Category Archives: Religion

Biden, Crime, Culture, Economics, Education, Elections, Family, Politics 2023, Religion, Responsibility, Sex

BEING A LONG SHORTLY – 5

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The importance of being vigilant

SEXUALITY

For some weird reasons: forms of moral communism, basically, sexuality has become a major element of elementary education and the business of thousands of men and women formerly respected as educators.  One wonders why there has been a virtual explosion of sexual deviance and why America tolerates it, let alone cements it in place with illogical legal protections.  The so-called LGBTQ+ “community” has shifted from seeking safety and tolerance to rabid dominance of culture and communications, and a legally enforced “right” to convert children to deviance in schools and elsewhere.  This abrupt, new trend is a sign of sickness in a culture.

Normalization of homosexuality was the beginning to a societal tolerance of deviant sexuality, but by itself, neither virulent nor threatening to our core morality.  Gay marriage, however, provided the breech in legality such that virulent deviance could force itself upon schools, society and families.  Proto-Communists in the schools and teachers’ unions, perceived gender confusion as an excellent tool for dividing society and weakening families: a key process to create totalitarian control of society.  How diabolically clever to choose as an “enemy” the widespread grasp of truth.  What is the most damaging effect of this subversion?

To answer that we need to establish some moral – and spiritual – ground rules.  It seems Prudent to reflect on life, itself.  It is fundamentally spiritual, in the majoritarian worldwide view.  There are too many “miraculous” events, large and small, that define, save and divert the lives of too many people to attribute everything to “luck.”  Even cultures that place great emphasis on “luck” are dependent on something “spiritual” – forms of super-natural forces. 

At the same time as “spiritual” beliefs or assumptions are at work, society, itself, must function for the maximum number of people.  That means food, safety, comfort, property and advancement.  All require stability and widespread agreement on rights and wrongs: ethics, courtesies and laws.  People had to cooperate in trusted and trusting ways.  The integrity and primacy of family units are essential, as are the education and acculturation of children.  Those who would disrupt – to the point of replacing the structure and strengths of – a successful society, recognize that disrupting families is the first and most effective step.  To some significant degree, those are people who are anti-spiritual, and in the case of America, anti-Christian in virulent ways.

Human sexuality, in nearly all family units, represents the creation of children, who are the descendants of that family line.  Grandparents are as keenly interested in that process as parents are.  Whatever interferes with conception, childbirth and acculturation of children, is striking at the essence of social success and of hope… for the future, one of those “spiritual” aspects of life.  To the disrupters, sexuality, in the soup of hypersexualization of “Western” civilization, became a weapon against American culture.

“Gay” marriage was a move spurred by compassion.  Once it had legal status, aggressive sex-weaponizers had a basis for demanding equal status in school settings: homosexuality now had to be taught along with heterosexuality, and not just about marriage.  Heterosexuality is – and always has been – normalcy: mothers and fathers produce children; boys and girls are different in “normal,” predictable ways; growing up takes place in predictable, “normal” patterns with predictable responsibilities, that ought to respond to parental and societal expectations.  The boundaries of ethics and law are equally recognized and predictable.  Progress occurs as does advancement, in that individuals become more skilled, more valuable in the economies of families and communities… and nations, and more spiritual.  Those formulas of cultural success are resilient, but only to a point.  Feminism, a re-ordering of relationships between men and women, perhaps inadvertently, provided political power to legalize increasingly non-normal sexual practices.  Gay marriage had opened the door a crack while a giant wedge of divisive realignment was poised, in the form of radical feminism, to jam it open to every form of deviant irresponsibility.  Our culture has, so far, failed to recognize the danger lurking within the virulent move to get children to renounce their true selves – basically denying responsibilities inherent in their genders and roles in a healthy society.  “Affirming” mental incongruities as more true than reality, has a very, very low rate of success.  The web of lies we call “laws,” should be unraveled.

ELECTIONS

The majesty of United States’ citizenship is taught – if taught at all – through detraction and condemnation.  Rare are the public, unionized schools where a deep understanding is gained by students, of the responsibilities imparted by our Constitution, Declaration and multiple other founding and originating documents and philosophies.  Freedom is not a gift from our forefathers, except as a door to the future that we, American citizens are obligated to pass through as leaders for this world.  We have the keys to progress, advancement and personal perfection in our hands; we have failed to implant it in the hearts of our children.  For most of us, the closest we come to that responsibility is in our role as voters – authorized choosers of America’s leadership, authorized lenders of power to those we choose to hold it.  That fundamental authority and power has been so corrupted as to be taken from us BY THE VERY PEOPLE we lend our nation’s representative powers to!

Some functions of democracy should not be computerized.  The stealing of elections has become virtually part of the background humor of the United States, and it’s a part of history, most especially in large cities.  The holding of public office in cities can, if manipulated successfully, provide great wealth and power over others.  Those positions will be defended and fought-for.  The rot of urban election theft has morphed, thanks to the mysterious wonders of computerized vote recording and tallying, into the theft of statewide and federal elections.

Voter lists are computerized and the printouts of those lists are available to official campaigns.  So, too, are lists of deceased or moved-away voters, and those who are ineligible for other reasons.  Fortunately for those who are willing to defraud the voting process, most of the ineligible voters are still listed among the names on the “voter” list.  A moderately sly campaign functionary can arrange for persons to go to the polls and vote in the name of ineligible, but still listed, voters.  It works, but is time consuming and risky.  How fabulous to have a “pandemic” strike the nation during a federal election year!  Resulting fears and medical ignorance (and mendacity) overrode legal and Constitutional strictures, enabling even more sly attorneys to win court cases allowing for “mail-in” ballots to “protect” voters from the scourge of COVID-19.

These mostly illegal changes under cover of a “national medical emergency,” were quickly stretched to allow ballot drop-boxes, official and unofficial, and then vote-harvesting from infirm voters, ostensibly.  Sympathetic election officials allowed ever wider interpretations of “safety” and “every vote should count,” which included every ballot – licit and illicit.  A handful of determined election fraudsters in mail-in states could, because of fellow-democrat fellow-travelers, sway tens and hundreds of thousands of invalid, but counted, “votes.” Even signature-match verification was disregarded in the interest of safety during a national medical emergency.  Computers helped, of course, providing unmonitored curing of “erroneous” ballots with new electronic records.  Damn the whole process.

Voting is the only sacrament in democracy.  We have allowed one party, basically, to corrupt voting and vote-counting to its benefit.  In 2020 these factors may have accounted for more than 8 million illicit votes.  It changed history and the resulting President is changing history more every day… not in good ways, at all.

How can this Jin be pushed back into its cave?  How can every election be trusted again?  What are the steps?  It requires a certain amount of automation, but no actual computerization and no internet connections to aggregation points or to state elections offices or to anywhere else.

First, hand-marked ballots, only.  Fill in the ovals or squares and let a machine scan them and count them.  A total is reported for each office.  Count the handful of write-ins, and pack up the ballots with a bar-coded wrapper.  A certified police officer transports that bundle to the single aggregation point near the state capitol.  There, that bundle is unwrapped and fed through a certified machine identical to the one in East Podunk that generated the draft, on-site total.  The stack is run through the second machine and the totals compared.  If they are exactly alike, the total is reported as final.

If the totals don’t agree the ballots are inspected by hand while monitored by poll watchers.  The stack is scanned again in a free-standing, non-networked machine.  At some point there will be two identical totals and that number is reported.  The total time to complete these steps might be 2 or 3 days, but the totals will be trustworthy.  Everything else that has been interjected into this process is bogus and serves only the convenience of government – and the purposes of the leftist party.  Absentee ballots should be only that, with significant reasons to avoid personally casting one’s ballot.

There should be no “early” voting, except, perhaps, for 2 or 3 days.  That will facilitate convenience without encouraging voting in ignorance of much of what might be exposed by the campaigns.  If the Post Office is to be involved in any significant way it should be to deliver registered ballots that must be signed-for by the requestor.  Then, ON A SPECIFIC DAY prior to Election Day, and involving no mail delivery on that day – perhaps a Saturday – Postal route personnel can pick up the ballots at the addresses to which they were delivered.  No wholesale mailings to untrustworthy “voting lists” and no ballot harvesting.

If we fail to secure our elections we fail to deserve the blessings of liberty.

BUDGETS

The term, “Budget” is not used in the Constitution.  Budgeting for government spending, however, is vitally important – it’s the only way to set a standard for the key functions of the Congress: raising revenue and appropriating it for legitimate government expenditures.  There are thousands of words in the U. S. Code relating to the President’s obligations to provide dozens of kinds and titles of data about programs and expenditures included in the President’s submitted budget.  Sadly, about three-quarters of “the budget” is considered permanent or “entitlements” or both at once, and therefore unchangeable by the people’s representatives, despite having been created by those same worthies on behalf of those same people.  Technically, EVERY element in the budget may be modified or removed.  However, virtually every aspect of federal expenditure has its own advocacy group, mostly political.  With Congress’ primary purposes being re-election and not the “people’s business,” no part of the budget that could have a negative impact politically, will be touched, except to increase it.

With a $32 Trillion federal debt, a large fraction of the sub-chapters of the budget must be “touched,” cut or eliminated.  They cannot all grow in every budget cycle, including payrolls, welfare entitlements pensions and other hot-button items.  There is no reason to expect that the Congress as constituted and elected, is going to ever balance expenditures and revenues, let alone cut any one of them.  The collapse of the U. S. economically is being led and accelerated by government debt and deficit spending.  All processes of taxation and revenue accumulation have failed to enhance America’s economic strength of freedom, nor has it done very much to increase the prosperity of a majority of Americans.  We feel like we’re becoming more wealthy, higher real estate prices and so forth, perhaps larger retirement funds, but our money is worth less every year and a lot of what we think we’ve gained is “balanced” by those trillions in debt.  Most of us will not be ready when the decline becomes a rout.

Our wonderful – magical – Federal Reserve Bank was given vital power by Congress in 1913: to coin money and set the value thereof.  Along with that sloughing off of Constitutional power, Congress also provided “the Fed” the magical power to loan money to the federal government, even when it doesn’t have money to actually lend.  So, it lends air and charges interest on it.  The federal government owes so much that it must borrow money to pay the interest on previous loans.  That amounts to three-quarters of a trillion dollars this year.  Only the most irresponsible presidential administration would run a greater-than-Trillion-dollar deficit in its budget in the face of this unprecedented indebtedness.

The history of the past 60 years has made the budget process of the U. S. federal government, an increasingly fraudulent exercise.  The fraud is perpetrated upon the American people, in the main, but also on every holder of dollars in the world, as the value of each dollar slips downward, year by year… sometimes week-by-week.

Prudence would dictate a different course for our ship of state, but we won’t see that happen under Democrat control of the White House.

And we’re still not done?

Climate, Culture, Environment, Foreign Policy, Governance, Politics 2023, Religion, Responsibility

THE GREAT POLAR SHIFT

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Any mention of “climate” over the past, say, 40 years, has always been fraught with the effects of “good” or “evil” thinking.  No matter where one lands on the spectrum of how much humans can effect changes in Earth’s climate, it is instructive to step back from personal fears or certainties and evaluate the phenomenon of “climate change” as political force.  Historically, political movements have centered on efforts that will produce changes that most adherents will experience if successful.  Fighting over abortion, for example will, within 9 months at most, yield a result.  The result might manifest in a few hours or days with the cessation of creation, but most certainly in about 270 days or so.  People can rally around reality and changes thereto.

Climate, however, that changes over decades and centuries, is a little harder to “pin down” when it comes to fears and certainties, so the people who have concocted the worst fears into a soup of political manipulation based on events that most followers, or fellow travelers on the anthropomorphic climate train, will never experience… are to be commended for their amorphous success.  Regardless of the fears that drive them, the only “changes” that their followers will enjoy, as it were, are losses of freedom and personal sovereignty.  Remarkable.

What if science revealed a change humans have made that has the actual potential to completely revamp Earth’s climate and even its geography?  Would it cause true international cooperation to reverse or counter it?  Or, would it hasten the takeover of national identities and create the one-world socialist Hell that many climate alarmists are in favor of?  Unfortunately, these are not idle questions, anymore.

Scientists – geologists and others – have noticed tiny aberrations in Earth’s rotation.  Several years ago they calculated that the filling of the 3 Gorges Dam in China had changed the location of enough millions of tons of water, plus the huge volume of concrete in the dam structure, itself, to perturb the Earth’s rotation around its axis.  Wow… who knew our engineering could have that large an impact?  Fast forward to 2022.

The Earth is wobbling a little more.  Scientists have studied the wobbles in part because the magnetic north pole has been shifting eastward much more rapidly than expected, whereas it had been slowly drifting westward for some years prior.  There appears to be a little more rotational wobble connected to the shift of the poles and, knowing that human engineering is massive enough to affect the wobble, scientists have been looking at other possible hydrological effects.

It turns out that it’s human activity that is putting the stability of the PLANET(!) at risk, and it has nothing to do with our “carbon footprints.”  Global warming, freezing, the melting of glaciers, will all be as nothing if the processes that have resulted in the current rotational disturbances are not reversed and replaced with something else.  “Oh, come on,” you say.  “How can anything be worse than climate change?  What ‘processes’ are you trying to scare us with?”

Water… which is to say, moving water around – putting it into storage or taking it out of storage.  We talked about the Three Gorges Dam, which changed flowing waters into stored waters.  At the other end of process, we take water out of the ground – out of huge aquifers – essentially out of the largest storage systems there are.  Humans need water and public health and prosperity require “clean” water, not always available from surface, recycled waters.  Humans need food, too, and food requires water.  The best soil is rarely where the most fresh water is, or so we believed until we figured out that the biggest fresh-water lakes were under the ground.  Hi-Ho, irrigation! … and the original “green revolution” that actually does a great deal of good.

However, just like putting a small bit of weight on the side of a top, the earth is wobbling as it spins at 1,000 miles per hour due to our rearrangement of fairly large amounts of weight.  When huge volumes of water come out of the ground they become surface water that either evaporates or runs off into the sea.  Where they were becomes much lighter.  For India, for example, the volume of lake Erie leaves their aquifers every two years.  That is, 50.2 Million tons of water is pumped to the surface every year!  From there it runs off ultimately to the Indian Ocean, spreading its weight across the globe.  Even for Mother Earth, that starts to add up. And in 10 or 20 years it’s enough to change her balance.  But, so what?  We don’t even notice the wobble.  Here’s where the warning comes into play.

At some point, and that point is not certain, but we are heading toward it, the wobble will, literally, and in a destructively short time – perhaps a couple of days or so – cause the earth to roll over to a new axis of rotation that is “balanced” with the changes we have made.  That is, the heaviest parts of the “top” that is our planet, will shift to the equator, and that new equator will be halfway between the new poles, north and south.  The lightest parts will have shifted closer to the poles.  And it won’t take long for these shifts to occur.  What will the surface of the earth experience?

Among other cataclysms, there will be earthquakes of immeasurable amplitude, and in lots of places that haven’t been along known faults.  Unfortunately, most people will be unable to pay attention to earthquakes because of the super-hurricane-strength winds that precede the largest tsunamis ever imagined: hundreds of feet high, as the oceans slosh over most of the land.  It is hard to predict any region that will be able to ride out the Great Polar Shift with only survivable damage.  One set of predictions places Europe at the new North Pole.  Not much of a growing season after the waters subside, there.  Chicago, in that scientifically and mathematically considered postulate, would be on the new equator.  God forbid it all.

These natural disasters are far more likely than any of the fears with which “climate change” acolytes have twisted so many people’s politics.  Will the Great Shift happen in the next 10 years?  No one can tell.  What can be told is that, barring a huge change in water management, worldwide, the shift will eventually happen.  What can we do?

There are three major goals in Prudence’ view: 1) Cease draining aquifers, everywhere, and allow them to refill – takes a century or more – this will require a global shift to ocean desalinization, the production from which will have negligible effects on weight distribution.   2) Gradually eliminate giant dams everywhere, replacing them with simpler, smaller, flood-control dams and intentional flood plains.  3) Engineer and re-engineer nuclear power-plant designs so that hydro-power can be replaced and exceeded, facilitating economic advancement for all nations… cleanly.

There may be a fourth goal, as well: thanking our lucky stars – and God – that we paid attention to warning signs in time to avoid our own extinction.

Crime, Culture, Economics, Environment, Health Care, Politics 2023, Religion, Responsibility

Street PEOPLE

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Quality of life…

Homelessness, despite its explosive increase in the past 30 years, still feels like an exception, an anomaly in the grand, prosperous and self-righteous tableau that is America.  How can so many be living “on the street,” basically, in a country with so many resources and so comprehensive a political infrastructure?  Liberalism causes otherwise rational people to defend the RIGHTS of the mentally ill, weird or addicted and largely uncivilized people to sleep in public places.  Eventually, their rights to urinate and defecate in public places are also “recognized.”  Due to some dislocation in the logical thinking of other liberals who consider themselves civilized (living in houses, indoor plumbing, decent ‘human’ activities and some form of productive wealth), residents of the same jurisdiction are permitted by virtue of the existence of other “rights,” to make their ways around the city, including eating in restaurants and entering various other businesses, in the nude.  Once good sense is breeched, the uncrossable lines of civilized decency become harder and harder to discern.

To varying degrees, many municipalities have descended into some form of what San Francisco has become a leader of.  Prior to the last 20 to 30 years western civilization, largely founded according to Judeo-Christian beliefs and ethics, was endeavoring to advance in terms of human civilization, habits and public, interactive, practices.  That direction has reversed.  That reversal seems to be centered in and controlled by liberals, leftists and socialists.  Conservatives are distinctly unimpressed by these trends, if not disgusted – as seems Prudent.

This accelerating retreat from good sense makes almost every “civilized” resident very uncomfortable.  It has seeped out into criminal justice to the point that criminals are coddled while ultra-liberal prosecutors expand the list of crimes for which punishment and retribution are no longer very important.  But the trend started with rampant and financially-encouraged homelessness – all of which programs have failed despite the millions of explanations of success by those same liberal politicians.  Liberal “government” has foresworn any moral judgment to the point that anywhere it can insert some “public” monies must also eliminate morality as a shared ethic.

The Prudent approach is to recognize that life is better, safer, cleaner, more productive and successful when the vast majority of the population – and its “governors” – share a basic morality.  In such a civilized environment certain behaviors and practices are not allowed for sensible reasons of health, public safety, compassion and cleanliness.  We can begin the return to civilization by ending the “root causes” of homelessness.  This will require the enforcing of laws despite the chagrin of some who are incorrigible – both homeless and “normal.”

Block by block, street-sleepers have to be rounded up and held in temporary – emphasis on temporary – facilities for evaluation.  Which of them are addicted?  Which truly mentally ill?  There won’t be any free needles or free drugs… only compassionate detox, physical clean-up and healthy food.  Every person will be required to adhere to rules in order to eat, hunger being the universal motivator.  Those who are clinically determined to be mentally ill will be treated, possibly medicated if it will help, and housed separately… depending on the nature of supportive bonds with others, mentally ill or not.  Instead of spending tens of millions of dollars on better tents or other free stuff that facilitates living on the streets, every person will be rehabilitated to the best degree possible.  Vocational training will be offered within controlled circumstances.  For many this will be a refresher for skills that used to support them before addiction took over.  Each will have to work in some way to earn his or her room and board.  Each should also be offered contact with religious people, ministers, or others.  There is always hope.

In a sense it is a program of second chances, but not a second chance to live on the street.  For those whose mental illness can’t be controlled, proper institutionalization is needed – not “warehousing” of humans, modified assisted living.  Nearly every state has a history of terrible handling of the mentally ill.  It always offended Prudence to hear about bad treatment and terrible conditions that seemed to go on and on… for years and decades.  Were those the only solutions human beings could come up with?  Was there someone else who could be blamed for the cruelty and stupidity that marked so many mental hospitals?

No, it was us, the same people who threw up their hands and closed the awful facilities and “mainstreamed” mentally ill people.  Every person living “homeless,” can be helped, rehabilitated made more healthy and given / offered new direction and opportunity to take good care of themselves.  If your politicians don’t agree, get some new ones.  Politicians who are willing to run on a platform of honesty would be the best place to start.

Take a look at: https://www.prudenceleadbetter.com/2019/12/26/new-life-town/

Crime, Culture, Economics, Education, Elections, Governance, Politics 2022, Religion, Representation

Constitutionally Speaking

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…A Republic if you can keep it.

Wise humans generally have tried to select their leaders from among those who think logically relative to the traditions and cultural mores of the society.  Those who would be leaders, but who tend to propose completely opposite ideas and beliefs at proximate times, are generally rejected for positions of leadership, and denied power over the “people” who have sought leaders who will protect their families and partner in achieving greater safety, comfort and wealth.  Along the way, their leaders are expected to protect and strengthen the children so that society will grow, be strong and continue.

In earlier times, especially when education was not widespread – mainly reserved to self-selected religious leaders and somewhat self-selected royal families – populations accepted their statuses as serfs and peasants for whom reverence of their “leaders” was how safety for themselves and their families was increased, including food security.  Things changed as education became “public.”  Wisdom and philosophies from the “ancient” past spread among millions of thoughtful humans, some of whom refined and expanded on the “pure” ideas of the Greeks, Hebrews, Romans, Persians and many others, interpreting human interactions amidst the “new” realities of economics, civic participation and independence.

Great minds eventually proscribed the foundational ideas of the United States, and they are quite simple!

Underlying the simplicity of the Constitution are principles of preventing or avoiding the proven tendencies of the worst of human nature to gain power and wealth at the expense of others: tyranny of one form or another.  Let’s consider the simple ideas and the assumptions on which they are dependent.  Our founders designed “self-government” against the backdrop of tyrannies they had seen and fought, both religious and monarchical, as well as militaristic.  They could not include tools designed to thwart the new tyrannies defined and refined by Marxism in the middle of the 19th century. That is our job, today.

The first simple idea, upon which our survival depended then and does, now: religious freedom.  Education in the late 18th century was based largely upon religious philosophies and structures of good and evil as spread by and through churches and prelates of all kinds, mostly Christian, and by locally hired teachers.  The vast majority of Americans shared basic beliefs in right and wrong as they ratified the Constitution; they never imagined that within a few generations the vast majority of Americans – AND THEIR CHURCHES – would no longer agree upon the principles of right and wrong and self-discipline.  The functioning of Constitutional republicanism depends upon “the people” being a moral, self-disciplined body politic.  To participate in and manage a republic, requires that its members – citizens – be educated in its principles and practices.  Sadly, this is no longer the case.

The second simple idea is representation.  A people who have learned to choose their representatives such that those so chosen will guard the people from the worst excesses of executive rulers, will, if properly educated, keep a civic eye on those representatives, in our case, on members of the House of Representatives.  Our Founders believed, based on a social compact within which nearly everyone shared common rights and wrongs, that representing people in the many states, would remain a mission of honor and fealty to their constituents.  They never imagined that election to Congress would become such a lucrative opportunity for personal gain, that re-election, and the many corruptions that facilitate re-election, would replace the proper role of service and honor.  “The People’s House” is no longer a place of honor but for a few.  Americans must educate themselves about the original purpose and model for representation, and MAKE THE CONSTITUTIONAL CHANGES required to restore representation to the primary purpose – and effect – of election to “The House.”

The third simple idea is states’ rights.  That is, that the Federal government is limited to those functions that states cannot do for themselves, and that the powers not granted to the Federal Government, or prohibited to it, are reserved to the states, respectively, or to the people.  Senators are supposed to represent the interests of the States; they are not supposed to be longer-serving, at-large representatives of the people.  They are supposed to be selected by the state legislatures to represent the STATES, guarding their rights and powers in a federal, not NATIONAL system of governance.  Because of the failures of some state legislatures during the late 1800’s and early 1900’s, leaving Senate seats unfilled, Congress proposed the 17th Amendment and it was ratified with little delay.  Since then, 6-year-term Senators have been elected similarly to 2-year-term Representatives.  Thus were the constituencies of Senators changed from their state governments to the general populations of states, which changed the responsibilities of Senators.  Being elected “at large” means that Senate candidates have, ever since, been able to lie at varying levels of effectiveness, twisting truth and news, particularly for incumbents, to gain popular vote victories. 

If the Senator in question had to answer to members of his or her state’s legislature, men and women who, to some greater degree, know what is going on and what they instructed their Senator to do, then the re-election/appointment landscape would be far, far different than the amorphous, dishonest campaigning that works with popular-vote elections.  Prior to the 17th Amendment, states’ senators had to answer for what they did in Washington.  It would be very good to repeal the 17th and make Senators responsible to SOMEBODY.  The chance of senators being re-elected for 24, 30 or 36 years, would be much reduced: a good thing.

The fourth simple idea is equal application of the laws.  The fundament of individual sovereignty and freedom is equal STATUS under the laws.  Our Bill of Rights, without which the Constitution would have never been ratified, or even considered for ratification by some states, codifies the assumptions that underlay the debates that developed the Constitution.  Madison and others believed that having won independence from a powerful monarchy, under which laws and persecutions were applied differently to citizens deemed by the monarch to be favored or unfavored, had cemented the concepts of equal application of law into the American people.  In fact, the ability of governments of any type: elected or hereditary, to become tyrannical, was bound to color the debates.  The likelihood that executive authority will garner power not specifically granted to it, is historically likely.  Government can NEVER be trusted to control itself on behalf of even the highest principles.  The rules limiting the power of government and protecting the unalienable rights of every person, had to be part of the proposed Constitution.  Ratification was effected by legislative agreement of three-fourths of the states; the formation of a FEDERAL government was a function of the STATES and not even of popular vote.

Let’s repeat that concept: the Federal Government is a creation of the states.  The power and rights of, now, 50 STATES, are SUPERIOR to the powers of the Federal Government.  How foreign this truth sounds.  It means that criminal laws as well as civil laws, are primarily the business of states, and that federal laws should be few in number and limited in scope to matters of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and other amendments, and matters of military justice and treason.  It also means that federal police powers and the so-called “F.B.I.” should be severely limited in terms of interactions with individual citizens.  Things have changed, to say the least.

The fifth simple idea is the ELECTORAL COLLEGE, which provides a mechanism of election of the Chief Executive Officer / Commander-in-Chief, free of undue influence from Congress or from direct democracy.  Our Founders understood the inherent dangers of pure democracy and that democracy, alone, would quickly yield tyranny of shifting majorities.  This is why so many mechanisms dividing power between states and the federal system, between states and pure democracy, and between citizens and their representatives, are built into the Constitution.  Lately, many on the Left have complained about the Electoral College, always touting the “popular vote” as having favored a losing Presidential ticket.  Needless to say, the popular vote is meaningless in presidential politics.  The Electoral college makes sure that presidents are elected by the States, not by popular vote.  The U. S. holds 50 state elections for 50 slates of electors who are committed to a presidential ticket.  While electors are related to representative numbers: 2 senators per state plus the number of representatives per state, presidential tickets must win the majority of presidential electors, state by state.  Both large and small states are important to the final total.  Presidents are elected by the states, not through direct democracy.

Those who want to get rid of the Electoral College are those who want government to be empowered through pure democracy, and they are not to be trusted with real power.

Another simple idea, relative to the Executive authority, is that Congress must declare war, not the President.  Under monarchies, the monarch can dictate foreign policy and declare war when he or she doesn’t get what he or she desires.  Again, to limit the concentration of power in the executive branch, our founders anticipated that Congress’ interests would be closer to the people and rarely in complete agreement with the Chief Executive.  What was never anticipated was that both the House and Senate would be so willing to avoid responsibility for much of anything, and so willing to relinquish powers to the executive bureaucracies of unelected rule-makers, as is attractive to communists.  Like all contracts and covenants, they are only as good as the quality and integrity of the parties to them.

Our founders, likewise, never anticipated that Congress would devise a means of creating perpetually growing public debt (in the form of the extra-constitutional “Federal Reserve” Check out: http://www.prudenceleadbetter.com/2020/09/27/knife-edge-election/).  In 1789 people – and governments – had to pay their debts before more loans would be offered; today we raise the “debt ceiling” so that we might borrow enough to pay only the interest on previous debts, let alone pay down the principals.  This results in our “representatives” failing utterly to represent the interests of the people each is paid handsomely to represent… adding annually to the peoples’ debt burden and being re-elected despite having done so.

The SUPREME COURT is a simple idea, although modern beliefs complicate it beyond reason.  The Constitution provides federal judges, including Supreme Court Justices, with lifetime appointments.  The purpose is to insulate justices from political whims and winds of change, and, presumably, allow them to hold firmly to the meaning of the Constitution’s words as ever newer, unanticipated legal problems emerge.  Politics has caused never anticipated complications to the balancing work of the Supreme Court.  Elected men and women have added to the responsibilities of the Federal government beyond anything the Founders could have imagined.  The lines between Constitutional powers and protections of individual rights, have become broader and diffuse as politicians have found political power in the invention of new “rights,” many based on falsehoods.  The Left’s penchant for changing the definitions of words has made “equal protection under the law” nearly impossible; foolish politicians have passed laws to accommodate false definitions and whimsical “realities.”  The supreme court is tested to find narrow truths amidst broadened political fantasies.

Yet, the concept of a final arbiter of our Constitutional protections is both wise and essential.  That the U. S. was founded in the presence of printing and publications, forms of mail service and book-binding, kept our founders mindful of the spread of new ideas and opinions.  Launching the new nation on a “ship” of ideals required that some mechanism of preserving and reinforcing those ideas and ideals was essential.  The Supreme Court, almost inadvertently, became that mechanism, thanks to the innovative application of its limited powers by Chief Justice John Marshall.

Finally, the NINTH and TENTH amendments are a combined, simple idea.  Hardly any of our student youth are taught about the Constitution, and few of them, or even of their parents, have knowledge or opinions about the last two amendments of the Bill of Rights.

Amendment 9 admonishes the FEDERAL GOVERNMENT that the rights named and listed in the Constitution – rights of individuals – cannot be construed to “deny or disparage” others (rights) retained by the people.  This is worth contemplating every day and upon every election:  The rights that are inherent in every citizen (unalienable rights), ARE NOT LIMITED to only those “enumerated” in the text of the Constitution, NOR can the constitution be employed to limit any of them!  These few words are quite possibly the most important and far-reaching in our Constitutional system.  EVERY piece of legislation and every surreptitious new regulation that spews forth from the tens of thousands of unelected bureaucrats, should be evaluated BY OUR (ostensible) REPRESENTATIVES as to its neutrality toward or protection of our inherent rights as individual citizens.  What a different “official” status we are each entitled to, than what we are now saddled with.

The 10th Amendment, in effect, reserves to the STATES, much as the 9th reserves to the people, all powers not specifically delegated to the federal government by the Constitution.  It then goes beyond the power of states and reserves the rest to the people, again.  This remarkable Constitution is unique in world history, and exceptional.  The rights secured to the citizens of the United States are exceptional among all the nations.  How is it that we have elected so many to Congress and even to the White House, who do not agree with what the Constitution says and promises to us as citizens?

Dear readers and fellow citizens, the simplest, most Prudent idea of all is to learn, teach, discuss, and study the Constitution and the thinking that supported its ultimate design.  Our students are deprived of the ONLY knowledge that will keep us and them, free.  If you have the ability to communicate to whomever is educating your children, insist that they, and all other teachers, produce high-school graduates who understand our rights and powers as U. S. citizens.

Culture, Economics, Education, Governance, Politics 2022, Race, Religion, Representation

All Christmas Matters

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Boston Rescue Mission

As the Christ Mass approaches we tend to – are obligated to – place our most prized results of our year of labor and multiplication upon the altar, proving our willingness to sacrifice for God and thanks to God.  It’s metaphysical… in a non-computerized sort of way.  God, of course, doesn’t need our sacrifices, he needs the act of sacrificing.  He needs that expression of love, and so do we.

There’s a lot of charity flowing at this time of year, as you surely notice.  Charity is an act of selfless, as in “non-selfish” love; acts of love with no physical benefit in return.  Of course those and their organizations whose appeals we may answer as Christmas nears, do their best to thank all who gave of our supply of time or treasure, but acts of charity don’t require such recognition.  Thanking is certainly good manners, sometimes done to ensure future charity and, truth be known, most humans resent the lack of thanks, but it’s not a true factor in the equation of love or of its charitable expression.

We humans are beings defined, or measured, by economics.  We consistently judge the values of giving and receiving, thanks for a gift… or for charity.  It’s not always a healthy calculation, nor is it part of the love equation.  Or, of the charity equation.  Love, or charity, is an aetheric substance.  What we do here on Earth is a rather crude reflection of the pure, spiritual development that happens to and for our higher selves, our non-physical selves.  Except, we can’t manifest things to and for other humans without being in the physical plane, as it were.  If we are, someday, accepted into the plane where our soul is supposed to be, love is an automatic manifestation, not a choice.  Here, amidst a thousand distractions and evil opportunities, love and charity are a decision – sometimes a difficult one.  If you find it easy to express love for others and to sacrifice for others, count your blessings.

One of the tests we must pass is how to not slip through the diaphanous membrane between love and hate.  Hatred is often expressed towards ourselves, where it is most damaging.  It may be as simple as a mistake, even just dropping something, spilling something… stupid stuff.  Immediately we chastise ourselves in words we’d never apply to another, certainly never towards someone we love.  If our spouse or child experiences something irritating, an accident, a time-consuming error that makes him or her angry, your usual reaction is to sooth and help in resolving the problem.  Yet when we do something similar, ourselves, we immediately express self-hatred for our failing to do something smarter.  Prudence can’t explain why it works this way, but “the force,” God, the Universe, or Life, cannot deliver the best, most fortunate opportunities to you if you are immersed in hatred of yourself, OR, toward others.  It’s an equation: Love fits into it but hatred never does.  Love yourself – you are a product of love and of an investment by your mother and others of love.  You never deserve to be hated.

The greatest gift we can give, whether at Christmas or on any morning, is to review and refresh the love you are giving to yourself and others.  Even in mundane, economic interactions like sales, the advice always is to imagine that you love the stranger you would like to have a sales relationship with, before you pick up the phone or walk into an office.  It seems to make the interaction far more successful.  Prudence can testify to this effect.

How different might all interactions be if every human projected love toward his or her correspondents.  Unfortunately, our society and politics, even our elementary schools and teachers(!), spend much of their efforts at teaching children and grownups alike to hate others.  What a gross distortion of the life opportunities God gives us every year and day.

Children, most sadly, are taught not just hatred of their race or skin color, but hatred of their selves.  If born male, they are taught to forego the responsibilities of manhood and to pretend to be female; if born female, they are taught to forego the majesty of motherhood and to pretend to be male: two special forms of self-hatred.  Part of the self-hatred process involves separation from parents and other relatives who won’t “confirm” their new sexual outlook.  Learning to no longer trust one’s parents is a giant step toward hating them or, at least, hating their roles.

Children can be, and should be, taught to love themselves… not to hate themselves… or others.  Like Critical Gender Theory, Critical Race Theory is an agenda based on hatred. 

Questions of race and slavery generate peculiar ripples of hatred, essentially only in the United States.  Millions are caught up in them, especially politicians of various stripes, who have learned that constant aggravation of these questions can yield political influence.  Such influence is fruitful within a population of people who “enjoy” rubbing hatreds raw, including within themselves.  Foolishly, politicians have figured out that hatred can be not only powerful, but profitable.  Still, the strong feelings do not, and cannot, lead to solutions or transformation into positive feelings, outlooks and cooperation.

There are truths about slavery… and falsehoods.  There are truths about racism… and falsehoods.  Falsehoods seem to prevail, but truths about both subjects are immediately seized upon to draw false conclusions and false premises about what some true piece of history should force upon people of today.  Just the fact of slavery in the past has proven sufficient reason to never stop hating, as evidenced by the renewed, and listened-to demands for “reparations.”  Reparations justify hatred for white-skinned people: apparently whites owe an undying debt to blacks because of slavery.  Whites, it seems, are prone to guilt over having succeeded in mastering so many sciences and skills.  Not all skills, of course, but whites pioneered in many skills that not only have created comfortable standards of living and great wealth, but which have benefitted virtually all peoples on the planet.  Perfectly?  Absolutely not.

If we are waiting to stop feeling guilty until we are perfect, no less, we’ll wait forever.  That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t become better.  But, are the children guilty of the sins of their parents?  Only by choice and training; those who decidedly choose a better path than their ancestors, better ways to treat and interact with everyone else, skin color notwithstanding, should be respected and loved as anyone might be loved.  There’s no guilt appropriate.  Unfortunate and deceitful politics, however, casts all whites into the guilty column because some of their forbears owned slaves or mistreated blacks following slavery.  What is owed to whom, today?

One of whites’ imperfections is an expectation that money can replace sin – the monetization of guilt.  It is the fundament of perpetual welfare and the social welfare state.  Perhaps handing over money for no value will convert hatred for whites into love for whites.  That seems doubtful based on the “success” of the Great Society.  Otherwise, every welfare recipient would run into the street to hug any taxpayer who wanders by their less-than-ideal, welfare-provided home.  Nope.  Giving free stuff makes only the most temporary of friendships and quickly reverts to resentment.  The only “reparations” of any value or consequence to the quality of life for anyone, is teaching a person how to succeed in our culture, perhaps even helping that person to succeed for a limited time.  But locking that person into perpetual victim-hood and welfare-poverty is a system designed to destroy that persons humanity and worth, yet we persist at it, waiting for the miracle socialists promise.

For their part, far too many blacks believe that destroying the society and culture whites have succeeded in, is going to make their lives better and balance the cosmic scales, somehow.  That approach requires perpetual hatred and resentment – there is no love that is part of it.  One doesn’t steal, loot, destroy and burn the work of others out of love.  One doesn’t teach others to hate anyone, let alone a group, or to hate themselves… out of love.  This is why socialism is an abject, deceitful lie: it is premised on the belief of the inability of the individual to elevate him- or herself, improving skills and understandings and esteem while teaching him or her to love the good in everyone and to strive against the bad.  Under socialism, all trust is placed in others, mostly unknown.

Interestingly, America is full of blacks who have raised themselves up by working within the system and then transcending the system, leading the rest of us to better ourselves.  In almost every field, great, accomplished black-skinned Americans have excelled and led.  Why not emulate them instead of hating whites?  Crappy politics, that’s why.  Since the Clintons popped into the White House, hatred has become the overarching driver of political action: not freedom, not justice, not improvement of living standards, not wisdom in foreign policy, not budgeting on behalf of American citizens, not “America first.”  Despite constant accusations from the Democrat left, most of the hatred emanates from Democrats and their allies.  Yes, there are haters on both sides of the divide, but the distinction between left and right is gigantic, culminating in the Communist uprisings in 2020 and the Covid pandemic.  There weren’t “right-wingers” burning America in 2020. 

There weren’t right-wingers creating and pushing Covid across the planet, or creating and pushing ersatz vaccines into every body.  Those were the works of the left.  Why?

It wasn’t to increase individual freedom or to balance the budget; it wasn’t to prevent inflation of the monetary supply or to strengthen energy independence and the U. S. balance of payments with other countries; it wasn’t to solve our weak border enforcement, improve public safety, reduce the rate of drug overdoses and deaths or to strengthen the rights guaranteed by the Bill of Rights in any way.  Why would a political movement take significant, even drastic steps that weaken the United States of America?

Well, aside from enrichening its adherents, it would be to, well… weaken the United States.

Love of country makes us stronger; hatred of it makes us weaker.  To govern and legislate in conformity with the warped ideas of the World Economic Forum and with the corrupted, communistic ideas of the United Nations, is to express hatred for the United States.  To promulgate policies, persecutions and punishments that divide Americans into two classes – favored and hated – is to DIS-unite the previously United States: hatred.

This is the time of this most important year, when love of others, of law, of nation, of selves and of God, should be foremost in all of our intentions, yet our politics has failed us, creating problems that our democratic republic can’t solve, while rewarding hatred as the means to power.  Let us pray as we see fit to return ourselves to a transcendent path, not the descendent path we’re on. 

Culture, Economics, Education, Family, Politics 2022, Religion

Greatitude

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Alter us

There are so many things to think about, wonder about, dream of or simply, profoundly contemplate… at Christmastime.  Modern society provides thousands of distractions to contemplative thought, even of religious thought.  It confuses young and old and even quite intelligent people, who, many of them, find comfort in overthrowing traditions and beliefs that, however jerkily, created pathways of progress and even enlightenment.  Enlightenment’s end will be realized when “woke” ideologies capture the last government.

Christmas takes place at the altar of God, like it or not.  Mankind is obligated to bring gifts of thanks to the Creator, gifts derived from multiplying what we have been given for a full year’s cycle of days and nights, pains and suffering, triumphs and failures, loves and losses, lives and deaths, babies and aged cadavers.  If we manage to not be destructively distracted, we have much to offer our Creator, and offer it we must.  This is not a new or even a “Christian” concept.  Most religious traditions include significant measures of time, “moons,” seasons and solstices.  The traditions that built our civilization caused the development of calendars that have a clear beginning and ending, recognized by everyone.  Those who understood the segments of time and lengths of daylight hours gained great influence.  As God and His prophets explained and taught spiritual laws, it was into the traditions of our incipient civilization that they fit them.  As much as the first day of a new year is meaningful about beginnings, plans and courage to attempt new things, the end of the year is important for tallying the results and expressing gratitude for the victories and challenges thereof. 

That there is believed to be a cycle of receiving and giving and of giving and receiving, all of which may contribute to a better destiny after one’s earthly life is finished, formed the basis of ethics, charity and hard work, and, it can be said, of honesty and personal responsibility.  Populations that share these concepts develop individual consciences and the greatest of all gifts: self-control.  This very capability is essential – indispensable – for the creation and maintenance of a personal relationship with God, God by any name, and, clearly, for the establishment of the democratic republic of the United States of America.

Many are alive today who, as socialists also do, believe that their purpose in life is to take as much advantage of society as possible.  They expect levels of wealth, comfort and licentious rights as though by magic.  Many don’t work or produce anything of useful value to others.  If they are in college due to signed loan contracts, they tend to agitate energetically for “the government” to absorb their debts, as if they who signed those contracts were magically absolved of a solemn promise.  It is an extraordinary expectation with literally no prior basis in law or social organization.  Such an outlook is the diametric opposite of accepting an annual opportunity to live, multiply and serve others, and laying the results on the altar at the conclusion of the annual cycle.  Education, parenting and religion have failed these people.

The American holiday, Thanksgiving, fits our founding philosophies perfectly.  As we approach the end of each year, we are reminded unceasingly that it is time to give thanks for the blessings of freedom and of our Constitutional governance.  Amongst the football, shopping, road-races and overeating, families and friends come together, let’s hope without conflict, where, even if not articulated, being thankful seeps in to the most unaware.  But, thankful to whom?

Some might think they are thanking the government… for the good fortune that has found them in the United States.  Yet the government spends most of its time limiting our freedom, not something to thank anyone for.  However, we do enjoy a good fraction of the freedom that was present at our founding and we should be thankful for that.  We still enjoy a measure of personal responsibility, the one ingredient in freedom that makes our personal choices meaningful as it makes our lives meaningful.  Government seems to be actively eliminating personal responsibility as though everything good or bad that happens is a social consequence, not a personal one.  That’s not what – or whom – we are thankful for, either.

Like love, hate or forgiveness, thankfulness is uniquely human.  So, too, is the ability to worship.  This combination of human attitudes and abilities is why socially sensitive civilizations exist.  Add to them the sense of sacrifice that spurs preparation for a better future for ourselves and for others, and some of the most sublime philosophies of social organization, economics and government can be understood.  The greatest advances of science and medicine would be impossible without certain attitudes, including sacrifice.  These are attitudes common to what we call, “human nature,” and which are fought against consistently by philosophies of what we call, “socialism.”

Humans have a further grant from, well, their creator… certainly not from any government.  We call it “free will” and it refers to the opportunity to choose from evil, which is to say, “away from evil.”  Clearly, God (I’ll use “God” – easier to type, you know) brought humans into being on a planet where “free will” would always be tested against the blandishments of evil.  Freedom will exist only so long as the young are taught about it and of it and, if truth be told, so long as God is worshipped.  No form of governance that denies those understandings is able to keep people out of tyranny.  For those who have eyes to see and ears to hear, and hearts to maintain the courage of free will, I am thankful.

“The life of the nation is secure only while the nation is honest, truthful, and virtuous.”  Frederick Douglass

“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” John Adams

Culture, Family, Health Care, Politics 2022, Religion, Sex

IF I ONLY HAD A BRAIN

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Sun Tsu teaches that to defeat one’s enemy one must know who (or what) it is.  The enemy, in its own defense, will always try to deceive, creating artifices against which its victim can expend great effort and resources, weakening itself to the point where the attacker can triumph with few losses.  We call these artifices “Straw Men.”

So it is with good and evil.  Evil never has strong footing but is very clever at creating false targets or disguises of its true purposes.  Good can dissipate evil in a heartbeat but, being more trusting, gets diverted away from the target evil and even allies with it for a time, believing there is some greater good being served.  And so it is with abortion.

The evil that is expressed through abortion is very clever.  Abortion, we are told – and sold – is an expression of freedom and even civil rights.  Most of us respect “freedom” and are quick to defend it.  Most of us feel the same about individuals’ “civil rights,” and “Constitutional rights” even more.   Being thoughtful and caring, most of us hate to admit that we have been deceived into defending evil when our whole intention is to defend rights, freedom and the Constitution – all “straw men” in this battle.

It doesn’t matter whether our core beliefs are religious, although such are great resources to bring into the battle against “abortion: “abortion” being the industry of the practice, now infecting medicine and even churches.  Agnostics and atheists are free, certainly, to question our spiritual underpinnings as archaic or no longer relevant in a scientifically sophisticated world, believing that “science” has, or should, take the place of religious “superstition.”  It doesn’t matter: religious truths and rules of honor are still operating regardless of any individual’s belief or disbelief.  We still should strive to expose the Straw Men erected to protect abortion.

Among the other effects of the most famous opinion authored by Justice Harry Blackmun in 1973, Roe v. Wade cemented the repudiation of morality into federal law.  Following the failures of moral struggles in the 1960’s, and as the federalization of welfare in the “Great Society” gained momentum, Blackmun conceived an invisible right to “privacy” that forced government’s hands off of virtually any moral judgements toward individuals’ behaviors.  In effect, Roe justified evil, couching evil as a “right.”  Historically, under a basically Christian impetus toward responsibility for one’s actions (essentially answering to a greater moral code than an individual might create for him- or her-self), individuals were free to be stupid, or to simply fail, but not to be immoral.  Those who fought against immorality, or for a greater morality, were lauded and rewarded in society.  Those who worked for licentiousness had to hide their purposes, often appealing to sympathies for the confused or otherwise “unfortunate” members of society who turned to an immoral path as their “only” means to elevate themselves from still worse circumstances.  Straw Men on the march.

One need not follow any of the major religions to be uncomfortable at the destruction of unborn babies.  If one is “religious” in outlook, he or she recognizes a more-or-less direct connection to God for every gestating child.  This imparts a more-or-less direct responsibility – an obligation – to protect the holy innocents, there being no person of greater innocence than a pre-born baby.  We should recognize the straw men arrayed against morality as those who seek to protect the abortion industry.

First is the claim that what has been conceived and is growing in the womb, is NOT a baby.  It is merely a “fetus” which, in the view of abortionists, is a “mass of cells.”  By implication, the proto-baby is a “foreign invader” and obligating the host-mother to protect and nourish it is a form of slavery or oppression.  This argument is not biologically sound, nor is it morally solid.  Humans, generally, are sympathetic to “baby” anythings, be they chicks, lambs, puppies or kittens, even heifers, foals, piglets and hippopotamuses.  By great dint of effort, we have been divorced from the same emotions regarding our own babies.  Indeed, appeals for donations to feed orphaned animals are far more successful than for the prevention of child abuse.  How grotesquely odd; who benefits from this strange incongruity?

Women who have “bought” the entire narrative of oppression and “not a baby” still are likely to suffer some separation anxiety, even sadness, after an abortion.  The older the fetus the more likely the grief.  Who was that baby going to be?  Would he or she have loved me?  Blackmun found a right of privacy that flushed the destruction of the unborn clear of morality or meaning; the Right to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness, he couldn’t find.  Interestingly, 90% of women who consider abortion choose to become mothers after seeing an ultrasound test and hearing the baby’s heartbeat.

Abortion can be rationalized with sufficient hatred, yet the essential child-mother bonding that commences very early on after conception, is real.  More than simple hatred is needed to convince a mother that her irreplaceable role can be dissolved by mere hatred of a “growth” in her belly.  It is a special virulence that brings a woman into an abortion provider’s lair, and it has to be carefully taught.  For many abortion advocates, the essential hatred is hatred of male oppression.  Such a transference of emotion is another variation of the Straw Man syndrome.

The country appears to be divided over the question of easy access to abortion on demand.  This means that abortion advocates want abortion to be available within a bus ride, inexpensive or covered by insurance, and bound by few, if any, limitations.

The divide seems to follow party lines, with those on the left: liberals, progressives and socialists, the most in favor of unrestricted abortion; conservatives and Christians the least likely to approve of abortion on demand.  The Democrat party has devolved into the party of death; it seems IM-Prudent to identify as such.  Advocating for the most premature death possible is a form of evil.  For religious citizens, it is proof of the actions of the “Devil,” which is to say, “Deified Evil.”  Some call him Satan.  Whether one “believes” or doesn’t, abortion is never as “nice” as the RIGHT to choose one.  Even pro-abortion advocates should be able to recognize that pro-lifers who believe in the sanctity, or sacredness of innocent life, cannot compromise with the killing of that life.

It is worth wondering about the nature of the anger generated among pro-abortion advocates.  It seems, well, out of proportion.  Where pro-lifers might sing hymns or pray or simply try to speak with those heading into an abortion clinic – and this is understandably upsetting to those who have decided that death of their proto-baby is a solution to life problems – pregnancy support agencies are more likely to be vandalized and threatened.  Where laws have been passed to protect access to abortion clinics and to prevent “harassment” of potential abortion clients, there are none that restrict the same for pregnancy support centers.  Laws against vandalism and arson exist locally, of course, but seem to be less well enforced than the FEDERAL laws protecting the abortion industry, even when the industry, itself, breaks federal laws.

Demonstrations by pro-abortionists exhibit intense angers and even hatreds for pro-life defenders.  One wonders why feelings are so high and angers so hot, in favor of abortion.  Often there are threats of retaliation against those who oppose abortion.  “If abortion isn’t safe, then neither are you!”  Most pro-abortion / pro-death advocates have never suffered an abortion, yet they turn red in opposition to pro-lifers.  Why?  Clearly, if motivated to join a demonstration in favor of abortion, an individual believes he, or usually she, believes that a gestating baby is not a baby.  Perhaps he or she also believes so strongly in Constitutional rights that the risk of breaking laws is well worth the righteous defense of such rights.

Yet, the only Constitutional right most pro-abortion advocates have ever defended is the right to terminate pregnancies.  Is it just to defend the practice of licentious sex?  Is the responsibility for the consequences of fornication so foreign a concept that the right to abortion must be defended?  Is it that simple?  It seems not.

Obviously, pregnancy resulting from rape is a special case, as is incest, and to protect the health/life of the mother goes without question.  Requiring birth of a baby in these cases is cruel and unusual punishment, and society is not prepared to take that step.  Neither is Prudence.  Still, the baby is completely innocent in any case.  We have to arrive at an agreement of person-hood at some point in gestation, whereupon Constitutional rights apply.  We have not been able to do so.

It seems as though the right to kill innocent life is behind – or beneath – it all.  It is an act that is as anti-religious, anti-God as is possible.  If abortions were committed by sociopaths on the sidewalk, who then held the dead baby aloft like a battlefield triumph, we would arrest and incarcerate that evil person until his trial for first degree murder, a capital offense!  Rightly so.  But hiding the act away behind “clinic” doors and surgical gowns and rubber gloves enables us to defend it as a solemn right.  Solemn rite, more like.

Biden, Crime, Culture, Economics, Education, Foreign Policy, Governance, Health Care, Immigration, Politics 2022, Religion

One Lie, Two Lies, Three Lies, Four

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One way to look at our current national condition is from the top of the Mountain Of Lies.  It’s a better viewpoint for observing the accumulating effects of dishonesty upon the health and strength of the nation to which it is dished on a literal daily basis.  Sometimes there is illumination provided by organizing lists of items that share one or more parameters.  It will be Prudent to consider the entirety, if not enormity of the following list of lies on which Americans’ lives depend:

LAW.  Our history and culture are replete with real and literary conspiracies based on subversion of laws.  To Prudence, undercutting the law is the worst of all lies.  Peace, safety, freedom and life, itself, depend on honesty in matters of law.  It is still worse when it leaves the individual level and seeps into “official” policy and action – denying or subverting the law, that is.  We can see the scope of damage that official lying can do, by reflecting on the completely fabricated “Russia” conspiracy that politicians and law-enforcement agencies attempted to pin on Donald Trump before he won election as 45th President, and through much of his administration.  Subverting federal laws only expanded after that.

A few people lost their jobs at the FBI, but, so far, not their pensions!  The message is that anything illegal done against Donald Trump is not considered to be nearly as bad as illegal acts taken against some other American citizen.  Yes, you broke the law, but it doesn’t bother us enough to apply legal sanctions – wink, wink.  Subversion of law: one of the worst kinds of lie.

But, unfortunately, the unprecedented crimes against Trump are not the worst in terms of how the citizens of the U. S. are besmirched by government lying.  We have to look at immigration and border policies and practices since Joe Biden signed that stack of executive orders on January 21st, 2021.

U.N. and U.S. rules for “refugee” and “asylum” status are pretty loose, subject to multiple steps of acceptance despite previous errors or even untrue/fraudulent applications.  A judge can always accept some claim of good reasons to submit fraudulent statements in order to obtain safety unavailable in their country of origin.  In other words, it is subjective at almost every step.  Those who hyperventilate over “loopholes” in tax laws are singularly unconcerned about the sieve of loopholes in immigration law.  Interestingly, many of the possible claims for asylum are based on non-binary sexuality.  However, there are laws and regulations that govern the processing of asylum claims and of asylees, themselves.  These are being ignored at the President’s direction, leaving millions of illegal entrants in our country with virtually no way for our erstwhile protectors to monitor or arrest them when they fail to appear for “hearings” required by law.

It’s all part of “Progressives’” intention to dissemble our Constitutional Republic.  Every person connected to the Biden administration who comments on “the border,” has lied about it, and quite consistently.  Those are bad lies, sure enough.

We could also bring forth the mendacity surround “Covid” and ersatz vaccines, but there’s only so much we can include, here. See: http://www.prudenceleadbetter.com/2020/08/26/if-you-knew-covid/ . 

LEGISLATION.  Once upon a time in Washington, representatives of the people and representatives of the states would diligently research and debate, in both Houses of Congress, the federal budget.  Presidential administrations would cook up budgets with their own plans and hopes, including the increased spending inevitably required by each and every one of the 1,000 or so executive departments, offices, agencies and “black” projects.  Congress, politically, would dissect parts of it, replace parts of it, gain hours of news coverage about their essential work, and eventually pass some form of it, including myriad political advantages for the parties holding some level of power: earmarks.  And, always, plenty of “pork.”

The two great sources of power in Congress are 1) Spending; and, 2) Taxing.  No matter how motivated or honest a new congressperson may be, fairly quickly he or she becomes either purposefully corrupt or casually corrupted by the systems of Congress.  The orientation process for newbies includes explaining why it is that what each feels is the right thing to do… cannot be done.  In order to accomplish a small bit of what spurred the campaign to enter Congress, much has to be compromised.  That is the economic dynamic of Congress – not right or wrong, but bartering for good and not-good.  With the number-one goal of everyone in both Houses being re-election, the barter system quickly becomes bartering to gain re-election benefits.  Voting on the so-called “budget” offers dozens of barter opportunities, and so it goes.  It is inherently corrupt and corrupting, which means that our fresh new representatives – House or Senate – must lie to us at their first opportunity.

Then, there are the aggregations of spending and taxing ideas that are given names like, “The Inflation Reduction Act.”  These mountains of malarkey cut and pasted by the “power brokers” who then present a 1,000-page or 3,000-page pile of words with hundreds of new “laws” included and call for a vote within 24 or 48 hours.  No one can read or understand the implications all of it before voting, yet there is a great trumpeting of accomplishment.  Most of the time prior to the vote is spent by each “yea” voter to find something – anything – that he or she can tell constituents was “accomplished” for their benefit, including how their representative “fought” for them against the evils of Washington.  Still, where’s the truth?  There are $31 Trillion in the national debt that display 65 years of great lying to American citizens.

IMMIGRATION:  No country is a greater magnet for emigration than the U. S.  Despite the constant Marxist drumbeat of “systemic” racism, imminent murder of blacks by police and unfair incarceration of pathetic, somewhat innocent or non-responsible prisoners, people of color flock to our southern border by the millions.  Some just walk in and say the magic words claiming asylum.  Our Border Patrol officers spend virtually all of their time “processing” the flood of people from up to 100 countries(!).  In The meantime, about 25% as many as claim asylum escape through our poorly secured border, carrying tons of fentanyl and other drugs (drugs that kill over 100,000 young Americans every year) as well as carrying plans in some of their heads to commit terrorist attacks.

It is one of the prime responsibilities of a President and administration to prevent these very circumstances.  For a government to NOT fulfill this obligation requires two forms of “untruth:” 1) a purpose other than protecting the United States or its citizens; and, 2) a constant barrage of utter lies about the “secure” status of the casually breeched southern border, supporting the pretense of an administration that is fulfilling its vows.  Typically, there is a penalty to pay for lying, much more so if the lie causes injury or cost to the subject(s) of it.  What sort of penalty is appropriate for this grandiose lie?

The upshot of this close-to-the-worst-of-lies is that about 4 MILLION illegal entrants are scattered across the country.  Each of them is a living, breathing, expensive lie.  Along with them are the nearly 1 MILLION “gotaways” who evaded apprehension thanks to President Biden’s utter… no, purposeful… failure to complete the border wall, which would at least have channeled prospective entrants to limited points of entry.  They are all lies, too, whose very presence implies some sort of right to be inside our borders.  That there is no such right for nearly all of the 4 MILLION and the 1 MILLION, simply compounds the grotesque lie this administration has been telling American citizens.

COVID:  This compendium of lies began 10 years ago as the great Dr. Anthony Fauci funneled NIAID grants to the Wuhan Institute of Virology for gain-of-function research on the SARS-2 coronavirus.  He has denied that purpose, of course, which simply shows that lying is common in the federal government’s hundreds of agencies.  Fauci’s NIAID agency of the CDC earned millions in royalties from helping Moderna develop its mRNA “vaccine” (the vaccine that doesn’t prevent infection, doesn’t create immune response and doesn’t prevent contagion), which Moderna was working on in Wuhan months before the world heard of the novel coronavirus, Covid-19.

Interestingly, the only response to Covid infection was – and still is – “vaccination.” All other treatments, some very effective, have been suppressed and discussion of them censored.  Reputable scientists estimate that half a million American deaths can be blamed on failures to treat Covid with known anti-virals, immune boosters and supplements.  Individual personnel within the NIH are allowed to earn royalties from numerous pharmaceuticals they helped to research, including the slickest liar of all, Dr. Anthony Fauci, reportedly the highest-paid employee in the federal swamp.  Lying about Covid must have been the most lucrative scam he’s had.  To really push the mass vaccination program that was part of a tawdry, essentially worldwide scheme, great fear had to be fomented, and locking down the country from most business activity fitted in perfectly with that goal.

First, though, the “Friends of Fauci,” recognized scientists all, conspired to flood medical publications with false opinion papers that claimed, uniformly, that the origin of the ENGINEERED SARS-2 novel coronavirus came from some natural evolution that workers at a “wet market” in Wuhan city were exposed to.  Real virologists, like Fauci, can identify the Furin cleavage site in the viral chain where other genes were added to the original SARS virus.  Yet the papers went forth at Fauci’s direction to confuse politicians and divert attention from the financing of the exact research – begun in the U. S. and shifted to Wuhan – that made COVID-19 so infectious.  Lies have consequences.

COVID killed a lot of people, although far fewer than statistics claim, and nowhere at a higher rate than in the United States!  How could that possibly be?  We certainly have a right to know.

In effect, the pandemic here was handled politically, not medically.  Fauci and others inside the deep state, beholden to big Pharma, and PROFITING from them, advised federal and state governments to impose useless and actually harmful steps, locking down economic and social activities, ruining family economics and, worst of all, forcing protocols on hospitals that ignored known treatments and caused the deaths of thousands who could have survived.  It seems criminal.

As the so-called “vaccines” were introduced, the lies became greater.  The definition of “vaccine” had to be changed to include the weird chemicals that comprise mRNA shots.  Pushing them as vaccines was and still is comforting to the average “emergency use” recipient, now pushed down to infants and children.  Unfortunately, nRNA shots don’t prevent the disease, they don’t prevent infecting others, and they don’t instill normal immune response.   Oh, and they don’t last long in their one effect: mitigating the “severity” of infection.  As one gets into “booster shot” country, the effects dwindle to a month or two.  The shots are utter failures as vaccines and immensely successful as money-transfer agents.

But, wait!  There’s more!… or less.  The shots are dangerous to humans!  You’ve seen the ads, over and over, telling the trusting that COVID vaccine is “effective and safe.”  Some mothers couldn’t wait for them to be available so that their kids could be protected from a disease that is of nearly ZERO threat to them!  Zero as in NO THREAT!  Why force an experimental drug known to damage children to the point that they are at greater risk from the injections than they are from the disease?  I’ll tell you why: FEAR and two years’ of lies from our helpful government.

Other lies… well, let’s talk about IMMIGRATION.  Anyone in this administration or Congressional Democrat who happens to get a question about the “control” of the border with Mexico, lies.  No one stands out as telling the truth about this one issue.

President Biden is virtually never asked about the border – that’s left up to his press flacks: first Jen Psaki and now the incomparable Karinne Jean-Pierre.  On August 29th reporter, Peter Doocy asked “KJP” why tennis star Novak Djokovic cannot enter the United States to play in a tennis tournament because he ‘s not “vaccinated” against Covid, but migrants can just walk into Texas and Arizona unvaccinated and are allowed to stay?

Jean-Pierre’s response was that just walking in was not how it works.  When corrected of that notion she stated that “…it’s not like that you can’t just walk over and…”  And so it goes in the great mendacity machine that is the Biden administration.

Prudence has asked before: Where do we turn when our own government lies to us?

Biden, Crime, Culture, Education, Health Care, Politics 2022, Religion, Representation, Sex

Psychology, If You Don’t Mind

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I have the answer here in my hand…

We’re all psychologists.  Humans could not work together, form societies or even families, if we could not “size up” one another and make relatively accurate judgments as to the attitudes and outlooks of those we need to live with.  Like every other human skill, psychological survival and progress has attracted experts, often the death knell of progress in the field of interest.  Beyond studying and learning about human psychology, psychologists have moved on to defining and even inventing forms of it.  Today it is almost as though the professional in the psychology field had DISCOVERED psychology in humans and that they, psychologists, must be consulted about any and every aspect of it, lest mere humans hurt themselves and others by trying to comprehend it.

Life is animalistic without psychological abilities.  Animal brains only barely exhibit any sense of meaning to the actions they take.  Humans strive to avoid it.  Part of the magic of human psychology is the ability to worship, and to perceive a spiritual existence that is the greatest sense of meaning possible.  What does – or what will – what I’m doing, mean?

Generally, the actions of today are taken because of their meaning something in the future.  We save today for security tomorrow; we court and marry today to produce a family of children tomorrow; we live honorably, creating friends and earning respect from others, so that we’ll have friends and friendship in our old age; we try to avoid poisoning our bodies and avoid danger and injuries because it means we can live longer.  We even attempt to extend our meaning to others beyond the date of our death with inheritances and bequests and instructions.  Unfortunately, we are descending into a process of talking ourselves out of our own humanity.  Psychologists of various stripes have convinced many to deny who they are, and have convinced many others with influence over them, to help them in the process of denial.  What for?

A large element of civilization has been and remains theater.  It could be as simple as street actors and their ad-hoc creation of scenes, characters and stories, to the elaborate production of operas that remain popular over decades and centuries.  Greek and Roman theater still teach us to look at life and meaning in “better” ways; Shakespeare, Marlow, Bacon and thousands of others from every culture, employed costume, staging, music, masks and pretense to teach cultural truths and lessons for living.  Modern electronics make it possible for every individual – including children – to become a preferred pretense character, almost always on a Snap-Chat stage.  It seems, unfortunately, that the “psychology community” talked itself into treating human theater, down to the individual level, as more valuable – more essential – than reality.

As one old Greek noted, “Virtue lies in Reason and Vice in rejection of Reason.”  However, as psychologists are only too aware, or promoters of, Reason cannot be satisfactorily defined, especially from generation to generation.  There seem to be thousands of permutations of reason, and as communications have advanced, so to speak, certain biases have become widely shared, affecting modern concepts of reason, which is not to say, Truth.  Since the 1960’s and ‘70’s, feminism has become the overriding permutation of reason in the United States, and it has led to a society-bending twist of sexual roles and mores.  Psychologists haven’t tried to stem this tide.  Where “psychology” might add to understanding of various truths, instead it seems to adapt to and rationalize social trends.

Prudence can expect to be roundly chastised for the previous paragraph, and, probably, the next one.

Feminism has done more damage to American society than any other belief system besides slavery.  Bit by bit – now chunk by chunk – it has feminized men and destroyed the majesty of motherhood.  Simultaneous with the explosion in homosexuality, feminism has also led to hyper-sexualization of school-age children down to disturbing ages.  As it has torn down the old morality it has failed to replace it with a new one.  Where women used to “civilize” men, they now compete in an arena of irresponsible sexuality where everything is planned or avoidable based on the whims of women.

Women are now the drivers of the new para-psychology called transgenderism.  And, rather than eliminating confusion about maleness or femaleness, it encompasses a host of “sexualities” that mainly women teachers and gay or other “non-binary” “teachers” feel compelled to dictate to, if not guide and groom, children at very young ages.  Where are “the psychologists” on this strange twist of “education?”  Sadly, they seem able to rationalize or even justify the trans-gender fad.  If it didn’t do so much damage to the kids whose theatrical fantasies everyone is rushing to “confirm,” the psychologists might be forgiven.

MOST of transgenderism is theater.  Children, some genuinely confused about sexuality, a very small fraction, and the rest who want to play at being the opposite sex, are pounced upon by agenda-driven teachers, psychologists, doctors and even hospitals(!), who are all in a hurry to “confirm” trans-gender fantasies.  Confirmation, unfortunately, consists of largely irreversible hormone injections and blockers, and even surgeries to remove perfectly healthy organs.  The children are permanently changed and their developments confused chemically.  The greatest effect?  Sterilization.  Not many teenagers and damned few adults can conceive of what full medical transfiguration means as time goes by.  Most come to realize that they have attempted something that is impossible in the majority of cases, and that leaves them neither male or female.  There is more at stake than pronouns.

Yet, some dysphoria is real – the people who transition to another way of living are still real people who deserve as much respect as anyone else.  Heterosexual people are largely unable to accept trans-gender people at “face” value.  Reactions vary over a short spectrum, from disbelief to disgust.  Normal people have a duty to learn respect for those who have found the only way to deal with their relatively rare dysphoria is transition.  Let the rest of us count our blessings.

This doesn’t excuse the agenda-driven recruitment of children to a belief in gender-fluidity.  Parents know that childhood whims and fantasies usually fade away or are outgrown by maturity in nearly all cases.  To pounce on these susceptible kids, especially for teachers, is criminal.  For administrators and political / civic leaders to make it ILLEGAL to prevent gender-predation shall remain a stain on the conscience of the nation.  Shame on us and kudos to those leaders wise enough to resist this weird aberration in human purpose.

Those who are committed to the “trans” state of being and living also need to recognize that their own, understandably very deep biases toward “non-binary” sexuality, bends their views to find trans potential atop almost every pair of legs.  Bigots on both sides need to stifle their angers and misunderstandings.  Professional, expert psychologists and psychiatrists ought to be guiding the confused toward a path that is constructive for society and civilization.  Unfortunately, they have agreed among their professional, expert-laden Societies, to avoid moral judgement and even counsel patients to dissociate themselves from religious codes.  Indeed, such counseling tends to affirm those ideas that comfort the patient, rather than disturb him or her.

In other words, psychology can affirm one’s deepest beliefs, which is not to say truth.  Unfortunately, sometimes beliefs are just wrong and counter-productive or damaging to society.  They can interfere with forming positive bonds with others, with family members, or with others who would be good for the individual.  Psychology has drifted too close to chemical solutions for too many conditions/reactions; they also tend to counsel for far too long, with patients dependent upon their therapists to maintain a new normalcy.

As Americans ponder the decline of trust in the institutions that ought to defend successful traditions and uphold the greatest strength of U. S. culture, one of those has been medicine, including mental health medicine.  The professionals in that society have always been people of sense, ready willing and able to advise patients toward the healthiest, most sensible habits and actions.  This used to include psychologists and psychiatrists, but this has all changed.  Why?  How did industries – professions – of HONOR, become so sullied? 

Politics and money, not synonymous, but often congruent.  If politics were corrupted by only money we could survive and even thrive as the running battle against corruption played its parallel games.  But politics has been corrupted by ideology, hatred and mendacity.  The Covid pandemic exposed the degree of twist that has occurred.  One political party routinely condemns half the voters in the country, not as those who see a different way to improve and strengthen America, but as a group that can’t be permitted to hold or even share power… a group that threatens the republic, that is racist, homophobic, transphobic and every other epithet that can be used on TV to denigrate another person.  Then that same party does everything that their opponents are accused of doing, BY THEM.  It is no longer politics, but managed hatred, and it has coopted the institutions of government, justice, education and medicine, among others.  None of the professions that once held the nation together have been spared.

The various forms of artifice are all masks, covering the faces of evil.  Millions of true patriots resist and believe in the majesty of the American way – most are Christians.  They – we – are the conscience of America.  A new professionalism and a new citizenship are all that can restore us… and a new / old spiritual understanding of why humanity is male and female, and how it can survive and grow stronger.  Honestly.

Crime, Culture, Education, Elections, Race, Religion, Responsibility

Heil Soros!

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It is certainly obscure, even mysterious, why a wealthy oligarch like George Soros would expend his fortune on the election of socialist, soft-on-crime District and States’ Attorneys.  He has had an outsized impact on not only crime rates and, automatically, the victims of criminal acts, but also on the reduction in trust of government, police and justice, itself.  Still, there must be a plan.

It doesn’t seem that Soros’ purpose stems from a love of crime or even any particular sympathy for the weak-minded dopes who commit crimes.  He doesn’t appear to be an advocate for all things anti-White or pro-Black.  But, there must be a plan and, considering his actions Prudently, the shape of the plan can be discerned.  It is quite simple.

Soros is a socialist – a virulent one.  He doesn’t seem to trust Communists, which is a mark of intelligence, but, like most political socialists, believes that socialism can be controlled and manipulated to fit the goals of oligarchs and one-worlders.  By employing a process that breaks down civil order and public safety, Soros makes clear his contempt for the “proletariat,” which is most of us.  He has always seemed offended, as it were, by the Constitutional limits that underpin the United States, the belief in “unalienable rights” that they guarantee, and, even more, the basically Christian love of freedom and personal sovereignty.  Soros hates the power and influence of the United States of America, and of Americans.

So, it seems clear that the purpose of destroying cities through increasing crime and lack of trust in authority, is designed to force Americans to accept authoritarian forms of government… so as to “clean up” the crime, drug, homelessness and other problems that make normal citizens unsafe.  It’s simple, really, and it won’t take long.  There is already a significant political party/movement that is pushing for exactly the solutions Soros wants: Democrats.  Their experience in promoting and excusing multi-city rioting and destruction, weakening of police departments and removal of the only populist president in our lifetimes, in 2020, and the ability to control almost everyone, including stripping many of their “unalienable rights” by building up the Covid-19 scare of 2020 – 2021 and beyond, encourages Democrats to attack the Constitution directly.  They, and Soros, have won some victories.

Are any students, anywhere in America, learning why what Soros has been doing with his money is evil and anti-American?  By the same token, are any learning about the Constitution, itself?