All posts by Prudence Leadbetter

Economics, Education, Governance, Politics 2020, Representation, Responsibility

THE BIG ENVELOPE

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North Carolina Senator Richard Burr coincidentally sold most of his stock portfolio after a closed hearing on COVID-19.

The big envelope arrived the other day, from the National Republican Congressional Committee, which is not a committee that tries to solve problems for the Prudent and concerned citizenry, but a campaign committee that tries to solve problems for politicians.  And, while it certainly has that right, Prudence dictates that recipients are just as permitted to scoff at it and withhold requested funding… or send in the funding to the degree that the needs of politicians may, momentarily, coincide with one’s own.

The questions were off-putting.  Did the carefully chosen recipient think that the Democrats would work with President Trump to improve things for the American people?  The options were Yes, No, and Not Sure.  At the very end of the over-sized questionnaire the committee provided a space for “Comments.”  Except, they didn’t really want very many of those.  Prudence tried to compose two sentences that could impart the folly of the questions and the implied policies they hinted at, to no avail.  It could fill a whole blog post.

Unfortunately, in this recipient’s view, even President Trump, ostensible leader of the organization that spawned the aforementioned Committee, is barely trying – or able – to shift the course of Socialism that has infected our Constitutional system of individual liberty.  None of the questions even hinted at the underlying, fundamental corrosion of our potential and promise, so it didn’t seem Prudent to answer any of them.  Most Americans are inured to the essential Socialism we live with, even as it washes out our national foundations, nor do we recognize the socialist nature of hundreds of federal and state programs.  The Left has dragged the debate firmly onto its spongy, swampy, turf, yet we still appear befuddled in the few debates there actually are.  Where is all this socialism?

The federal and state budgets are replete with it.  “How can that be?” you ask.  “We don’t like socialism in this country!”  That’s what WE think.

Since 1946 the federal government has provided subsidized free and reduced-cost lunches to school-age children… millions of them.  Most recent statistics indicate that some 30 Million children receive breakfast AND lunch in public schools.  Here and there late-afternoon meals are also served.  Where are the parents?  Obviously so tied up with important tasks that they are unable to feed their own children. 

Obviously, no one can bear the thought of hungry children trying to learn on empty stomachs; we must feed them.  At the risk of sounding cruel, one is prompted to ask what the SNAP program is accomplishing if it fails to make sure that children receive nutrition from its benefits?  Are there no sanctions on parents who fail the test of the most basic parental responsibilities?  Feeding your own child?  Apparently not, and not needed.  The federal government has provided much of that function so that parents need not be bothered.  Everyone is happy.  Socialism:  identity linked to a certain group spurs unique attentions from a central governing body, frequently economic attentions – positive or negative.

What about the most basic socialist program: Social Security?  Begun as a simple, partial support for those too old to work, Social Security has become an ostensible retirement program as well as a source of “off-budget” revenues for our erstwhile budget-masters in the Congress.  Indeed, there they were: some dollars they couldn’t obtain cheaply enough on the open bond markets, and they didn’t actually steal  them.  They placed bona fide I. O. U.’s in the form of United States bonds in the imaginary “lock box” of which existence taxpayers were repeatedly assured.  In a way, the moneys collected on behalf of future retirees WERE stolen, another of the inevitable actions of socialists for whom ANY source of revenue may be justified for the good of all.

Social Security, long in surplus, was too sweet a piggy-bank when the “need” to provide for the mentally “disabled,” especially children, and for a host of others deemed disabled under the ADA, including alcoholics and other addicts.  Now, in answer to another prayer to who knows who, for more revenue for the common weal, we have THC emporiums springing up from coast to coast, often enriching former socialist office-holders, and which can allay the disabling anxiety of the developmentally coddled.  There will be less crime, now, and happier sheeple, ahhmmn… voters.  Gambling wasn’t expanding its contributions to the common good quite rapidly enough.  Prostitution is always waiting in the sheets, as it were, with added revenues needed for “education” and “infrastructure.”

Another clue to our socialist underpinnings is the $23 Trillion-dollar debt hanging over us, all.  The centuries-old result of socialism is running out of other people’s money.  Socialism is based on collectivist action, governing by group identity rather than having power derived from individual rights and actions… and responsibilities, the source of business-generated productive surplus and innovation.  Socialism is a system of diffusing responsibility, and once in that mindset it is a small step to borrow today’s comforts, ahh… crucial needs, from future taxpayers.  Politicians are especially comforted by the prospect of buying votes with the greatest “other people’s money” ever conceived: “borrowing” from 3 generations in the future.  Talk about diffusing responsibility.

Into this dishonest mess has dropped Covid-19, facilitating the wet dreams of socialists everywhere: “universal” health… ahh, well, not care, exactly, but universal RULES that are backed not by law but by police – best of all.  And these aren’t rules for hygiene; these rules are destroying the economy, individual businesses of every size, jobs, household economies, availability of goods, including food, paper goods and all the cleaning and disinfecting products that are needed to render every body antiseptically pristine.  All it costs are hundreds of billions of lost business and tax revenue, plus a few inalienable rights, like the entire Bill of Rights.  In one swell foop our governments have rendered virtually EVERYONE dependent on government, and otherwise rational and independent men and women are willing to argue angrily for following every new restriction on rights and commerce, out of fear.

Meanwhile, the largest bailout/stimulus/stock-buyback program in the world is being polished up by the 535 people on Capitol Hill who can benefit the most from it.  Don’t you sometimes wonder how Representatives and Senators become multi-millionaires while sacrificing for us in “public service?”  Insider trading is a good way.  Let’s hope that what they finally shove down Pennsylvania Avenue is actually the right prescription for our suddenly sick economy.  Could happen.

The third person in line of succession to the presidency, Nancy Pelosi, doing her level best to help Americans in this time of shared stress and fear, tried to slip a loophole into the emergency “stimulus” legislation that would have enabled federal funds to pay for abortions, which is currently illegal.  She has her priorities; most of the rest of the people in the United States have theirs.  One could look back to 1973 when a shadowy “law” was discovered in the fog and abortion became “constitutionally” protected, and wonder if the termination of 61,000,000 Americans was simply not enough to have prevented COVID-19.  Maybe speeding up and expanding the death of our future will have a net positive effect.

Fortunately, every college graduate over the past 40 years has NOT been a communications, marketing or art major, and the latest iteration of “coronavirus” will be solved and resolved by very smart and accomplished people.  The problems of the hog-tied economy will not be so readily set aright.  It was shaky prior to the flood of unprecedented federal and state dictates, becoming, both because of and in spite of the booming financial markets, more and more unbalanced.  The ultra-rich were becoming ultra RICHER; a smaller middle-class of small and medium businesses were doing better; the vast majority of small businesses were struggling against the globalization of contracts and ownerships that remove thousands of previously independent enterprises from the competitive, free-enterprise marketplace.  A large fraction of the population were simply watching the growth of the rest of the economy, while experiencing little of the new wealth.  This model is common as socialism matures in the societies that have suffered under it.  A small group becomes very much more comfortable – and powerful – than everyone else, the middle class is reduced to homogeneity, the helpless low-producers are eventually eliminated or relegated.

Right now we are required, under stronger and stronger sanctions, to place our trust in a pyramid of government strata, populated by smiling politicians who have made careers out of deceiving Americans.  Let’s hope this crisis has shocked them into utter veracity, now.  That could happen, too; we’ll ignore the deceptive insider trading.  It’s nothing new.

Culture, Economics, Family, Governance, Health Care, Politics 2020

WOO, WOO, WUHAN

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We have enough to worry about... I'm not going to worry about toilet paper on top of everything else.

You may have heard of this new virus, COVID-19?  Many have.  It’s not as widespread as “the flu” or hemorrhoids, but it’s becoming a popular meme.  The Chinese provided the best possible environment for the rapid spread of “Coronavirus,” but they are quite reluctant to take full credit for their successes with this new flu virus.  Funny, that, for the progressive and benign inventors of virtually everything, starting with justice for all.

People and governments, businesses and schools and other institutions, have reacted in some ways foolishly.  Again, the Chinese were world leaders, although they have started to forcibly push that honor onto the United States, displaying their progressive generosity, to the point of claiming the highest honor of all: being the victims of COVID-19, rather than the originators.  How friendly is that?

There are numerous “corona” viruses, 7 at least.  Some of them haven’t “sold” as well due, possibly, from their not having been granted cool, mysterious names.  Right now, COVID-19 is hot, and everyone seems to want it… or, at least, wants to worry about it.  229E (alpha coronavirus), NL63 (alpha coronavirus), OC43 (beta coronavirus), and HKU1 (beta coronavirus), all gain customers every year but are never celebrated as much as SARS, MERS or the king, COVID-19.  I mean, who the Hell would want people to know he or she were suffering from “NL63?”  No one, that’s who.

“Coronavirus,” however, or COVID-19, clearly carries a certain élan, some people are so excited about it they are posting their symptoms and difficulties for all to envy and, perhaps, copy, if they’re lucky.

Admittedly, your correspondent, who has never caught SARS, MERS, 229E, NL63, OC43, or HKU1, and not even the 2009 Swine Flu, and whose ability to get within 6 feet of COVID-19 is equally in doubt, still shares your desire for victimhood and all the benefits that go with it.  President Trump and Congress have cooperated to pump air into our virus-deflating economy.  They call the air, “money,” so-called “billions” of dollars’ worth.  It, and many regulatory changes may prove valuable in the limiting of COVID-19’s popularity, so those of you who have gotten hold of some will be even more famous as the weeks and years go by.

Popular and social media, along with other “influencers,” have managed to whip up a pretty good frenzy over “coronavirus.”  In response, every business that typically attracts crowds of people to its products, from Wal-Mart to the NBA, major league baseball, the NHL and various marathons and fun-raisers, have cancelled or postponed their events, at great economic loss.  Individual star-players have stepped forward to financially support the hundreds of ancillary employees and businesses that function to operate sporting events and to serve their attendees.  Real generosity, as compared to the “federal” type.  A lot of the lost or displaced economic activity will never be restored or replaced.

Some businesses, naturally, will benefit mightily… paper-goods manufacturers, for example and any store or supermarket that sells them.  Bottled-water purveyors and those same stores, again.  Company’s that make hand sanitizer, antiseptic surface wipes and face-masks, among other goods, are doing nicely as sheeple attack their supplies to obtain extra quantities of those items that no one and no family, certainly, could bear to do without.

Toilet paper is a big item as the perceived threat of worldwide pestilence rears its empty head.  Dozens of rolls.  If the supply chain for toilet paper gets severed, people are calculating, their family is not going to suffer the absence of toilet paper until the very last possible minute.  This is perfectly logical, possibly even Prudent, although neither quality can be judged on real merits.  Faced with a frightening disease, the natural reaction is to stock up on toilet paper.  Clearly adherents of this philosophy have not thought things through: if conditions deteriorate to the complete cessation of toilet-paper production, there likely won’t be any food to eat, either, and wiping one’s butt will mean less and less in the grand scheme of things, until we are all smothered by the final, rapid descent of what’s left of the sky, bonking us all on our heads, rendering us senseless.  No shit?

Basically, coronavirus, COVID-19, is a new strain of an old friend, causing a variant of the seasonal flu.  AS WITH ALL “FLU” VIRUSES, elderly, especially elderly nursing-home residents are at the greatest risk, as are those with other respiratory diseases or weaknesses, smokers and those otherwise immune-compromised.  Without strong immune systems, infected victims will find it hard to conquer the virus, and in those, the virus will replicate at its fastest, causing fluid build-up in the lungs and death from pneumonia or, in effect, drowning.  No one wishes such an end on anyone.

The “flu,” we have observed, tends to decline in the spring and virtually disappear in the summer.  Why would that be so, if it’s so virulent?  Why are some people able to fend it off easily in its “high” season, mid to late winter?  Why are carefully-tended nursing home residents so susceptible?  It’s all dependent upon individuals.  It is our habits, our practices, our health and nutrition and our good sense that enables a virus like COVID-19 to succeed or fail.

Why do flu viruses infect more people in the winter?  In large part it is because humans tend to have more bronchial and rhinopharyngial inflammations in cold weather.  We cough, our sinuses produce more fluids and mucus, we blow our nose, and our bronchial tubes collect mucus and fluids.  We work hard to get rid of these intruders and enflame these sensitive linings.  Both bacteria and viruses find welcoming environments and it’s off to the races.  Over the period of a couple of weeks to a month our bodies fight off the infections and our immune systems are invigorated.  Fairly soon there are fewer and fewer people who are contagious and the season passes into spring and summer, and another factor kicks in: sunshine.

Vitamin D is essential in all sorts of organic functions, including strengthening our immune systems.  We are likely to be a little healthier in warm weather because we get more sunlight and our skin creates more vitamin D.  It’s not just that simple, but it’s not a lot more complicated, either.  Nursing-home residents don’t get as much sunshine, for one thing, rarely consume really good meals, don’t get to take supplements, and are kept away from viruses to a great extent, thus rarely exercising their immunities, leaving them more vulnerable than just age alone would make them.

With flu warnings hammering us every “flu season,” we also modify our habits, cover our coughs and sneezes more diligently, stay away from others when we’re feeling ill, take our vitamins more diligently, wash our hands more often, things like that.  And, we survive the flu, kind-of like the way we are surviving the new “coronavirus” this year, too.  There aren’t many MORE ways to have reacted badly to COVID-19 than the ones we have and are trying, starting with the Chinese in particular.  If we had simply described this virus as an especially aggressive flu bug and blasted the airwaves with how to protect ourselves and what to do if our symptoms are one way or another, we’d be acting extra carefully and still going about our daily and business activities.  There’d be more absenteeism, but no mania, the cost of which we can hardly estimate.

COVID-19s is a nasty bug.  It has a more severe effect on lungs than other coronaviruses, making breathing difficult and stressing hearts.  The death rate is higher, too, and, like other coronaviruses, mainly for senior citizens, rates spike with age and certain pre-existing conditions.  Number-one is heart disease.  Another big one is diabetes, which is its own epidemic in overweight America.  If your health is already under attack, please protect yourself.  For age groups over 60 the risks are higher.  Compared to other well-known flu’s – the ones that come back every winter – the death rates spike higher with this new one for these at-risk, older groups.  Use good sense: don’t snuggle with anyone exhibiting ANY flu symptoms.

In the United States, hyper-politicized and divided into sets of enemies, we have allowed the entry of the latest coronavirus to modify our governance and our economic relationships, citizens and federal government, and states and federal government.  It’s dangerous.

COVID-19 is a serious disease, mainly because it is more easily transferred than other flu’s.  It doesn’t mean we’re all doomed to catch it, nor that every senior citizen is going to die if he or she is infected.  The speed of its spread has tripped up health systems, but now that it is better understood, the natural anxiety caused by the rate of infection can be set aside and replaced with best practices to help people recover, AS MOST OF THE INFECTED ARE GOING TO DO.  Reactive mania, while politically irresistible, is not particularly helpful beyond the shortest of terms.  The concerns about testing rates have more to do with getting the infection statistics right than with specific treatments for those infected.  One of the reasons South Korea has relatively low infection and death rates is its widespread testing.  That data keeps panic at bay.  With cleaner air nationwide, and lower smoking rates than Asian nations, Americans are in some ways healthier and somewhat less at risk.

Americans have learned, on a sudden, how quickly their freedoms may be curtailed by a handful of press conferences and an executive declaration of a “state of emergency.”  Families can be disrupted with school closings and by “woke” corporations changing job descriptions without notice.  Whole businesses may be shut down by arbitrary event-attendee limitations, mostly by state authorities.  It seems unreal, yet the expansion of economic, social and religious displacements is evident with every hourly newscast.  It seems imPrudent.

Take your vitamins, extra C, as much as 3,000 IU’s of vitamin D, eat fresh fruits and veggies, and an orange every day.  It makes a lot more sense to stock up on oranges, lemons and limes than toilet paper.  Don’t smoke… anything.  Get plenty of sleep.  Don’t frequent venues where people are packed tightly together; stay away from others if you feel sick, have a tough cough or are sneezy.  Pray – praying for those who are sick is always recommended.  While you’re at it, ask God to protect our hapless United States of America.

Economics, Education, Governance, Representation, Taxation, Terrorism

TO CATCH A THIEF

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If only it were only our money being stolen…

Coronavirus, Covid-19, strain S or strain L – or both – is the unannounced candidate in the 2020 presidential race.  Democrats have already been calculating how to use the epidemic to make Trump look bad; they haven’t been calculating, much, as to how to protect citizens and residents from the disease, or to restore the pharmaceutical industry to the United States.  Hatred will do that: blind the carrier to its contagion, making him, or her, feverish and seeking a point of blame.  Trump will do.

Theft is very similar.  Where the blind virus can steal a person’s health, mobility, outlook and good nature, so can hatred, equally blind, make off with decorum, civility, kindness, compassion and good sense.  Both patients are… sick.

But theft, as any victim of a thief can testify, destroys belief as it reduces one’s economy.  A break-in to one’s home, for example, leaves residents distrustful, vulnerable and suspicious.  New information coming to those people is filtered through a different set of beliefs than prior to the act of thievery.  Eventually, assuming no repetition of the crime, distrust fades, safe feelings return and life goes on.  Love for others replaces fear.  But what if the nature of the theft is not precisely known… and what if the feeling of one’s safety and privacy having been breeched, one’s familial or even personal integrity being threatened by unrecognized thieves, almost continuously… what does a person believe then?

A person would certainly be angry at the violation, the assault on privacy, safety and personhood.  And that feeling would lead a person to be mad at, well… someone – whoever is stealing from him or her.  What is being stolen?  Who is it that should be punished for the constant thievery?

We live, today, right now, in a world of constant thievery, and among those things being stolen are the traditions of America’s founding.  One could posit that history, itself, is being stolen from us as “we” dis-educate our youth and restrict and belittle the beliefs that made the American experiment work and the American Dream real.  It’s unsettling.  What other thefts are being perpetrated?

Pick a state, any state.  How many of its agencies are staffed beyond need and paid beyond reason?  How many departments or programs are suspected of malfeasance, misfeasance and corruption, often political?  Surely some.  Honesty is being stolen every hour of every day.  How many have died from opioids?  How many from in-hospital errors?  How many children in state care were neglected so badly that their health or lives were threatened, perhaps lost?  How are such questions answered to the public on whose behalf all such actions are taken?  Almost never in full truth, often in blatant deception and cover-up.

We are forced by police power to sacrifice our private properties – the gains from our labors – to PAY for governments that lie to us as normal operating process.  It is unsettling.  A little anger is justified.  If one is not angry, he or she isn’t paying attention.

What about our past 3 years nationally, when one political party conspired with federal agencies and officers to attempt to unseat a president?  So many lies were told to us by so many official and “news” organs that the count is without total.  The political divisions exposed over the past 20 years have been sharpened so fiercely that the next 20 years are in grave doubt.  Taxpayers pay for everyone who works in the federal government and they have been lying to us, all, and never more grotesquely than in the years 2016 through 2019 and through the impeachment of president Trump.  They, including many in congress, have lied and stolen from our present and future the innate trust we ought to be able to enjoy with regards to our representatives, so called.

That our heritage has been stolen, tossed away when we weren’t looking, can be realized by noting the groundswell of support for an old communist/socialist as he claims to be the “leader” America needs.  Young people, college students, even many adults seem enthralled by attacks on capitalism and free enterprise, the unfairness of success, the inequality of unequal results for unequal efforts.  It’s all a matter of “fortune” and “unfortune.”  The fortunate ones, regardless of their path to wealth and regardless of the millions of jobs they create and the trillions of tax dollars their enterprises and employees pay to support common goods, should not have any more than they need to live on… the rest to be divided amongst the “unfortunate.”

Truth and reason have been stolen, as have history and fact.  And, it is unsettling.  Even those espousing socialist nonsense feel stolen-from, although they refuse to recognize what their losses truly are.  It makes them hazily angry at the fortunate thieves, for they have no mirrors.

Inheritance far greater than one’s grandmother’s silver has been, is being stolen right from our dining-room buffet, and we have not only left the back door open, we’ve marked the shortest path to the buffet with bright orange duct tape.  How can we tell all these thefts have gone on?  Check the books, the ledgers of our balance sheets.  We’re out of balance.  “What happened?” we ask one another.  “How did we get $23 Trillion in debt?”  “When did it become illegal to separate boys’ and girls’ bathrooms?”

“When did people start to hate others so much that teams of thugs would be allowed to beat them up while police watched?”  “Is this what Socialism has done?  Made us hate each other?”  “They” are stealing our nation.  It’s unsettling.

Culture, Education, Family, Health Care, Politics 2020, Sex

THE PRINCESS AND THE P

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Lyon Hospital, Department of urology. Sex reassignment surgery, transgender Female to Male, hystero-ovariectomy under laparoscopy. Operation which precedes the phalloplasty, hysterectomy, ovariectomy, vaginectomy, (Photo By BSIP/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

“Male and female created He them.”  For hundreds, thousands, millions of years, this truth was not a burden on humanity.  Many would rather ignore the whole statement because they don’t – or don’t want to – accept the “He” portion.  Somehow, and religious teachers must bear some blame, “we” have, over just a couple of decades, tried to undo the essential facts of biology: male and female.  Being called a female or male, amazingly, collides with thousands of people’s beliefs.  Why has this phenomenon crept out of counselors’ offices and parents’ concern?  Who are they who work so tirelessly to force the sexual variant of Jonestown on the rest of society?

Because lives are definitely lost amongst this new belief structure.

Transgender-ism  is a belief structure.  It is not supported by biological fact in any but the rarest of anomalies.  It is a belief, usually quite temporary, that one’s body is the “wrong” one.  This is a strange thing to believe… strange only if other humans were interested in discovering the source of the belief, itself.  But, strange becomes “normal” and deserving of societal respect if – and only if – the individual’s feelings  have been elevated to the level of truth: truth in the absence of evidence, a new faith.

Non-evidenced “truths” are now receiving legal  status as craven legislators bend over as far as possible to pander to the new faith.  Sadly, there are craven doctors, too.

And craven educators.

Public schools are not merely tolerating and preventing overt discrimination or bullying against children pretending to be their opposite gender, but they are encouraging  transgenderism among those children who are, for the moment, envious  of the opposite sex.  Parents, and professionals, ought to be helping children to be comfortable with their bodies, not to be revolting against them.  At the same time, adults should all be trying to find the source of childrens’ “gender dysphoria.”

The resolution of this heretofor rare condition, is something adults should pursue, even if it means a full social transition.  Few people will need to know that an individual was not born as he or she appears.  Whether full surgical mutilation is called for, is quite another question.

In the past decade the number of dysphoric youth has grown 1,500% to 5,000% and even more in some countries, with the ratio of girls to boys flipping dramatically.  Why?  Transgenderism “advocates” would say that only now are trans youth enjoying the freedom to express their “true” identities, thus accounting for the explosive growth.  Critics of the trend might see a frightening desire, like a virus from the bowels of China, that infects female and male alike, however disproportionately, with the desire to escape the responsibilities of their sex. 

There are unnumbered ways to achieve sexual release, alone, in pairs or even groups, and none require total denial of self, or bodily mutilation, so there is something else at work, beyond the sexual.  Perhaps it is more Prudent to consider a virus that infects not those who reflect its torment but their parents, schools, and social institutions, like unbalanced feminism, which, with other failures of freedom, convince late-term, newborn, toddlers and pre-schoolers (which age socialists and fascists would have include all of the earlier mentioned) to distrust, if not hate, the prospects of womanhood and manhood.  Despite our access to Instagram and Twitter, Panera, Chick Fil-A, Starbucks and weed, our twisted norms create a society in which children don’t want to be, well… who they are.

The result is not true gender dysphoria for most of its claimants, but a hatred for life, itself.  Prior to actual suicide (the end-game for many who attempt to change their sex) these, now, tens of thousands try to kill their personal realities.

For those who are dysphoric, one’s heart must fill with sympathy, and great care should be shown them, and tolerance and kindness.  For most of the new residents of Jonestown, however, new beliefs, alone, can save them however that counseling can be accomplished.  Doctors and clinics that press them with chemical and surgical confirmation of unreality, are but licensed charlatans.  Their parents, worse.

Shame on religious institutions.  From old, old texts, replete with truths eternal, they have made difficult lessons and philosophies not more clear, but softer and “more inclusive,” practically rejecting realities in order to fill pews.  The elegance and majesty of womanhood should be the easiest clay to work into gracefulness and motherhood, but they’ve largely failed to enhance those values.  The responsibilities and required wisdom that men are obligated to accept and to achieve, are trivialized and even derogated, as boys are drugged into submission and global communications portray men not as leaders but as fools.

The institutions of our culture and nationhood, almost as though coordinated by some evil puppeteer, are all reinforcing the concepts of unreality and hyper-sexualization.  Websites produce and provide pornography 24/7 for free, perhaps the most insidious attack on men, marriage and mental health.  Congress after congress ignore this corrosion without even discussing ways to restrict and limit global pornographics.  Why?  Money?  Is this addiction different from opioids, gambling or tobacco?  Or does it simply expose the flaws within males that all “woke” geniuses knew were there all along?

In a thousand ways we have made life, itself, unattractive.  Why would thousands of young people, even youngsters, refuse to the point of embarrassment and mutilation, to be who each actually is?  Is it because so many are born with the “wrong” body?  All of a sudden?  Doubtful.   Birth is not the issue, Prudence believes, but influences, even before birth.  We are teaching boys that being male is a sort of disease; and teaching girls that life is a system of oppressions, including motherhood.

The destruction of social roles and values is reaping its foul rewards with great efficiency.  The end-game is social dissolution, loss of nation-hood, economic stratification and, worse, institutionalized unreality.  What shall we teach our children when lies have gained legal status?

Culture, Economics, Education, Governance, Health Care, Obama, Politics 2020, Responsibility

Corona, corona

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Corona beer comes from yeast, not a virus.
there is no connection whatsoever…

There are people who believe that the latest health threat to emanate from China is caused or somehow made contagious by Corona Beer, a well-known health threat from Mexico.  It is on this canvas that the gloppy acrylics of impeachment, economics, presidential politics, petro-dollar monetary policy, Antifa, Hezbollah, North Korea, opioid deaths and suicides, and the real threat of coronavirus must create a picture that is both truthful and meaningful to majorities in dozens of countries including our own.  Whew!  There are 15 national leaders whose views and beliefs about these and other issues, will define the next ten years and beyond: Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, Angela Merkel, Vladimir Putin, Benjamin Netanyahu, Ali Khamenei, Kim Jung Un, Xi Jinping, Ram Nath Kovind, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, Volodymyr Zelensky (who at least has a sense of humor), Arif Alvi (who doesn’t), and both last and least, Nicolás Maduro, who is an idiot.

Mixed up in all of their opinions is the existence of American constitutionalism, our ostensible structure of rights and freedoms, and our unbalanced, imperial economy.  Our primary concern must be the survival of the United States and freedom itself.  What presidential politics does every four years is stir us enough to reflect on our beliefs about our nation and our country, not the same things.

Democrat hotheads, committed to control of… well, everything, have impeached Trump to no good end, although his acquittal was never in real doubt.  No good end, certainly, but the disinformation value of, first Mueller, and then impeachment itself, must appear to elected Democrat leaders as a worthy end nevertheless.  Those who now shy away from bottled Corona most assuredly cling to bottled hatreds, known and unknown, but felt viscerally.  So there is the worthiness of relentless hatred of the aforementioned Mr. Trump.

There should be little disagreement with the proposition that hatred is the worst basis for political competition, yet hatred is everywhere employed in the United States, of all places.  Hatred doesn’t develop automatically.  Fear does: it’s pure ethnocentrism, even “racism,” per se.  But racism and fear of difference are not hatred.  Hatred is a visceral desire to kill or destroy the “other.”  To fear or to mistrust a stranger – or a strange “culture” – is instinctive and need not be taught.  To HATE  that person or group requires coaching, teaching, explanation and mythology.  It’s a long-term, methodical process to convert fear to hatred.  Who does crap like that?

Here and there are parents who were, themselves, taught to hate certain others and to varying degrees manage to convince their children to also hate them.  But it’s not as easy to do in the modern era, as public schools, ostensibly, fight the urge to bully or to gang-up on the unusual or most defenseless kids.  To some degree, children receiving messages of hatred at home are going to hear enough lessons countering that prejudice, that fewer and fewer reach early adulthood with firm hatreds.

Yet, now we have a split electorate, fueled by the sweet lies of socialists (people complain about Trump’s looseness with the truth but never a peep about the absolute and historical bullshit spread in the name of socialism).  A virtual communist is at or near the front of the pack in the ostensible “Democrat” party’s campaign for nomination to the presidency, and giddy polls regularly trumpet the acceptance of “socialism” by millenials.  There are reasons to fear Bernie Sanders’ cry for “transformation” of the United States, just as there were for the stated intentions of Barack Obama to “fundamentally transform” the United States.

Consider just the “ACA,” Affordable Care Act, which was not “affordable,” whatever that was hoped to mean, and it wasn’t about “care,” particularly: it was about coverage, the perpetual stumbling bloc to health care.  The nature of every “coverage” entity, whether “insurance” companies and HMO’s or governmental agencies that both regulate and directly pay actual care providers, is to reduce costs.  The main difficulties inherent in the ACA-expanded coverage industry were made worse and more expensive, nearly removing people from decision-making while nearly removing physicians and others from caring about their customers.

These sorts of change ought to be anathema to citizens of a nation with the heritage of the United States.  Our mythos is founded in individualism, self-made success, pioneering advancement into unexplored territories, and homesteads created even where the only building material was prairie turf.  Somehow the steady erosion of socialist promises of “free” safety and comfort have weakened the resolve of Americans to take control of their lives and circumstances, and to do so responsibly.

(See:
http://www.prudenceleadbetter.com/2017/01/16/health-care-fairness-and-free-enterprise/

Obama also made substantial changes to our foreign relations and to our ability to control events to our benefit, rather to enhance the influence and strength of Muslim regimes.  Fundamental transformation.  Here in 2020 these same intentions are voiced repeatedly by Bernie Sanders and others whose vision is not to improve or “perfect” our union, but to replace our form of government by altering Constitutional institutions and original rights.  The “new” goals are not comprised of strengthening liberty, but to “set” everyone’s standard of living so that no one is “above” his fellow residents: ultimate “fairness,” a new form of political organization that removes the interference in individual beliefs by churches, and in which every sort of human pleasure-seeking will be permitted… by benign elites, and, perhaps, taught in public schools.

The struggle of socialism is never-ending.  While “we” in the American, Judeo-Christian traditions of individual liberty and responsibility tend to assume our battle for freedom is won… and done, globalist socialism never rests on its continuum of undermining and destroying liberty and faithfulness.  It is a continuum that extends back to the “Garden of Eden.” 

“What?” you say, “nothing Prudent about that silly claim.”

Well, a few terms we don’t think about enough: Thesis – The Word of God, or the first premise; Antithesis – Direct opposition to the Word of God; Synthesis – Human-generated, pretended, compromise position with the Word of God.  The synthesis becomes the new Premise, no longer the Word of God, something less.  Is this not exactly what the “Serpent” offered to Eve, assuring her that God’s threat to not eat of the tree in the midst (center) of the Garden, or touch it “…,lest thou die.” would not come true.  “thou shalt not surely die.” the serpent told her.  God issued the thesis to Not eat of the tree; Serpent offered the antithesis  that the punishment would not be death (at least not right away) and the rewards of knowledge were worth the chance.  Is this process any more or less than the Hegelian dialectic?  Thesis – Antithesis – Synthesis.  Abortion is no longer murder; socialism will create a better America than God did.

Economics, Governance, Representation, Taxation

ARTICLE v. AMENDMENT

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If there were, finally, a convention of the States under article 5 of the Constitution, there are many concerns that people across the political spectrum would like to “fix,” and some of these are appropriately “Constitutional.”  Care must be taken to control the content of the hundreds of proposals that will likely inundate the convention.  Still, here are a few problem areas that are the result of either inadequate institutional structure for today’s technologies (communication, globalism, trade and warfare), or the result of the infusion into federal responsibility dozens if not hundreds of matters that are the appropriate business of sovereign states within a federal system.  Here is a list as seems Prudent:

Lifetime Sinecures – Senators and Representatives are in office too long.  The basic mechanism of election and re-election has become anachronistic in the age of, first, widespread and rapid communication, and, now, virtually instant and digitized communication and data analysis.  The control of data and virtual control of news/information, results in mostly “safe” seats, quantified as 94+% re-election rates.   If each were motivated by purity of public service and statesmanship, longevity in office might be laudable.  Unfortunately, we see over recent decades, that federal office-holders not only tend to ignore their constituents, preferring to deal with and respond to their confederates at the next Senate or House desk, but they become wealthy while in office, leading them to focus on pleasing those Congressional associates so that re-election is made more likely.  Once the first re-election is accomplished, relationships with lobbyists and interest-group advocates of all stripes become more and more crucial and consuming.

This means that change #1 should be Term Limits which, most Prudently, should be stated in terms of continuous service.  That is, being a past Senator or Representative should not preclude running for that office at some future date.  The issue is: How many terms must pass before an individual can run again?  Prudence suggests that one full Senate term and two House terms are appropriate periods.

Administrative Statism – For many reasons we are devolving into a national, rules-based control system, rather than a willing federation of semi-sovereign states, based on laws and shared cultural mores.  Since the Great Depression, the many Congresses and 13 more or less feckless Presidents have overseen massive growth in administrative departments and programs.  Erstwhile “representatives” have successfully divested themselves of most of their governing responsibilities, save two critical ones: Expanding the scope of issues that must be federalized, and Debt Creation.  This massive, unelected, regulatory bloat must be reversed, and the only way to do so is to regain control over federal budgeting.

Federal Budgeting – Of the three key covenants the federal government holds with the citizens of the several states and with the states, themselves, how tax monies are spent is the one that affects everyone, every day.  For the past 50 years, or so, there has not been a “budget,” in fact, for a budget would limit expenditures to match, virtually, the revenues raised.  Moreover, the revenues raised would, in an honest federal system, be expended only by vote of the two houses of Congress and agreement of the President.  We are told this is the case, still, but in truth, most of the budget is “entitlements,” and these are rarely, if ever, considered as manageable by Congress, and if some slight study of them is attempted, the result is generally to increase them by increasing the indebtedness of the United States.  That is, we have outlived our means for decades – a most mendacious process.

By itself, the failure of a string of Congresses to debate, analyze and produce an expenditure plan that is honest with the citizenry, and affordable through taxation, is proof of the utter failure of political leadership since the inception of the Great Society.  These failed potentates of promiscuous promises get re-elected at a 90+% rate, while their “work” product becomes smaller and smaller.  They receive automatic pay raises.

So, correcting the budget process will solve multiple losses of freedom.  There should be an amendment that requires that the “budget” of EVERY Department, Agency, Program and Title within them, shall be approved separately by the Congress through legislation.  In short order this will be seen as “impossible,” and the impossibility of financing more “line items” than can be understood or even counted, should become clear.  The redundancy and overlap of purposes for the thousands of expensive programs, must be cleared away and reduced to fewer than one hundred.  The federal government must get out of much of the peoples’ business that it is in.  Some of it is best managed by States with overarching direction by federal laws that ARE APPROVED by Congress, not by relatively hidden agencies and functionaries.  Americans deserve REPRESENTATION in all matters lawful and budgetary.  This brings us to another section of this amendment.

Legislation – There shall be no “omnibus” bills or laws.  That is, no bill shall be brought forth the content of which is not directly related to a single purpose clearly described in its title, nor should the text of any section be longer than 250 words, with budgetary supporting statements of account allowed, nor should any bill in its entirety contain more than 2,000 words.  Prudence would dictate that unrelated attachments to “must-pass” legislation should be banned.

Further, no new policies or expenditures may be included in any “budget” or taxation legislation without a separate bill that shall be studied and approved by committee and brought to a vote by the whole Congress.  Legislation for such “new” federal activities must contain provisions for financing said actions or policies WITHOUT causing any increase in the indebtedness of the United States.

Balanced Budget – Having established over many decades that Congress is incapable of limiting or cutting virtually ANY expenses other than by shifting expenses from the Defense Department toward domestic expenditures, elected Representatives and Senators shall establish a balanced budget.  However, a limit must be set as a percentage of, what?  Gross Domestic Product?  Some percentage of all taxable income?  Can any “federal” metrics be even trusted?  Some clear standard of measure must be set, else the habitual connivance of re-election interests will modify and obfuscate the intention of this amendment.  Further, no budget shall be passed that increases the indebtedness of the United States except in times of national emergency  or declared war.

Citizenship – No person shall be counted among the census, nor be part of any apportionment of Congressional representation except he or she be a naturally born or legally naturalized citizen of the United States.  No person may be considered a naturally born citizen unless one or both parents shall be a legal citizen at the time of birth.

Sanctuary – No state may interfere with legitimate and proper execution of federal laws, nor with the proper functions and procedures of federal law enforcement personnel.  No law passed by any state or subdivision thereof shall be deemed enforceable if it shall interfere with execution of federal laws or attempt any form of nullification of federal laws.  Federal law enforcement agencies may withhold financial support from those state or local law enforcement agencies that attempt to inhibit, delay or interfere with proper federal law enforcement procedures and personnel.  Interference with proper and appropriate federal law enforcement and personnel shall be adjudicated in federal courts.

Prudence tells us that once a Convention of the States has come to pass, the prospects of another are much greater.  The actions of the organizers and participants of the first such convocation will form crucial precedents that may, one hopes, set a pattern similar to the traditions of the supreme Court, the membership of which has been only discussed, never changed.  Consideration might be given to yet another amendment that limits the frequency  of Article V. conventions.

Culture, Economics, Foreign Policy, Governance, Taxation

20-20 Vision

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Wither Freedom?

What shall we do, we American people, holders of the temporary promises of freedom and individual sovereignty, with our new gift, the year of our Lord, 2020?  What will be our direction?  Toward greater wisdom and enlightenment, growing nearer to God as we know Him… or Her?  Or, as this millennium has presented, toward firmer rejection of God, morality, purpose and humanity; toward greater animalism and destruction of the Constitution?  Big choices, either way.

We err terribly if we devote ourselves to any politician, thinking, dreaming, hoping or wishing that that one person will “fix” our own lives, our uncomfortable feelings or our deep concerns about the future of America.  A terrible mistake, that.  The only true value of a political leader is that he or she might cause large segments of the constituent population to develop a new sense of hope, of good expectations and of a belief in their social abilities to solve problems.  Unified purpose – not coordinated, necessarily, but unified – is the most powerful force on Earth.

Unified purpose can ignore the pain of sacrifice, as it has during times of war, for example, or during the 8 years that created the Apollo space program.  Tyrants create a form of unity by instilling fear.  Dominated subjects believe they will suffer if they act on contrary thoughts.  Free people, unified in purpose and hope, will overturn the dominator every time.  Nothing can resist the power of free people who believe in freedom.

The only way a free and sovereign people can be defeated is to render them less and less free over time – even it takes 4 – or 20 – generations.  Those who are threatened by freedom, who fear it, never stop trying to destroy it.  They, too, have a unified purpose.  When they are the only unity on the playing field, freedom cannot survive.  When young citizens are at an intellectual point where socialism appears preferable to “capitalism,” several of the methods of rendering a free people less free are revealed.

First is re-education.  Naturally conservative people, enjoying freedom and responsible for themselves, have to be taught to rely on “the government” when ill fortune finds them.  That purchase of philosophy might not have worked if the “government” hadn’t created a misfortune, like the Great Depression, that seemed too difficult and complex for individuals to withstand on their own.  Social Security easily became law and was tiny, a mere minimum for old widows.  Today Republicans defend it as if part of the granite of Mount Rushmore.  Older former conservatives speak up for “their” Medicare, now that the government has made health care so costly and complex that individuals cannot contend with it on their own.  A little socialism goes a long way.

Second is education, itself.  The best plan would be to populate the education licensing bureaucracy with unified liberals/leftists who could guide education degree programs such that new teachers would tend toward socialist ideals of equality, fairness, anti-racism, anti-discrimination of all sorts, feminism, bi-lingualism and multi-culturalism.  Pretty soon they’ll be teaching youth that our Constitution fails to defend these important principles and needs to be changed or supplanted with new thinking.  Pretty soon a proto-communist can be elected president, and the long march to the end of this democratic republic will be underway.

Thirdly, enough rope, in the form of creature comforts, new cars, easy credit and wide-screen TVs, must be provided for erstwhile Americans to hang themselves while their heritage is forgotten and their freedoms swept away.  Let illegal entrants have the country – we don’t seem to want it any longer.

Lastly, promote new “rights” that no one ever heard of, but the lack of which can be made to appear oppressive.  Link the denial of such rights to the constantly re-boiled slavery-guilt/systemic racism civil rights struggle, and soon these new rights gain the power of civil rights that once nearly split the nation… politicians must respond.  Shortly after, laws are proposed, agitated for and passed to, perhaps, force boys and girls to bathe or perform their toilet together.  What, “never,” you say?  Or, as a fantastic example, licensed, educated teachers could actually lose their jobs for failing to call a boy a girl.  “Impossible.”

We have contributed mightily to our “mis”-education and “mal”-economics.  The worst of our economics has two parts: Unconstrained debt creation, and incredible inflation.  You’re objecting, now, that “inflation” is only at 2%, or some such low number.  You’re talking about price increases, which are not what inflation is.  Prices go up and down for reasons of supply of goods, demands (desires) of consumers, including competitive products, and availability of spendable cash (or credit, nowadays).  “Inflation” affects only the last factor: spendable, or “excess” cash and credit.  “Inflation” is inflation of, or artificial expansion of, the money supply, something individuals cannot control.  Politicians do that or allow it to happen by government agents.

Don’t confuse inflation with a rise in the cost of goods.  Inflation is tolerated or actively promoted when government needs more money and is politically unwilling to raise taxes.  Foolishly, we have converted our money system to a debt-based system whereby the federal government borrows every new dollar it wants to balance the federal budget with.  As it does so, it infuses added dollars into the economy as a whole.  This will increase sales of thousands of products as companies that do business with the government get new contracts and, presumably, hire more people or raise wages.  Increasingly, more of those products are imported, sending a lot of those “excess,” “new” dollars to other countries.  This increases domestic profits, but not domestic, widespread, individual wealth.  Consumer prices don’t experience much upward pressure because the actual inflation of the money supply is siphoned into the hands of multi-billion dollar companies, or concentrated in the hands of external multi-billion dollar companies or government-run companies, which is to say, in the hands of foreign governments.  What does this mud puddle of excessive profits and concentrations of wealth have to do with most people?

It diverts their freedom and personal sovereignty, and… it so corrupts free enterprise that socialism, despite its total history of failure – history little known by today’s youth – can be made to appear attractive.  Step by step, the never-ending plan to destroy freedom and independence (non-globalism) is being carried out.  Our government education systems, including “private” universities and colleges made wealthy by government-promoted student loans, are almost the last places to depend upon to correct this historic ignorance.

And all of those inflated dollars?  Since our prices haven’t risen too, too badly, can we pretend they are no concern of ours?  Every dollar “bill” is a bill America must eventually pay.  If the rest of the world no longer wanted (thank you, Saudi Arabia) U. S. dollars, our economy, and those of several other countries, would collapse.  Along the way every dollar, printed or electronic, would drop in value like a stone.  How’s $50 or $80 gas sound? At those prices the “national debt” will be manageable, won’t it?

Meanwhile, we, who should be totally pissed-off, are comfortable enough that we worry about climate change, UFOs and the NFL standings, rather than what should be job-one for American citizens.

Foreign Policy, Governance, Obama, Responsibility, Trump

BALANCING ACT

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Increasingly Mr. Donald Trump is becoming the fulcrum on which our democratic republic balances, and he has not shown, yet, that he is rigid enough to affect the balance.  This is not to say he isn’t tough.  The constant attacks, threats of impeachment since inauguration, and unusual hatred, would wilt lesser men, and often has.  Much has been made of the turnover in Trump’s administration, as if it represented “chaos” in the administration.  While it may yield a little “chaos,” it is temporary.  The problem is that Trump believes that when someone is hired, he or she owes an outward loyalty, at least, to the “boss.”

What has taken him some time to recognize is that every – as in, every single one – person in a position to execute policy or influence policy, has an agenda.  Worse, since the Obama administration, agendas in Washington are no longer matters of how to accomplish national goals, no nuanced approaches to policy.  Agendas now are only to accept or to oppose the direction desired by the elected president.  Many of those recommended for top appointments, especially on matters of international policy, held an agenda of opposition, and deserved replacement.  The president now must become very strict towards his appointees, and this mood must extend deeper and deeper into the many agencies who are happy to oppose him.  (see: http://www.prudenceleadbetter.com/2019/11/28/due-process/ )

Is Trump up for this?  It is hard to tell.  He seems not to take very much advice, else someone would have tempered his Tweeting; on the other hand, his selections for judgeships reveal good work and recommendation by someone else.  Still, he has not been as thorough in replacing appointees as his predecessor was, and many of those in the White House, State Department, Department of Justice and the “Intelligence Community,” are actively opposed to Trump, his background, his style of work and speech, and to his America-first policies.  Their allies in the Congress and other covens of Democrat-leftists, have done their worst to hamstring the president since he first appeared to have a chance at the nomination, never mind the election.

Despite the roadblocks and mistreatment by much of the press, Trump has managed to accomplish quite a bit, and he has changed the nature of American diplomacy somewhat.  Will it all bear fruit?  It is impossible to say, but certainly no more impossible to predict than have been the results of “normal,” deep-state diplomacy over the past 50 years.  The best way to guarantee the predicted outcomes in all that time has been for the United States to give up more – including sovereignty – than we ever have asked… or received in return.  Predictions of opposing sides’ accepting all the American largesse our “negotiators” could give away, always came true.

One hopes that should we not obtain the quality of a deal we need for U. S. benefit, that our “side” will stay strong and not immediately throw more value to the other side in order to “win” some sort of a deal that politicians can crow about, knowing that after a few dust-ups, most voters will forget what was even at stake and accept that the deal we got is better than “not talking” at all.  This is national hogwash, of course, and it stems from a general attitude of American unworthiness compared to other nations’ interests.  Trump supporters want a bull-dog negotiating for our side, both domestically and internationally.

At some point, one would surmise, the mendacity of the FBI, the CIA, the State Department and even the Obama White House, and the 3-year story of failing to prove any – as in, not even one – of the amazing allegations against Donald Trump and his appointees and supporters, would begin to dissipate the hot tempers that accompanied those allegations, both personal and legal.  At some point, the charges of “racism” and “sexism” should abate; the so-far indefatigable charges of “collusion” with Russians, well-debunked at great effort and expense, should fade away as the truth penetrates haters’ consciousness.  At some point, all of the energy needed to maintain hatred of Trump, the person, could be expected to turn toward political action.

But, with the gaveling into passage of two gaseous “articles of impeachment,” not yet.

Culture, Economics, Education, Family, Governance, Race

NEW LIFE TOWN

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Side WALKS no longer: semi-permanent housing.

Leftism, global socialism, in fact, is transforming America’s national unity and our local states, counties, cities and towns.  It is insidious.  Because of George Soros’ financed groups, for example, several counties are suffering under prosecutorial regimes that refuse to prosecute “small” crimes.  Unfortunately, the definitions of the nature of crimes that fall in the “serious” and “minor” lists, are subjective, and proving to be dangerous by their very existence.

Every major metropolis, at least all the ones run by liberals… but I repeat myself, is turning away from public order.  Several have District Attorneys who campaigned on platforms of “criminal justice reform,” which is Orwellian newspeak for leniency toward criminals.  In Boston, which is mostly in Suffolk County, the new D. A., Rachel Rollins, ran with a list of “petty” crimes her administration would not spend time prosecuting.  This was so that “they” could concentrate on “serious” crimes.  One might suppose that every petty criminal – particularly those that enjoyed doing those crimes, or who felt a right to the proceeds of those crimes, or any of their relatives who thought it unfair that their otherwise “good” sons, daughters, nieces, nephews or grandchildren should be hassled or incarcerated when, after all, life has already been unfair to them, voted for Ms. Rollins… all in the interest of social justice.  The D. A., it is fair to say, has never made a living running a convenience store, or an auto-parts store or small grocery.  She has never paid  the increasing insurance rates for small businesses victimized by thefts deemed non-serious; she has never paid the extra-high prices for the products those stores’ neighbors must pay to cover the no-longer-sanctioned thievery.

She represents the very odd, even twisted logic of liberalism: people of certain skin colors and economic circumstances are not responsible for their actions, since they are largely RE-actions to (pick all that apply) racism, systemic racism, institutional racism, heritage of slavery, social injustice, police brutality, departmental (police) racism, lack of education resources, having to pay for Transit rides and poor housing.  In fact there IS systemic racism and it is the outrageously expensive welfare racism that has destroyed the family structure of inner-city populations – mostly of color – since the “Great Society” began.  Regardless of what people of any color may think about brown-skinned people, even if their thoughts are racially vile – and they’re out there – it is only the actual impact of “racism” that truly matters.  It is safe to say that only an infinitesimal fraction of “racist” or prejudicial thoughts have any impact on anyone besides the ignorant thinker.

Racism is as natural as breathing, otherwise, today, there would be no ghettos forming.  People, however, prefer people like themselves: those who look like, sound like and “live” like themselves… even those who eat the same foods and attend the same churches.  It’s as natural as breathing.  What each ethno-centric group thinks about the others is mostly inconsequential.  Should they think nicer thoughts?  Probably, but it’s not anyone’s business what thoughts they think unless… unless they take some negative action because of them.  Burning down or looting some Korean’s store because of racial hatred is racism that actually matters.  Stealing from any store because you think life has been unfair to you because of “racism,” is actual racism that matters.

Consigning 4 or 5 generations of black and brown people to welfare dependency, and now “legally” enabling them to be more effective criminals, that is real racism that matters.  To help counter black welfare hopelessness, the same liberals promote and finance abortion-on-demand as some sort of civil right, and, as evidently intended, it reaches 60% or more of its pinnacle of “success” by killing off black and brown babies.  What a country.

San Francisco, formerly under the guidance of Gavin Newsome, now the winsome governor of California, has, in the span of less than a decade, converted itself from a city of beauty to one where humans are enabled, if not encouraged, to live more like animals, thanks to new “rights” afforded to those so inclined, to camp out in public spaces, take illegal drugs in public, commit certain levels of crimes to support their “oppressed” life choices, fornicate in public, and relieve themselves wherever the fancy strikes them, now amounting to 20,000 or more defecation “rights” in public places, including sidewalks, parks, playgrounds and schoolyards, each year!  Uptight “conservatives,” San Francisco authorities discovered, have no right to impose lifestyle choices on others not as fortunate.

Dogs and other animals at least endeavor to cover up their feces.  Once public nudity was found to be a “right,” was public defecation far behind?  Once public defecation was ensconced among constitutionally protected “rights,” was defecation in a super market far behind?  That’s where the toilet paper is, after all.  The astronomical property values in San Francisco are starting to slip, and segregation from public areas is growing for those able to afford it.  Dystopia.

Liberalism appears to have partnered with global socialism on the path toward destruction of “Western” culture and North American culture in particular.  A very effective way to accomplish that goal is to disrupt cultural norms, one of which has ALWAYS been that laws mean what they say, those who break those laws deserve legal sanctioning for those criminal acts, policing, prosecution and adjudication shall be, BY LAW, unbiased, fair and based only on the law.  In other words, no individual in the chain of justice has the power, logically, to decide the resolution of cases outside of the lawful process – certainly not on the premise of some sort of triage due to “limited resources.”

Who represents justice for victims?  Isn’t justice the key reason for relinquishing personal sovereignty to a government?  Where does ANY law convey authority to an individual to judge some people’s justice as more valuable than that of others?  None does, in fact, but many are deciding that justice somehow varies based on skin color.  This is not to say that injustice hasn’t been meted out by white authorities based exactly on skin color.  It was shameful then, and is shameful, now.  But how is injustice for most citizens able to correct, or balance, injustice meted out for some others in the past… even if the past was yesterday?  It isn’t, of course, unless perceived in a certain level of hatred… hatred spawned in racism, a terrible way to conduct public safety and other policies.

Public safety is attacked hourly by the growing hordes of “homeless” people accumulating in major cities, all liberal bastions of victimhood.  Clearly, feeling sorry for people who, in the vast majority, choose to be how and where they are, neither improves their condition or living circumstances, nor their health or humanity.  Victimhood requires someone to be “oppressing” those in uncomfortable straits, and liberals/socialists, never exhaust the reasons that misfits, criminals, drug addicts and otherwise “homeless” denizens are not responsible for their situations.  Indeed, it seems more cruel to perpetuate – practically promulgate – living “on the streets” rather than forcing those who do so to “shape up.”

Public vagrancy laws have, in some liberal jurisdictions, been set aside as somehow un-Constitutional.  In other words, “society” has no right to require either living or sanitary standards.  Drug addiction and public urination, defecation and lewd exposure are now civil rights.  “Crimes of survival” are to be tolerated by the more fortunate in order to balance past – possibly current – oppression of “the homeless.”  Cultural standards, norms, are now simply suggestions.  By extension, then, one is left to decide which laws enforcing standards are worth obeying: very poor statecraft, to be sure, helping, steadily, to dissolve social and political unity.  The natural result will be imposition of social order by a police state.  The mindset of modern liberalism is creating, or has created, sets of problems that are insoluble by democratic republicanism.

A woman in Seattle was brutally raped at a car dealership by a “homeless” man.  Her screams brought help too late to prevent the consummation of the assault.  She has spoken out as loudly as she can against policies that foment Seattle’s growing homeless/lawless population.  Liberals, at least those who still feel sorry for poor, victimized, homeless criminals, attacked the victim for spreading a story that might reduce public sympathies for “homeless” people!

In Los Angeles many homeless people “live” in the terminals at LAX international airport.  They cause problems, of course, including filth, lewd and lascivious exposure to both adults and children, stealing of small packages and purses – generally discomfiting the traveling public.  Some keep themselves clean in the restrooms, some don’t.  Some avail themselves of indoor plumbing, some don’t.  The situation is tolerated.

Liberal administrations shrug at the existence of these “intractable” problems.  Cities spend tens of millions “addressing” the homeless problem, basically in trying to contain it.  But they cannot, or will not, contain the drugs, the diseases, the “petty” crimes or the human failure.  Liberalism is incapable of creating or imposing order and standards in urban centers.  Does this mean the problems are unsolvable?  If liberals declare a condition as “normal,” does that stop consideration of ideas for its solution?

To correct the conditions, or causes of homelessness and addiction, requires changing the beliefs of those who cling to that way of life.  This is not to say that most, or even very many of those living on the streets intended to live this way or even want to live this way, but they cling to it out of fear.  It is their life and their comfort.  It is where their co-sufferers live, their friends and drug dealers, some quite petty, sharing more than selling.   To be torn away from them is the most grievous outcome imaginable.  They help one another and bond with one another.  “Arresting” them is no solution, since the penal system cannot provide what is missing.  Individual cities cannot simply “place” them in housing: their beliefs won’t have changed and their habits and life-choices will immediately resume.  For most of the “street” people, a new belief in both themselves and in their legitimate place in civilization, must be learned – inculcated, if you will.

OMG!  Do you mean “re-education camps?  You fascist!”  Yes.

The loudest screams will come from leftists, for whom the entire country is a well-orchestrated re-education camp – but let that go for the moment.  There is no long-term, or even short term solution to rampant, growing homelessness, other than changing the beliefs of those who cling to that way of survival.  Pursuit of happiness, indeed.  They need a new happiness, and not one drug-induced.  A test-city/county needs to be selected and a tightly defined state of emergency declared.  The resources of a wealthy nation, and its brain-power, must be applied to a new community where survival depends on learning and practicing the skills of construction, farming, sewerage treatment, fire-prevention… every single skill and craft needed to operate a small town.  Every homeless or addicted person in the test region will be brought there.

Removed from filth and literally forced to be clean, in every way, and drug-free, our test-community will rise from a tent-city to a constructed one.  Individuals will be detoxed and then taught nutrition and self-care and then their old skills or new ones will be employed – as will they – to create a model community.  These people are not worthless, they are lost or trapped.  If they do not work they will have meager sustenance.  If they work and contribute and grow, they will eat better, live better, perform better.  Much like the American legion’s “Boys’ State” and “Girls’ State” programs, they will form neighborhood groups and eventually town or city councils.  They’ll elect leaders and establish schools for themselves and their children.  They’ll learn how to build and furnish houses in the most eco-friendly ways, and they’ll produce goods or foodstuffs to sell to others so that their town can afford fuel, electricity and so forth.  From completely subsidized they will become completely independent, a program that will probably take 4 or 5 years.  With success, every drug addict, homeless or not, could be sentenced to “New Life Town.”

To accomplish this will require military discipline and regimentation, and a domestic “Peace Corps” to assist relatively backward people to learn to be civilized, to live well through self-discipline and responsibility, rather than enforcements.  They are the wayward children of America.  We know how to effect adult maturity and responsibility, we do it all the time with our own children.  For how many more decades and ruined lives will we refuse to “raise” these people?

Foreign Policy, Governance, Representation, Trump

REAL GOVERNANCE

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Despite his New York crudeness and bragadocio, Donald Trump has begun a service to the foundational ideas and premises of America, and thereby to every American.  He, himself, and every one of his most loyal compatriots, is oblivious to the magnitude of that service.  What has he done?

His presidency has operated, as most have done, at a public level, variously reported in praise and condemnation, broadcast and published – the level at which modern politics are negotiated and fulfilled.  Beneath that, he operates within the secret, classified levels that are presented to each president as though to initiate him to the centers of real governance, hidden from public view for reasons of “national security,” wink.  This secrecy conveys a patine of power and influence to which he has been inaugurated, shared by very few.  It is heady stuff, becoming a member of the world’s most august and arcane fellowship.  The continuity of the secrets, of the secretive machinations, of the vital, world-controlling decisions that only he can make, of the “nuclear launch codes,” and of the distilled intelligence few others will see, is really out of his hands.  It is shared with every president as part of the fable of democratic, civilian control not only of the vast domestic bureaucracies, but of even the military-industrial complex.  But, it is a fable.

Here and there brief windows open between the public and private presidencies and much heat is generated, politically, some of the citizenry become agitated, editorials are written, commenters supply commentary, and even Congress expresses its dudgeon, both high and low.  The portion of the public made restive by the once “secret” revelations is assuaged by palatable political lies and life goes on.  Very few lives are affected.  Elections, however, can be effected because of them.  Still, not much changes over time.

Beneath the “secret” level of (mostly military and international) governance, there is the amorphous, faceless, simultaneously unorganized yet unified, unelected and permanent, administrative state.  This vast majority of our “governors” have virtually no connection to any president or even presidency.  Each new “head” of the administration is largely uninvolved with this level.  It was in place – two millions strong – long before his election to the “most powerful office on Earth’ and it will remain in place long after he has “left his mark” upon America.

And now, Trump.  Trump got elected by defeating the penultimate deep statist, Hillary.  Hillary is a political deep statist; the permanent deep statists are, however biased, mainly interested in their individual interest areas, perhaps thanks to some college degree, and in their economic security, excellent benefits and virtual tenure.  Political  deep statists are more likely to adhere to either the socialist world view – and power – and to the eternal struggle to impose it upon the United States, or to simple, tawdry, utterly corrupt and corruptible personal financial aggrandizement.  This is where Hillary Clinton has spent nearly five decades and America has finally had enough of her.  Trump is clearly on a path quite divergent from the Clintons’.

Trump doesn’t much care about political correctness.  He doesn’t care much about whom he offends, even when he intends to offend them.  Most are offended because that is their “shtick:” finding offense everywhere and garnering immediate social media support that will bring the weak-willed to their sniveling, apologetic knees within the hour.  Otherwise decent, even productive and useful people, are made weak and malleable by the “woke” offense industry.  Soon, people like Joe Biden and Beto O’Rourke are apologizing for being white.  This doesn’t work with Trump, one of the reasons his supporters stick with him.

Because he doesn’t suffer fools, Trump has engendered impressive levels of hatred here and there within the deep state.  He has a pro-America agenda, which is to say, an agenda that hews slightly more closely to the presumptions of liberty that were part and parcel of her founding.  He wants domestic policy to reflect individual responsibility and even-handed law enforcement, for example.  This is not the policy of the deep state, crafted in tens of thousands of regulations whereby virtually everyone may be persecuted or prosecuted for broken “laws” created by those unelected regulators.  Regulators hate Trump, even though he hasn’t struck all that deeply into their regulatory empire.  It is hateful enough that he undid some of the “great regulator, Obama’s” glorious flood of executive orders.

The deep, deep state, State Department department hates him because he wants America’s treaties and foreign relations, trade and otherwise, to work FOR the United States and no longer against us.  Most presidents make diplomatic noises while the State Department’s deep statists (largely globalist socialists) do what they “know” is best for the world; Trump intends to reverse much of that and make it pro-American.  They will undermine his policies wherever possible, like in Ukraine.  He has no interest in helping George Soros.

The EPA minions surely detest him because he wants land use to include humans.  It may sound silly, but many EPA regulators literally prefer squirrels and other four-or-more legged denizens of Earth over almost any two-legged ones… except for them, of course, and the other climate-change thinkers who, they dream, will wind up taking care of the planet far better than most humans have been, and in deserved comfort – few, if any, America-first conservatives included.

Interior has little use for Trump.  The careerists at Interior cannot imagine any wide-open spaces that are not restricted to bears, wolves and armadillos.  Humans don’t belong in those habitats, just lizards and beavers and so forth.  Any humans already mistakenly thinking they “own” a plot in those open lands can be eased – or forced – out of the “habitat,” and eventually housed in a 300 square foot dormitory space powered by solar panels, vegetables growing on the roof, drinking recycled water.  Only by being as uncomfortable as possible could humans – non-ruling humans – ever balance the ways we’ve despoiled all the “habitats.”  Trump isn’t into that view of the future.

It is impossible to evaluate the motivations of 2 Million federal workers.  The majority are lifers, eventually to retire from their federal jobs.  Each has his or her own motivations, personal “profits,” philosophies and biases.  No single description can apply to 5 people, let alone to a million or more, but given their similarities of employment, there are obviously some motivations, satisfactions, that they share.

Primary of these is a general approval of government, defined as interlocking bureaucracies within which, and among which, are performed the “real” work of government.  Federal government personnel are generally in favor of federal government: perfectly logical.  Next, each long-time employee is generally favorable toward his or her own agency or office.  Each perceives his or her work as valuable, if not vital.  Each, then, is likely to be resistant to any diminution of his or her agency or mission.  The managers in each agency are, more than just stability, desirous of growth – growth of mission and growth of personnel numbers.  Growth equals importance, promotion, better pay.  Built into the 15 executive departments of the Cabinet, are so many agencies that no firm count of them exists!

There are 200 at least, but there may be over 400.  These, alone, provide a substantial force for permanence and growth – a force that politicians cannot find the courage to temper.  Four hundred or so would seem to be a manageable, or at least a take-controllable number.  But it is merely the blueprint.  Within them all are PROGRAMS, programs and more programs.  Congress creates them.  For every one there is an advocacy group that at some time identified a problem that a federal agency/program was not addressing specifically.  The good intention of every advocate is probably real.  Problems exist.  Solutions are often obvious, but rarely easy to effect.  So, politicians are scratched at their most itchy spot: re-election.  Soon a bill is filed to great publicity, that will finally, after years of Republican inaction, solve this or that terrible problem.

Mainly out of ignorance for some, and out of innate anti-liberty socialist beliefs for the rest, problems, no matter how small or how caused, are federalized.  That the federal administrative state is possibly the least effective way on earth to solve problems, only describes the cynicism of politicians who put every problem in the federal lap or on the federal breast.  That they do so while the federal budget is $22 Trillion in debt – and more – only describes their utter mendacity and failure, over many terms, to uphold one of the most basic covenants the federal government makes with its citizens.  For shame.

Trump, unfortunately, has yet to express a willingness to change federal budgeting.

Still, whether it is because of, or in spite of himself, Trump has caused to be exposed the infidelities of globalists and socialists who prefer a continuing, costly, international policeman role for the U. S.  Several have been ejected and more soon will be.   But even if all of the untrustworthy DOJ, DOD, CIA and NSA apparatchiks were cleaned out… all of them… the liberty-corroding machinations of the molasses-heads just a bit deeper entrenched in the hundreds of agencies and thousands of programs (did you know there are over 1,000 federal programs “addressing” poverty?), will plod along, inflicting regulations with the force of law, able to strip citizens of their constitutional rights, among other things.  It is insidious, yet not corrupt, actually – it’s a way of stultifying, nightmarish administrative life.  Blame for it rests on 50 Congresses and a dozen presidents.  And on us.

Conservatives like to think that they are upholding the Constitution when they oppose communists, socialists, liberals and other Democrats.  They tout principles and vote to increase the debt ceiling like lemmings.  They are hated roundly for this, by the “woke” socialists who are not only not awake, but are barely aware of either the Sun or the Son.  God help anyone who threatens to cut the budget; only enemies of the Republic would conspire to allow the “government” to “shut down.”  It never does.