The American Principle 101

We now see that the top down politics that has come to a head in the Obama Administration is against human nature. Only the individual man knows what it takes to keep him looking forward to and wanting to take on life. (The moral is that which causes that desire in the individual human being. He must pursue happiness or his lust for life will die.) All orders and dictates from a top-down government chafe against that individual right. When it interferes too much, it must be changed as the Declaration of Independence makes clear.

The people of Vernon NJ are a beacon for what is possible and will need to take place all over this country. As it is learned in the incubators of liberty such as Vernon, so it shall grow into the full-fledged power of the possibility that only the United States has ever presented to mankind.

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness." -- Declaration of Independence, 1776

Awaken

One man awake,
Awakens another.
The second awakens
His next door brother.
The three awake can rouse a town
By turning
the whole place
Upside down

The many awake
Can cause such a fuss
It finally awakens the rest of us.
One man up,
With dawn in his eyes
Surely then
Multiplies

by Lawrence Tribble in the latter 1700s.

We are in America's third great awakening. The first begun by the Declaration of Independence led to the Revolutionary War. The second begun by the seceding Confederate States led to the freeing of the slaves and the securing of our union once again. The third begun by Ayn Rand's novel, Atlas Shrugged, is leading us to realize that we need to secure our identify as a nation of free men. This awakening is the shift from the collective to the individual as the ultimate source of moral authority and good in the world.

Politicians, the New Criminal Class

We are coming to a new realization in America: Politicians comprise the new Criminal Class. They decide everything about our lives from what we shall eat, how we use our property and how we shall spend our time. Apparently, all they care about is how to loot us for their purposes. Their rhetoric is the con's front which always proves to be a lie in the end. Even Michelle who advocates the right foods, takes every opportunity to stuff her face with French fries.

Apparently they take glee in impoverishing and disenfranchising their own people. Every success of theirs and their cronies is at our expense (Solyndra, e.g.) and they show no remorse for their heinous acts. They cultivate an alternate universe, oblivious to citizen violation and pain, much, most?, of which is because of them.

The idiots now are those who think they will now or ever could benefit from this criminal activity. All of these are now accessories to the crimes. They provide the complicity required to keep them in existence. When you see someone who argues for the politicians and holds out the hope that one of them will somehow save us from this scourge, you are talking to a person who can justify criminal actions.

This current state of affairs must now drive itself off the cliff, maybe taking liberty with it for 100, 200, 500 years.

If you notice, the thing that has the politician = the criminal is that he can tell you what to do with your property - all of it, from your body to your extra-body possessions. He does so with the threat of taking if from you, even your life itself. He has no right by nature to do this. Even if he has been granted that right in some measure by some people, that does not make it right with what life requires. Man-made documents and agreements are always subject, ultimately, to the laws of reality. It is this fact and the acceptance of this fact that has the politician be a criminal and advocate criminality. He does not check reality to make sure he is true to that and thus true to what life requires. He willfully departs from reality allowing, even encouraging, man to cannibalize man.

For the politician to become, for the first time in history, a man of honor, he will have to give up usurping individual rights. He will have to be a protector of every man's individual rights. No man can be entitled to live off the body and work of another man except by the agreement of that man. The honorable politician protects as a first principle, every human life's right to his life - at, by nature, the expense of no one else.

For this to happen on a consistent basis, there must be the separation of the economy from the state.

The role for a legitimate state is to protect individual rights. That's it. Every activity which it takes on must be for this purpose and must always prove that it is for this purpose. The army protects our borders because it is protecting the citizens-of-this-country's right to live their lives.

Even paying for the government's activities has to be voluntary. In other words, the government provides services - police, courts and a militia to protect the people's individual rights - and their value is such that citizens would want to pay for them. For example, the right to use the government's court would follow from paying a fee whenever you created and registered a contract with the government for future potential adjudication. The same principle of the government earning its money based on the value it offers would apply to every individual-rights-protecting service the government offers.

A lot of people think my position is ridiculous and not within the realm of possibility. "Government is always going to be this way," they say. They are telling me, in so many words, they will put up with a thief living in their house (which he is, you know), so long as they don't have to think about and work out a new system that honors individual rights. My answer? "May you rot in the hell of your own making. For me, I'm not interested."

JUDGMENT - The Missing Moral Principle

Who is the Ragnar Danneskjold* of our time? Who is calling the destroyers of value to account?

We live in a time of a giant sucking sound. The WEST is flushing itself down the toilet.

Why? It cannot pronounce moral judgment. When I say "it," I mean that the culture is in such a weakened state that a strong pronouncement of moral judgment to true matters up would be shouted down as unseemly. Given this state, the strong pronouncement will have to be yelled through a din of naysayers. Someone will hear it anyway. I promise you, I will hear it if it can be heard.

I dedicate this piece to Bosch Fawstin. He's fearless, especially in his fingering the contradictions and inhumanity of the Muslims, and I love him for that. I really liked his entry into the Twin Towers Goes Global contest. Maybe now they can get why people don't want the Ground Zero Mosque.

Along this line, I've been thinking of all the "brands" that are being diminished because the people who speak for and work to enhance those brands will not pronounce moral judgment against Obama who, highly associated with them, is taking them down with him.

Here's some: Democrats, Harvard, Columbia, Chicago, Illinois, Oprah, Unions, Blacks in general, and the USA. (The only one I care about supporting is the USA. The rest will have to earn my respect one man or institution at a time.)

Wouldn't it be something if a leader from Harvard came forward and said that he now sees, with Obama as its currently most famous product, the enormous cost of Affirmative Action? OR wouldn't if be astounding if a black leader came forward and said that it's time for blacks to stop acting like a "pack" that "goes along to get along" and call Obama to account for all of his violations of human freedom, the most precious of conditions for the people who knew and tell the stories of slavery? Wouldn't it be amazing if a Democrat denounced Obama for enacting policies destroying the economy stating that it is time to call him to account regardless that he is black? Or gosh, wouldn't it be something if someone would stand up for America and apologize to "the best within us" for "forgetting who we are," by letting Obama, our President, besmirch the ideal that quickens the beat of the human heart around the globe?

All of us are going to pay dearly for "going along" with Obama - the Con. Every brand associated with Obama will pay. Oprah has never been held as high as she was before she endorsed Obama. (It's interesting about Oprah. People loved her and were always talking about her when her program was geared to all people. Who is she now that Obama favors blacks over whites in instance after instance and she says nothing? Swiss cheese?)

Harvard and Columbia are being drug through the streets insofar as providing a solid education for real values. They are gaining the reputation of being an intellectual hot house that doesn't know what goes on in the real world.

Chicago and Illinois have been corrupt for a long time, but now they have taken on a real and dangerous quality that they didn't have before. Why? Obama thrived there.

America granted grace, which I don't think has been an entirely good thing since freedom is its own reward, to blacks because their ancestors were slaves. That's over. I called the grocery clerk to account where before I would have let her slide.

The thing that is so clearly missing in the public arena of our era is judgment. No one will pronounce it. No one will take action for a proper standard. No one in Congress is making a dent on the corruption that is overtaking our government. It is simply missing.

In the ever-present choice of wings or spine, we've chosen wings.

36"w x 24"h acrylic on canvas, 2004

Where is the spine. It doesn't exist in this soupy, slurpy world of words. Just words - words that mean nothing except to have you think they do. For every statement coming out of Obama's mouth, we have a video or audio clip of him saying the opposite. Insanity reigns. Obama, the Con, spins more words tonight in his Jobs Speech. Words, just words. Except they are costing us not only our treasure, but our moral vitality.

Obama may paint a socialist utopia, but we all know that it shall not happen. Never has, never will. Why would it? No one gives a damn. And, no one does because the government won't allow it. Who can care when you are regulated from morning 'til night and this plague is spreading faster than we can get rid of it?

All will stop when someone with a voice that can be heard pronounces moral judgment - the judgment that gives one's moral vitality a bracing jolt!**

Who among us possesses THE VOICE THAT CAN BE HEARD? That is who we are waiting for.

_______________________________

*Ragnar Danneskjold is a character in Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. He was a pirate for justice. He calculated the amount a businessmen deserved from his production and trade, because he earned by trading value for value. Then he would attack ships which the government used to transfer wealth from America to People's States around the globe. (Sound like Obama?) When he got the wealth on board, he took it to a place where it was held in account for the producer of it. It became available to him when he chose to take his power back, go on strike and renounce being a sacrificial lamb.

**Ayn Rand is the only one in my lifetime that has done this. And she did it the hard way. She earned it.

"Need" as the Ultimate Justification

I believe the liberal mind is a more socially accepted version of the criminal mind. Both justify taking other people's money and property for their purposes.

The human condition at bottom is that one must traverse the gap from "need" to "value produced" which satisfies the need. The need is generated by a living organism using its energy to maintain its life. That process, life, gives rise to needs which must be fulfilled if the life is to continue.



The blue arrow is "the gap." To mature as a human being means that one is able to navigate that gap and provide for his needs in a way that works while at the same time doesn't undermine his continued ability to provide for his needs.

The criminal mind and the liberal mind emphasize "need" as a lack - ultimately a lack of stuff or status. They think it unfair that the needy are not provided for. They believe that it is fundamentally unjust that everyone is not provided for - that it is some kind of cosmic injustice and that the world, because of this, is basically unfair. Because this is unjust, they say, they feel justified to correct this injustice and that is why they can, with a straight face, advocate taking your stuff, destroy a country such as America that has a system that allows people to traverse the gap of being human and create value, giving away other people's values (money) to poor people and poor nations, etc., etc.

Every time they open their mouths, they reinforce the "goodness," the "appropriateness" of being needy. When Obama brings some poor person or crippled person or in some way needy person onto the stage with him, he wants to hear about their neediness - the more needy the better - and he adds importance to their being needy. (I find this embarrassing for the person he is using.) He gives them his ear and kindness, attention and ultimately some money or goods. The one thing he doesn't do is talk about how they resourcefully went from need to results that satisfied their need. To focus on that would mean he would have no reason to exert his power over us and take our stuff.

Because Obama and Michelle, the current point people for this view, and the rest of the liberals do this, I consider them and their kind the embodiment of evil in mankind. (I'm not talking about evil in the Judeo-Christian Ten Commandments manner. Because man possesses volition, he chooses his course of action. He can choose to get across that gap, using his talents and mind to do that or not and this is his fundamental choice - to live as a human being or not.) There is nothing evil about having needs. We all have them by virtue of being alive. Granting them ultimate status and holding them aloft rather than supporting getting across the gap - by being creative and productive - is evil.

The ultimate joke, though, is on those that hold aloft need as the ultimate in importance. Although evil appears potent because it counts on fear and causes havoc in human lives by destroying their values and it always seems pleasurable in the short run, it is ultimately impotent. That is because it is not about developing the means for producing real value and satisfying needs. To continue, the mind besieged by evil must feed off the people who do traverse the gap since they are the ones who know how to get from need to value produced. (Frederick Douglas made clear that taking care of the needy for its own sake provides nothing lasting: "A man, at times, gets something for nothing, but it will, in his hands, amount to nothing.")

When I hear/see Obama, Michelle, the Pope, mother Theresa when she was alive, Pelosi, Schumer, Reid, Weiner, Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, and thousands of other such people, I see evil incarnate. They foster a world that doesn't and cannot work, and they work to create parasites wherever they go. There is nothing more hideous that that. (If you think Mother Theresa was humane, she had millions of dollars and would not spend a frickin' dime on having the dying people she cared for have some measure of comfort as they went through the dying process. She could have conditioned the air because she could have easily have afforded it. Why? Because she thought suffering was the way to becoming whole - and holy, i.e., coming to know god. Source: The Missionary Position: Mother Theresa in theory and Practice by Christopher Hitchens.)

The criminal mind is always justified to commit his crime. Why? Because to his mind, the world is not just and did not treat him fairly for him to properly mature when he was dependent on others. To him, this shouldn't be. (I wonder if some portion of humanity is pissed because their God or their ancestors' God threw they out of the Garden of Eden? There everything was provided. Now they must work for the values they need.) He stays needy rather than find a way to clear away his fears and his grievances such that he become a value producer.

A person stuck in need ends up hating the good (value production) for being the good. (The good is value production and virtue is action which produces value.) Hating the good for being the good is envy and this mental orientation is sourcing the destruction of values now upon us.

So how do we get through this? Create and produce value. In everything you do. You will love it and will feel so nourished by it.

The torch represents the value you seek to produce that
lights your way. The stiffened arm is your moral strength
to get on with it and produce the result!

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

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

The Insanity of Government Health Care

For all those that think that public health care, i.e., Government Health Care, is good, this man, Representative Rogers of Michigan, is very clear as to what the issues are and what’s more important, the insanity of the plan and the callous, arrogant, disgusting attitude of the government toward the people of the United States.

I suppose there are some sweet little old ladies out there advocating government health care who we think are soooo innocent that they would never be so evil and anti-human as to advocate a system of institutionalized evil - which is what government health care is. It’s time to call them, all of them, no matter what form they come in, to account. They are not your friend, not my friend, not humanity’s friend.

There should be no Government Health Care. None. Freedom which provides innovation in every aspect of that field is the answer if we want health care. The last anyone should want is the dead, corrupt, entangled, unaccountable, violently costly, political hand of government. I can't think of anything worse than that. No man should have to live with that institution directing his life. It is simply anti-human and sucks the life out of HIS life.

Apparently during this time in our history, a large number of people want the "mommy" state. Whatever that means, one thing is for sure. The state will not fulfill on that requirement. It has none of the characteristics of a mommy unless your view of a mommy is a "Mommy Dearest."

There is a place for government, but a proper government is nothing like the government we have today. For one thing - and for a teaser - it must not be able to arbitrarily levy taxes. There has to be another, voluntary way for the state to raise money. It must, as all of us must, be created to depend on enrollment and registration, not force of arms to obtain money from the people who it is designed to protect.

Great minds ought to be creating how, and the system required for a voluntary payment to government to work. Then it should be tried in small, and then increasingly larger, jurisdictions until it gets perfected as a working method for the government to raise money. We are never going to be politically free until we get rid of the arbitrary force of Caesar. I'm not persuaded by the Bible's command to "render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's." I might be persuaded just to keep myself from having to go to prison, but I definitely am not persuaded as a design principle for a moral, principled and just government.

The Fear-based Government

Never have I seen such a fear-based Administration and government. The US Government has truly become public enemy #1. Give a man motivated by fear a gun and trouble is likely to ensue. The fact that the government is the final authority and possesses and uses guns as its ultimate and distinguishing characteristic, means that we are in big trouble.

Anyone who understands freedom and the abundance it provides for all those who participate must realize that we are on a path which is 180 degrees from that course. We have gotten a man and wife in the White House which have a score to settle. That score is based in hatred and hatred is based on fear. Instead of seeing an expansion of freedom such that we all can continue to learn what life requires and which nourishes us, we are seeing rules and regulations on everything. Instead of men welcoming disagreement in order to learn more about how life works and what is true, this Administration is refusing to talk to or about anyone who disagrees with them. This, I assert, implies massive fear.

It's funny to watch Obama pretend that Fox News, e.g., is not even a news organization. This guy is massively out of touch with reality. Further he is counting on the dumbbells of this country to give him the approval he needs. No one who is interested in life and living a good life can afford to live this way. Obama thinks he can. Hmmm. Is he that stupid? I don't think he is innately stupid. I do think, rather, that fear will make one stupid. Fear of people asking questions and perhaps doubting that he is really The One must be terrifying.

Clearly we are in a battle: Freedom vs. Tyranny. Barack Obama is the first snake oil salesman of the 21st century. He has the pleasant manner and the "sweet" family that keep a lot of people lulled into an "everything will be ok" state of mind.

Believe me, it is not OK and it will not turn out well. And at the rate that things are happening, it will not take long for the consequences of this horrendous, people-fearing, Democratically controlled government to become apparent.

The wealthy people may be able to get out of the country and not be controlled by this tyranny. But for the middle class and the underclass, this promises to be one huge concentration camp, border to border.

Sounds horrendous, doesn't it? If you show me one fact, one marker, that the direction of this government is any way other than toward tyranny, I would like to see it or hear it. I assert that the people who are still believing that this Administration is acting in their interests are asleep - deeply asleep. They are deeply invested in not rocking any boats. They hate conflict and argumentation, even disgruntlement. Their wallpaper patterns consist of babies, kittens and puppies. Or, as Rand once said, their lives "are about baby blankets and hams." They would rather ride blithely in a boat headed for the falls than jump overboard and, even though difficult, work to get to a solid bank.

The solid bank IS one's knowledge of how the world works. Not how one hopes it will work. Not how one prays it will turn out. I mean how the world works. It means being grounded in how human being operates, what political freedom is and why it is important that the political system be consistent with the possibility of human being, not the control of human being. (If you think that control of human being is the way of the future, you need to get your ass on a psychologist's couch to see if you can discover why you think that.) One must have, one way or the other, the philosophical/moral basis for the requirements for a society such that a man can freely live in it. And during these trying times, that knowledge cannot be implicit. It must be conscious and explicit. Otherwise, you don't really know and know that you. Without that, one is destined to drift, float and go over the falls. Without that there can be no access to the will to speak out, to resist and finally take the action which can, if successful, save yours and your loved ones' lives.

Do you think this is a dire message? Your god-damned right this is a dire message. Do you think I'm typing this up because I want to be ostracized as a pariah? No, I'm not. I am saying this because I'm a canary in the coal mine. I understand these things. The value of freedom and the morality that works for freedom has been something which was awakened by my father when I was a kid. I could see that he cared about such things and got disgusted when people didn't act according to the principles which honored people in their rights and as a person. He could get morally outraged at injustice. I liked that. I admired that. I became that.

I know what freedom is. I am very aware of it vs. when it is not present or being threatened to be taken away. I worked for 40 years to increase the distinctions I have around this topic. I am not one who is going to blithely slip into a life where those distinctions are missing. It's not me.

If you lived on a desert island, you would be free because there would be no one else on the island. A free country, a political system whose value and organization is for freedom, is living as free in society as one is free on a desert island. In a free society, people recognize and honor the right of every person to live his life. Nothing impinges upon him other than the principle by which he chooses to live which is, to honor the right of every man, woman and child which includes him, to be free of everyone else. He can do anything he wants except initiate force against another person or his property. A free man can interact with any other man so long as he can obtain the agreement of that person for such action. A lot of this is in the unsaid that governs society, but really it's quite simple.

But now, people are primarily scared. The big motivator is fear. The blacks have been buying the victim conversation for decades and that is a fear-based conversation. Many women and gays have been generating a fear-based conversation too. With all education controlled by the government, we are now realizing that our children have no knowledge of core values. Consequently anytime their actions are threatened or something isn't magically on the table before them, they have no interior to which to repair. All they have is fear - and then the sob stories.

So we have many millions of people who are hanging onto Obama as some kind of hope. Hope for what? Their good feeling won't be interrupted? Crumbs and chump change? What exactly? That their race will have some power and won't be a barrier for them? What is it? I don't see that hope.

We know that government health care will produce a poverty of health services and care. If that comes to pass, right now we are on the mountain top insofar as the kinds of health care that an average person can obtain. The wealth of health care that we now have will be going the way of the vinyl record. Fear shrinks life. Love expands it. Tyranny and fear go together. Freedom and love go together. Tyranny and poverty go together. Freedom and wealth go together.

American freedom and wealth is about to end. It has been easy for a middle class person to live well in the United States. Eighteen months ago, I was commenting on this very fact. That is ending and it is soon going to be hard. A year from now, that will be apparent to more people although I have to admit that I am experiencing it now.

Architecture, especially so for my small business, is one of the first things to be affected by the larger economic picture. I can tell you with certainty that nothing is happening. One thing that is happening is that people who have wanted to build are still wanting to build. As this drags out, they look for the slightest clue that it would be good to move forward. So if there is any easing, I expect it to be a boom, at least for a short period of time. It could be that in 2 to 3 months I may be working as much as I can physically work.

With the kinds of things going on with the government now, I will have to have everything be put in a form that can have some power in the dry period that will inevitably follow. Damn it, I wanted a flat screen TV. That, however, may not be the thing to be buying. I don't want to be one of those dunderheads that go with the flow and wake up one day shocked within an inch of my life. I know that experience. Not good. This clearly is going to take some thought.

We are in and heading for the eye of a fear-based hurricane. Do what you can to stop it. I think stopping the government from instituting government health care, a bureaucrat who is designated to sit between your mind and your body, would put an enormous crimp in the Democrats' push for total power. I think Government Health Care means that the government, not you, owns your life. It means that you do not possess the right to your life for the simple reason that you will be unable to act in your own interest when it comes to your body. You will get the chump change. The choices that would have been possible under freedom won't be. Simple as that. Only the government's interest will matter in that world.

The Cap and Trade bill definitely needs to be defeated. That will tax you unto death. Thousands of dollars in higher prices caused by the government's tax on energy will change your life. Man's role in the climate is not understood. Frankly, I don't think it amounts to much in the face of the enormous forces of a much larger system in which we and our planet lives. Read Heaven and Earth by Ian Plimer for a scenario that will place the earth in a much larger context than the global "warmist," "climate changers" have. I think Al Gore is an idiot. He's a person whose purpose is to accumulate wealth via political means.

The five primary arguments I have against the global "warmist" positions are these: 1) The science is not there. Al Gore and the desperate global warmists are not careful about the facts and they are only interested in pushing people to a conclusion that will get them the control they want. I saw An Inconvenient Truth and I was appalled at how disrespectful it was to a thinking person. It was really not about the earth at all. It was about getting the audience to like Al Gore. (Now isn't that an interesting motivation for a politician? Oh my, I should be surprised. Sounds like someone else I know.)

2) Environmentalists lie - boldly and outrageously. They lie about polar bears, for one thing. They also lie about a lot of other things. Many of these lies have been documented. They are not about the Environment. They are about religion. This is not the first time in history that the earth and nature has become the touchstone of a religion. People live on the earth and need the earth as a resource to maintain their lives. But, their lives are not to be sacrificed for the earth or nature. That would turn the whole way things work upside down. But this is the way an Environmentalist thinks. He would rather save a 2" fish than provide food for people. Something wrong here. When I see him be the first to lay down his life for a fish, he will have some credibility. Until then? No.

Another very interesting fact is that private property owners take care of the environment much better than government ever has or will. One of the reasons is that government, as it now operates, is set up on a double standard. Everything you cannot do, they can. I've read articles about tree farms and such and the private farms are far better than the government owned lands. People generally love their property and they do not go around with the intent to harm it. Also, property is an investment and it works to maintain its value. On the other hand, the government could care less. It is oriented toward power and political spoils, not real life and real property. (Of course if you organize a march on Washington with a million or more people, you might get their attention to do something. Not necessarily though.) The great devastation of land is in the public lands. Since no one owns it, the thing to do is get as much as one can while he has the access. Or to pass a law such that it cannot respond to the natural laws that govern it. There is no future that one is worried about. The future for someone with access to public lands is far more dependent on one's ass-kissing ability than one's nature-caring ability.

3) Resources never go out of existence. They are always in a process of transformation of their form. Today's trash is a potential resource tomorrow. (Actually it is a resource right now, but until we have worked out how to use it, it is in a latent form.) E = m times c squared. Energy and mass are intimately related. One transforms into the other. As we are better able to control this process, we will be able to make these transformations ourselves. There is no need to be "spiritually" worried that we are going to run out of resources. Not possible.

I think that eventually all the manufacturing may be located on other planets and asteroids. Earth, where we live, will be a country club.

4) Pollution is not something that is necessarily damaging. In a free society, pollution becomes a problem if it damages someone's property - their body or their farm, if you get my point. No one gets to dump their weekly trash on my side of the fence, the property line. If I think that factory X is polluting my property, all I have to do is show that to be true. I do that by discovering the facts that show that. Until one has discovered those facts, there is no evidence that Factory X is polluting my property. (In today's world, people try everything but the facts to get people to stop doing something. The tools are sob stories, social pressure and unearned guilt. That's the tools we now use. Nasty tools. They don't work and we don't learn anything about how things work except how to better use those tools which makes our social world an increasingly nasty place to live. Not good.)

5) The free market responds to change the fastest of any human invention ever. It is constantly changing and the entrepreneur is always on the lookout for how better to meet the needs and wants of potential consumers. If the climate changes, the last thing we need are rigid laws decided by a bunch of politicians sitting in Washington or State Capitols trying to figure out how to change the laws so they and their backers can make a buck. This is corrupt. The free market, if free, will handle the changes we are always dealing with and seeking to provide for and it will do it magnificently and quickly. That is inherent in its nature. Nothing to fear. It is imperative to separate economy and state.

There are many areas to fight the current government. The control of speech is one area. Net neutrality is an attempt to place the internet under government control rendering it unable to respond to what people want. Obama's czars have various plans for controlling talk radio, disagreeable cable channels, etc., etc. All of this is very bad for us because it makes it much harder for us to get information and adjust our view of the world as we need to do for our survival.

Do what you can to prepare. The very best thing you can do is school yourself as to why fear doesn't work and you should give it up. I'm 69 years old and I would give up Medicare in a nanosecond for a free market in health care. I guarantee you I would be far more likely to get the health care I need if the market is free. Government control of health care will, if it comes about, strangle health care. If government saw to it that freedom increased, there would be nurses in drug stores and grocery stores taking care of most of the basic questions we have about health care. Health care would be abundant. Instead, Obama, Pelosi, Reid and company trot out some sob story (what I call sore picking) which they think is sufficient reason to put the noose around the nation's neck. What a Carnival of Arrogant Asses we have in Washington.