Will the Real Terrorist Please Stand Up?

Now that terrorism has been downgraded to "man caused disasters" and the Global War on Terrorism to "Overseas Contingency Operations", the only one causing terror, if we mean by that "intense fear or dread" looks to be the Obama Administration.

The first instance I noticed was the verbal use of the image of pitchforks by Obama when he met with bankers regarding bonuses. He then called out ACORN to terrorize the employees of AIG with threatening messages and visitations by thugs to their homes.

Now we see this:



Obama even talks like a terrorist. Of course it is someone else's fault that this happened.

Since Air Force One is his plane and he completely commands its use, the least he could have done was own up to that fact when a reporter asked him a question. He said it was a mistake (Really? How would we know?) and that he learned of it about the same time the media did. Never did he say he had approved its use nor did he say that he had an insubordinate in his ranks which he would handle. Nor did he apologize in the interview. Juvenile.

Obama has paralyzed the economy being a six-shootin' economic "cowboy" (in the sense that the Left castigated Bush) who says one thing, reverses it the next day, and lays his gun on the table in every dealing with business leaders.

If he isn't The Terrorist, what is he?

The Subterfuge Strategy

Operating via crisis is the means of the Obama Administration and the Congress to get their programs enacted. The crises are merely the cloak for what is really happening and they are manufactured to distract you from the action in the background. So what part will a manufactured crisis in the area of health care provide justification for? And why is the Department of Homeland Security front and center on this one?

This from Instapundit.

SWINE FLU: Nothing new. “The fact of the matter is, swine flu has been hopping from pigs to humans for decades, sometimes causing disease, sometimes not. . . . But I don’t think we need to worry about this pandemic too much, because there’s one thing to keep in mind when news of a unique flu strain breaks: perspective. As of this writing, 80 people in Mexico have succumbed to swine flu. By comparison, the CDC estimates that 36,000 people in the United States die each year of influenza-related illnesses. And in spite of this, we in the medical community still have a hard time convincing people to get their flu shots.”

And what is the DHS report trying to scare people into believing that the real terrorists are veterans and right-wingers about? Remember, this is the foreground.

And what was Obama's European tour really about? We saw the surface. Have you read his pledges to destroy American sovereignty? Why all the money going to the IMF? Do you really think it is to help some impoverished third-world country? Or is he once again counting on your willingness to sacrifice for your (not mine) moral ideal to give him and the IMF a pass?

And what about blaming businessmen for the economic problems? This is the foreground. What's in the background?

Or why is there so much emphasis on Obama's speaking ability and his smooth, soothing oratory to engender trust when so many of the people he has hired or wanted to hire are crooks and don't pay their taxes?

Now what is this idea that Obama wants to grant 3% of our Gross Domestic Product to government sponsored science. Do you get what that amount is? Last year's GDP in current dollars was 14.264 trillion. That is 14,264 billions or 14,264,000 millions. 3% of that is 428 billions which is 428,000 millions. What is this money really going to?

And we still don't know what the money for the bailouts and the budget is going for? All inside a crisis, of course.

I'm sure you know of more. The list grows daily. Thus far, I'm sticking with my thesis: If Obama or his Administration says something is A, it is about non-A. I don't see any countervailing evidence.

The cardinal characteristic of a Community Organizer is subterfuge. And, that, I say, is this Administration's strategy. Crisis, Confusion, and Steal the Store!

When will the suckers stand up?

So Much Verbiage, So Little Time

I find myself trying to explain what is currently going on with our government. I resort to talking about Atlas Shrugged, economic principles and history, philosophic history and the playing out of those ideas, and just plain fretting and fuming over the course of events with my attendance at the Atlanta Tea Party as my latest expression.

This cartoon sums it up succintly. John Cox, the artist and author of the cartoon, is a genius here.

FREEDOM or FORCE?

CHOOSE!

Who in the hell are YOU? This is what I want to know.

Are YOU going to voluntarily associate and deal with people or force them to your will? And by extension, what are you asking of your government - if there is still any meaning to your answer having any effect. THIS IS the fundamental question. All the rest are the justifications with reference to knowledge or morality or just your feelings, as if the stars in the heavens give a damn.

No vaunted intelligence is required to answer this question. Children and teenagers can. And we, as a society, can.

This is the question that must become the essence of our struggle. The Tea Parties. The Republican Party, if it is to distinguish itself from the fascist (currently known as progressive) Democratic Party - and which it so far has not. The Health Industry. The Automotive Industry. The Financial Industry. The Energy Industry. The Education Industry. Maybe even the News Industry.

Who are you? Which do you choose?

Tea Parties - The Heart of the Matter

Here's Dr. John Lewis of Ayn Rand Institute speaking at the Charlotte, NC Tea Party.

The Republicans Are Not Big Enough for Freedom

And the Democrats are virulently anti-freedom!

As the Tea Parties have unfolded, I have been disgusted with the talk emanating from Fox News - especially Sean Hannity. Although he pretends to not be beholden to the Republican players, which may be true, he advocates "conservative" values associated most strongly with the Republicans - you know, the ones who went belly-up on November 4.

At his broadcast from Atlanta, one of the first things he featured was a little girl's sign - "Keep Your Hand out of My Piggy Bank." And practically ever other sentence had the phrase "leave our children and grandchildren's money alone" or "we don't want this debt for our families, our kids and our grand-kids." He loves to speak of "future generations" and "generational debt."

Newt echoed this in New York City, although not as much, but still unable to get to the heart of the matter.

All of this misses the point and distances me from these people working so hard to be a spokesman for liberty and the sanctity of one's property, the essence of the tea party demonstrations. The truth? They are not up to the job.

By the way, I did not get that the Tea Party was Republican or Democrat. I got that it was producers, people who work for and earn their living. My experience of them was that people were bright, friendly, courteous, funny, serious and above all, safe. For sure, they had no attributes of a mob - far different than Obama's contrived ACORN demonstrations.

Freedom mean one owns his life and his property, starting with his body and building whatever he can for his life. He chooses his purpose(s) and gets to work. He keeps what he earns and keeps on building. It's not a difficult concept.

Freedom is valuable for people without families as it is with those with families since it is, bottom line, the freedom to use your own mind for your own survival. But above all, it is not for future generations. It is for right now - for my life while I'm living - not what I hope some niece, nephew, kid or grandkid will do with his life. That is up to him. If I want to give somebody's kid or my kids a good start, I do so because that is MY value. That fact has nothing to do with my kid's values. It's my life right now that counts and is my access to my bringing forth my vision which may or may not include future generations.

The Soviets sold socialism on the future great society that they would become. So has every tyranny. Hannity is right in line with this idea. Further he is a collectivist, just as the socialists are. He touts family, country and old-time religion and wouldn't hesitate to advocate a tax or pass a law (i.e., use the gun to compel you) for these values regardless of your right to your life and property. For him it is a matter of degree, not a matter of principle.

One of the most disgusting stories to come out of the wars in the Mideast is how the Muslim warrior sends a child or a women into the line of fire counting on the enemy to withhold its fire. This gives him the opportunity to kill you while you are dealing with yourself about what to do. Sometimes the "innocents" carry the bomb.

Hannity sends out his "innocents", unwilling to powerfully stand for the value of his own life as an end in itself. He trots out his stories of kids and future generations like that is what our lives are for. Well, he's wrong. His story is the one he thinks we cannot refuse.

Of course, the Democrats are masters of this. They too are no better than Hamas. Practically every speech of Obama and Hillary during the campaign started off with a sob story. Yup, put those "innocents" out there.

Where are the real men? The real individuals who can stand for something? Haven't we had enough of snakes in the grass?

I didn't see this at the Atlanta Tea Party because I left before the Hannity program began. I decided to watch it on TV. Later, a friend told me he was planning to watch Hannity a bit before he left, but when the crowd began yelling "Hann-i-tee, Hann-i-tee,...", not unlike "O-bam-a, O-bam-a,..." and all he did was lap it up rather than redirect it into "Lib-er-tee, Lib-er-tee,..." or something the crowd was there for and, allegedly, he was there for, he had to leave. This convinced me that Hannity and others wanting to direct the Tea Party protests are off - WAY OFF!

For him, a tea party is an afternoon chat where you have eat little spread-filled, crustless white bread sandwiches and drink tea. For Liberty's sake, Hannity, go home and stay there.

The Tea Party is about Individual Liberty and its concomitant, the Right to Own Property and use it only for one's own purposes. Individual Liberty is the name for the value and of what freedom consists. It is the freedom to act in society according to the dictates of one's own mind so long as one does not violate that same right of others. The Right to Property is the structural and real means for that to happen. It's my life and what I earn is my property - all of it. That's it and that's all it is. Everything else having life worth living - and there is a miraculous abundance of stuff including world peace - follows.

Letter to Sean Hannity, Fox Cable Channel

Dear Sean,

You are incorrect that this is a Christian country in terms of its basic principles. The truth is this country was founded on individual rights - the Bill of Rights - and anyone can believe whatever he wants to believe. It's true that many of the people in America were Christian and held Christian values at the time of the founding. The fact that the Constitution uses the word Creator could mean anything - one's parents, the wonder of the creation of a new life or the metaphysical identity of a human being as a distinct entity of all that exists - it is whatever you say it is. It specifically does not reference Christianity.

One of the primary concerns of Jefferson was to separate the church from the state. Thus the state has no authority to establish or require anything about religion - any religion.

The thing that concerns me in Obama's statement is that he singled out Christianity. Why didn't he hold up the ideal of religious freedom which is exactly the ideal that will support a peaceful world and it would be a mark of leadership to stand for that principle.

My concern is that his making the statement the way he did is for the purpose of linking the Tea Parties with riled up conservatives screaming about Christianity. Now is the time that this issue gets clear, otherwise the conservatives are going to be unable to forge a new, more fundamental base for a reconstituted Republican Party or some other party. The Republicans have been covert socialists, bringing to law many, many socialist programs.

Bush is a prime example of this. His faith based programs are a direct threat to the freedom of religion. When the leaders of the churches realize their money comes from Washington and take care of that source rather than their members as the source of their existence, they will lose them. Further, taking the money from the government is an endorsement of theft - the theft that is involved in every socialist program. So, the churches involved in the government's faith-based programs render themselves hypocrites, jettisoning integrity.

I'm an economic conservative and I am so damned tired of linking conservative political values to religion. It is poison and always has me wary of the Republicans. On the other hand, the anti-morality, government-is-the-beginning-and-end-of-human-life position of the Democrats and the left leaves me running for cover. Any politician worth his salt would restate the principle of religious freedom and take the religion issue off the table.

The minute the Conservatives jettison the religious issue, the sooner they will start to connect with people on the valid basis of individual freedom. Politically, the big threat is fascism - the trappings of individualism but the complete control of their activities via the government. This is the real threat - more clearly now than at any time in my lifetime - and I'm sick of it as are the rest of the people I know who stand for individual freedom. If the Tea Party movement connects to Christianity in a primary way, I will not support it. Simple as that.

I'm standing for individual rights and that's it. This is my stand - no more and no less. I want the government to protect my rights, the reason it was originally instituted. The Constitution says this and it is still valid although dismissed by almost everyone with a public voice. No one is arguing principle. Rather they are wrangling in the issues of political power - my gang over your gang. Argue principle and authentic political power will follow.

Sincerely,
Principlex

Following the writing of this letter to Mr. Hannity. I came across this video which makes my point in a larger context - the context of individual rights.

Shut Up

As we get closer to the Tea Parties next week, the dynamic is getting clearer. The Left is scared of cowboys, guns and Christian fanatics, their caricature of people who want to live in freedom and have their property respected - not taken from them and given to those that don't have it, in the name of "fairness."

Rather than confront these issues intellectually and in debate, the Left smears, works to destroy people (witness Palin, who they have treated hideously and their attempts with Limbaugh and many others) and if necessary, call out the ACORNiacs, the pitchforks, for a demonstration. During the campaign no one could say anything against Obama that wasn't interpreted as racism by someone on the Left. In the universities, the sacred home of the Left, the dialogue is very restricted by rigid politcal correctness. A documentary, Indoctrinate U, demonstrates this in spades. Shut up! names the issue and is empowering from the standpoint that someone has finally named it.

The Lesson

This cartoon is by John Cox. He's a good cartoonist and has been producing them for many years. Check out Cox & Forkum. Buy some of John's art or hire him as an illustrator.
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Let's see, I'm to inflate my tires, buy cars at his gov't companies, and today, buy a house and save $1600 to $2000 a year. Oh my.

On the other hand, if I look to him as C-in-C for guidance in a pirate capture of my captain, he has nothing to say - not even that someone else is handling it. Jeez!

Why an American Does Not Bow to Kings

Obama violated a principle of being an American. He bowed to the Saudi King. Why?

As leader, he deals in symbol and meaning. Like it or not, he has that role and whatever he does is interpreted thusly - for good or bad.

An American is a free man. He conducts himself as an equal with all men, neither better nor lesser. Every man, including himself, in an American's eyes, has a right to his life. He does not exist by the permission of any other man nor does any other man exist by his permission. For this reason, he meets people head on.

What was your purpose, Mr. Obama? Why did you not approach the King as an equal?

The fact that the White House said he did not bow is unacceptable. Are we no longer to believe our eyes? Is that dictated too?



My take: I do not see Obama as an American in his sense of life. He has not once mentioned individual rights nor freedom. Never. He speaks in fog-bound terms of fairness and workers accentuating the weak over the powerful. He deals with people in one of two ways: I have more power than you or you have more power than me. ("Hey, I won!")

Notice, he never admires a person for his achievements. Rather he draws attention to people's miseries and failures.

He is not nor will ever be a leader of all the people. He is mentally unable to do it. He cannot conceptualize that all men are equal in the fact that they are men and have a right to their life and given that, are unique.

His moralizing (intimidation and guilt) and dictatorial pronouncements (force) - power over others - is the only way he can deal with men that frighten him. It's either that or bended knee. He is showing us his orientation to people and to life.

Adulation means everything to him. When that is present he is momentarily free of his internal battle - me vs. them. It's pathetic.

America, we have a Boy President!

Mary Poppins

The Wall Street Journal published an editorial this morning entitled "The Nuclear Illusionist." It ran this Mary Poppins style picture I show here.

"Rules must be binding. Violations must be punished. Words must mean something."

"So declared President Obama Sunday in Prague regarding North Korea's missile launch, which America's U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice added was a direct violation of U.N. resolutions. At which point, the Security Council spent hours debating its nonresponse, thus proving to nuclear proliferators everywhere that rules aren't binding, violations won't be punished, and words of warning mean nothing." (WSJ)

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What is going on? We get the eloquent straight-forward rhetoric on the one hand and the facts on the other hand. The two could not be more contradictory.

This is a clear example of the rule that I've come to follow in relation to Obama:

If Obama says A, it means non-A.

So why does he speak one way and do another? Is he just a carefree child in a Mary Poppins world who plays with words like supercalifragilisticexpialidocious to see how they, and thus he, can create an effect? Are they "just words" for which he has no purpose for them in reality to which they refer? Or does he intend to create an effect and think we will be so taken with his theater that we will never hold him to account for the actual results?

Or is their something sinister behind lil' ol' innocent Barock?

Except for gaining the Presidency, which he did masterfully if you consider it an isolated phenomenon, the only other thing he has used his political offices for is the destruction of existing legal structures, institutions or people. I don't see that he cares whether his programs work. Apparently, never has he cared about his results which are strewn as wreckage behind him.

His mind is completely anti-conceptual and I'm persuaded he doesn't even have a Self. Were it not for adulation, he would evaporate into the ether. If there is a there there, where is it?

And what does this say about those that still think he cares about them or the country? Would a man of self esteem, the head of the greatest country on earth in terms of its vision for political life that sought to free all men to live the life they could envision bow to another leader or would he stand proudly for who he is and who he represents?

My Administration is The Only Thing between You and the Pitchforks

Obama introduces brutality into our public conversation!

As this becomes more apparent, people will be compelled to choose: Dictatorship, Force and Brutality OR the Rights of Free Men!
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Capitalism and altruism are incompatible. Make no mistake about it - and tell it to your Republican friends: capitalism and altruism cannot coexist in the same man or in the same society.

Tell it to anyone who attempts to justify capitalism on the ground of the "public good" or the "general welfare" or "service to society" or the benefit it brings to the poor. All these things are true, but they are the by-products, the secondary consequences of capitalism - not its goal, purpose or moral justification. The moral justification of capitalism is man's right to exist for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself; it is the recognition that man - every man - is an end in himself, not a means to the ends of others, not a sacrificial animal serving anyone's need.

There are only two means by which men can deal with one another: guns or logic. Force or persuasion. Those who know that they cannot win by means of logic, have always resorted to guns.

If service and self-sacrifice are a moral ideal, and if the "selfishness" of human nature prevents men from leaping into sacrificial furnaces, there is no reason - no reason that a mystic moralist could name - why a dictator should not push them in at the point of bayonets - for their own good, or the good of humanity, or the good of posterity, or the good of the latest bureaucrat's latest five-year plan. There is no reason that they can name to oppose any atrocity. The value of a man's life? His right to exist? His right to pursue his own happiness? These are concepts that belong to individualism and capitalism - to the antithesis of the altruist morality.

No man or mystical elite can hold a whole society subjugated to their arbitrary assertions, edicts and whims, without the use of force. Anyone who resorts to the formula: "It's so, because I say so," will have to reach for a gun, sooner or later.

(Ayn Rand, "Faith and Force: The Destroyers of the Modern World", Philosophy: Who Needs It, 1989)

My Letter to U.S. Congressman Lewis

I received this email letter from Congressman John Lewis who represents the Fifth District in Georgia.

Needless to say, I've had it with the irrational spending and the values that the current administration are attempting to institute. They are by a rational standard completely wrong-headed and will cause problems far greater than anything we are now experiencing. The reasons?

First, Obama does not govern all men equally which causes problems in itself. He singles out people who want to make money and have been successful at it as if that in itself is a crime. At the same time he knows that the money he needs must come from their successes which includes all the people they hire and pay all the way down to the lawn keepers of their buildings.

Second, he insists on bold sweeping changes of everything and with wild abandon as to the real consequences. You can see some of this wild talk in Mr. Lewis's letter.

Third, he acts like he is guaranteeing the quality of everything. Yes, I said everything - from being involved in banking to selling cars to making sure you inflate your tires. This in itself shows me how unbearably ignorant and lacking in integrity he is. There is no way in hell that he will ever be able to deliver on any of these promises although he will have a story about how he delivered on them in one or two individual cases.

The man is bullshit from top to bottom, front to back. Even if the "stimulus" throws a wad of money into the economy which may have an immediate effect, it is not designed to do anything except inflate the money supply, saddle people with mountains of debt and strap all creative and industrious people with restrictions that will prevent them from rationally responding to the circumstances they find themselves in. Everything he is doing is anti-reason and anti-man's life. I predict he will be a huge failure even though he will attempt every form of smoke and mirrors to have you believe otherwise. He's slick, but no one can fool mother nature - including the supremely arrogant Obama.

Here's most of the letter from Congressman Lewis.

Dear Principlex:

"Thank you for taking the time to write me and express your views on the budget for Fiscal Year 2010 recently proposed by President Obama. I appreciate hearing from you and having the benefit of your views.

"Producing a federal budget is an important and lengthy process, and ultimately, a statement of our shared national priorities and ideals. This preliminary budget proposal, outlined by President Obama in February of this year, will change national spending priorities and outlays. (That's for sure.) This budget makes important investments in clean energy, education, healthcare, and new infrastructure. It sets lofty goals to double the nation's renewable energy capacity and improve energy efficiency of homes. (The truth is it seeks to cause America to buckle at the knees for two reason: Energy will be very costly and it will systematically undermine all existing systems. It is clearly anti-industrial.) It will create jobs installing both solar panels and wind turbines, manufacturing fuel efficient cars, and will move us towards the goal of a cleaner, safer planet. (There is no conclusive proof that there is a single reason that our existing energy production is harming the planet and to radically change the systems we have without conclusive proof is grandly stupid.)

"The budget makes immediate investments to computerize all health records in the United States within 5 years, and will fundamentally reform our health care system, delivering quality care at reduced costs. (It will reform how the government controls you which is what it is really designed to do. The government knows nothing about the practice medicine in reality. It knows a lot about how to control you thought.) (This is a flat lie as it will seek to control health care costs, lowering its quality and therefore quality of the lives who use it and provide it. You may as well go have brain surgery at the post office.) Money will be allocated to upgrade school equipment and buildings, and systems will be put in place to make sure that college tuition remains affordable for everyone. Vital infrastructure, including crumbling roads, bridges and schools, will be rebuilt, while broadband service lines will be extended all across America. Money will be allocated ensure that our veterans are well taken care of.

"Government must work for the American people, and I believe that President Obama has put forth a comprehensive plan to move our country forward in an ever changing world. This budget brings new levels of honesty and fairness to the Government (Well we certainly see no harbinger of that in the Obama Administration), and attempts to restore a basic sense of fairness to our tax code (Since when it is fair to take from one at the point of a gun in the name of giving to another? So have we given Obama the right to be the world's biggest thief?). I know that this budget is but one step on the path towards the reinvigoration of our economy and the job is far from done.

Congressman John Lewis
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Dear Congressman Lewis,

There is but one avenue to prosperity - productivity. Just as I cannot borrow and spend my way to prosperity, neither can the country. Thus, your position is untenable by anyone who is rational and gives the matter some thought in terms of the fundamental laws of nature.

The correct course is to cut government expenses, leaving as much of the citizens' earnings in their hands in order to support them to be productive. Further, the chains of onerous and ubiquitous regulations need to be removed. Only crimes of one man or group of men initiating force or fraud against another need to be kept. All else is anti-man, anti-freedom and anti-prosperity.

The only thing you ever did was fight for the rights of the black man and for this I commend you and revere you. But that work is now done. And, the road you are now on is actually returning the black man, the white man, the red man and, in fact, all men to slavery. You are now on the side of the plantation owners who kept the slaves, not on the side of a man's right to be a free man.

For this reason, I will work to seek your unseating from your position as U.S. Congressman. You can count on it.

Sincerely yours,
Principlex

Slack for Black - Over

With Obama's election victory, America showed that it could, in fact, elect our first black President. This was an historic victory and to my mind says something about American culture, particularly non-blacks who voted in droves to see to it that America got beyond a harped-on racial divide.

Stop-Change-Start

Since the 60's and 70s, although the Jim Crow laws were banished and blacks were fully free men, new laws were passed which gave preference to blacks in the name of diversity. This was an attempt by some people who felt guilty for America's past to redeem themselves. What it did, since it was an example of injustice in reverse, was exact payment from blacks and whites. Blacks enrolled wholesale in the idea that racism, and their consequent being less than, was still a powerful determinant of their plight and that was by virtue of whites being white. This was all supposed to be unconscious on whites part and their existence as such was evidence of this subconscious racism.

This unleashed thugs such as Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, morally supported and apologized for by many others, who extorted millions from corporations in order to prove that they were redeeming themselves from this non-objective, original-sin version of racism.

Thus this notion spread through the culture creating a sub-conscious unearned guilt among many whites. (I'm sure it created sub-conscious unearned guilt in many blacks too; those who didn't want nor expect to be excepted from reality.) How it manifested itself was for whites to cut blacks slack rather than have them meet the standards that work for a particular industry or job. What this meant for whites is "Don't call blacks to account or you will be seen as racist." With stories on TV, in the newspapers and on the Internet, it was like a rainstorm. No one chooses a rainstorm, he just gets wet. He puts up with this and goes on about his business. Nevertheless, unless he specifically, consciously negates what he hears, he gets wet.

Since Obama's inauguration, he has taken bold action - the primary one being to spend the taxpayers' money long into the future and to convert the freedom of individuals and businesses to extensions of and property of the state. ("Of course you own your life. We just tell you what to do with it." Doesn't that have a familiar ring to it? Don't you blacks recognize this refrain?) Thus his actions are stripping the power of every citizen, including blacks, to live the life he wants to live by using his property and resources to fashion his life.

Last week on a particularly bad news day when Obama was acting the buffoon to the max taking still worse actions in terms of the economic principles that any idiot can see don't work when he looks at them from the actions he has to take in his very own life, I had had enough.

First of all, I do not agree with Obama's agenda, rushing everything without debate, unwilling to hear legitimate differences about his plans; and doing much under the cover of extraneous issues and people bashing. I consider him incredibly arrogant, dictatorial and imperial, and don't like him one bit. His actions tell me he is intending to drive America off a cliff. He violates the values I hold dear on every level - political and method of behaving. So, get that.

In the wake of that, I went to the grocery. I bought a single item and I wanted to handle the payment for that in a particular way. I told the black cashier what I wanted to do. She understood what I explained to her and agreed to it. I wanted to keep the cash in my wallet, so I wanted to use the amount I had in my debit account first and then add only what I had to add from my cash to keep my account solvent.

So, I looked at the amount she tallied and gave her some cash. She subtracted that and when I looked at the amount still owed, I realized I needed to give her some more cash. So I did.

She turned around to put the cash in the register and ring up a lower amount to come from the debit account. At that point I executed the debit transaction.

Whoops! She had not tallied the additional cash I gave her and so the debit overdrew my account. I blew up. Pissed to the max.

"What happened? Didn't you ring up the rest of the cash?"

She just looked at me. "No."

"Why?"

"I apologize."

In a loud voice, loud enough to be heard plainly in a circle with a 20 foot radius, I said, "You cost me 35 dollars."

"I apologize," she said.

I said, "Apologize hell! I'm going to the manager and have it taken out your pay check." With that I picked up my stuff and "harrumphed" over to the manager.

While all of this was going on, I expected the 3 or 4 people standing in line to start screaming "racist" at the top of their lungs. I wasn't sure what would happen and definitely was concerned about what I may have unleashed.

I told the manager what happened. I told her I yelled at the cashier, intending by shouting to rearrange her molecules because she didn't do what she said she would do. Calming down, I told her that I was thinking I may be able to correct the situation if I went to the bank and deposited some money. She said she would talk to the cashier about the matter and I told the manager that if I was unable to recover from the error, I would be back to submit my bill.

This ended my cutting slack for black. Whatever guilt I had unconsciously taken living in America was over.

That evening I had great energy. Truly, this was a breakthrough.

I wasn't fully happy with my public display however. It's not my usual way of behaving and I am sure I will apply other ways to accomplish the same end in future circumstances. I didn't lay a finger on the cashier which I was in no way tempted to do. You got to begin somewhere and so I did.

Last night I went to the grocery again. I noticed I was there differently. I was looking around at the blacks who work there and, specifically, I was looking at them as to whether they were doing their jobs and exhibiting competence. A new awareness was present.

Obama has caused this - probably unwittingly. His job is way bigger than the color of his skin. And, it is by the criteria of his position as President that he is now being judged - just as any other President would be. And that is exactly the criteria by which anyone should be judged insofar as we deal with people on a daily basis. There are other contexts for judging people for sure, but in the public context - when people are working, taking care of customers and doing their jobs, it is by the standard of what that job requires and implies that we should call them to account.

So be it. This is freedom for all people. Racism has never been nor will ever be anything other than treating a person according to the color of his skin rather than by his conduct and his character. If Obama's Presidency is ending the scourge of a racism that one never consciously embraced nor acted upon, then this is a very good thing.


"There is no escape from justice, nothing can be unearned and unpaid for in the universe, neither in matter nor in spirit – and if the guilty do not pay, then the innocent have to pay it." -Hank Rearden, Atlas Shrugged

Obama's Moral Drivel

At his appearance on Jay Leno (By the way, wasn't Leno a complete ass or what? The most exciting day in his whole life? I hate to see people prostrating themselves before anyone. Whatever that was, it wasn't a statement of admiration) Obama said he wants to take the country back to the moral values that built this country.

Since when does stealing people blind represent a value that builds anything? Since when does saying one thing and doing another represent a value that builds anything? Since when does smiling and acting coy before the doting millions represent a value that builds anything? Since when does throwing the minister that you adored for 20 years under the bus represent a value that builds anything? Since when does sealing the records of one's past represent a value that builds anything? Since when does hiring a right-hand man who openly disrespects the outgoing President represent a value that builds anything? Since when does hiring or attempting to hire people who have not paid their taxes and not stand out as law abiding, upstanding citizens building anything? Since when does a man who does not know the difference between what America has always stood for, even though she has made mistakes and corrected many of them, and the depravity of dictators and authoritarian societies represents a value that builds anything?

The gap between reality and fantasy is so great with Obama, if you actually listen to and think about what he says, that it is mind-boggling.

Only on one premise does any of this make sense. He knows exactly what he is intending for America and all the lying and deceit is meant to keep the unthinking, hope-filled people off guard and those who would gladly live off whatever he can take and hand to them mollified. He is intending to take America down and deliver it without power to the wolves of the world. He will call that international cooperation. He is wrong.

Obama is, in my estimation, the most evil of all the men in the world at this point in time. The scope and effect of his evil is staggering to contemplate - and not just us, but the whole world. Believe me, the people who he claims he is out to help will get trampled in the coming rush to escape his clutches.

Anyone who buys this kind of drivel or who doesn't buy it but won't speak out against it deserves the coming results. Above all, collectivist societies are not good societies. Preying on others is raised to an art form as one group devours another. You think people are negative now, this is only the beginning as the cooperation and integration caused by freedom devolve to grabbing the means to force another to whatever one thinks is the solution. I love the outrage that people are expressing, but there isn't a one that is screaming, "LET THE PEOPLE GO FREE." No, they all have their form of the chains we should wear and they all want to use the gun of government to cause that.

And believe me, they do not know the answer. No one knows the particular answer. The best one can do is know the philosophical answer - that freedom for people to use their minds, which is the basic means of survival and which they are going to do even with the chains they are wearing, produces the only moral and good result. It must since for man to live, he must be moral and choose life. He has to by nature and he has no choice in this matter except that if he doesn't, he will make it harder to live and eventually will cause his own death.

Obama says he wants to stop the blaming. Bull! He is so full of shit. Blaming, and manipulation, will be raised to a new art form of human expression. It won't be fun. Notice how Obama himself uses it by having his minions working overtime finding new people to blame, people that are not even involved in causing the errors he is making and people who distract his followers from those real causes.

All of his talk is aimed at one thing. Whatever you can see and think you know, he wants to obliterate. He is working overtime to rob you of sight. The blind, the weak, the helpless are the one's he talks about as worthy of his work. He wants you blind, weak and helpless so that you will think he is doing a good thing. This is Obama's evil.

What is a seeing man to do? Extricate yourself from him. Pronounce moral judgement against him in an effort to keep your sight. You have to keep your own mind functioning and it takes a hefty effort to do so. Expend the effort. Do the work. Take care of yourself, the end and ultimate purpose of your life. Do not get entangled in his trap of beguiling talk and style. He's smooth. He's playing the role.

But it is a con so big that it is beyond belief and that is why people believe it. To believe the opposite seems petty, small and divisive and well, "What do I know anyway." Believe me you know what you know. Stand on that and don't look back. 2 + 2 does equal 4!

Obama's Perfidy

Tonight, Obama was out of Washington DC where his Administration has plunged the city into a mob mentality where Congressmen have called for heads and passed a law violating the purpose of law - namely to apply equally to all people. His government is out of control and the country is getting angry - very angry.

Tonight, Obama appeared on Jay Leno's show. He schmoozed with Jay and the audience. He spoke with great confidence of things he knows little about like finances and electric cars. He threw in stories of his daughters to provide the warm fuzzy feeling needed to bathe the uncritical masses - who cheered wildly.

It's clear to me that this man's confidence relies on one thing: he has America conned. The poll approval he enjoyed after the election and inauguration is falling faster than Bush or Clinton. When those percentages fall below 40% and keep sinking, we are going to see a different Obama. Then it will be anger and imperiousness, which is already present, alternating with trying desparately to get his groove back or the blues.

A man who clings to his teleprompter like a binky is not someone speaking from fundamental conviction. He knows that won't sell. (Hint: His fundamental conviction is something like Rev. Wright's and Bill Ayers'.)

He said he wants to get back to the morality which made this country great. And that's right after a month of stealing you and your children blind of untold trillions at the point of gun. What are we supposed to believe that morality is? Honest production or unlimited theft?

There in one thing Obama is not: Moral. That's the last thing on his agenda. Fred Barnes of the magazine, The Standard, wrote: "Doing the opposite. Obama insists he's not in favor of big government, then proposes a 10-year budget with vast amounts of new spending and a vastly expanded role for government. He denounces distractions that keep everyone from focusing on significant issues, but his White House aides cause a huge controversy by calling Rush Limbaugh the leader of the Republican Party. He promises bipartisanship but doesn't practice it. He's against earmarks but refuses to call on Congress to strip them from the 'omnibus' spending bill. He's the enemy of 'business as usual' in Washington, but the way he conducts his presidency is business as usual. He's for making 'tough choices,' but doesn't make many. He's for 'fiscal responsibility' but...well, you get the drift."

Tonight he talked about wanting to get rid of the climate of blame in Washington while his staff works overtime blaming Limbaugh, Bush, Cheney and 6 or 7 others for his problems and being divisive. Do as I say, not as I do.

We now know that whatever Obama says, it's not that.

His affable presence with Leno so starkly clashed with the reality he has created in Washington and the country it is astonishing and defies description. I could only wonder if he is insane.

How can a man be this duplicitous, this callous, this utterly cruel? How?

I'll tell you how. Obama is working to transform the United States from a country based on the principles of political freedom to one based on the principles of slavery - slavery to the government. That's the only consistent thing going on.

His actions make sense in one way. He creates diversions and crises, all the while smooth talkin' us, and while we and the news outlets are preoccupied with those diversions and crises, he slips laws through Congress just like the bailout bill and the budget - no time to read them, no debate and costly as hell. This is what's up for healthcare and energy.

Start "reading" the strategy in the background and see how the foreground camouflages that. When you are sufficiently worked up, make a sign and join a Tea Party. Grow this thing until he breaks out the tanks. Like MLK was able to accomplish, we will then be able to witness who this man really is.

The Root of the Matter

RATIONAL SELF-INTEREST or SELF-SACRIFICE,

TO BE or NOT TO BE,

that is the question.

This morning, thanks to the Wall Street Journal, Yaron Brook, president and executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute, presented this editorial below.

Never has the difference between two philosophies been so apparent in the United States to discerning observers as it is today given that Obama's actions always kill off the individual in favor of the group. I've repeatedly spoken against Obama philosophically as well as against his imperious ruler style.

I find him so offensive because he rolls over vast swaths of people on the one hand and favors others on the other. He makes no pretense of this. A president of all the people, he is not. To have him speaking for our country alternates between disgust and terror. I feel like I'm on a drunken "joy ride" with an extremely reckless driver.

Further, he doesn't care about human nature. He doesn't even see it. There is no universality in man. He thinks that this is not an issue in his "us vs. them" world. He's going to elevate the "us" and vanquish the "them."

The clash of these two opposing philsophies, particularly ethics, is going to continue. But this is THE battle - the real deal - and either we are going to resolve it FOR all human life in society or AGAINST all human life in society. All of life is entwined and actually it is an all or nothing undertaking.

IS RAND RELEVANT?

By YARON BROOK

Ayn Rand died more than a quarter of a century ago, yet her name appears regularly in discussions of our current economic turmoil. Pundits including Rush Limbaugh and Rick Santelli urge listeners to read her books, and her magnum opus, "Atlas Shrugged," is selling at a faster rate today than at any time during its 51-year history.

There's a reason. In "Atlas," Rand tells the story of the U.S. economy crumbling under the weight of crushing government interventions and regulations. Meanwhile, blaming greed and the free market, Washington responds with more controls that only deepen the crisis. Sound familiar?

The novel's eerily prophetic nature is no coincidence. "If you understand the dominant philosophy of a society," Rand wrote elsewhere in "Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal," "you can predict its course." Economic crises and runaway government power grabs don't just happen by themselves; they are the product of the philosophical ideas prevalent in a society -- particularly its dominant moral ideas.

Why do we accept the budget-busting costs of a welfare state? Because it implements the moral ideal of self-sacrifice to the needy. Why do so few protest the endless regulatory burdens placed on businessmen? Because businessmen are pursuing their self-interest, which we have been taught is dangerous and immoral. Why did the government go on a crusade to promote "affordable housing," which meant forcing banks to make loans to unqualified home buyers? Because we believe people need to be homeowners, whether or not they can afford to pay for houses.

The message is always the same: "Selfishness is evil; sacrifice for the needs of others is good." But Rand said this message is wrong -- selfishness, rather than being evil, is a virtue. By this she did not mean exploiting others à la Bernie Madoff. Selfishness -- that is, concern with one's genuine, long-range interest -- she wrote, required a man to think, to produce, and to prosper by trading with others voluntarily to mutual benefit.

Rand also noted that only an ethic of rational selfishness can justify the pursuit of profit that is the basis of capitalism -- and that so long as self-interest is tainted by moral suspicion, the profit motive will continue to take the rap for every imaginable (or imagined) social ill and economic disaster. Just look how our present crisis has been attributed to the free market instead of government intervention -- and how proposed solutions inevitably involve yet more government intervention to rein in the pursuit of self-interest.

Rand offered us a way out -- to fight for a morality of rational self-interest, and for capitalism, the system which is its expression. And that is the source of her relevance today.

The Heart of Obama

Here is an article by Daniel Henninger that appears in the Wall Street Journal this morning. It gets to the heart of Obama's purpose and THE MAJOR REASON I stand four-square against him as President of the United States. What the article below does not pursue are the wider implications of Obama's policy and direction. Obama's campaign is not just a campaign against wealth, it is a campaign against success - each and every success. Why?

Obama is not distinguishing between those who earned their money honestly, providing a valued product that people want. If he were to do so, his attack would be against the crooked wealthy and uphold the social principle that no man has the right to initiate force or fraud against another. No. His attack is against success without qualification, period!

What does success depend on? It depends on the abilities one has to produce products of widely seen value - value so great that many, many people want to buy what has been produced. Production is not just the production of a material product. It is also, and in fact, depends upon intellectual productions including ideas and art.

All production from the making of a bowl of soup to an airplane depends upon man's basic means of survival - his mind. It depends upon being able to excell in math or history or medicine or surgery or building or reading (even remembering what your mother said) in any of a thousand pursuits. Beyond that, great financial success depends on grasping how to get those products out to many people. Thus it depends on marketing and salesmanship and negotiations of all kinds. The really successful are good at many things or they understand and apply the principles which attract to their organizations those who have those talents.

All of the standard of living we enjoy is dependent upon this. Obama is attacking all of this - your children's success in school, your success in cooking a meal, success of any kind.

It doesn't look like that especially if you are blinded by Obamamania or envy. However, if I say "Men are stupid," I have included myself. If I say "Men are greedy," I have included myself. If I say "Men are evil," I have included myself. If I say "The world sucks," I have included my world. In other words anything we say is also part and parcel of the larger concept and thereby applies to me, my friends, my family, my work associates. If I think my cat is devious and say "Cats are devious," I apply it to all cats. If I say at home, "Money is the root of all evil," then I am telling my children to not earn money unless you want to be evil.

Human beings who indulge a compartmentalized mind make a psychological error which results in an intellectual mistake, actually a MORAL mistake, that the values they seek are not connected to wider values. If a man cannot succeed then why be good at math? Or production? Or marketing? Or networking? Why be good at anything? In Obama's world it won't matter because you will be punished if you succeed.

Now the truth is, The Obama Principle cannot be practiced. If you were to attempt it, you would have to screw up you evening meal, turn every social interaction into a bummer, add 2+2 and get something other than 4, miss every basketball shot and screw up driving your car from point A to point B.

Since it cannot be practiced and one live at all, what does it do? To the extent one likes Obama and his programs and doesn't consciously reject him/them, he lives within them and, by osmosis, takes on guilt for his successes. And this is the big bonanza of the Obama Administration. If a person accept an unearned guilt, once he does, Obama has him by the you-know-what. Now he can play him like a fiddle. He is attacking him at his root and he will have diminished his self-esteem.

Is there any possiblity that this is an error in Obama's thinking and he has no vicious intent? Whatever I could say positive about Obama, this is not such a thing. Why? From his teenage years onward, he has dwelt in the halls of revenge - the erroneous philosophy of Karl Marx. Add to this the maliciousness of Alinsky and later the Broward-Piven strategy, and it all adds up to what we are seeing. Listening to the 20-year hatred of Reverend Wright is no mistake in Obama's life. Perhaps in the 30s when it was thought that Marxism could work, it would have been possible to forgive him this. But this is not the 30s and millions of lives, probably nearing a hundred million, have been starved and slaughtered due to precisely this idea.

This is exactly how evil he is. I see no evidence for him playing you and me any other way. Further I don't care how smooth he is, how calm he is in the middle of a crisis, how physically attractive he is, the man is pure poison given his position. There is no hope for Obama nor his policies unless he has a transformational moment. It ain't gonna happen.

Obama is the interstate highway back to the Dark Ages and the morality of duty. Duty means to follow a moral law because you cannot relate to it. It means to follow it whether there is any pleasure or benefit in it for you or not. In fact, you are unable to prove that you are moral under this injunction unless you get no pleasure or positive result from it. This is the spiritual dead end of human being. It is the adoption of failure because it is failure. It is adoption within yourself of the bad, the corrupt, the immoral, the unhappy, the weak, the handicapped, the losers, the beggars and the depraved because they are that. It is to hold up the opposite of achievement, happiness, love, joy, success, wealth, winning, strength and skill as the moral ideal. It is the worship of death.

I won't stand for this because I cannot - without immediately committing spiritual, and ultimately physical, suicide.

America is asleep. Wake up!!


• MARCH 12, 2009
The Obama Rosetta Stone
• By DANIEL HENNINGER


Barack Obama has written two famous, widely read books of autobiography -- "Dreams from My Father" and "The Audacity of Hope." Let me introduce his third, a book that will touch everyone's life: "A New Era of Responsibility: Renewing America's Promise. The President's Budget and Fiscal Preview" (Government Printing Office, 141 pages, $26; free on the Web). This is the U.S. budget for laymen, and it's a must read.

Turn immediately to page 11. There sits a chart called Figure 9. This is the Rosetta Stone to the presidential mind of Barack Obama. Memorize Figure 9, and you will never be confused. Not happy, perhaps, but not confused.

One finds many charts in a federal budget, most attributed to such deep mines of data as the Census Bureau or the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The one on page 11 is attributed to "Piketty and Saez."

Either you know instantly what "Piketty and Saez" means, or you don't. If you do, you spent the past two years working to get Barack Obama into the White House. If you don't, their posse has a six-week head start on you.

Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, French economists, are rock stars of the intellectual left. Their specialty is "earnings inequality" and "wealth concentration."

Messrs. Piketty and Saez have produced the most politically potent squiggle along an axis since Arthur Laffer drew his famous curve on a napkin in the mid-1970s. Laffer's was an economic argument for lowering tax rates for everyone. Piketty-Saez is a moral argument for raising taxes on the rich.

As described in Mr. Obama's budget, these two economists have shown that by the end of 2004, the top 1% of taxpayers "took home" more than 22% of total national income. This trend, Fig. 9 notes, began during the Reagan presidency, skyrocketed through the Clinton years, dipped after George Bush beat Al Gore, then marched upward. Widening its own definition of money-grubbers, the budget says the top 10% of households "held" 70% of total wealth.

Alan Reynolds of the Cato Institute criticized the Piketty-Saez study on these pages in October 2007. Whatever its merits, their "Top 1%" chart has become a totemic obsession in progressive policy circles.

Turn to page five of Mr. Obama's federal budget, and one may read these commentaries on the top 1% datum:

"While middle-class families have been playing by the rules, living up to their responsibilities as neighbors and citizens, those at the commanding heights of our economy have not."

"Prudent investments in education, clean energy, health care and infrastructure were sacrificed for huge tax cuts for the wealthy and well-connected."

"There's nothing wrong with making money, but there is something wrong when we allow the playing field to be tilted so far in the favor of so few. . . . It's a legacy of irresponsibility, and it is our duty to change it."

Mr. Obama made clear in the campaign his intention to raise taxes on this income class by letting the Bush tax cuts expire. What is becoming clearer as his presidency unfolds is that something deeper is underway here than merely using higher taxes to fund his policy goals in health, education and energy.

The "top 1%" isn't just going to pay for these policies. Many of them would assent to that. The rancorous language used to describe these taxpayers makes it clear that as a matter of public policy they will be made to "pay for" the fact of their wealth -- no matter how many of them worked honestly and honorably to produce it. No Democratic president in 60 years has been this explicit.

Complaints have emerged recently, on the right and left, that the $787 billion stimulus bill will produce less growth and jobs than planned because too much of it goes to social programs and transfer payments, or "weak" Keynesian stimulus. The administration's Romer-Bernstein study on the stimulus estimated by the end of next year it would increase jobs by 3.6 million and GDP by 3.7%.

One of the first technical examinations of the Romer-Bernstein projections has been released by Hoover Institution economists John Cogan and John Taylor, and German economists Tobias Cwik and Volker Wieland. They conclude that the growth and jobs stimulus will be only one-sixth what the administration predicts. In part, this is because people anticipate that the spending burst will have to be financed by higher taxes and so will spend less than anticipated.

New York's Mike Bloomberg, mayor of an economically damaged city, has noted the pointlessness of raising taxes on the rich when their wealth is plummeting, or of eliminating the charitable deduction for people who have less to give anyway.

True but irrelevant. Mayor Bloomberg should read the Obama budget chapter, "Inheriting a Legacy of Misplaced Priorities." The economy as most people understand it was a second-order concern of the stimulus strategy. The primary goal is a massive re-flowing of "wealth" from the top toward the bottom, to stop the moral failure they see in the budget's "Top One Percent of Earners" chart.

The White House says its goal is simple "fairness." That may be, as they understand fairness. But Figure 9 makes it clear that for the top earners, there will be blood. This presidency is going to be an act of retribution. In the words of the third book from Mr. Obama, "it is our duty to change it."

If you care to, write to henninger@wsj.com

The Unseen Coming Tsunami

No comment. Gold looks good!

Uncle Sam's Plantation

One of the most frustrating things about the election - in talking to blacks and liberals - is that they could not see that Obama wanted to put them and the rest of us on his plantation with him as the master. For over twenty years he had schooled himself in, associated with people of very specific ideas and placed in practice where he could Marxist/socialist practices. In case after case, he sought to increase citizen dependency on the government - in the name of the greater good, fairness and equal opportunity.

No one I know who voted for Obama tried to find out about Obama. He is an extremely consistent man in working for his ideas and to this day the liberals and Obama voters I know will not question the ideas that fuel him. He said in his campaign what he wanted to do and most people didn't believe him since he promised on both sides of the fence depending on who he was talking to. They who gave him a pass thought he would be a pragmatist and switch back and forth to please the wider public. This has not been the case.

Back to the issue? Do they that voted for him really want slavery? That's what we are getting - in spades - and in bold, very fast moves on his part. This is nothing short of a coup d'etat and it is not the first one that was accomplished by a democracy.

A friend found this article and sent it to me. It is written by Star Parker, a female African-American syndicated columnist. In researching her a bit, I can already see that I am not in complete agreement with her political ideas. But on this issue, she gets it and explains it in direct terms - a benefit for us all. SCB

Back on Uncle Sam's plantation

Star Parker - Syndicated Columnist - 2/9/2009 8:00:00 AM

Six years ago I wrote a book called Uncle Sam's Plantation. I wrote the book to tell my own story of what I saw living inside the welfare state and my own transformation out of it.

I said in that book that indeed there are two Americas -- a poor America on socialism and a wealthy America on capitalism.

I talked about government programs like Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), Job Opportunities and Basic Skills Training (JOBS), Emergency Assistance to Needy Families with Children (EANF), Section 8 Housing, and Food Stamps.

A vast sea of perhaps well-intentioned government programs, all initially set into motion in the 1960s, that were going to lift the nation's poor out of poverty.

A benevolent Uncle Sam welcomed mostly poor black Americans onto the government plantation. Those who accepted the invitation switched mind sets from "How do I take care of myself?" to "What do I have to do to stay on the plantation?"

Instead of solving economic problems, government welfare socialism created monstrous moral and spiritual problems -- the kind of problems that are inevitable when individuals turn responsibility for their lives over to others.

The legacy of American socialism is our blighted inner cities, dysfunctional inner city schools, and broken black families.

Through God's grace, I found my way out. It was then that I understood what freedom meant and how great this country is.

I had the privilege of working on welfare reform in 1996, passed by a Republican Congress and signed 50 percent.

I thought we were on the road to moving socialism out of our poor black communities and replacing it with wealth-producing American capitalism.

But, incredibly, we are going in the opposite direction.

Instead of poor America on socialism becoming more like rich American on capitalism, rich America on capitalism is becoming like poor America on socialism.

Uncle Sam has welcomed our banks onto the plantation and they have said, "Thank you, Suh."

Now, instead of thinking about what creative things need to be done to serve customers . . . they are thinking about what they have to tell Massah in order to get their cash.

There is some kind of irony that this is all happening under our first black president on the 200th anniversary of the birthday of Abraham Lincoln.

Worse, socialism seems to be the element of our new young president. And maybe even more troubling, our corporate executives seem happy to move onto the plantation.

In an op-ed on the opinion page of the Washington Post, Mr. Obama is clear that the goal of his trillion dollar spending plan is much more than short term economic stimulus.

"This plan is more than a prescription for short-term spending -- it's a strategy for America 's long-term growth and opportunity in areas such as renewable energy, healthcare, and education."

Perhaps more incredibly, Obama seems to think that government taking over an economy is a new idea. Or that massive growth in government can take place "with unprecedented transparency and accountability."

Yes, sir, we heard it from Jimmy Carter when he created the Department of Energy, the Synfuels Corporation, and the Department of Education

Or how about the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 -- The War on Poverty -- which President Johnson said "...does not merely expand old programs or improve what is already being done. It charts a new course. It strikes at the causes, not just the consequences of poverty."

Trillions of dollars later, black poverty is the same. But black families are not, with triple the incidence of single-parent homes and out-of-wedlock births.

It's not complicated. Americans can accept Barack Obama's invitation to move onto the plantation. Or they can choose personal responsibility and freedom.

Does anyone really need to think about what the choice should be?

What is Greed?

Milton Friedman is eloquent in his argument for the selfish interests of individual human beings.




(See my comments on this video below.)

Is it not time to give up accepting any guilt for acting out of your hunger to produce results and be successful? Those that lay this on anyone are attempting to saddle you with unearned guilt. Say NO!

(For an analysis of the craziness of limiting CEO salaries, read this by Thomas Sowell, a black man, by the way. The battle we find ourselves in is not racial. It is a battle of ideas. Specifically, moral ideas. The right to own yourself - egoism; or the right of the state or God to own you on their big plantation - altruism, the doctrine that requires self-sacrifice. Another term for it is "other-ism" and it means that you give up what is important for you in order to please or prove that you are not a selfish jerk.)

If a man initiates or threatens to initiate force against another then he is guilty of a crime. Punish him accordingly. That is the remedy, not some murky guilt trip that requires that a man's life - his reputation, his character and his achievements - be destroyed so that some small-minded, envy-ridden, revenge-bent man can feel good about himself. This behavior is rampant in our society right now and for no good purpose except power over other people and the hatred of the good because it is good. It is despicable and should be called out wherever you find it. Go here to get how a society destroys itself when envy is king.

Obama is playing the us vs. them strategy full tilt. It doesn't work, so now he finds himself in a battle over petty things. Notice that he has to attack Bush as if the buck stopped with Bush, not himself; or his attack on Rush Limbaugh; or his attack on CEO's salaries. As time goes on, whatever good he could accomplish will be used up and and his political capital squandered to fight this battle. He won't emerge a great man. Universal principles work as they do whether anyone wants them to or not. Either a man gets right with them or he doesn't. Either way, the consequences follow.

The same strategy has been used by all the dictators. For the Soviets it was the bourgeoise, for Hitler it was big business and the Jews, for Obama it is CEOs and capitalists. They never use words which denote or connote all the people that they are in charge of governing. Thus, they do not act in terms of the unchanging universal principles which from his nature govern a man's life. Rather, they act from some future point, an end, and feel that is sufficient to justify any means necessary. It is the "divine harmony" of the ultimate Soviet State, or the perfection and dominance of the Aryan man and the country that is in charge of his perfection, or the egalitarian ideal that all men shall possess the same existential opportunities and that the government shall redistribute the means to those opportunities at the point of a gun. Some think Obama is a pragmatist lurching from one direction to another. I've never thought that. Reading his history displays a man remarkably single-minded from an early age. Further he chose this direction out of hatred.

When you can look in your child's or grandchild's eyes and tell them that you spent most of what they will ever earn and that life will be hard, then maybe you can disavow yourself of the current regime's ideas and actions.

I am reminded of this, the existential reality of all us vs. them strategies:

First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out--
because I was not a communist;

Then they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out--
because I was not a socialist;

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out--
because I was not a trade unionist;

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out--
because I was not a Jew;

Then they came for me--
and there was no one left to speak out for me.


(I do have to say for clarity that Friedman is distinguishing a phenomenon known as psychological egoism, not rational egoism. The value here is that he is pointing to the beneficiary of moral action - the person himself - rather than whether the action was rationally moral. The rational moral means that the action is judged by a rational standard, the nature and requirements of a human life which comes in the form of individuals. There are many irrational standards which he doesn't address.

The value of the video is that he is pointing out that there is no thinking around the subject of greed. I have never seen an objective definition of it. My position is that is nothing more than a "hunger" for a specific result. If that "hunger" causes a person to violate people's rights, then he is in trouble. Otherwise go for it Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods, Warren Buffet, and Bill Gates!

Psychological egoism is the error that everyone by nature is egoistic. This is false because man is not given any way to be nor know which actions he needs to take. He must choose and he can choose actions which sell himself and his values out or he can choose actions which achieve his values. This fact and the fact that life must be maintained in existence is why morality is necessary.

Further, he suggests that a President picks his men for their political clout. Without unpacking that one, a President picks his men for the values he perceives that gives him political clout. For example, I think Obama picked Rahm Emanual because he is a ruthless exactor in the political game Obama plays - namely politics of spin and personal destruction for the purpose of political control of his enemies for the ultimate purpose of maintaining his hold on the unthinking masses. Another president could pick a man for his character, integrity and his ability to inspire people.)

(This picture of Rahm thumbing his nose at Bush at the inauguration ended my possible admiration for him.)