All posts by Bob Wescott

Governance

Don’t Feed the Beast

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There’s an old admonition about feeding the beast: it starts to hang around and won’t leave when you try to shoo it away. Even if you scream really loud and wave your hands – or ballots – it won’t leave if the food trough is still where it always was. That’s how liberalism / progressivism is. While we weren’t looking it was building thousands of troughs and passing laws and regulations that make it illegal, or something, to NOT fill the troughs… and not with just the normal rations, but ever larger ones.

Donald Trump is a pretty canny guy and has a good eye for talent. He also can recognize problems for what they are and, better, envision a path to solutions. What he never understood was how tightly, ferociously and viciously the progressive beasts are prepared to cling to their “food” troughs.

They’ve had a good run, our progressive saviours – about a hundred years or so, constantly finding reasons that freedom was a problem, as is free-will and any religion that preaches the concept of free will and personal salvation. And they became very good at stifling freedom and when that didn’t work, stealing it.

How can politicians steal freedom? Let us count the ways. A key measure of freedom is private property. The Constitution enshrines the concepts of private property, private thoughts and beliefs, and of security within one’s private realm. That is, that one is free to live as one pleases in his or her pursuit of “happiness.” The government – the locus of political action – exists to assure your freedom from threats to your privacy.

Just saying the previous five sentences is to laugh at our precarious position in modern America. There is barely an activity left that is no longer truly “private.” Try to think of one:

• Sex? What kind of sex? Surely the federal government has nothing to say about sex, right? Except that they do. All kinds of sexual function and dysfunction have gained the status of “protected minority” with rights and enforcement.

• Business, private, owner-operated business? Should be a “piece of cake,” but, please…

• Raising your children? Punishing them? Teaching them your values? You are so suspect that every teacher and school administrator has been placed on notice to observe and report any ways you handle your child that the state disagrees with. Worse, you are often the last person to know about the mind-numbing, values-warping content of many lessons and courses. Do you know how to use a condom? Or what “gay” sex is? Your eighth grader does.

• Driving? If you pay enough, it’s a privilege. If you are deemed “suspicious,” such as driving where you – or your car – don’t belong, you can be stopped, identified, and your personal property searched on the basis of some articulable “suspicion.”

• Do you work? Earn an income? Well, it’s certainly not really yours, is it? Numerous of others’ needs must be addressed by “your” pay before you get a share. Many of these are “benefits,” so-called, but they are benefiting someone else. Things like FICA, your Social Security “contribution.” Then there is the bonus deduction for Medicare and the so-called “income tax withheld” that pays a Hell of a lot of people to do things you never heard of, probably don’t like and probably can’t afford for yourself! It must also pay interest on debts you have not incurred but which were incurred in your name, long before you were born, most likely. How free is that?

• Private property? From local “zoning” boards to the EPA, how you use your own property is abridged in, literally, hundreds of ways. God forbid you’ll be found to own a “habitat” for an “endangered” specie of gnats or centipedes. No one wants to be responsible for killing the last right-handed beige centipede, but the concept of “threatened” or “endangered” life forms carries great power to push humans around. So-called progressives love doing that. They are those who know what’s wrong with most humans and why what they tend to do is flawed. Want to build a shed for your garden tools? Better get permission from the town and all your neighbors.

• Your own health? I mean of YOUR OWN BODY? Well, you can’t buy the care you want because the doctor you want to buy it from can’t sell it to you. “Free” enterprise, indeed. Congress, that bastion of good sense and careful budgeting, is cobbling together how the last frontier of control will dictate how and, eventually, whether you will live, at all, if your life will burden the federal deficit. Ye Gods!

• And self-defense? Immigration and the world-wide movement of peoples have changed the need for personal self-defense. Add drugs to the mix of cross-cultural peoples and it is a more dangerous world – and neighborhood – today than it was a hundred years ago, or even fifty years ago. Yet our progressive neighbors, who place little value on the United States’ cultural norms, or its borders, are the same who demonstrate AGAINST your inherent, inalienable right to defend yourself and your family. You are rendered more free to die for their principles.

Finally, consider that when a new American is born, he or she has a debt of $155,000! And the government, that benign behemoth we all depend upon to protect our “rights,” is adding to that debt for all 330 Million of us at the rate of $5 a day. That’s $150 a month ON TOP OF the taxes we already pay. With about half of us NOT PAYING federal taxes, it’s more like $300 a month for every family that has a worker/ breadwinner.
The problem is, rather than figuring out how to reduce that burden, congress works overtime to INCREASE it. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Let’s keep in mind that every dollar of tax is a loss of freedom; every dollar of DEBT is a growing ball-and-chain that now inhibits our collective ability to defend ourselves.

Mr. President, I haven’t heard much about this…

Economics

HOW MANY DIVISIONS…?

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The seeds of division in our beautiful nation were planted in the Revolutionary War. You are wondering how could that be so when we all know they sprouted in just the past 8 years? How simple would be the solution if that were so.

The intention toward one-world government was already formed in the late 18th century and it was the birth of American constitutional republicanism that reversed the momentum toward ever-greater authoritarianism. But it was a momentum, yielding Hegel’s Dialecticism, Karl Marx, Otto von Bismark, Lenin, Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler and Mao Tse Tung. Along the way authoritarianism cost nearly 200 Million lives, each belonging to a human being person.

America, founded on religious freedom in more ways than one, including the inherent freedom of will that makes right action truly right, was not immune to the desire for ever greater centralization. So-called Progressivism, particularly since the Civil War, following which social problems and care for disabled veterans, for the first time in large numbers, became Federalized.

It is often said that “power corrupts.” But it should also be noted that “power justifies…” itself. Government attracts governing types who quickly find that even soft police powers lend a sort of antiseptic clarity to their decisions. Government decisions gain an aura of purity, especially in comparison to the chaos of freedom – that messy, disorganized, self-serving and selfish jambalaya of individual sovereignty with which our Constitution saddles the nation.

As giants of industry developed their monopolies and industrial efficiencies, there developed a view of government as becoming the ultimate efficient industry, led by a college-educated priesthood of good intentions and of higher thoughts than common people. “Wilson-ism.” A classless society, indeed.

Damn the laws of economics. Socialists of all stripes seem to think that by their super-clarifying adjustment of society and the physical (non-spiritual world), they can cause humans to be more perfect, more docile, more willing to accept average uniformity, and therefore happy to allow the ruling classes to enjoy their extra rewards for having done all the needful thinking for the whole group. Whew! It never works.

Oh, it might continue for quite a while – longer with a police state that is able to weed out cancerous individualists – but it eventually goes broke. Humans will be humans. Rulers might think they can get everyone to share and to accept their share, but they can’t destroy the human spirit: the inherently human desire to perfect oneself, to grow closer to God, or to improve one’s earthly condition. Damn humans. This would be a great place to live if it weren’t for most of the humans. The rich have obviously proven their greater value.

Immigration, Terrorism

Who’s in charge here?

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President Trump’s recent travails over his immigration restriction order call up the question of what the role of the U. S. federal government is, perhaps in contrast to the roles of other governments. “Federal” is in quotes because many people don’t understand the difference between a federal government and a national one.

Further, many don’t grasp the unique role of the United States – and our government – in the world, since, say, the Spanish-American War. That was a funny, lop-sided war about which little is taught in public schools, anymore. In fact, it was so short-lived and had so few veterans that one might wonder what the fuss was all about, anyway.

“Remember the Maine!” Ever hear that? If you’ve gone to Arlington National Cemetery you’ve seen the Memorial to Maine’s 260 dead sailors. The destruction and sinking of the Maine may or may not have had anything to do with the Spanish, but it caused the decision to solve the Cuba problem, and the Spanish problem, once and for all.

In the end we temporarily took over Cuba (dominating it until Batista was dislodged by Castro), Puerto Rico, the Philippines and Guam; Teddy Roosevelt enhanced his resumé, changing presidential history, and the U. S. became a more involved Pacific power. MacArthur was forced out of the Philippines by the Japanese only to commit to returning, and Guam played a key role against the Japanese, as well. U. S. relations with South and Central American nations became even more strained and domineering, causing difficulties that persist to this day. So, not so inconsequential, after all.

America’s role on this multi-national planet has been gigantic since then, through two World Wars, the rise and demise of Communism in the Soviet Union, and astounding control and profiteering from the global banking/monetary system. Petro-dollars. There are many who think we should tuck our tail and let some other nation do the heavy lifting for a while… we’ve got our own problems to deal with.

Careful thought should reveal that that is the worst path for us to follow. On the other hand, we have learned, painfully, that we can’t impose our form of government on other nations, and we should not. If you’re looking for things that are not constitutional, that is a big one, Prudence counsels.

But after we tried having the several new states contribute to the operations of a “central” government under the Articles of Confederation, we put our minds to the task of creating something new on Earth: a Constitutional Republic, with separated powers and democratically elected representatives and even a democratically elected chief executive – a president not of the Congress, but of the united STATES. It has been quite a ride since then.

By adopting our phenomenal Constitution, “we the people” relinquished a carefully measured portion of our inalienable rights as sovereign citizens, whose rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness came not from the government, but from God, or, if you please, the order of the Universe that resulted in sentient human beings, whatever that is.

At the same time we created for ourselves an exceptional class of humans who are citizens of the United States with certain rights and responsibilities, while we remain citizens of the several States with additional rights and responsibilities. WE, as citizens of the States, FORMED and granted power to, for limited things – big things, but constrained – the new, FEDERAL government. People have their inalienable rights, States have their rights and the Federal government has its rights and “enumerated” powers to facilitate our individual pursuits of happiness, protect our union of states from foreign and domestic dangers, and, to impose some uniformity of laws and economics, including federal taxation and tariffs, and to maintain an army, a navy and a court system.

States could no longer conduct their own diplomacy with foreign governments or have different policies of immigration or of citizenship – those are Federal, logically, and all matters of citizenship or denial of citizenship, with all of the rights and powers that attach to U. S. citizenship, are the business of the Federal authority and of the Federal courts. Disputes between States or between States and the Federal government, are also the province of Federal courts, including appeals to the Supreme Court. And here we may soon be.

The two forces at conflict in the U. S. since the Civil War are Constitutional liberty and extra-Constitutional socialism. Originally, people and States were free to work, create, gain or lose within the law, and take responsibility for gaining or losing; alternatively they needed collective, or socialized sharing of life’s ups and downs to the point of being “free” from hardship and responsibility under the law. One path is strengthening, the other weakening of the social order and of individuals, and weakening of the States, themselves.

President Trump, as he promised, issued an appropriate Executive Order in accordance with the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), 8 U.S.C. 1101 et seq., and section 301 of title 3, United States Code, restricting entrance to the United States of persons not otherwise legally entitled to enter or re-enter (poorly executed on the ground, but legal and justified, nonetheless) from 7 failed countries that cannot “vet” their residents – no, their occupants – sufficiently to ascertain whether they are who they claim to be or what their record is. From these 7 countries have come, since 9-11, some 72 bad actors who have committed terrorist acts in the United States.

There is no way, practically speaking, to know whether more are on their way; Mr. Trump took an appropriate, Federal step.

Two states sued on the basis that the abrupt interruption of travel impinged on the smooth function of their state governments, particularly of their State Universities, and a federal judge ruled that they had standing to sue. They further charged that Trump’s intention was to ban Muslims, for which they claimed unconstitutionality, as well as “unconstitutional” interruptions on the free travel of their residents, not necessarily of their citizens.

The judge went so far as to cite Trump’s campaign statements about banning Muslims temporarily as a basis for construing an unconstitutional intent – INTENT! – that made the need for a Temporary Restraining Order an emergency.

And here we are. Without precedent, and, let’s hope, without creating a precedent. A federal court has ruled that temporary inconvenience for a State’s internal functions may be sufficient to interrupt lawful measures for the purpose of national security. This is new territory. The creative interference with valid federal duties that restive state’s Attorneys General might devise, is limitless. Federal judges should have sense enough to reject these efforts to politicize our security.

Clearly Prudence doesn’t direct the President, but she strongly advises that the new U. S. Attorney General defend this case in the supreme Court so that there is no precedent created for left-leaning judges to take non-judicial steps to interfere with the executive branch, UN-constitutionally.

Culture, Health Care

TO LIFE, TO LIFE, L’CHAI’IM

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Now that life, itself, is measured only in financial terms, at least for many – mostly young First-Worlders, the shining wisdom of liberal thinkers is becoming clearer… and more frightening. Canada recently completed a study that showed “savings” of nearly $140 Million, Canadian, that might be realized with more accessible “end-of-life” care, as they call it.

Or suicide, for the crudely honest. And that $140 Million could finance, ummm, infrastructure improvements and transportation safety! For those who remain, of course. One hopes that all that protein won’t go to waste – maybe pet food. After all, we’ve been eating animals like forever and they’re only human, too.

This is a side-effect of socialized health care, like those ads for the latest wonder-drug where the disclaimers about side effects like moods of depression or suicide, elevated heart rates, rash, constipation, diarrhea, dry mouth, bad breath, loss of vision and tingling in hands and feet, are three-fourths of the ad. Certain cancers and even death have occurred. If you experience any of these symptoms, speak to… your… doctor. He or she is a caring, white-smocked employee of the Government Accounting Office.

Abortion as a “constitutional right” is the first step to the destruction of not just life, but of freedom. We have been sold on abortion providing “Freedom” of choice for women who are shocked, shocked to find themselves pregnant when a child is too much to cope with… for any number of reasons. Even Planned Parenthood, responding to the outcries of stranded, pregnant, shocked women, has found ways for all that protein to not be wasted, as a market exists for whole, pre-natal organs and tissues. Financial value and loads of freedom for those who remain. They’re a non-profit, you know, so not much help with the infrastructure thing.

Some Planned Parenthood executives have had their own infrastructures improved.

And yet, despite all the excess babies we produce, “scientists” are struggling to clone humans like frogs and sheep, as if there were not enough, already. Maybe we just don’t want to accept the risk of imperfection; let’s replicate a human that “we” like.

We’ve followed the liberals, the socialists, the communists, the progressives and the Democrats down the path to where dollars or other forms of power define the value of life, even as the role of churches, religion, spirituality itself, are cast aside like so much magical mumbo-jumbo, a drag on society and on tax-receipts. We should be taxing all that church-owned property because our collective costs to protect it are born unfairly by non-believers. Abortion, and infrastructure, and voting… that’s real.

Since we can’t keep up with fertility, and since more people born into the last, best hope for freedom is a big public problem, we have got to destroy hopefulness, as they have in Russia, for example, where too few people are being born. Perhaps some terrorism will help spur the youngest, most fertile citizens to fear bringing children into “such” a world… a world where Donald Trump can be elected. Let’s just hook up after lecture hall and if I get pregnant I can get an abortion before mid-terms.

The value of life is primarily spiritual, if there’s any purpose beyond finance and fun, at all. Isn’t that the big question? What is the purpose, the meaning of life? Didn’t you see the movie? Hilarious. No, but honestly, sometimes I get the feeling that there just must be more to it than eating and screwing, don’t you think?

Well, we could help people who are having problems – that always makes me feel good. You should take that job at the clinic and you could help girls with unwanted fetal masses. When I get my promotion at the condom factory we’ll have enough money to maybe donate to Greenpeace or PETA. How would that be?

I’d rather donate to my alma mater where the money could help poor kids get their Masters. Aren’t they a religious school? Oh, they used to be.

Roughly speaking, Americans can choose, now, between the Death Party and the Life Party. The Deathers are pretty firm in their beliefs, while the Lifers are kind-of soft in their defense of Life. The former can state their death wishes as matters of Freedom, and Choice, and purging the country of brown people… except they don’t mention the last part. Lifers are almost afraid to mention their beliefs or their spirituality, yet they somehow won an election the other day. Seemed like spiritual intervention, but with all this warm weather we’ve been having, who can worry about that?

The main thing is to get back on the death track or we’ll never balance the budget. Consumer confidence is high, though. Maybe Christmas sales will cap a really good year, financially.

I hate Christmas, don’t you? It’s so commercial.

Culture

More than a game

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What can be said that hasn’t been beaten into the ground already, about football? Well, some things can be said about the meaning of it. Your response may be that there must be something more important to expound upon, but there is a point, here, worth making.

Football is a metaphor for America. Not because of the “sport” aspect, but because of its declaration of excellence being rewarded and celebrated, vicarious inclusion of couch potatoes, and attraction of profits – even the creation of millionaires.

“Aww, c’mon,” you say, “it’s just a game.” No, no it isn’t.

Football is a great business, and Americans react well to this because we are, like every other human, innately capitalist. We recognize and appreciate smart business, smart marketing, and that wonderful effect of smart business: secondary benefits to multiple other businesses and tremendous flows of profit dollars into charities.
Even better, football succeeds, itself, because it grandly recognizes and rewards individual excellence and discipline.

No matter how loosey-goosey our morals appear to be, we each value excellence and we honor those among us who strive, daily and hourly toward perfection. We are awed and thrilled by organizations whose profit motivations imbue their individual members toward constant improvement… and success.

“Do Your Job.” Americans respect and reward responsibility. No matter the qualities of leaders – and successful organizations, particularly business organizations are led, obviously, more than simply managed – every individual following a leader is ultimately responsible to that leader, to his associates who depend upon him or her, and to him- or her-self, for the task each has trained and learned to accomplish at the moment of execution. Ya’ gotta’ love it.

There are a handful of truly great and greatly led moments in our history, when large fractions of the nation followed, even sacrificed, for the proper purpose a recognized leader had placed before us. The Revolutionary War – in a sense our first Civil War, as we “seceded” from England – is a perfect example. Clearly Washington was a superb leader who was able, in the face of extraordinary odds and opposition, to maintain the shining goal and keep his under-fed, under-supplied and under-appreciated troops striving toward an “impossible” goal: Independence.

The Americans weren’t fighting for treasure or even for comfort or out of fear, but for a set of ideas and ideals. To maintain leadership for such an effort is rare and justification for our reverence of General Washington.

Lincoln showed similar, not identical traits. But his sense of “mission” was no less complete than Washington’s. And there was a purity of purpose that never faltered and was apparent to enough people in the “Union” to re-elect Honest Abe in the midst of our bloodiest, most-hate-filled war ever.

In a sense, Washington led his troops to become the prow of the ship facing war’s stormy waters; Lincoln was, himself, the prow of that same ship. Both were leaders for the right reasons… and respected. Those being led were able to sacrifice for the purposes each leader embodied. Americans respect and honor that stuff!

Another, more refreshing example was the Apollo Moon-landing mission. Jack Kennedy was a leader. It’s not because of any significant executive experience – far from it. It was because of vision. For those of us born during WW-II, the 1960 election was the first we could vote in. We grew up under Eisenhower, but he didn’t “speak” to us. His presidency marked the end of an era and of his career… he was our parents’ president.

Kennedy represented the vitality of America and the start of new adventures, new ideas… the New Frontier. He was our start, too, and anything was possible. Somehow, in spite of his practical naiveté Kennedy perceived that the competition with the Soviets was a competition between cultures, between beliefs, between dreams, and that American needed a new dream every so often, and that the times and the possibilities were coming together. The U.S./U.S.S.R. conflict was a challenge to the ideas of America, and there simply was no room to come in second.

Kennedy’s May, 1961 Moon-landing proposal to Congress met every aspect of what a leader should include in laying out a mission: it was bold, it was a challenge, it was timed and measurable, and it had a specific goal – a goal that rose and set every day. It was perfect, and what the nation needed at a time when popular, slanted news was extolling the amazing progress the Soviet system had made in everything from rocketry to housing to medicine and to education.

The other element of the Apollo challenge was technological, and a certain boost to our economy… something every President needed. What happened?

Military leaders, scientists, engineers, colleges, think-tanks, machinists and a thousand businesses with their own leaders, adopted the mission and devised a thousand missions of their own. Most of the knowledge needed to pull off the moon landing and a safe return to Earth, was unknown. Many of the skills were floating around among the disparate parts of the nationwide, about-to-be-team, but they’d never been marshaled to a single goal until Kennedy presented a new dream. Still others had to be invented.

Again, what happened? A new unity of purpose. Indeed, there was an irresistible force of purpose that caused levels of sacrifice, stress, service and a striving for perfection rarely experienced by any industrial society… and success. The success was so profound that it swept up the vast majority of Americans into a new belief in what we stood for and could accomplish. It has not been repeated.

But metaphorically, its impact is out-pictured in teams’ quests to reach the Super Bowl. And the fans of those quests, fans of every team, respect the sacrifice and discipline, study, practice, learning and leadership that’s needed to get there. Brady would be nowhere without good leadership at the head of and within the Patriots organization, and within himself in fact.

Americans get that, and respond, even to buying shirts and hats as if to absorb a little of it.

The same qualities exist in the military, although the sacrifices are so compellingly greater. And Americans grasp what it means. We honor and respect the training, discipline, leadership and near-perfection elite teams strive for in every service… and even more, the physical, sometimes mortal sacrifices made in furtherance of the greatest mission on Earth: defending America. We share the pain when we back out of conflict without victory; we try to honor the many victories it has taken to get even to there.

We felt and respected some of the magic under Ronald Reagan, perhaps never recognizing the nature of his and our victory over the Soviet communist system.

But the momentum of dis-education and the constant anti-American pressure that has marked American culture since Nixon was forced out of office, was bearing fruit… and nuts.

From the utter debauchery of the Clintons, through the distorted semi-conservatism of Bush-43, through the Obama dislike of America, of Whites and of Christians, and his greater respect for everything we are not, Americans have yearned to respect again; to respect, perhaps, themselves. We have yearned to respect our institutions, and people, and systems and teachers and churches and everything that has, no matter how hidden or suppressed, the innate sparks of leadership, training, practice and sacrifice, that we know has created greatness in this land and in us.

No ONE can do that, and certainly he or she cannot BE that – not even Donald Trump. But he, at least, knows what IT is and its importance to the ideas of America. Like JFK, he has succeeded because he sensed Americans’ need for a new dream, every now and then.

Now is good. Go Pats!

Immigration

Immigration, Emigration, Love the nation

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Immigration is a decidedly misunderstood aspect of nationhood. Our Constitution nowhere mentions border protection. At the time of its creation and adoption, everyone was intimately aware of and concerned with frontiers, borders, defense and protecting the existence of our new nation.

Border integrity was so obviously the business of the new government that no one needed reminding. Besides, it was pretty difficult for an individual to get here and hard for him to cause widespread mayhem or murder. Women didn’t do such things in the old days.

And there was still a frontier and unlimited space, or so it seemed. From our side the frontier was where WE were the invaders, which served as a form of border defense in its own way. Manifest destiny.

But border control is inherent to the obligations of government, indeed, primary to them. Without it government becomes simply a facilitator in the demise of it’s ostensible permanence.

Americans have grown up in a dream world. Thanks to instant worldwide communications and the lingering lessons of the 1960’s, Gen-X’ers and Millennials perceive themselves as “citizens of the world,” and borders as inconveniences. To many, the advantages of the United States belong to the world and to everyone who wishes to share the “American Dream.” And he or she has an ill-defined “right” to those advantages, especially if he or she has had a tough life, is poor, and not white… and not a Christian.

As Americans have drifted away from less-than perfect churches, and enjoyed relative peace and fattening prosperity, their children have been taught that religion has no place in their education, and, besides, it imposes restrictions on the wonderful new forms of fun that the “American Dream” has produced. Who are we to withhold this great place to live from non-citizens? How cruel to enforce our own laws.

But, despite our lax mores, the majority of states elected a very different kind of leader in Donald Trump. There is trepidation to be sure, in the early going, but we’re getting what he promised. There is no way – NO way – to reverse the course of national dissipation that outrageous immigration, purposeful lack of border control, and fascination with socialism and communism have wrought, without breaking a lot of eggs… or snowflakes.

Trump, or someone quite like him, was inevitable following the descent into the regulatory, bureaucratic, non-representative state that has eroded the Constitution and the real freedoms enshrined therein. A second mendacious socialist was too much for the heart and soul of the United States. As Ross Perot once stated, 24 years earlier, it was “…time to pick up the broom and go clean out the barn.”

Well, it took us a generation, but we finally hired someone to do so, except he’s “draining the swamp,” which might be better.

Illegal and un-vetted immigration was Trump’s key theme for a year and a half. Daily there are dozens of incidents in which illegal entrants have broken laws as simple as drunk-driving and as complex as home invasion and rape. Sometimes as simple as vehicular homicide or as complex as drug distribution. Sometimes as simple as working under-the-table, or as complex as gang-banging, mayhem and rioting. Sometimes as simple as terrorism with rapid-fire weapons or as complex as terrorism with bombs… or passenger jets.

What is our obligation to illegal entrants, or to false asylum-seekers or to false refugees? Do they have Constitutional rights? How is that possible? When did the Constitution start applying to non-citizens?
What obligations do we have to our legal citizens? Well, everything the Constitution ostensibly guarantees, including the Bill of Rights, which did not create rights, but clearly enumerated them as rights the government we formed henceforth was obligated – is obligated – to PROTECT. Nowhere is the government given license to spread its responsibilities across the peoples of the entire globe – including trying to change their governments.

Our obligation ends at civil, humane treatment of non-citizens, including humane deportation if they are inside our borders illegally. Hell, we even treat them humanely if they commit serious crimes. Since even wealthy drug dealers are “indigent” when caught, we provide attorneys for one and all, EVEN TO FIGHT DEPORTATION when our total responsibility to the citizens of the United States is prompt, humane deportation of them!

The U. S. is not perfect and has been less so in the past, and MORE SO at other times in our past. On balance, we’ve done more good than bad and jump first and fastest to aid anyone who asks when disaster strikes. Our philosophies and the IDEAS that formed this nation are better than those underpinning most countries. That’s not bragging, it’s just so.

They are the reason our growth and wealth have led the world, and why, frankly, so many have come here and try to come here, now. Like no other nation, the United States invites people from every other nation to come here – legally – in order to become Americans. It’s a unique process. Americans, for our part, welcome both visitors and newly-minted citizens. One need not be of the exact same race and origin as those already here, he or she need only share the ideas of America: personal freedom and responsibility, religious freedom and tolerance; honest dealing, respect for law and earning one’s own way.

Those who wail about “illegals” as though they were not only entitled to steal across our borders but are deserving of Constitutional rights as amended and applied for citizens to this day, are deeply confused as to the nature of nationhood, specifically, the nationhood of the United States. These are the same who refuse to acknowledge any goodness in the hearts of patriots of this country, now or in the past, and who, if charged with the task of education, nearly refuse to teach its founding, its ideas or the documents and philosophies that underlay them. For shame.

And so, there is no justice in denying free entrance to all who choose to take our bounty and who, if properly different from U. S. citizens, can help remove the blot of America.

The alternative to erasing the time and impact of Americana is controlling immigration, indeed, limiting it, so that those who come do so to assimilate and share the ideas and ideals of our exceptional nation. All may become Americans, one nation under God.

“OMG, can you say that?”

Foreign Policy

The UN, or something better?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Education

SCHOOL CHOICE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Responsibility

THE BELIEFS OF LEADERSHIP

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Health Care

“Single-Payer?” Single delusion.

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

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

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

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

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