The Real EVIL of the Obama Presidency

All those that seek to have a better world and think Obama is the answer do not realize that what he is out to kill is possibility - their possibility, anyone who isn't already at the peak of political power or financial power. He think that money is evil or at least an enormous threat except in their hands. They damn it. They tax it.

As an end in itself money leaves a person empty. With no end for which to use it - be it his family's future, an invention, a shot for the moon, why bother trying to earn money. But this is just the point. Most people do have ends in mind.

Political power is also an empty game when it has as its end the maintenance of its own power. And this is the phenomenon we are now seeing with the Democrats in Washington. Whatever illustrious value the Democrat Party has had in the past, this is not it. Corrupt to the core, we are seeing them cut off all avenues for their competitors to effectively challenge them. Cutting off the money is key.

The other key areas where people must be dis-empowered if those in power are to maintain their grip is in information and the process of thinking itself, which involves education. There are many other fronts in this battle but Victor Davis Hanson puts his finger on one of them.

What's Behind War Targeting Wannabe Rich?

By VICTOR DAVIS HANSON Posted 12/24/2009 06:17 PM ET

There is class warfare going on in this country — but it's not against the established rich. It's against those who are trying to become wealthy.

President Obama has declared that those who make over $200,000 will pay higher income taxes. Caps on payroll taxes are supposed to come off as well for the upper class. Envisioned estate taxes will take 45% of individual inheritances valued over $3.5 million. Many states have also hiked their income taxes on the upper brackets.

Again, most of those targeted are not the already rich — a Warren Buffett or Bill Gates — but millions of the wannabe rich. They may have achieved larger-than-average annual incomes, but they're not the multimillionaire speculators on Wall Street who nearly wrecked the American economy in search of huge bonuses and payoffs.

Most are instead professionals and small-business owners who take enormous risks in hopes of being well-off and passing their wealth on to their children.

Oddly, much of the populist rhetoric about the need to gouge the newly affluent is voiced by the entrenched wealthy, who don't have to care how high taxes go, given their own vast fortunes.

Take Bill Gates Sr., who is clamoring for higher estate taxes on inheritances. Such advocacy comes easy for him. After all, he is the father of the richest man in the world — someone who clearly needs no inheritance.

Billionaires also often set up charitable foundations to ensure that their estates are channeled to their own preferences rather than simply given over to a needy U.S. Treasury. In contrast, moderately affluent business owners or farmers often leave enough property for their heirs to pay death taxes, but not enough to set up tax-exempt charitable foundations.

Warren Buffett also wants higher income taxes on the wealthy. He once confessed that thanks to all sorts of write-offs, he had paid only about 17% of his gross income in federal taxes, a lower rate than many employees in his office.

But Buffett, like Bill Gates Jr., is worth many billions of dollars. In truth, he has so much money that no amount of taxes would affect him much. A combined tax bite of 60% of his annual income would still leave Buffett each year with millions. Yet the same rate could cripple a business owner making $300,000 in annual income.

Often those in government claim that their higher-taxes proposals are simply targeting the affluent like themselves — proof of their own selflessness. President Obama, for example, has complained that the well-off like him could afford to pay more.

But unlike politicians in Washington, most upscale Americans in private enterprise do not receive free government perks and lavish pensions. Nor are they guaranteed lucrative post-political lobbying and speaking careers.

Focusing tax hikes on those who in some years make between $200,000 and $500,000 makes no sense in a recession for a variety of reasons. They are neither the speculators who caused the panic of 2008 nor the Washington politicians who are bankrupting the country.

Instead, most are small-business owners who hire the majority of the nation's employees. But faced with the talk of higher taxes, more regulations and hostile rhetoric, they will remain confused, and so retrench rather than expand.

With the proposed new income, payroll and health care tax rates, along with increased state and local taxes, many business owners fear that 60% to 70% of their income will go to the government. That does not seem a good way to persuade small businesses to hire more workers in hopes of greater rewards.

Income is also not the only barometer of affluence. Two-hundred thousand dollars is quite a lot of annual money in Kansas, but does not always go so far in San Jose, where modest houses often cost well over half a million dollars. For those whose children do not qualify for need-based scholarships, a private liberal-arts education can easily set a parent back $200,000 per child over four years.

Why the war against the productive classes who want to be rich?

Maybe it is because they are not as numerous as the proverbial middle class. Perhaps they do not earn our empathy that is properly accorded to the poor. They surely lack the status and insider connections that accrue to the very rich.

Yet continue to punish and demonize them, and the country will grind to a halt — as we are seeing now.

Seasons' Greetings

There's something magical about Christmas - about creating a wild fantasy during the days of the most darkness and the cold nasty weather. How wonderful.

Enjoy your holiday.

Principlex

The Best is Yet to Be

For the man who owns himself as his purpose, "The best is yet to be,..." --Robert Browning

Have a happy holiday season.

Principlex

Dictatorship - The Anti-Industrial Coup

Here is all the evidence you need to know that we live under a dictatorship. The reality of that is getting clearer and clearer. This analysis is produced by Robert Tracinski of the TIA Daily, a daily analysis of current events from an objectivist perspective. SCB

The Anti-Industrial Coup

Intellectual climate change seems to be transforming Australia first. For example, a prominent new article in The Australian summarizes recent scientific findings that refute the basic assumptions behind the global warming hysteria.

"What this means is that the IPCC model for climate sensitivity is not supported by experimental observation on ancient ice ages and recent satellite data.

"So are we justified in concluding that the concentration of atmospheric CO2 is not the only or major driver of current climate change? And if so, how should we re-shape our ETS legislation?

"I don't know the answer to these questions, but as Nobel prize winning physicist Richard Feynman observed: 'It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn't matter how smart you are. If it doesn't agree with experiment, it's wrong.'"

In America, the biggest sign so far of the political impact of Climategate is a new op-ed in the Washington Post by Sarah Palin using Climategate as a springboard to dismiss global warming and call for the US to stay home from the Copenhagen conference.

Palin is not significant because she carries any scientific authority. She is significant because her public statements on this are a bellwether for the political right.

Until a few months ago, the typical position on global warming within the right could be described as "moderately skeptical." There was doubt that we could know about global warming with certainty or that we could do anything about, but the view that global warming is flat-out wrong—much less that it is a fraud—was still considered somewhat extreme. And that's how someone like John McCain, a global-warming believer, could still get the Republican nomination.

Attitudes were already beginning to harden a bit, but Climategate was a major turning point. The left has ignored the scandal as best it can, and I am not sure how much independent voters have been permitted to hear about it in the press. But it is now the mainstream position within the right that global warming is a fraud, a hoax, a dishonest power grab.

This is important because it means that one major political party—which just might regain a majority in Congress next year—is willing to fight against cap and trade.

And we'll need such a congressional majority. Before he left for Copenhagen, President Obama pledged to enact reductions in carbon dioxide emissions. Congressional leaders immediately reminded him that he couldn't act without the approval of Congress. The Obama administration's response was to declare: yes, we can.

They have announced their intention to stage an anti-industrial coup, using the authority of the EPA to impose a "command-and-control" global warming dictatorship on the American economy. They are then using this as a threat against Congress: pass cap-and-trade legislation, or we'll impose something even worse by executive decree.

The only answer to this is strong action by Congress to reassert its power by explicitly denying the EPA any legal authority to regulate carbon dioxide. But to do that will require a Republican majority with the confidence to reject global warming as a fraud and a threat to liberty. And that is precisely what we may get in 2010.


"Administration Warns of 'Command-and-Control' Regulation Over Emissions," FoxNews.com, December 9

The Obama administration is warning Congress that if it doesn't move to regulate greenhouse gases, the Environmental Protection Agency will take a "command-and-control" role over the process in a way that could hurt business.
The warning, from a top White House economic official who spoke Tuesday on condition of anonymity….

[W]hile administration officials have long said they prefer Congress take action on climate change, the economic official who spoke with reporters Tuesday night made clear that the EPA will not wait and is prepared to act on its own.

And it won't be pretty.

"If you don't pass this legislation, then...the EPA is going to have to regulate in this area," the official said. "And it is not going to be able to regulate on a market-based way, so it's going to have to regulate in a command-and-control way, which will probably generate even more uncertainty."…

The economic official explained that congressional action could be better for the economy, since it would provide "compensation" for higher energy prices, especially for small businesses dealing with those higher energy costs. Otherwise, the official warned that the kind of "uncertainty" generated by unilateral EPA action would be a huge "deterrent to investment," in an economy already desperate for jobs….

Rep. James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., ranking Republican on the House Select Committee for Energy Independence and Global Warming, said Tuesday he is going to attend the Copenhagen conference to inform world leaders that despite any promises made by President Obama, no new laws will be passed in the United States until the "scientific fascism" ends.

"I call it 'scientific fascism,'" Sensenbrenner said during a press conference with fellow climate change skeptics. Sensenbrenner said, "The UN should throw a red flag" on scientists who support global warming to the exclusion of dissent.

Government Power Grab of the Private Sector

Michelle Bachmann tells of a new bill initiated by the Obama Administration to completely and arbitrarily control the business sector of our society. This is done completely stealthily and we do not even know that this is going on. Listen to the interview here.

Progressivism is a Gigantic Fraud!

Indy Tea Lover penned this overdue indictment of Progressivism and the Progressives. Thank you, RV.

If this passes, you, your parents, your friends and the same for me will likely die by Obama and the Democrats’ hand. This bill cannot and will not improve health care for people – above all the poor. It’s purpose is to end the control that you have over your own life. Call your Representative and Senators and up the ante with them. Whatever it takes to stop this incredible injustice must happen now.

We know that freedom provides for an abundant life. Government control, on the other hand, causes the opposite. This bill is definitely a program to control, control, control you to death. SCB

The Cold Heart of Obamacare

by Nat Hentoff

Nat Hentoff is a nationally renowned authority on the First Amendment and the Bill of Rights. He is a member of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, and the Cato Institute, where he is a senior fellow.

_____________________________________________________

Much of the press coverage of the Democrats' health-care legislation, now fiercely embattled in Congress, focuses on the public option, the actual long-term costs and tax increases, and the amendment barring funding for abortions, but the cold heart of Obamacare is its overpowering of the doctor-patient relationship — eventually resulting in the premature ending of many Americans' lives for being too costly.

To call the dangers of this legislation "death panels" obscures the real-life consequences to Americans, not only the elderly, of a federal government-run health-care bureaucracy. In the Senate bill, for instance, Medicare doctors whose treatments of certain, mostly elderly, patients costs more than a set government figure each year, will be punished by losing part of their own incomes.

Not only Medicare doctors will be monitored for their cost effectiveness. In the House bill, as Cato Institute's health-care specialist Michael Tanner explains (New York Post, Nov. 8), "111 government agencies, boards, commissions and other bureaucracies — all overseen by a new health-care czar," the commissioner of Health Care Choices, will keep watch on what the president has called excessive, wasteful health-care expenditures.

Moreover, President Obama has made clear that eventually he desires a U.S. equivalent of the British National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE), a commission that decides which drugs and procedures for patients are within the national budget for health care. The current baseline expenditure for each Briton, according to Michael Tanner, is $44,305 per year.

In this country, bureaucrats keeping tabs on patients — without actually seeing them and their condition — will mean, as Tanner notes, that "every time a doctor decides on a treatment, he or she would have to ask: 'Does the government think I'm doing this too much? Will I be penalized if I order this test?'" (Disclosure: As a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, I have access to its continuing research.)

President Obama and his supporters in Congress insist that clinical studies prove how many needless and expensive tests and procedures are so often performed. But these are collective statistics. Individual patients are left out.

Harvard Medical School faculty members Jerome Groopman and Pamela Hartzband bring the individual back into this crucial debate in "Sorting Fact From Fiction on Health Care" (Wall Street Journal, Aug. 31): "Data from clinical studies provide averages from populations and may not apply to individual patients.

"Clinical studies routinely exclude patients with more than one medical condition and often the elderly or people on multiple medications. Conclusions about what works and what doesn't work change much too quickly for policymakers to dictate clinical practice." Everyone, regardless of political party, should keep in mind:

"If doctors and hospitals are rewarded for complying with government-mandated treatment measures or penalized if they do not comply, clearly federal bureaucrats are directing health decisions."

If congressional Democrats succeed in passing their health-care "reform" measure to send to the White House for President Obama's signature, then they and he are determining your health decisions.

Also remember that these functionaries making decisions about your treatment and, in some cases, about the extent of your life span, have never met you. They do not know your name, have not spoken directly to your doctor and, of course, haven't the slightest idea of what your wishes are. Is this America?

Another doctor whose byline in the New York Post I try never to miss is Mark K. Siegel, a practicing internist and an associate professor of medicine at NYU Langone Medical Center. In "Destroying the Doctor-Patient Bond" (New York Post, Aug. 3), he points to Section 123 of the House bill that "establishes a Health Benefits dvisory Committee, chaired by the surgeon general, which makes recommendations to the HHS secretary on what should be covered and what shouldn't.

"These rulings from on high," Dr. Siegel warns, "are problematic, since useful treatments or tests for one patient are not appropriate for another. Appeals are bound to be time consuming and largely ineffective. This is the government interfering directly with the practice of medicine."

Is this what presidential candidate Barack Obama meant by "Change we can believe in"? Even if you voted for him, is this the change you will believe in if your doctor is overruled by the government in his or her treatment decisions about you?

Remember those federal bureaucrats recently ruling on breast-cancer screening? Dr. James Thrall, chairman of the American College of Radiology and a Harvard Medical School professor, said the resulting furor of dissent by doctors showed (Wall Street Journal, Nov. 18) that rulings "based on costs and large group averages, not individuals" lead him to fear that "we are entering an era of deliberate decisions where we choose to trade people's lives for money."

Is there anything you want to say to your representatives in the House or Senate before the final vote is taken? If you don't act urgently now, you may become part of another collective statistic — American annual death rates.

I'm scared, and I do mean to scare you.

We do not elect the president and Congress to decide how short our lives will be. That decision is way above their pay grades.

___________________________________________________

More by Nat Hentoff

Hentoff, Nat (2009, December 6). The Cold Heart of Obamacare. Retrieved December 7, 2009, from The Cato Institute Web site: http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=11024

If You Run Across an Environmentalist, Run for Your Life!

I found these quotes at this website. This, plus the collapse of all credibility and integrity of the Global Warming project fostered by the UN through the IPCC, is completely and finally damning insofar as any value in the environmentalist movement. Whatever the honest hopes of that impulse is or was, they cannot find expression through the intellectually and morally corrupt spokesmen and leaders of the environmentalist movement.

Life is always self-limiting. It doesn't need the hand of a grand human planner to tell it how to do that.

Contrary to common misconception, resources are not limited and will never become limited. Man's survival depends on recombining what he finds in nature in order to make things which satisfy his needs. Everything is constantly undergoing transformation but it never goes out of existence. Our limit at any point in time exists in our knowledge to transform resources into useful, need-satisfying products.

Although it may look like we are creating waste, the truth is we have just changed the form of the resources we used. They are available as a resource to be used in the satisfaction of still other human needs. The process never stops.

The thing environmentalist fear most is human success and because they are so terrified of it, they must enslave, i.e., control their way or else, or destroy human life rather than bear dealing with the success that free minds and free markets produce. Of course there will be problems - life consists of problems - but those will then be dealt with by means of ever advancing knowledge. SCB

Here are the quotes of the spokesmen and leaders of The Environmentalist Religion. In reading them, I'm amazed at how well they would have fit into the Nazi regime. Then it was a hatred of any human non-Aryan. Today it is hatred of any human.
_______________________________________________________

“Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?”
- Maurice Strong, founder of the UN Environment Programme

“A massive campaign must be launched to de-develop the United States. De-development means bringing our
economic system into line with the realities of ecology and the world resource situation.”
- Paul Ehrlich, Professor of Population Studies

“The only hope for the world is to make sure there is not another United States. We can’t let other countries have the same number of cars, the amount of industrialization, we have in the US. We have to stop these Third World countries right where they are.”
- Michael Oppenheimer, Environmental Defense Fund

“Global Sustainability requires the deliberate quest of poverty, reduced resource consumption and set levels of mortality control.”
- Professor Maurice King

“We must make this an insecure and inhospitable place for capitalists and their projects. We must reclaim the roads and plowed land, halt dam construction, tear down existing dams, free shackled rivers and return to wilderness millions of acres of presently settled land.”
- David Foreman, co-founder of Earth First!

“Complex technology of any sort is an assault on human dignity. It would be little short of disastrous for us to
discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy, because of what we might do with it.”
- Amory Lovins, Rocky Mountain Institute

“The prospect of cheap fusion energy is the worst thing that could happen to the planet.”
- Jeremy Rifkin, Greenhouse Crisis Foundation

“Giving society cheap, abundant energy would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun.”
- Prof Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University

“Our insatiable drive to rummage deep beneath the surface of the earth is a willful expansion
of our dysfunctional civilization into Nature.”
- Al Gore, Earth in the Balance

“The big threat to the planet is people: there are too many, doing too well economically and burning too much oil.”
– Sir James Lovelock, BBC Interview

“My three main goals would be to reduce human population to about 100 million worldwide, destroy the industrial infrastructure and see wilderness, with it’s full complement of species, returning throughout the world.”
-Dave Foreman, co-founder of Earth First!

“Current lifestyles and consumption patterns of the affluent middle class - involving high meat intake,
use of fossil fuels, appliances, air-conditioning, and suburban housing - are not sustainable.”
- Maurice Strong, Rio Earth Summit

“All these dangers are caused by human intervention and it is only through changed attitudes and
behaviour that they can be overcome. The real enemy, then, is humanity itself.”
- Club of Rome, The First Global Revolution

“Mankind is the most dangerous, destructive, selfish and unethical animal on the earth.”
- Michael Fox, vice-president of The Humane Society

“Humans on the Earth behave in some ways like a pathogenic micro-organism, or like the cells of a tumor.”
- Sir James Lovelock, Healing Gaia

“The Earth has cancer and the cancer is Man.”
- Club of Rome, Mankind at the Turning Point

"A cancer is an uncontrolled multiplication of cells, the population explosion is an uncontrolled multiplication of people. We must shift our efforts from the treatment of the symptoms to the cutting out of the cancer. The operation will demand many apparently brutal and heartless decisions."
- Prof. Paul Ehrlich, The Population Bomb

"A reasonable estimate for an industrialized world society at the present North American material standard of living would be 1 billion. At the more frugal European standard of living, 2 to 3 billion would be possible."
- United Nations, Global Biodiversity Assessment

“A total population of 250-300 million people, a 95% decline from present levels, would be ideal.”
- Ted Turner, founder of CNN and major UN donor

“… the resultant ideal sustainable population is hence more than 500 million but less than one billion.”
- Club of Rome, Goals for Mankind

"One America burdens the earth much more than twenty Bangladeshes. This is a terrible thing to say in order to stabilize world population, we must eliminate 350,000 people per day. It is a horrible thing to say, but it's just as bad not to say it."
- Jacques Cousteau, UNESCO Courier

“If I were reincarnated I would wish to be returned to earth as a killer virus to lower human population levels.”
- Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, patron of the World Wildlife Fund

“I suspect that eradicating small pox was wrong. It played an important part in balancing ecosystems.”
- John Davis, editor of Earth First! Journal

“The extinction of the human species may not only be inevitable but a good thing.”
- Christopher Manes, Earth First!

"Childbearing should be a punishable crime against society, unless the parents hold a government license. All potential parents should be required to use contraceptive chemicals, the government issuing antidotes to citizens chosen for childbearing."
- David Brower, first Executive Director of the Sierra Club

“In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill.”
- Club of Rome, The First Global Revolution

“We need to get some broad based support, to capture the public’s imagination… So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements and make little mention of any doubts… Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest.”
- Stephen Schneider, Stanford Professor of Climatology, lead author of many IPCC reports

“Unless we announce disasters no one will listen.”
- Sir John Houghton, first chairman of IPCC

“It doesn’t matter what is true, it only matters what people believe is true.”
- Paul Watson, co-founder of Greenpeace

"We've got to ride this global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic and environmental policy."
- Timothy Wirth, President of the UN Foundation

"No matter if the science of global warming is all phony, climate change provides the greatest opportunity to bring about justice and equality in the world."
-Christine Stewart, former Canadian Minister of the Environment

"The climate crisis is not a political issue, it is a moral and spiritual challenge to all of humanity. It is also our greatest opportunity to lift Global Consciousness to a higher level."
- Al Gore, accepting the Nobel Peace Prize

"The only way to get our society to truly change is to frighten people with the possibility of a catastrophe."
- emeritus professor Daniel Botkin

"We are on the verge of a global transformation. All we need is the right major crisis."
- David Rockefeller, Club of Rome executive manager

"Humanity is sitting on a time bomb. If the vast majority of the world's scientists are right, we have just ten years to avert a major catastrophe that could send out entire planet's climate system into a tail-spin of epic destruction involving extreme weather, floods, droughts, epidemics and killer heat waves beyond anything we have ever experienced - a catastrophe of our own making."
- Al Gore, An Inconvenient Truth

"By the end of this century, climate change will reduce the human population to a few breeding pairs surviving near the Arctic."
- Sir James Lovelock, Revenge of Gaia

"Climate Change will result in a catastrophic, global sea level rise of seven meters. That's bye-bye most of Bangladesh, Netherlands, Florida and would make London the new Atlantis."
- Greenpeace International

"Climate change is real. Not only is it real, it's here, and its effects are giving rise to a frighteningly new global phenomenon - the man-made natural disaster."
- Barack Obama, US Presidential Candidate

"We are close to a time when all of humankind will envision a global agenda that encompasses a kind of Global Marshall Plan to address the causes of poverty and suffering and environmental destruction all over the earth."
- Al Gore, Earth in the Balance

"In Nature organic growth proceeds according to a Master Plan, a Blueprint. Such a 'master plan' is missing from the process of growth and development of the world system. Now is the time to draw up a master plan for sustainable growth and world development based on global allocation of all resources and a new global economic system. Ten or twenty years from today it will probably be too late."
- Club of Rome, Mankind at the Turning Point

"The concept of national sovereignty has been immutable, indeed a sacred principle of international relations. It is a principle which will yield only slowly and reluctantly to the new imperatives of global environmental cooperation."
- UN Commission on Global Governance report

"Democracy is not a panacea. It cannot organize everything and it is unaware of its own limits. These facts must be faced squarely. Sacrilegious though this may sound, democracy is no longer well suited for the tasks ahead. The complexity and the technical nature of many of today's problems do not always allow elected representatives to make competent decisions at the right time."
- Club of Rome, The First Global Revolution

"In my view, after fifty years of service in the United National system, I perceive the utmost urgency and absolute necessity for proper Earth government. There is no shadow of a doubt that the present political and economic systems are no longer appropriate and will lead to the end of life evolution on this planet. We must therefore absolutely and urgently look for new ways."
- Dr. Robert Muller, UN Assistant Secretary General

"Nations are in effect ceding portions of their sovereignty to the international community and beginning to create a new system of international environmental governance as a means of solving otherwise unmanageable crises."
- Lester Brown, WorldWatch Institute

"A keen and anxious awareness is evolving to suggest that fundamental changes will have to take place in the world order and its power structures, in the distribution of wealth and income."
- Club of Rome, Mankind at the Turning Point

"Adopting a central organizing principle means embarking on an all-out effort to use every policy and program, every law and institution, to halt the destruction of the environment."
- Al Gore, Earth in the Balance

"Effective execution of Agenda 21 will require a profound reorientation of all human society, unlike anything the world has ever experienced - a major shift in the priorities of both governments and individuals and an unprecedented redeployment of human and financial resources. This shift will demand that a concern for the environmental consequences of every human action be integrated into individual and collective decision-making at every level."
- UN Agenda 21

"The earth is literally our mother, not only because we depend on her for nurture and shelter but even more because the human species has been shaped by her in the womb of evolution. Our salvation depends upon our ability to create a religion of nature."
- Rene Dubos, board member Planetary Citizens

Obama's Torture

Picture from Spiegel Online International

Note that quilted face working overtime to control the right placement of the chin and the lips. Here we see what Obama looks like tortured - by conditions of his own creation.

We have a man who has always been an outsider. He hates the United States and the grounds on which it was founded. "Every man an end in himself? Are you kidding? A Code of Individual Rights? Hate it! I think we should take what you've earned, Joe, and give it to your neighbor down the street who deserves a chance. It's only fair."

Rather, he nurtured from early in his life the story that he is a victim and he created in speech after speech how everyone in this country except white people are victims. Not only that, America is a hideous country that exploits the entire globe. All the third world countries are worse off because of the US. Reverend Wright was great support for twenty years for this position. "The solution is to take your money away and give it to the 3rd world countries." (This, of course, is straight-up Marxism, hand-maiden to poverty wherever it is believed and tried.)

Most people, including people who would not consider themselves victims even though he includes them in his race/ethnic categories, don't really buy his story. Apparently they do buy that they should be concerned about other people and take some kind of direct action through the government in order to right circumstances gone wrong. And yes, he is a good speaker, an orator in fact, seems intelligent, reasonable and is good looking.

There's only one problem. He got elected and he's no longer the outsider. He's in charge and he has a country to lead, a country which historically and by virtue of its constitution, he doesn't like. He only feels comfortable with his buddies who also don't like the country.

Having to speak to cadets who have chosen in the most overt and obvious action possible to serve a country they love, is too much a clash for him to overcome. Thus the picture of the tortured Obama.

This picture symbolizes Obama's conflict. He knows that the United States cannot survive with a leader as he is. And he knows that he will have to sacrifice these men to keep up the pretense. Even though the cadets were told to welcome him enthusiastically, they couldn't. They were cool.

They are not anxious to be thrown onto the pyre of perfidy.

He never used the word victory in his speech about fighting a war. Is this not a better indicator that he does not love this country? Is he willing to send America's sons and daughters to be killed - for nothing?

What we see is the same thing we have seen from the beginning of this man's presidency. He is small-minded and partisan, born of willful outsider-ness, and as a consequence is completely blocked from rising to the larger context required to be a leader. The root element missing from Obama is an integrated view of existence - a philosophy that corresponds to the way the world works that he can rely on to answer the questions "Where am I?" "How do I know?" and "What should I do?" Although he sounds intelligent, he actually isn't able to be. Wrong teachers, wrong influences, wrong philosophy. It doesn't work and he is their product. And since he is the gatekeeper for his life, as we all are for our lives, he is responsible.

Obama has never been able to overtly define himself. He has always known he couldn't because if he did so, he would be marginalized. Regardless of how innately bright the man is, he is driven to small-mindedness (better known as unintelligence) as part of the constant distraction that must be maintained to keep us from knowing who he is. (I actually question that he knows who he is. I think he's so used to being a nobody grounded in victimhood reaction, that he has never defined himself except superficially - a look, a face, a talent for talking and saying nothing.

I can say this: This man has no talent for political leadership. He is not a person who can provide guidance for people that leaves them calm and knowing how to get along. He could not draw a line to delineate one thing from another if his life depended on it. Why in the hell do you think he voted "present" 132 times in the Illinois Senate? If his "talents" don't move the nation, his time will be up. I think he is already starting to feel the effects of such a reality.)

Back when he was a Senator, thinking ahead to the presidency, he was on the Hate Bush bandwagon as were most of the Democrats. Because everything Bush was bad including his war in Iraq, Obama declared Afghanistan the good war. (He couldn't have won the election had he declared himself against both wars so he chose to play politics.) His small-mindedness landed him in front of the cadets at West Point.

I will say the fact that he is tortured by all of this is to his credit. For those of us wondering if he has a conscience, whether there is any there there, this is the first sign that there may be some stunted root of one in there someplace. But I have to say, he has me on the edge of my seat. Will this man melt down? Do we have a resignation in our future? Obama's look in this picture did bring Nixon to mind. Hmmm.

Viva Political Salsa

Here! I am looking forward to a song about freeing America. We're a long way from being free here. We've backed our butts into slavery big time.

Global Warming Crooks

This article is written by Ian Plimer, author of Heaven and Earth, a book I've featured in the sidebar of this blog. Written November 25, 2009, I found this at the Pajamas Media website under the title, Climategate: Alarmism Is Underpinned by Fraud (PJM Exclusive)

In the geological past, there have been six major ice ages. During five of these six ice ages, the atmospheric carbon dioxide content was higher than at present. It is clear that the colorless, odorless, non-poisonous gas called carbon dioxide did not drive past climates. Carbon dioxide is plant food, not a pollutant.

Humans have adapted to live on ice sheets, deserts, mountains, tropics, and sea level. History shows that humans and other organisms have thrived in warm times and suffered in cold times.

In the 600-year long Roman Warming, it was 4ºC warmer than now. Sea level did not rise and ice sheets did not disappear. The Dark Ages followed, and starvation, disease, and depopulation occurred. The Medieval Warming followed the Dark Ages, and for 400 years it was 5ºC warmer. Sea level did not rise and the ice sheets remained. The Medieval Warming was followed by the Little Ice Age, which finished in 1850. It is absolutely no surprise that temperature increased after a cold period.

Unless I have missed something, I am not aware of heavy industry, coal-fired power stations, or SUVs in the 1,000 years of Roman and Medieval Warmings. These natural warmings are a dreadful nuisance for climate alarmists because they suggest that the warming since 1850 may be natural and may not be related to carbon dioxide emissions.

There was warming from 1860 to 1880, 1910 to 1940, and 1976 to 1998, with intervening periods of cooling. The only time when temperature rise paralleled carbon dioxide emissions was 1976-1998. The other warmings and coolings in the last 150 years were unrelated to carbon dioxide emissions.

Something is seriously wrong. To argue that humans change climate requires abandoning all we know about history, archaeology, geology, astronomy, and solar physics. This is exactly what has been done.

The answer to this enigma was revealed last week. It is fraud.

Files from the UK Climatic Research Unit were hacked. They show that data was massaged, numbers were fudged, diagrams were biased, there was destruction of data after freedom of information requests, and there was refusal to submit taxpayer-funded data for independent examination.

Data were manipulated to show that the Medieval Warming didn’t occur, and that we are not in a period of cooling. Furthermore, the warming of the 20th century was artificially inflated.

This behavior is that of criminals and all the data from the UK Hadley Centre and the US GISS must now be rejected. These crooks perpetrated these crimes at the expense of the British and U.S. taxpayers.

The same crooks control the IPCC and the fraudulent data in IPCC reports. The same crooks meet in Copenhagen next week and want 0.7% of the Western world’s GDP to pass through an unelected UN government, and then on to sticky fingers in the developing world.

You should be angry. Very angry.

The Palin Phenomenon

What are they responding to? "She's real. She's true to who she is. She's not perfect, but my goodness, you get what you see."

And in this Age of Duplicity, that's a godsend. We didn't want the country fundamentally transformed. We wanted it to become closer to the ideal it was designed to be.




Let me state for the record that I like Palin's fire, her spirit and what feels like an All-American reality-based woman. But no matter that she exists, the real battle is more fundamental than supporting Palin, which I plan to do at least for ballast to right a listing ship of state as a result of the dead, toxic hand of the Democrats.

The real issue and battle is about the moral basis required not only for a life graced by happiness but to have political freedom for human beings be a viable, secure reality on earth. We live in a painful time, powerlessly observing the loss of political freedom. We see the government has turned on us and is wholesale violating our individual rights at every turn. A big part of the reason this has been able to happen is because the Republican Party has always supported and drawn on the moral base which has allowed it. I don't see Sarah Palin being able to speak from a moral base any different from the one that is the root of the problem.

The work ahead is not really political. Any political work can only buy time for the real work to happen. The real work is to cause a cultural renaissance which will arise from learning to live on a new moral base. From there the political consequences will naturally follow. This is what my life is dedicated to and I must say that it is one kickass, hell of an adventure.

And Now for some Oxygen in the Room

The Lost People of America

I remember reading Ayn Rand and hearing lots of questions as to whether a person should find a Galt's Gulch or create one to live in. There were a series of questions of this type which are related to this line of inquiry: "Should one accept Social Security or should one go to a government school or accept money from the government in any way?" Later Rand was glad that Alan Greenspan, one of her proteges, had the opportunity to curb inflation and buy time by becoming the head of the Federal Reserve Bank.

She always advocated living in the world and achieving values in the world. And she always advocated living and advocating the values required of a moral man in full possession of his own life force for the purpose of maintaining his life for his own happiness. But, there was a line one must never cross: One must never advocate for the programs that the government offers nor in any way become captured by them or the government to the point where he advocates, actively or passively, the collective at the expense of the individual. That was the sealing of one's fate, the collapse of one's moral fire. At that point one loses himself and his right to exist as an individual human life. He becomes a vegetable in spirit - living, but not alive.

In the case of Alan Greenspan, we see that he did cross that line.

One of the shocking and disheartening results of this past horrendous year is to realize that many of those close to you or that you have known have crossed that line. They have submerged themselves into the great collective, the home of non-existence of the individual. The grand irony is that they expect you to take them, an individual, seriously and listen to them as if their individual opinion should count when they have given up that ground. If we are all to be folded into the collective, the reason for that is to erase individuality. If you notice, at bottom, that is the sum total of the thing that all of the people who advocate this socialization want to get rid of.

image by ukyo_freak

These traits and effects come with the territory of individual and individualism.

Happiness: There is no collective happiness. Happiness as a concept will have to go out of existence. This is too bad because for some of you, it will pass from the cultural conversation before you discovered what it was and that it was actually a wondrous possibility.
Pursuing one's dreams: There are no collective dreams/ambitions. Those are individual.
Merit: Bad. After all, everyone in the collective must have self-esteem as a right and it is not something one earns.
Motivation: There is no collective motivation. There is only the sum of individuals' motivations. The collective has to get rid of motivation and replace it with fear - the fear of not looking good which amounts to always looking like one is part of, at least in some way, the group.
Prosperity: There is no collective prosperity. You may be prosperous and your neighbor may not be prosperous. It depends on what you do and how you do it. The collective is always trying to stamp that out and redistribute the wealth so that those difference don't invite envy and hatred.
Differences: Differences always imply individuals and in the collective, those are bad. In the collective there is always pressure to belong and not stand out. One cannot excel or achieve lest someone else may want to do that and therefore threaten the cohesion of the collective.
Love: Love is always individual. Not important in the collective. Love gets replaced with duty. "Of course we love our country. We must."
Attraction: Attraction is always individual. Again, not important unless it is attraction to an abstract idea like the State or the greater good or feminism or diversity or anything group oriented.
Values: Values are the possession and the motivation of the individual. No good. Only the group's so-called values are the ones you can espouse - whether you give a damn about them or not.
Trade: This form of peaceful activity is something that comes when individuals are ends in themselves. That's no longer true under collectivism. Everyone is a means for the collective's ends. Peace has no meaning under collectivism which depends on the dynamics of drama and turmoil to generate sufficient fear to drive people wherever the leaders want them to be.
Capitalism: This is what freedom for the individual is insofar as a political/economic system is concerned. It is based on individual rights. This definitely is out, replaced by socialism, which operates by pro-collective, anti-individual rules which means by regulations, taxes, permissions of a zillion kinds and is the diametric opposite of freedom.

All of those kinds of things are what must be forever denigrated and diminished, sometimes even stamped out by force, if a society of people as a collective is to be maintained. In the collective there is a constant drumbeat against these values and attributes which arise only in the evil-by-nature individuals. Hmmmm, sounds like the biblical "original sin" idea.

A few days ago I highlighted one drum banger: US Representative John Lewis. Entitlement is the watchword of the collectivist. If you buy that, then you have submerged yourself into the collective - or as Neal Boortz calls it, "the great unwashed."

I see John Lewis as a profoundly evil man. He calls for every individual to become a dependent. "He is entitled to healthcare," he says. "It is his by right." Of course, now it is healthcare, but in principle, he is saying that every man is entitled to all that others produce. He is trying to drive the future slaves into the pen under the guise of it being morally justified for him to eat the flesh of his neighbor.

This is always the way. No one looks at the other side of the hand - the side that has to provide the benefits that the government and politicians plan to disburse or the diminished lives of those trapped by the dependency. The other side is the dark and ugly slave side of the hand.

Somebody has to go "pick that cotton and tote that bale" and guess what? It is going to be YOU. And it is not going to be you because of what YOU want. It is going to be YOU because of what THEY want. You might get a few scraps from the table, but that is just to keep you unable to rise up and speak. Whatever you would say has to look dumb and really beside the point. They keep a close eye on how much of what they disburse it takes to maintain this oppression.

History has taught us everything we need to know about how this works. The great result of the The Great Society was entrapment of those who became dependent on it. Generally, it literally ruined their lives. Once sucked in, they were stuck in the goo and their lives became about manipulating the goo. "You mean I can get more money if I don't have a husband? Jettison his ass. You mean I can get more money if I have more children? Let me get some more of them then."

This is the basic principle of socialism: "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need." Having viable needs becomes the name of the game.

It was never intended to work. It cannot work. It is against the laws of nature, specifically man's nature. And so, there has never been a more evil system devised to enslave men than socialism. And right now if you are a liberal, you are a backer and a believer in the principle that generates this horror.

This is the drumbeat that is being sounded by President Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Jesse Jackson (notice how he uses race, another collective, to drive men into the pen), Al Sharpton and many, many more.

But the sharpest pain of this whole great division of mankind which is going on right now is when you see the people you love urging you and all those around you to go on into the pen. You see them submerging themselves into the great unwashed, losing their identify and their value except as another body that can work for the collective. "It's what you deserve," the lost people of America say. How can something be any sadder than that?

How have we come to this horrendous state of affairs in the lives of men? Why is it that the descendants of slaves are now advocating slavery? What is going on? Why is slavery suddenly, in 2009, looking to some like a good thing?

Slavery is the good? I never thought I would see the day. Talk about a disconnect. This is the greatest disconnect of human history. How can it happen that a country of free men, the richest country to have ever existed and able to provide a higher standard of living for all its people including its poor, suddenly throws itself back in time and into an abyss where there is no freedom? How is it possible that suddenly freedom looks like slavery and slavery looks like freedom? What is the cause of this greatest of all flip-flops?

Until this question gets answered, a Glenn Beck on every street corner will not be able to save us. It's as though we are zombies unable to respond and must go on into the pen. Why? How did we become so frozen, so deadened? How is it possible that the siren's call into the slave pen actually holds some allure?

This question shall be taken up in a future post.

image by Cotter158

What is War?

With the al-Qaeda trials moved to New York City and the United States not dealing with these killers as a military matter, we find ourselves carrying out a purpose that is based in denial: denial of the nature of human being. A lot of questions are raised which you can read about here. Is this the ultimate exposure of the anti-life nature of the Obama presidency? It may be.

What happens to a human being that causes him to go to war against another human being? What is the change that occurs in his mind? Although we think of war as a social phenomenon, at root it isn't. We as individuals are at war with people and ideas all the time. It is part of living.

War occurs when a person comes to see another person not as 'human' in the sense that he has values, desires, feelings, defeats and triumphs and walks around in the neighborhood where you live. Rather he is seen as the embodiment of a purpose that is destructive of one's own life and the lives of those one loves. In other words, this other person or group's existence, as he/they are living it is a threat to one's life.

Since a man must possess at least some remnant of a purpose in order to have an 'alive' life - i.e., anything than other as a dependent on life-support provided by someone else - the issue is that he should not have a purpose but that it should be such that it is aligned with life and not objectively threatening to others' lives. (By being objectively threatening, I mean that an action is physically damaging or threatens to damage a human life. We are not talking "words, just words" here. We are talking about actions which deprive one of the freedom to live - things which physically take or damage a life or that life's property, the material things in the world that possesses and uses to live.)

War is the recognition that one sees a person's or group of persons' purpose, and his/their actions as evidence of such a purpose, as life-threatening and as a consequence needs to take action to stop those actions. It requires a declaration that one has placed them into that status in relation to himself. (If one does not declare the state change of the other person, group or country, then to fight them is to engage in the behavior of the terrorist -a person at war without a declaration of war. I do think it is possible to do this so long as one is conscious of the state change in his own mind. And, in fact in a state of war, it may be valuable to operate underground. But I believe these are strategic questions.) Once war has been declared, the rules for dealing with that person are completely different, night and day different. Reason and persuasion are no longer the tools one can use. One must use force to stop the initiated or potential initiated force.

The focus no longer becomes acting in a way that works for getting along with other people. In war, the focus becomes about acting in a way that destroys the other person or group's ability to carry out its anti-life, specifically anti-my-life, purpose.

It is said that war dehumanizes people. That depends. It depends on where one is standing. If one approaches war as an action treating people not as the embodiment of a purpose but as ordinary human beings living in some non-threatening way, then yes, it would be senseless and dehumanizing. If one approaches war for what it is - fighting an enemy's ability to carry out its life-destroying activities, then it is not dehumanizing. Rather it is life-enhancing and life-ennobling. It is the ultimate stand for life - putting one's own life on the line in favor of life.

People who are pacifists and display signs "War is not the Answer" in their front yards, without specifying the question, are people who act against the nature of human life itself. They pave the streets with gold for the arrival of the evil person by removing their resistance to him. It's my experience that the only thing they really get mad about is if you challenge their view regarding peace. "War is not always bad" is usually sufficient.

I notice Obama speaks like ministers speak. Ministers do not understand the distinction of war and the valid, life-enhancing purpose of war. They seem to always be trying to get people to deal with each other as regular folks in a socially and ideologically non-challenging world, whether that is appropriate or not. They try to make us feel guilty because there is no peace all the while unable to grasp the validity of war. Thus they are forever unable to be a cause for peace.

The thing they all deny is greatness. They treat life as a "boy next door" phenomenon. Humility, turning the other cheek, always being nice, engaging in socially non-challenging activities like gardening, dusting and discussing arcane philosophical ideas.

Greatness in the full sense of the word is a function of purpose. Because a minister likely does not understand purpose (And without reading the Purpose-driven Life, I suspect he doesn't understand it either.) and its requirements, he more often than not undermines the concept of purpose and thus undermines robust, healthy human life. Rather than talk people out of having a purpose and creating a guilt-trip every time they exhibit one, a minister and a lot of other people in the humanities need to get a grip on human nature. A man cannot reach his full potential as a man without a purpose. And yes, he is capable of choosing an anti-life purpose.

It's ironic that Obama who denies man his nature so morally justifies himself in the name of human life. (This contradiction is another topic entirely.) America, at least in its remnant, is a nation of people with strong and powerful purposes. We have been reared in the bosom of freedom where it is up to every man to forge his purpose and go forth in the world. Thus every time Obama says anything, he goes against the grain of who we are. I hear fingernails dragged across my black board.

Obama and his band of anti-life men attract all those who think that being in favor of life is to be nice, not say anything that is not PC, stand up for the little guy and the traditional victims, and strive to fit in rather than have a purpose which some people may oppose. It is because one buys that view of life at some level rather than the true, life-rousing one of purpose that they gravitate toward Obama. He, after all, is going to provide everything that a man without purpose, a man who has given up on the cardinal characteristic of life, self-generation, needs in order to be on life-support. He (and the likes of John Lewis) urges them to become dependent. To be such is a right one is entitled to, they say.

Obama hopes that his band of resuscitated bodies will have just enough energy to vote.

(PS: I am watching the public reaction and the way of reacting to the rise of Sarah Palin. It's my hypothesis that a person's response to Obama and to Palin are polar opposites and that they key on one's sense of life. Is one a prime mover in his life or not. Depending on one's deepest conviction, he will respond to either Palin or Obama, but not both.

These two are opposites: Palin is a woman of the frontier embodied with the spirit of one who isn't waiting for someone else to do the job. If the government is corrupt, clean it up. If we need energy, "drill, baby, drill." If someone besides who you say gets to decide whether you get medical treatment, they are your "death panel." If someone is a part of the al Qaeda gang who plotted 9/11, "hang 'em high." She has shot the moose and dressed him for dinner. She has fished the waters for winter's bounty at the table. She knows who she is. Her political power comes not from the power gods, but from the people's recognition, from that bubbling spring within of which they cannot speak, of who she is. Thus she is powerful.

Obama on the other hand is a man who has been pissed off and slighted from birth. He wears those slights as badges of honor. Every one is a sore which he picks and uses to gets someone to do what he wants. He had "smarts" and people saw this so they supported him, groomed him and lifted him up as their offering to the gods of political power. The power gods liked their offering and so they granted them power. But being a product of those who did his work for him, he is unable to lead. He cannot take a position, he cannot vote, he cannot fashion a rule which keep people from fighting. The gods of power speak too loudly into his ear and he knows that they can remove him from power whenever it looks good to do so. Thus he is powerless.

Speaking into the Listening? Hell No!

When China's concern is the stability of the dollar so they get their money back, Obama has no idea what their concerns are. They had to ask. Here.

To get questioned about our domestic issues on the world stage is an embarrassment which Obama and the Democrats have caused. Rather like your neighbor asking you in public if you can afford something you are about to buy.

Obama then talks about how no nation should dominate another, delivering his view of a fantasy world. The thing he leaves out is that free trade does not operate on the principle of force and domination. If a company, a corporation or a country is dominant in the field, it is because they earned that position. Obama seems completely unaware that voluntary interactions and agreements can occur among men and that they are the basis for civilization. For him there is only force and that's why he is compelled to tell people they shouldn't do that.

Given his point of view I'm expecting the bows to get lower and lower until he finally just prostrates himself flat on the floor before any man who will give him an audience.





The man offends my sensibilities.

The Necessity of Wandering in a Desert for 40 Days and Nights in an Age of Abundance.

America seems to be in a phase of self-hatred. It has been going on for 40 years, starting small and growing into the current crescendo. Out of the 60s came people who thought America was a bad place - all dominating and treating people badly around the world. These stories have advanced to absurd proportions and at last, we have elected a president who is an expression of what I call, the American Distortion. President Obama holds up as the ideal before the United Nations "No nation should dominate another." (Since domination appears to occur quite naturally among all life, there's nothing like trying to create an anti-life vacuum. This is soooo Obama.) He then apologizes for America's dominance. He doesn't see much of anything that has been accomplished by America as a great thing. He, as I have said before, prefers sores to pick which naturally blinds him to accomplishments. So far as I can tell, he considers everything that America has produced a product of an evil system which causes evil men. He then feels perfectly justified taking property from one and giving to another, rearranging businesses to his liking and all of the kinds of actions that despots and tyrants throughout history have taken. (Hmm. Did he include himself as a product of America?)

Given that abundance has been all about us, why suddenly have people taken to making it wrong? If you notice, President Obama has done nothing to stimulate the economy. He's said he wants to use money to do that but then he passes it out to his cronies to insure his reelection. Almost no jobs have been created so he has taken to emphasizing that some have been 'saved', although no one knows how to measure that. Clearly President Obama and his Administration have a completely different view of man and what is appropriate for a man's life than I do.

To me this left turn into the desert is uncalled for and even mean spirited, but what if there is something underneath it that needs to be recognized. What if there is a lesson to be learned here.

There are two kinds of men - the one who knows who he is and knows where he is going, and the one who is lost and doesn't know where he is going. It is a much noticed phenomenon that rich kids are often lost. They have had everything and so they never had to figure out what is important. In relation to purposeful human beings, they appear as robust weeds in an otherwise naturally ordered garden.

But now we have a different phenomenon. Man has risen to the level of material abundance such that we have a society of rich kids. Thus we are seeing all kinds of thing that we have never seen before. We see kids who lose their lives to a computer game, never knowing what it is like to live in a real world rather than a virtual one. We see ordinary people weighing 300 pounds. With food so plentiful, they cannot resist the pleasures of food. They have not figured out how to reshape their values such that they use their resources for other things that will yield new pleasures and rewards.

So, how does one figure out what is important and make something of his life? Given that by and large human kind has handled the matter of his physical existence and we depended on going after those values to keep us true to what life requires, we are realizing that if that matter is largely handled we no longer have that truing-up mechanism to keep us present to what life requires. What we took for granted before can no longer be taken for granted. We are realizing that there is something deeper that we have to take care of. We cannot merely keep ourselves alive; we have to keep ourselves vital.

Or said another way, given that we have handled the material side of life, how do we reform the spiritual side of life given that vitality is a function of one's spiritual notions?

Clearly this problem can be handled two ways. One is to not see it as a problem and every time things get too good, arbitrarily create a situation such that one strips himself back to basics so he learns those lessons and knows who he is. In the vernacular of my upbringing, "Whenever a man get too cocky, he needs to be brought down off his high horse." The other is to embrace the progress and see this as a problem which progress itself brings.

Rather than all the preachers getting up on Sunday and telling people how evil they've been to have allowed themselves to be seduced by abundance and therefore gotten soft and lazy, what if they congratulated their congregations on their great achievement and then began the process of discovering the nature of living now that they have achieved that?

(And what's even worse about someone trying to solve the problem by damning the present and taking a person back to a previous solution is that it does not advance the knowledge required to handle the problem at this level. This suggests to me that the moral principles as formulated in old-time religion are not going to work for where we are now and that we need to look at this matter newly.)

A man to be effective must know his values. Further, he must know the ranking of his values. There are many choices made that are bad choices because one acts for a lower value and gives up a resource that he should have used to gain a higher value. If a dad is writing a book to earn a living and has children, chances are both are values high on his list of values. But which is higher? Writing the book or being with the children? If he chooses to be with the children, he gives up the time he could use to write the book. Likewise, if he spends his time writing the book, he gives up time he could be with his children. If his wife urges him to be with the children and he does so to please her, that doesn't work either. Who is he anyway? These are the questions that trouble men's souls.

All of these troubles fall into the category of forging oneself into a mighty purpose. To do that one has to know who he is. He has to know his values, what captures his energies such that he causes something to happen. Then he must rank them in a way that he knows supports the life he wants to live. After he has discovered this for himself and knows who he is, he is a force to be reckoned with. He becomes as a piece of steel that was once liquid but has now taken shape in a particular form.

In the Bible, Jesus went to the desert for 40 days and 40 nights. Why? I say, to sort himself out. He had to learn the ranking of his values and come to know who he was -- what was most important for him so he could design himself true to himself.* Thus, he made himself into a man who could be responsible for his own vitality.

In the Age of Abundance, if man is to advance, he must put in this sorting process. When living is not that hard, one isn't required to put forth much effort to obtain the values he needs to just keep himself alive. He can live well easily. But, in the doing of that, he has to watch that he doesn't give up the most important thing of life - his vitality - his life and what he could have made of himself. No one wants to die with that "On the Waterfront" line: "I could have been a contender."

Unless we tackle this problem, it grows and creates wild distortions in culture. We have parents who never sorted themselves out and are scared to death of alone time with only themselves for company. In raising their kids, they won't let them settle down into this sorting time because it threatens them, the parents. They can only see it as "something is wrong here."

But what if nothing is wrong? In fact, what if it is what the requirements of being human ordered? This is the opportunity hidden in the Age of Abundance. How does one sort through his values and craft them into a clear cut code such that he is able to use the resources he has in the best way he is able? This is the challenge of abundance and it is the challenge of political and personal freedom. This is a challenge we take up one at a time. Until we learn this, we, as a culture and society and as the leader of men to the full bounty of political freedom, are going to fall back into the old ways. Eras will be dedicated to learning this lesson until we master it and are able to go through it and beyond it.

And, we know what those old ways are. Our leaders tell everyone "There is something wrong here. We have sinned. Now it is time to exact punishment for those sins." Today how they do that is tax us within an inch of our lives and give it to their friends. Is this an uptick from how the Catholic church did it? Come in for confessions and leave your offering. You remain poor, we put our riches into the churches and institutions to take care of us. Hmmm. That's another seminar.


*When I say design himself true to himself what I'm saying is that there are two levels of things going on in man. At one level, he is determined by his nature. He possesses a life force which came with being born a living thing. That life force in a human being has a particular nature. It seeks to live and maintain itself and it has to do it a human way. Inside that, it will do it according to its particularity as an individual human being. Exactly what this nature is is part of what a man must discover about himself.

To be true to himself, he must act consistent with not only his nature as a man, but also consistent with the particular traits and aptitudes that he was born with. A successful design for one's life is mounted with full knowledge of oneself on that basic template. The truth? No one has full knowledge of himself at any point in time - ever. So what I mean is that one's mind is properly related to the facts one discovers about himself such that he is able to integrate and build on them.

People get into forcing themselves to be a particular way at the expense of their nature. The character of this is that they will not face a particular painful event that happened to themselves and integrate the facts of their lives. Consequently, there is a distortion in their personality which is shaped by this avoidance of anything which hints at that event which they have shaped themselves to avoid. (Character is not something that can be developed, I assert, until one has cleared out all of the generating factors of this distortion. Character is something one must develop by choice and it cannot be counted on until it is developed and held by choice.) Given this, they cannot discover their nature - their talents, the things they love, all the things that they cannot relax and enjoy because of the fear that has shaped their evaluations of their perceptions.

A big part of forming oneself is discovery. If one is not getting the things he wants in life, then he has to discover why that is so. He has to discover the misalignment of his values. He has to notice when he sacrifices himself (acts on a lower value and sacrifices a higher value) and why he doesn't like himself right then. This can be an involved process where at first one doesn't have many tools available to do it. But with an increase in the powers of inspection, he gains those tools. Once he understands what is going on, he is in a position to rearrange his values and cause a different outcome. And above all, he is in a position to design his own character. Once that is done, he becomes a force to be reckoned with. Until then, he's mere flotsam and jetsam, floating on the surf of humanity

Race, Politics and Glenn Beck

Today, Glenn Beck was awesome. He struck a note with me that needed striking. In fact I think that note needs to come from a gong hanging from a tall tree's limb to be heard throughout the country.

When Obama ran for office there were many concerns and ideas running through the culture. The two basic ones were political freedom/slavery and race.

I've always been a devotee of political freedom. It's the only thing about politics that I care about. All issues can be solved in those terms. Is the government increasing its hold over our lives or do we have the full measure of freedom that we need to live as human beings and that we ought to have? That is and always will be my question.

My relationships with my black friends has always been one of mutual respect and fun with some inspiration thrown in. Whenever there is a story about overcoming slavery and gaining freedom, I'm all in, often inspired and moved to tears.

I've always felt a common ground with blacks because of my anti-slavery, love-of-freedom values, but hearing Obama speak the strains of slavery in his messages of socialism, I wasn't so sure. When 95% of blacks voted for Obama, I was no longer sure what was going on. Did I have a common value of freedom with them or not?

No one said anything and my interracial relationships near me have gone quiet. Although I've communicated with blacks who I'm clear are solidly against socialist slavery and for political freedom, they are people I discover on the internet. I'm glad for these relationships, but they don't replace the friends I had.

Beck's program today pierced that desert of silence. I saw there a studio full of people who are Americans first and who are not afraid to speak against Obama and the Democrats as they seek to increase slavery and reduce freedom. I heard a number of them struggling with the hyphenated African-American designation. They are Americans first and they don't want some hyphenated name diminishing that. I heard them hating it that people in their culture deride knowledge and speaking good English.

I was left clear that we are into waters that we do not know how to navigate. And I was left clear that there are some courageous blacks willing to speak for the deep and enduring values of our larger, common American culture.

I was left heartened that the Democrat progressivism/socialism agenda lead by a black man is not sitting well with some of them. Given the results that government programs have had on their families and children, trapping them in ghettos of poverty and ignorance, they are not enticed by Obama's smooth words and Mr. Cool. They know bullshit when they see it.

Bottom-line I was left with that when it comes to ideas and discerning truth and value, there is no such thing as color. Beck's was the first post-racial program I've heard. I only wish Obama could lead as well.

I thank Glenn Beck today. It was an opening in what has seemed to me like a monolithic, impenetrable Obama-barrier.


Here are videos of the program. I got them from Fox News. He bills this as Part 1 of his series on black conservatives. What I hear is a series on black people who have different views and can speak out. I didn't parse their words for whether they were strictly conservative or not, whether they stayed on or went off the tracks.

Part 1


Part 2


Part 3

People are Divided over Obama. Why?

Here is an article, Grouchy Public Sticking With Obama. What are they grouchy about and why are they sticking with him?

Some think he has a bad situation to deal with and isn't doing so well, but they like him. Others think he is inept and isn't even interested in improving the situation and in fact wants to produce a failed America, upside down in all of its traditional values which at root means the protection of the individual and his right to live his life.

The first group doesn't care what Obama has said. When he tells Joe the Plumber that he is going to take what he earns and give it to the poor guy down the street because it's fair, they don't get that when they earn something, it will be them that is separated from their earnings. Suddenly their kids and loved ones and plans and projects are stopped in their tracks so the poor guy down the street can do his thing. They don't hear what he is saying and cannot hear what he is saying. The second group hears Obama and believes him and what is known about his past.

The first group distrusts ideas, knowledge and actively works to keep everything like that at arms' length. The second group welcomes ideas and knowledge and actively works to use information to improve their lives and world.

The first group would rather find a recipe that gives them comfort food. The second group would rather explore a new taste.

I'm realizing that people are dividing themselves into two groups. I call these two groups, The Folks and The Adventurers. Another word for Adventurers is Thinkers. Thinking is an adventure because it goes where you have not gone before - otherwise it isn't thinking.

The Folks create their lives in every way around the social and they think socially. The Adventurers create their lives in every way around the possibilities they see and how to attain those possibilities.

The Folks put social first and kill off (when they get political power which is the power of force) anything which threatens the social, especially any idea which forwards the individual. The Adventurers put creativity and ideas of the world first and create their social activities to support that.

The Folks live life as a warm, fuzzy dead-end. The Adventurers live life as an exciting possibility.

Barney and his boy-friend belong to the first group. Barney bends all the mortgage rules in order to provide a warm fuzzy which he cannot make stick because he cannot control reality. Barack and Michelle, although they pretend to be adventurers and courageous fighters, also belong to the second group. Every policy they advocate firmly supports The Folks.

Right now, there are no public people in the second group. We used to see people like Tiger Woods and his dad as they worked on perfecting Tiger into a superb athlete. But those people are now silent, having been frightened into the shadows. Pursuing excellence is something one has to do secretly. The unsung people are those worrying how they can live and raise their families in a world that does not support them and, in fact steals, one way or the other, everything they earn in order to support the warm, fuzzy social dead-end.

The Folks is a deadly group and ultimately will murder any individual who doesn't put social first. Their worldview is the source of failed, dispirited communities, societies and states. They like forced education and indoctrination and ultimately concentration camps - although they will never admit it. They are so industrious in their attempt to cover this motive that they work overtime to create real freedom lovers as the kind of people that they are at heart. Notice how they portray the tea party people.

There is but one thing more powerful than a person, one of The Folks, using everything within his power to not face the truth - a person who grasps the truth from the ground up and will not yield his life for trifles. He is The Adventurer. He has reality on his side.

The Folks are terrified of the individual. Why wouldn't they be? Their lives depend on him. The second group is not terrified of the individual but rather looks to him and nurtures him for ideas on how to live. They know their lives depend on exalting the mind and currying an environment that nurtures the independent thinker - the one unafraid to say what others cannot see.

I think people still like Barack because they cannot tell the difference between someone who knows what he is doing and someone who pretends to know what he is doing or who, by stealth, consciously knows what he is undoing. They are dazzled by the rhetoric and not paying attention to the results. They like Obama the actor who keeps talking about why the results are not here yet and false results - like "saved" jobs. They are desperately hanging onto their warm fuzzy.

We are starting to see the final test of their loyalty. Will they embrace the force, the coercion that is going to be required to install this unreality as the new reality? Will these warm fuzzy "nannies" advocate theft, silence and even murder of anyone who tells them they are wrong, that their world will not work and that they may be full of shit?

The confusion around what is going on has spread far and wide. For example, it infects the issue of nurturing vs. calling to account and being responsible. It infects the current interpretation of the role of the female principle and the male principle. It infects the place for feeling and the place for thinking. It has infected everything to the point that people cannot see what is so. Everything is upside down.

A very good example of this is Obama's approach to the recession. I know for a fact that a person cannot build a solid life without living within his means. And before that growth begins, a person becomes of a new, clarified mindset. At the point of his clearing, he can cut out the expenses that will not allow him to live within his means. He becomes able to talk to people, i.e. creditors, and work out something that can work from where he is within his means. A new confidence comes over him and he is on the road to building his life.

But notice how Obama and our leaders have chosen to prevent America from knowing this place and getting its feet on the ground. And not only that, the government is actively stealing money from the citizens to pay for the borrowing that the government is doing in order to maintain the false principle of being able to live outside our means. It works to scare us saying that the whole system will collapse. So what. In fact, it should collapse because it caused the problem in the first place. Just as a family may have bought a second home which caused it to live beyond its means and borrow more money, so a government can do the same thing.

Using this simple example of what sanity vs. insanity looks like, we can see that Obama and our government is thoroughly in the camp of unreality. Yes, I would be willing to call it insanity. And this is causing Obama's popularity to erode.

But there is one other thing which has the potential of completely destroying Obama. Obama isn't merely a straight up politician who one agrees with or disagrees with. There is too much of Obama's past that tells us he has a particular outlook on politics that is anti-American. He loves everything and has spent his life forwarding everything that is anti-capitalist, anti-individual and anti-independent thinking. (Be careful not to fall for the words "critical thinking." That is a school of thought and operation which is smuggling in how The Folks should think.) What people feel and haven't put their fingers on yet is that Obama is creepy. There is something off about Obama and until that gets sorted out, there can be no forward movement.

It's this creepy element that has me unable to watch him posturing as the leader of this great country. My experience is that of some kind of Great Disconnect. I see a man speaking about America and American values. All I get is words, just words. The best I can grant him is that he has translated them in his mind to the emotional base of his Marxist/socialist ideal. This is a terribly painful experience. Although I would like to embrace him because I honor the office and the form of it all, I cannot stretch pretense this far.