The UN, or something better?


We’ve been part of the United Nations for 72 years, nearly a third of our national history. At the end of World War II the U. S. stood astride the globe, stronger than any other nation or even groups of nations. We were so rich that we financed several countries’ rebuilding after dramatic devastation, both militarily and politically. The globalists, led by Averell Harriman, David Rockefeller, Henry Luce, Eleanor Roosevelt, Harry Truman, himself, and a host of left-leaning FDR advisers and academics, saw a unique opportunity to dilute American sovereignty and independence.

The UN’s purpose was to “end” war and provide “prosperity” and the ability for everyone to “live free.” Grand, grand ideas that never would have been the topic of worldwide planning had it not been for the external and internal success of the British and American empires. Like most benign, centralized efforts, the “UN” attracted – and still attracts – many globally-minded Unitarian types. These are they who believe the words of Pope John Lennon: “…no Hell below us; above us only sky…” because “Love is all you need, love is all you need, love is all you need…,” songs best appreciated with a toke.

Free sex, seed-free weed and the UN and to Hell …oops, to oblivion, then, with the United States, Christianity and the requirements of citizenship. “Nothing to kill or die for; the brotherhood of man…”

One of the first, and greatest acts of the U. N. was to create the nation of Israel in 1948. Hitler’s allies, the hard-rock Muslims who have been fighting the Hebrews for millennia, were not happy with this tiny piece of land’s becoming a home for the most oppressed of oppressed people, and they caused two things to happen: first, the “Palestinians” separated themselves from “Israel,” and then Arab League militias and mercenaries attacked cities in the Israeli portion of the Resolution 181-partitioned land. Jordan, Egypt, Lebanon, Syria and Iraq attacked the fledgling nation, including with air strikes and even forces from Saudi Arabia and Yemen. By 1949 the Israeli’s had defeated the uncoordinated forces arrayed against them. In the process they gained the West Bank and East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip. More wars followed and still Israel stands.

Israel made the desert bloom and planted, as well, a democratic republic amidst a dozen dictatorial, theocratic, tribal and royal countries, sworn to it’s destruction. In the Muslim view, once land is possessed by Muslims it becomes sacred, never to be stained by the presence of infidels. Their habit is to erect mosques on “conquered” land, often directly upon infidels’ religious sites. For such land and sites there can be no future negotiation – only discussions about how to remove all other infidels.

Since the Six-Day War in 1967, Israel has been a target of hatred in the UN, the high-minded body that had created it 22 years earlier. As the United States became more intimately connected with Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Iraq and Iran, attempting to eliminate Soviet influence and build however shaky alliances in tolerance of Israel, the hatred of fundamental Islamists, particularly since the installation of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini as the Supreme leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran, has been concentrated on the “Great Satan,” America at least as much as on the “Little Satan,” Israel. And so it continues.

Aside from the near-total corruption of the UN Secretariat and its multiple “missions,” the UN has become a forum of hatred and opposition for the United States, reinforcing the self-hatred, fifth-column actions of many Americans, themselves, and interfering with foreign policies of the U. S., England and most of the industrialized “First” World.

Things are changing. The European Union has shown its inability to resolve its finances as sovereign countries fail to adhere to dictates of the Über bureaucrats serving the European Parliament in Strasbourg. Europe is a “nation” of rules… rules that require the steady erosion of sovereignty from its member states. Britain voted to withdraw, not to form a competing “nation,” but to reform itself. The United States elected Donald Trump for much the same reason.

I believe we should take the next, logical step: form, with the U. K. and others, an international Association of Representative Republics. And have it stand for some things. Things like honest government, honest courts and honest contracting and trade; things like democratic elections, representative legislatures, parliaments and councils; things like free speech and the rest of the Bill of Rights.

Except for a handful of charitable works, the U. S. could divest itself of U.N. influence and interference. Membership in the A. R. R. would be open to every sovereign nation that governs itself according to principles that we believe in, including religious tolerance and non-theocratic governance.

As I perceive it, member-states of the Association of Representative Republics would maintain their treaty relationships, including trade agreements, but agree to somewhat better terms with other A. R. R. members. Military treaties should remain bilateral, but with a general agreement to continue working toward non-aggression toward every other member. But there is no reason to subject ourselves to constant attack and calumny while we erode our own sovereignty at the U. N. Better to expend our efforts and treasure among nations that have roughly equal goals of freedom, prosperity and security for every member nation, and in helping other nations to qualify under those principles.

Funding various terrorist nations and sub-groups who wish to destroy us and our allies, is not foreign policy – it is foreign folly.

SCHOOL CHOICE

School choice is a big deal for our new president, our soon-to-be Secretary of Education, millions of parents and students, and for teachers’ unions. Three out of these four favor it. The process of expanding school choice and the effects of it are the basis, potentially, of a learning revolution.
“You’re destroying public education,” say public-school educators.

Charter Schools are a hot topic and part of the revolution. Politicians take strong positions on both sides of the issue. Some like to defend “allowing” more charter schools in urban school districts; others, mindful of union support, insist on defending “our public schools,” as if charter schools weren’t “public.” They are public schools, but they aren’t unionized, for the most part, and they can set many of their own policies, work rules… and inspirations.

Public schools have been saddled with tasks that do not improve learning. This has happened in fulfillment of social-engineering intentions, “political correctness,” whatever that happens to be this year, and in reaction to fairly poor management, generally. There is little accountability under unionization, particularly when most middle-level school managers are in the same teachers’ unions.

America has tried to “fix” education… we can give some credit for that, but the fixes are bureaucratic and government-growing, and have yielded spotty improvements. And, they’re damned expensive. In general, learning problems concentrate in “poor” school districts, and these concentrate in urban areas. Simply busing children around to “mix” them with richer kids in richer districts has some individual success, but it reaches very few.

There’s no news about school districts EVER recommending that less money should be spent because they have learned that a lot of it has no value to education.

School budgets start with staffing classrooms and balloon to provide disproportionate numbers of administrative personnel. In the mid-1980’s the Brookings Institution completed a survey of public school districts nationwide. Across every demographic stratum, they found, test scores and other grade performance metrics were lower in inverse proportion to the number of administrative personnel.

Another way to look at that result is to say that in school districts where higher proportions of personnel funds were spent on teachers, students did better. Too many highly energized, highly motivated teachers are ground into robots by having to explain what they intend to do, describing what they are doing and reporting on what they did.

Too many, who never were highly motivated, are protected by unionized tenure, sometimes reporting to lounges to do what they wish because no principal wants them – still paid as if one did. Will more money correct that?

Although the premise of the public complex says that now that we have calcified all of this waste and misspending, more money will make things better from this point forward, little evidence exists to show that it does.

Charter schools, by and large, have few administrators and are non-unionized. Their teachers may be fired if they don’t teach with zeal and initiative and love. The schools, themselves, will go out of business when they screw up, fail to educate or mis-spend their budgets. Public schools never close due to failures like these – they get more money… and administrators.

Choice is what makes freedom work… Free Will: the essence of our Judeo-Christian ethics and heritage. “Thou mayest choose from evil.” We can choose to accept the responsibilities of freedom… of our choices. Or we can choose foolishness, crime, irresponsibility… socialism, in effect, not to be confused with humanity or even humanitarianism.

We can choose what is best for ourselves, and still be responsible. We can choose to marry and be a parent and a dedicated spouse, and thereby to raise our children and choose their educations in fulfillment of our philosophies and responsibilities.

We are not obligated, except by the public school monopolies, to turn our children over to different philosophies and relinquish our responsibilities. We can choose – or should be able to in a free society of sovereign citizens – to direct our children along the responsible path of our choosing. We can choose his or her place of education and the teachers who will help us create a new adult one day.

Somewhere, a town or school district will vote to charterize all of its schools and provide separate, superb facilities for individuals who cannot contribute to or grow within standard classroom environments. May God bless their endeavors. Otherwise and in spite of that, the resources the polity has decided to spend on each school-age child should be available for parents to spend as they see fit. Universal vouchers, universal responsibility. Let a teachers’ union prove that it delivers better education.

THE BELIEFS OF LEADERSHIP

There are lessons to be learned from the reactions of his opponents to the campaign and election of Donald Trump. Those same opponents seem deaf to them… and blind. As history often provides, the lessons will be made clearer, oddly enough, as the lens of time becomes thicker, longer and, in fact, cooler. Are these lessons so earth-shattering? Well, yes, probably.

Some nation is going to lead all nations, like it or not. Since its founding, in a sense, the United States has been that nation. Why? Much derives from the sacrifices of George Washington, a quite spiritual man. Unlike all the kings of history, Washington finished his second term as president and went back to his farm. He could have been president for life; he could have dictated who the next president would be. Instead, he surrendered a power the extent of which he may not have realized. In many ways he was the key man, launching our ship of state with faith in the inherent goodness of the people of America… and little else.

That “goodness” was primarily Judeo-Christian, filtered through all of Europe and the British Isles. Whether steady attendees at churches or not, most “Americans” were Christian – an inconvenient truth. When Franklin answered that the Constitutional Convention had delivered a “…republic, if you can keep it(.)” he expressed his recognition of the need for a morally straight citizenry in order for a representative democracy to function and survive.

Only morally raised children would grow up to live in honesty. Only a moral people would demand and sustain a legal structure of honest jurisprudence, honest, enforceable contracts, written and verbal, and honest money, trusted by every seller and buyer. Only an honest people would allow, even encourage, the least among us to excel, grow and succeed. Our many flaws grew from wrong beliefs and our regret is justified. But, our basic honesty and the strength of our institutions enabled us to change flawed beliefs.

Which is not to say that changing all beliefs is a good thing – our forbears were right about most of it.

Those of us old farts who have worried about the upset changes of the 1960’s, are being proven right, too. That was a decade that saw socialism become a “solution” through the “Great Society,” and indulgence of every youthful abandon begin the erosion of moral institutions, education as a moral institution, and every sort of drug and sexual thrill gain “rights.”
These changes are bearing their fruits… and nuts.

Daily we are challenged over every institution’s role as modern politicians – liberal ones, anyway, and fearful non-liberals – bow to every new idea about how individuals are not responsible for building their own lives and economics. Unfortunately, in a whirlpool of new “rights,” the lives of those citizens who don’t agree with or don’t care about the new licentiousness, the power of government has been turned against the majority of those who give it power in the first place. What are the new beliefs?

A growing minority believe that every form of sexual expression is as valid as all the others. These same believe that resistance to the disappearance of procreative sacredness is the equivalent of Hitler’s incomprehensible pathologies. This same group decries all rules of personal behavior not invented by them, and they are quick to hate while castigating haters. What sort of leaders will they be? With no social norming at work, will nations, in their view, become irrelevant, too?

The ungoverned seem quick to demand that “government” destroy the lives and rights of the traditionalist majority, and there are sufficient psychologists and lawyers to twist their ideas into effective arguments against… whatever. Screams for diversity – whatever that is – turn into screams of rage when diversity of beliefs is placed before them. Technology cannot mask that divide, nor, apparently, can elections. Majority rule is hateful until the disenchanted are in a majority position, however briefly. Since it will be brief, court rulings are sought to make their beliefs permanent policy.

Drugs are becoming mainstream, which might have some positive value if they calmed the hateful. They don’t, evidently. Drugs are a subject for belief and not necessarily truth, or reality. Besides, there are tax revenues to be realized, the purest calcimine that ever touched a brush. Soon we’ll be crime-free. Let’s hope the lights come on and the water flows on that day.

“Single-Payer?” Single delusion.

Socialists never learn. Socialism, or Communism, failed in the past because the practitioners weren’t as smart as we are, today. Can you say ‘hubris?’ Can you recognize utter failure to learn from history OR from human nature?

Single-payer health care (they mean single-payer FINANCING) is some people’s answer to the problems governments have created in health-care. This is a pattern for statists: problems can never be solved by freedom or free enterprise (the system that has solved more ‘problems’ than any system ever devised) but only by the benign love of government bureaucrats.

If those bureaucrats have actually made things worse (typically), the solution is ALWAYS, always more money (from taxation) or more bureaucrats who are told to be nicer or to not be stupid, and to be “fair.” Laws are passed to these effects. Oh, what a glorious new morning!

Single-payer is sold to the gullible as THE means to “contain costs” of medical care. Only through coercion, my children, only through coercion. How benign can they get?

You need to read “Health Care, Fairness and Free Enterprise” and I’ll send you a copy if you send a stamped, self-addressed envelope to Prudence Leadbetter, PO Box (tba)

WHERE’S THE CARE?

The grand error that has been undermining health care for about 50 years is grandiosity. It is federal politicians’ belief in their greater-than-average wisdom and resulting ability to guide every individual’s life. Health care provides not 2 or 5 or 50 issues about which politicians can buy votes, but hundreds! Oh, the sweet possibilities.

Federalizing healthcare under Medicare was a stroke of genius: give needed stuff to a demographic that votes. At first, it was “free,” another key element for acceptance of big government. Medicare was originally paid for through Social Security… what a slick idea.

There will always be elderly citizens who managed to grow old without preparing for their old age. Today an observation that those people should have prepared is a radical, hateful statement; obviously it is the government’s job to take over responsibility for individuals once they reach a magic age. Everybody knows that.

Health care has not become “better” as a result of Medicare, but it has become more widespread. “Well,” say most, “that’s certainly ‘better,’ isn’t it?” Well, for some, certainly.

Medicare began the process of creating HMO’s and PPO’s and mediocritizing (if that’s a word) medicine. It’s a process that separates individuals from the doctor-patient relationship, one that will ultimately separate individuals AND DOCTORS from personal responsibility. Only government is left to fill that “responsibility vacuum.” The statists’ dream realized.

Maybe such matters of state and culture are too intellectual. All that matters is that people get health care when needed. Unfortunately, that has not been the greatest effect of federal intrusion in our personal lives. The greatest effect is cost, followed by government growth, followed by fraud, followed by new, tangential costs. All in all, it’s unaffordable and governmentally wondrous.
Amidst the federalization is incredible confusion and obfuscation. Very few patients know what to do or who to do it with for the best results. Almost none has much choice of who or where to go unless he or she pays high premiums to augment or supersede Medicare. For non-Medicare-age workers, everyone must now pay for Medicare in addition to the 13+% of payroll they pay for Social Security. And we are 20 Trillion in debt, placing everyone’s health care at risk, along with our ability to defend the nation.

Obamacare tried to involve the federal government in every health-care decision. Amazingly, costs went up faster, options declined to only 1 in many states, and the government got bigger faster than ever before. Do we discern a pattern, here? Yes! The greatest advantage and success is for government! Not patients, not costs, and not care.

So we really ought to divest ourselves of the “government solution.” There are many ways to provide care, to sell it and buy it, to negotiate the cost of it and to compete for a share of the business. Statists distrust nearly all of them, except those most infused with federal cost-saving finesse. Since we’ve allowed statists to make the rules we are left to hope ever more diligently that the doctor we saw truly cares what happens to us – if it was a doctor.

Statists seem to distrust insurance companies, also, yet love them beneath the sheets of propriety since they provide substantial bribery for re-election and other purposes. Let’s hope that the double-dealing done with the insurance companies and the reverse bribes Obama finagled with the people’s money, is brought to light so that we may never attempt such thievery again. In any case, the attention called “health care” is spent on the wrong target: “coverage.”

It ought to be spent on HEALTH.

We need better ways to inform patients on how and what to buy that will improve their health, repair their injuries and treat their diseases. That’s health care. It’s not sex-obfuscation operations or breast enhancement. Such are not the public’s concern. What is of widespread concern is the 40% of “health-care” costs that go to administration. Anything proposed as a “solution” that increases administrative overhead must be resisted with every fiber of our citizenship.

RACE? AGAIN?

Prudence says that America needs some fresh thinking about race.  Anthropologists can “describe” some 300 “races” using markers like blood-type concentrations, in a process that tries to use physiology to delineate human “types” or races.  It is largely a waste of time for most people since it cannot relate social activities, social actions, with physiological differences.

RACE is a construct for both safety and control within societies.. except, lately, a construct for hatred.  The most visual markers are employed – like skin, facial distinctions, hair, eye-color… virtually meaningless attributes in terms of how people ACT, but crucial when differing groups come together.  No training or understanding is required to distinguish physiognomy.  That is a matter of belief.

Prudence has thought long about the power and dangers of belief.  It can exist and guide the actions of millions of people without paying any heed to reality… to truth.  Just as faith is the engine for maintaining religious traditions, there are many other belief structures to which individuals can adhere that effectively replace reality with constructed, believed paths of action that guide whole lifetimes.  Belief can be so self-fulfilling that it becomes its own evidence of “truth.”  It’s commonplace.

Less common is honesty.  An honest person can be taught the error of his or her beliefs and it is this very effect that has held the United States together through slavery, Manifest Destiny, the Civil War, destruction of Native American culture, waves of immigration and the Great Depression.  Beliefs have changed, honing more closely to reality little by little… until the 1960’s.

It was under the aegis of “The Great Society” that we changed the role of government to one of, essentially, social engineering – unionized social services that Lyndon Johnson and other hubris-laden socialists believed could change the nature of both rich and poor people for the better.  Change has certainly happened.

Blacks, who were making sure, but uneven progress in the 1950’s, have regressed in the inner cities where federal and state policies have re-enslaved them for 3 generations.  Why such conditions continue, even as the drug trade flourishes in that population, seems a great mystery to progressives.  It must be the fault of Republicans.  Our incoming president has mentioned conditions in the inner cities, but no policy changes have been described.

It’s all a matter of belief.  Progressives have long held the belief that the most generous “safety-net” possible, especially now that welfare has been federalized, will cause people WE have taught to be irresponsible for themselves, to become responsible, self-sufficient citizens.  We have placed them in a system where the only way to “get a raise,” requires careful cheating – things like getting two EBT cards or SNAP allowances beyond one’s entitlement.  Or, to sell some drugs, perhaps.  There should be no surprise that blacks hate whites.  They believe that whites have kept them from opportunity, that we discriminate in a thousand ways, that we are racists and on and on.  Some of it is true.  But the policies that have done so are not those of most whites, who feel guilty about black’s condition, and who act a little nutty because of their guilt; they are the policies of progressives who believe socialism will make better humans than God has… despite all reality to the contrary.

One might infer that Prudence indicates that progressives may not be truly honest, else they could learn the error of their beliefs, lo these past 50 years.

CODIFYING TOLERANCE

The latest issue of the National Geographic has a trans-sexual boy, a de facto girl, on the cover. The balance of the issue explores multiple examples of “trans” children, primarily, and how girls grow up and are often mis-treated (by our standards) around the world. Throughout are stories of the very rare instances of genetic mis-firings that yield unusual development of reproductive organs in humans, animals and insects. A survey is quoted that says “milennials” (in the West and U. S.) see “gender” as a spectrum rather than just male or female. Hmmph.

So there is no misunderstanding, this old stump is decidedly uncomfortable with the publicity afforded sexual incongruity. I don’t like the new rush to normalize exotic behaviors, which has proceeded with such politicized demonization of those not embracing it, as to make declarations of normalcy statements of gross intolerance and even of hate.

We are on the wrong track, it seems to me, to be denigrating and attacking very tolerant Judeo-Christian moral guidance (and institutions) and the essentially Judeo-Christian mores of Western societies and of the United States in particular, while affording equal, if not superior credence to the abject tolerance of non-believers and refuse-to-believe-ers. One group, attempting to adhere to socially-strengthening traditions while having compassion and tolerance for new conditions, desires and loves, is trying to maintain ideals about family, sexuality and moral purity. The other, mostly young, instantly connected and instantly knowledgeable (regardless of reality) is rushing toward license and the intentional destruction of all moral strictures. “It is their right,” some trumpet.

For purposes of the most tawdry and SHORT-LIVED political expediency, sexual oddities have received legal status that not only offends faithful Jews and Christians, but which force “straight” citizens (over 95% of us) to change our habits, practices and even beliefs, if we are to not be labeled “haters” for expressing our own condition! Within this twist of social norms are corrosive, acidic re-definitions of words, and IN-tolerance of normality.
Every Christian expression must be stricken from the public arena, for example. Christian beliefs that are the foundation of law and social norming, may no longer be uttered, EVEN WITHIN CHURCHES in some views, as they are deemed offensive to a tiny, tiny fraction of society who, not needing to have actually heard the scripture that they claim would have offended them, need only to hear that it was heard by others. Instant media sweeps across their non-judging (non-thinking) consciences and yields the “offense” they seem to seek and celebrate.

Perhaps the worst example of the dangers of codifying tolerance is the experience of Aaron and Melissa Klein whose Gresham, Oregon bakery was put out of business by a lesbian couple whose feelings were hurt when the Kleins refused to apply their artistry to a custom wedding cake for the upcoming nuptials of the same-sex couple. They did not refuse to bake a cake, nor to sell them one. On religious grounds they refused to decorate a cake that would assist in glorifying a wedding that contravened their faith.

Immediately the lesbian couple garnered widespread support against the “discrimination” and supposed hatred exhibited by the Kleins toward same-sex weddings and therefore anyone who favored or accepted such ceremonies. Next, they filed a complaint with the State of Oregon , which resulted in a fine of $135,000, payable to the “offended” couple, which was ultimately paid. The Kleins’ business was shuttered very quickly as hatred toward THEM yielded threats, picketing, slanders and public intimidation.

The offenses toward the Kleins, engendered by the “flash-hatred” of social media in favor of all things homosexual, were not defended against by any state laws. Indeed, the state took the side of two people whose feelings were ostensibly hurt, helping them in their campaign of hatred and destruction so as to put the Kleins out of business, and to punish them for refusing to employ their artistic abilities for the benefit of an event that their faith forbade.

In effect, this couple was told that they might live according to their (Christian) faith ONLY inside their home or their church, and that adherence to faith is not legal if one has a business. There are many examples of private citizens suffering severe economic punishment for merely expressing their faith with no related “illegal” actions!

We are in the realm of thought-policing. Free-thinkers (without moral anchor) like to compare everyone with whom they disagree to Hitler. No doubt the Kleins are among those so compared. But, it was Hitler who first imposed rules that faith may be expressed only in church. Delightful company, he.