Category Archives: Responsibility

Biden, Culture, Economics, Education, Foreign Policy, Health Care, Politics 2022, Religion, Responsibility

WHERE THE GLOBALISTS STRUCK FIRST

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No need to run for office.

A year from now, or 5 or 10 or 50 years from now, the sacrificial role that Ukraine has played in the direction history flows, will be understood far better than it is today.  The forces of freedom and integrity are fortunate that Ukraine is where the globalists struck first.  Ukrainians… not so much.

This chapter is not written, yet, but it is taking shape.  The average American is poorly informed, generally, but right now, dangerously so.  We don’t understand the Ukraine invasion no matter the details portrayed on our screens: the awful deaths and explosions.  We don’t recognize the interplay with China; we don’t recognize the interplay with Iran; we don’t recognize the “cat’s paw” role of North Korea.  We don’t recognize the far, far leftist swing of the Biden administration.  We don’t recognize the damage already done to America’s standing in the world and the inroads into our sovereignty that Covid-19 fostered.

Yet even with all of that, our greatest failure is not comprehending the expanded, vital and increasingly crucial role of the United States as the last and only impediment to global communism.  You may be shaking your head at the wild conspiracy theories that seem completely im-Prudent, but we’re working only from the statements of very powerful people who are in a position to guide and facilitate the imposition of the “Great Reset” you ought to have heard of by now.  What does that reset consist of?

The number-one component of the globalists’ plan is the end of nationalism.  Yet nationalism accounts for the greatest progress mankind has ever made in virtually every arena from health care to nutrition to family and personal safety.  Donald Trump became president on a platform and promise of “America First,” and it is an ideal that resonates with Americans.  We believe in our nation; we believe in the exceptionalism of our nation’s history, founding and divine purpose.

Barack Obama became president on the premise of a flawed and somewhat illegitimate nation, forever soiled by slavery and racism – soiled in a way that cannot be eradicated – and, specifically, as Obama made clear in foreign speeches, no more exceptional than any other nation.  We elected him out of guilt as much as anything else, as if to say that it was high time we had a “black” President, and that perhaps race relations would become even better if we did so.  Where Trump fought the leftists to secure our borders, Obama had loosened enforcement of immigration laws, the essential definition of nationhood: borders.  The Obama administration saw the rise of “sanctuary” jurisdictions, both cities and states.  The very nature of self-declared “sanctuary” status is the rejection of United States’ national authority over matters of national concern: borders, immigration, citizenship and the myriad matters ancillary to those concerns, not least of which is law enforcement and public safety.

Inherent in the concept of nationhood and of patriotism, itself, is that of abiding by true and just laws.  For citizens of the United States this starts with fealty to the Constitution and to the principles of rights enunciated in the Declaration of Independence, neither of which documents implies hatred for another country, particularly England, but which declare independence from England’s misapplication of rights normally enjoyed by English citizens, even under a monarchy, however tempered.  The U. S. was founded on the basis of ideas and ideals to which belief in God, or Providence, impel humankind.  Based on the Bible, and particularly the New Testament’s instructions on how individuals should relate to God and to one another, the U. S. Constitution established a framework of civil decency and authority, individual sovereignty and responsibility, and individual private property, within which U. S. citizens could and do perfect themselves.  Neither the founding documents nor the government they spawned take the place of the Bible, or of God or of the individual’s relationship with God.  A system of government like ours requires that individual citizens carry both the burden of freedom and of responsibility, and it works best, if at all, only when individuals have the moral guidance of a well-informed “conscience” such that most governance is from the self.  This means that only when both citizens and legal residents of our nation share essential beliefs in what is legally “right” and “wrong” can justice prevail for everyone.  Only then can civil society – and civilization, itself – succeed and produce progress in living standards and both individual and public safety.

Americans have both the benefits of Freedom and the obligations of defending Freedom and all that is implied under our Constitution and Declaration.  Our civic responsibilities are NOT LIKE those of any other nation.  We are exceptional.  We are not perfect.  Back to nationalism.

President Trump was often accused of being a “nationalist” as though that linked him to NAZISM in some way.  He obviously was not – is not – a leftist, which generates the abject hatreds aimed at him, and he certainly is not a NAZI, as in National Socialist, another stripe of leftism.  The fact that there are white supremacists who have adopted NAZI symbols and gestures does NOT mean that they have anything to do with conservatism, nationalism or “the right.”  To be pro-American nation is not on the left-right spectrum.  To claim that is merely a means by which leftists make it seem as though the right were evil and that, therefore, being “good” is to be some sort of socialist giving out “free” stuff from the government.  Otherwise, one is a “hater.”

Not having recognized nations simplifies the plans of super-rich oligarchs who meet in Davos every year: the WEF, or World Economic Forum.  There are two major elements of their “perfected” future for mankind: Far, far fewer human beings on the earth, and global governance and economics, such that no one will “own” anything and that will enable us to be happy.  It also requires the dissolution of organized religion, since an individual with faith in a higher purpose than survival will not accept simple worldliness.

The Executive Secretary of the W.E.F. is Klaus Schwab.  He is smart, capable and very rich, much like every other member of the Forum.  There are strange people among them, including Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, George Soros, every major bank in the world, major industries, major securities trading exchanges, huge international companies of all sorts, particularly in energy and food distribution/production.  Also, unsurprisingly, major pharmaceutical companies partner with the forum, too.  There are heads of state or relatives, but none of the executive or managing Board members are popularly elected.  No one has granted them power: they have created this shadowy “world management system” through self-selection and financial influence.  It is more than Prudent that we grasp what the existence of this “Forum” and its growing bureaucracy means to the residents of Earth.

We have seen in the United States, for all of its magnificent founding, how government types congregate in the “deep state” where their full-time jobs are developing and enforcing tens of thousands of regulations, most of which are unknown even to our elected representatives.  Almost to a person, this invisible “state” believes in its ability to “run” things better than individuals… right down to whether babies should be born or weird gene therapies should be mandated for all humans.  To this group, elections are side-shows.  The “voice of the body politic” is not loud enough to affect their far-more-important-work-than-that-of-any-elected-official’s – representative, senator or president.

We have about 150 years of experience with how inefficient and often criminally so, the process of “federalizing” problems is.  One need consider only health care – a most personal problem – as it becomes increasingly “federal” and politicized… one of the base principles of communism.  The nearly immeasurable waste of resources and the dishonesty connected to the NIH, the CDC and the NIAID agencies, and even the “independent” FDA, should be a lesson to Americans that dumping problems onto federal bureaucrats is the same as foregoing our fundamental rights.  We think we are a “free people,” but our freedoms have been diminished faster through federalized health care than by any other mechanism.  There are hundreds of federal mechanisms.

Our Constitution is under assault almost daily; the morality that enables it to guide our national identity is under assault almost hourly.  The process is made worse as rapidly as our shared beliefs crumble, our shared morality dissipates, our institutions shift leftward and our shared freedoms are politicized.  We have become a nation of rules rather than of law.  Yet our Constitution is still defended in the courts to a great degree, and it still protects individuals to a great degree.  However, as the globalist W.E.F. inserts itself into governance in almost every nation, the erosion of our very nation accelerates.  The Constitution will simply be collateral damage.  We need only observe the elimination of the southern border and the laws that ought to be protecting it, to realize that there are people in our “elected” government who are accelerating the dissolution of our nation.  Nationalists have their irreplaceable place.

The United States of America, then, in its exceptional position and DUTY, is the only significant stumbling block to a global, uber-socialist government.  That anti-nationalist, W.E.F. oligarchy will not be bound by the quaint rights and responsibilities of our famed Constitution.  It will govern more closely to the habits of Communist China.  “You won’t own anything and you’ll be happy,” said Klaus Schwab.  Think about that.

The concept of private property, owning the fruits of one’s labor, having rights of possession even under rental or lease agreements, has been the greatest spur to progress in all of history.  Globalism and anti-nationalism cannot succeed where capitalism – if properly regulated to prevent the effects of the worst of human nature – is allowed to flourish and fuel the dreams of billions of free people.  It is no coincidence that the nature of capitalism has been allowed to create the oligarchy we have, today.  For the success of globalism, the image and understanding of capitalism must be destroyed along with nationalism and individual sovereignty with rights granted by God.  Today’s youth, almost to a majority, view socialism as a superior economic system to our increasingly putrid capitalism.  Thank you, public education and essentially communist universities.

Thank you, also, to our socialist-infiltrated governments of the “United” States.

Can we regroup and re-educate quickly enough to stave off the globalist revolution?  Are there enough Americans left who will refuse to trade freedom for some hollow “safety?”  Has America enough courage left to throw out the snakes, eels, alligators and constrictors who have settled in to “Deep State Swamp,” from whence they are sucking from us our livelihoods and our independence?

Is resurrection possible?  God save America.

Education, Family, Responsibility

LETTER TO A GRADUATE

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Dear Jon,

Congratulations are truly in order.  This is a milestone.  You have a diploma, but what does it mean?

That is, what does it mean to those who do not know you?   The LACK of a High School diploma would mean a lot to people who knew only that much about you, but the fact that you have a diploma simply places you in a group of hundreds of thousands of young people who got one.  Now what?

Some kids are lucky.  They have a strong direction and interest by the time they finish highschool and they go right off to college to learn more about what interests them and some of them even wind up working at what interested them when they began college.

Many don’t.  They go to college, spend tons of money to get a degree and eventually wind up doing something entirely different.  However, the fact that they have that COLLEGE diploma, means a great deal to potential employers and colleagues.  That’s because there is no law that says a person has to attend college.

Gaining a college diploma means that an individual had enough drive and self-management to complete a course of study, and almost regardless of what the course of study was, that diploma marks the person as a good do-er – someone who could get his or her homework done even when parents weren’t there to nag and remind.  So, maybe that person can be trusted to do valuable work in exchange for money.

Some kids are even luckier.  They have a drive to learn and excel in a particular field and then go on to master that field and strive to “make a difference” in the “world.”

For many, the easiest way, or, at least, most certain way to make that difference is by becoming a teacher, and there is some truth to that.  As a teacher one is able to affect the minds and beliefs of dozens and hundreds of children – affects that will be part of them for the rest of their lives.  So teaching is pretty significant… but it’s not the path for everyone.

Sometimes the best difference that a person may make in the world derives from what he or she teaches just one or two other people – maybe children or grandchildren.  You never know.

The world, however, is still there, ready for all those “differences” to be made in it.  All those differences are not made only by high-minded diploma-holders:  the greatest ideas will evaporate if some do-er doesn’t make them real.  Often, the thinker and the do-er is the same person, and we celebrate those people.  Andrew Carnegie, Henry Ford, Eli Whitney, Edwin Land, Thomas Edison, Clara Barton, Marie Curie, and a host of other industrial, military and political leaders are among that group.

Then there are those who are famous for having done what others dreamed up: people like Neil Armstrong.  He didn’t conceive of the machinery that took him to the moon,

but he had an ability of courage and good thinking, combined, to execute the great ideas and engineering of others.

Most of us are not like that.  Most of us are pretty-well occupied dealing with “life” as it comes along, earning a living and meeting our responsibilities.  Eventually, in the course of doing what’s best for ourselves and our families, many of us also give to others in time or money or otherwise, and make our own little, un-heralded “differences” in the “world.”  This applies to most, and is the greatest, cumulative force for good in the “world.”  Some turn criminal for whatever reasons, but most are good and civilization and society move haltingly, unevenly, even stumblingly toward an average better life for all people.  You can see there is a long way to go.

Which means there is plenty of room for you to make your own difference as you make your own way, your own life, your own living.  Eventually you will do your own good.  But, how?  Ay!  There’s the rub.

I know you didn’t have the most happy, care-free experience through school.  Neither did I.  But that’s done, now.  Now – right this instant – you are alive, healthy and strong, smart and good-looking and existing at the time of greatest opportunity ever!  Right now is when you can’t shuck your responsibility to yourself because you “deserve” a vacation or a little “rest” after your twelve grueling years slaving over textbooks.

Right now is when you have to make a map, of sorts.  It’s not a map that shows roads, trails, paths and correct turns at every intersection.  It’s a map of decision, though – definitely of decision.  You are very fortunate – lucky, even – that you are where you are with the people in your life who are here.  You have a smart brain.  And, it’s time to make a decision about making decisions.  Life on this planet is based on assumptions, beliefs and decisions.  And love.  It’s also based on love.

First, let’s examine what love has to do with it.  You are a product of love, for example.  Your mom and dad loved enough to go to the trouble of creating you, but not simply as a gift to YOU, but as a gift to each other, and with some expectation – an assumption, if you will, that whoever you were would give love back in return.  That is the real circle of life.

Love is not infinite.  It’s huge, but it has limits.  People who never return love that you send their way, can literally suck all the love out of you, leaving emptiness.  By returning love, you can multiply it, and the person to whom you returned that love not only has as much love as he or she originally had for you, but more than that.  Multiplication.  It’s a really cool phenomenon.  We don’t always call it love. 

Oftentimes the energy or effect that we might call love, is called and expressed as trust.  When you are trustworthy, when you keep your word, when you keep a secret, when you deliver on a promise, when you meet right expectations… you are expressing the force we call love.  People who learn to trust you develop an assumption about you that is called trust, but is a form of love.  Like love, trust given in return tends to

multiply trust between people.  There are very few “good” accomplishments that do not include a lot of trust between people.  It is the unwritten contract of honesty that enables most of the commerce of life, both monetary and personal.  Honesty, trust, love.  Obviously it’s important and you know you have already learned to trust quite a few people in your first eighteen years on Earth.  Have they all learned to trust you back?  That’s the first decision on your decision map: am I willing to do what it takes to be a person of trust?  Am I willing to sacrifice, sometimes, to maintain that trust?  Am I willing to do what it takes to deliver on promises I have made?  Will people who know me always know that I may be trusted to keep my word?  That’s the first decision, Jon.

People who live in accordance with that decision generally GIVE as much as they RECEIVE.  Like emotional love, people who accept the trust of others and don’t return it by action and discipline, will soon suck all the trust out of a relationship, leaving emptiness.  I hope you decide to be a trust generator.

You are bound to encounter people who are not worthy of your trust and you must be wise and careful of where you place YOUR trust.  You know someone like Frank Allen, for example, can always be trusted, but there are those who will lie to you, take advantage of your trust, even steal from you, and you must recognize when trust is the wrong thing to do with that person.  Trust is big but not infinite, and it’s extremely fragile.   A solid trust relationship is worth more than gold, and you are obligated to protect and nurture it.  It’s everything from doing what you said to saving the life of the soldier next you in battle – or him saving you.

We all live on a path built out of assumptions… assumptions that are part of our personal belief structure.  For example, we assume that the sun is coming up on time each morning; we assume that when we put our foot down on the floor that it will be firm and able to support us – same thing with the ground.  We expect – or assume – that tap water is safe to drink.  There are thousands and hundreds of thousands of assumptions that we have learned to depend upon.  Most accidents, surprises, shocks, injuries… the list is long, that happen, are when something we assumed to be true or real, is not.  Or it’s when something that we are in the habit of assuming, but which can actually vary, has varied and we fail to observe it – we fail to adjust our assumptions.

For example, a driver may assume that the person in the intersection who appears to be signaling for a turn is actually going to make that turn.  We have experienced enough instances when a turn is signaled and then actually made, that we “let down our defenses” and assume that the turn will be made this fine morning, too.  Unfortunately, sometimes the signaler is not aware he or she is signaling and instead drives right into you, or, worse, you drive right into him or her.

Assumptions can let you down.  Assumptions are created out of one-way trust.  Since the ground has always been solid, you can assume it will be today, also, but you can’t “trust” that the ground will be solid, can you?  The ground has no heart.  It can’t love you, it can’t “return” your trust.  You must recognize that making assumptions is strictly

a one-sided activity.  Make a decision, please, to never assume too much.  Maintain conscious awareness… and a sense of skepticism.  It is an old saying, but totally true: “Things are not always what they appear to be.”

The greatest pain and emotional injuries occur where someone has assumed a certain relationship exists – perhaps one of trust, or even love – when it does not, or that it is of a particular nature when it is something quite different.  The assuming party then acts or trusts in a certain way and is thunderstruck when what he or she expected would happen is completely different from what actually does happen – like assuming the other driver were going to turn – and great pain is the result.

From that might spring great anger or hatred, two things you want to avoid with as much power as you can muster, for they are corrosive, like a strong acid, eating away at your abilities to love and trust.  Don’t assume too much.

You know something about the “scientific method,” I’m sure.  An observer takes note of a phenomenon – maybe as simple as a pin dropping to the floor.  He or she measures how long it takes for the pin to reach the floor and creates an experiment where the same pin can be measured falling to the floor, again.  After two or three repetitions, the observer, armed with the recorded observations, may make a statement that gravity has a “rate” of attraction.  In other words, a weight equal to the weight of the pin will fall the observed distance in so many thousandths of a second, every time.  Others won’t even try the same experiment – they begin to assume the truth of the observer’s statement about falling pins.  Can you already see how many mistakes the others are making?  Let’s list a few:

  1. Does a square chip of metal the weight of that pin fall at the same rate?
  2. Does the pin dropped head down fall differently than point down?
  3. What if the pin is dropped sideways instead of head or point down?
  4. Is it different in a vacuum than in the air?
  5. What about if it were dropped in humid air, or bone-dry air?
  6. What if it were dropped in a freezer at 32 degrees below zero?
  7. If you climbed a mountain and dropped the pin the same height at an altitude of 10,000 feet above sea level, would it fall at exactly the same rate?
  8. What about if you went to the shores of the Dead Sea and dropped it there?
  9. What if you went to another place on Earth at exactly the same conditions, would it fall at exactly the same rate?

Wow.  Such a simple experiment with so many variables!   Who knew?  The point is, just like relationships in life, work, families and friendships, a single observation can’t be the basis of trust or love.  You must decide that you will test for some variables before you start assuming that something is true, real or honest – ie. trustworthy – between yourself and new acquaintances.  This also means that you can’t assume that you have the trust of other people, or that you have the right to be combative or quick to anger with others.  You have to find a pattern of truth from multiple observations.  When you have a basis for trust, your relationship with others will be the best it can be.  If you assume a level of trust and it proves to not be real, you will be hurt and so will the other person, and so will some around you.  Please, make a decision that you will be a wise observer: ready to trust, but only when it’s proper and good.

Of course, a lot of these decisions and observations and even skepticism, apply to you, yourself, as well.  Do you keep promises to yourself?  Do you trust yourself?  What if you said to yourself that you were going to become an expert at… gaming software, for example.  Are you willing to do what it takes to become that expert, to gain that expertise?  Will you keep your word to yourself?

Or, if you find that it is hard work to keep that promise, will you talk yourself out of caring about that promise?

Or, are you willing to find out what the steps will be to gain that expertise, so that you can then plan to achieve it?  In other words, are you going to become a great    do-er or simply dream about becoming one?

Maybe simpler terms are easier.  If you lived in an apartment and there was no food in the cupboards or the refrigerator, would you be willing to do what it takes to buy some food?  Or would you go to a soup-kitchen and beg for a meal?

Those are promises you make to yourself.  Everyone has relationships with others where he or she keeps a high trust level, protecting confidences, keeping promises, stuff like that, yet fails to keep a promise to him- or herself.  You are the only person who can make that trust decision; you are the only person who has the ability to observe whether you have proven to be trustworthy to yourself.

It is that tiny, tiny sliver of distance between trusting yourself or not, that determines how we live our lives.  “This above all, to thine own self be true; And it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not be false to any man.”

So, you must decide, and now is when you must.  How will I live?  And you can’t leap, in one step, one experiment, one observation, from where you are to some ultimate dream or goal.  You need a number of observations.  You can try college or junior college and find it a perfect fit for your “map.”   You might observe that it is not.

You could “apprentice” yourself in a field you are interested in, and work for a while before going to college.  You’ll have a lot of observations on which to base your self-trust.

You could take a minimum-wage job and master it.  You will be amazed to see how many doors open up as a result.  It doesn’t matter what it is.  It is YOUR decision to be a drudge or a dynamo.  You took that job with Frank at the Elks and became a dynamo, gaining an excellent reputation, there, while helping a lot of people you don’t even know.  You TOOK the $25.00 but you GAVE much more.  It’s a formula for a good life.  You also gained many observations about cause and effect, work and rest, starting and finishing, cooperation and independence, expertise and apprenticeship.

You can do hard jobs.  You may not always like what has to be done, but you can do hard work.  That’s pretty important.  The greatest successes in America are based on starting at the “bottom” and working your way up.  Every famous general started at the “bottom.”

Finally, you must never stop learning, reading or teaching.  Learn things so that you can teach others about them.  I hope you make this decision / promise to yourself.  None of us knows enough.  The mind is always at a new level, having accumulated the education of yesterday.  Now, it’s today.  You can’t stay here, for tomorrow is coming.  You can try, but you’ll fail in everything if you think today is your forever.

Today is the only day in which you can prepare for tomorrow.  Whether you intend to (which I hope) or not, you ARE preparing for tomorrow.  It’s almost like magic.  No matter WHAT you do today, it is preparation for tomorrow.

The magic is in your soul.   It’s you.

Biden, Foreign Policy, Politics 2021, Responsibility, Terrorism

THE RED STAIN OF DISHONOR

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Biden lied… people died.

THE BIDEN VARIANT     

To the best of the Biden Administration’s ability, the United States – the gullible third, anyway – is being pushed into a fear of Covid at least the equal of the preposterous terrors of 2020.  The Delta Variant, so-called, comes not only from India, a place of murky religions and filthy rivers, but also from… uhhhooh… South AFRICA – what could be worse?  Africa and India combined into a fearsome strain of a disease we never even heard of 20 months ago!

“Delta” will surely be followed up by the global-warming-enhanced, “I-Swelta Variant,” and then that by the Climate-Changed “I-Melta Variant.”  None will be as loathsome as the Albany, New York strain, the “I-Felta Variant.”  If the DNC and global Communism can hold things together long enough, these variants, alone, might keep the White House in the hands of the anal sphincters who control it now, in 2024.  If things seem to be heading “South” they can pull off another “victory” as breathtaking as the last one with the help of the BLM variant, “Helta-Skelta.”

These stages of control are all made possible by the national infection known as the Biden Variant.  Although we’ve had an infection in the federal bureaucracy (and state bureaucracies… and county, city and town bureaucracies) for decades, greatly accelerated during the depression, it’s an infection the only symptoms of which is shameless mendacity and personal wealth.  Since the Johnson administration the spoors of the disease have found fertile, manure-enriched soil in the Congress to the point, now, that there are hardly any anti-fungal treatments sitting in the House or the Senate that can look out for American constituencies who elect them and pay them very handsomely.  Worse, the houses of Congress – the wealthy long-termers and the freshmen –  have done their very best to become their own bureaucracy which is acting exactly as needed for the mendacity infection to spread and take deep root there.  The mushrooms are the same.

Biden will go down… in history, for elevating mendacity to a governing philosophy.  No more of that individual liberty jazz or stupid personal responsibility stuff – Biden, Harris, Pelosi, Schumer, Durbin, Cortez, Tlaib, Omar and fellow travelers like Obama, Rice and some other enemies of the State, are determined to punish anyone who likes those quaint, racist, homophobic, Islamophobic, trans-phobic and genetic manipulation-phobic, science-denying errors in thinking.  Their best camouflage is “bi-partisanship.”  They need to show their own depraved souls that it’s not just they who believe the crap they’re espousing, but those 19 RINO’s accept the crap, also.  So, it must be valid.

In the Trump years the leftist “press” fact-checked every utterance he provided and, lo! … almost everything he said was a partial or complete lie, especially about Hydrochloroquine among other COVID treatments.  Everything he said about the “vaccines” we would have in a year or less was also not true. Even Kamala Harris said she wouldn’t trust any vaccine that Trump was involved with.  Well.  Trump’s promises made as a candidate were carried through to a remarkable degree, but whatever he said about them was all questioned.  His claims about the most robust economy and levels of employment participation in decades, despite the facts that bore him out, were put down as mere bragging and, mostly judged not true or ignored, lest some Democrat voters hear the truth about anything Trump had done.

Meanwhile the “Mueller” Report, that the namesake, himself, had probably not read, initiated on the falsest of false premises and abuse of the FISA process, produced lots of theatrical opinion, but no facts with which to besmirch Trump.  Then a proper and legitimate phone call with the Premiere of Ukraine spawned weeks of calumny and literal fake news as Democrats attempted to impeach Trump for doing what Joe Biden had so recently bragged about doing, himself: “quid pro quo.”  This all by the masters of quid pro quo in the Congress of the United States: “You repeat my bull-hockey and I’ll repeat yours.” 

Then, based on hatred, again, not evidence, the House impeached Trump a second time for “Inciting a riot” or, worse even than 9-11 or the Civil War, “Inciting an insurrection.”  The only evidence of Trump’s “incitement” were the opinions and accusations hurled against him.  The Capitol was certainly breached, but not by Trump’s rally-attendees, for he was still speaking to them near the White House when the breach occurred.  The federal assistance to protect the Capitol buildings that Trump had offered two days earlier having been refused by Speaker Pelosi, the under-manned Capitol Hill Police were unable to stem the flow of people, in most cases guiding them into the building to avoid confrontations.  There are few 3-hour periods in history that have spawned more fake news – some still repeated 8 months later – than this unarmed “insurrection.”

There has been no greater loss of civil liberties than the aftermath of January 6th, either.  Virtually every rioter caught burning or looting central cities in 2020, the “Socialist Spring” as it were, has been released, most with charges dropped.  Dozens of so-called “insurrectionists” still languish in federal jails without the option of bail, some in solitary confinement, those same 8 months later.  Frankly, with the serial mendacity spewing from the Congress for decades, there were plenty of very good reasons to storm the Capitol and unseat the entire population of its two houses, election theft be damned.

Enter the mildly, sometimes seriously, confused Mr. Biden, who has apparently agreed to take direction from some America-Last haters.  Nearly every action he has taken, starting with his stack of policy-reversing “Executive Orders,” has damaged the United States domestically, economically and internationally.  Yet he and his cohorts are happily prattling on about how the “border is closed,” massive unfunded spending will reduce inflation, and that he meant every word when he swore to faithfully execute the laws of the U. S. and when he swore to uphold the Constitution.  Thank goodness he promised to not raise taxes – not a dime – on anyone making less than $400,000 per year.

To their credit, his supporters in Big Tech and the leftward press have agreed to not fact-check Biden, else there would be no time to “dig for the truth” and report it to the American People.

Now the world is watching as the United States, mis-led by a President whose legitimacy in terms of electoral honesty is seriously in question, a president whose elected career is marked by not-very-creative lying, and whose views on virtually every foreign policy challenge we’ve encountered over the past 45 years or so are completely wrong, just as completely and utterly screws up a planned withdrawal from Afghanistan.  He claims to be president of the United States.  We have the capability, militarily and in terms of logistic support, to do virtually anything we decide to do.  Our intention to subdue a backward nation – even 8,000 miles away – may be physically effected if our decision-making matches our intentions.  Whatever waste, corruption and failure we effected during our occupation, must have fulfilled our actual policies: it was what we wanted to have happen!

Whatever tragic loss and stupid-seeming actions the U. S. has suffered and done in our “withdrawal,” are also exactly what people in charge wanted to happen!  Think about that.

Then let’s think about the plethora of disconnected lies our “President” has told about the withdrawal.  The biggest of all is that there was no other way to withdraw that wouldn’t have yielded chaos… and yielded abandonment of billions of dollars worth of armaments, including some of our latest technology in helicopters and other big hardware, one must suppose.  What a traitor he has proven to be.  Was this outcome a big accident… this arming of the Taliban and, soon, many other terrorist groups with superb weapons?  Was the automatic transfer of technology into the hands of the Chinese, Russians and Iranians also an accident?  That defies logic.  So many drastic, costly, traitorous errors including risks to the lives of thousands of Americans and tens of thousands of Afghan allies, would take careful planning!  It would require precise intention!  It would have value to those who executed them.  It would require absolute rejection of the best advice available from military and intelligence agencies – advice that we now know Biden received.  What a shit he has proven to be.

May God save us from ourselves.

Culture, Economics, Education, Politics 2021, Responsibility

PROXY SOCIALISM

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Free thinkers….

Whether it’s baloney or just heat, much of it is spewed about the preference for “socialism” over “capitalism” among a large fraction of young Americans.  Few are responding with the right counter-arguments.  The debate has typically conflated socialism, which is fundamentally a GOVERNING/control system, using economic control to control groups of people, with capitalism, which is 1) human nature; and 2) a means of wealth creation AND RETENTION that is individual.  The real enemy of socialism is CONSTITUTIONAL REPUBLICANISM, not capitalism, per se… socialism simply destroys capitalism.  In the United States we utilize democratic selection to choose our representatives and executives, BUT WE ARE NOT A DEMOCRACY!  Those who insist on referring to the United States as “our democracy” and similar phrases, are those who wish it were.

Government by “democracy” is a ticket to ride into the tunnel of tyranny – tyranny by the majority.  In the new era of instant communication and widespread ignorance of history, civics and economics, tyranny sometimes takes only a few tens of minutes to destroy peoples’ lives, livelihoods and reputations.  Imagine if every public policy were promulgated the same way.  Temporary “majorities” could strip hated groups of rights and empower preferred majorities with privilege and wealth.  Imagine what it could do to tax policies and welfare.  Democracy is a scorpion in the digital bottle, requiring sophisticated and unbreakable controls in order for it to serve a free people.  An educated person can appreciate the sublime protections against unbridled democracy that are built into the Constitution; he or she will also recognize the changes that must be amended to that sacred document to stop the unbridled theft of representation under which we suffer, now.

The real contenders for the future of mankind are socialism morphing into communism, and Americanism, including all that set of concepts means.

Right now we are not enjoying the miraculous advantages of individual capitalism, responsibility and morality.  We are being crushed, inch by inch, by OLIGARCHY, which is a horrible, though impressive, perversion of capitalism: a concentration of financial power in the hands of a tiny, tiny number of people, to whom flow political and even intellectual power.  That is, obscenely wealthy people have come to believe they are not only smart in business and finance, but, since all their minions and obsequious politicians repeatedly tell them so, that they are also WISE – a grievously dangerous belief.  One need only investigate the actions and beliefs of the odd Bill Gates to see the dangers possible.

These oligarchs are not patriots – not a single one of them.  Oligarchs are insatiable: there are never sufficient “markets” in which to sell, there is never enough revenue, never enough power in their hands.  Their abiding fears all are based on the loss – even slightly – of any portion of any of those aspects of their existence.  This forces them to purchase, as it were, unlimited political influence so as to protect their levels of accomplishment in markets, revenue, and power.  Political philosophy is none of their concern.  They are just as happy to deal with communist and other dictators, probably more so, than with elected, representative governments, the latter being hard to control and, occasionally, “suffering” changes of leadership.

The U. S. has acted as the “world’s policeman” since World War II.  Despite forming the “United” Nations, most of the “policing” fell to the U. S. – most of the waste of treasure and sacrifice of young men and women has also been borne by us.  All the while, the global leftist pressure has infected the American body politic and the institutions designed by our founders and those added by both good- and bad-intentioned politicians.  Those who think we are not socialist already, are blind.  Socialism is not about to sweep in and improve our system… our system is already fouled up by socialism.  The likelihood is that we will become MORE of what the ‘woke’ generation rails against.

Conservatives – traditionalists – have no love for the corrupt, partially socialist mess we survive in.  Our problems stem not from a lack of socialism but from a lack of Americanism.  We have literally voted-in our own destruction.  There is a narrow window of freedom left, but the Biden administration has chosen to accelerate the damage instead of beginning to repair freedom and individual responsibility.

If nothing else, every American patriot should stop listening to or sympathizing with the gross, broad-brush claims made by Communists in our midst (like “BLM”) or by committed “socialists.”  By those irrational statements those anti-American fellow-travelers are advertising their ignorance – largely willful ignorance – of history and of the basis for the creation of our founding documents and principles.  They don’t deserve our attempts to understand nor will they debate or analyze the views of any other “side.”  America used to work quite well for the maximum number of people, here and across the world.  However, since the “Great Society” and the Viet-Nam loss, our system has become corrupted by socialists and, with the closing of the “gold window,” by the insatiable creation of debt to buy ever more and more votes.

Monopoly Capitalism is not the model for freedom, it is the antithesis.  Wise people, educated and informed, should, through their representatives in Congress, refine our institutions to break up monopolies and to prevent new ones.  Unfortunately our ruling elites have shifted closer and closer to Fascism, where huge, monopolistic and global companies, no longer American companies, are “bribed” in effect, BY THE GOVERNMENT, to carry out control policies the government lacks the legal ability to effect: socialism by corporate proxy. 

America, awake!

Biden, Culture, Governance, Religion, Responsibility

THE NEW JERUSALEM

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Volunteer “service” clubs are a crucial part of American exceptionalism.  Whoops, these days it is imPrudent to describe the United States of America as exceptional in any way, yet it IS Prudent to so describe it and us, that way.  Contrary to the outright lies and un-historic opinion contained in the “1619 Project,” the founding of our nation WAS exceptional compared to ALL other forms of greater-than-tribal governance ever tried in all of history.  We were, upon our founding, an exception.  Service clubs are not exceptional in and of themselves, but the American style of such voluntary assemblies is unique if, for no other reason, because of patriotism.

The United States was founded as an extension of the will of the God of Abraham, and of Christianity: the “New Jerusalem.”  Carefully delineated in Ezekiel, the simple understanding of the new temple, the Holy of Holies and the city around it, was “Where the Lord God is.”  Subject to Masonic interpretation, the much-sullied Jerusalem, stained by the conquest by Islamic armies, needed replacement on Earth and the “new world” of America looked to be the “clean” location for the New Jerusalem, ostensibly defined in the District of Columbia. 

Distinction from Europe, and from England following the Treaty of Paris, led the “Founding Fathers” to create an exceptional set of premises to define the first populist, Constitutionally limited government.  It was and is exceptional.  Only fools and communists cannot admit the truth of that statement.  That it was flawed cannot be argued, nor can the fact that the new structure of distributed powers contained the tools to correct those flaws.

Obviously those flaws, most intensely, that of slavery, neither faded away nor were resolved quickly enough.  Yet, to keep its moral word, The United States took sides on the question of slavery at the most serious possible level: life or death… of the nation and of hundreds of thousands of soldiers and citizens.  No nation, anywhere or at any time, has paid such a high price to adjust relations between races, ie. to end racial injustice.  No nation.  Lately, however, as leftists are wont to do, we have been rubbing salt in old, old wounds, racial and pseudo-racial, attempting to exhume the guilt of past generations so as to gain dominance over current ones.  What a rotten process it is.

Those seeking political – or military – advantage, love conflict.  Those are they for whom the suffering, even deaths of those enmeshed in conflict are of no moral or humane concern.  For those, there is always some nebulous, overarching and much greater morality that magically forgives all injustices on the path to victory or revolution.  The presence of conflict implies an eventual resolution of that conflict, wherein all the opportunities for drastic change resides.  What sort of drastic change might be needed?

For those who have been busy tearing down our heritage, our Constitution, historical statues and election laws, the drastic change leads only to destruction of this democratic republic and its replacement with a fundamentally communist-socialist regime in concert with International Communism, but dominated by black and brown people.

For those of us who are not sold on that end result, what changes should we make and insist upon from OUR government?  Should we insist on only truth being taught in our schools?  All of them?  This would eliminate race and racialism as “curricula.”  There is enough negative, and positive, in TRUTH, to show the wrongness of slavery and racial discrimination, while showing the exceptional nature of the American model.  Perhaps we could insist on the strengths of smaller government as part of “civics” education.  Could we learn to be individually moral and responsible citizens rather than haters of one another?  That would be a nation-strengthening change.

Could we create a plan to ease people OFF of welfare?  The worst aspect of socialism is dependency and lack of growth as an individual.  What sort of rotten philosophy would guide anyone toward that end?  After 60 years of federalized welfare we have accomplished nothing as successfully as the destruction of the nuclear family, particularly of black and brown peoples.  Who could be proud of that?  Who could possibly proclaim that “accomplishment” as a reason to be granted more elected power?  Who would “fall” for it?

What the past 60 years have done is prepare a failing nation for Communism, and 2020 is the year the Communists among us believed their time to pounce had come, and pounce they did.  COVID-19 was their major ally whose only worldwide beneficiary was Communist China and a handful of multi-billionaire oligarchs for whom borders are mere address indicia.  The longer we fail to recognize the source of COVID’s international spread, the sooner we will fall to China for lack of preparatory defense.  Shame on us and on “our” media for whom facts are mere props or weapons in the battle to hide the truth.

During the COVID attack, Americans of all sorts were taught to follow the somewhat whimsical dictates of public “servants,” for whom Constitutional rights took a back seat, every time, to the fears mongered by elected and non-elected experts who, it turns out, were involved in the CREATION of the monster known as COVID-19, and, worse, creation in collaboration with Communist China’s military-dominated virology laboratory in Wuhan.  Little by little we are learning about the fraudulent nature of how the COVID epidemic was being handled in the United States, largely by the deep state and the collusion between “big Pharma” and the CDC and NIH bureaucracies.  Supporting their mis-directions were the cruel and mainly ignorant reactions of governors and mayors as they locked down economic and other activities on the premise of “slowing” the spread of the virus.  It is far from clear that any of the lockdown actions were particularly effective except to ruin the best economy in the world.

Oddly, the same period of economic lockdown and breakdown was chosen for coordinated rioting and violent, even murderous protests of ostensible “systemic” racism.  “BLM” and “Antifa” and most Democrats running large cities purveyed a grand lie of the historic upset over the death of George Floyd as adequate justification for destroying businesses and other properties, looting and violent attacks on municipal and federal buildings – particularly police/law-enforcement related.  Immediately, national leaders had to explain away (lie about) the threat of COVID among irresponsible rioters while locking down churches, schools and a host of other business types and activities like weddings, funerals and graduations.

Amazingly, the state and federal politicians who forced unconstitutional changes in voting procedures across the country, and who lied about the nature and consequences of multiple protests and riots, are the same who charge anyone, particularly Trump, who might question the results of the oddest election in our history, an election replete with an incredible set of vote-pattern anomalies made astronomically less likely to be innocent by virtue of their simultaneous manifestation at a single historic point… all favoring the least-competent candidate to ever win a major-party nomination, with telling lies.  We are still told that only that party can be telling the truth about the weird 2020 electoral processes.

Maybe a change we might demand would be honesty.  Perhaps we could strengthen our body politic and our “united” peoples (“e pluribus unum”) by telling the truth about the nature of communist/Marxist front groups who led the riots of 2020.  Maybe we could demand honesty from Congress about our budgets.  If budget honesty is too much to ask, maybe we can get just the truth about January 6th and the involvement of undercover federal law-enforcement personnel on that day and the days leading up to the breach of the capitol.

Maybe we could change how we identify ourselves, not by discarding precise pronouns in favor of those that somehow validate self-declared, non-empirical feelings, but by celebrating the exceptional quality of citizenship in the United States of America.  Maybe we could change the relative application of Constitutional rights to only U. S. citizens, relegating non-citizens to somewhat lesser advantage when residing in the U. S.  Another change might be to relegate non-citizens who enter our nation illegally, to the most temporary residency status, including comfortable transportation back to their countries of origin, assuming they have completed their prison terms, if so disposed.

The “New Jerusalem” is a concept, not a place; a means of fulfilling a philosophy, not a myth.  Jerusalem is “where the Lord God is,” which is to say, “Where the surrender to God’s will is.”  To Masons, Jerusalem is expressible in a sacred geometry: sequences of geometric ratios and relationships that outpicture divine mathematics.  Washington, D. C. is laid out in partial fulfillment of those divine patterns.  The Constitution and other founding “scriptures” are laid out to enable religious men and women to fulfill their own divine geometries, as they fulfill the divine plan of America.  It is not all an accident of architecture, but an intensely purposeful architecture.  God is the Divine Architect in both physical form of the Universe, and in the spiritual design of His Laws for mankind: each fits and complements the other.  The Universe for testing man’s mettle and faith; the Law for testing man’s faith and mettle.

The imperfect but perfectible architecture of the United States was entrusted to future generations.  Our democratic republic was deemed suitable only to a moral and religious people, being inadequate to any other.  To the best of its ability, the global, socialist movement to unseat God has inexorably pursued the removal of God, Christianity and (our) divine architecture of freedom and free will that is essential for the evolution of souls and the defeat of evil.  That architecture was entrusted across the ages to the fledgling United States.  Since the end of the Civil War Americans have done their best to shuck off this holy responsibility as we have shucked off holiness, itself.  The left perceived and employed our weaknesses and struck in 2020.  The hopeless Mr. Biden, ostensible president of the people to whom America, the “New Jerusalem” was entrusted, is our reward and his plans – or someone’s plans – are well underway to completing the undermining of the two architectures.  Just read H.R. 5.

Biden, Economics, Elections, Governance, Politics 2021, Responsibility, Taxation

Biden’s Billingsgate

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Who was that masked man? Why, he’s grown stranger…

President Biden is proposing to exceed the THIRTY TRILLION dollar debt level.  What he suggests is not only partisan and disingenuous, but includes multiple effects that restrict and undercut capitalism.  If he ever understood the relationship between debt, productive surplus and growth, he has forgotten it… along with Constitutional provisions and any semblance of American exceptionalism: down the memory hole.

Under his and other socialists’ direction, American will be exceptional again:  among all industrialized nations we will lead the world in our concerted, legislated efforts to destroy our hard-won success and relinquish our sovereignty.  Biden wants to “go big” – biggest fool, perhaps.

The only system that can both destroy debt and increase freedom, is free-enterprise capitalism.  That is, NOT monopoly capitalism OR globalism, both of which concentrate money and power OUT of the hands of free citizens and OUT of the hands of their elected representatives – although not out of their pockets in many cases.  Those must be stopped before it’s too late.  Some serious trust-busting is essential to restoring America.

Practically, a clear course-correction would be to limit the level of corporate net-worths or levels of gross revenues that may donate ANY money to candidates or PAC’s – ANY money.  Perhaps companies with $50 millions in assets or $25 millions in revenue or LESS, may donate, not larger.  Also, companies that have government or military contracts may not donate.  Then trust-busting could proceed.

Already we’ve experienced reduction in job and business growth – returning to pre-Covid levels – because excessive, socialist, “rescue” or “stimulous” payments are keeping people from returning to work!  Work… where guided labor produces things, including taxes.  We know where idiots… umm, ignore that… “progressives” think economic growth comes from: unemployment checks.  Nancy Pelosi said so.  Only as employment increases will freedom, independence and tax revenues increase.

People earning their own livings strengthen both responsibility and financial freedom.  Having more taxpayers increases political freedom.  2020 has shown that weakening election laws weakens political freedom, and it disenfranchises citizens from our most fundamental and hard-won civil rights.  Adding greater responsibility to the exercise of the franchise will clarify honesty in elections – a fundament of the American promise.

Back to what Biden has forgotten… if he ever knew it.  Debt is a superb tool for growth, but not for maintenance – period.

Imagine a factory producing, say, refrigerators.  Its lines are operating, workers are working and every unit that comes off the line is sold within days.  In fact, there is a shortage of refrigerators; people are forced to devise meals for their families without foods that need refrigeration.  People are denied good nutrition for lack of a high-enough rate of refrigerator production.  Even if the government passed a law requiring more refrigerators to be made, only so many can be.

To upgrade the factory and machinery to produce a third more – a 33% increase – will cost $100 Million.  Because the refrigerator company has made a profit over the past 15 years, of $30 Million after all expenses, cost of goods sold and payroll… and taxes, it is able to borrow, or gain a debt of $70 Million.  They’ll be able to make a productive surplus of not $3 million, but $4 million per year at 133% of current production, since all costs won’t increase proportionately.  Each refrigerator will cost a little less to produce with the new machinery and facility improvements.  The $70 Million loan, combined with investment out of increased operating profits, will be paid back with interest to the lender, in less than 20 years.

The earning of profits – creation of productive surplus – enables “Refrigerators, Inc.” to become more productive and efficient, able to modernize, hire trainees who can become highly paid refrigerator builders, and pay taxes to support our civic institutions and even donate money to charitable causes.  Productive surplus also enables the company to destroy debt – make it disappear – while increasing production, the only purpose of investment.  That’s it.  It’s NOT an investment to provide living expenses for people who do not work enough to support themselves or their families; it’s an emergency… it’s charity, not a way of life.

Meanwhile, everyone who wants a refrigerator can buy one – or, contrary to socialist dogma – go to work to earn enough to buy one.

Capitalism is the only process that can destroy debt or, in fact, make investments at all.  All other bills incurred by a society that is complex, are paid, or financed, by the productive surplus of profitable, capitalist enterprises.  All of government: schools, police fire departments, hospitals, military, public works… everything, is paid for from tax revenues that derive only from productive surplus in a profit-making economy.

The growing tragedy – growing weakness – is our habit of borrowing for current expenses from generations into the future, now to the tune of $28 Trillion.  About one-third of our annual federal “budget” is borrowed, not paid from current revenues.  This part of economics Joe Biden has not forgotten, even embraced: the lie of modern politics.

For a long time the U. S. borrowed real money… from banks, individuals and even other countries.  The Treasury sold bonds: saving bonds, Treasury notes (“Treasuries”) of different maturities and yields.  Investors used real money to “invest” in U. S. debt – one step removed from investing in future productive surplus, itself.  This was bad enough; we lived beyond our means but we could afford the interest on those debts, not so much affording repayment of the loan principals.

Unfortunately we have worn out our welcome among real investors.  Now we “borrow” from the Federal Reserve. 

(See: http://www.prudenceleadbetter.com/2020/09/27/knife-edge-election/)

The “FED” is a private bank consortium that can legally “lend” us money they do not have – $Trillions of it.  So, they lend us “air” and we pretend it’s money and pay interest on it.  Oddly, the Federal Reserve is also granted power to set interest rates, which for a long time have been near 1%, God bless their charitable hearts.  What will we do when they decide the rate should be 3%?  On $10 Trillion?  That’s $300 Billion in real money.  That’s a lot of Meals on Wheels.

Wait a minute… wait a minute.  Did I say, “$10 Trillion?”  I meant $30 Trillion, if we fulfill Biden’s plans.  Why, that would be $900 Billion… a YEAR… close to a $Trillion, itself – just interest!  That’s a lot of everything, including our own defense.  We literally cannot afford more multi-$Trillion spending plans; they are actually taxing plans. 

Many in government believe these “air-debts” never have to be paid back!  “We owe them to ourselves,” they think.  Ooookaaaay… aren’t the UFO people going to usher in a new era of no worries?  Oh, absolutely.  And, Joe Biden is going to unite the country, end racism and borrow us into prosperity.  And equity.

Crime, Economics, Elections, Politics 2020, Politics 2021, Responsibility

LETTER TO A LIBERAL FRIEND

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          Your quick rejection of voting problems has made me think… your comments and views always do.  I consider you an inherently honest person in that you are true to your beliefs.  Truly, that is the only measure of honesty that humans can apply.  Reality is dashed on the rocks of belief all the time, for everyone.  About the highest level of human honesty that we can obtain occurs where believers maintain a rational skepticism about everyone’s beliefs, including their own, and then constantly examine bits of information that don’t perfectly fit belief structures. 

          One must also be prepared to alter beliefs when new facts require it.  This would be wonderful in a generic sense, but some beliefs are already based on hard reality and should not be questioned.  An honest discussion might ensue at the end of which the questioner of reality-based beliefs should change his or her own.

          Many beliefs are perceived by their holders to be unassailable, such as matters of faith, including moral codes and things spiritual, and honesty as a functional reference, itself.  Evidence for such things varies from historic to emotional to community-shared beliefs as evidence.  Arguments, even in historical realms are unrewarding, threatening and worth avoiding.  But beliefs derived from more recent news: incomplete facts, unproven evidence (in the mind of the recipient) deserve some continuity of skepticism until reality can be more firmly grounded in support or disproof of outside opinions not personally experienced.  I believe that you are more liberal in political views than am I and of a different faith, yet we respect one another’s views enough to change our own if either might reveal bits of reality to the other.  I try to be an honest conservative and you are an honest liberal; I voted for George McGovern, after all.

          And so, evidence is the key to any discussion about political shenanigans, one of the least honesty-based areas of argument in human history.  But, even here, there is reality, however difficult it may be to pry evidence from the hands of those who may be the perpetrators of voting irregularities, which is where it all resides.  At the very least I trust you can agree that there is some evidence of voting anomalies in the 2020 elections (plural; there being 50 state elections held on the same day).  In opposing virtually every charge of voting irregularities, media observers, not quite exclusively patisan, immediately state that “You have no proof of fraud.”  This is true in a definitive sense since, again, all the hard evidence is in the possession of those who are being accused of perpetrating or allowing said irregularities; there is abundant circumstantial  evidence, however.  In most cases of civil crimes, circumstantial evidence constitutes “reasonable suspicion” and grand juries have little else to go on unless there is sworn testimony that tends to support the circumstances of possible criminality, from which indictments often derive.  Correct me if I misunderstand that.

          There is a trap for many when considering political  crimes.  “It’s just politics as usual.”  “This has been going on since Tammany Hall.”  “It’s nothing new; charges were leveled in 2016 so it’s just tit for tat politics.”  A crime is a crime…                             (ref: http://www.prudenceleadbetter.com/2020/12/26/admirable-crimes/ )               and we are all besmirched if crime is not sanctioned in a nation of laws, not of men… and women.

          Judgment is twisted when hatreds form part of beliefs, and there are hatreds on all sides of the 2020 elections.  These are guarded against firmly by honest observers… and debaters, and certainly, we hope, by judges, attorneys and sworn public officials.  They are embraced by those who fail to meet standards of honesty, and they’re out there.

          One could posit a scenario, based on the past 4 years of unrelenting attempts to politically destroy President Trump, having failed his removal by those means, that the unfulfilled hatred for Mr. Trump by the Democrat Party and the “deep state” denizens, would be concentrated on guaranteeing that Trump lost re-election.  To do so required controlling the results in 5 or 6 states, only – the states Hillary was counting on and didn’t nail down in 2016.  Attempting to effect a guarantee meant organizing hyper-partisans in only a few cities or counties: just a few parts of those few states.  Given this hypothesis, is there any evidence that indicates such a plan may have been put into play?

          Why, yes, yes there is!  Like what, the skeptical questioner asks?  Are there unusual patterns of vote counts in historically strong Democratic counties, cities or even precincts?

          Georgia being on everyone’s mind, right now, let’s look there.  Georgia’s voting and tabulation procedures have vulnerabilities, as do most states’.  To generate a “certified count” for any single vote to be part of the count (assuming a legally-cast vote, disregarding temporarily deceased voters, out-of-state – non-resident voters, or “harvested” absentee votes), the ballot is first marked by the voter and scanned into an electronic file/database: safe so far.  Absentee ballots, assuming each is marked by the legitimate voter who requested it, enter the system through a different “door,” but once scanned are also converted to specific pieces of data, safely entered. (A large number of ballots were mailed without a corresponding request, hopefully to be destroyed by the honest voter or person who sees it first.  Some voters received more than one with slight variations in the addressee name.  If there were a desire to skew the votes, floating quantities of unrequested ballots would be a simple way, particularly where a state has not purged its voter lists for years.)

          So, vote intentions are converted to sacred data, one could say, which data is deserving of every possible protection and maintenance of accuracy as humanly possible.  Each represents the most fundamental civil right we have.  For weeks, absentee, mail-in and in-person early votes have been accumulating, each to be converted to a sacred datum.

          Once counting is completed in each precinct / polling place, the compact flash cards holding the images from each “machine’ (scanner-computer) are physically driven by courier to a drop-off point for that jurisdiction, be it a precinct, city or county.  From there they are escorted by police to the central tabulation center for the larger jurisdiction-County.  Again, assuming that every ballot has been marked and recorded in the name of a legitimate voter, the data are still “safe,” one is assured by elections officials.  Unfortunately, signature verification on mail-in and absentee ballots turned out to be a haphazard process in Georgia, largely unmonitored.  For mail-in ballots, it was essentially ignored, according to sworn witnesses.

          Up to this point the data are passed from machine to machine with no opportunity to manipulate the totals.  However, once at the tabulation center, poll workers could exploit wide open vulnerabilities in “RTR” software, including deleting batches of votes, creating batches or replacing batches with new ones.  From these tabulation centers across the state, the data is then sent to the SCYTL system that reports totals to the Secretary of State and to the Edison data aggregators who report to the media.  If fraud has occurred at the input side or at the tabulation center, it is that fraudulent data that is being reported and relied upon by the Secretary of State and by the media.  Is there evidence of these potential frauds?

          A team of data analysts looked at only the numbers and the patterns of changes in vote totals along the timeline of the count.  Different counties had similar problems and anomalies, most peculiarly sudden NEGATIVE vote movements.  That is, in a system that increments  votes as reported, there appeared huge decrements of Trump votes.  In Gwinnett county, for example, Trump had 29, 391 votes to Biden’s 17,218, reported at 9:11 PM.  Eight minutes later, the report was exactly switched, and Trump had 17,218 while Biden had 29,391, a decline of 12,173 for Trump, an identical gain for Biden.  Trump ostensibly lost Georgia by only 12,670 votes.

          In Putnam County one of those odd “decrements” erased 5,935 votes from Trump – gone altogether.   Dougherty County saw 17,650 Trump votes disappeared.  Dodge, Daltrey and Fulton Counties, together, saw some 30,000 votes removed from Trump.  These are changes: negative vote counts, that cannot happen in an election tabulation that sees votes increasing (incrementing) in varying quantities for all candidates as totals come in.  How much cleaner it is for all concerned if the machines are programmed, or intruded upon over the internet, to change totals – plausible ignorance of everything.

          In Fulton County (Atlanta) the Elections Director, Richard Barron, announced that of 113,130 ballots counted at one point, over 106 THOUSAND had been adjudicated due to some sort of errors in the scanning/reading of them.  The problem with adjudication is that the original ballot image is replaced with a new one, and the original image-data is lost forever.  During adjudication the “vote review panel” evaluates the ballot and imputes the voter’s intent, and then enters the new information in replacement of the original.  This is a great way to defraud voters and send corrupt data downstream for publication.  This was a greater than 94% error rate.  The logs from past elections show rates in the 1% or less range; THE LOGS FROM 2020 ARE MISSING.

          More glaring, and perhaps more understandable, are anomalies in vote ratios.  In most instances, historically, vote ratios of 75%/25% are considered outliers and cause for investigation.  This year in Georgia, DeKalb County showed 94 polling places where votes came in at 90% or greater for Biden, a statistical impossibility.  Fulton County had more than 150 polling places at 90% or more for Biden.  These patterns are anomalous with regard to ANY past presidential elections, and exceed results for Barack Obama in 2008.

          There is testimony, lots of it.  Those who have come forward are not all Republicans, as if being one meant an inability to tell the truth, and they all have sworn affidavits about what they observed.  Many testify to active harassment and intimidation whenever they tried to question obviously questionable votes.  Votes by mail, for example, whose ballots had no corresponding registered voter on the qualified voter list, were still counted and challengers were intimidated for suggesting a challenge.

          Some 138,000 mail in ballots were received ostensibly from people who had moved out of state, yet were counted without question.  It is not possible that 138,000 former Georgia residents are all duplicitous; much more likely it is that these names were known from careful data mining over many months prior to the election, and purposely voted by third parties who knew the voter rolls were not “cleaned” of these ineligible voters. 

          The famous video of the Fulton County State Farm Convention center shows how observers and press were removed from the center at about 10:30 on the false premise that counting was done for the night.  Once they were gone 5 remaining employees resumed counting without observers (illegal) and continued for almost 2.5 hours.  In that time they scanned more ballots than the winning difference (12,670 statewide).  In short, more than 200,000 votes are questionable in the Georgia election.  Exorbitant vote totals from just a handful of counties – totals that exceed all previous voting patterns and statistical probabilities – overcame Trump’s substantial lead during the early morning hours, including “Biden spikes” similar to those in 4 other battleground states.

          It is interesting that EVERY single anomaly in vote patterns and in illicit handling of ballots, and every batch of ballots of dubious origin (including photocopied ballots being scanned and stacks of hundreds of pristine, just-Biden votes) benefited Joe Biden.  None benefited Trump which, statistically, if honest errors or “glitches,” some percentage would have.

          Additional circumstantial doubts are raised by unusual differences between Biden totals and Democrat Senate candidates’ totals in the same key swing states.  Pew Research did polling of likely voters in both parties, who overwhelmingly agreed that they would vote for the Senate candidate of the same party whose Presidential candidate they would likely vote for – not 100%, but close, as is the historic pattern in all presidential elections.  Oddly, Biden polled 69,000 more votes than did Senate candidate, Greg Peters in Michigan.  Compare that to Trump’s difference of just 7,131 over John James in the Republican party.  Trump’s is a “normal” differential; Biden’s is 10 times that.

          More striking is Biden’s outpolling of Senate candidate John Ossoff (the scheduled 6th year senate race) by 95,800 votes, 117 times Trump’s difference of just 818 votes over David Purdue.  Both cases reflect huge quantities of Biden-only votes where no down-ticket choices were made, a very unusual pattern that happened, apparently, only in the “swing” states.

          Does any of this constitute the “evidence” or the “proof” that media pundits keep asking for or denying the existence of?  Those inclined to believe such an effort to guarantee Trump’s loss is possible, are likely to think it is, albeit not quite courtroom “quality.”  Those inclined to dismiss Trump as never classy enough to sit in the oval office, or who may hate Trump for whatever reason, would naturally deny that anything besides Trump’s lack of civility, crude language and embarrassing Tweets were required to secure his defeat.  In fact, every aspect of Trump’s campaign, political operation and instincts, and every aspect of historic precedent, numeric, social and cultural indicators… every aspect except just one, Biden’s apparent vote totals in 6 states, predicted a massive Trump landslide.  How is it that every predictor of election outcome was wrong for the first time – in some cases for 150 years – and wrong together?  That the Biden vote totals were such outliers in the political history of the United States, should at least increase skepticism regardless of partisanship, especially given the near lack of a campaign on the part of Joe Biden.

          Donald Trump gained more than 10 Million votes compared to his 2016 totals.  By itself this fact should guarantee his win.  Historically, such a resounding increase has meant re-election.  But, miracle of miracles, not this year.  Obama, himself, won in 2012 with 3.5 Million FEWER votes than in 2008.  Biden actually received fewer black votes than Obama did everywhere in the United States EXCEPT in the relative handful of cities and counties where ALL the anomalies occurred and from where all the questions derive.  Such a pattern deserves some scrutiny, even more so when EVERY anomaly benefits only one candidate.

          Okay, enough of this.  There are just a couple of final points you should consider.  One is that through a couple of obscure corporate steps, a Chinese investment house, UBS Beijing Co., Ltd. owns Dominion voting systems and, through side connections, Smartmatic software, both of which companies have taken part in election fraud in several countries prior to our elections.

          The other is that the CCP funds and guides a huge voter registration campaign under the Chinese Progressive Association in San Francisco, whose head brags of his coordination with the Chinese consulate.  China has made no secret of its preference for Biden as president.  Trump is the first president to resist the Communist Chinese in 50 years.  The Biden family is deeply enmeshed with Chinese investment companies tightly connected to the CCP.  Biden in the Oval Office is our worst nightmare.  The people he has suggested as his appointees to cabinet and other positions all seem to be globalists who are “soft” on China.  God save us.

          I don’t believe that anyone using Dominion voting systems has any idea what the actual democrat vote totals were on November 3rd (28 states and most of their counties) or else has chosen Dominion precisely because the machines are easily programmed to slice or switch votes.  There is evidence of both capabilities.  God forbid.

          I urge you, as an American citizen, to review this video:

https://www.theepochtimes.com/2020-election-investigation-who-is-stealing-america_3617562.html

          _________________________________________________________________

UPDATE:  The events of January 6th are gruesome to watch and heartbreaking.  Every true conservative hates them, especially Trump’s urging people to go to the Capitol and his son’s encouraging adoption of the tactics of the left.  “To what end,” we cry out, Mr. President?  Stopping the inevitable? 

          To be suspicious of very suspicious actions and irregularities on November 3rd, is Prudent.  There was a point in Mid-December where the vitriol about what appears to be coordinated fraud should have simply stopped.  It was time to be cool and to continue such legal challenges as remained.  It was time to listen to cooler voices.  It doesn’t mean that Trump needs to concede; his refusal is understandable, believing as he and many others do. 

          It does mean that January 6th could have easily been avoided.  A terrible miscalculation, Mr. Trump.  That would have been real leadership of a movement that had the potential to expose the rot in Washington.  It will be a while before conservatism can wield as strong a lever again.  Certainly it must.  The nation won’t withstand much further drift leftward; China’s tentacles are already inverting and subverting our highest ideals with the active connivance of many politicians.  Money and re-election are their compass, regardless of source.  For shame.

          “Globalism,” tightly enmeshed in banking and Wall Street, is antithetical to a Constitutional republic.  Some prefer to ignore this truth and its consequence, because working with it makes them wealthy or temporarily powerful.  When the ideas of America crash down, many of those who are helping may escape the new order; many hundreds of millions will not.

Crime, Governance, Politics 2020, Representation, Responsibility

ADMIRABLE CRIMES

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After following the flood of evidence of election thievery in 2020, Prudence leads one to wonder many things, posit many questions.  These are questions to Americans who love our nation, our history, our traditions and the ideals embraced by the Constitution.  Asking the same questions of people who are willing to riot, loot, burn and destroy the properties of others, or who are so consumed by hatred for any individual or group that they are unable to consider any ideas with which the objects of their hatreds may agree, or of those who think they are communists and Marxists or fundamentalist Muslims or anyone else whose core beliefs and loyalties are antithetical to our constitutionally limited democratic republic, will result not in thoughtful response or discussion, but in restated hatreds.  Let us not waste that time.  Prudence dictates that we place these concerns before those who want to strengthen our present, defend our heritage and who will build a better future than what appears to be gathering force, as I write, against our highest ideals.

With these caveats in mind, then, a question:  given the growing list of sworn witnesses to malfeasance in the prosecution of elections of presidential electors in multiple states, and given the corollary existence, therefore, of dozens or hundreds of electoral criminals, should not the worst and most significant bad actors be prosecuted?

In other words, crimes against state, county and federal interests – defined by laws at each level – and against states’ and the U. S. Constitutions, were committed.  This fact means that there are criminals guilty of committing those crimes.  Neither Jonah Goldberg nor Joe Biden nor Chief Justice, John Roberts can deny those simple facts.  By some sleight of magic, however, the three Jays and a host of lower-court judges, elected and appointed, are able to determine without reviewing evidentiary specifics, that none of the witnessed crimes – civil rights violations of the highest order – were of sufficient consequence to matter to the declared outcomes of the states’ electoral votes.  Maybe there is a perspective to this that escapes the hapless U. S. citizen who trusts the upholding of his or her Constitution, state or federal.

It’s Friday at 3:00 PM  in downtown Philadelphia (or Milwaukee, Atlanta, Pittsburgh, Las Vegas, Phoenix or Raleigh) and people are streaming out of the city for the weekend.  A well-planned robbery of the Republic Bank branch at 1601 Walnut Street is executed with the perpetrators making off with six bags of cash just delivered by the armored-car service at 2:54.  They exit by a rear door, setting off alarms, and they casually drive away in a sedan, changing cars at Franklin Hospital visitors’ parking and disappear.  Total take: $510,000, all insured.

City police and the Philadelphia FBI “SAC” are all over the case.  The Bank, which handles several millions of dollars every week, is deeply concerned and cooperates in every way possible, sharing video tape and testimony from every person who witnessed anything of the event.  Bank personnel are carefully questioned, since these crimes often have an “inside” component.  Newspapers publish articles and photos, local radio and TV decry the ease with which the terrible criminals made off with, well… money.  By 6:00 PM the insurance carrier has been alerted, coverage processes begun and it sends its own investigator to check out the nature of the incident.  For a while, the whole city seems concerned.

On Monday morning, however, the FBI and City police make a joint statement that since the acquisition of the cash was so very important to the thieves, and since the amount of money is not enough to threaten the continuation of the bank, itself, they have decided to drop the case and congratulate the criminals.

Another question: What sort of reaction would other banks, the Department of Justice, the FBI Director and the governor of Pennsylvania have to that announcement? Do you think they would accept that since the investigators didn’t have all the evidence or “proof” necessary to win a case in court, that the matter should be dropped and the thieves congratulated for such a smooth operation?  Do you suppose that someone, a Republic Bank depositor, say, could file suit in state court demanding that the various investigatory authorities be enjoined from dropping the case?

Another question: If tens of thousands of votes, not dollars, were questioned by witnesses to their tabulation being performed illegally, possibly disenfranchising the same number of legal voters – effectively stealing their fundamental, unalienable right – is not an investigation that might restore their rights and provide the evidence for a trial of criminals who stole them be justified?  Should not the co-conspirators be enjoined from destroying evidence or from dropping the investigation, the theft being so well-executed, after all?

And, if the bank robbers were to use their ill-gotten gains to buy a beautiful, white house with servants, do you think they should be allowed to keep it?  No?

So, if dishonest people steal money we will chase them to the ends of the earth and convict them, but if dishonest people steal as many as a Million votes in an election we should let them keep them and enjoy all the fruits of their crime?

Tell me again, about what the Constitution means.

Culture, Economics, Education, Governance, Politics 2020, Race, Responsibility

THE ENCROACHING

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The encroaching divide of America into “Constitutionalist” and “Socialist” camps, is proceeding apace.  At no time in our history has the nation and its culture been so threatened, not even at the time of the secession of the Confederacy.  Then both “North” and “South” shared nearly all moral beliefs and religious ones, economic practices, and the honesty in contracts that underpins our ability to cooperate as a civilization.  The exception, alone, was on the matters of slavery and racial differences and prejudice.

Wrenchingly, courageously, the slavery error has been solved.  During the civil War, reconstruction and segregation, the nation held together and made progress on virtually all fronts, including for the economic success and educational advancement of non-white peoples within the United States.  Black families were strong and growing stronger all the way through “Jim Crow” laws and post-war awakening and struggles, as was the nation as a whole.  This, only because the moral values and their religious underpinnings were widely shared across all strata of American society.

Today, not so much.  The first 60 years of socialist, globalist intrusion had paved a path but few were taking to it… at least until Lyndon Johnson took over from JFK.  Under the guise of “fulfilling Kennedy’s dream,” the Great Society was foisted on a relatively balanced government, federalizing welfare for “the poor” and “minorities,” mainly blacks.  Johnson’s famous prediction, “…I’ll have those n***ers voting Democrat for 100 years” exposed the cynical plantation-mentality of Johnson’s Democrats, and the base, gutter-snipe qualities of Johnson, himself.

At the same time Johnson plunged the U. S. into a meaningless war… er, U.N.-sanctioned conflict, in Viet-Nam, that split the nation politically and for the first time, split youth from parents.  With the advent of drugs and drug-infected music, the revolution was under way:  “the Sixties.”  Nixon was our last attempt to reign in alien culture, and they got rid of him in the most politically destructive way.  Meanwhile, welfare was corroding black families and dissociating old morals from “modernity.”  Feminism aggressively began to destroy both manhood and motherhood and education commenced to dissolve Christian thought as rapidly as new socialist-trained and unionized teachers could be installed in supposedly “public” schools.  Clever lawyers, psychologists, judges and justices found ways to parse common sense and conscientiousness into never-imagined “constitutional” rights.

Even so, with Ronald Reagan’s election patriotic Americans were renewed in belief in the “American Way:” that together, with right leadership, Americans could restore the nation they loved and pull back from the rot that was slipping past common sense everywhere.  We even vanquished Soviet Communism without a nuclear war; “History is over,” pundits declared.  Even Bill Clinton seemed rational for a while as his Alinskyite wife plotted “communitarianism” and socialized medicine.  Rational people seemed to be back in control of our freedom-loving destiny.  But the left never rests.

Gore almost pulled it off.  The Democratic party was, haltingly, inquiringly trying not just voting for the temporarily deceased, but here and there, voting for the imaginary.  Bush stopped them in Florida and waltzed into the September 11th attacks.  For a few hours the congress was unified and appeared to be patriotic.   We’ll be damned if some backward Islamists are going to attack us on our home turf!  That’s OUR job, after all.

Americans still largely believe that we can “fix” things.  Problems are solvable and resolvable in fair and rational ways or, as we’ve shown the world for 300 years, with technical skill and innovation.  Along the way we have spread wealth to more poor people than any other society on earth or in history.  But, we’re slipping:  concerted efforts to change our shared beliefs have taught millions of us to distrust and even hate, our own nation.  The most effective poison?  Charges of racism… and hateful or just confused racism, itself.

The source of these changes is Marxism-socialism.  Those of you who are not willing to correct the flaws of poorly regulated capitalists, and who believe that distorting history and historic figures will somehow make life better in 2020, should step away from the next planned “protest” and consider your own role in the destruction of the best system yet devised for the betterment of the most lives possible.  To reach back to the only governing system that has NEVER succeeded to replace the Constitutional democratic republic that always has, is to prove yourself a fool.  Please wake up.

Nevertheless, the plan to divide and dissolve the United States is working.  States are now practicing what then-future Confederate states employed prior to secession: “nullification.”  With “Sanctuary” status being self-declared by cities and states, the federal system is under assault.  Politically useful illegal immigration is used as a “humanitarian” reason to disavow proper immigration regulations and restrictions, while still accepting federal welfare payments to even illegal recipients.  To date, the political will to stop this trend and restore primacy of federal law over international border control, has not been found.  Division.

Covid-19 has played neatly into the hands of socialist control-agents.  Economic and religious lock-downs both fit their innate desires to impose superior ways of living and doing than those chosen by free citizens.  Dictating how many free citizens can buy the services and products of other free citizens is a reach of executive whim that would seem impossible in an individual-freedom-and-responsibility, Constitutionally limited governance system.  Yet we have acquiesced to it rather sheepishly.  But, not everyone, by a wide margin.  Division is the greatest impact of the 2020 lock-downs.  Disease-prevention is a far-distant secondary effect.  The United States and China are the only major industrialized nations still hampered by this misguided theory.  The United States, ostensibly a “free” nation, is the only one damaged by it.  Division.

The tools of division are mostly forms of lying, whether about the efficacy of Covid lockdowns or of switching America’s high-energy-density economy to a low-energy-density one based on sunlight and windmills, or of “systemic” racism or tremendous racial progress and tolerance.  Those who would divide us are, practically speaking, anti-Christian and anti-Judaic.  Those who would divide our peoples wish most of all to divide us from our past… at least from the good parts.  In their views all that came before right now is so rotten as to be worthless, including the people and philosophies that created it.  Their Marxism is the only true philosophy (religion) and there shall be no other religions before it.

One wonders if they ever listen to the things they say.  Do you?

Culture, Politics 2020, Race, Responsibility, Terrorism

FIELDS OF HONOR

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Forever in a field they wave…  In rows and columns true;
Each soldier’s memory proudly etched – Loyalty, dressed Red, White and Blue.
Deeds of Honor recognized… Of times not long ago;
Field of Flags wave proudly.
History written in hearts aglow…  Offer silent reverence, quiet prayer;
Noble servants rightly praised… On through time pass forever grateful.
Remembered with Flags unfurled and raised.   By Mike Sousa, North Andover

In a summer marred by urban insurrections and variously excessive and unconstitutional, official pandemic fears and dicta, community service clubs, pillars of society, all, “Zoom” notwithstanding, continue their often unheralded works raising money to give away, along with countless hours of volunteer time.  So it is with chapters of the Exchange Clubs of America who “Exchange our Service today to build stronger communities and a better Nation tomorrow.”  This concept would be moribund if Exchange (and Rotary, Kiwanis and others) did not believe in the likelihood of stronger communities and a better Nation tomorrow.  In fact, service clubs’ heartfelt faith in America’s striving for a more perfect Union – and Unity – is so directly opposite, and in opposition to the sea of hatreds that some stoke for anti-American ideologies, that the distinctions are quite sharp in the Summer of 2020.

Exchange in the lower Merrimack River Valley of northeastern Massachusetts is one of those chapters: the Exchange Club of Lawrence and the Andovers, sponsored in 1947 by the Exchange Club of Lowell, Mass., 8 miles up the river, just a few months after the Exchange Club of Haverhill was chartered, 8 miles down the river from Lawrence.  Many Clubs were formed or grew significantly right after World War Two, as Americans returned from battles in terrible places and conditions to recognize how great the promise and premise of the United States of America truly were then and, Exchange members believe, still are today.  Americanism is one of the 4 pillars of Service that define Exchange Clubs of America.

Following the September 11th attacks in 2001, a flag company, at the urging of Exchange members in Sandy, Utah, created the first “Healing Field” of nearly 3,000 flags for those killed in the 9-11 attacks.  The idea became a National Exchange project and over the past 20 years has been a focus for 9-11 and for other events that cry out for attention and memory across the country, promoted by various Exchange Clubs and by many other organizations. 

Despite Covid-19 shutdowns and restrictions, the Town of North Andover, where Exchange did its first local “Field of Honor” in 2019, encouraged us to do a Field in 2020, as well, although without a closing, crowd-attracting ceremony on the Common where 500 flags were displayed.  Local access TV created a video of the many parts of the ceremony that we would have done, and created a You-Tube video for anyone to watch:

The value of the Field of Honor is not mere patriotism, as essential as patriotism certainly is, it is a set of focused remembrances.  Whether “In Memory Of” or “In Honor Of,” the person(s) to whom a flag is dedicated is an important part of who the flag sponsor is, now, today.  The first time our Club installed a “Field of Honor,” we were not ready for the importance  to our “customers” of this simple act of stating – printing out for all to see – the name and “heroic” worth  of their relatives, antecedent or descendant, or even of great, somewhat sacrificial friends, even acquaintances.  In every case, the honoree associated with each flag is important to the flag sponsor and the fact that he or she or they remember  or take note of the honoree and are in some way affirmed  in their own lives by the excellence, value  or sacrifice of the honoree.  It is intensely important that their own lives are acknowledged through the best connections that comprise them.  It’s spiritual.

Every flag is about love and many about the deepest love: respect.  Each tells a story about the sponsor and about the honoree, living or passed.  The Field of Honor is merely a focus for manifested love and remembrance, but oh, so crucial – something the club was not prepared for the first time we installed a Field in 2019.  Even more, we were not prepared for the importance of reading, saying, the dedications out loud.  Spiritual.

For the Town of North Andover and for Andover and Lawrence as well, the Field created a statement of normalcy against a backdrop of Marxist anti-American hatred in the spring and Summer of 2020.  There it was okay to be patriotic, okay to recognize goodness and honor and duty.  There were so many outpourings of gratitude to the Club  when the gratitude belonged to the flag sponsors… at least as the Club members saw it.  Yet there they were, steadily, thanking us  for erecting the Field.  Humbling, spiritual.

For those who don’t share the views of rioters and insurrectionists, the Field is a comfort.  It’s presence is an affirmation of America, of the Constitution, of what we hold dear in our families, and of what we hold dear in our faiths.  The American flag, itself, is simple, by itself… no more complex than any other national flag, and we display it and hundreds of others very simply.  A cheap PVC pipe is the flag-pole, slid over a short piece of steel rebar we try to pound vertically, we hope, into the soil.  Tie-wraps hold the flag in place through holes we drill through the pipe, and a cheap golden bulb is stretched – coaxed – over the top.  The flag is a printed one of decent quality, metal grommets and sewn edging.  We tell sponsors that it will last eleven months and two weeks.

But for patriots the flag is a history, a heritage, a dream and a promise.  Those who dedicate one to an Honoree of their choice, feel all of these aspects of this amazing symbol and yet more – things they can’t put into words.  As we install them, straighten them, put dedication tags on them, and straighten them again, we feel those things, too.  Together, we not only feel that history and heritage, and hear those dreams and promises, we make them, anew.

At the beginning of our You Tube video our senior member, a virtual pillar of these communities – his children following his example – recites a somewhat famous, somewhat poetic statement entitled, “I Am The Flag,” by Howard Schnauber:

I am the flag of the United States of America.

My name is Old Glory.
I fly atop the world’s tallest buildings.
I stand watch in America’s halls of justice.
I fly majestically over institutions of learning.
I stand guard with power in the world.
Look up and see me.

I stand for peace, honor, truth and justice.
I stand for freedom. I am confident.
I am arrogant. I am proud.
When I am flown with my fellow banners,
My head is a little higher,
My colors a little truer.
I bow to no one!
I am recognized all over the world.
I am worshipped – I am saluted.
I am loved – I am revered.
I am respected – I am feared.

I have fought in every battle of every war for more than 200 years.
I was flown at Valley Forge, Gettysburg, Shiloh and Appamatox.
I was there at San Juan Hill, the trenches of France, in the Argonne Forest, Anzio, Rome and the beaches of Normandy.
Guam, Okinawa, Korea, KheSan and Saigon, Vietnam know me.
I was there. I led my troops.
I was dirty, battle-worn and tired,
but my soldiers cheered me and I was proud.

I have been burned, torn and trampled on the streets of countries
I have helped set free. It does not hurt for I am invincible.
I have been soiled upon, burned, torn and trampled in the streets of my country.
And when it’s done by those whom I’ve served in battle – it hurts.
But I shall overcome – for I am strong.
I have slipped the bonds of earth and
stood watch over the uncharted frontiers of space from my vantage point on the moon.
I have born silent witness to all of America’s finest hours.
But my finest hours are yet to come.
When I am torn into strips and used as bandages for my wounded comrades on the battle field,
when I am flown at half mast to honor my soldiers,
or when I lie in the trembling arms of a grieving parent at the grave of their fallen son or daughter,

I am proud.
I am the flag of the United States of America.

Al Torrisi is a natural leader and a forceful speaker at any time.  Yet his voice has a stronger, more commanding timbre (good for the 50-year owner of a large lumber company) than at other times when he recites these words.  Years of patriotism, loyalty and love of country spill forth as he speaks, infecting and affecting his listeners.  Truth is the most spiritual statement of all.  It is the truth of America and of every flag sponsor and honoree, and of the Field, itself.

As this is written the Exchange Club of Needham, Mass. has experienced vandalism of its Field of Honor with some 30 flags being burned.  The empty, sinking feeling a fellow Exchangite and field of Honor afficianado feels is hard to articulate.  Clearly the membrane of civilization is thin and easily sundered for those who cannot judge the presence of hatred for their own country that such an act exposes.  For shame.