Friday, November 27, 2009
Viva Political Salsa
Here! I am looking forward to a song about freeing America. We're a long way from being free here. We've backed our butts into slavery big time.
Thursday, November 26, 2009
Global Warming Crooks
This article is written by Ian Plimer, author of Heaven and Earth, a book I've featured in the sidebar of this blog. Written November 25, 2009, I found this at the Pajamas Media website under the title, Climategate: Alarmism Is Underpinned by Fraud (PJM Exclusive)In the geological past, there have been six major ice ages. During five of these six ice ages, the atmospheric carbon dioxide content was higher than at present. It is clear that the colorless, odorless, non-poisonous gas called carbon dioxide did not drive past climates. Carbon dioxide is plant food, not a pollutant.
Humans have adapted to live on ice sheets, deserts, mountains, tropics, and sea level. History shows that humans and other organisms have thrived in warm times and suffered in cold times.
In the 600-year long Roman Warming, it was 4ºC warmer than now. Sea level did not rise and ice sheets did not disappear. The Dark Ages followed, and starvation, disease, and depopulation occurred. The Medieval Warming followed the Dark Ages, and for 400 years it was 5ºC warmer. Sea level did not rise and the ice sheets remained. The Medieval Warming was followed by the Little Ice Age, which finished in 1850. It is absolutely no surprise that temperature increased after a cold period.
Unless I have missed something, I am not aware of heavy industry, coal-fired power stations, or SUVs in the 1,000 years of Roman and Medieval Warmings. These natural warmings are a dreadful nuisance for climate alarmists because they suggest that the warming since 1850 may be natural and may not be related to carbon dioxide emissions.
There was warming from 1860 to 1880, 1910 to 1940, and 1976 to 1998, with intervening periods of cooling. The only time when temperature rise paralleled carbon dioxide emissions was 1976-1998. The other warmings and coolings in the last 150 years were unrelated to carbon dioxide emissions.
Something is seriously wrong. To argue that humans change climate requires abandoning all we know about history, archaeology, geology, astronomy, and solar physics. This is exactly what has been done.
The answer to this enigma was revealed last week. It is fraud.
Files from the UK Climatic Research Unit were hacked. They show that data was massaged, numbers were fudged, diagrams were biased, there was destruction of data after freedom of information requests, and there was refusal to submit taxpayer-funded data for independent examination.
Data were manipulated to show that the Medieval Warming didn’t occur, and that we are not in a period of cooling. Furthermore, the warming of the 20th century was artificially inflated.
This behavior is that of criminals and all the data from the UK Hadley Centre and the US GISS must now be rejected. These crooks perpetrated these crimes at the expense of the British and U.S. taxpayers.
The same crooks control the IPCC and the fraudulent data in IPCC reports. The same crooks meet in Copenhagen next week and want 0.7% of the Western world’s GDP to pass through an unelected UN government, and then on to sticky fingers in the developing world.
You should be angry. Very angry.
Monday, November 23, 2009
The Palin Phenomenon
What are they responding to? "She's real. She's true to who she is. She's not perfect, but my goodness, you get what you see."
And in this Age of Duplicity, that's a godsend. We didn't want the country fundamentally transformed. We wanted it to become closer to the ideal it was designed to be.
Let me state for the record that I like Palin's fire, her spirit and what feels like an All-American reality-based woman. But no matter that she exists, the real battle is more fundamental than supporting Palin, which I plan to do at least for ballast to right a listing ship of state as a result of the dead, toxic hand of the Democrats.
The real issue and battle is about the moral basis required not only for a life graced by happiness but to have political freedom for human beings be a viable, secure reality on earth. We live in a painful time, powerlessly observing the loss of political freedom. We see the government has turned on us and is wholesale violating our individual rights at every turn. A big part of the reason this has been able to happen is because the Republican Party has always supported and drawn on the moral base which has allowed it. I don't see Sarah Palin being able to speak from a moral base any different from the one that is the root of the problem.
The work ahead is not really political. Any political work can only buy time for the real work to happen. The real work is to cause a cultural renaissance which will arise from learning to live on a new moral base. From there the political consequences will naturally follow. This is what my life is dedicated to and I must say that it is one kickass, hell of an adventure.
And in this Age of Duplicity, that's a godsend. We didn't want the country fundamentally transformed. We wanted it to become closer to the ideal it was designed to be.
Let me state for the record that I like Palin's fire, her spirit and what feels like an All-American reality-based woman. But no matter that she exists, the real battle is more fundamental than supporting Palin, which I plan to do at least for ballast to right a listing ship of state as a result of the dead, toxic hand of the Democrats.
The real issue and battle is about the moral basis required not only for a life graced by happiness but to have political freedom for human beings be a viable, secure reality on earth. We live in a painful time, powerlessly observing the loss of political freedom. We see the government has turned on us and is wholesale violating our individual rights at every turn. A big part of the reason this has been able to happen is because the Republican Party has always supported and drawn on the moral base which has allowed it. I don't see Sarah Palin being able to speak from a moral base any different from the one that is the root of the problem.
The work ahead is not really political. Any political work can only buy time for the real work to happen. The real work is to cause a cultural renaissance which will arise from learning to live on a new moral base. From there the political consequences will naturally follow. This is what my life is dedicated to and I must say that it is one kickass, hell of an adventure.
Sunday, November 22, 2009
Friday, November 20, 2009
The Lost People of America
I remember reading Ayn Rand and hearing lots of questions as to whether a person should find a Galt's Gulch or create one to live in. There were a series of questions of this type which are related to this line of inquiry: "Should one accept Social Security or should one go to a government school or accept money from the government in any way?" Later Rand was glad that Alan Greenspan, one of her proteges, had the opportunity to curb inflation and buy time by becoming the head of the Federal Reserve Bank.
She always advocated living in the world and achieving values in the world. And she always advocated living and advocating the values required of a moral man in full possession of his own life force for the purpose of maintaining his life for his own happiness. But, there was a line one must never cross: One must never advocate for the programs that the government offers nor in any way become captured by them or the government to the point where he advocates, actively or passively, the collective at the expense of the individual. That was the sealing of one's fate, the collapse of one's moral fire. At that point one loses himself and his right to exist as an individual human life. He becomes a vegetable in spirit - living, but not alive.
In the case of Alan Greenspan, we see that he did cross that line.
One of the shocking and disheartening results of this past horrendous year is to realize that many of those close to you or that you have known have crossed that line. They have submerged themselves into the great collective, the home of non-existence of the individual. The grand irony is that they expect you to take them, an individual, seriously and listen to them as if their individual opinion should count when they have given up that ground. If we are all to be folded into the collective, the reason for that is to erase individuality. If you notice, at bottom, that is the sum total of the thing that all of the people who advocate this socialization want to get rid of.
image by ukyo_freak
These traits and effects come with the territory of individual and individualism.
Happiness: There is no collective happiness. Happiness as a concept will have to go out of existence. This is too bad because for some of you, it will pass from the cultural conversation before you discovered what it was and that it was actually a wondrous possibility.
Pursuing one's dreams: There are no collective dreams/ambitions. Those are individual.
Merit: Bad. After all, everyone in the collective must have self-esteem as a right and it is not something one earns.
Motivation: There is no collective motivation. There is only the sum of individuals' motivations. The collective has to get rid of motivation and replace it with fear - the fear of not looking good which amounts to always looking like one is part of, at least in some way, the group.
Prosperity: There is no collective prosperity. You may be prosperous and your neighbor may not be prosperous. It depends on what you do and how you do it. The collective is always trying to stamp that out and redistribute the wealth so that those difference don't invite envy and hatred.
Differences: Differences always imply individuals and in the collective, those are bad. In the collective there is always pressure to belong and not stand out. One cannot excel or achieve lest someone else may want to do that and therefore threaten the cohesion of the collective.
Love: Love is always individual. Not important in the collective. Love gets replaced with duty. "Of course we love our country. We must."
Attraction: Attraction is always individual. Again, not important unless it is attraction to an abstract idea like the State or the greater good or feminism or diversity or anything group oriented.
Values: Values are the possession and the motivation of the individual. No good. Only the group's so-called values are the ones you can espouse - whether you give a damn about them or not.
Trade: This form of peaceful activity is something that comes when individuals are ends in themselves. That's no longer true under collectivism. Everyone is a means for the collective's ends. Peace has no meaning under collectivism which depends on the dynamics of drama and turmoil to generate sufficient fear to drive people wherever the leaders want them to be.
Capitalism: This is what freedom for the individual is insofar as a political/economic system is concerned. It is based on individual rights. This definitely is out, replaced by socialism, which operates by pro-collective, anti-individual rules which means by regulations, taxes, permissions of a zillion kinds and is the diametric opposite of freedom.
All of those kinds of things are what must be forever denigrated and diminished, sometimes even stamped out by force, if a society of people as a collective is to be maintained. In the collective there is a constant drumbeat against these values and attributes which arise only in the evil-by-nature individuals. Hmmmm, sounds like the biblical "original sin" idea.
A few days ago I highlighted one drum banger: US Representative John Lewis. Entitlement is the watchword of the collectivist. If you buy that, then you have submerged yourself into the collective - or as Neal Boortz calls it, "the great unwashed."
I see John Lewis as a profoundly evil man. He calls for every individual to become a dependent. "He is entitled to healthcare," he says. "It is his by right." Of course, now it is healthcare, but in principle, he is saying that every man is entitled to all that others produce. He is trying to drive the future slaves into the pen under the guise of it being morally justified for him to eat the flesh of his neighbor.
This is always the way. No one looks at the other side of the hand - the side that has to provide the benefits that the government and politicians plan to disburse or the diminished lives of those trapped by the dependency. The other side is the dark and ugly slave side of the hand.
Somebody has to go "pick that cotton and tote that bale" and guess what? It is going to be YOU. And it is not going to be you because of what YOU want. It is going to be YOU because of what THEY want. You might get a few scraps from the table, but that is just to keep you unable to rise up and speak. Whatever you would say has to look dumb and really beside the point. They keep a close eye on how much of what they disburse it takes to maintain this oppression.
History has taught us everything we need to know about how this works. The great result of the The Great Society was entrapment of those who became dependent on it. Generally, it literally ruined their lives. Once sucked in, they were stuck in the goo and their lives became about manipulating the goo. "You mean I can get more money if I don't have a husband? Jettison his ass. You mean I can get more money if I have more children? Let me get some more of them then."
This is the basic principle of socialism: "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need." Having viable needs becomes the name of the game.
It was never intended to work. It cannot work. It is against the laws of nature, specifically man's nature. And so, there has never been a more evil system devised to enslave men than socialism. And right now if you are a liberal, you are a backer and a believer in the principle that generates this horror.
This is the drumbeat that is being sounded by President Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Jesse Jackson (notice how he uses race, another collective, to drive men into the pen), Al Sharpton and many, many more.
But the sharpest pain of this whole great division of mankind which is going on right now is when you see the people you love urging you and all those around you to go on into the pen. You see them submerging themselves into the great unwashed, losing their identify and their value except as another body that can work for the collective. "It's what you deserve," the lost people of America say. How can something be any sadder than that?
How have we come to this horrendous state of affairs in the lives of men? Why is it that the descendants of slaves are now advocating slavery? What is going on? Why is slavery suddenly, in 2009, looking to some like a good thing?
Slavery is the good? I never thought I would see the day. Talk about a disconnect. This is the greatest disconnect of human history. How can it happen that a country of free men, the richest country to have ever existed and able to provide a higher standard of living for all its people including its poor, suddenly throws itself back in time and into an abyss where there is no freedom? How is it possible that suddenly freedom looks like slavery and slavery looks like freedom? What is the cause of this greatest of all flip-flops?
Until this question gets answered, a Glenn Beck on every street corner will not be able to save us. It's as though we are zombies unable to respond and must go on into the pen. Why? How did we become so frozen, so deadened? How is it possible that the siren's call into the slave pen actually holds some allure?
This question shall be taken up in a future post.
image by Cotter158
She always advocated living in the world and achieving values in the world. And she always advocated living and advocating the values required of a moral man in full possession of his own life force for the purpose of maintaining his life for his own happiness. But, there was a line one must never cross: One must never advocate for the programs that the government offers nor in any way become captured by them or the government to the point where he advocates, actively or passively, the collective at the expense of the individual. That was the sealing of one's fate, the collapse of one's moral fire. At that point one loses himself and his right to exist as an individual human life. He becomes a vegetable in spirit - living, but not alive.
In the case of Alan Greenspan, we see that he did cross that line.
One of the shocking and disheartening results of this past horrendous year is to realize that many of those close to you or that you have known have crossed that line. They have submerged themselves into the great collective, the home of non-existence of the individual. The grand irony is that they expect you to take them, an individual, seriously and listen to them as if their individual opinion should count when they have given up that ground. If we are all to be folded into the collective, the reason for that is to erase individuality. If you notice, at bottom, that is the sum total of the thing that all of the people who advocate this socialization want to get rid of.
image by ukyo_freakThese traits and effects come with the territory of individual and individualism.
Happiness: There is no collective happiness. Happiness as a concept will have to go out of existence. This is too bad because for some of you, it will pass from the cultural conversation before you discovered what it was and that it was actually a wondrous possibility.
Pursuing one's dreams: There are no collective dreams/ambitions. Those are individual.
Merit: Bad. After all, everyone in the collective must have self-esteem as a right and it is not something one earns.
Motivation: There is no collective motivation. There is only the sum of individuals' motivations. The collective has to get rid of motivation and replace it with fear - the fear of not looking good which amounts to always looking like one is part of, at least in some way, the group.
Prosperity: There is no collective prosperity. You may be prosperous and your neighbor may not be prosperous. It depends on what you do and how you do it. The collective is always trying to stamp that out and redistribute the wealth so that those difference don't invite envy and hatred.
Differences: Differences always imply individuals and in the collective, those are bad. In the collective there is always pressure to belong and not stand out. One cannot excel or achieve lest someone else may want to do that and therefore threaten the cohesion of the collective.
Love: Love is always individual. Not important in the collective. Love gets replaced with duty. "Of course we love our country. We must."
Attraction: Attraction is always individual. Again, not important unless it is attraction to an abstract idea like the State or the greater good or feminism or diversity or anything group oriented.
Values: Values are the possession and the motivation of the individual. No good. Only the group's so-called values are the ones you can espouse - whether you give a damn about them or not.
Trade: This form of peaceful activity is something that comes when individuals are ends in themselves. That's no longer true under collectivism. Everyone is a means for the collective's ends. Peace has no meaning under collectivism which depends on the dynamics of drama and turmoil to generate sufficient fear to drive people wherever the leaders want them to be.
Capitalism: This is what freedom for the individual is insofar as a political/economic system is concerned. It is based on individual rights. This definitely is out, replaced by socialism, which operates by pro-collective, anti-individual rules which means by regulations, taxes, permissions of a zillion kinds and is the diametric opposite of freedom.
All of those kinds of things are what must be forever denigrated and diminished, sometimes even stamped out by force, if a society of people as a collective is to be maintained. In the collective there is a constant drumbeat against these values and attributes which arise only in the evil-by-nature individuals. Hmmmm, sounds like the biblical "original sin" idea.
A few days ago I highlighted one drum banger: US Representative John Lewis. Entitlement is the watchword of the collectivist. If you buy that, then you have submerged yourself into the collective - or as Neal Boortz calls it, "the great unwashed."
I see John Lewis as a profoundly evil man. He calls for every individual to become a dependent. "He is entitled to healthcare," he says. "It is his by right." Of course, now it is healthcare, but in principle, he is saying that every man is entitled to all that others produce. He is trying to drive the future slaves into the pen under the guise of it being morally justified for him to eat the flesh of his neighbor.
This is always the way. No one looks at the other side of the hand - the side that has to provide the benefits that the government and politicians plan to disburse or the diminished lives of those trapped by the dependency. The other side is the dark and ugly slave side of the hand.
Somebody has to go "pick that cotton and tote that bale" and guess what? It is going to be YOU. And it is not going to be you because of what YOU want. It is going to be YOU because of what THEY want. You might get a few scraps from the table, but that is just to keep you unable to rise up and speak. Whatever you would say has to look dumb and really beside the point. They keep a close eye on how much of what they disburse it takes to maintain this oppression.
History has taught us everything we need to know about how this works. The great result of the The Great Society was entrapment of those who became dependent on it. Generally, it literally ruined their lives. Once sucked in, they were stuck in the goo and their lives became about manipulating the goo. "You mean I can get more money if I don't have a husband? Jettison his ass. You mean I can get more money if I have more children? Let me get some more of them then."
This is the basic principle of socialism: "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need." Having viable needs becomes the name of the game.
It was never intended to work. It cannot work. It is against the laws of nature, specifically man's nature. And so, there has never been a more evil system devised to enslave men than socialism. And right now if you are a liberal, you are a backer and a believer in the principle that generates this horror.
This is the drumbeat that is being sounded by President Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Jesse Jackson (notice how he uses race, another collective, to drive men into the pen), Al Sharpton and many, many more.
But the sharpest pain of this whole great division of mankind which is going on right now is when you see the people you love urging you and all those around you to go on into the pen. You see them submerging themselves into the great unwashed, losing their identify and their value except as another body that can work for the collective. "It's what you deserve," the lost people of America say. How can something be any sadder than that?
How have we come to this horrendous state of affairs in the lives of men? Why is it that the descendants of slaves are now advocating slavery? What is going on? Why is slavery suddenly, in 2009, looking to some like a good thing?
Slavery is the good? I never thought I would see the day. Talk about a disconnect. This is the greatest disconnect of human history. How can it happen that a country of free men, the richest country to have ever existed and able to provide a higher standard of living for all its people including its poor, suddenly throws itself back in time and into an abyss where there is no freedom? How is it possible that suddenly freedom looks like slavery and slavery looks like freedom? What is the cause of this greatest of all flip-flops?
Until this question gets answered, a Glenn Beck on every street corner will not be able to save us. It's as though we are zombies unable to respond and must go on into the pen. Why? How did we become so frozen, so deadened? How is it possible that the siren's call into the slave pen actually holds some allure?
This question shall be taken up in a future post.
image by Cotter158
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
What is War?
With the al-Qaeda trials moved to New York City and the United States not dealing with these killers as a military matter, we find ourselves carrying out a purpose that is based in denial: denial of the nature of human being. A lot of questions are raised which you can read about here. Is this the ultimate exposure of the anti-life nature of the Obama presidency? It may be.
What happens to a human being that causes him to go to war against another human being? What is the change that occurs in his mind? Although we think of war as a social phenomenon, at root it isn't. We as individuals are at war with people and ideas all the time. It is part of living.
War occurs when a person comes to see another person not as 'human' in the sense that he has values, desires, feelings, defeats and triumphs and walks around in the neighborhood where you live. Rather he is seen as the embodiment of a purpose that is destructive of one's own life and the lives of those one loves. In other words, this other person or group's existence, as he/they are living it is a threat to one's life.
Since a man must possess at least some remnant of a purpose in order to have an 'alive' life - i.e., anything than other as a dependent on life-support provided by someone else - the issue is that he should not have a purpose but that it should be such that it is aligned with life and not objectively threatening to others' lives. (By being objectively threatening, I mean that an action is physically damaging or threatens to damage a human life. We are not talking "words, just words" here. We are talking about actions which deprive one of the freedom to live - things which physically take or damage a life or that life's property, the material things in the world that possesses and uses to live.)
War is the recognition that one sees a person's or group of persons' purpose, and his/their actions as evidence of such a purpose, as life-threatening and as a consequence needs to take action to stop those actions. It requires a declaration that one has placed them into that status in relation to himself. (If one does not declare the state change of the other person, group or country, then to fight them is to engage in the behavior of the terrorist -a person at war without a declaration of war. I do think it is possible to do this so long as one is conscious of the state change in his own mind. And, in fact in a state of war, it may be valuable to operate underground. But I believe these are strategic questions.) Once war has been declared, the rules for dealing with that person are completely different, night and day different. Reason and persuasion are no longer the tools one can use. One must use force to stop the initiated or potential initiated force.
The focus no longer becomes acting in a way that works for getting along with other people. In war, the focus becomes about acting in a way that destroys the other person or group's ability to carry out its anti-life, specifically anti-my-life, purpose.
It is said that war dehumanizes people. That depends. It depends on where one is standing. If one approaches war as an action treating people not as the embodiment of a purpose but as ordinary human beings living in some non-threatening way, then yes, it would be senseless and dehumanizing. If one approaches war for what it is - fighting an enemy's ability to carry out its life-destroying activities, then it is not dehumanizing. Rather it is life-enhancing and life-ennobling. It is the ultimate stand for life - putting one's own life on the line in favor of life.
People who are pacifists and display signs "War is not the Answer" in their front yards, without specifying the question, are people who act against the nature of human life itself. They pave the streets with gold for the arrival of the evil person by removing their resistance to him. It's my experience that the only thing they really get mad about is if you challenge their view regarding peace. "War is not always bad" is usually sufficient.
I notice Obama speaks like ministers speak. Ministers do not understand the distinction of war and the valid, life-enhancing purpose of war. They seem to always be trying to get people to deal with each other as regular folks in a socially and ideologically non-challenging world, whether that is appropriate or not. They try to make us feel guilty because there is no peace all the while unable to grasp the validity of war. Thus they are forever unable to be a cause for peace.
The thing they all deny is greatness. They treat life as a "boy next door" phenomenon. Humility, turning the other cheek, always being nice, engaging in socially non-challenging activities like gardening, dusting and discussing arcane philosophical ideas.
Greatness in the full sense of the word is a function of purpose. Because a minister likely does not understand purpose (And without reading the Purpose-driven Life, I suspect he doesn't understand it either.) and its requirements, he more often than not undermines the concept of purpose and thus undermines robust, healthy human life. Rather than talk people out of having a purpose and creating a guilt-trip every time they exhibit one, a minister and a lot of other people in the humanities need to get a grip on human nature. A man cannot reach his full potential as a man without a purpose. And yes, he is capable of choosing an anti-life purpose.
It's ironic that Obama who denies man his nature so morally justifies himself in the name of human life. (This contradiction is another topic entirely.) America, at least in its remnant, is a nation of people with strong and powerful purposes. We have been reared in the bosom of freedom where it is up to every man to forge his purpose and go forth in the world. Thus every time Obama says anything, he goes against the grain of who we are. I hear fingernails dragged across my black board.
Obama and his band of anti-life men attract all those who think that being in favor of life is to be nice, not say anything that is not PC, stand up for the little guy and the traditional victims, and strive to fit in rather than have a purpose which some people may oppose. It is because one buys that view of life at some level rather than the true, life-rousing one of purpose that they gravitate toward Obama. He, after all, is going to provide everything that a man without purpose, a man who has given up on the cardinal characteristic of life, self-generation, needs in order to be on life-support. He (and the likes of John Lewis) urges them to become dependent. To be such is a right one is entitled to, they say.
Obama hopes that his band of resuscitated bodies will have just enough energy to vote.
(PS: I am watching the public reaction and the way of reacting to the rise of Sarah Palin. It's my hypothesis that a person's response to Obama and to Palin are polar opposites and that they key on one's sense of life. Is one a prime mover in his life or not. Depending on one's deepest conviction, he will respond to either Palin or Obama, but not both.
These two are opposites: Palin is a woman of the frontier embodied with the spirit of one who isn't waiting for someone else to do the job. If the government is corrupt, clean it up. If we need energy, "drill, baby, drill." If someone besides who you say gets to decide whether you get medical treatment, they are your "death panel." If someone is a part of the al Qaeda gang who plotted 9/11, "hang 'em high." She has shot the moose and dressed him for dinner. She has fished the waters for winter's bounty at the table. She knows who she is. Her political power comes not from the power gods, but from the people's recognition, from that bubbling spring within of which they cannot speak, of who she is. Thus she is powerful.
Obama on the other hand is a man who has been pissed off and slighted from birth. He wears those slights as badges of honor. Every one is a sore which he picks and uses to gets someone to do what he wants. He had "smarts" and people saw this so they supported him, groomed him and lifted him up as their offering to the gods of political power. The power gods liked their offering and so they granted them power. But being a product of those who did his work for him, he is unable to lead. He cannot take a position, he cannot vote, he cannot fashion a rule which keep people from fighting. The gods of power speak too loudly into his ear and he knows that they can remove him from power whenever it looks good to do so. Thus he is powerless.
What happens to a human being that causes him to go to war against another human being? What is the change that occurs in his mind? Although we think of war as a social phenomenon, at root it isn't. We as individuals are at war with people and ideas all the time. It is part of living.
War occurs when a person comes to see another person not as 'human' in the sense that he has values, desires, feelings, defeats and triumphs and walks around in the neighborhood where you live. Rather he is seen as the embodiment of a purpose that is destructive of one's own life and the lives of those one loves. In other words, this other person or group's existence, as he/they are living it is a threat to one's life.
Since a man must possess at least some remnant of a purpose in order to have an 'alive' life - i.e., anything than other as a dependent on life-support provided by someone else - the issue is that he should not have a purpose but that it should be such that it is aligned with life and not objectively threatening to others' lives. (By being objectively threatening, I mean that an action is physically damaging or threatens to damage a human life. We are not talking "words, just words" here. We are talking about actions which deprive one of the freedom to live - things which physically take or damage a life or that life's property, the material things in the world that possesses and uses to live.)
War is the recognition that one sees a person's or group of persons' purpose, and his/their actions as evidence of such a purpose, as life-threatening and as a consequence needs to take action to stop those actions. It requires a declaration that one has placed them into that status in relation to himself. (If one does not declare the state change of the other person, group or country, then to fight them is to engage in the behavior of the terrorist -a person at war without a declaration of war. I do think it is possible to do this so long as one is conscious of the state change in his own mind. And, in fact in a state of war, it may be valuable to operate underground. But I believe these are strategic questions.) Once war has been declared, the rules for dealing with that person are completely different, night and day different. Reason and persuasion are no longer the tools one can use. One must use force to stop the initiated or potential initiated force.
The focus no longer becomes acting in a way that works for getting along with other people. In war, the focus becomes about acting in a way that destroys the other person or group's ability to carry out its anti-life, specifically anti-my-life, purpose.
It is said that war dehumanizes people. That depends. It depends on where one is standing. If one approaches war as an action treating people not as the embodiment of a purpose but as ordinary human beings living in some non-threatening way, then yes, it would be senseless and dehumanizing. If one approaches war for what it is - fighting an enemy's ability to carry out its life-destroying activities, then it is not dehumanizing. Rather it is life-enhancing and life-ennobling. It is the ultimate stand for life - putting one's own life on the line in favor of life.
People who are pacifists and display signs "War is not the Answer" in their front yards, without specifying the question, are people who act against the nature of human life itself. They pave the streets with gold for the arrival of the evil person by removing their resistance to him. It's my experience that the only thing they really get mad about is if you challenge their view regarding peace. "War is not always bad" is usually sufficient.
I notice Obama speaks like ministers speak. Ministers do not understand the distinction of war and the valid, life-enhancing purpose of war. They seem to always be trying to get people to deal with each other as regular folks in a socially and ideologically non-challenging world, whether that is appropriate or not. They try to make us feel guilty because there is no peace all the while unable to grasp the validity of war. Thus they are forever unable to be a cause for peace.
The thing they all deny is greatness. They treat life as a "boy next door" phenomenon. Humility, turning the other cheek, always being nice, engaging in socially non-challenging activities like gardening, dusting and discussing arcane philosophical ideas.
Greatness in the full sense of the word is a function of purpose. Because a minister likely does not understand purpose (And without reading the Purpose-driven Life, I suspect he doesn't understand it either.) and its requirements, he more often than not undermines the concept of purpose and thus undermines robust, healthy human life. Rather than talk people out of having a purpose and creating a guilt-trip every time they exhibit one, a minister and a lot of other people in the humanities need to get a grip on human nature. A man cannot reach his full potential as a man without a purpose. And yes, he is capable of choosing an anti-life purpose.
It's ironic that Obama who denies man his nature so morally justifies himself in the name of human life. (This contradiction is another topic entirely.) America, at least in its remnant, is a nation of people with strong and powerful purposes. We have been reared in the bosom of freedom where it is up to every man to forge his purpose and go forth in the world. Thus every time Obama says anything, he goes against the grain of who we are. I hear fingernails dragged across my black board.
Obama and his band of anti-life men attract all those who think that being in favor of life is to be nice, not say anything that is not PC, stand up for the little guy and the traditional victims, and strive to fit in rather than have a purpose which some people may oppose. It is because one buys that view of life at some level rather than the true, life-rousing one of purpose that they gravitate toward Obama. He, after all, is going to provide everything that a man without purpose, a man who has given up on the cardinal characteristic of life, self-generation, needs in order to be on life-support. He (and the likes of John Lewis) urges them to become dependent. To be such is a right one is entitled to, they say.
Obama hopes that his band of resuscitated bodies will have just enough energy to vote.
(PS: I am watching the public reaction and the way of reacting to the rise of Sarah Palin. It's my hypothesis that a person's response to Obama and to Palin are polar opposites and that they key on one's sense of life. Is one a prime mover in his life or not. Depending on one's deepest conviction, he will respond to either Palin or Obama, but not both.
These two are opposites: Palin is a woman of the frontier embodied with the spirit of one who isn't waiting for someone else to do the job. If the government is corrupt, clean it up. If we need energy, "drill, baby, drill." If someone besides who you say gets to decide whether you get medical treatment, they are your "death panel." If someone is a part of the al Qaeda gang who plotted 9/11, "hang 'em high." She has shot the moose and dressed him for dinner. She has fished the waters for winter's bounty at the table. She knows who she is. Her political power comes not from the power gods, but from the people's recognition, from that bubbling spring within of which they cannot speak, of who she is. Thus she is powerful.
Obama on the other hand is a man who has been pissed off and slighted from birth. He wears those slights as badges of honor. Every one is a sore which he picks and uses to gets someone to do what he wants. He had "smarts" and people saw this so they supported him, groomed him and lifted him up as their offering to the gods of political power. The power gods liked their offering and so they granted them power. But being a product of those who did his work for him, he is unable to lead. He cannot take a position, he cannot vote, he cannot fashion a rule which keep people from fighting. The gods of power speak too loudly into his ear and he knows that they can remove him from power whenever it looks good to do so. Thus he is powerless.
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
Speaking into the Listening? Hell No!
When China's concern is the stability of the dollar so they get their money back, Obama has no idea what their concerns are. They had to ask. Here.
To get questioned about our domestic issues on the world stage is an embarrassment which Obama and the Democrats have caused. Rather like your neighbor asking you in public if you can afford something you are about to buy.
Obama then talks about how no nation should dominate another, delivering his view of a fantasy world. The thing he leaves out is that free trade does not operate on the principle of force and domination. If a company, a corporation or a country is dominant in the field, it is because they earned that position. Obama seems completely unaware that voluntary interactions and agreements can occur among men and that they are the basis for civilization. For him there is only force and that's why he is compelled to tell people they shouldn't do that.
Given his point of view I'm expecting the bows to get lower and lower until he finally just prostrates himself flat on the floor before any man who will give him an audience.
The man offends my sensibilities.
To get questioned about our domestic issues on the world stage is an embarrassment which Obama and the Democrats have caused. Rather like your neighbor asking you in public if you can afford something you are about to buy.
Obama then talks about how no nation should dominate another, delivering his view of a fantasy world. The thing he leaves out is that free trade does not operate on the principle of force and domination. If a company, a corporation or a country is dominant in the field, it is because they earned that position. Obama seems completely unaware that voluntary interactions and agreements can occur among men and that they are the basis for civilization. For him there is only force and that's why he is compelled to tell people they shouldn't do that.
Given his point of view I'm expecting the bows to get lower and lower until he finally just prostrates himself flat on the floor before any man who will give him an audience.
The man offends my sensibilities.
Saturday, November 14, 2009
The Necessity of Wandering in a Desert for 40 Days and Nights in an Age of Abundance.
America seems to be in a phase of self-hatred. It has been going on for 40 years, starting small and growing into the current crescendo. Out of the 60s came people who thought America was a bad place - all dominating and treating people badly around the world. These stories have advanced to absurd proportions and at last, we have elected a president who is an expression of what I call, the American Distortion. President Obama holds up as the ideal before the United Nations "No nation should dominate another." (Since domination appears to occur quite naturally among all life, there's nothing like trying to create an anti-life vacuum. This is soooo Obama.) He then apologizes for America's dominance. He doesn't see much of anything that has been accomplished by America as a great thing. He, as I have said before, prefers sores to pick which naturally blinds him to accomplishments. So far as I can tell, he considers everything that America has produced a product of an evil system which causes evil men. He then feels perfectly justified taking property from one and giving to another, rearranging businesses to his liking and all of the kinds of actions that despots and tyrants throughout history have taken. (Hmm. Did he include himself as a product of America?)
Given that abundance has been all about us, why suddenly have people taken to making it wrong? If you notice, President Obama has done nothing to stimulate the economy. He's said he wants to use money to do that but then he passes it out to his cronies to insure his reelection. Almost no jobs have been created so he has taken to emphasizing that some have been 'saved', although no one knows how to measure that. Clearly President Obama and his Administration have a completely different view of man and what is appropriate for a man's life than I do.
To me this left turn into the desert is uncalled for and even mean spirited, but what if there is something underneath it that needs to be recognized. What if there is a lesson to be learned here.
There are two kinds of men - the one who knows who he is and knows where he is going, and the one who is lost and doesn't know where he is going. It is a much noticed phenomenon that rich kids are often lost. They have had everything and so they never had to figure out what is important. In relation to purposeful human beings, they appear as robust weeds in an otherwise naturally ordered garden.
But now we have a different phenomenon. Man has risen to the level of material abundance such that we have a society of rich kids. Thus we are seeing all kinds of thing that we have never seen before. We see kids who lose their lives to a computer game, never knowing what it is like to live in a real world rather than a virtual one. We see ordinary people weighing 300 pounds. With food so plentiful, they cannot resist the pleasures of food. They have not figured out how to reshape their values such that they use their resources for other things that will yield new pleasures and rewards.
So, how does one figure out what is important and make something of his life? Given that by and large human kind has handled the matter of his physical existence and we depended on going after those values to keep us true to what life requires, we are realizing that if that matter is largely handled we no longer have that truing-up mechanism to keep us present to what life requires. What we took for granted before can no longer be taken for granted. We are realizing that there is something deeper that we have to take care of. We cannot merely keep ourselves alive; we have to keep ourselves vital.
Or said another way, given that we have handled the material side of life, how do we reform the spiritual side of life given that vitality is a function of one's spiritual notions?
Clearly this problem can be handled two ways. One is to not see it as a problem and every time things get too good, arbitrarily create a situation such that one strips himself back to basics so he learns those lessons and knows who he is. In the vernacular of my upbringing, "Whenever a man get too cocky, he needs to be brought down off his high horse." The other is to embrace the progress and see this as a problem which progress itself brings.
Rather than all the preachers getting up on Sunday and telling people how evil they've been to have allowed themselves to be seduced by abundance and therefore gotten soft and lazy, what if they congratulated their congregations on their great achievement and then began the process of discovering the nature of living now that they have achieved that?
(And what's even worse about someone trying to solve the problem by damning the present and taking a person back to a previous solution is that it does not advance the knowledge required to handle the problem at this level. This suggests to me that the moral principles as formulated in old-time religion are not going to work for where we are now and that we need to look at this matter newly.)
A man to be effective must know his values. Further, he must know the ranking of his values. There are many choices made that are bad choices because one acts for a lower value and gives up a resource that he should have used to gain a higher value. If a dad is writing a book to earn a living and has children, chances are both are values high on his list of values. But which is higher? Writing the book or being with the children? If he chooses to be with the children, he gives up the time he could use to write the book. Likewise, if he spends his time writing the book, he gives up time he could be with his children. If his wife urges him to be with the children and he does so to please her, that doesn't work either. Who is he anyway? These are the questions that trouble men's souls.
All of these troubles fall into the category of forging oneself into a mighty purpose. To do that one has to know who he is. He has to know his values, what captures his energies such that he causes something to happen. Then he must rank them in a way that he knows supports the life he wants to live. After he has discovered this for himself and knows who he is, he is a force to be reckoned with. He becomes as a piece of steel that was once liquid but has now taken shape in a particular form.
In the Bible, Jesus went to the desert for 40 days and 40 nights. Why? I say, to sort himself out. He had to learn the ranking of his values and come to know who he was -- what was most important for him so he could design himself true to himself.* Thus, he made himself into a man who could be responsible for his own vitality.
In the Age of Abundance, if man is to advance, he must put in this sorting process. When living is not that hard, one isn't required to put forth much effort to obtain the values he needs to just keep himself alive. He can live well easily. But, in the doing of that, he has to watch that he doesn't give up the most important thing of life - his vitality - his life and what he could have made of himself. No one wants to die with that "On the Waterfront" line: "I could have been a contender."
Unless we tackle this problem, it grows and creates wild distortions in culture. We have parents who never sorted themselves out and are scared to death of alone time with only themselves for company. In raising their kids, they won't let them settle down into this sorting time because it threatens them, the parents. They can only see it as "something is wrong here."
But what if nothing is wrong? In fact, what if it is what the requirements of being human ordered? This is the opportunity hidden in the Age of Abundance. How does one sort through his values and craft them into a clear cut code such that he is able to use the resources he has in the best way he is able? This is the challenge of abundance and it is the challenge of political and personal freedom. This is a challenge we take up one at a time. Until we learn this, we, as a culture and society and as the leader of men to the full bounty of political freedom, are going to fall back into the old ways. Eras will be dedicated to learning this lesson until we master it and are able to go through it and beyond it.
And, we know what those old ways are. Our leaders tell everyone "There is something wrong here. We have sinned. Now it is time to exact punishment for those sins." Today how they do that is tax us within an inch of our lives and give it to their friends. Is this an uptick from how the Catholic church did it? Come in for confessions and leave your offering. You remain poor, we put our riches into the churches and institutions to take care of us. Hmmm. That's another seminar.
*When I say design himself true to himself what I'm saying is that there are two levels of things going on in man. At one level, he is determined by his nature. He possesses a life force which came with being born a living thing. That life force in a human being has a particular nature. It seeks to live and maintain itself and it has to do it a human way. Inside that, it will do it according to its particularity as an individual human being. Exactly what this nature is is part of what a man must discover about himself.
To be true to himself, he must act consistent with not only his nature as a man, but also consistent with the particular traits and aptitudes that he was born with. A successful design for one's life is mounted with full knowledge of oneself on that basic template. The truth? No one has full knowledge of himself at any point in time - ever. So what I mean is that one's mind is properly related to the facts one discovers about himself such that he is able to integrate and build on them.
People get into forcing themselves to be a particular way at the expense of their nature. The character of this is that they will not face a particular painful event that happened to themselves and integrate the facts of their lives. Consequently, there is a distortion in their personality which is shaped by this avoidance of anything which hints at that event which they have shaped themselves to avoid. (Character is not something that can be developed, I assert, until one has cleared out all of the generating factors of this distortion. Character is something one must develop by choice and it cannot be counted on until it is developed and held by choice.) Given this, they cannot discover their nature - their talents, the things they love, all the things that they cannot relax and enjoy because of the fear that has shaped their evaluations of their perceptions.
A big part of forming oneself is discovery. If one is not getting the things he wants in life, then he has to discover why that is so. He has to discover the misalignment of his values. He has to notice when he sacrifices himself (acts on a lower value and sacrifices a higher value) and why he doesn't like himself right then. This can be an involved process where at first one doesn't have many tools available to do it. But with an increase in the powers of inspection, he gains those tools. Once he understands what is going on, he is in a position to rearrange his values and cause a different outcome. And above all, he is in a position to design his own character. Once that is done, he becomes a force to be reckoned with. Until then, he's mere flotsam and jetsam, floating on the surf of humanity
Given that abundance has been all about us, why suddenly have people taken to making it wrong? If you notice, President Obama has done nothing to stimulate the economy. He's said he wants to use money to do that but then he passes it out to his cronies to insure his reelection. Almost no jobs have been created so he has taken to emphasizing that some have been 'saved', although no one knows how to measure that. Clearly President Obama and his Administration have a completely different view of man and what is appropriate for a man's life than I do.
To me this left turn into the desert is uncalled for and even mean spirited, but what if there is something underneath it that needs to be recognized. What if there is a lesson to be learned here.
There are two kinds of men - the one who knows who he is and knows where he is going, and the one who is lost and doesn't know where he is going. It is a much noticed phenomenon that rich kids are often lost. They have had everything and so they never had to figure out what is important. In relation to purposeful human beings, they appear as robust weeds in an otherwise naturally ordered garden.
But now we have a different phenomenon. Man has risen to the level of material abundance such that we have a society of rich kids. Thus we are seeing all kinds of thing that we have never seen before. We see kids who lose their lives to a computer game, never knowing what it is like to live in a real world rather than a virtual one. We see ordinary people weighing 300 pounds. With food so plentiful, they cannot resist the pleasures of food. They have not figured out how to reshape their values such that they use their resources for other things that will yield new pleasures and rewards.
So, how does one figure out what is important and make something of his life? Given that by and large human kind has handled the matter of his physical existence and we depended on going after those values to keep us true to what life requires, we are realizing that if that matter is largely handled we no longer have that truing-up mechanism to keep us present to what life requires. What we took for granted before can no longer be taken for granted. We are realizing that there is something deeper that we have to take care of. We cannot merely keep ourselves alive; we have to keep ourselves vital.
Or said another way, given that we have handled the material side of life, how do we reform the spiritual side of life given that vitality is a function of one's spiritual notions?
Clearly this problem can be handled two ways. One is to not see it as a problem and every time things get too good, arbitrarily create a situation such that one strips himself back to basics so he learns those lessons and knows who he is. In the vernacular of my upbringing, "Whenever a man get too cocky, he needs to be brought down off his high horse." The other is to embrace the progress and see this as a problem which progress itself brings.
Rather than all the preachers getting up on Sunday and telling people how evil they've been to have allowed themselves to be seduced by abundance and therefore gotten soft and lazy, what if they congratulated their congregations on their great achievement and then began the process of discovering the nature of living now that they have achieved that?
(And what's even worse about someone trying to solve the problem by damning the present and taking a person back to a previous solution is that it does not advance the knowledge required to handle the problem at this level. This suggests to me that the moral principles as formulated in old-time religion are not going to work for where we are now and that we need to look at this matter newly.)
A man to be effective must know his values. Further, he must know the ranking of his values. There are many choices made that are bad choices because one acts for a lower value and gives up a resource that he should have used to gain a higher value. If a dad is writing a book to earn a living and has children, chances are both are values high on his list of values. But which is higher? Writing the book or being with the children? If he chooses to be with the children, he gives up the time he could use to write the book. Likewise, if he spends his time writing the book, he gives up time he could be with his children. If his wife urges him to be with the children and he does so to please her, that doesn't work either. Who is he anyway? These are the questions that trouble men's souls.
All of these troubles fall into the category of forging oneself into a mighty purpose. To do that one has to know who he is. He has to know his values, what captures his energies such that he causes something to happen. Then he must rank them in a way that he knows supports the life he wants to live. After he has discovered this for himself and knows who he is, he is a force to be reckoned with. He becomes as a piece of steel that was once liquid but has now taken shape in a particular form.
In the Bible, Jesus went to the desert for 40 days and 40 nights. Why? I say, to sort himself out. He had to learn the ranking of his values and come to know who he was -- what was most important for him so he could design himself true to himself.* Thus, he made himself into a man who could be responsible for his own vitality.
In the Age of Abundance, if man is to advance, he must put in this sorting process. When living is not that hard, one isn't required to put forth much effort to obtain the values he needs to just keep himself alive. He can live well easily. But, in the doing of that, he has to watch that he doesn't give up the most important thing of life - his vitality - his life and what he could have made of himself. No one wants to die with that "On the Waterfront" line: "I could have been a contender."
Unless we tackle this problem, it grows and creates wild distortions in culture. We have parents who never sorted themselves out and are scared to death of alone time with only themselves for company. In raising their kids, they won't let them settle down into this sorting time because it threatens them, the parents. They can only see it as "something is wrong here."
But what if nothing is wrong? In fact, what if it is what the requirements of being human ordered? This is the opportunity hidden in the Age of Abundance. How does one sort through his values and craft them into a clear cut code such that he is able to use the resources he has in the best way he is able? This is the challenge of abundance and it is the challenge of political and personal freedom. This is a challenge we take up one at a time. Until we learn this, we, as a culture and society and as the leader of men to the full bounty of political freedom, are going to fall back into the old ways. Eras will be dedicated to learning this lesson until we master it and are able to go through it and beyond it.
And, we know what those old ways are. Our leaders tell everyone "There is something wrong here. We have sinned. Now it is time to exact punishment for those sins." Today how they do that is tax us within an inch of our lives and give it to their friends. Is this an uptick from how the Catholic church did it? Come in for confessions and leave your offering. You remain poor, we put our riches into the churches and institutions to take care of us. Hmmm. That's another seminar.
*When I say design himself true to himself what I'm saying is that there are two levels of things going on in man. At one level, he is determined by his nature. He possesses a life force which came with being born a living thing. That life force in a human being has a particular nature. It seeks to live and maintain itself and it has to do it a human way. Inside that, it will do it according to its particularity as an individual human being. Exactly what this nature is is part of what a man must discover about himself.
To be true to himself, he must act consistent with not only his nature as a man, but also consistent with the particular traits and aptitudes that he was born with. A successful design for one's life is mounted with full knowledge of oneself on that basic template. The truth? No one has full knowledge of himself at any point in time - ever. So what I mean is that one's mind is properly related to the facts one discovers about himself such that he is able to integrate and build on them.
People get into forcing themselves to be a particular way at the expense of their nature. The character of this is that they will not face a particular painful event that happened to themselves and integrate the facts of their lives. Consequently, there is a distortion in their personality which is shaped by this avoidance of anything which hints at that event which they have shaped themselves to avoid. (Character is not something that can be developed, I assert, until one has cleared out all of the generating factors of this distortion. Character is something one must develop by choice and it cannot be counted on until it is developed and held by choice.) Given this, they cannot discover their nature - their talents, the things they love, all the things that they cannot relax and enjoy because of the fear that has shaped their evaluations of their perceptions.
A big part of forming oneself is discovery. If one is not getting the things he wants in life, then he has to discover why that is so. He has to discover the misalignment of his values. He has to notice when he sacrifices himself (acts on a lower value and sacrifices a higher value) and why he doesn't like himself right then. This can be an involved process where at first one doesn't have many tools available to do it. But with an increase in the powers of inspection, he gains those tools. Once he understands what is going on, he is in a position to rearrange his values and cause a different outcome. And above all, he is in a position to design his own character. Once that is done, he becomes a force to be reckoned with. Until then, he's mere flotsam and jetsam, floating on the surf of humanity
Friday, November 13, 2009
Race, Politics and Glenn Beck
Today, Glenn Beck was awesome. He struck a note with me that needed striking. In fact I think that note needs to come from a gong hanging from a tall tree's limb to be heard throughout the country.
When Obama ran for office there were many concerns and ideas running through the culture. The two basic ones were political freedom/slavery and race.
I've always been a devotee of political freedom. It's the only thing about politics that I care about. All issues can be solved in those terms. Is the government increasing its hold over our lives or do we have the full measure of freedom that we need to live as human beings and that we ought to have? That is and always will be my question.
My relationships with my black friends has always been one of mutual respect and fun with some inspiration thrown in. Whenever there is a story about overcoming slavery and gaining freedom, I'm all in, often inspired and moved to tears.
I've always felt a common ground with blacks because of my anti-slavery, love-of-freedom values, but hearing Obama speak the strains of slavery in his messages of socialism, I wasn't so sure. When 95% of blacks voted for Obama, I was no longer sure what was going on. Did I have a common value of freedom with them or not?
No one said anything and my interracial relationships near me have gone quiet. Although I've communicated with blacks who I'm clear are solidly against socialist slavery and for political freedom, they are people I discover on the internet. I'm glad for these relationships, but they don't replace the friends I had.
Beck's program today pierced that desert of silence. I saw there a studio full of people who are Americans first and who are not afraid to speak against Obama and the Democrats as they seek to increase slavery and reduce freedom. I heard a number of them struggling with the hyphenated African-American designation. They are Americans first and they don't want some hyphenated name diminishing that. I heard them hating it that people in their culture deride knowledge and speaking good English.
I was left clear that we are into waters that we do not know how to navigate. And I was left clear that there are some courageous blacks willing to speak for the deep and enduring values of our larger, common American culture.
I was left heartened that the Democrat progressivism/socialism agenda lead by a black man is not sitting well with some of them. Given the results that government programs have had on their families and children, trapping them in ghettos of poverty and ignorance, they are not enticed by Obama's smooth words and Mr. Cool. They know bullshit when they see it.
Bottom-line I was left with that when it comes to ideas and discerning truth and value, there is no such thing as color. Beck's was the first post-racial program I've heard. I only wish Obama could lead as well.
I thank Glenn Beck today. It was an opening in what has seemed to me like a monolithic, impenetrable Obama-barrier.
Here are videos of the program. I got them from Fox News. He bills this as Part 1 of his series on black conservatives. What I hear is a series on black people who have different views and can speak out. I didn't parse their words for whether they were strictly conservative or not, whether they stayed on or went off the tracks.
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
When Obama ran for office there were many concerns and ideas running through the culture. The two basic ones were political freedom/slavery and race.
I've always been a devotee of political freedom. It's the only thing about politics that I care about. All issues can be solved in those terms. Is the government increasing its hold over our lives or do we have the full measure of freedom that we need to live as human beings and that we ought to have? That is and always will be my question.
My relationships with my black friends has always been one of mutual respect and fun with some inspiration thrown in. Whenever there is a story about overcoming slavery and gaining freedom, I'm all in, often inspired and moved to tears.
I've always felt a common ground with blacks because of my anti-slavery, love-of-freedom values, but hearing Obama speak the strains of slavery in his messages of socialism, I wasn't so sure. When 95% of blacks voted for Obama, I was no longer sure what was going on. Did I have a common value of freedom with them or not?
No one said anything and my interracial relationships near me have gone quiet. Although I've communicated with blacks who I'm clear are solidly against socialist slavery and for political freedom, they are people I discover on the internet. I'm glad for these relationships, but they don't replace the friends I had.
Beck's program today pierced that desert of silence. I saw there a studio full of people who are Americans first and who are not afraid to speak against Obama and the Democrats as they seek to increase slavery and reduce freedom. I heard a number of them struggling with the hyphenated African-American designation. They are Americans first and they don't want some hyphenated name diminishing that. I heard them hating it that people in their culture deride knowledge and speaking good English.
I was left clear that we are into waters that we do not know how to navigate. And I was left clear that there are some courageous blacks willing to speak for the deep and enduring values of our larger, common American culture.
I was left heartened that the Democrat progressivism/socialism agenda lead by a black man is not sitting well with some of them. Given the results that government programs have had on their families and children, trapping them in ghettos of poverty and ignorance, they are not enticed by Obama's smooth words and Mr. Cool. They know bullshit when they see it.
Bottom-line I was left with that when it comes to ideas and discerning truth and value, there is no such thing as color. Beck's was the first post-racial program I've heard. I only wish Obama could lead as well.
I thank Glenn Beck today. It was an opening in what has seemed to me like a monolithic, impenetrable Obama-barrier.
Here are videos of the program. I got them from Fox News. He bills this as Part 1 of his series on black conservatives. What I hear is a series on black people who have different views and can speak out. I didn't parse their words for whether they were strictly conservative or not, whether they stayed on or went off the tracks.
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
People are Divided over Obama. Why?
Here is an article, Grouchy Public Sticking With Obama. What are they grouchy about and why are they sticking with him?
Some think he has a bad situation to deal with and isn't doing so well, but they like him. Others think he is inept and isn't even interested in improving the situation and in fact wants to produce a failed America, upside down in all of its traditional values which at root means the protection of the individual and his right to live his life.
The first group doesn't care what Obama has said. When he tells Joe the Plumber that he is going to take what he earns and give it to the poor guy down the street because it's fair, they don't get that when they earn something, it will be them that is separated from their earnings. Suddenly their kids and loved ones and plans and projects are stopped in their tracks so the poor guy down the street can do his thing. They don't hear what he is saying and cannot hear what he is saying. The second group hears Obama and believes him and what is known about his past.
The first group distrusts ideas, knowledge and actively works to keep everything like that at arms' length. The second group welcomes ideas and knowledge and actively works to use information to improve their lives and world.
The first group would rather find a recipe that gives them comfort food. The second group would rather explore a new taste.
I'm realizing that people are dividing themselves into two groups. I call these two groups, The Folks and The Adventurers. Another word for Adventurers is Thinkers. Thinking is an adventure because it goes where you have not gone before - otherwise it isn't thinking.
The Folks create their lives in every way around the social and they think socially. The Adventurers create their lives in every way around the possibilities they see and how to attain those possibilities.
The Folks put social first and kill off (when they get political power which is the power of force) anything which threatens the social, especially any idea which forwards the individual. The Adventurers put creativity and ideas of the world first and create their social activities to support that.
The Folks live life as a warm, fuzzy dead-end. The Adventurers live life as an exciting possibility.
Barney and his boy-friend belong to the first group. Barney bends all the mortgage rules in order to provide a warm fuzzy which he cannot make stick because he cannot control reality. Barack and Michelle, although they pretend to be adventurers and courageous fighters, also belong to the second group. Every policy they advocate firmly supports The Folks.
Right now, there are no public people in the second group. We used to see people like Tiger Woods and his dad as they worked on perfecting Tiger into a superb athlete. But those people are now silent, having been frightened into the shadows. Pursuing excellence is something one has to do secretly. The unsung people are those worrying how they can live and raise their families in a world that does not support them and, in fact steals, one way or the other, everything they earn in order to support the warm, fuzzy social dead-end.
The Folks is a deadly group and ultimately will murder any individual who doesn't put social first. Their worldview is the source of failed, dispirited communities, societies and states. They like forced education and indoctrination and ultimately concentration camps - although they will never admit it. They are so industrious in their attempt to cover this motive that they work overtime to create real freedom lovers as the kind of people that they are at heart. Notice how they portray the tea party people.
There is but one thing more powerful than a person, one of The Folks, using everything within his power to not face the truth - a person who grasps the truth from the ground up and will not yield his life for trifles. He is The Adventurer. He has reality on his side.
The Folks are terrified of the individual. Why wouldn't they be? Their lives depend on him. The second group is not terrified of the individual but rather looks to him and nurtures him for ideas on how to live. They know their lives depend on exalting the mind and currying an environment that nurtures the independent thinker - the one unafraid to say what others cannot see.
I think people still like Barack because they cannot tell the difference between someone who knows what he is doing and someone who pretends to know what he is doing or who, by stealth, consciously knows what he is undoing. They are dazzled by the rhetoric and not paying attention to the results. They like Obama the actor who keeps talking about why the results are not here yet and false results - like "saved" jobs. They are desperately hanging onto their warm fuzzy.
We are starting to see the final test of their loyalty. Will they embrace the force, the coercion that is going to be required to install this unreality as the new reality? Will these warm fuzzy "nannies" advocate theft, silence and even murder of anyone who tells them they are wrong, that their world will not work and that they may be full of shit?
The confusion around what is going on has spread far and wide. For example, it infects the issue of nurturing vs. calling to account and being responsible. It infects the current interpretation of the role of the female principle and the male principle. It infects the place for feeling and the place for thinking. It has infected everything to the point that people cannot see what is so. Everything is upside down.
A very good example of this is Obama's approach to the recession. I know for a fact that a person cannot build a solid life without living within his means. And before that growth begins, a person becomes of a new, clarified mindset. At the point of his clearing, he can cut out the expenses that will not allow him to live within his means. He becomes able to talk to people, i.e. creditors, and work out something that can work from where he is within his means. A new confidence comes over him and he is on the road to building his life.
But notice how Obama and our leaders have chosen to prevent America from knowing this place and getting its feet on the ground. And not only that, the government is actively stealing money from the citizens to pay for the borrowing that the government is doing in order to maintain the false principle of being able to live outside our means. It works to scare us saying that the whole system will collapse. So what. In fact, it should collapse because it caused the problem in the first place. Just as a family may have bought a second home which caused it to live beyond its means and borrow more money, so a government can do the same thing.
Using this simple example of what sanity vs. insanity looks like, we can see that Obama and our government is thoroughly in the camp of unreality. Yes, I would be willing to call it insanity. And this is causing Obama's popularity to erode.
But there is one other thing which has the potential of completely destroying Obama. Obama isn't merely a straight up politician who one agrees with or disagrees with. There is too much of Obama's past that tells us he has a particular outlook on politics that is anti-American. He loves everything and has spent his life forwarding everything that is anti-capitalist, anti-individual and anti-independent thinking. (Be careful not to fall for the words "critical thinking." That is a school of thought and operation which is smuggling in how The Folks should think.) What people feel and haven't put their fingers on yet is that Obama is creepy. There is something off about Obama and until that gets sorted out, there can be no forward movement.
It's this creepy element that has me unable to watch him posturing as the leader of this great country. My experience is that of some kind of Great Disconnect. I see a man speaking about America and American values. All I get is words, just words. The best I can grant him is that he has translated them in his mind to the emotional base of his Marxist/socialist ideal. This is a terribly painful experience. Although I would like to embrace him because I honor the office and the form of it all, I cannot stretch pretense this far.
Some think he has a bad situation to deal with and isn't doing so well, but they like him. Others think he is inept and isn't even interested in improving the situation and in fact wants to produce a failed America, upside down in all of its traditional values which at root means the protection of the individual and his right to live his life.
The first group doesn't care what Obama has said. When he tells Joe the Plumber that he is going to take what he earns and give it to the poor guy down the street because it's fair, they don't get that when they earn something, it will be them that is separated from their earnings. Suddenly their kids and loved ones and plans and projects are stopped in their tracks so the poor guy down the street can do his thing. They don't hear what he is saying and cannot hear what he is saying. The second group hears Obama and believes him and what is known about his past.
The first group distrusts ideas, knowledge and actively works to keep everything like that at arms' length. The second group welcomes ideas and knowledge and actively works to use information to improve their lives and world.
The first group would rather find a recipe that gives them comfort food. The second group would rather explore a new taste.
I'm realizing that people are dividing themselves into two groups. I call these two groups, The Folks and The Adventurers. Another word for Adventurers is Thinkers. Thinking is an adventure because it goes where you have not gone before - otherwise it isn't thinking.
The Folks create their lives in every way around the social and they think socially. The Adventurers create their lives in every way around the possibilities they see and how to attain those possibilities.
The Folks put social first and kill off (when they get political power which is the power of force) anything which threatens the social, especially any idea which forwards the individual. The Adventurers put creativity and ideas of the world first and create their social activities to support that.
The Folks live life as a warm, fuzzy dead-end. The Adventurers live life as an exciting possibility.
Barney and his boy-friend belong to the first group. Barney bends all the mortgage rules in order to provide a warm fuzzy which he cannot make stick because he cannot control reality. Barack and Michelle, although they pretend to be adventurers and courageous fighters, also belong to the second group. Every policy they advocate firmly supports The Folks.
Right now, there are no public people in the second group. We used to see people like Tiger Woods and his dad as they worked on perfecting Tiger into a superb athlete. But those people are now silent, having been frightened into the shadows. Pursuing excellence is something one has to do secretly. The unsung people are those worrying how they can live and raise their families in a world that does not support them and, in fact steals, one way or the other, everything they earn in order to support the warm, fuzzy social dead-end.
The Folks is a deadly group and ultimately will murder any individual who doesn't put social first. Their worldview is the source of failed, dispirited communities, societies and states. They like forced education and indoctrination and ultimately concentration camps - although they will never admit it. They are so industrious in their attempt to cover this motive that they work overtime to create real freedom lovers as the kind of people that they are at heart. Notice how they portray the tea party people.
There is but one thing more powerful than a person, one of The Folks, using everything within his power to not face the truth - a person who grasps the truth from the ground up and will not yield his life for trifles. He is The Adventurer. He has reality on his side.
The Folks are terrified of the individual. Why wouldn't they be? Their lives depend on him. The second group is not terrified of the individual but rather looks to him and nurtures him for ideas on how to live. They know their lives depend on exalting the mind and currying an environment that nurtures the independent thinker - the one unafraid to say what others cannot see.
I think people still like Barack because they cannot tell the difference between someone who knows what he is doing and someone who pretends to know what he is doing or who, by stealth, consciously knows what he is undoing. They are dazzled by the rhetoric and not paying attention to the results. They like Obama the actor who keeps talking about why the results are not here yet and false results - like "saved" jobs. They are desperately hanging onto their warm fuzzy.
We are starting to see the final test of their loyalty. Will they embrace the force, the coercion that is going to be required to install this unreality as the new reality? Will these warm fuzzy "nannies" advocate theft, silence and even murder of anyone who tells them they are wrong, that their world will not work and that they may be full of shit?
The confusion around what is going on has spread far and wide. For example, it infects the issue of nurturing vs. calling to account and being responsible. It infects the current interpretation of the role of the female principle and the male principle. It infects the place for feeling and the place for thinking. It has infected everything to the point that people cannot see what is so. Everything is upside down.
A very good example of this is Obama's approach to the recession. I know for a fact that a person cannot build a solid life without living within his means. And before that growth begins, a person becomes of a new, clarified mindset. At the point of his clearing, he can cut out the expenses that will not allow him to live within his means. He becomes able to talk to people, i.e. creditors, and work out something that can work from where he is within his means. A new confidence comes over him and he is on the road to building his life.
But notice how Obama and our leaders have chosen to prevent America from knowing this place and getting its feet on the ground. And not only that, the government is actively stealing money from the citizens to pay for the borrowing that the government is doing in order to maintain the false principle of being able to live outside our means. It works to scare us saying that the whole system will collapse. So what. In fact, it should collapse because it caused the problem in the first place. Just as a family may have bought a second home which caused it to live beyond its means and borrow more money, so a government can do the same thing.
Using this simple example of what sanity vs. insanity looks like, we can see that Obama and our government is thoroughly in the camp of unreality. Yes, I would be willing to call it insanity. And this is causing Obama's popularity to erode.
But there is one other thing which has the potential of completely destroying Obama. Obama isn't merely a straight up politician who one agrees with or disagrees with. There is too much of Obama's past that tells us he has a particular outlook on politics that is anti-American. He loves everything and has spent his life forwarding everything that is anti-capitalist, anti-individual and anti-independent thinking. (Be careful not to fall for the words "critical thinking." That is a school of thought and operation which is smuggling in how The Folks should think.) What people feel and haven't put their fingers on yet is that Obama is creepy. There is something off about Obama and until that gets sorted out, there can be no forward movement.
It's this creepy element that has me unable to watch him posturing as the leader of this great country. My experience is that of some kind of Great Disconnect. I see a man speaking about America and American values. All I get is words, just words. The best I can grant him is that he has translated them in his mind to the emotional base of his Marxist/socialist ideal. This is a terribly painful experience. Although I would like to embrace him because I honor the office and the form of it all, I cannot stretch pretense this far.
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
The Real Reason for Obamacare
This from the Wall Street Journal Editorial Page, November 10, 2009
Confessions of an ObamaCare Backer
Confessions of an ObamaCare Backer
A liberal explains the political calculus
The typical argument for ObamaCare is that it will offer better medical care for everyone and cost less to do it, but occasionally a supporter lets the mask slip and reveals the real political motivation. So let's give credit to John Cassidy, part of the left-wing stable at the New Yorker, who wrote last week on its Web site that "it's important to be clear about what the reform amounts to."
Mr. Cassidy is more honest than the politicians whose dishonesty he supports. "The U.S. government is making a costly and open-ended commitment," he writes. "Let's not pretend that it isn't a big deal, or that it will be self-financing, or that it will work out exactly as planned. It won't. What is really unfolding, I suspect, is the scenario that many conservatives feared. The Obama Administration . . . is creating a new entitlement program, which, once established, will be virtually impossible to rescind."
Why are they doing it? Because, according to Mr. Cassidy, ObamaCare serves the twin goals of "making the United States a more equitable country" and furthering the Democrats' "political calculus." In other words, the purpose is to further redistribute income by putting health care further under government control, and in the process making the middle class more dependent on government. As the party of government, Democrats will benefit over the long run.
This explains why Nancy Pelosi is willing to risk the seats of so many Blue Dog Democrats by forcing such an unpopular bill through Congress on a narrow, partisan vote: You have to break a few eggs to make a permanent welfare state. As Mr. Cassidy concludes, "Putting on my amateur historian's cap, I might even claim that some subterfuge is historically necessary to get great reforms enacted."
No wonder many Americans are upset. They know they are being lied to about ObamaCare, and they know they are going to be stuck with the bill.
D E P E N D E N C E = S L A V E R Y
D E M O C R A T S = M A S T E R S
It is difficult to be with how wrong-headed, anti-human and utterly negative the position of the Democrats and Obama is on these matters. Freedom = life, creativity, entrepreneurship, higher standard of living, innovation, more health care, increased happiness. Control and dependence = victimization, entitlement and demands, lower standard of living, fewer innovations, less health care, more sadness and hopelessness.
It is not true that a free society is less equitable. A free society is not based on comparison of people as if they are all cut out of the same mold. Each man is different. No one is equal, except in his right to live. Only in a free society is it possible to for humanity to bloom as millions of points of light. On the other hand, the mark of a socialist society is lights going out. Everyone and everything grows dim, dull and dead. Socialism in any degree is anti-human life, anti-energy. You see people living there, but they are forbidden to be alive.
Saturday, November 7, 2009
To John Lewis - for the 2nd day in a row.
To The Honorable Representative from Georgia, John Lewis:
NO. Above all, vote NO, on the health care bill.
Will John Lewis vote for MANDATES and thus, slavery? We will see.
Freedom is the answer. Force and slavery is not the answer.
I will not vote for anyone who votes for this bill. That is my final answer.
Sunday, 11-8-09: Last evening I saw a clip of John Lewis, my representative, before the House of Representatives.
I know John Lewis. When his book Walking with the Wind was published, I went to Barnes & Noble in Buckhead to buy his book and he could sign it. I have it in my library. That evening I was so moved being in his presence that I had to turn away lest I dissolve in tears. In the context of what he did for civil rights, he was great.
But the context has changed and he is no longer great. Never - never - have a I seen a representative who is so out of touch with the requirements of human life that he is a demand that people be made dependent upon the government. Further, he has the temerity to call it the right thing to do. He has acted counter to what he says his life is about - freedom - and instead came down four-square to enslave all of us forever.
No man can possess an economic right - the right to health care - without also creating a slave to provide it. Any man who, at the point of a gun, will force a man to become something less than human in order to do good is an evil man.
Forcing a man to support his neighbor takes the entire action out of the realm of the potential good. A man forced is unable to be good or bad. John Lewis denies that men should possess choice. He cannot trust that men will do what they see as the good. Further he thinks that what he thinks is the good is The Good, as if he has some claim on that knowledge and that it exists in some context which does not depend upon individual people and their lives. Thus he places himself and will now find himself in the same realm as all tyrants. If he had not pulled his gun on us, we could consider what he thinks is good and we might even come to think so ourselves. But not now. John Lewis has sunk as low as a man can sink and whatever good he may have done, he has now transformed himself into a menace to a civil and humane society.
Since these people cast their lot with the wrong side of what a human being is, I bet my life that the people who advocate this are on the wrong side of history. The consequences of this, should it become law, are vast. Slavery does not work. Never did. Never will. The costs are devastating.
Our biggest problem is to see the transformation of the human spirit that follows from enslavement. We have plenty of evidence in this country of those effects. Slavery instills a self-hatred, sprung from powerlessness, that takes generations to erase and then only if it is understood as to how it can be erased. At root it is a transformation in one's relation to power regarding the self. John Lewis has never understood any of this. Thus he seeks to spread the poison of his own spirit over the entire society - hoping that if we are all that way, it will become reality and because it will be the water we swim in, invisible.
By his actions, he is a mighty force to entrap and keep stuck all people who learn to depend on someone else for what they need rather than learn that they can create value, offer it in the world and make it on their own - really they can. And, consequently he makes all our plights worse by his existence. He loves being the victim, playing to the victim and creating ever more victims. This is who John Lewis is, the source of the spirit of John Lewis that enrolls his victims. I'm not impressed.
Freedom is one thing - freedom. One cannot make up for slavery except to free the man enslaved. All attempts to enslave the free for the purpose of reparations for the cost of slavery are beyond possibility. No material good can cause the transformation that must occur in a man's mind. In fact, to distract from this task only causes the effects of slavery to last longer. No transformation can occur until the nature of the free human being is grasped.
And, this is possible. It is possible to experience what freedom in one's spirit is and to know that it exists. But it is not possible until one understands himself as his own and only valid motive power. So long as his behavior is bottom-line caused by his reaction to someone or some thing outside himself, whether it happened yesterday or thirty years ago, rather than he seeking or keeping his own values, he is an enslaved, spiritually impoverished man.
There is a great misunderstanding athwart the country. It's generally believed that nurturing is good while standards and calling to account are bad and should be upended. Consequently we keep everyone a baby so that they can be nurtured within the popular paradigm. What we have not understood is that nurturing applied at the wrong time kills and destroys just as much as lack of nurturing when needed kills and destroys during those times. And this error about how life works has completely infected politics. John Lewis along with many others are flat wrong in their understanding of this principle. We suffer accordingly.
Down with all those who advocate babyhood and slavery - Lewis, Pelosi, Reid, Obama, Michelle and millions of others. They portend a dark, sad world indeed.
Up with freedom - all of those who see what people need, create it, produce it and offer it in free trade. There's the future. There's the incredible lightness of being. There's where the love is. This is the light that America is known for - not John Lewis's horrendous, demoralized, slave-bedecked worldview.
NO. Above all, vote NO, on the health care bill.
Will John Lewis vote for MANDATES and thus, slavery? We will see.
Freedom is the answer. Force and slavery is not the answer.
I will not vote for anyone who votes for this bill. That is my final answer.
Sunday, 11-8-09: Last evening I saw a clip of John Lewis, my representative, before the House of Representatives.
I know John Lewis. When his book Walking with the Wind was published, I went to Barnes & Noble in Buckhead to buy his book and he could sign it. I have it in my library. That evening I was so moved being in his presence that I had to turn away lest I dissolve in tears. In the context of what he did for civil rights, he was great.
But the context has changed and he is no longer great. Never - never - have a I seen a representative who is so out of touch with the requirements of human life that he is a demand that people be made dependent upon the government. Further, he has the temerity to call it the right thing to do. He has acted counter to what he says his life is about - freedom - and instead came down four-square to enslave all of us forever.
No man can possess an economic right - the right to health care - without also creating a slave to provide it. Any man who, at the point of a gun, will force a man to become something less than human in order to do good is an evil man.
Forcing a man to support his neighbor takes the entire action out of the realm of the potential good. A man forced is unable to be good or bad. John Lewis denies that men should possess choice. He cannot trust that men will do what they see as the good. Further he thinks that what he thinks is the good is The Good, as if he has some claim on that knowledge and that it exists in some context which does not depend upon individual people and their lives. Thus he places himself and will now find himself in the same realm as all tyrants. If he had not pulled his gun on us, we could consider what he thinks is good and we might even come to think so ourselves. But not now. John Lewis has sunk as low as a man can sink and whatever good he may have done, he has now transformed himself into a menace to a civil and humane society.
Since these people cast their lot with the wrong side of what a human being is, I bet my life that the people who advocate this are on the wrong side of history. The consequences of this, should it become law, are vast. Slavery does not work. Never did. Never will. The costs are devastating.
Our biggest problem is to see the transformation of the human spirit that follows from enslavement. We have plenty of evidence in this country of those effects. Slavery instills a self-hatred, sprung from powerlessness, that takes generations to erase and then only if it is understood as to how it can be erased. At root it is a transformation in one's relation to power regarding the self. John Lewis has never understood any of this. Thus he seeks to spread the poison of his own spirit over the entire society - hoping that if we are all that way, it will become reality and because it will be the water we swim in, invisible.
By his actions, he is a mighty force to entrap and keep stuck all people who learn to depend on someone else for what they need rather than learn that they can create value, offer it in the world and make it on their own - really they can. And, consequently he makes all our plights worse by his existence. He loves being the victim, playing to the victim and creating ever more victims. This is who John Lewis is, the source of the spirit of John Lewis that enrolls his victims. I'm not impressed.
Freedom is one thing - freedom. One cannot make up for slavery except to free the man enslaved. All attempts to enslave the free for the purpose of reparations for the cost of slavery are beyond possibility. No material good can cause the transformation that must occur in a man's mind. In fact, to distract from this task only causes the effects of slavery to last longer. No transformation can occur until the nature of the free human being is grasped.
And, this is possible. It is possible to experience what freedom in one's spirit is and to know that it exists. But it is not possible until one understands himself as his own and only valid motive power. So long as his behavior is bottom-line caused by his reaction to someone or some thing outside himself, whether it happened yesterday or thirty years ago, rather than he seeking or keeping his own values, he is an enslaved, spiritually impoverished man.
There is a great misunderstanding athwart the country. It's generally believed that nurturing is good while standards and calling to account are bad and should be upended. Consequently we keep everyone a baby so that they can be nurtured within the popular paradigm. What we have not understood is that nurturing applied at the wrong time kills and destroys just as much as lack of nurturing when needed kills and destroys during those times. And this error about how life works has completely infected politics. John Lewis along with many others are flat wrong in their understanding of this principle. We suffer accordingly.
Down with all those who advocate babyhood and slavery - Lewis, Pelosi, Reid, Obama, Michelle and millions of others. They portend a dark, sad world indeed.
Up with freedom - all of those who see what people need, create it, produce it and offer it in free trade. There's the future. There's the incredible lightness of being. There's where the love is. This is the light that America is known for - not John Lewis's horrendous, demoralized, slave-bedecked worldview.
Friday, November 6, 2009
Insane Pelosi and Her Democrats
(Is Pelosi insane? Now that the die is cast, we shall see. I'm sticking with my assessment. Let the good times roll, i.e., enjoy Pelosi battling the hydra-head, and let the evidence roll in! 11/8/09 SCB)
MANDATES: THE INSTITUTION OF SLAVERY
PELOSI: Buy a $15,000 Policy or Go to Jail
JCT Confirms Failure to Comply with Democrats’ Mandate Can Lead to 5 Years in Jail
Friday, November 06, 2009
| |
Today, Ranking Member of the House Ways and Means Committee Dave Camp (R-MI) released a letter from the non-partisan Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) confirming that the failure to comply with the individual mandate to buy health insurance contained in the Pelosi health care bill (H.R. 3962, as amended) could land people in jail. The JCT letter makes clear that Americans who do not maintain “acceptable health insurance coverage” and who choose not to pay the bill’s new individual mandate tax (generally 2.5% of income), are subject to numerous civil and criminal penalties, including criminal fines of up to $250,000 and imprisonment of up to five years.
In response to the JCT letter, Camp said: “This is the ultimate example of the Democrats’ command-and-control style of governing – buy what we tell you or go to jail. It is outrageous and it should be stopped immediately.”
Key excerpts from the JCT letter appear below:
“H.R. 3962 provides that an individual (or a husband and wife in the case of a joint return) who does not, at any time during the taxable year, maintain acceptable health insurance coverage for himself or herself and each of his or her qualifying children is subject to an additional tax.” [page 1]
- - - - - - - - - -
“If the government determines that the taxpayer’s unpaid tax liability results from willful behavior, the following penalties could apply…” [page 2]
- - - - - - - - - -
“Criminal penalties
Prosecution is authorized under the Code for a variety of offenses. Depending on the level of the noncompliance, the following penalties could apply to an individual:
• Section 7203 – misdemeanor willful failure to pay is punishable by a fine of up to $25,000 and/or imprisonment of up to one year.
• Section 7201 – felony willful evasion is punishable by a fine of up to $250,000 and/or imprisonment of up to five years.” [page 3]
When confronted with this same issue during its consideration of a similar individual mandate tax, the Senate Finance Committee worked on a bipartisan basis to include language in its bill that shielded Americans from civil and criminal penalties. The Pelosi bill, however, contains no similar language protecting American citizens from civil and criminal tax penalties that could include a $250,000 fine and five years in jail.
“The Senate Finance Committee had the good sense to eliminate the extreme penalty of incarceration. Speaker Pelosi’s decision to leave in the jail time provision is a threat to every family who cannot afford the $15,000 premium her plan creates. Fortunately, Republicans have an alternative that will lower health insurance costs without raising taxes or cutting Medicare,” said Camp.
According to the Congressional Budget Office the lowest cost family non-group plan under the Speaker’s bill would cost $15,000 in 2016.
###
What this means, in principle, is that every day when you awaken, to live that day you will have to walk to your US Government Post Office and give them $3 (or some such amount). After you have paid your fee, you can live, but you have to make sure that you earn enough that day to pay $3 the next morning - morning after morning, seven mornings a week, 365 mornings a year for every year of your life. Never will you breathe as a free man again. I've said that the liberals are the new slave masters - owners of the plantation upon which you and I live as slaves.
Liberals are the 21st century's newest fascists. Although it is completely un-PC to make this claim, no matter how sweet Barack Obama is, once government is transformed into a instrument of oppression, it's only a matter of time until a growing corruption will produce our own murderous dictator for a President. Fighting this bill is worth every cell in your body - if you want to wake up tomorrow and call them your own. Should this bill pass into law, it will mark the beginning of the growing public knowledge that the only enemy the American people have is their own government. SCB
WRITE YOUR CONGRESSMAN NOW!
NO DELAY! AGAIN!
Tuesday, November 3, 2009
What ObamaCare Means for You
by Robert James Bidinotto - Nov 2, 2009
WRITE YOUR CONGRESSMAN NOW!
NO DELAY!
Robert Bidinotto is former editor of The New Individualist, and is writing a book on the philosophical and mythological roots of environmentalism. His website is www.RobertTheWriter.com.
WRITE YOUR CONGRESSMAN NOW!
NO DELAY!
Obama's health care initiatives will change America forever, in ways that are not hard to predict. Here is what you can expect from it — and how to stop them in their tracks this week.
Now that the House and Senate finally have drafted their enormous health-care bills, we know what the final provisions will be. Their differences are far less important than their similarities.
Either version will be a disaster for our economy — for our personal well-being, both financial and medical — for our precious rights and freedoms — and for the futures of our children and grandchildren.
If “ObamaCare” becomes law, we will never again have the same America that was given to us by our nation’s Founders — that was defended by the blood of our ancestors — and that we have enjoyed as the greatest nation in the history of the world.
Both bills are coming up for crucial floor votes as early as this week. However, many in Congress are very nervous about what their votes will mean for their political careers.
This week is thus critical in either passing or defeating this legislation, once and for all. Now is the time that you can weigh in and make a real difference with your congressman and senators.
Here, in summary form, is what you need to know. Rather than overwhelm you with arcane details of each bill, it is more important that you understand in principle what ObamaCare will portend for you and your family.
ObamaCare will mean:
Outrageous costs. At a time of exploding federal spending and budget deficits, both the House and Senate bills would add far more than a trillion dollars to the mind-boggling financial liabilities we taxpayers already face. Even the stated price tags of these bills are fraudulent products of statistical manipulations. One way they pretend to reduce costs is to remove a quarter-trillion dollars in doctor Medicare reimbursements from the bills, but instead add that gargantuan spending into separate legislation. Another way they pretend to balance the books (“deficit neutrality”) is to impose years of tax increases to fund these bills, before the outrageous spending actually kicks in. When it does, the “cost curve” in later decades will soar upward, and deficits will pile up by the billions. In addition, the bills would vastly expand the already-bankrupt Medicaid program; this would impose on state governments, which already face crushing budget crises, tens of billions of dollars in new taxing and spending commitments. You will ultimately pick up that tab, too.
Soaring taxes. ObamaCare is not “insurance,” but a gigantic new entitlement scheme meant to “spread the wealth around.” To pay for this spending spree, both bills will drain our ailing private economy of hundreds of billions of dollars in higher taxes. These taxes will fall disproportionately upon the young and healthy: They will be forced to buy costly policies, thus expanding the “pool” of payers who will subsidize those older and sicker. Higher taxes also will fall heavily upon “the rich.” But these include the same entrepreneurs and employers whom we expect to create businesses and jobs to lift us out of the recession — and also the very doctors whom we expect to provide the medical services to the millions of new patients. The legislation also proposes hefty taxes on better private-insurance plans, which would penalize and undermine existing employer-employee benefits packages. These are just a few of the many new taxes and fees the bills would impose on us.
Perverse incentives. ObamaCare would subsidize and greatly expand the demand for health care, while discouraging the supply of health care. It would create a gigantic new federal entitlement program that would add millions of new, taxpayer-subsidized claimants for health-insurance coverage. Then it would force insurers to accept all comers — regardless of any actuarial risk factors — and to provide them coverage that is far beyond what many people actually require. On the other side of the equation, ObamaCare will increase taxes on those private insurers (who now average only 2-3% profit margins), while expecting them somehow to pay all the new benefits. It will also increase taxes and fees on hospitals, doctors, pharmaceutical manufacturers, and the inventors of new medical devices — thus punishing those who create and provide medical treatments. Inevitably, this will deter many of them from developing or offering vital new medical treatments for patients, and it will even force some of them out of business.
Government rationing. When soaring demand for medical care overwhelms shrinking supply of providers, the only outcome would be government rationing of medical care — which has occurred in all socialized-medicine regimes — and which is the intended outcome.
Lost individual choice. All talk of adding “choice and competition” to the health-insurance market is a complete fraud. The bills do not free individuals to buy insurance across state lines — “choice and competition” that would actually reduce the cost of insurance. Instead, the bills propose a host of new mandates on private individuals, employers, and private insurers. Under penalty of fines or jail, individuals will be forced to buy costly coverage; employers will be forced to provide it and to comply with countless petty regulations; and doctors, hospitals, and private insurers will be forced to comply with a mountain of new government orders, requirements, restrictions, demands, and regulations. Compliance with all these ever-expanding governmental edicts will drive up the costs for physicians, hospitals, medicines, treatments, and private insurance premiums. Skyrocketing costs will force more and more people into the “public option.” Meanwhile, the bills would slash reimbursements to Medicare Advantage plans, killing a private-insurance option now exercised and enjoyed by one-fourth of all seniors.
Broken promises. The pending legislation will not cover all the uninsured; it will not add to freedom of choice for consumers; it will not be “deficit-neutral”; it will not “bend the cost curve downward”; it will not prevent illegal aliens from receiving taxpayer-subsidized medical care; it will not prevent government payments from funding controversial procedures such as abortions; and it will not allow people to “keep their current coverage.” All of these are the loud promises of ObamaCare’s advocates; all are demonstrable falsehoods.
Instead, ObamaCare will do only one thing, which was the overt objective of its proponents from the outset: put the federal government in charge of the delivery of all health care in America.
A single-payer, government-run program of socialized medicine is the stated objective of those who designed this legislative monstrosity — from President Obama, to the vast coalition of unions and advocacy groups, to the congressional leaders who drafted these bills. They explicitly intend to bankrupt the private-insurance marketplace, so that only the government option remains. Far from adding “choice and competion,” then, ObamaCare aims at imposing on us a government health-care monopoly.
But only if we allow it to happen. Because this power-grab still can be stopped.
Congress remains deeply divided over many provisions of this legislation. If it passes, it only will be by a handful of votes. That means we can defeat this monstrosity by changing just a few minds. Now — this week — is the time for you to raise your voice and put on the pressure.
To contact your congressman, by phone, mail, or email, go here. And contact your two senators by going here.
Tell them the following, preferably putting the ideas into your own words:
The House and Senate bills will not create “universal, affordable insurance.” They instead would create a gargantuan, unaffordable new federal entitlement program. They would further explode our soaring deficits; hugely increase tax burdens on our ailing economy; create perverse incentives that would expand the demand for medical services, while discouraging and punishing the suppliers of medical care; and deprive Americans of true choice and competition, by imposing an endless stream of new “mandates” on individuals and employers. This legislation would destroy existing private health-insurance plans, and ultimately destroy the quality and affordability of health care in America.
This legislation is so flawed and destructive in principle that it cannot be “fixed” or amended; it must be scrapped in its entirety. True health-care reform is necessary, but it must be based on our free-market system — such as:
- allowing individuals to purchase insurance from companies across state lines, and letting them take that coverage with them when they change jobs;
- letting individuals buy high-deductible, low-cost catastrophic coverage, by freeing insurers from laws that force them to offer only costly, state-mandated provisions in their policies;
- enacting tort reform, to eliminate the costly practice of “defensive medicine.”
Such reforms would expand coverage to millions of the uninsured, while actually reducing costs to employers, policy-holders, and individual taxpayers.
I feel so strongly about this, that I cannot consider you for re-election unless you vote against this legislation, in any shape or form.
Whether or not you have ever contacted a congressman or senator, now is the time to do it. This week may be the last time we can influence the outcome on this issue.
Your health, your financial well-being, your liberty, and your nation’s future hang in the balance.
Please act today — then copy and/or direct this message to your family, friends, and associates.
Robert Bidinotto is former editor of The New Individualist, and is writing a book on the philosophical and mythological roots of environmentalism. His website is www.RobertTheWriter.com.
Monday, November 2, 2009
It's in the Listening, Stupid!
On Drudge tonight, there is a headline that Obama is getting skinny. Things aren't working. His approval ratings are going basically in one direction.
Why aren't things working? "I've got the skill. I know the art. But my smooth-talking isn't making the difference. Why not?"
"It's in the listening, stupid." Things are not working because Obama is not interested in what people are thinking and talking about. He wrongly believes that his power comes from the conversations he is speaking. They do not. He is completely controlled by the listening in the country, and if he is unable to speak into that, he loses the patience of his audience. And that is what is happening.
People are not stupid. Politicians and intellectuals of various types act as if they have some inside knowledge about life. When the government attempts to stimulate growth by borrowing and spending, for example, people know that it doesn't work in their lives so it isn't difficult to question whether this will work on a larger scale. When one loses a job, is it time to go borrow money? Whatever the hole one is in, borrowing money only makes it deeper. Wouldn't it be better to cut expenses, sell some things and create some operating room to produce a value that someone might pay you money for? Debt makes that process harder, logic tells me.
So unless a person is some kind of sycophant or wants to live in fantasy, he's going to be listening for how Obama and his Administration square themselves with reality. If, on the other hand, he hears Obama and his associates driving an agenda and not getting what the people are concerned about, then the people's experience is that they have not been heard and that Obama doesn't care about them.
Any ideas that fall on deaf ears go nowhere. One has to get what the ears want to hear and then his speaking will work wonders. But so far, the O is unwilling to find out what the ears want to hear. So they get more frustrated.
And, essentially, this explains the whole damn thing.
Obama is agenda driven. His powerful intention to push his agenda is what prevents him from hearing people's concerns. He seeks to dispell, even thwart, any attempts to reach him. When over a million people showed up on his lawn on September 12, he left town and acted like no one drove across country to Washington. He should have been down on that mall with his ear to the ground. Is it not clear that Obama is not interested in governing the people - all of them? But rather is scared of them and takes refuge in his toadies?
Reading a tabloid, Obama was reported to be smoking up to 2 packs a day. He's not getting the sleep he needs and is losing weight. He screams at his staff and makes impossible demands. At a recent public meeting a young boy asked, "Mr. President, why do people hate you so much?" Is this the question that is dogging him day and night?
Apparently Beck and Limbaugh are on O's enemies list. Why? He should be listening to them. They definitely do have their ear to the ground and know what is going on. That's why they have huge audiences - the very thing that Obama needs. Hmm. What's wrong with this picture, Mr. O?
Given that Obama is a personality, actually a celebrity personality, I could get why he would be concerned about such a question. As far as I can tell, he's never gotten any of his motivation from being a lawgiver nor a judge nor even a cop. He does like moralizing - those "I will always..." and "I will never..." statements - but his payoff is getting elected. He loves the attention and privilege (hotshot status) that comes with that. That looks to me to be the end of the story.
I don't see a President Obama who is on the side of humanity except in an old-fashioned, old country, anti-American kind of way. He takes sides and wants to take from one and give to another and revel in the power he has over people. He's not showing me any wisdom or even-handedness in the application of the law. He never mentions the subject. In the case of the Boston professor and the cop, he didn't even bother finding out what was going on. Rather, he immediately called the cop stupid and said that it is a known fact that cops profile blacks. This is the kind of thing that undermines the space people have for him. Those on the receiving end of those judgments don't like it and those on the other end get scared, not knowing where that kind of partisanship can lead.
But even with all of the negativity that he has drummed up over the months, he could change that quickly if he wanted. All he would have to do is set aside his agenda and start listening to people and their concerns. Seriously doing that, his solutions would likely start to dance with those concerns.
As it is, he's going to stress himself out and may even crack. If he's a puppet, which increasingly he looks to be, then he is not going to have any room to make adjustments. When Clinton learned this lesson after the Republicans took control of the Congress, he began to have some programs and policies that actually responded to what the country wanted and needed. But until he got the lesson, he was failing. Will Obama learn? Does he have the room to learn? Time will tell us.
Will The O grow? That is the question.
(Since writing this, I've seen two articles on listening. They are posted in the comments section. Perhaps O will begin to grasp this fundamental dynamic in any relationship. If not, the applause is going to thin out, man by man.)
Why aren't things working? "I've got the skill. I know the art. But my smooth-talking isn't making the difference. Why not?"
"It's in the listening, stupid." Things are not working because Obama is not interested in what people are thinking and talking about. He wrongly believes that his power comes from the conversations he is speaking. They do not. He is completely controlled by the listening in the country, and if he is unable to speak into that, he loses the patience of his audience. And that is what is happening.
People are not stupid. Politicians and intellectuals of various types act as if they have some inside knowledge about life. When the government attempts to stimulate growth by borrowing and spending, for example, people know that it doesn't work in their lives so it isn't difficult to question whether this will work on a larger scale. When one loses a job, is it time to go borrow money? Whatever the hole one is in, borrowing money only makes it deeper. Wouldn't it be better to cut expenses, sell some things and create some operating room to produce a value that someone might pay you money for? Debt makes that process harder, logic tells me.
So unless a person is some kind of sycophant or wants to live in fantasy, he's going to be listening for how Obama and his Administration square themselves with reality. If, on the other hand, he hears Obama and his associates driving an agenda and not getting what the people are concerned about, then the people's experience is that they have not been heard and that Obama doesn't care about them.
Any ideas that fall on deaf ears go nowhere. One has to get what the ears want to hear and then his speaking will work wonders. But so far, the O is unwilling to find out what the ears want to hear. So they get more frustrated.
And, essentially, this explains the whole damn thing.
Obama is agenda driven. His powerful intention to push his agenda is what prevents him from hearing people's concerns. He seeks to dispell, even thwart, any attempts to reach him. When over a million people showed up on his lawn on September 12, he left town and acted like no one drove across country to Washington. He should have been down on that mall with his ear to the ground. Is it not clear that Obama is not interested in governing the people - all of them? But rather is scared of them and takes refuge in his toadies?
Reading a tabloid, Obama was reported to be smoking up to 2 packs a day. He's not getting the sleep he needs and is losing weight. He screams at his staff and makes impossible demands. At a recent public meeting a young boy asked, "Mr. President, why do people hate you so much?" Is this the question that is dogging him day and night?
Apparently Beck and Limbaugh are on O's enemies list. Why? He should be listening to them. They definitely do have their ear to the ground and know what is going on. That's why they have huge audiences - the very thing that Obama needs. Hmm. What's wrong with this picture, Mr. O?
Given that Obama is a personality, actually a celebrity personality, I could get why he would be concerned about such a question. As far as I can tell, he's never gotten any of his motivation from being a lawgiver nor a judge nor even a cop. He does like moralizing - those "I will always..." and "I will never..." statements - but his payoff is getting elected. He loves the attention and privilege (hotshot status) that comes with that. That looks to me to be the end of the story.
I don't see a President Obama who is on the side of humanity except in an old-fashioned, old country, anti-American kind of way. He takes sides and wants to take from one and give to another and revel in the power he has over people. He's not showing me any wisdom or even-handedness in the application of the law. He never mentions the subject. In the case of the Boston professor and the cop, he didn't even bother finding out what was going on. Rather, he immediately called the cop stupid and said that it is a known fact that cops profile blacks. This is the kind of thing that undermines the space people have for him. Those on the receiving end of those judgments don't like it and those on the other end get scared, not knowing where that kind of partisanship can lead.
But even with all of the negativity that he has drummed up over the months, he could change that quickly if he wanted. All he would have to do is set aside his agenda and start listening to people and their concerns. Seriously doing that, his solutions would likely start to dance with those concerns.
As it is, he's going to stress himself out and may even crack. If he's a puppet, which increasingly he looks to be, then he is not going to have any room to make adjustments. When Clinton learned this lesson after the Republicans took control of the Congress, he began to have some programs and policies that actually responded to what the country wanted and needed. But until he got the lesson, he was failing. Will Obama learn? Does he have the room to learn? Time will tell us.
Will The O grow? That is the question.
(Since writing this, I've seen two articles on listening. They are posted in the comments section. Perhaps O will begin to grasp this fundamental dynamic in any relationship. If not, the applause is going to thin out, man by man.)
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