Culture, Economics, Education, Governance, Politics 2018

MATTHEW’S Wolves

December 10, 2018 Prudence Leadbetter Leave a comment

Much is made of “division” in the United States. “Left” and “Right” are “far apart” on the “issues.” Congress is “hopelessly” divided, “races” are divided, the “middle class” is being destroyed. What is going on?

How has the America of World War II, of Eisenhower and J. F.K., Moon landings and even of 9-11, turned into a multi-cultural, deeply indebted nation that seems no longer to have common purpose or even common vision? The only nation launched on the distillation of ideas, philosophies and experiences about FREEDOM – freedom for individuals – has entered into an era of division, disagreement and hatred for opposing opinions and for those holding them. How did we get here? Why haven’t we arrived somewhere else… someplace where our better natures, better educations, better communications and greater technical opportunities would make us more unified, stronger, more capable and even more equally prosperous – free-er, one might have hoped?

There have to have been forces, perhaps “efforts” applied to divert the hope of generations, indeed to divert the “hope” of the “free” world– the dream of the not-free world – into a path of division and hatreds, a path of ultimate destruction and dissolution. What “forces?” It should be no surprise that the strongest forces applied against America’s future come from inside our borders. As always,there are and have been competitors, opponents and enemies from outside. How we have dealt and deal with all of them,comes from inside.

Have there been “outside” forces in our favor? One might count France among those, without whose assistance the bloody divorce from England’s monarchy would have failed in 1783. In an odd, sad way, The French revolution also instructed our fledgling nation as to the excesses to avoid in search of ephemeral purity. In a sense we owe much to both France and to England for the philosophical bases of America. Their joint challenges of World War I caused “America” to repay our debts, most specifically to France when General Pershing”s chief administrative aide, Colonel Charles Stanton, declared to France, and to the World in a sense, “Lafayette, we are here.” And America, having won the great internal battle for its soul in the 1860’s, had clearly grown to national adulthood,ready to play its part in establishing order and correcting injustice.

Although the influences of socialism had begun inserting themselves after the Civil War, it was our new international position during the first world war that enabled statist, Woodrow Wilson, to attempt to replace America’s national independence with a new global partnership, the League of Nations, including, he hoped, conforming our independence to that new order… such is the overarching dream of the strongest “outside” forces against American independence and survival.

To begin the process of bringing America down from its skyrocketing growth and influence, required financial brakes. The first Federal Reserve tryout resulted in the Great Depression and the installation of a social engineering president,FDR, and the great socialist program, Social Security. And, it began the new education of Americans, whose economic fears subsumed the promises of freedom and the duties of responsibility and even the lessons of the Bible. Dependence upon government taxing authority could be suddenly, slyly defined as the new INDEPENDENCE: a remarkable accomplishment over the span of just 11 years. These were inside forces, infinitely more powerful than the outside forces that encouraged and encourages them still.

World War II briefly delayed the socialist wave, even as communists embedded in the federal government prepared Americans for wholehearted embrace of the United Nations as the well-fertilized seedling of a “new world order.” Deeply flawed Joe McCarthy flared brightly as he exposed a number of communists in and near the State and Defense Departments… so did Congressman, Richard Nixon. In the 1960’s society and government were transformed. Government by the Great Society and the 3 assassinations; society by drugs, sex and rock-and-roll, but I repeat myself. Mixed among these social assaults upon morality were the retirements of the great educators – educators who taught more in high school than students learn in college it seems, today. Education became liberal and within the decade, socialist.

The Vietnam war, controlled in large part by the U. N., destroyed the nation’s trust in the rightness and righteousness of government. We were killing soldiers stupidly, without a goal or plan for victory. The hope of the world was dimmed, its trustworthiness diminished. Despite winning virtually every battle in Vietnam, The U. S. conceded defeat and crawled home ashamed. A process of military stalemate, begun in Korea, multiplied in Vietnam, has persisted to the current time, fulfilling the socialist lie that no nation is any better than any other, no culture is exceptional, no social structure is superior. September 11, 2001 came and… well, went, its lessons unlearned and turned against ourselves.

Government can no longer do enough. A president who believed the Constitution is fatally flawed with its “negative rights,” was elected and re-elected. Inside forces. Generations, now, believe that a Constitution without socialism is not worth defending and they don’t even see the dichotomy. Inside forces.

Now education is likely the most potent inside force that pushes and molds our supposedly self-governing citizens. Given the remarkable resources developed inside the United States, one might think that the education of American citizens would be wholly according to our own heritage and culture, yet we are turning out American youth who’ve been taught that every other culture on Earth is equal to or better than our own, and that our heritage and history is so flawed as to be indefensible. No history-changing, indeed, history-improving ideas about freedom and self-governance and governmental constraints, can be allowed credence any longer because actions taken by the respective thinkers 250 , 300 and 500 years ago, are disapproved-of in the 21^st century.

One is stressed to imagine a greater waste of time or greater loss of opportunity. Instead of leading today’s students – inheritors of the exceptionalism of America’s founding – to grasp and then build upon, improve upon, the phenomenal break with history that our Constitution represented and represents, its lessons are rejected in favor, unbelievably, of socialism,and denigrated in preference for division and hatred. Is this accidental? Is the inexorably leftward, anti-constitutional drift of U. S. education all happenstance? Is it reasonable for a purposeful society to maintain some control over the imparting of culture to its youth? Or shall the freedoms we enjoy be defended only in terms of their allowance for the undermining of the foundations of that society?

Inside forces. Beware of wolves in sheep’s clothing.

Governance, Immigration, Politics 2018, Race, Representation

Mid-Term Elections and the Anti-Thesis

November 25, 2018 Prudence Leadbetter Leave a comment

The “elections” of 2018, slowly completing as Thanksgiving approaches, are a foggy mirror held up to a nation and an electorate that cannot see clearly what America is, nor what America’s future should be. Here and there a partisan inadvertently rubs a spot clear and the real purposes of his or her struggle are revealed.

One such is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Although somewhat loose with veracity, she is probably no more dishonest than the majority of congress-people, or politicians of any sort. Probably – at least according to accepted norms of mendacity and political advancement, today. On the other hand, as her proudly cleared spot on the foggy glass reveals, she is deeply socialist, possessed of a twisted Elizabeth-Warren-like view of free enterprise and private property… not to mention of the role of a Constitutional Republican government. So, aside from the inherent untruths of socialism, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez is every bit as honest as the majority of congress-people or politicians of any sort.

Mrs. Warren, on the other hand, is more dishonest than the average political miscreant. She believes some of the same nonsense as more pure socialists do, but she hasn’t the rough courage of Ocasio-Cortez, for example, to oppose those who don’t and who do great damage to our nation by playing footsie with rotted monopolists for whom free-enterprise is merely a slogan. Ocasio-Cortez has a loosely-grasped mission greater than her self-aggrandizement, a prospect that’s foreign to Elizabeth Warren.

Then there’s Senator Bob Menendez of New Jersey, a serial philanderer who purports to represent the interests of his state. Unlike simpler thieves who simply sell their votes for personal enrichment but who may be trusted in most human relationships, like in their families, Menendez besmirches every human quality. One suspects that Ocasio-Cortez has no use for people like Menendez, and, possibly, little use for Warren, either. Warren, on the other hand, hasn’t and won’t criticize Menendez because he may be helpful, someday – to Warren, not to America.

Maxine Waters is a special case, not just because she is African American, which makes telling the truth about her… “racist,” but because her abuse of the concept of hypocrisy is so blatant as to be egregious. Her voting base, almost 50% Hispanic and 25% African-American, doesn’t seem to mind her multi-millionaire status and inability to find a nice enough residence within her District. She “fights” for them and plays “California Hold-em” with all race cards.

Waters’ second husband, former NFL player, Sid Williams, had $350,000 worth of stock in a supposedly minority-sensitive bank called OneUnited. With a history of sketchy deals under the leadership of an equally sketchy president with a blemished record, let’s say, OneUnited was going to fail, destroying what was left of Sid Williams’ stock value, already cut in half when the 2008 banking crisis blind-sided the Bush administration. Waters, through Treasury secretary Henry Paulson, arranged a meeting with top Treasury officials that she later claimed was to support all minority community banks. OneUnited Bank, however, was the only bank at the meeting. Ultimately, OneUnited received $12 Million in TARP funds, which is to say, the taxpayers bailed out OneUnited and Sid Williams. Waters’ grandson, her “chief of staff” at the time, was reprimanded for engineering the meeting specifically for OneUnited’s benefit. Waters knew nothing about that.

Once described as the most corrupt congress-person, Waters is now a darling of the left for her constant condemnation of President Trump. Unlike Republicans, who quickly encourage exposed unethical or corrupt office-holders to resign, Democrats rally around the worst of their lot and fight to keep them in office.

An argument could be made about the candidacy of Judge Roy Moore of Alabama, but as more and more was revealed or, at least charged, Republicans withdrew support. The more that is known about Bob Menendez, Bill or Hillary Clinton, the harder the left fights to defend them. Just saying.

All in all, the Democrats gained 38 seats in the House, apparently restoring 78-year old Nancy Pelosi to the Speakership. She’ll be 3rd in line to become president if something incapacitates both Trump and Pence. Barely able to string together 2 sentences in a row, the Grand Nancy raised large amounts of cash for house candidates across the country. She and her flock of new majoritarians will run the House and its committees from a solid base of hatred: hatred for Trump, hatred for the exposure of the deep State, hatred for any reduction in regulations, hatred for conservatives, conservative judges and for the reality of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s terminal frailty. Of course, if they can hobble or impeach the president sufficiently, they may sidestep the consequences of that last concern – medical science has produced so many miracles.

For this crew of hate-filled heroes there has never been a more hopeful era in factional governance than the current one of virtually permanent, extra-Constitutional and free-wheeling “special counsel (prosecutor)-ism.” According to one of the foulest White House denizens in Prudence’ lifetime, Rahm Emmanuel, politicians should “…never let a good crisis go to waste.” If the reader will take note, nowadays EVERYTHING is a crisis. It’s why we are teetering on national bankruptcy, beholden to a cabal of international banks.

The greatest crisis of all is the lack of a socialist majority, but that is being addressed by importing large fractions of Central America, creating what is arguably an actual crisis, but, as you take note, it is the one crisis that is not a crisis at all – for us, anyway – except that it is a “humanitarian crisis” that only the rainbow-flagged warriors of the United States can “solve.” It’s how they’ll vote, you see.

Underlying everything on the left is hatred for White America, Whites in general, White Donald Trump, White explorers from Europe 500 years ago, White business owners, White baseball players and White Tom Brady. White ideas of a meritocracy, derived clearly from the Old and New Testaments and Judeo-Christian philosophy, is also hated. In obeisance to “Social Justice” socialism, there must be sufficient numbers of non-whites running, essentially, everything or else whatever enterprise it may be is cast as part of “White Oppression.”

The Bible was written, fundamentally, by non-Whites, with its strongest traditions maintained in Africa. None of that matters, of course, because Santa Claus is portrayed as, OMG, WHITE.
To be honest about history, which is to say, be honest about everything, whites are no more guilty of injustice than any other “race” of people. Part of Whites’ problem is that much more of “their” history is documented and, since the fulfillment of Christianity, White’s have celebrated all the ways they might be sinners. Then they invented printing and spread their history across the “white” civilized world. Along the way White’s invented democracy, banking, economics and various kinds of engines that multiplied production of food and other things.
Slowly, imperfectly, “White” civilization developed the philosophies, sanctions and shaming that molded a more honest social structure. Written laws that bound both governors and governed, concepts of personal responsibility and of the freedoms to be so were finally distilled into the Constitution of the United States, the essence of the lessons of the New Testament. “As ye sow so shall ye reap.”

Immediately, the threat to tyranny that was born in the Constitution garnered enemies… enemies roughly aligned with and derived from the original sin of dialectic rationalization, so neatly allegorized in the story of the serpent.

God, having provided everything “Adam and Eve” needed for life and comfort, had admonished them to not eat of the “Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil” that for some reason He had planted in the midst of the Garden of Eden. That knowledge was the province only of God and His warning was that should they eat of it they would surely die.

The serpent, however, for some never-stated value to himself, told Eve that “Ye shall not surely die.” Thesis (word of God): “Lest thou die.” Antithesis (anti-word of God): “… not surely die.” Thesis – Antithesis – the tool of Hegelian dialectic materialism. Adam and Eve were not killed on the spot, they were banished from the “Garden:” God’s benevolence and Eternal Life. Thereafter they would toil mightily for the needs of life, suffer in childbirth, and be forced to choose between good and evil… a new “Thesis.” Soon there were tests of that thesis, choices to be made for short-term, Earthly gains, in exchange for allowing some “antithesis” to gain a foothold in defining evil as not all that evil. Then that thesis would be immediately challenged with a new antithesis, and on it goes. Abortion is not murder; murder is not always bad; marriage is neither sacred nor limited to a man and a woman; individuals are not responsible for the consequences of their decisions.

Now, it’s “racism.” And whiteness. Hatred, normally frowned upon as somehow sinful, is now a good thing in defense of non-whiteness and in opposition to individuality… in opposition to the Constitution; Socialism: the original anti-thesis and still champion. To the best of mankind’s ability, the American Constitution is the Thesis. Our new Congress, both houses, and the deep state in all of its permutations and polluted judgeships, comprise the anti-Thesis.

It is comforting to think that good and evil may be located under party banners; in fact they can, all of them, both of them. There are neither purity nor perfection. Sometimes evil appears to concentrate in one faction, identified with concentrations of socialism. Here we are.

The defense of freedom is unending; the requirement to dis-empower the anti-Thesis is paramount to that mission.

Culture, Economics, Governance, Representation, Taxation

Innocence, Debauchery, and the American Dream

November 17, 2018 Prudence Leadbetter Leave a comment

America suffers in the 21st century not from a loss of innocence, but from a loss of discrimination… a loss of judgment. Mankind has never lacked for debauchery nor for ways to debauch nearly every civilized function, from work, construction and development to education, medicine, churches and religion. Everything “we” have discovered or invented, we seem to have figured out how to besmirch and cheapen… like government.

Government, at least since Saul fell on his sword and bequeathed kingship to David, however inadvertently, has been occasionally a good invention, often completely inimical to human growth and perfection. Okay, okay, humans are perfected only in the rarest of circumstances, but, still, government is mostly inimical. In the long sweep of history, despite themselves, governments have brought a semblance of order, enabled scientific advances, established widespread education – some of it good – and provided measures of safety and peace within which individuals can seek happiness, or perfection, or both.
The last we call constitutional republicanism which stands out among the dozens of forms of tyranny still in use. Nevertheless, despite its promise, this form of self-governance has not been immune to the diabolical inventiveness of the forces of debauchery, of which there is space enough to discuss only a few.

Money is big in the debauchery field, as it is in the politician field, making it frequently difficult to discern between them. There never is enough money in the politician field, particularly where it intersects with socialist whims. Money, money, money means taxes, taxes, taxes and from time to time the working people object to taxation and politicians, who have the clarity of vision denied to workers, can perceive – if not create – hordes of dependents for whom that tax money is so sorely needed. That some dependents are billionaires is of little importance in the grand scheme of dependency. You’ve got your troubles, I’ve got mine.

So if taxation can’t be trusted to produce money fast enough, it becomes increasingly crucial that ways to expand the income of government be devised and, politicians having been elected and installed for their unique efficiencies, recognize that there is no point to re-inventing the wheel, as it were, in the matters of government income, so turn to the financial successes of debauchery for new ideas. Humans have left no stone unturned in the search for ways to cheat others out of their hard-earned money and one of the neatest tricks is the infamous “Ponzi Scheme.” It is easily explained:

A Ponzi scheme is an investment fraud where clients are promised
a large profit at little to no risk. Companies that engage in a Ponzi
scheme focus all of their energy into attracting new clients to make
investments. This new income is used to pay original investors their
returns, marked as a profit from a legitimate transaction. Ponzi
schemes rely on a constant flow of new investments to continue to
provide returns to older investors. When this flow runs out,
the… scheme… falls… apart. [From “Investopedia”]

When the government, itself – who convicted Ponzi for fraud in 1920 – follows Ponzi’s formula, it takes a longer view and fewer dollars from each “investor,” and calls it “Social Security.” No slouches in the debauchery of public trust, politicians are able to compel workers to “invest” by force of police power, and then restrict the “returns” to only so many dollars per month and only after leaving the “investment” fallow for decades. That way the originators of the fraud will have passed on before the scope of the trick is figured out by the “investors.” “Invested” funds are then used to get future “investors” to vote for future perpetrators.

Prudence would suggest that “investors” should contemplate the consequences of having personally (actually) invested 15% of their pay over their entire working career. Upon retirement they would have had a huge financial asset and they wouldn’t be dependent on government to dribble back their own money! Of course, empowering citizens to live WITHOUT government is as anti-socialist as it could be and virtually never allowed even lip-service.

We need to give politicians the power to make life, health and death decisions for us.

Social Security really took off after World War II, as payrolls grew and pay rates along with them. The river of money was “re-invested” in all sorts of vital, crucial, crisis-averting expenditures that any sane and humane investor would endorse… had he or she known of them. After 1968 especially, the number of non-citizens who arrived on our shores seeking the “American Dream” exploded, and the means to support their “disabled, disadvantaged” selves derived from the “lockbox” of Social Security cash. Naturally, thanks to Ted Kennedy’s (the lyin’ of the Senate) legislation (Hart-Cellar Act), the colors and origins of immigrants are more important than the needs of the United States, and their relatives became more important than immigrants who can actually contribute to the strength of the nation. Many had/have no marketable skills or are “disabled” and “qualify” for SSDI or SSI support derived from – you guessed it – the “investments” of those canny worker-investors who are so proud of their own district’s Representative and state’s two Senators… oh, yes.

Unexpectedly, the Social “Security” lockbox tends to empty more quickly than promised. More money is needed! What to do? What to do without “raising taxes,” of course? There must be a form of debauchery… uhmm, we mean, outright mendacity and fraud… well, not that, of course, but some kind of “wool” that can be pulled over enough people’s eyes… naw, that’s just an old political joke, ha – ha – ha. There must be a form of courageous legislative governance that can find “new” revenue to meet the nation’s vital, crucial, crisis-averting expenditures. Aha! Loans!

Fortunately, globalist bankers had finally convinced Congress to approve the creation of a means to provide constant DEBT to the federal government. Now, if you’re one of those worker-investors we were talking about, you’re asking yourself: “Who in Hell would want a supply of debt?” (And you’d be right, but it’s a different topic.) “Everyone wants to get OUT of debt,” you’d say to yourself, being right a second time, “and anyone trying to get more debt should have his head examined!” (Or, his ledgers… again, right!)

Growing governments while controlling countries is a long-term plan. The international socialists have been at it for a long, long time. The “income” tax was instituted by amendment in 1913. This provided a large enough river of funds to enable the government to “help” itself and more and more people. Interestingly and, it certainly must be coincidentally, the Federal Reserve Act – a 20-year project of the largest banks – was passed at the end of… well, ha!… 1913! Both long-term efforts needed a global statist like Woodrow Wilson to be president in order to come to fruition.

The only way to quietly undermine the nationalism and freedom of the United States was to plant the seeds of debt and a private bank that controls the nation’s money supply is the best tool to do so. The “Fed,” as it’s called, makes economic policy as it sees fit. The “governors” don’t take advice from elected representatives, most of whom are happy to not be responsible for too awfully much. Whenever the Chairman of the Federal Reserve testifies in Congress it’s to tell Congress how things are going to be and not to ask the people’s representatives how things should be. The “Fed” is about as “federal” as Federal Express.

So what about how a central bank can control a nation’s economy? Why would any Congress vote for that? Well for the first 20 years or so the new “Fed” was practicing frog boiling, and the financial waters were just pleasantly warm… until the crash of 1929 and the attempts by, first, Hoover, and then by Roosevelt, to force an end to DE-flation and unemployment by running deficits and pushing the private economy to adapt to federal pressure. The federal government could borrow in the face of the human problems that bad economics had wrought.

Adopting the programs initiated by Hoover, FDR managed to keep the U. S., and much of the world, in depression until the Second World War broke out. Prior to the emergency legislation passed during the “Banking Holiday” of 1933, the 12 “Fed” Districts made policy on their own, enabling some to do severe damage in parts of the country while recovery was stumbling forward in others. Naturally, the preferred answers to the crisis were always based in more central control, essentially the story and the outcome of the “Great Depression.”

Until the Federal Reserve was created the U.S., like most industrial nations, was on “the gold standard.” United States Dollars represented a number of grains of 90% pure gold. That is, an ounce of “.9 fine” gold “cost” $20.67 and had since 1900. Never failing to take advantage of a crisis, 1930’s era leftists – FDR and the “brain trust” – used the banking and international gold crises to obtain emergency legislation making private ownership of gold coins, metal or bullion illegal! That is, everyone had to turn in his or her gold in exchange for $35.00 worth of U. S. “dollars” (actually, Federal reserve notes) that were now backed by so many grains of silver or by 60% as many grains of gold than prior to the seizure. It was pretty slick.

The federal government had acquired tons of gold for, in effect, next to nothing, but gold was now valued at $35 an ounce of .9 fine purity. Suddenly the government had a lot of money to spend in its attempts to correct the severe deflation and unemployment afflicting the U. S. and other industrialized nations. Most of it helped but did not solve the fundamental problems in the economy; it took a big war to do that.

We have got to give the federal government total control over our life, health and death decisions.

Where there is a name for schemes like Social Security (“Ponzi”), there isn’t a moniker for what happened to America between the two world wars, except, perhaps, “Progressivism,” not to be confused with “Progress.”

In a Constitutional Republic, “Progress” is measured first by how large a fraction of the population DOESN’T DEPEND ON GOVERNMENT for basic needs like housing, food, clothing, employment and health care. It’s also measured by the quality of citizenship, the honesty of jurisprudence, of police agencies and individuals, the clarity and even-handed enforceability of laws, the honesty of education and the level of cultural agreement by and amongst the vast majority of its citizenry.

The worst chicanery of all is the structure of the federal budget, which is barely a budget at all since it is about 75% “entitlements.” Congress has NEVER cut the budget, has never cut an “entitlement,” has never gotten rid of an “executive” department, has never paid down the national debt, at least in the past 60-odd years, has not failed to borrow from our great-great grandchildren for a like period, and has never audited the “Federal” Reserve. That’s because it’s.., well…, too busy. They are so busy on our behalf of course, and so tired from “fighting” for the middle class and “working” families who are non-working families to a significant degree, fighting to “improve education” and “leveling playing fields,” that there is barely enough time to begin to explain why what rational people think should be done simply can’t be done, unless they write a check for the campaign.

Mostly, they are too busy raising money for re-election, which is the number-one mission after a couple of years in office, and helping their real constituency: the congressmen and women and senators who sit nearby, because THEY can help in the fight for re-election more than any other group in the country.

We elect them, you and I, because their counterparts in the other party – pick one – are such scurrilous bastards and bitches that we have to keep “our” representative or senator in there so that we can continue the fight to “take back our country.” And a check for the campaign is not only vital, right at the moment you tear open your mailer, but may be multiplied up to FIVE times if your check is received by midnight 4 or 5 days hence.

Save yourself and the “campaign” even more, maximizing the value of your support, by using a (bank) interest-bearing credit-card to make your nation-saving donation!

Leftists are loathe to argue principles but they love to set the terms of public discussion. To effect that control they have to change the meaning of words… like “democracy,” for example. Where ”democracy” once meant a system of civic governance where the majority ruled – right or wrong – it now means “when Democrats rule… right or wrong.” So, when non-Democrats are in power, having been elected by a majority of votes, they are “threatening democracy.”

The United States is not organized as a “democracy.” It is a Constitutional Republic with democratically elected representatives and, interestingly, democratically elected executives, part of an extraordinarily well-designed system of dividing powers and constituencies to which each must answer. But power is vested in representatives of the citizenry who, the original theory is, are knowledgeable, honest and willing to sacrifice for their fellow citizens. That last is where the system breaks down. There no longer is any sacrifice! Right under our noses “our” representatives have turned the tables on us and we didn’t smell the odor!

Being an elected official, legislator or appointed officer in any of our states’ governments, the federal government, certainly, most cities and in virtually every public school system on up through state colleges and universities, is a very sweet deal – far more lucrative and secure than any “private” sector position, and with better benefits, more holidays and many “perks.” The “public servants” in today’s equation are you and me: taxpayers… and we don’t get free healthcare when WE retire.

“Representing” ignorant taxpayers is the best job many reps and senators will ever have: high pay, big benefits and almost no responsibility beyond re-election. Americans, themselves, should have it so good.

And, finally, for this chapter, the biggest scheme of all: that “debt” we looked at earlier. A “ponzi” scheme would seem a bad enough swindle for elected representatives to foist upon their “constituents,” but the worst is far, far greater, and so slick that Republicans are regularly denigrated for attempting to slow it – not STOP it, slow it – by just a few billions from time to time. Somehow, Democrats tell us, not going further and further into debt to pay the INTEREST-only on earlier debt, is tantamount to treason and threatens to “ruin the credit rating of the United States of America!” God save the Queen!

If you are seeking a way to judge the veracity, competence, integrity, legitimacy or sensibleness of ANY federal Congress-person, just consider the CURRENT national debt. You do know that it’s closing in on $21 TRILLION dollars, yes?

You do realize that it threatens our very economic existence? That it represents how far beyond our national means we have lived for the past 60 years? That it exemplifies the utter inability of our elected representatives (so far) to manage the budget for which they ARE responsible… and for which job they have earnestly sought our votes?

Do you recognize that unlike wars and other existential threats, since the “Great Society” kicked in, in 1968, every social discomfort has been labeled a “crisis,” confirmed by rigged congressional testimony, making raising the so-called “debt ceiling” every year an act of “courage” and of patriotism. Those 21 Trillion dollars are the proof that socialism will destroy our freedom. It is taking a long time because of the exceptional work ethics of Americans, but our economic destruction is a safe prediction, given that the history of the last 6 decades of representative government in our (ostensible) 2-party system is one of utter economic debauchery.

But then, there’s always Broward County.

Economics, Education, Family, Governance, Politics 2018, Sex

The Potters of Socialism

October 27, 2018 Prudence Leadbetter Leave a comment

During a recent conversation, Prudence opined on the new trends of “body art” and unusual piercings, increasingly involving the bodies of young women. It has something to do with both feminism and socialism, Prudence suggests, and this view has caused demands for substantial clarification. Indeed. This line of reasoning could lead to a unified theory of wrong directions and unnecessary complexity.

Life is a test… a series of tests: momentary, hourly, daily, situationally – from birth to death. Humans, LIKE ALL LIVING THINGS, become stronger, more honest, more independent, by facing tests and “passing” them. What is the greatest dis-honesty, therefore?

It is denial of the test. It is humans’ penchant for convincing themselves that they might avoid the testing (which is the spiritual aspect of life) coupled with the denial of spirituality, itself. These fundamentals lead to lifetimes of failure, unfulfillment and even to widening circles of tragedy for other humans, particularly people the unfulfilled try to “love.” On the other hand, those tragedies are also tests that may be passed, leading to strength and growth.

Stated more simply, the worst lie is that which one tells to him or herself. We are in an odd time where such lies are celebrated, promulgated, codified and made, legally, into community-wide lies that form the new bases for anti-discrimination criminality. The hot one is trans-genderism. We call it an “ism” because it derives from belief and not from reality. Under it males tell themselves that they are females, in the preponderance of instances, and females tell themselves that they are males. It is the penultimate denial of human testing there could be.

It isn’t the absolute worst, any longer, because here and there are humans who tell themselves that they are not human, and who seek “rights” as this or that animal… often a dog: humans like dogs.

But, declaring oneself to not be what one is requires holding two conflicting ideas at once, ultimately leading, for most, to mental breakdown. This is not to say that some are not “happy” to be living outwardly as the opposite gender, but they are the minority. Still, they deserve their own happiness and other humans should not disrupt it. But the truth is that gender cannot be changed, only masked. Individuals who are emotionally secure may be happier adopting the mask. It is their mask, and by its artifice the individual attempts to avoid or deny the testing that his or her gender would otherwise face.

So, some would ask, what’s wrong with that? Lots of people avoid tests. We have an entire welfare system that purports to “help” them do so. And this shows the intersection of socialism as a construct of lies and the increasing lies of sexuality that some fight for as forms of “progress.” Both are means of test-avoidance, test denial, and both tend to leave the denier weaker spiritually.

What has this to do with tattoos and piercings? Both are forms of masks, are they not? Even homosexuality is a mask. It doesn’t mean individuals are not “happy” living as not being tested as a man or as not being tested as a woman, but it does mean they have made a choice to not face tests of emotion and feelings of one sort, and the growth their passing would provide. Because of anti-discrimination rules, declaring oneself homosexual means avoiding tests as either one’s gender or as one’s new identity.

In the 1950’s and 1960’s a big form of masking was hair. Girls would shave their heads or apply odd colors to their hair, for example, daring others to react to the change. In that way, at least temporarily, they could step out of the role of “woman” and be tested on the most ephemeral aspects of being rather than facing the tests of female growth and honesty. Boys at the same time would grow their hair to great lengths or shagginess, altering their “aura” as it were, too. Any troubles that came their way over rebellious hairstyling were deemed preferable to those that were associated with maturing in the role of “man.” Test denial. It’s what socialism promises to whole populations, inherently including a denial of spirituality.

In the midst of the “sexual revolution” last century, society, institutions and families fairly consistently encouraged the reality of acceptance of one’s role as man or woman. Most youngsters “grew out of” their odd experiments. Not all, though. By the mid-seventies several large trends were underway:

1. Welfare was federalized and entrenched under the “Great Society.”
2. Feminism was aggressively undoing traditional roles and family structures.
3. Leftist media were celebrating their successful castration of the Vietnam War
and all efforts against Communism that it represented.
4. Leftist media were celebrating the destruction of Richard Nixon, a flawed
conservative at best, over relatively minor crimes.
5. Attacks against organized religion were becoming normalized even as churches
themselves were corroding innocence within their ranks.
6. The Federal Reserve was prosecuting economic policies without regard to
elections or even office holders like presidents in the exercise of new powers
elected representatives could not grasp or counter.
7. Homosexuality was exploding in Western societies.
8. Black families were disintegrating with the help of federalized welfare.
9. Faith in the American idea was fading as quickly as American History curricula.

America is reaping the corrupt crops, now, from mutated seeds sown for fifty years. Youth are in favor of socialism, politicians are proud of it while other politicians flail about in their quest for proper rebuttals to socialist mendacity. Just like homosexuality and its ragged cousin, transgenderism, socialism requires believers to hold, and defend, two diametrically conflicting ideas at once.

Socialism intends two conflicting outcomes: 1) People will become better humans by virtue of changes in their physical surroundings and LACK OF RESPONSIBILITY; 2) If people fail to become higher-quality people thanks to socialism, socialists-in-charge will happily control them until they do.

Prudence’s correspondent had recently visited the waiting room of a plastic surgery and facial reconstruction practice and was struck by the number of quite young people, mostly females, who were there for recuperative follow-ups for various procedures. This, too, is a trend: Young people are having one or multiple procedures done to, they, hope, cause fulfillment of a physical image that is more pleasing, more acceptable, more attractive to society. That is to say, they are living out a dream of comparison to others rather than living on purpose.

Just like body arts or fanatical workouts, plastic surgery provides a mask that the wearer believes is more ”beautiful” than the innate self; this work, often painful, is endured in lieu of making ones inner, true self more attractive or charitable or loving. It is a personal dose of socialism whereby the physical or worldly appearance forms its own replacement spirituality and belief structure. There is no surprise that such shallow, literal children are unable to discern the corrosiveness of socialism. It is no wonder that socialists, and most progressives, are not nearly as happy as conservatives whose belief structures are based in spirituality that leads them to accept and pass tests in reality.

Changing ones physique or physiognomy to fulfill the expectations of society is a means of sidestepping true tests in life. Like the long hairs of the ‘60’s, others will deal with the mask rather than the real person and, it is hoped, the tests associated with the original person will never need passing. Growth is avoided.

Perhaps the most anti-spiritual, test-denial of all is abortion. Despite playing a role in conception of new human life, women have been convinced that the tests of motherhood may be avoided and that they will be more happy and fulfilled as a result. Indeed, not only have they the right to avoid those tests, but all of society, through government theft of others’ earnings, ought to support that avoidance. Perhaps there is less stress temporarily, but little happiness obtains.

Instead of accepting the tests of womanhood and motherhood and the concurrent civilizing of more animalistic males, females are encouraged to exist untested and to a degree, unfulfilled and incomplete. Obviously many of these women will see a logic to socialism and to government “nannyism” throughout their lives. Who needs men in that future? Socialism destroys humanity and abject feminism is socialism’s handmaid. How bleak.

The constant undermining and outright attacking of Christianity feeds socialism’s ascension to acceptability. Not the old testament, but the new, defines man’s relationship to God as personal and an individual responsibility – not as one of God’s chosen people, but as God’s chosen person, responsible to him or her self and to God to take the energy of life provided, and to multiply it by learning and following the rules laid out in dozens of religious traditions.

There is no room for the spiritual in socialism. Socialism is based on groups and denies individual greatness. The infection of education by socialism is obvious in the moves to eliminate valedictorians and salutatorians, or to have multiples of each. Another is to avoid “F’s” or other negative marking, to give everyone a trophy, to (claim to) not keep score in youth sports. One can also observe the same rot supplanting historical knowledge resulting in America’s being no more exceptional than literally every other nation. Rampant egalitarianism provides another patine of legitimacy: no one can earn more, be more worthy, honorable or valuable than the rest. Apparently, only government officials are permitted to be smarter than others, or more morally pure.

Ultimately, Socialism is the avoidance of human tests and, essentially, the avoidance of personal growth. Humans become stronger by overcoming adversity – everything from discomfort, to hunger, to tyranny and lack of freedom. We call the triumph over adversity, “freedom,” not the avoidance of it.

Avoiding adversity is a form of self-subjugation, leaving the subject/practitioner in a jail of his or her own making: less and less likely to ever overcome adverse circumstances. Dependence is the only result. Dependents are the most malleable of clays for the potters of socialism who are more than willing to offer ever more complete avoidance of tests, gaining perpetual power for themselves. Perhaps this little essay is testing the reader, right now.

Education, Governance, Politics 2018, Responsibility

Mid-Terms… and here we are.

September 29, 2018 Prudence Leadbetter Leave a comment

The mid-term elections of 2018 provide a vibrant graphic – Kodachrome – Technicolor – Cinemascope (old terms you can Google) of both the failings and successes of the American experiment. Every stress and resolution since King Philip’s War has contributed to how the U. S. was formed and how we arrived… here. Which is where, exactly?

Hard to say. We have paddled, splashed, kicked and floated out past the string of floats, out past the raft and out to where a dense fog obscures the shoreline so well that we can’t be sure from where on the shore we departed, nor are we sure if that’s the shore we wish to return to. The fog is Socialism, the raft is principled education and the string of floats that marked the edge of safety, is the Constitution. The barque we are riding is Progressivism, and if we sink, at last, the people on shore who can barely see or care about us, will simply say good riddance; we were more trouble than we were worth, us and our God and our founding principles.

From where we Faithful constitutionalists are, we must devise a way back to shore – the ideas of America – while we convince the socialists that Constitutional republicanism based on democratically elected representatives, within which individuals are responsible for their choices and duties… and failures… is the only true direction to follow.

The mid-term elections in 2018 are an obsidian mirror reflecting every dark political urge, lie, distortion and fraud either party is inclined to use to further its ends. It all stinks, albeit obscurely. There is very little truth at work this year. It appears that if several media outlets were not repeating and amplifying increasingly strident and unsubstantiated statements, particularly in reference to Judge Brett Kavanaugh, Democrats would have a very thin campaign “platform.”

Republicans stand for a closer approximation of Constitutional strictures and forms, but fail to stand firmly on much beyond Defense and tax cuts. Their own adjustment of principle for purposes of re-election is no less corrupt than that of their opponents. Connections to Chinese moneys, subtle, legal bribes, in both parties but sizable among Republicans, distorts decision-making on a hundred policies and problems. Somehow these two groups of self-serving oligarchs deserve our trust in the fulfillment of our Constitutional form of government. Now they are both demanding a hold on Constitutional power, vested in the Congress. Their tools are neither truth nor justice, but belief.

Republicans believe in the direction Trump wants to take us, for example, even if they dislike him personally. Democrats believe he is evil and their enemy, worthy of any form of resistance and defeat. Yet, he was elected by sufficient states to become president. Most of the nation preferred his promises to Mrs. Clinton’s. Effectively, Trump is on the ballot in every state again in the mid-terms. His opponents and all socialists are focusing on Brett Kavanaugh in order to coalesce their ostensible “base:” minorities, those dependent on government support, illegal entrants, abortion-lovers and the abortion industry, angry – likely single – women and the ‘deep state,’ itself. Their utter lack of ethics and decorum during the hearings, however, may not create the groundswell they hope for.

Democrats are also employing the final tactic in the 150-year war against Constitutional republicanism: pure socialism/communism. In the wake of socialist upset wins in a couple of primaries, numerous candidates for higher offices have come out directly in support of pure socialism. Socialism and Constitutional republicanism are antithetical and diametrically so. One wonders what country’s offices these former Democrats think they are seeking.

That obsidian mirror makes it hard, but not impossible, to see the shadowy actions of bad actors in the Department of Justice and elsewhere, as they strive to upset the result of a clearly-won presidential election. A perpetually compromised Congress, far more exposed in its work, attempts to expose illegal actions resisting the president, inside executive department agencies. It is not limited to Justice – far from it. Yet the demands of re-election distort the timing of their expository work.

Prudence would indicate that our biennial election “show” serves other-than-governance purposes, while it appeases, briefly, the unsettledness of the populace. People have followed, for decades… no, for centuries, political divisions. They followed them into civil war in 1861, and into other, bullet-less, civil “wars” since then, no less disruptive in a sense, including the current one. Now we must choose to continue towards restoration of Constitutionalism, or to hasten our descent into globalist socialism. For the aware, the mid-terms are how we’ll make that choice.

For everyone else, this is when we vote for more free stuff from Uncle Sucker.

Culture, Economics, Education, Family, Governance, Politics 2018

As Ye Sow…

September 13, 2018 Prudence Leadbetter Leave a comment

The alligators are circling and the Democrats are circling at the same time. The former are circling the Trump administration and the presidency, itself; the latter are circling the cesspool drain of socialism. Both the alligators of the “deep,” or now referenced, “steady” state, and the Democrats/neo-Socialists use the same set of tactics: Fascism.

“Oh, no,” you might say, “Fascism is a tool of the far-right and of White supremacists (whoever they are), and the left tries to fight them off!” Well.

You, the alligators and the Democrat left are confused. Fascism is a tool of the left. You have been taught the opposite, but a simple reading of history instructs us that we need to properly define Left and Right, perhaps starting with a change of terms. The left has changed the meaning of words repeatedly, but again, let’s use the right terms for Left and Right. “Liberal,” after all, described the colonists who fought against the British crown – which was “right” and which “left?”

Let’s consider that one trend in history, indeed the most common trend by far, is toward tyrannical control of people and economies. The alternative, individual liberty and actual democracy, is rarer, and, in combination with republicanism, more so. These two large trends can, roughly, describe almost every organized nation, today, and even the United Nations organization. Here’s where the permanence of word definitions becomes crucial. For our discussion Prudence suggests that “Liberty” be the direction of one trend, the rarer one, and “Tyranny… no, too pejorative a term… Control” be the direction of the more common trend throughout history. Societies and nations are on either a path toward greater individual liberty or toward greater centralized control.

On the liberty path we mark events like the invention of democracy, attributed to the Greeks; the Roman Senate, Christianity – which is not to say the Catholic or any other church unequivocally – the Renaissance, the Magna Carta, the English parliament, the Reformation of Martin Luther, the U. S. Constitution, Bill of Rights and other key amendments, the Civil War, World War II and the breakup of the Soviet Union. An incomplete list, certainly, but milestones nonetheless.

The story of control has always been marked by stronger over weaker people, conquest, kings, caesars and czars. As economic freedom and rights to private property took hold, the rise of socialism, always lurking but strengthened by unchecked economic inequality, became widespread enough in the 1800’s to create the dominant political forces of the 1900’s, including fascism and its ugly brother, communism. The new colossus, America, was not and is not immune from their blandishments.

We cannot examine our current status and our future, without recognizing the organizing morals of religion, and the educational value of churches. For “western” civilization the chief organizing moral structure has been, first, Judaism and the Old Testament, and then Christianity and the New Testament. The result of the long sweep of the Old Testament was to usher in the New and the examples and teachings of Jesus, the Christ. It is not one path, it is two, the second of which proclaims an individual relationship with God, and individual responsibility, as well. No longer was the story of God’s chosen people told about groups, but about individuals. No longer was the possibility of ascension into Heaven reserved for a handful of prophets, but it was made the business of every person. It was no longer an arcane secret, but instead the path was described and illustrated by Jesus, himself: “Greater things than I have done you shall do because I go unto the Father.”

Okay, enough of that. Let’s at least agree that Jesus’ teaching was that every individual was responsible for his or her own salvation or refusal of salvation. The doors of heaven were open to every person not committed to or consumed by evil… and each of us is responsible for the path he or she chooses – not so different from the Old Testament lessons, but personalized. It is the fundament of the Constitution and the concept of liberty, itself, and at no time divorced from responsibility: “As ye sow, so shall (must) ye reap.”

We can’t sow lies and expect honesty and truth to spring forth, for example.
Does this background inform the present? Prudence suggests that it does. Which actors are motivated by the desire to control individuals and their economic circumstances? Are they not “Democrat Socialists?” How do they propose to exert control?
The methods and tools are a very long list, but here are the most obvious ways:

Universal health care, or “single payer” or “Medicare for all.”

Comprehensive gun control.

Lower education standards for American history.

Nationalized Welfare.

Aggravated racial tensions.

Paid “antifa” thugs.

Those should be enough to show the direction that the left is taking, none of which is strengthening for the United States.

At first it is hard to understand why Democrats of today would be so fired up about the short list of 6 tactics, above. It is because they are socialists and socialism is about control and little else. You can see from the lowered education tactic that socialism’s resistance to the American experiment in individual sovereignty is not new, and if it must take 3 or 5 or a hundred generations, liberty’s ugly plans must be thwarted. The only defense against socialism is an alert, educated, self-disciplined citizenry… one that shares basic moral codes.

We can’t deny that Judeo-Christianity has informed our entire legal code and common-law bases for organizing this amazingly successful (western) civilization. We need not delve into matters of faith to recognize the practicality and reinforcing values of our legal traditions. It is informative that lately all things Christian are derogated and mocked, attacked, in fact. At the same time government and education institutions remove themselves from moral guidance or enforcement and even punish expressions of Christian values.

In the streets and in current politics, resistance to laws and their enforcement – and to their enforcers – is rampant, and deadly. These are socialists and fascists who are tearing down our legal and moral codes. Socialism lives on rules that society needs our wonderful governors to enforce (fulfilling the control instinct) since non-elite people cannot be expected to do almost anything correctly without them. This includes raising of children, imbuing them with morals, teaching them how to strive and excel, instructing them on proper relationships with and respect for the opposite sex, economic responsibility for oneself and one’s family, preparing them for independence and enlightening them with patriotism. These are all responsibilities of a benign, socialist government, after all.

When the Founders assembled the Constitution from the greatest civil organizing philosophies of freedom, they initiated a unique challenge to the prevailing organizing principles of tyranny, monarchy and theocracy. No other nation had attempted the creation of a government based on the principles enunciated in the Declaration of Independence. In the process, and following a bitter fight against arguably the most powerful empire in the world at that time, the “American Dream” was born. It is little understood today, but is defined by “E pluribus unum.” America – the United States – would be a nation where all kinds and origins of people can form a nation, live and work together under a regime of personal responsibility and shared morality, self-discipline and individual civic sovereignty. Remarkable, and the diametric opposite of socialist diffusion of responsibility – and morality.

Socialism is by origin and intent a system without spirituality. Every one of its tenets presumes that human-devised, rules-based micro-management will yield a better society than religious or faith-based moral structures have or ever will. Socialism, by definition, is antithetical to Constitutional republicanism, and this fact illustrates why socialists have been pressing socialist “solutions” to civic and economic problems in the U. S. since the post-Civil War era, an effort that gained strength with each World War, the Depression and the “Civil Rights” movements. The skids were greased by Lyndon Johnson, Ted Kennedy and “Watergate.”

Now we are faced with one of our two major political parties celebrating resistance to laws and to law enforcement, even as it cries for more regulation from a massive, unmanageable government. What sort of political future… what sort of governing future do its members foresee? Are they anticipating a society with better cohesiveness, or lower crime rates, perhaps? By what mechanisms shall order be assured after dozens, if not hundreds of crimes are deemed un-prosecutable? Even now attorneys general are fighting federal authorities in many jurisdictions; many candidates for those offices are campaigning on their willingness to overlook criminal prosecutions they don’t like. How, indeed, will order be ensured?

Disorder is far from the socialist model… control is its bedrock. These same who agitate and cry for legal disorder, swoon for ultra-left socialist candidates and for ‘antifa,’ itself. It is the grand disorder of freedom that they hate… the majesty of it left in the hands of a moral, independent people. We are socialism’s enemy and socialism is ours, if we have the mind to understand and the heart to defend, our Constitution.

We cannot sow socialism and expect freedom and individual liberty to spring forth.

Culture, Education, Immigration, Race

What Direction is “Right”

September 3, 2018 Prudence Leadbetter Leave a comment

The wasteland of American politics, amongst a hundred other logical and moral perturbations, is roughly divided into a party of life and a party of death, neither perfectly, of course. But… but roughly, yes. One party is aligned more with “pro-life” and one is aligned more with abortion, or “pro-choice.” Anyone can state which is which since it’s fairly well known where the two “parties” stand.

But it’s a circle and not neatly linear. The leftists, or progressives, infatuated with victim-identity-groups, exercise their dudgeon in support of “civil rights,” regardless of the effects on the group they describe as victimized by the denial of this or that civil “right.” In the case of abortion that group – and it’s a good, big one – is every woman. Rightists, or conservatives, are opposed to abortion because they think it’s evil and bad for individuals. They see the “right to life” as somehow the opposite of the freedom to choose abortion when pregnancy occurs, seeing the unborn child… and the mother… and the father, as affected individuals protected by the constitution. Leftists see the decisions about pregnancy, both the inception and the termination, as strictly the purview of the mother – so far always a woman. And so we divide.

It is impossible to avoid hypocrisy when it comes to other positions involving life and death. For example, progressives are both pro-choice and anti-death penalty, while conservatives are anti-abortion and pro-death penalty, very generally speaking. The latter would say that the unborn have a “right” to life but that murderers and other capital offenders have relinquished that right by their actions.

Progressive argue that pregnant women have the unique right to choose abortion, a right that must be protected, while those condemned to death at the hands of the “state” deserve a right to be rehabilitated from the conditions – many of those social – that caused them to kill or brutally rape and that the state should not become a murderer, itself. Both sides defend these “rights” and views with passion. Well, okay.

War – or defense – muddles the life or death arguments of both camps. Stalin, for example, caused the horribly painful deaths of millions of peasants (and intellectuals) in order to impose purer Communism, and he is regarded as a leftist exemplar and hero, today. After all, a thousand deaths are a tragedy; a million or more is a statistic. Hitler killed many fewer millions but the left declares him “right-wing,” although it is the right, today, that defends Israel. Hitler, a different-striped socialist than Stalin, the left has decided to hate; Planned Parenthood, the largest abortion mill in the world – and most profitable – they love. It can be confusing.

Progressives also fight for the “right” of illegal entrant women to have their babies (in the United States) so the confusion of leftists and of rightists trying to comprehend them, is understandable.

Giant business conglomerates that make armaments are identified with the right, although those companies, themselves, have literally no concern for parties or even nations. Their partnerships with governments removes them from the capitalist economy, in a sense, since they have saddled taxpayers with the burden of their success, not competitive customers. Both parties like these people because they are willing to support anyone financially, who will maintain them in power. It’s no longer recognized as corruption – just business, although it has little to do with the free-enterprise engine of capitalism that pays for everything.

To function over time armaments manufacturers need conflicts and threats of conflicts. Both parties come around the circle of life and death to where they bump into war and the manufacturers of the implements of war. The unpleasant side-effect of war, unfortunately, is death – death of soldiers, men and women, who despite volunteering for the military still didn’t want to die, and death of innocent civilians, no matter how careful politicians would direct the soldiers to be. Lots of death, injury and ruin, and both parties enable war in their own ways; both run in the opposite life or death direction from their opponents and inevitably bump in to the war business that puts the lie to most other philosophies each espouses.

Rightists tend to identify with “a strong military” and they use patriotism to the fullest for their advantage. Leftists, in very recent years, have come to despise patriotism, our anthem and the flag, itself, which rightists still can’t figure out. Conservatives see militarism as protection of the nation’s “life.” Progressives seem to have grown tired of the U. S. and patriotic references to it are of no value to them and may be readily opposed if only to aggravate the right. One might infer that the “death” of the nation wouldn’t upset the left nearly as much as it would the right.

Still, very generally speaking, the “right” tends to be pro-life while the “left” is pro-death. Like other destructive (of constitutional republicanism) movements based on “rights,” the right to destroy one’s fetus is defended as superior to the historic right to life. Indeed, the distinction between the two conflicting rights is a point of battle, not just opinion. As vital and fundamental as this conflict has been for 40 years (and for hundreds of years before Roe v. Wade) Society is now being sundered by the conflicts between “rights” unheard-of 40 years… or even 20 years ago.

Of ironic interest is the intensifying effort to grant Constitutional “rights” or “protections” to illegal entrants. While a pleasant-sounding attitude, there is no logical basis for giving such hard-earned rights to non-citizens. The Constitution was formed by American citizens in an era of freedom purchased by the blood of the first Americans. Citizens in the first thirteen states approved it. It is a benefit of citizenship whether by birth or by adoption, not of illegal residence or illegal presence. Yet there are large minorities in both parties – larger in the anti-Trump party – who are evidently quite happy to damage the nation, no matter how permanently, by breaking down immigration and border-defense laws. Many of these are equally enamored of Socialism… even of Stalin, himself, not because they understand what they are doing, but because they are willing to do anything to damage the United States. Make no mistake.

Many of the “no borders” zealots preach the “right of immigration” to improve one’s living conditions. It is a broad and ill-defined right that extends to everyone who is, first and foremost, not white. Like the right to abortion, when actually contemplated, the image of an immigrant or of an aborted immigrant to life, is covered in brown skin. Whites have been defined as oppressors in any and every instance, and are therefore entitled to almost no rights and chief among those so proscribed is ownership of private property. Thank you, education systems.

A more dangerous trend, Prudence teaches us, is “rights” codified based on personal, self-declared feelings. Our culture has been turned, if not twisted, by the 30-year fight for “gay” rights. Initially it was a logical, and reasonable push back against cruelty and discriminatory rejection of professed “gays” and “lesbians.”

Appropriating the word, “gay,” apparently applied primarily to male homosexuals but is sometimes used to describe lesbians as well.

But the “gay rights movement” quickly morphed from tolerance and non-discrimination towards unusual people, into demands for total acceptance and legalization of every permutation of sexual deviance – all of it self-declared. In other words, a person can declare him- or her-self to be “gay,” and come under constitutional protections now accepted as protecting every form of “expression.” That same person, however, can also choose to live as a heterosexual, self-declaring a non-gay status, and have, in effect, fewer rights or protections than previously.

This seems like a preposterous basis for application of the 14th Amendment. We have moved into a realm where people’s feelings are made the basis for anti-discrimination protections. More diaphanous is legislative logic for “trans-genderism.” With no physical evidence, men and women… and boys and girls… are permitted, if not encouraged, to live out their fantasies of being the opposite “gender.” The argument is based on “gender” being a linguistic designation of maleness and femaleness, and therefore nothing “permanent.” The lack of permanence is based on the fluidity of feelings and not of gender, itself, necessarily. Some exercise their convictions to the point of bodily mutilation and chemical distortion of their natural hormonal beings. The legitimization of these emotional incongruities has found its way into governmental responsibility for the emotional satisfaction and even physical or chemical balance of military personnel and even of prisoners who self-declare their identification with the opposite sex from that of their birth. Again, individuals are able to gain rights and protections based upon only their declarations and not on verifiable evidence. It is a dangerous path; parents keep your children safe – society no longer will.

Finally, and simply for the length of the essay, come the new “rights” to be offended. This amorphous body of social “rule-making,” stems from the concept of “hate crime” and its bastard child, “hate speech.” For a legal and judicial system that can’t define pornography, defining “hate” as an enforceable term seems a bit of a stretch. By some sort of arcane, subjective reckoning, a murder performed by a killer who keeps his feelings to himself is LESS of a crime than if he advertised his extreme dislike of the group he thinks the victim deserved to be part of. A dope who kills a fat person and who also hates fat people is in worse trouble than a murderer who loves them. You figure it out.

Academics and others who are ostensibly intelligent, actually nurture the concept of unbridled “offense” and attempt to set rules against “hate speech” (anything traditional, conservative or Constitutional… or critical of liberalism… or of Hillary Clinton), or insensitive pronouns like “his,” hers,” “he’ and “she.” By accepting the mythical “fluidity” of gender, colleges and other self-righteous arbiters of “education” buy in to the concepts of self-selected pronouns the meaning of which is decided by their inventors, with no connection to our common language(s). It’s another dangerous path, one that leads to hatred and confrontations initiated by the supposedly offended. Social and cultural adhesion are the victims… as is freedom, itself, in a country of rules rather than laws. Those are the tools of socialist fascism.

The loss of freedom our rabid quest for “rights” engenders (speaking of “gender”), is a form of death for every free person.

Culture, Economics, Education, Governance, Immigration

America on the High Wire

August 25, 2018 Prudence Leadbetter Leave a comment

Constitutionalists and other conservatives, along with the rest of the world, are watching the American high-wire act being performed without practice and without nets. Having had top billing in the center ring since WW-II, The U. S. has also had unique control of the world’s money supply and, in the pleasant swaddling clothes of the so-called “Federal” Reserve Bank, has enjoyed unlimited debt creation for more than a century, financing sticky, anti-Constitutional socialism, sold so softly that once-conservatives defend its pillars, now.

Along the way the innate goodness of American ideals enabled the U. S. to also liberate and rejuvenate millions of people and dozens of countries, imperfectly, but with the best of efforts. On balance, the United States has done sufficient good in the century of its financial dominance that people living under much crappier politics still risk everything to get here. Unfortunately, unlike the struggle to get to “America” during the first 130 years of our existence, immigrants come less and less often for the opportunity to perfect themselves and their families, and more and more to grasp the socialist welfare for which we have indebted several generations to come, to provide for the “less fortunate,” who, in the minds of virulent anti-American socialists, comprise the rest of the world.

Therein is the outline of one of the strands of the high wire we, through our virtually inept governments, are attempting to navigate across a chasm so dark that most of the citizenry will not look into it… or acknowledge it, believing that nothing so threatening could possibly exist nor could our Senators and Representatives have allowed it to manifest. Yet here we are, gingerly sliding one fat foot before the other, hoping to cross to a better century to come.

In that better century we won’t be in debt up to our annual eyebrows, or obligated socialistically for many multiples of our entire annual economic output. We love our Social Security, our Medicare and a thousand other benefits. We love being able to shove the irresponsible in under the umbrella of Medicaid, lest we worry ourselves sick over them. But we aren’t loving the loss of independence that ungodly debt represents, nor the loss of freedom that taxes represent – at least we shouldn’t be. You do understand these concepts, don’t you?

Taxes are a loss of freedom? It should be obvious: freedom and economic freedom are symbionts. Debt, on the other hand, threatens freedom of the nation in terms of independence – economic independence. We owe a year’s economic output to someone, many some-ones, and a lot of that we owe to people who wish to destroy us.

Independence. It’s another strand in that taut, high wire on which America balances.
Most of those who would weaken, dominate or destroy the United States, removing us from our global economic chairmanship, and from our military empire, do not have the internal dissent that freedom allows. They do not have debilitating, enervating victim-based political mine-field governance. Nor are they constricted by waves of illegal and criminal aliens and hired armies of “antifa” street thugs who use violent force to make points that duplicitous media endorse. They aren’t required, politically, to attempt to coexist with a dozen opposing cultures within their borders, schools and core cities. They aren’t burdened by thousands of laws that are never enforced, or enforced differently for citizens and non-citizens.

And, like badgers, or jackals, they probe and push and nibble at our strength, waiting… waiting for the moment we are so distracted, or weary, or confused about our existence, that we can be toppled. Such an occurrence will mark a new dark age.

The high wire is not unable to hold our weight, or our debt or our dissension. Our confusion is more worrisome, but right now, it’s holding. There is no net. We have succumbed to debauchery, as it were, with governments decriminalizing activities and products they can tax… or gain votes from. It’s tawdry. What sort of government can profit from the temporary or permanent mental incoherence of its citizens? Our individuality no longer breeds responsibility or cohesiveness, rather division and wasted potential. As a people we are becoming more clever and less intelligent. Instead of rewarding success and improvement, we are rewarding failure, deviance… and incoherence.

Immigration, once a strength, we are now rushing – indeed fighting – to make a weakness and a threat. It’s not the stuff of socialism, but it is a weapon to prevent resistance to socialism. Socialism, a virtual denial of the spirit, is threatened by freedom – not by licentiousness, for that weakens freedom – because freedom, described by God in a million religious texts and well-distilled into our Declaration and Constitution, empowers individuals, not groups or classes. The majesty of individual sovereignty, barely recognized or remembered, today, is at the foundation of the American idea. For those blinded by the allure of socialism: the ability to get something for nothing – American independence of the individual is the enemy. The high wire is not yet severed, but the blowtorches of the original lie, now emboldened as “socialism,” are trying to soften its tensile strength.

Still we proceed, one foot before the other, carefully sliding and balancing, while the burdens of debt cower us and the rending of our muscles by a million jackals weakens us. The ideas of America – not her mistakes – are so strong that we are able to find new ways to rejuvenate her body, albeit more temporarily each cycle.

Belatedly, Trump is trying to “clean up” international problems that have encroached on our peace and prosperity for decades. Politically we have botched many circumstances, treaties, agreements and relationships around the world – too many to list. Currently we worry about North Korea, Iran, Russia and China, along with Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, Turkey, Libya, Zimbabwe, Sudan and South Africa… oh, and Venzuela, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Mexico, Brazil, Haiti, and even Canada. Ooops, forgot Philipines, Indonesia, Somalia, Poland, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. Other than that, things are pretty calm… unless we want to not overlook the entire EU and Britain in particular and the Balkans, Romania, Bulgaria, and Ukraine. And Georgia. Never mind the DNC.

The point is, it is a consummate balancing act the U. S. performs to keep its dominance through both economics and diplomacy, while shoveling huge volumes of “foreign aid” in the form of military aid, if not intervention, into over 150 countries. This doesn’t begin to quantify activities of the C. I. A. No wonder everybody loves us. All this while our enemies – every one socialist, communist or fascist (socialist) – watch for weakness, indecision, or introversion, or, for “leading from behind.”

If at some point the U. S. stumbles, fails to defend itself or, worse, fails to stand up for its majestic founding principles, the jackals will pounce to bring down – as in destroy the greatest affront to socialism and tyranny the world has ever seen: our great, lumbering hodge-podge of cultures and beliefs which had not the good sense to teach its own children the ideas of its founding and its exceptional place amongst humankind.

Our greatest balance pole has always been freedom, outlined in the Bill of Rights and elsewhere. We will do best to preserve ourselves and our countering role by cleaning our own house and by returning to our long climb toward honesty and perfection based on the sovereignty and individual responsibility of our people. We’ve drifted away from our ideals as we’ve carefully stepped far out above the abyss. Every reader knows the cleansing that must be done. There is no amount of political Febreeze that will correct for the rot it covers up.

We must regain our balance, and in fairly short order, Prudence indicates.

Education, Governance, Politics 2018, Representation, Trump

St. Mueller the Silent

August 17, 2018 Prudence Leadbetter Leave a comment

The “Mueller Investigation” as the “Special Counsel” investigation is known, is a confusing, obfuscatory, scattershot, and stupefying, yet crystal clear example of the failure of American self-government. Mueller has played his role very well: careful, quiet, indictments of several people who a) will never be extradited for trial or, b) have nothing to do with what the public believes is the purpose of his investigation. A cool character, he.

Now the big press controversy is over a pre-election meeting attended by Paul Manafort, Jared Kushner, Donald Trump. Jr. and some ostensible carriers of dirty dirt about Mrs. Clinton, Russian origin. The meeting wasn’t illegal and nothing illegal was done for all of its 20- or 30-minute duration. BUT! BUT! Did Trump, Sr. know about the meeting?

If he had known, it still wasn’t illegal. But, if he lied about knowing about it – which some claim, although there’s no evidence – and all one needs to do is accuse Donald Trump of something for certain people to “know” that he did not only that of which he is accused, but much worse, he’s such a terrible human being after all, then maybe Mueller can get him to testify that he didn’t know about the meeting under oath and then he may be accused of perjury because someone like James Comey, an established liar and hater of the aforementioned Mr. Trump Sr., and of Jr., too, most likely, has said he told him he did know of the meeting.

Mueller can choose whom to believe when testimony conflicts, and therein lies the flaw in the grand-jury / indictment system, proving the maxim that a good prosecutor with a grand jury could indict a ham sandwich. All he needs is for some homeless witness who claims to have seen the meat inside the sandwich in question, and to accuse the ham sandwich of being, in fact, a turkey sandwich. Soon the prosecutor’s suspicious attention is turned toward the sandwich so accused, with demands to hear what the purported ham sandwich has to say in its defense, only to find that the sandwich refuses to answer! Indictment follows.

Manafort is in big trouble. He apparently committed crimes by hiding income received from some sort of work for the then pro-Russian president of Ukraine. So his crimes were financial. His offense was working for the Trump campaign in 2016, during which time he committed no crimes. But, he breathed the air in Trump Tower and Mueller has treated him very differently from anyone else accused of similar crimes, including revoking his bail and holding him in solitary confinement. All this for a case that Mueller could have handed off to other federal prosecutors as he has other cases his broad investigation uncovered.

Manafort is obviously different because of his direct connection, briefly, with the eeeevil Mr. Trump: Mueller’s real target.

The official charge establishing this unique “Special Counsel” for the DOJ is short and incredibly broad:
ORDER NO. 3915-2017
APPOINTMENT OF SPECIAL COUNSEL
TO INVESTIGATE RUSSIAN INTERFERENCE WITH THE
2016 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION AND RELATED MATTERS

By virtue of the authority vested in me as Acting Attorney General, including 28 U.S.C. §§ 509, 510, and 515, in order to discharge my responsibility to provide supervision and management of the Department of Justice, and to ensure a full and thorough investigation of the Russian government’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election, I hereby order as follows:
(a) Robert S. Mueller III is appointed to serve as Special Counsel for the United States Department of Justice.
(b) The Special Counsel is authorized to conduct the investigation confirmed by then-FBI Director James S. Comey in testimony before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence on March 20, 2017, including:
(i) any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump; and
(ii) any matters that arose or may arise directly from the investigation; and
(iii) any other matters within the scope of 28 C.F.R. § 600.4(a).
(c) If the Special Counsel believes it is necessary and appropriate, the Special Counsel is authorized to prosecute federal crimes arising from the investigation of these matters.
(d) Sections 600.4 through 600. l 0 of Title 28 of the Code of Federal Regulations are applicable to the Special Counsel.

Mueller was head of the FBI for years and worked closely, indeed friendly, with all the people who have lost their jobs there, over the past year: Comey, McCabe, Strozk, Yates, Paige, and others to come. Rod Rosenstein, not yet fired, who appointed Mueller, is also a close friend of his. The investigation team is comprised of anti-Republican and avowedly pro-Democrat, pro-Clinton personnel. It is reasonable to be suspicious of the even-handed application of the “law” likely to be arrayed against a Republican president who defeated “their” candidate. Mueller says nothing, but his treatment of Paul Manafort is louder than words.

Where the average sentence for Manafort’s alleged crimes is less than a year and a half – in a low-security “club fed,” Manfort is threatened with many decades of incarceration. A logical observer would recognize the prosecutorial tactic of squeezing a low-level criminal to get him or her to “rat” on his boss. There is plenty of doubt of that outcome.

But the Mueller probe is masterful in any case. While it makes clear the inability of our rotten, fatuous federal institutions to keep their own houses clean, it also has provided tidbits for rabid anti-Trump forces in media, the establishment parties, and in a thousand “non-profit” activist groups whose lifeblood comes from a thousand rotten grants of socialist funding whereby they separately and collectively weaken the body politic on a daily basis, and most foully from within the very government institutions created and sold to a heretofore “free” people as the fundaments of law and order.

And all of these seize on every tid and bit and crumb… and ham sandwich, with which to assail the President and all who granted him power to do what he is struggling to do. In truth he is neither Republican nor Democrat, yet the states are with him in the hope that our Constitutional republic might be saved.

On a sudden, the long knives of utter socialism are out. “Deminos” (Democrats in name only) are exposing their hatred for the ideas that formed The U. S. of A. Socialism, like the “serpent” that tempted Eve, is antithetical to Americanism. The American Constitution and Declaration of Independence cannot coexist with socialism. One need only to understand our founding and the majesty of liberty to recognize that truth. The heavy oil of socialism chokes out the life-giving waters of freedom and personal sovereignty. Need proof? There are twenty Trillions in proof hanging over our heads.

Mr. Mueller is faithfully serving the haters. Perhaps he knows this – his own past is far from pure.

Economics, Education, Politics 2018, Representation, Responsibility

Earning a Vote

August 8, 2018 Prudence Leadbetter Leave a comment

People elected to office in the United States, from Senators and Representatives to state’s legislators, Governors and state-wide officers, Sheriffs, Judges, District Attorneys, Registers of Probate, Deeds and what-not, to cities’ councilors, Mayors, aldermen, local selectmen and various trustees of reservations, libraries, housing authorities and conservation commissions, all have an obligation, TO WHICH EACH SWORE ON HIS OR HER HONOR, BEFORE WITNESSES, to conduct him or herself and the business of the office at stake according to the law and in defense of various charters, bylaws, state and federal constitutions.

That is, each swore to be honest. Prudence recommends honesty as the best way to conduct the people’s business. Unfortunately, honesty, truthfulness are almost NEVER part of anyone’s campaign message, platform, literature or advertising, despite each knowing that he or she will happily SWEAR to be honest during the conduct of the office being striven for. Odd, that. In practice, all oaths to the opposite, many office-holders consider that honesty, in fact, extends only to the scrupulous fealty to the letter of the law: every jot and tittle and loophole thereof.

We do hear a lot about “working hard for you,” or “it’s time your group is treated more fairly,” or “my opponent, the incumbent (stated in a low voice) has not been honest with you,” or, if the case, “he doesn’t even pay his parking tickets!”

Because legislation – and regulation – is devised and designed by people who are hoping to find a way to gain personally from the “loopholes” they write into it… legally of course, voters rarely get much input to the process or the content of new laws. And, we are reassured from the rooftops as to the diligent efforts made on voters’ behalf, sometimes late into the night at great sacrifice, keeping their promises to “fight” for us and to “work hard for us” if entrusted with the office. After all, they swore an oath to uphold the law and the constitution, and there they are keeping every word of at least part of what was promised. And we re-elect them, sometimes for decades, as if we can’t imagine causing them to “lose” their jobs, for goodness sake!

Most gain considerable wealth while in office, and this is a very mysterious consequence of becoming a public servant. Some are paid from the public treasury quite handsomely, even exorbitantly, yet they continue to “sacrifice” in public service instead of accepting much more lucrative positions in the “private sector.” Just look at the millions paid to people like the presidents of nationwide banks, insurance companies, invest firms, Boeing, Amazon, Facebook and Exxon-Mobil. Yet still they toil on our behalf under terrible conditions and low pay, particularly in view of the tremendous responsibilities they carry for the rest of us. [See: http://www.prudenceleadbetter.com/2017/03/31/massachusetts-vaults-into-first-place/]

Congress members and Senators seem to fare the best of all – at least the crafty ones. Politics, unfortunately, seems to attract those who are always looking for an edge of some kind… not a scam, necessarily, but some special advantage, like signaling what’s in your hand to your Bridge partner. One notices that there are many laws that specifically exempt the “Royals” (those currently in Congress) from their terms or penalties. For decades, for example, members of the House and Senate could take advantage of what in the private sector is known as “insider trading.”

That is, by virtue of knowing what laws and attendant regulations were about to be imposed, the Royals could buy stocks about to go up as a result, and short stocks that were about to go down as a result. It’s “edgy,” one could say, and we can be comforted in our beliefs that none of them would ever share that information with a mere civilian, since they all are sworn to uphold the law: every jot and tittle and loophole thereof. Moreover, they are forced to be away from their families and pay for extra housing in or near Washington, and it’s not fair to demand so much additional sacrifice on top of that already entailed in their “jobs” in Congress.

In response to negative press, Congress crafted the “STOCK” act, that essentially made insider trading by legislative employees (over 28,000 of them) and by executive department employees, illegal. President Obama signed it into law with cameras blazing. Not only was the trading illegal, finally, but everyone affected would have searchable financial disclosure statements available on some website, a requirement that was not very popular. A few months later, with most members absent, the House and Senate rushed a bill through and the President signed it with little notice or announcement. This bill kept the thousands of disclosures under lock and key in a basement room in the Capitol, where virtually anyone could review them… individually, by correct name, and even copy them for 10 cents a page. But they couldn’t be “searched,” per se, and you had to get to the Capitol and to that room during limited hours, and provide the correct name of the disclosure-owner. Nothing illegal, but just a little edge over the competition – us.

The search for truth is a competition, if you hadn’t realized that before now, and in this competition relative to our public servants, we have very wily opponents. Think of that: opponents.

How nice would it be to hear an office-seeker say in his “stump” speech: “I promise only a few things, ladies and gentlemen… just a few.” He or she holds up the fingers of one hand. “First, when you ask me a question about any part of my public job – the one you pay me to do – I will answer truthfully and fully, unless there is a specific statute that prohibits me from doing so. I will then explain that statute to the best of my ability, or get back to you promptly with the explanation. If there is a way for you to obtain the information from another person or office I will tell you and, if you need it, I will help you get the information… not just an ‘answer,’ but the information you are entitled to.

“Secondly,” holding up his pointer finger, “I will tell you the truth about the budget and about expenditures. The money we spend and allocate is all taken from your wallets and I will show you at least enough respect as American citizens, to tell you the truth about what’s being done with it.”

“And, finally, point number 3. I will not vote for any legislation that contains provisions that are ‘snuck’ into the wording because those provisions could not have passed on their own merits. In other words, some legislation is brought forth with titles that indicate it is about one issue, while hiding legislation about unrelated issues. Those bills are at least partial lies and I will not vote for them. On the other hand, I will fight to stop this practice. To do so I need your vote on Tuesday.”

Prudence declares her support for any such candidate. Sadly, none has presented him or her-self for consideration. On the other hand, if one were looking for someone who has crafted an articulate message of hate for certain groups, individuals or for the United States, there are several from which to choose.

The underlying problem with elected and appointed malfeasance is that it undermines the ideas of America. And there is no one to our West who will come to our rescue when our citizens lose all trust in our “self” governance. There is no one else with a more “free” system or where citizens have sufficient sovereignty to perfect themselves, who will ride to our salvation and help as throw off tyranny. We, the United States of America, still somewhat free, still somewhat honest, still somewhat Christian, are the last best hope on Earth. If, in our libertine libertarianism we allow Constitutionalism to perish, or if we fail to reverse our educationally slipshod descent into sexual confusion and feelings education, the whole experiment is at risk.

Indeed, for an American elected official to abuse his or her office, particularly for illicit, if not illegal personal gain, is among the worst offenses against our nation. It is virtual treason against the electorate, and utterly inexcusable. Compromised judges and law-enforcement officers naturally follow the path of rot blazed by dishonest elected officials. Tightening and increasing the penalties for official corruption should be the fourth part of our “honesty is the only policy” candidate wished-for above. Let’s hope.

The Civil Right

Yearly Archives: 2018