in a landfill.  You can expect to pay between $200 and $300 for that.  Let’s stay on the cheap side of this argument. Let’s assume you euthanize and dispose of the horse for a grand total of $300.  As compared to taking that same horse to slaughter, you’re out $900.  Math is hard.  Nature is harder.

Let’s imagine that this animal is going to be kept as a pasture ornament.  Let’s just say we’re going to keep the animal around indefinitely.  You will spend an average of $1500 annually on veterinary care, and another $600 on farriers’ services, and you will feed the horse hay and some sort of bulk protein in the form of grain or pelletized feed products.  The average one-thousand pound horse is going to consume $40 in hay and $20 in feed for a week.  Do the math.  You’re going to spend a load of money on a horse that isn’t doing anything else.  It’s not at all difficult to suggest that with the average horse, even bargain-shopping on all the necessities, you’re going to spend $5000 per year to maintain the existence of the animal.   At present, the average healthy young horse does not fetch $1000 at a sale in my home state.  I want you to think about that reality: On average, in my state, if you can give a horse away, you’re doing well.  Texas has some particular problems in its horse market brought about by politicians, but nationwide, the industry has suffered from this horse slaughter ban.  Too many unfit, infirm animals are taking up too many resources, because for the last five years, we have been prevented from slaughtering the excess.  While horses haven’t been going to slaughter, many horse farms have been killed off, because they can no longer sell their product at a profit for all the useless animals stacking up all over the country.

Now, before some PETA-minded “animals have rights too” whack-job starts in on me, no, I have never personally shipped a horse to slaughter.  Every horse we’ve ever had that became seriously injured or sick was euthanized.  Yes, I paid the freight to haul off their carcasses, but understand that in all but one hopeless case, we tried to save the horse first, meaning its meat was unfit for human consumption anyway due to the medications that were used in the animal’s treatment.  With perhaps all but one of them, if I had known that the treatments would have been futile, and that they were going to die irrespective of our veterinary efforts, I would rather they had gone to slaughter than spend untold thousands on treatments that were ultimately followed by euthanasia and disposal.  At least that way, some good would have come of them.

I realize that seems harsh to some people.  Part of this sense is born of the fact that some people mistake livestock for pets.  Pets live indoors. Pets are generally in some manner housebroken.  If you’ve managed that with an equine, you’ve one serious horse-whisperer.  The simple fact is that the bias in favor of horses on the part of some resides purely in their minds, much like any other bias.  I mentioned “all but one of them,” and that was such a case, where my bias in favor of the horse would have caused me to expend a good deal more if the veterinarians had not convinced me it would be fruitless.  It had nothing to do with the horse’s market worth, but his worth to me personally, but the fact that one particular horse was especially valuable to me doesn’t change the fact that horses are livestock.

I also think with the shape of things in our world, the time is quickly coming when we will have no room for purely sentimental legislation that effectively leads to asinine bans on the slaughter of horses for human consumption.  The simple truth that none of the do-gooders ever address is that horses will die. All horses will die.  How they will die comes down in many cases to human choice, but the only end accomplished by slaughter bans is to deny to horse owners a residual, token amount for the tens of thousands of dollars they will have spent over the life of a horse, and to make those owners slaves to animals long beyond their use.  You can call me a mean and ruthless bastard if you like, but the truth of the matter is something else entirely.

I love horses, but  I know that the only way we will preserve them is that if they are maintained as private property.  A thing is defined as property in part by the right of its owner to use and dispose of it.  If the argument of the anti-slaughter advocates is that I should be denied the use and disposal of my property, they are merely communists acting under another claim of “the public interest,” or “the public good.”  If I knew who inserted that provision into the bill that eliminated the ban, I would give them a big sloppy kiss and $100 toward their re-election.  So would most others in the horse husbandry business.   It’s not that any of us in the horse industry seek to slaughter horses, but we know so long as they exist, this will be necessary, if unpleasant.

Follow-up: A Note to Horsemen

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