No, Shirley! Let's Try That One More Time!

The story this week is that of Shirley Sherrod talking about her judging people by race and transforming to a person who judges them by class.

Beep!

Both wrong Shirley! Both lead to the same consequences: No freedom and the theft of one man's life (I know it looks like a benefit at first) at the expense of another man's life - as public policy.

The Obama Administration immediately cast itself into a deeper HELL by falling all over itself to apologize for its quick judgment. Whoops! Another quick judgment! And just as bad!

Mr. Intelligence jumped from the racism of Sherrod to the thieving of Sherwood. So Robin Hood is the good?

Puh-leaze! If that's the case then it ought to be quite alright to relieve Obama of his millions. And Soros of his. And let me see how many there are that ought to cleanse their souls.

Not only is this pure hypocrisy as advocacy, it is simply wrong. To succeed, to excel, to achieve, and yes, to become wealthy is something that a person ought to want if he is actually seeking to better himself. Money is one measure. It's not the only one. Michael Jordan is an example of wealth - in basketball talent and works. Michelangelo is an example of wealth - in artistic talent and works. Others are example of wealth - in marketing talent and works, in entertainment talent and works, in manufacturing talent and works, etc.

No wealth, no future. So what Sherrod did by robbing the rich and giving to the poor was rob the poor man of his future. The underlying lesson was to be rich meant he would be robbed and probably no better off if he were to become rich. "Oh well, being rich was never my thing anyway."

None of this is America as conceived. None of it. It is as foreign to America as the Mandarin of China or Bantu of South Africa. Here, every man is protected in his life. He can work and earn property and live his life. It's his. He has a right to his life - ALL OF IT. Not a tiny piece of it. All of life and all that he sees is possible for life. This is America.

The thing that America used to do well but has literally been taxed out of doing is taking care of those that need a helping hand. Once the government started doing this, it has grown an industry of its own and it is no longer related to life. It's become the death industry - surviving on the blood of the poor for its existence. It survives on the sob stories of the poor. Their blood is the fertilizer that they must constantly give up so that the government can justify its need for the blood of the rich. What a horrible industry. Hideous to the hilt. I want to puke.

We are under a scourge. One that has been growing for a hundred years. It's the scourge of the little people - the people who hold individual human beings as small. The little people's biggest fear is that people can actually be great and large as a possibility that we can all aspire to. Rather than let man yearn and grow and fill these possibilities of his imagination and shape our government to allow this freedom (which is what it was designed to do), the little people strap down everything, regulate everything, tax everything, and in one way or another constrict everything and bend everything until is is some distorted, tortured, grotesque mis-shape of what it could be. This is the real pain of living in the United States right now.

When this passes, and only then, can we exhale.

And then...and then... we can inhale the sweet air of life once again.

In Defiance of the Law of Cause and Effect

How many times have we heard this same refrain? Act against your nature, people! Our President pretends that somehow, when people have a purpose and build their life on it, they won't chose to act consistent with that purpose - that they can be seduced into changing their purpose - or more like this, "because of me, my charm and my idealism, you will want to change". It garners no credit for anyone to believe (and hope) for such a magical "transformation." It isn't generous. It isn't intelligent. It's stupid. Why? Because it defies a law of nature.

What law? The Law of Cause and Effect!

Listening to John Allison III of BB&T fame,(a recorded speech I possess) he said it this way. The Law of Cause and Effect: Everything in nature has a nature and it acts consistent with its nature. Tigers are tigers, stones are stones and people are people.

So what is the nature of a person? At root, a person is consistent with his purpose. One cannot operate for a minute without a purpose of some kind. An idea that comes into one's conscious mind is the event which unites spirit with body, mental with physical to cause a result of some kind.

Suppose a person laid in bed until he had some idea that he wanted to get up. He can say all kinds of things to himself - like, "I've got to get up because I've got to go to work. Yah, no one should have to work and because I have to, life is hell. I'm consigned to the burden and drudgery of life" - in other words, he may consider himself completely at the effect of, a victim of life. Of course there are zillions of positive reasons for getting up too.

No matter, what had to happen - regardless of the reason - was that an idea had to pop into the person's head and that became his purpose for the next few minutes or hours or longer. Whether he's willing to be responsible for that is another matter in this discussion. One simply could not operate without a purpose - at even the most rudimentary level above the automatic functions that the body provides so long as it lives.

But, creating a purpose for which one lives his life is more than a momentary undertaking. That goes far beyond waiting until one is struck by an idea or a feeling. It is something that one can create in the largest sense and generated from one's loves and one's ideals for an eminently fulfilling life. Or it is something one can create from the unquestioned beliefs he got from his childhood - but to the same scope. It can provide motive for a moment, a month or a lifetime.

A purpose sets the aspect of one's personal nature - his character. And this doesn't change in the broadest sense. It is possible to change it, but not without a lot of serious self-examination and work extending oneself into new, uncharted areas of his life.


When any leader has gotten to where he is, by virtue of his purpose and by enrolling, willingly or unwillingly, millions of followers, and further, when his purpose is rooted in the soil of centuries, that person is not going to change. To pretend otherwise and enroll the American people on that idea is immensely, horrendously disingenuous. (It could only be done with such people who defer to faith as a valid mental action, be it in a specifically religious form or in a modern mystical form. Anyone who lives in and is oriented to the real, everyday world and is working to manifest their larger and long-range purposes and have some capacity to integrate ideas and the events of life, simply would not buy this idea. One has to revert to the "magical thinking" of childhood [a stage in an individual's development] in order to consider this a real possibility.)

And yet, this is the foreign policy of this Administration that we are asked to swallow.

The cartoonists are reacting. (I got these from Sultan Knish's blog.)

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

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.

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!

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.