Awaken

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

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

by Lawrence Tribble in the latter 1700s.

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

The Biggest Job Killer

Here is a John Stossel column from the Washington Times. There is no doubt that government is the most toxic agent in our society. Nothing else is even close.

Government is the biggest job killer

By: John Stossel | 10/13/11 8:05 PM

President Obama says government will have to build the nation out of the economic trough.

"We're the country that built the intercontinental railroad," Obama says. "So how can we now sit back and let China build the best railroads?"

Ironic that he mentions the Chinese. Progressives used to complain that to build the railroad, bosses abused Chinese workers -- called them "coolies" and treated them badly. Now this is big success?

I guess Obama doesn't know that the Transcontinental Railroad was a Solyndra-like Big Government scandal. The railroad didn't make economic sense at the time, so the government subsidized construction and gave the companies huge quantities of the best land on the continent.

As we should expect, without market discipline -- profit and loss -- contractors ripped off the taxpayers. After all, if you get paid by the amount of track you lay, you'll lay more track than necessary.

Credit Mobilier, the first rail construction company, made enormous profits by overcharging for its work. To keep the subsidies flowing, it made big contributions to congressmen.

Where have we heard that recently?

The transcontinental railroad lost tons of money. The government never covered its costs, and most rail lines that used the tracks went bankrupt or continued to be subsidized by taxpayers.

The Union Pacific and Northern Pacific -- all those rail lines we learned about in history class -- milked the taxpayer and then went broke.

One line worked. The Great Northern never went bankrupt. It was the railroad that got no subsidies.

We need infrastructure, but the beauty of leaving most of these things to the private sector -- without subsidies, bailouts and other privileges -- is that they would have to be justified by the profit-and-loss test.

In a truly free market, when private companies make bad choices, investors lose their own money. This tends to make them careful.

By contrast, when government loses money, it just spends more and raises your taxes, or borrows more, or inflates. Building giant government projects is no way to create jobs.

When government spends on infrastructure, it takes money away from projects that consumers might think are more important.

When government isn't killing jobs by sucking money out of the private sector, it kills jobs by smothering the private sector with regulation. I talked to Peter Schiff about all this.

Schiff is a good authority because he was one of the few people to warn of the housing bust. Now he's had a run-in with the federal government over job creation.

Schiff, who operates a brokerage firm with 150 employees, recently complained to Congress that "regulations are running up the cost of doing business, and a lot of companies never even get started because they can't overcome that regulatory hurdle."

Schiff claims he would have hired a thousand more people but for regulations.

"I had a huge plan to expand. I wanted to open up a lot of offices. I had some capital to do it. I had investors lined up. My business was doing really well. But unfortunately, because of the regulations in the security industry, I was not able to hire."

So if he wants to hire an analyst, he can't just hire him? "I had to get permission to publish their research, which I didn't get for years. And so I can't pay analysts if I can't sell their research.

People don't appreciate the number of regulations entrepreneurs face. Schiff pays 10 people just to try to figure out if his company is obeying the rules.

"You can't just act very quickly, because everything has to be done through this maze of compliance. Even my brokers ... find out that maybe 20 percent, 30 percent of their day is involved in compliance-related activity, activity that is inhibiting their productivity. ... All around the country, people are complying with regulations instead of producing, instead of investing and growing the economy. They're trying to survive the regulations."

This is no way to create jobs or wealth. Keynesian pundits and politicians can't understand why businesses sit on cash rather than invest and hire unemployed workers. It's really no mystery. Government is in the way.

Examiner Columnist John Stossel is nationally syndicated by Creators Syndicate. Read more at the Washington Examiner:

(The idea of regulating a man assumes he wakes up criminal. In other words, it assumes, since the criminal political class do not operate by these standards, that we are their slaves. America's founding attempted to end this. That experiment has failed. Now we have to end slavery once and for all by getting our government established on a rational basis of the nature of man and separating Economy and State. The politicians can never have unilateral access to the property of the citizens. SCB)

Politicians, the New Criminal Class

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The ESSENCE of Evil and the ESSENCE of Good

A man has to CREATE to get from a need of his, which is asserted by his life asserting itself (the thing that life does since life is a self-generating, self-sustaining process), to the value that satisfies that need and sustains his life. He can only do this if he chooses to do it. To live, a man must create value.

The antithesis of creating value, the ESSENTIAL GOOD, is to be a VICTIM of the circumstances of one's life. THE ESSENTIAL EVIL, the first evil on which all others depend, as it were, is to cause being a victim and discourage being a creator of value in oneself or another. One can cause being a victim by acting to have a person think he is a victim since if a person thinks he is a victim, then he will act out of that mindset. (Running a guilt trip on oneself or another is an example of this kind of action.)

If someone is downtrodden, be it oneself or another, because life is not going well for them, what there is to do is "get that" but not add mass to it. If the victim story goes nowhere with you, the "victim" will either go elsewhere looking for sympathizers or his mind will shift to creating something.

We are never in both of these places at one time. It is like the picture of the vase and the two faces. You can see one or the other.


Now check out Obama. He dwells in blame. Blame automatically means that he is the victim of some other person's actions - Bush, economic situation, Republicans, Tea Party, big oil, Beck, Limbaugh, typical white people, Jews, people holding on to their money, anyone that is either under the bus or he wants under the bus. He thinks we will have sympathy for him and not hold him responsible. (He's counting on our coming from or adopting a victim mindset. For those of us who don't go there, his blaming demonstrates his powerlessness and if we were to go there, we would adopt powerlessness too.)

Obama loves sob stories. Nothing is more perfect for him than to parade before us a miserable, downtrodden person who finds himself in difficult circumstances to have us commiserate with him, keeping him luxuriating in his "victimhood" and us dwelling in the misery of the situation. Because this is such an anti-human-dignity display, we often feel embarrassed for the person.

It is this support of the worst among us and within us that is putrid about Obama. For him to like you, you have to have the biggest and ugliest warts. You can't have a spine and be responsible. Nothing can add up and produce a real result. See Solyndra and a number of other numbskull projects - like Cash for Clunkers, e.g. How many of his speeches boil down to asking us to hate somebody - the rich, Wall Street, bankers, the Tea Party, Republicans... Who could stand to be around such a person? And, to be this evil, this negative, he can only act arrogantly, otherwise he would realize he is a worm too. Is it no wonder we see this picture of him? Obama is a sick man.


And all of this is why Obama will not be our President come November 2012. If we elect him again, it will be because we are mired in this essential evil ourselves - and I refuse to believe that. Americans, in the main, are too grounded in reality and what life requires, to buy this. We know the government as provider is not the answer to anything. It won't be there to hold our hand. We are not haters. Mostly, we create and trade.

Rather than offer government solutions to everything, which require dependency and maintain us as a victim, whoever runs against Obama needs to encourage creation of value in every way he can. How you do this is to affirm people's values that motivate them to work and create their lives. You safeguard individual rights; you safeguard property; and you safeguard the country that is home to individuals who have the right to their lives.

It ought to be easy to defeat Obama. A society, just as a life, cannot run on being a victim. We are tired of this odor (you can guess what that is). I don't think Americans hate themselves enough to reelect him. And I think plenty of people know that as long as we are creating value, life is good.

Are We Headed for Dictatorship and a Totalitarian State?

It is now time to take action to protect and maintain our political freedom and America, the land of the free and the home of the brave. We are under threat from within. Here are two people giving us information portending an ominous future.

The Campaign of Hate

Already it has begun. The only way you can place your name under the Democrat banner this coming year is if you hate the rich, hate the Republicans, hate the Tea Party, hate the anti-Obamacare-ites, hate the Constitutionalists, hate, hate, hate.


Obama gets this honestly. He sat in that hatred-spewing Reverend Wright's church for 20 years - and Reverend Wright is a master of hate. No one can make his voice sound like without being filled with hate. And of course, O made friends with self-styled, hate-filled terrorist, Bill Ayers, who is snide as he can be as he still generates discord.

The Community Organizer business runs on hate. Alinsky runs on hate. That is all Obama and his cronies know - hate, hate, hate - tear down; destroy; burn, baby, burn.

Why? There are only two positions of being available and they are mutually exclusive: Creating Value or Victim. When one is a victim, he's not creating value and when he's creating value, he's not a victim.

The thing that is basic to the American idea is that people are free to create value. In fact their individual rights including their property are protected so they can do that. And because they are, they do. And because they do, many are successful.

The liberal Left position is in an unworkable situation. They are forever the victim. America was built on the enslavement of the black man, they say, and no matter that we fought a war over that and he was set free, he is still and will forever be a victim of that. Now that belief is pure bunkum. In fact there were slaves who weren't victims when they were slaves. But some black parasites making a living out of stoking the victim position. Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, John Lewis, the Congressional Black Caucus, and Obama, to name a few. All of these people are despicable people. They deserve to roast in a hell sparked by their own tongues.

One never grows out of being a victim. One transforms from victim to creator and can do it at any moment, any time, any day. It happens in the twinkling of an eye and is completely up to the individual - and it is an individual phenomenon. Tribes never make the transformation. They use being victim to glue the tribe together. It's like the picture that is either a vase or two faces, but not both at the same time.



This stuff is totally predictable. Every would-be dictator, which I think Obama considers himself to be, must generate folks being victims because it provides the grounds for the hatred. And so all Obama has to do is keep generating "you poor thing" and "you should hate the rich and successful," and arrogantly take credit for knowing these things. He sets the perfect example. After almost 3 years in office, he claims to be a victim of that horrible Bush. What a baby. My God, Obama, grow up.


He's going to egg it along by letting the financial situation deteriorate. He won't cut a thing - something that everyone has to do that is not earning enough income to support their lifestyle. And he's going to do this by taking the money from the citizens. Color has nothing to do with this. He could give a damn about blacks. He's proved that many times. Their jobless rate is higher and their standard of living is sliding the most too. Does he care? Hell know. He wants them to feel like victims. We are all going to be poorer which is going to make the victim position more popular than ever. O is loving it that he's so effective at his work.

He will have no solutions to anything. He's not about solutions. He couldn't decide to vote yes or no in the Illinois Senate over a hundred times. Why? He's not about resolving anything. His specialty is to start strife and then like a net cast to trap fish, he picks out the fish he wants offering them special deals if they go along with him. And, isn't that all he's done? Tell me anything he's touched that has a sense of resolution and peace and goodness about it? It stinks like s---. He hates peace. He hates individuals. These are cardinal for him.

And if you stick with him, the entry ticket is self-hate. In fact you have to hate yourself most of all or you wouldn't spend a minute on that side of the dichotomy. (Don't forget: It's the two faces or the vase. Not both at the same time. Victim or Value Creator. Choose.)

All I can say is that I hope Americans see beyond this ruse. It's all about diversions and mirrors. But if you listen to how he is, it is plain as the nose on your face. It's hard to believe that he is as nasty as he is, but he is. All of these effects and there are still people who want to give him the benefit of the doubt? Jeez!

Do You Know the Difference Between Freedom and Slavery?

‘On their way to Susa, they visited Hydarnes, a Persian by birth who was in command of the whole Asiatic seaboard; and by him they were given a hospitable welcome and invited to dinner. During the meal Hydarnes said: ‘Why is it, Lacedaemonians, that you refuse to be friends with the king? You have only to look at me and the position I enjoy to see that he knows how to reward merit. Now Xerxes believes that you, too, are men of merit; and both of you, if only you would submit, might find yourselves in authority over lands in Greece which he would give you.’

‘Hydarnes,’ came the answer, ‘the advice you give us does not spring from a full knowledge of the situation. You know one half of what is involved, but not the other half. You understand well enough what slavery is, but freedom you have never experienced, so you do not know if it tastes sweet or bitter. If you ever did come to experience it, you would advise us to fight for it not with spears only, but with axes too. (Herodotus, Book VII, 135)

I read this here.

My comment: First you have to get that there is a difference and second you have to choose freedom. Most people think this a political thing. The truth is, it is a personal thing, an individual thing, and when you and other people see how valuable it is, you set up the political structure to allow it and protect it.

If you want to experience what freedom is, check out "I Create," a 2-session course on the creative process. Then you will understand why political freedom, liberty, is the social essential for life to thrive.

This is What Evil Looks Like

Take a good look at this look. That is evil incarnate. How do I know? He is unable to create value. No, its worse, much worse than that. He foments divisions among men and hatred in order to destroy value. Obama is a destroyer for no reason except to destroy. This is the essence of evil. His slick facade only fools the fools.

Maybe Oprah can be excused. She's gullible and has supported con men a number of times. But Warren Buffet ought to know better. What has Warren done to bring forth such guilt? Earn a profit? Or maybe, like Oprah, it is the their view of the good that is flawed. Something is unbelievably, wildly off.

It's clear to me that at this point in time, Warren is now laying his body on the pyre which will be lit by Obama's ability to attract destruction to everything he touches. Just as Oprah became beside the point for a lot of people, so will Buffet. It will be interesting to watch this play out.

There are no free lunches nor ways around Justice. The demands of human life will not allow it. Warren will now be treated to a close-up view of the law of cause and effect. Say "Good Night," Warren.

Obama, for his part can only exist so long as the victims of his policies sanction him and his policies. Buffet is "sanction of the victim*" writ large.

Also today, the Black Congressional Caucus threw itself onto the bonfire. In so many words, it admitted that it has one motivating reason to exist: Racism. Not reason, not value, not the well-being of the people it supposedly represents matter to it. It will support Obama because he is black and obediently ride the boat as it goes over the falls. Who would have predicted that a group of black men would endorse a black man to take their people back into the poverty, a state of being rather akin to slavery without the excuse of it.

Socialism, redistribution, taking away property from the creators and owners of value and wealth, is for one and only one purpose: the destruction of the power distributed throughout society so it can be placed in the hands of the few. We are experiencing the Sovietization of America. This is what Obama and his backers are up to. They intend to destroy the United States and turn is into a country of beggars, all beseeching them for another morsel, another minute to exist.

So, let us get that. And let us also understand why what is happening now is possible. It didn't happen overnight. And until we get clear as to what is primarily important and how, in society, those primary values can be allowed to reign, this will not clear up.

The one thing that has to be grasped is that every man is his own moral authority. He cannot change this fact since it comes with his nature. Only he experiences his vitality and can manage his moral energy.

He is the guardian of his own will to live and when some other authority prevents him from exercising what is his by right - the right that his nature demands he exercise - then there is no prosperity - hell, there isn't anything he can count on. There can only be struggle without reward and destruction of value. The usurpation of this power, which is known in the political domain as the violation of individual rights, is how the destruction is caused.

And, because we are no longer jointly engaged in trading with each other to carry out and fulfill our lives and instead commanded by a few for their purposes, we are unable to fulfill our purpose here. It cannot be done.

With destruction, havoc and mayhem rule. And, this is the world of Barack Obama. This the world he's trained to deal in and he's caused this situation everywhere he is. Call it community "organizer" - a euphemism for community disorganizer - community destroyer - human being destroyer.

We may be in a monumental, global revolution from group to individual. I actually think we are. The United States led the way when it empowered the individual with the authority to govern himself. This was done through the idea of individual rights grounded on property rights.

This experiment has been so successful that it has beget man knowing himself differently than in those dark ages of oppression. All kinds of technology which has freed other individuals around the globe has been invented once the dark ages turned to light. Once this power was acknowledged to exist, people operate from it and it determines the way the world works when it comes to human being.

Obama and other anti-leaders are attempting to re-empower the old paradigm - the tribe. The tribe or the collective, which it is also called, comes in many forms - socialism, communism, statism, fascism, welfare statism, oligarchy and monarchy. In every case there is the elite who tell others what to do and the peons who are expected to follow the rules and provide the money. Attempting to affix this old order onto the new order is not working. And Europe, Asia, the Middle East and the US are going to have to give up trying to make the old order work. Unless some authoritarian government is willing to cut off communication and destroy human beings by the multi-millions, there is no way it can be imposed. So O and his ideas are has-been ideas. They are dead in the water and have only managed to call out the neanderthals from under the rocks where they had been hiding. Now they are in the open and a truly ugly sight they are.

None of this means that this oh sooo arrogant man isn't dangerous. He's very dangerous.

_______________________________

Here's another example of what evil looks like:

*"Sanction of the victim" is one of the major points Ayn Rand made in Atlas Shrugged.

Make Mine Freedom - a 1948 Cartoon

Who Is Going to Pull Back the Curtain on the Wizard of Oz?

We all know the story of the Wizard of Oz. The potentate in charge was never seen. He stayed behind the curtain. He probably spoke using a teleprompter.

But one day, the curtain was pulled back and there was this ordinary man. Everything that had propped him up was stripped away.

We have a similar situation with our President. He is the Wizard of Oz and the curtain that no one will pull back is that he is black. That curtain and our fear of messing with it protects him.

Who is going to pull back that curtain and reveal that he is just a man - a man who can be wrong about anything and everything. Who is going to eject him from the comfort of Affirmative Action and ask him to produce real results?

You can bet it won't be a Democrat. They have been using that curtain of Obama's blackness since before he was elected. We've all been called racists when they are the only ones thinking about and using race to get them something they don't deserve. So, have I got this right? The Democrats are such huge cowards that they are willing to let the Democrat Party be destroyed - which it will be? There are many of us who will never vote Democrat again. Not that I have so many years left, but that they will not be able to put together anything credible for a liberty-lover before I expire.

And, I notice that the Republicans are following right in the Democrats' footsteps - as they always have. They've been just as liberal - GW Bush proved that - just slower. So, its going to take even more courage to pull the plug on the Republicans - at least as they have constituted themselves in the past. Their mixed premises will keep them muddled longer.

But guess what. I am not interested in either of these parties, per se. Both are thoroughly Statist which means that they will sacrifice me and any other individual, you, in a nanosecond for someone else's need. And, that is evil in my book. That is exactly what every slave owner in Georgia did before he was stopped.

So Obama is just the front man playing the Wizard of Oz. But there's a lot more Oz that needs to be exposed for what is. We want liberty. Period. We want it just like the people who came to America and formed this United States wanted it. Anything else is Oz.

I think it is funny that the politicians think the Tea Party is a passing fantasy. That's not my experience. The people who sympathize with the Tea Party are not going away. If anything, they are more determined than ever. I'm expecting 2012 to be a huge shock for the politicians of both parties and other establishmentarians - one more time. I don't have long to wait to find out if I'm right.

JUDGMENT - The Missing Moral Principle

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_______________________________

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

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

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The wording on the flyer is as follows:

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You may not know this: By your nature you are destined to create!

I Wonder Whose Side These People are On?

Maxine Waters told the Tea Party they can go straight to hell. The Tea Party's main focus is to get Federal spending under control lest it destroy our wealth and liberty. Who are the people of the Tea Party? They are the taxpayers - those ordinary people who work and pay for Maxine's programs and benefits. So we have here a thoughtless, impudent woman chastising the people upon which, in a fundamental sense, she depends. For damn sure, the dependent people are not going to be funding her programs.


Today I read that the National Black Caucus has declared war on the Tea Party. Why? The Tea Party is the only group of people that are fighting for a man's liberty. And, without liberty, a society is hardly worth living in. Ask an ordinary Chinese , Russian, Venezuelan or Cuban how easy it is to look ahead to a bright future. Liberty is the condition providing openness, benevolence and possibility among men. Anti-liberty provides fear, stinginess and a numbing feeling of being trapped in a condition where everyone is going through the same motions day after day just to stay in the same place. I've got to survive is the mantra. In these societies it is unwise to be open to one's neighbor.

It amazes me that the National Black Caucus is so supportive of the social quality of a slave society. They champion entitlement - the condition of their masters on the southern plantation. Isn't it obvious that this principle is unworkable? Can they not be counted on to grasp that they are working like hell to institute the very thing they have wanted so desperately to escape? Are they not clear that their mindset is still that of the slave/master flip/flop?

A free society runs on individual rights and free trade. And, the people who get ahead are those who move out into the society and trade with other people. Who are the leaders of the African-American community that they want to make it harder for people to get ahead? Yet, that is exactly what they are doing. They use every opportunity to chastise their neighbors never thinking that their future may depend on those very neighbors.

This way of interacting with people is ancient and tribal and ignorant. If it continues, it will not lead to anything good. President Obama doesn't have to be a great leader. If he were merely a good leader, he would use his position to speak against this craziness. But alas, he doesn't - and thereby has it growing like weeds in what could be a beautiful garden.

The Broken Window Fallacy

On August 7, I called attention to the fallacy of Obama's policies. To win the game, "Cut the legs off Jordan," he says. Here.

Here's the fallacy that is running that thinking: The Broken Window Fallacy.



By this reasoning, total war and destruction will cure our problems and stimulate the economy. Oh my, ohmy, ohmy.

A Hideous Tribute to Anti-Liberty

Martin Luther King is one of America's heroes. He is because he stood for and caused the freedom of every American and, in particular, our freedom from apartheid, the Jim Crow laws that were still on the law books in the 50s and 60s. By championing the dignity of the black American, he stood for the dignity of all men.

His speeches reach so deeply into the human soul that no human can escape being moved by them. I remember going to Barnes and Noble in Buckhead here in Atlanta in December 1999 to have John Lewis sign his book, Walking With the Wind. There were not many people in line and so I moseyed around until there was no line. I went up to him and his wife and asked him to sign my book. He did and said a few words to me. I was so moved being in his presence that I had to unnaturally turn away for fear of bursting into tears. That is how I, a white man, hold as sacred Martin Luther King, John Lewis and the struggle that was the Civil Rights movement.

John Lewis has been my Representative in Washington DC forever. Not knowing his record, I voted for him because of his connection to Civil Rights. But as the first decade of this new century wore on and I watched more closely what he advocated, I realized I was against him and could no longer vote for him. He has not followed the words of Martin Luther King which over and over call for all men to grasp that they are, in common, men first, foremost and most fundamentally. Lewis and other prominent blacks have advocated entitlement to economic goods and there is always someone who must provide those goods. And to the extent this is a system enforced by the government's gun, it is yet another form of enslavement and the destruction of human dignity. The cruel irony is that it entraps the lower end of the economic scale which considerably affects blacks. So much for John Lewis.

From all the speeches of Martin Luther King I've read, he would flip in his grave if he knew what was going on. He was so keenly aware of our common humanity that there is no way that he would not pick up that blacks and guilty liberals are walking down the wayward path of the new slavery.

This week, there is a new monument on the Washington Mall - a monument to Martin Luther King. Pictures of the monument were released Monday. My God! What an appalling monument to Martin this is. I despair.

King searched for the right phrase to subtly include all that he meant when he said "man." He was in a constant process of distinguishing that and he did it so well that few can listen to him without their heartstrings strummed or the sudden lump welling up in their throat. He showed us in speech after speech how truth IS beauty.

This statue possesses none of that. And what is further wrong with it is that it indicates nothing of the American character that could hear and grasp King's words, a culture grounded in the primacy of the individual man. It was because we saw the images on TV and could relate to those individuals undergoing that kind of indignity that we had to correct this travesty. Another culture at another time could not have heard them in the way King meant them and was able to convey them to the American people.

The statue on the mall is as gross and wrong-headed a statement of Martin Luther King as I can imagine. It shows him in a stance of authority with his arms crossed. King, on the other hand, was dynamic and attuned to a possibility that he worked and worked to convey. He never had the attitude that he "already knew," because he didn't. The truth wasn't in itself the final answer for him. Finding the right words and speaking in a way to convey that truth was what he was inspired to seek and his work was a wonder to behold - on a par with a great symphony or magnificent work of art.

The tragedy of this statue is that it coveys the presence of Big Brother or, I think, Mao Tse-Tung or Joseph Stalin, ruthless, murderous, communist dictators both. Even the rock which, in the work, King walks through although not free of, is more evidence of crudity. King was free of that rock because he experienced in himself that possibility and that was what he conveyed. This is why he was able to take us to the heights.

The whole feeling of this work is un-American, maybe anti-American. It feels like an outsider's perception imposed on us. It has none of the refinement and panache of the art deco communist art of Rockefeller Center built in the 30s when socialism and communism were a possibility. Now that they are proved to not be a possibility for any human society, this is nothing more than some dullards' slap at America and the potential for the individual human being that she has always represented. This, I must say, is disgusting and it ought to be removed from the mall and taken all the way back to the drawing board.

The sad thing is that if this image gets associated with Martin Luther King, it will end him as an inspirational figure. There is none of that in this monument which is a hideous tribute to mankind's hell, the endurance of another authoritarian figure.

Tribute to Liberty

Mural in Bucyrus, OH painted by Eric Grohe Murals

Time for a Moral and Informational Adjustment

Just what happened that America atomized Hiroshima and Nagasaki and why was America the good guy? If your primary social value is liberty, Bill Whittle is your moral avenger. Here.

Our Anti-Human-Life Administration

“If you have a basketball team with tons of talent including Michael Jordan, Obama, the coach, would say ‘To win, we must cut off Jordan’s legs.’ Apply this to the people with resources able to expand and create business in our economy and perhaps you can see why taxing and regulating them is a problem. It takes away their means - their money and the use of their minds.” - Principlex

Happy BirthdayO!

In the past, I don't remember ever knowing when a President was having a birthday. Not so with Obama. Everyone knows what August 4th is. Why, it's President Obama's birthday. We know this because that is just the kind of guy he is. He keeps himself front and center. Here's a cartoon where he's so happy with his gifts.

Go here to see all of Comically Incorrect's many political cartoons.

I even got inspired to create a bumper sticker for his 2012 campaign. Here it is.

Capitalism

Here's the counterpart bumper sticker: