Increasingly there are stories and speculations about autonomous, or “self-driving” cars. Upon hearing these stories, many just look at their friends and roll their eyes, as if to say “Yeah, right. Never happen!”
POWER
People are too tightly connected to controlling automotive power, gunning it to pass or enter highways; there is too much alignment with sexual prowess for males, at least, to give up the pilot’s role. Maybe.
Self-driving vehicles hold a lot of promise. Consider overall expense. An ‘SD” vehicle won’t at least initially, be your all-around vehicle. Rather, it would be utilitarian, mostly used for commuting and short-haul shopping missions. Unlike mass-transit, a self-driving car retains independence and privacy for 1 to say, 4 passengers, but doesn’t have to be parked once “work” is reached. It can be electric, of course. Once depositing its commuters it can self-drive to a charging station – like a Roomba vacuum cleaner.
SAFETY
At 3:30, or 4:00, or whatever time the commuters have told it via cell-phone, the vehicle will guide itself to the convenient pick-up spot(s), receive its passengers and head home… or to a sports bar. Commuters could work, play games, watch TV, fool around (just sayin’) or, if not stupid enough, take a hit of ‘medical’ marijuana, all while presenting no threat to other drivers/commuters.
After all, the weakest link in a car or truck is the driver. Self-driving vehicles will offer some positives.
INDEPENDENCE
Not the least of these will be mobility for seniors (or the blind!). No one likes to be the one to tell mom or dad that it’s time to relinquish the keys and stop driving. That’s tantamount to saying stop enjoying independence. A self-driving car extends the “freedom” years for both parents and children. This alone will make autonomous vehicles popular, and keep other drivers safer, too. You watch.
****
AND MORE THAN THAT…
Autonomous cars can solve a lot of problems. Imagine every self-driving car having fairly simple radio-frequency communication with all the others within, say 100 yards, and with beacons at intersections. This inter-communication will enable cars to automatically give way to one another at merges and intersections, such that there will be very few reasons for forward progress to totally stop… as it does, constantly, during both “rush” hours and all other hours, when red and green lights “control” drivers to avoid collisions.
INSTANT PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION
Now imagine that for most uses, travelers will simply call for a car via cell-phone. Even for local shopping trips, the drudgery of parking can be avoided. As you check out with your groceries, a car is automatically called for you, meeting you almost at the door of the supermarket. You ride home with your stuff and the car moves off to do another job. Your flashy, powerful, expensive, highly-taxed and rapidly-depreciating (although impressive to others) SUV, remains in its garage-nest, shiny and undamaged. That’s good, right?
Except for the need to stow all the crap we leave in our cars – sometimes for years – not being completely responsible for a “car” can be increasingly attractive.
STAYING RICH
Rather than a $500,000 home – mortgage payment, insurance, upkeep and all – one’s car is the largest expense one carries. Over, say, twenty-five years, a homeowner might spend $30,000 a year for his home and on his home… $750,000, a lot of money. In the same time, he might buy and finance five $30,000 cars… $165,000. Insurance adds another $50,000, maintenance and taxes, gas and sundries, probably another $75,000 – altogether $290,000 (very conservative number).
At the end of the twenty-five years the home will be sold for a million dollars (if not three times that much), while the last car will still be on the road, sucking up expense dollars. Most homeowners will profit on the home, but the car dollars are all gone.
HOW MUCH PER MILE?
Suppose the homeowner travels 20,000 miles a year commuting, shopping and few trips. His average cost per mile is 58 cents, except, well, over the years, he’s also spent $120 a month for parking while at work – another $36,000! Now we’re over 65 cents a mile, despite some of the dollars being for “non-miles.”
What if you could call up a car whenever you needed it, for $500 a month, same amount of miles? To compare, that would be only 30 cents a mile… HALF! The other $150,000 you can keep in your pocket!
Insuring your private vehicle is a function of the extraordinary risk one takes both for himself and his prized possession. You might have a new, ultra-safe, back-up camera’d SUV that has cost you $4,000 before you left the dealer’s lot (taxes, registration, insurance, etc., etc.) and will soon generate monthly payments of $600. The first morning you pull onto the interstate parking lot, where its comforts and sound system are so valuable, and where its appearance can be thoroughly envied, a $500 piece of… crap can drift over the line as its driver reads the paper, texts or reaches for another doughnut, and pretty well ruin the driver’s side of your polished beauty. You can imagine your own feelings without my help.
In an instant you will appreciate the economy and efficiency of autonomous vehicles for commuting purposes, if for nothing else.
WHY YOU’RE GLAD YOU LEARNED LOGARITHMS
We can imagine, as autonomous vehicles gain numbers and acceptance, that only one lane, the “breakdown” lane will be designated for them at first. They will travel at no more than 40 miles per hour, automatically giving way to private cars that signal for exits. The blinker itself or a radio beacon it turns on will tell the “AV” that will create space for the exit turn, of the need to do so, and through virtually instant communication with the AVs behind it, a slight reduction in speed is smoothly achieved logarithmically back down the line, as is smooth acceleration back to normal.
Along with other automatic adaptations to traffic conditions, the ride-sharing (or not) commuters in the AVs will arrive at the destination for each in about half the time as all those individually impressive, singularly occupied, driver/commuters will. Better still, they won’t have to find parking – or pay for it.
SHARED CONTROL
Now let’s imagine that most of the vehicles on the Interstate are autonomous and happily communicating with the dozens of other AVs that are nearby. Let’s extend that to all cars being required to have a couple of basic transponders so that “special-license” drivers can’t screw up the works. Now manually-operated and autonomous vehicles can share the road, even to the point that the AVs can “scatter,” so to speak, whenever a “ManOp” does the wrong thing. If it’s something really foolish, or dangerous, all the vehicles around the offender will “know” who the offender was – at least what the ‘numbers’ of his vehicle were.
RISK
AVs will cost a lot less. With fairly simple RFID chips in every vehicle, there won’t have to be on-board radars, back-up cameras, etc. (that may not be paid-attention to). Those suckers are expensive. Plus the cost of insurance will be very low and cost in dollars and suffering will be almost eliminated. That is the best part. Medical care (some quite dramatic) resulting from automobile accidents, is just as expensive as for other reasons.
This is disruptive technology. The phase it is going through, now, is going to be brief. All the automatic safety and silly systems (like automatic parallel parking), that owners love to show off, will become superfluous in large part, when there is no need to park, among other things.
NEW-CITY
Imagine the people-positive effects of not having millions of cars parking in our cities and towns.
Drunk-driving, drugged-driving, texting, reading, applying makeup and eating breakfast on the commute, will all become safe to do! How cool is that? Streets and interstates can be smaller, believe it or not, instead of constantly become larger, more costly, ugly and dangerous. We won’t need as many police, either, since the number of accidents will decline markedly, and insurance will cost a lot less.
When you start to consider all the crap we put up with to maintain private, manually-driven cars – and trucks – the day when true transportation arrives, can’t be too soon. I didn’t even mention the first teen-age solo…
Yearly Archives: 2016
A PROBLEM LARGER THAN RADICAL ISLAM!!
The following was originally published in the Westford CAT as a letter to the editor by Dennis J. Galvin of that town.
home phone : 978-692-3157 cell phone: 978-846-2635 cell email: galsix90@aol.com
June 27, 2016
Letter To The Editor
A PROBLEM LARGER THAN RADICAL ISLAM !!
Our nation recently experienced one of the worst terror attacks in its history. Yet, rather than coming together, with a firm resolve to respond, Americans find themselves bitterly divided over political agendas. There are three rails in American politics today. The conservative rail favors small government, strict adherence to the constitution and a free enterprise economic system. The liberal rail favors larger government, wide latitude in the interpretation of the constitution, and qualified support for the free enterprise system, provided there is a safety net. The third rail are the progressives. They are neo Marxists, who believe that American society is inherently flawed and must be torn down and rebuilt. Centralized re-education, social re-structuring, pervasive government indoctrination and rule by fiat are their answer. They see the constitution as biased toward certain classes and believe that wealth redistribution is the only way to achieve social justice.
Progressive ideology has played a significant part in bringing about our division. The mass shooting in Orlando Florida gives clear evidence of this. It was perpetrated by a self-avowed radical Islamist, supported by an ideology focused on destroying western civilization. Progressives distinguished themselves by their response to this incident. They fabricated a narrative to distort the intent of this ruthless killer, using his crime to attack American citizens, who do not agree with their agenda. Gun owners, Christians, straight men, were all accused of contributing to the conditions that led to this carnage. The leading national progressive, our president, became unglued over criticism of his leadership, attacking Republican candidate Donald Trump with a ferocity that should have been reserved for the terrorist ideology responsible for the killings.
This display is unnerving and it supports an assertion made by David Horowitz, a former member of the new left, now a progressive critic, who said that to understand progressives, one must remember that “the issue is never the issue, the issue is the revolution.” Horowitz warns that the only focus of progressives is their agenda. The implication: no matter what happens, with regard to the radical Islamic threat, progressives would sacrifice our security to advance their goals. The anemic response of our President to ISIS, his unwillingness to fully commit the nation to their destruction, and the renewed calls to curb the second amendment support this assertion. It would also explain his vehement public attacks on Republicans, rather than homicidal radical Islamists.
Horowitz’s implications are clear, progressives are so blinded by the correctness of their ideology, that they no longer feel an affinity for their nation or their fellow countrymen, if they disagree. All that counts is the cause, anyone who gets in the way must be destroyed. Offering a sobering insight into this mindset, Horowitz once said “ if you believed that you could bring about heaven on earth, what crime would you not commit and what lie would you not tell.” Such audacity threatens our freedom and our security. The aftermath of Orlando reveals that as a nation, we are facing bigger problems than just ISIS.
END
FAIRNESS and TRUTH
Truth applies to things both transient and permanent… like clouds, for example. Obviously they are a true thing, but the truth of how they appear was not known for most of history. It was still true.
SUN, SON
The Sun truly exists. Exactly how it came to be is only well-theorized. (Did you know that ‘theory’ means “words about what God is thinking?”) It is impossible to truly know until we can re-create its formation, and until that day we accept the words of scientists and their wonderful mathematics – a great source of truths all its own.
POLITICAL SCIENCE
Politicians love “science,” but not math so much. They like ‘agreement’ more. As science reveals truths or, better, evidence of truths, the opportunities for more laws and taxes multiply. But when a majority of people agree that something is true politicians can immediately step in front of that large group and claim to have always known the truth of that something in their electable hearts.
Absolute truths make these types very wary, unless, joy of joys, their absoluteness creates unfairness. Agreeable people will always vote to end unfairness wherever it lurks, or to create fairness. Fairness, as opposed to truth, is a poor basis for law. Some will look at a truth that affects everyone equally – as does a law based upon it – as completely “fair.” Equality is a good thing, no?
PRICE OF TRUTH
Money interferes with truth, for some people. If one has less money than some other person, then absolute truth/law can feel unfair, and those feelings build up and up, especially if one is reminded of them daily – or hourly. This is painfully true if the one with more money appears to be having more fun in life despite the absolute truth and the laws it spurs. Then politicians are called upon to level a playing field and eliminate unfairness. This is accomplished by penalizing those with more money and “fairer” taxation is the tool.
Fairness, in a political sense, is inseparable from truth and, like so many issues today, is best described as attempts to deny, or manipulate truth – also known as ‘reality.’
LIARS AND FAIRNESS
Harry Truman described three kinds of liars: “liars, damn liars, and statisticians.” Statistics are, ostensibly, evidences of truths. When certain statistics are used but not all, or if statistics that aren’t really related are placed together, patterns of “unfairness” can be discerned, especially by those who are looking for them. This affects tax theories and governance.
When Barack Hussein Obama was running for president, he stated that he would raise corporate taxes on the basis of simple “fairness.” The consequences to corporations, or to the economy, as well as considerations about whether the federal government “needed” those new revenues, were not part of his thinking. His statement was pure politics, based on perceptions of unfairness that were derived from the belief that corporations had too many tax advantages – or “loopholes” – while poor people (who largely paid no tax) didn’t have those “advantages.”
CAREER FAIRNESS
Obama’s entire career has been based on defining unfairness and getting people organized to put an end to it. It has not been because he cares about any particular social construct’s impact on people’s lives. It has been based, as many liberals’ views are, on the perception of unfairness that may be tapped into and used to incite radical change. Very little “fairness” is ever achieved. And if it is, it comes at a severe cost, often to those whose unfair situations were the spur to identifying the unfairness. Fairness, unlike truth, is malleable, and a destructive basis for laws.
SOCIAL JUSTICE
“Social Justice” has been the motivating buzz-word in the 21st century, and Obama has capitalized on its amorphous unfairness – if socialists can capitalize. Essentially, social justice takes over where “reparations” for the sin of slavery, falter. The concept of reparations disintegrates as the details are examined. Hundreds of thousands of Union soldiers, and millions of dollars (back when a million dollars was a lot of money) were expended to defeat the Confederacy – many thousands of black soldiers included. Millions of people sacrificed to fight to total victory. Who owes who what?
Most claims center on corporations that existed before the Civil War, especially those that existed in the 18th century. The condemnation is that they profited from slavery and that it’s time to “own up” to that tainted past. Apparently, the only way to set things right is to give money to brown-skinned people who were never slaves, themselves.
TRUTH IN EDUCATION
Truth in education would seem to be a perfect sequitur. That is, educators will naturally be imparting truths to their students… without question. Go to school – society’s best expression of its worth, strength and future – and truth will be your reward. Naturally. But, increasingly it seems, not necessarily.
HISTORY AND TRUTH
What has happened in the past, for example, to the best of our ability to discover and document, provides a body of truth that should be the basis of a History course. In order for our children to know our nation’s origins, our standards of action and cultural “traditions,” we are obligated to convey to them what the facts are and were. We are obligated to tell our children the truth… I think.
Adults – and teachers – sometimes forget that what they show and what they tell their kids is grasped as TRUTH. It can take years for those who have the good fortune or good parenting to unlearn opinions, biases or hatreds, and replace them with “truer” truths. Unless they also have the good fortune to go to most colleges.
COLLEGE LEDUCATION
There they’ll listen to deeper biases, radical anti-Americanism, lists of words that can’t be used any longer, while learning about “trigger” words or concepts that can damage their fellow students… although they won’t be allowed to say “fellow” students. That’s a micro-aggression.
The “Education Industry” used to open minds to new ideas, challenge them with opposing views, teach them to embrace exploration for ever greater and purer TRUTHS. That is a habit that serves American citizens and other humans, for their entire lives.
TRUE HATE
How did higher educators become sources of so much hatred? Inordinate amounts of effort are expended teaching students whom they ought to hate, largely by accusing their targets of being haters! No debate seems to affect this process. Then they demand campus cultures that protect their charges from hearing hateful opposing views. Often this includes agitating to prevent certain people – some quite accomplished – from speaking on their “safe” campus.
WAR ON TRUTH
The college war on TRUTH includes cleansing courses of books written by white people that have been judged by today’s irrelevant attitudes to have been hateful, regardless of truths they may have understood or discovered. There are, apparently, no reasons to learn about truths discovered or described by people we no longer approve of. The entire basis of the United States, going back 500 years, is now rejected as distasteful and properly hated by our delicate “students.” One wonders if they are students if their areas of exploration keep shrinking.
The Constitution and its intellectual premises are well documented, forming a certain body of truth worthy of study (“worthy” is an opinion). At least, one would hope that raising new citizens would include truths about their own country.
TRUTH – On the Road
[Part A] TRUTH IN PAVING
Truths with hard, empirical evidence are best, since all concerned see, or know, the same information, the same fact(s). Laws may be enforced based on empirical evidence. Consider directions, or geometric dimensions. They are often expressed as related to right or left hands. Roads are an example: they have length and width, width described as the left side and right side of the road. As soon as more than one person desired to travel on a road, some sort of custom, and later, law, was needed to prevent collisions.
TWO SIDES TO EVERY TRUTH
Since it was – and is – absolutely true that the road had a left and right half – or sides – then a law that directed travelers or drivers to “keep to the right,” as they were facing, prevented collisions to every traveler’s benefit. Truth is a good basis for laws.
Nowhere are people who have lost their right hands excused from obeying the “right-hand” law. The loss of a hand doesn’t change the truth.
DIRECTIONAL OPPRESSION
Now, let’s imagine some travelers, or drivers, feeling oppressed by the right-hand restriction. These are they who feel compelled to drive in a different lane than the right-hand one. This leads them to drive on the left side, which poses serious risks to themselves and others. Mature, elected leaders, never at loss for a pander, rather than tell those differently-compelled drivers that they must drive on the right, instead tell cities, towns and states to hurry up and create a third lane down the middle so that the differently-compelled can drive in a lane that’s not the right-hand lane.
THREE DIRECTIONS… FOUR
No sooner is the third lane completed, striped and the road landscaped, but a problem crops up with other differently-compelled drivers going the other way, who also want to drive in the center lane. No problem to political types: everyone will simply cough up the taxes to build a fourth lane to accommodate both directions of differently-compelled drivers. Problem solved… maybe.
PAY NO ATTENTION TO THE TRUTH BEHIND THE CURTAIN
Unfortunately, many differently-compelled drivers can’t set aside the urge to drive on the left side, and actually feel discriminated against to be forced to use the middle lane(s). Politicians feel their pain right away. A new law is created that requires all right-hand-adhering drivers to make way whenever some differently-compelled driver feels compelled to use the left lane. Old-law-abiding drivers are given the option to drive in the middle lanes or, if they think it’s safer, to pull off the road and wait until a differently-compelled driver goes by. It interferes with all the non-differently-compelled drivers’ travel, but, none of the differently-compelled drivers feel oppressed any longer. That is legally important above all other concerns – even truth.
A TRUTH TO FIT EVERYONE
Eventually, though, non-differently-compelled drivers find that when traffic builds up, it saves a lot of time to take the center lanes or even the left lane. Police pull them over because they look like Non- Differently-Compelled drivers, and not like differently-compelled ones. Amazingly, every driver pulled over for driving on the wrong side of the street turns out to feel compelled to drive in other than the right lanes!
Oppression is either more widespread than originally known, or it’s contagious. Traffic cops would now be in a tough spot since the oppressed, non-oppressed and temporarily-oppressed all look alike. Perhaps the oppressed could wear different hats… or something.
Truth, Belief, Spirituality, Life, Death, Freedom
THE BIG SIX.
It feels as though all the “old” ways are under assault at once. The arguments against what is and how it came to be, are endless. Overpopulation is an argument that’s so old it’s become new again. The reasons to limit – even reduce – population change with the winds of politics, but they’re certainly heating up again, now. Mankind has no clear basis for determining when population is “over,” or just larger, but there are plenty of worries… and theories – same things, sometimes.
TRUE SEX
Another, relatively new argument is about sexuality. The closer we can get to pure animalism the better, according to some. Animals, themselves, exercise better ethics about sex than do humans who want to act like animals. Even Federal and state governments are de-regulating sex, mostly by coercing straight people, who are the vast majority. Why it is a government problem is hard to compute.
Reconfiguring sex brings up issues like Freedom, Social Cohesion, Law, Justice and the Regulatory State. The social – and sexual – roles of males and females are shifting, and have been for a century, to the point they no longer have legal definition. Their denial is where legality matters. The original feminist rebellion, allegorized in the Garden of Eden story, is playing out to unintended results, all around us.
HOT TRUTH
Climate Change – measurable in less than half a lifetime – is a wonderfully heavy political tool for leftist, controlling types. Too many people on the planet is the source of it, of course, as we are the source for everything unpleasant, even, now, earthquakes and volcanoes. The chief agitators about climate change are the same who want to sunder sexuality, disrupt business, cut law free from its moorings and render education into government pigeon-holing.
COLD TRUTH
Religious institutions are being de-legitimized, despite Constitutional protection of religious freedom, but religion, itself – as in spirituality – is being lost at the same time, as if it were never more than decoration. The spirituality of life is dismissed as inconvenience, as millions of abortions are committed around the world, so strongly advocated by those who deny fatherhood and motherhood as oppressive.
Science, to socialist controllers, is the new religion. It’s technology, really, that provides cover for the erasing of tradition… and of spirit. Science somehow justifies top-down regulation; freedom, religious and otherwise, is its impediment.
FORMULA SIX
All areas of human testing, failure and success derive from the following elements of the formulae for Humanity:
1) Truth; 2) Belief; 3) Spirituality; 4) Life; 5) Death; and, 6) Freedom.
I have tried to identify another “root” or “end” to improve this sextet, but these encompass everything, I think. All other topics of debate, argument, war and peace, including those heated and cold, are “means” to these “ends.” My contention is that it is possible to devise governance that prevents the means from thwarting the ends for all… and for every individual, family, extended group or nation. So, in turn:
TRUTH is absolute, illimitable, pure. It bumps into beliefs – or the other way around – constantly, but it can’t be changed with a new truth (opinion) to take its place, and lies may stick to it only temporarily. Truth is the reason for experiment, discovery, curiosity and science, but it can’t be limited by any of those – it simply is.
TREWTH
Many of mankind’s troubles stem from attempts to define or re-define truth, as though different opinions represented differing sets of truths. Obviously that is impossible; there are only differing sets of beliefs or, corrosively, attitudes.
Truth may be described through evidence, but evidence, itself, requires constant, scientific (defined as examination and testing free of the pollution of beliefs) distillation. There are as many truths as there are atomic particles, all potentially discoverable, but true regardless. Humans are concerned with a tiny fraction of them.
PERSONAL TRUTH
Our greatest literature is about the revelation of truth, or about truths that conflict based on unequal beliefs about them. Often, unable to reveal absolute truth, literature will draw moral lessons from its obvious existence, even if imperfectly known, and present those as a form of proof of absolutes. Such are easily disregarded by skeptics, who insist that they are entitled to irrefutable proof of absolute truth if they are to respond to it in any way. Otherwise, their comfortable beliefs will suffice for this lifetime.
JUDGMENT
Legal battles are one forge for isolating absolute truth, hopefully stripped of all misunderstanding. Oddly, mere opposing “views” of what is true are the essence of “proof” that will convict or acquit a suspect. Recognizing that absolute proof of absolute truth is imperfectly achievable by humans, we invest judges and juries with the power to “rate” the quality of opposing views of truth, in order to convict or acquit. Neither outcome establishes “truth,” although one may come close. Whose opinion of what is true, is most plausible?
Even confessions must be proven, as individuals are known to admit to acts not performed for various reasons.
TRUTH IN POLITICS
Controlling types, politicians and others, find that controlling access to truth – thereby defining truth for the controlled – yields immense power. Science is their umbrella, and education, glorious, indoctrinating, “public” education, is their most effective tool.
The monopolistic ability to control the beliefs of most of the population, and therefore how that population grants power democratically, enables teachers – controlled through licensure and unionization – to define “truth” for their students. “Science,” then is more free to pursue the “truths” it wishes to discover and to ignore those it wishes to obscure – or, as happens, doesn’t believe in.
Truth controlled by politics is a dangerous, dangerous weapon.
TRUE LIES
The existence of truth spawns lies… some unintended. Lying, when on purpose, is purely human. There is no inherent requirement for lying that must be met to live well. Lying is easy in its simplest applications; many are harmless, even beneficial for the “ly-ee.”
“Do I look stupid?” The asker probably thinks he or she DOES look stupid in some situation, but usually receives an answer like, “Of course not!” Which might be a lie. “Do these clothes make me look fat?”
Of course not.
[Additional Truthiness to follow]
The Guardian Program
It is time that we institute a national program I call “Guardian.” The Guardian program will be populated by men and women who are trained to take emergency defensive steps in all sorts of venues, and who are willing to carry and employ firearms as part of those steps. Each would be carefully investigated by the U. S. Marshall service, and trained, at partly their own expense, at certified gun safety ranges and, later, at police academies in each state. The idea is that these thousands of individuals would have a form of interdiction powers, such that one might stop an incipient crime or shooting by presenting his or her weapon and a trained stance, in situations where an idiot wielding a firearm would have expected no resistance whatsoever.
Copious history supports the likelihood that a fool with a gun will usually abandon his plans and submit or attempt to flee when faced with a defender with a gun. At the worst, like the examples of Adam Lanza at Newtown, or James Holmes at Aurora, Colorado, or even the two dopes at Columbine High School, a single armed and trained individual would have stopped the carnage before or immediately upon its beginning in all three of those circumstances.
Guardians would also be equipped with “911” buttons, so to speak, that would be required equipment anytime they are carrying a firearm. One push of the button would open a 911 channel unique to that purpose, such that the wearer could explain what was happening as it unfolded. Police could respond at their fastest, knowing it was a potential shooting incident, probably active.
Guardians would be insured under a federal policy, and held harmless from prosecution unless true negligence were established. It will be at some risk that a gun owner might submit to the rigors of Guardianship, but, aside from announcing the existence of the program and the numbers of Guardians in the country, neither their identity nor their locations – even generally – would be published.
Obviously they would be witnesses, but perhaps better-quality witnesses – part of their training. Masking their identities at trial is not an insurmountable problem.
Many of the objections raised to the free exercise of 2nd Amendment rights eventually come around to “that’s not the kind of country we are,” or, “we aren’t that kind of people.” Such statements are correct, in the worst way. America is increasingly occupied by who must be seen as “non-Americans.”
That is, there are, ANNUALLY, many thousands of illegal and legal entrants added to our population, who have no desire or intent to “become” Americans. In other words, they are not interested in our culture, morals or heritage of individual responsibility. Many of these entrants and immigrants, come to the U. S. for no more than personal gain. They may work, but this means “under the table” for a large number. They may be granted refugee status and this provides various forms of welfare support without waiting, and it is as likely as not that what is claimed to earn “refugee” status is a lie. They may have a distant relative already here, making it easy to “win” welfare status.
They may simply be criminals, drug merchants or otherwise, ready to take full advantage of liberalism’s open arms. Despite their receipt of welfare and education, these criminal types remain members of criminal gangs who ply death amongst us.
The rise of indigenous gangs is another source of extreme criminality that soft hearts and softer heads attempt to explain, rationalize and justify as a fault not of the criminals involved, but of society -American society – itself.
None of these sources of sociopathy can be traced to the mere availability of guns, nor to the legal ownership of guns, regardless of number. What these sources have done, similarly to the influx of Italian gangs in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s, is to introduce a new element of danger and criminality to American society, with two significant differences.
One is the scale and reach of modern criminality – largely connected to drugs – which reaches down to virtually every street, unlike “organized crime” that may have profited from many streets, but which limited its murderous effects to rivals in its own universe. The other is that, today, murder is a way of doing business, even crappy, penny-ante neighborhood-dominance business. Kids are being shot before they can overdose.
The conditions for widespread death-dealing are a direct result of federal policiy failures. Yet many are afraid to recognize – or are blind to – that fact. As suburban kids, from “good” towns and families run a race to eternity with heroin, fentanyl and pain-killers, not always beating the cops with the Narcan, at least not the first time, more and more parents, police, teachers and counselors are asking why things have sunk to this.
Having porous borders for not just the past 8 years, but for the past 30, has promoted the hard drug trade like nothing else. Instead of delivering drugs to retailers, loose immigration has enabled larger-scale wholesalers to establish themselves in every metropolitan area and in many mid-size cities. Drugs, now, are delivered in tons rather than pounds. Shipments of cash in return are measured the same way.
A federal administration that prevents arrest and deportation of illegals only compounds failures of policy marking the last 30 or more years. Compounding that, the policy of releasing convicted criminals, mostly drug dealers – re-defined as “non-violent” offenders – has made a mockery of federal law in general, and a mockery of the oath by every member of our armed forces, to “…support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic…”
Finally, we have entered a period of social confusion that seems more concerned with the misfortune of criminals than with that of their victims. A new faith in “rehabilitation” has infected our judicial network and we are less safe. Some can be rehabilitated, and God bless them. The other 80% of violent offenders – and I include drug dealers – will not be. Yet we feel compelled to parole them, somehow, to test arcane psychological theories. No one involved is held accountable when a parolee murders an innocent, and we are less safe.
Combined with the influx of new criminals from outside our borders, we have created our own, unfolding tragedy. Gun ownership is a perfectly logical reaction; self-defense an inherent right, the Guardian program a wise extension of those rights. I strongly encourage its adoption.
Drugs and Governance
We are not serious about ridding ourselves of drugs. We’ve been touting a “war on drugs” since 1971. Nixon’s concept was dead-on. Yes, it was a reaction to the wantonness of the ‘60’s, and an unpleasant adult’s attempt to restore adult control over the dangerously immature. But it is impossible to measure the destruction of lives that could have been avoided over the fifty-plus years since: the loss of fertile minds, the waste of generations of inner-city youth, the corruption of law enforcement and even the judiciary, and, now, the virtual abandonment of moral authority by governments at all levels.
The instinct to protect ourselves and others from mind-corroding drugs is now conflicting with a new, unprecedented concept of “rights.” America was founded in a time of moral adjustment and intellectualization of models of governance. Smart people, sensitive to history and the writings of philosophers both current and precedent, and fresh from the struggle of revolution, conceived of a constitutional republic where qualified citizens would vote for three levels of government: local, which elections already existed, state, which had existed for domestic issues despite top-down controls from England, and the new, federal, yet divided, central government. Overarching was the logical fear of creating a new tyranny to replace the old one: government could not be trusted to govern itself.
None of it worked without a shared morality among the citizenry and, most basically, moral self-governance. The Founders expected, and observed, a general ability to govern oneself, and the social agreement of when self-governance had failed. How distant those concepts are.
The Constitution, revered in theory and acknowledged in breach, has become the means to separate individuals from all external moral forces, starting with one’s parents. Not the original intent, but enough lawyers and psychologists, teamed with power-hungry political weasels, have managed to literally talk us out of our heritage. Shame on us.
We are now at the critical knife-edge of history where a civilization finds the courage to defend and restore itself, or passes from history to join the other failed attempts to organize societies with a measure of individual freedom. For the new power-meisters, morality and moral stricture are the obvious enemies of the individual’s enjoyment of life, and they are happy to take the votes of the threatened and pass laws that prevent morality from interfering very much. So long as “things” hold together – things like infrastructure, utilities, law-enforcement and food and energy supplies – individuals’ new friends in government will continue to find ways for their voters to avoid responsibility, taxes and work. Maybe. It’s all crap.
Meanwhile, human potential is dissolving in mixtures of chemicals, both legal and, nominatively, “controlled.” Parents are crying over suburban kids dying from heroin, boys and girls, while legislatures rush to legalize marijuana. The edge of logic has become fuzzy. Lives of otherwise responsible people are being distorted, ultimately twisted, by cocaine. Oh, but not “crack” cocaine! No, no, no; that’s for stupid people.
And the ‘War on Drugs’ goes on, accumulating statistics. What is missing is the will to actually stop the drug business. Succeeding will ruffle a lot of feathers.
Suppose a tough governor and a tough U. S. Attorney, working for an adult, a-political Attorney General, agree to designate a venue like a group of urban counties, and said governor agrees to take the heat for allowing a federal “state of emergency” in those counties. Under that declaration a special form of “martial law” would establish a camp, or camps, where National Guard troops will hold everyone arrested for even minor drug infractions. There they may be held indefinitely until the source of their drugs is identified and proven, on the presumption that ALL drugs have crossed state or international borders and are subject to federal penalties.
Detention camps will have ‘detox’ facilities. Addicts obviously are in possession of drugs on, or in their persons. They will be detained until their sources are identified. Then their sources will be arrested and detained until their sources are identified. And on, and on, until serious distributors are detained. As each level of source has been identified, the corresponding identifiers will be released to normal legal processes with all evidence gained under martial law admissible. We are either going to save our children – and society – or we are not.
Is it inevitable that individual freedom shall destroy our families, communities, schools, police and judiciaries? Because of our cleverness with words? Or do we have the right to cleanse society of corruption and disease, and to raise succeeding generations in clean, nurturing environments? Let’s choose rightly.
The Long Game
Of the election marathon of 2015-2016 it is safe to say that the Hillary phenomenon is not much of a surprise, although the Bernie Sanders phenomenon is – and he’s more instructive.
On the other hand, the Trump phenomenon has caught a lot of supposed wise observers by surprise and it surely ought not have. Trump is fulfilling an Alinsky-ite prediction: Obama’s EVERY effort has been to destroy his enemies and the classic Alinsky tactics have been employed repeatedly over his two terms.
First was / is to assault normalcy not quite outrageously, but steadfastly, in small ways and large. The “crisis” of financial meltdown, so convenient for Obama’s election, was the blasting cap. Never let a good crisis go to waste. Bam! In came the bailouts and Obama’s first victory in the budget-busting “stimulus” package that upped federal spending by 20%. Republicans didn’t have the majority, then, and watched helplessly, moaning and groaning, some even voting FOR it – able to swallow almost anything.
The Tea Party was born and the 2010 campaigns for Congress joined at that moment. The opposition was “stirred up,” as it were, and Obama’s plan was working. With the mainstream media lathering syrup on his every waffle of wisdom, Republicans were made to look silly in opposition. Time to strike!
In came Obamacare, that Orwellian lie of a law (or, Orwellian pile of crap… whatever works for you), that caught Republicans and the country off-guard. Bam! That was slammed through: another gigantic increase in federal share of GDP, gigantic increase in police-state controls over our most intimate freedoms, and Republicans were made to look silly in opposition.
In 2010 the House went Republican. Oh, wonderful, they said, now we can thwart Obama through control of the “purse strings!” Obama was perfectly satisfied to have Congress split. His plan never was to increase Democratic majorities – it was to destroy Republicans and any opposition to his socialist weakening of the U. S. When you’re in a shooting gallery, the only ducks you can hit are the ones parading by in front of you.
Well, the Republicans were really mad, now, and they proposed repeal of Obamacare, over and over again. The Senate pissed on that idea and Republicans were made to look silly in opposition. No formal budgets were passed, just continuing resolutions that cemented-in the 20% budget increase (plus Obamacare that kept getting funded) the stimulus had injected, and Republicans were made to look silly in opposition, especially when the government shut down for a few days.
Oh, my God! Look at the suffering! It didn’t stop the Republicans. They made believable promises to their base that once they had both Senate and House they could really stop the Obama regime and its terrible…, whatevers – fill in the blank and send a check. Republicans and conservatives were reaping a windfall in donations thanks to that ogre, Obama. And continuing resolutions were passed and the budget remained outrageous, even as Obama could claim to be “reducing deficits at the fastest rate in history.” It was still better that Republicans now controlled Congress for the press could make them look even sillier in opposition… as well as disingenuous to their base!
Having boxed them in with lies about government shutdowns and other opposing acts, Obama and the press displayed all too clearly how Republicans could not be trusted even when they had all the power to stop him that they’d asked for.
Enter Trump, a fallen angel, but angel nonetheless. He has ploughed through standard Republicans, and even Ted Cruz, engendering a substantial opposition within the Republican party, itself, including Mitt Romney Syndrome, that will, if successful in presenting a third candidate, complete the destruction of Obama’s enemies.
It was a long game, but perfectly played by the president, traitor though he may be. Watching the Republicans fumble around, afraid to impeach or withhold funds, all the other crises of Obama’s making were just diversionary, happily watched and waited-out while the long game played along.
Republicans’ 8 years of foolishness have brought us almost to our own goal line, not even talking about defending it, while Mr. Obama flips America the bird.
Prudence Leadbetter
Free Sex and Freedom
Homosexuality and other sexual expressions have changed. No news flash there, but what does it mean? In many ways it is a frontal attack on religious belief and expression, but it is also an attack on free enterprise, Constitutional protections and the public covenant. AIDS was its greatest ally.
AIDS was spread almost exclusively from particular sex acts by men. It can infect both genders but it began with men doing unnatural – as in non-evolutionary – sex acts. And it was and is terrible.
Once it was identified and named, teams of researchers began seeking a cure and seeking voluminous funding from governments to expand the fight against AIDS. Within a couple of years AIDS had legal standing, virtually unique among diseases. Special non-discrimination provisions were added to our laws so that sufferers would not be ostracized and suddenly, everyone was feeling sorry for – and accommodating – homosexuals! Gays, queers, trannies, lesbians, dykes and butches were organized in ways and with successes, never achieved before.
It was great news when the first non-gay was infected because now AIDS was “everybody’s” threat and problem. Now, straights and gays were the SAME! No more could gay friends and co-workers coexist through tolerance or ignorance of their differences, now the path was celebration, equality, pin-point anti-discrimination, and marriage! Glory be to politics! Being recognized not for gender but for sexual practice was a new pathway to power, codified, publicized, made equal in education and made equal to religion. Soon it was not equality but dominance that was sought – and here it is.
Homosexuality is not an evolutionary trait. It occurs in nature but by definition cannot procreate and pass on more and more “successful” homosexual genes. Homosexuality, at least until the twentieth century, was never more than a tiny percentage of humanity because it is constantly dying out.
What has happened? Homosexuality has gained a social value, and, therefore, political value and power.
Non-heterosexuality (NHS) is not normal in that it is unable to reproduce, which is to say, it cannot strengthen the gene pool. This is not to say it does not occur. Even some animals display same-sex courtship activity, but whatever motivates such action, it will not “enter” the genetic stream.
This was the case for all of human history until quite recently. We can look back from our new ethical platform and say that it was terrible to treat NHS people so poorly. Today, except for Islam, most social systems have decided to accept NHS at varying degrees of ignore-ance, tolerance or “equality.” Muslims kill homosexuals. They kill lots of other groups they don’t agree with, also, but they are just about the last belief structure that applies torture and death to NHS’s. In most cases, then, homosexuality is now tolerated. In our cloudy enlightenments America and Europe not only tolerate it, we give it “equal” status with heterosexuality. That is, NHS’s can now “marry” some one not of the opposite gender. However, they are not really “equal,” because they have also gained legal protections that restrict only heterosexuals.
Indeed, the diaphanous basis for enacting laws that benefit only NHS people is constitutionally questionable, to say the least.
Lately the battle lines are between the tiny, tiny number of self-identified “trans-gender” NHS people. These are they who claim – and perhaps believe – that their “identity” and their bodies don’t match. For those not suffering the same way this is not only hard to empathize with, it is hard to tolerate in its outward expression. We are adapting, little by little, largely through force of the new political power connected to all things sexually deviant – deviant in the sense that they are not evolutionarily functional, only socially.
“Transsexuals” want to utilize facilities where clothing comes off, based on what they believe about their bodies. Removing one’s clothing is a basic sexual act in western society. It is also a necessity in order to relieve one’s self, bodily, or to bathe or to replace soiled clothing with fresh. For transsexuals, these things cannot be separated. Their perceived “gender” is the determinant of their rights and necessities, evidently with no compartmentalization.
Social norms require that our sexual beings be limited, which is to say, mostly private. We celebrate the events in the creation of families, from marriage to pregnancy to birth and on and on. Families are the keystone to our civilization. They are strengthened by shared restrictions on sexual activity, and destroyed by sexual abandon, debauchery, adultery and so forth. That destruction hurts our children and their upbringing and maturation, things that society – all of us – want to see happen. These norms – and our children – are under assault.
Ultra-feminism has a role in all this, as does liberalism generally, which gains through group identities and group victim-hood. First, feminism has distorted the roles of men and boys. It wants softness, less manliness, sensitivity. It demands that rambunctious boys be corralled and defined by female control.
Feminism has changed ratios of success and achievement in education, business, politics and medicine. At the same time it has equalized sexual abandon and destructive habituation. Most of all it has confused the roles of men and women in the key functions of love, romance, marriage, family and child-rearing. Politics, feminist-driven, has enabled and profits from this demand for both victim-hood and dominance. Manhood is retreating.
Non-heterosexuality is growing socially, not genetically. It has become simultaneously acceptable – celebrated! – and less-threatening to bond with another man or woman than to undergo the rigors and risks of heterosexual courtship and responsibility. Almost like gang initiation and in-group recognition or status, “coming out” removes one from fulfilling roles that accept the burdens and risks of society and family and love of, and sacrifice for, a true spouse. And, we have the full force of government – right down to first grade and earlier – punishing heterosexual expression when it isn’t even sexual.
We bring up children amidst all of this and (feminist-driven and politically protected) unfettered abortion of unwanted babies, and then marvel at their growing reactions as they choose to couple purely for fun, hetero or homo – responsibility be damned.
The arenas in which men fulfill male responsibilities and accept risks are shrinking, even in the military. Every form of sexual aberrance now has “rights” that all institutions in society (religions included, except Islam, apparently) must accommodate, if not promote. The destruction of culture and social strength that is racing to an end we pretend won’t come, is all of our faults. Shame on us and shame on the professions and politicians that enable it, rationalize it, give it classy names and ride the waves of new unfairnesses for their personal gains.
***
One would think that personal feelings could not be a premise for codification. There is no empirical evidence of feelings and as a result, any “law” based upon them cannot be enforced equally for all. A good example might be separation of bathroom and shower facilities based on gender. In keeping with the protection of females from feral males, and with the protection of children from pederasts, restricting access to “boys’ rooms” and “girls’ rooms” has been one of the most fundamental and successful social norms since civilization got organized… and crowded.
Indeed, as mass communications became increasingly sexualized in both words and images, and with heightened mingling of young men and women in schools, jobs and elsewhere, the removal of clothing became more and more of a point of risk for unwanted sexual contact with people unrelated to one’s family, and unknown in proclivities. The segregation of bathroom facilities – and other places of disrobing, even partially – is increasingly important, not less.
The fears of individuals – particularly females – about being assaulted in places of compromise or of temptation, are valid. The rights of those offended or just unnerved by the presence of someone other than one’s own gender, are equally valid, and codified in law! But, somehow, such laws are being over-ridden in the interest of… what? Celebration of mental incongruities.
The syndromes, or popularly-honored sexualities that have been named by psychiatrists as if to impart patinas of reality, are little more than mental distortions. This is not to say they aren’t deeply felt and troubling for those who feel them. They don’t derive from the wrong number of genes; these people are not genetic oddities. They are odd in habit and have, they claim, deep feelings. For whatever emotional, mental reasons these are feelings that express through sexuality and deserve, I think, sympathy.
It is impossible for heterosexuals to empathize with someone who feels like his or her gender is a mistake. But, we should be kind; we should be completely civil; we should not denigrate or mock or chastise that person. He or she is human and deserves to exercise inherent human rights.
A proper question is whether we are being kind when we facilitate self-mutilation in a most fallible attempt to re-order the flesh to please the mind. Suicide rates would argue the negative.
What is the legal status of a gay or lesbian person who elects – chooses – to live a straight life. It happens all the time. People who have lived “straight” for even decades, decide to “go gay” at some point. That happens, too. In BOTH instances, the change is not genetic, it’s self-declared. Yet when he or she has decided to be gay or lesbian, he or she is protected by unusually strict anti-discrimination laws… laws so severe that “straight” people accused of such discrimination can be ruined socially and financially with the aid of government police powers. That is, when straight they are at great risk for persecution under laws that apply only to heterosexuals. Is there no definition under the 14th amendment?
As we move farther and farther away from the fundamental rights protected (ostensibly) by the Constitution, we get mired in the soft police-statism of creating rights that may only be enjoyed by taking rights away from others! To paraphrase a great mind’s observation: “The road to fascism is paved with good intentions.”