Category Archives: Economics

Culture, Economics, Education, Elections, Family, Immigration, Politics 2023, Religion, Responsibility

IDENTIFYING ENMITY

Leave a comment

Secretary-General António Guterres (left) speaks with Volkan Bozkir, (Russia)
President of the UN General Assembly.

The position of the United States of America, once the beacon of hope, justice and honesty, relative to the rest of the world’s nations, has changed.  It’s not a change most Americans have hoped for or, cruelly, even anticipated – certainly not one that our erstwhile “leaders” have anticipated.  In a nutshell: our enemies have identified themselves.  None of the bribes or blandishments by which we have executed “foreign policy” are sufficient any longer.  The outright gifts to those who will be just as happy to watch our demise as grand influencers, have proven to be a waste… unappreciated largesse from our grandchildren’s grandchildren that bought, evidently, only tolerance.

Now that the Bidens have destroyed faith in our money, in our courts and in our foreign services, Americans have what might be perceived as an opportunity to stop lying to ourselves the way we’ve been lying to other nations.  Honesty is not a commodity that is banked in any quantity by our federal administrative state or by the elected trolls it maintains for our imagined benefit.  We vote and vote, hoping and praying that the latest lines spewed in campaigns are, at last, the true ones, but nothing changes very much.  The only change agent in the past 9 administrations has been hounded and vilified, attacked and threatened by the administrative state’s agents, since before he won election in 2016.

The internal and external destruction of the United States of America, has been engineered by the Communist Party of China – CCP.  The majesty and Christianity, tolerance and charity of America has been given away, diluted and stolen by even our trusted friends, neighbors and “public servants” as we’ve barely watched, so consumed are we by technology and hyper-sexuality and self-hate.  “They” have divided us against ourselves – the only way America and Americanism could have ever been defeated.  We’re still standing by the Grace of God, but our own determined effort will put an end to that.  Still, while we yet stand, we have an opportunity to make some radical decisions.

A quick and painless one, an obvious one, is to get rid of the United Nations and renounce every connection or treaty that we’ve ever honored with that den of thieves.  Kick them out of New York, out of our State Department and out of any influence in our curricula (aside from history) or our medical establishment.  We are Americans – we own this country and we can clean out this fetid closet of worms if we wake up in time.  Let China build a new set of club-houses for the International Liars’ Club to meet in.

Next, recognize who our enemies actually are and stop treating them like imminent friends whose undying friendship may be cemented by only a few billion more debt-dollars from our grandchildren’s grandchildren.  If they wish to trade with us or even enter our country, they will have to be at least courteous towards our national sovereignty and honor.  Let those who are proven friends to our nation, have advantage over other nations in terms of trade, commerce and intercourse.  Let us make mutual defense agreements with those who will commit as much to those treaties as our nation does – who will risk their citizens’ lives in our defense as we have and will in theirs.

Our international agreements should be mutually beneficial while not draining our treasury.  We’ll need some honest financial managers to replace the band of liars who operate the mis-named Federal Reserve, FDIC, Treasury Department and the IRS.  They operate as controllers of or enemies of American citizens.  Naturally, our federal budgets must be in surplus all-the-friggin’-time.  Inflation of the money supply has only limited value to AMERICAN CITIZENS, and then only in times of war or national disaster.  These do not include local hunger or personal failures or homelessness or drug addiction or unhappiness.  We’re talking only the business of the federal government, personal matters notwithstanding.

It is not the business of the federal government to house people, feed or clothe them, educate them or wipe their bottoms.  At least half of the federal departments and sub-agencies can be eliminated along with half of the work-force… to start.

It IS the business of the federal government to defend and control our borders, ports of entry and the presence of non-citizens.   Illegally residing non-citizens should be humanely rounded up and deported to their home countries, from where they can apply for visas.  Our country has allowed its past half-century of federal administrations to over-promise and over-spend to the amount of some $32 Trillion of current debt, and over $100 Trillion of future socialist obligations.  This is the same as pointing out that we have exceeded our productive surplus* over the past 60 years in order to transform other countries, provide comforts to non-productive citizens/residents of our own country, act like we are the most wealthy nation in the world, and to add numerous socialist programs for political reasons (vote-buying).  We cannot afford to live the way we have been.  We must stop borrowing and pay our loans off.  We must teach/force our citizenry to take responsibility for themselves and take that same off the back of the federal government.  The future can be one of freedom or of socialism/Communism; it can’t be both.

We need more tax-PAYERS, not more tax-TAKERS.  Currently, and since the outbreak of COVID-19 in particular, the long, slow creation of federal dependents has been operating at hyper-velocity – the dream of the Communists among us.  Sadly, we have been electing Communists to positions of influence and power in our states and in the federal government.  Part of how this could be is our hasty acceptance of people from widely diverse cultures, making them citizens and allowing them to create pockets of cultural distinction rather than assimilating them into our unique American culture.  We can identify the Communists among us by observing their disdain for that American culture.  We allow many of these weird people into our education establishment and then marvel at how differently our children treat American values.  In too many cases, our children have never learned what those values are.

Recently, 700 professors on the staff of the University of North Carolina signed a letter opposing a new requirement to include instruction in America’s founding documents and Constitution.  They feel that “academic freedom” is threatened by teaching American history.  A great university is represented by faculty who, evidently, fear the inculcation of AMERICAN values.  Perhaps their best efforts are perceived as the separation of their students from American values, should the primary and secondary schools not done an adequate job.  Maybe this explains why teachers see parents as the enemies of “education:” they might be teaching their own children the American values that teachers are committed to destroying.  America Awake!

*Productive surplus is what is available to be taxed out of payrolls and profits. 

Climate, Culture, Economics, Elections, Governance, Health Care, Politics 2023, Religion, Representation

LE MAIN GAUCHE

Leave a comment

The laziness of Americans, as opposed to the laziness of humans in general, will prove the undoing of our culture and comforts, unless there is large-scale social change.  The pieces – or parts – of the social engine that created a series of technological revolutions that placed men on the moon in 1969, are well-known, but widely disparaged.  How can a successful society turn away from what worked for it for hundreds of years – even thousands – and turn in a generation or two towards multiple paths of destruction of those same social-civil engines that made America the most attractive, envied nation in the world?  It requires intense purpose and planning.

Not long before the Eagle landed, the United States reached its highest level of living standards for the largest number of people, of all races.  John Kennedy was president at the time and it’s been downhill for the United States since then.  Social pollution had slipped into our “main” stream of progress towards the future.  The generations of World War I and the Depression had proven their rightness and righteousness by raising up the “Greatest Generation” who sacrificed lives and property to remove large elements of evil in World War II, and then rebuilding former enemies so that they might join “America” in a future of freedom, democracy and prosperity.  Unfortunately, the evils of Communism were not destroyed at the same time, instead literally encouraged through treaty and malfeasance to grow and entrench in two of the largest countries: the U.S.S.R. and China.

Communism is unalterably antithetical to the American idea and system; it is antithetical to religion, by definition, and it is contained and promoted within a mission of ridding the world of religion and individuality… two of the key engines of American success.  How is it possible that Communism could ever gain a foothold against the beautiful system and ideals of America?  Long-term, never ending planning and step-by-step erosion of values.  “Well, I’m not a Communist,” you are saying to yourself, “and there’s no way other Americans could ever fall for that crap.”  You’re only half right… on both parts of your statement.

First, how could anyone fall for Communism in the United States?  We “know” it fails to increase freedom and inevitably descends into fascist authoritarianism, controlling every aspect of life and interaction in society.  Communist nations are organized by classism and are examples of racialism of the worst sorts.  Communists of varied virulence have followed two tracks, and one is education.  Over the past 60 years, while our “representatives” have been consumed with clinging to their elected sinecures, leftists, convinced of their being so much smarter than those who “cling to their guns and Bibles” as Obama notably observed, have taken control of educational colleges and programs.  This placed leftists (Communists) in charge of certifying teachers and controlling the curricula in education degree programs.  Bit by bit our schools, mostly public, but the majority of private schools as well, have slanted curricula toward what “educators,” especially those Phd.’s who get hired as superintendents and commissioners of education, think is most “progressive.”  No one wants to be “old fashioned” else we won’t be keeping up with competing countries.

From teens and college students who got away with drugs and free sex rebellion in the 60’s and 70’s, have sprung generations of children who have been raised in “socialist” homes by parents who perceive winning as more valuable than learning, training and personal advancement.  If that means “beating” the system and protecting their offspring from the consequences of failure, then there are no limits.  College courses, themselves, have more and more quickly responded to social change and trends, first from feminism and then anti-Christianity and sexual deviance.  Today students can “major” in relatively useless study areas that have grown out of non-individuality, non-individual responsibility, communalism.  We can hear this diversion from what made us strong and resilient when “advocates” and activists describe their deep feelings and concerns for this or that “community.”

The “gay community” or the “trans community” or the “African-American community” are terms that display an inherent rejection of Americanism.  Our fundament is individual responsibility, individual success and individual failure, if that is what it takes to learn how to improve and succeed.  The quality and character of each of us Americans, is what matters… not the false groupings proto-Communists would try to have us believe exist.  Everything, good or bad, is “class-actionable” to communists.

The most destructive laziness is to allow the present circumstances to continue.

The other part of your – our – belief that we’re not Communists also is, sadly, in question.  Leftists – Democrats – love to accuse Republicans of planning to cut Social Security and Medicare.  Republicans automatically trumpet their promise to “protect Social Security and Medicare!”  What they are really saying is: “We believe in these parts of the Communist Manifesto even MORE than those Democrats who claim to care about you!”

Federal money has purchased most Americans’ philosophies.  The line between good solid American values and corrupt socialist nanny-statism is moving with almost every “omnibus” bill in Congress and every election cycle.  We are, by and large, afraid to give up Communism, now.  How can we make the case for freedom?  And, what is that case?  If most Americans are committed socialists, who is going to rally behind rolling socialism back?

Perhaps you were an obedient mask-wearing soldier in the battle against COVID-19.  Some of your compatriots are still wearing their masks, convinced, by government wisdom, of something or other.  You have thought you were protecting others and saving lives (despite all science to the contrary) and need only for our benign governors to alert you to something else that only your sacrifice can save us from… imminent destruction of the environment and our planet, for example.  “Whatever it takes,” you think to yourself, “just tell us so that we know what to do.”  Needless to say, YOU will never be called an “anti-vaxxer” like those deplorables that are constantly skeptical of what is necessary to save us, all.  Many of them probably attended Trump’s speech on January 6th, 2021.  You don’t need to convert to Communism, the Communists are perfectly happy with you as you are: malleable and far removed from individuality. No trouble.

Now, to save the planet, we are instructed, American success must be stifled.  Americans use too much energy, eat too much food, consume too much health care, drive too many miles, invent too much.  Maybe if we legalized extra-strong marijuana, dumbed down our education, shifted our university education towards social confusion and division, spent time and money on transgenderism in the military… perhaps then we can make progress towards snuffing out that damned American energy and genius.  Individualists will never kneel down for global government so let’s force Americans to divide against one another.  Students must be encouraged to foreswear their responsibilities by pretending to be the opposite sex – it’s a good way to divorce them from their meddlesome parents, as well.  We can’t have parents inculcating their offspring with religious beliefs and hard-work ethics.  All that pro-American stuff must be watered down.

So who are the “we” making all these plans?  Why they’re our elected and appointed federal and state officials!  We, the people, put these communist-socialists into power over us!  We, the people, largely ignorant of our responsibilities as U. S. citizens, have agreed with the hateful divisions that have popped up everywhere with the appearance of COVID.  Leftists have been rubbing raw the feelings of many blacks, mainly those who have failed to excel after generations of welfare dependency, failed education and inner-city criminality.  Institutionalized failure under federal “programs” have rewarded “community activists” for agitating a restive sub-group.  Leftists have worked for years to forgive the somehow-justified hatred for “white” culture, even when it expressed in riots, murders, looting and arson.  All that has been needed is an “unjustified” death at the hands of white police personnel – and not always “white” – any police.  A few communists, a few hired-to-be-incompetent district attorneys, and almost any tragedy can be turned into a society-ripping weapon against America.  If you think the anger and destruction is justified: the “Saint George Floyd” effect, then the committed communists and globalists (same people) are perfectly happy with you.  Their plans to remove the U. S. of A. as a stumbling block to globalism, are working better than well.

There’s always the next election, of course, when we can vote in some true patriots who will correct the problems the federal government creates for us.  That might be a plan if we hadn’t acquiesced to wholesale weakening of election laws and voting regulations slowly for decades, then in a rushing flood under COVID.  Every one of us must be vigilant in our states and question every regulation for voting that has been promulgated since March of 2020.

Communists and other leftists LOVE democracy.  All that voting… all those ballots… people can be persuaded to believe they are in control and making real choices.  One can observe that the largest “democracies” have nearly universal voter participation and, interestingly, nearly universal approval of one candidate.  How wonderful.  Even not-so-large “democracies” where some hapless opponent(s) of the approved candidate(s) find that the approved candidate still manages to eke out a win after ALL votes are counted.  This means ALL ballots are counted, not actual votes, but ballots.  As the great democrat, Josef Stalin opined, the people who count the votes are more important.  Clearly that has become the byword for leftists and capital-D Democrats in the United States: the purpose of an election is power – not democracy, not strengthening our republic, not expanding citizen participation… power.  And, since that is the true purpose, whatever it takes to realize that goal is justifiable.

After all, whenever leftists slip up and a Republican gains power, he or she is merely an interloper to be tolerated until power is restored to its rightful owners.  It is time, fellow citizens, to restore honesty in government – all three branches and the elections that create them.  Maybe a candidate will run on a platform of honesty and truth-telling to his or her constituents… ummm, naah.

We could ask, though.  If you’d like to make a candidate squirm, ask if he or she will adopt honesty and truth-telling as his or her platform, promising to tell the truth about government to constituents… to people like, well, you?  You won’t be able to keep up with the semi-true and misleading replies that question elicits.  Should that person take office, Prudence predicts that the answers he or she might offer, should you ask, will become less and more tenuously connected to truth.  Finally, “our” representative become a representative of the government TO us.  That is when we ought to know that it’s time to replace him or her with someone new.  Otherwise that sickly-sweet candy shell with the intensely bitter center, known as Communism, will win.

Culture, Economics, Education, Family, Health Care, Politics 2023, Religion, Sex

I AM WHO I AM

Leave a comment

There is a certain fascinating aspect and predictability to the ways leftists, Democrats and Communists create solutions to difficult social problems that they often have also created.  To resolve the growing, activist-multiplied problem the various shades of leftists inevitably proffer a “solution” that strengthens the government and the leftists, themselves… and on and on it goes.  Freedom gets traded for a new level of “safety.”  Only the rarest of elections changes this course.

We see this playing out in the sudden pandemic of trans-sexuality that has infected our schools, our governments, our colleges, even our medical establishments – including pediatrics, a form of medicine most of us have always trusted – and even some churches.  It’s a worse pandemic than COVID was intended to be, bad as it was.  It’s worse because there is no injection that will immunize the hearts and minds of the susceptible, nor is any pharmaceutical company working on one.  No President has cleared the decks for a “Warp Speed” development of a cure for this new disease; various groups cannot agree on its origin: animals or a laboratory.  It is grotesquely infectious, however, affecting many organs, starting with the brain.

Just like COVID, trans-genderism has attracted new streams of commerce, catering to the needs of the infected as well as the threatened.  Some of these are drugs, so helpful to transitioners as they leave reality, and surgical procedures, even in pediatric departments at formerly trusted hospitals, but, not to be out-done, beer, sneakers and other products are making sure that “trannies” know where to buy whatever makes life worth living, including rapid delivery from Amazon Prime vans.  We are no slouches when it comes to scraping a buck off of the mentally ill.

The psychiatry and psychology industries are getting the short straw, though.  Lots of jurisdictions had long-ago made it illegal to treat sexual matters, no matter how confused, psychologically.  Affirmation and the aforementioned drugs and surgeries, not to overlook deception of parents and grandparents, are the only accepted maltreatments.  If parents and grandparents react badly to teachers and school policies that lie and mislead them about the children they raise and love AND ARE RELATED TO BY BIRTH, the leftists will send police and the FBI and others to harass and arrest them.

The widespread reactions to opposition to the trans-gender pandemic, are the basis of the new problem that cries out for a governmental solution… from the same leftist gaggle that created the original problem/pandemic.  Pretty soon, state by state, legislation will be offered to “protect” the LGBTQ+ “community” from “Christian fascists” who wish to take away the “civil rights” of the deviant.  Grotesquely, that “community” has attached itself to real civil rights problems that are based on inherent distinctions of race and birth – unchangeable things.  Always seeking support, militant “civil rights” activists are happy to add sexual deviance to their reasons to protest and, now, to tear down.  In their anti-historical foolishness, true civil rights activists are abetting the complete tear-down of society and culture that global communists have always wanted: the “solution.”

Most “trans” and other abnormal sexual claims are based on – wait for it – self-declarations.  They are not based on empirical evidence of gay-ness or of needs to convert one’s body to one that has the appearance of the opposite sex.  It’s all mental-emotional.  This in no way belittles the intensity or “reality” of emotional worries, fears and other feelings that cause the sufferer to believe his or her body is the “wrong” one.  The suffering person is suffering.  How though, could enforceable laws be based on the utter lack of empirical evidence: nothing to show anyone, nothing a jury could review, nothing with the possibility of forensic discovery.  How much worse it is when a trusted adult asks the questions 5, 8, 11-year-old children don’t have the wisdom to answer.

Tik-Tok and other kid-centric social media enhance the peer pressure to adopt the latest, most affirmative trend / fad, and it is largely out of sight of parents and other non-affirmative adults.  After all, your teacher, for Heaven’s sake… well, not Heaven’s sake, certainly, but someplace’s sake, told you not to tell your parents that you really aren’t a girl and that your name is now Brad instead of Bonnie.  Go ahead and send that video to your favorite classmate of how cool you look, dressed like a boy.  What rot.

Evil trends have conspired to destroy humanity, especially in the United States.  Separating children from their actual selves denies them the ability and opportunity to fulfill the responsibilities of their gender.  The education of boys ought to be different in key ways from the education of girls.  Each gender has its own preparation for adulthood.  Boys and girls are equal under the law, but not equivalent in roles and in life.  It’s not mysterious, but it is a crime socially, culturally and (should be) actually.

There is no reason to trust anyone who thinks the explosion in “trans-genderism” is good or valid.  There’s no reason to trust medical institutions or personnel who accept minors for surgery for the purpose of “changing” gender.  No reason to trust anyone who will feed puberty blockers or opposite- sex hormones to minors.  No reason to trust anyone who will ruin the maturation and fertility of a minor human child.  God save us.

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

BEING A LONG SHORTLY – 5

Leave a comment

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?

Culture, Economics, Education, Elections, Foreign Policy, Health Care, Immigration, Politics 2023, Responsibility

BEING A LONG SHORTLY – 4

Leave a comment

How we deal with national problems need not, in all cases, be nationally.  A large fraction of our national weakness has resulted from the least-efficient mechanism in the country – and the most expensive – the federal Government in its thousands of permutations, assuming responsibility for local and intensely personal problems and discomforts.  These would include things like food, education, employment, housing, and sexuality… not to mention the nature of household appliances and pronouns.  We are becoming weaker as a people and weaker individually, as we wait for unrelated bureaucrats and disingenuous politicians to make us comfortable.  Only in the past 30 years, or so, have we begun to recognize that every bit of comfort has come at a loss of freedom.  Let’s move forward.

IMMIGRATION

Every nation must deal with immigration.  It’s an outgrowth of the “greener-grass” syndrome.  People in many countries live in economic and political systems that are pretty crappy.  Often there isn’t enough food or the government is mean to people.  Many of those countries are led by dictators or communists of various shades of red, leaving the residents not very happy.  Eventually some of those people do what it takes to move to some other country where the political and economic “grass” is greener… or prettier… or less crowded.  All countries, including those that people leave, have laws – or fences – to control entry, which means not crossing their border until or unless the new country actually thinks it might be good to let the foreigner across that border.  Every country does this: controls and guards its border, mainly because one never knows when a foreigner might try to steal from the new country or from its people or, worse, try to do harm to the new country or to its people.

So, every country on Earth controls its borders, umm… except for one: Ours, the U. S. of A.  Interestingly, ours is one of the freest and the most blessed with food and blessed with the idiocy of perpetual welfare.  How would a relatively modern, successful country like ours, ever select a leader who would not defend its borders?  It is a conundrum.  Our current leader, chosen according to legend by 80 Million of his fellow citizens, has actively subverted the laws – and the fences – of his country resulting in the unbridled entry of more than 5 Million strangers from 100 other countries (or more), a million of whom sidestepped the polite greetings of the so-called “Border patrol” staff so that they could enter in secret, perhaps with less than honorable intentions toward their new country.  What an odd “leader” our country is entrusted to.

Let us hope every voter with the opportunity is able to choose a far, far different leader so that our country’s border will again be protected and guarded.  It’s a simple thing.

DRUGS

Drugs can heal or injure or kill.  These 3 options are true for both licit and illicit drugs.  In concert with the problems of immigration, tons of illicit drugs cross the unguarded border we just discussed, and they definitely injure and kill the legal residents of this country.  Our erstwhile government, hired to protect us, the citizens, has failed to solve the problem of mind-altering and often deadly drugs for, well, virtually forever.  But, under current leadership and the inactions of our bureaucratic “deep state,” the swath of death such drugs have wrought has reached new depths of death and failure.  One wonders why this particular national problem has proven insoluble.  Our national government reflexively tries to force the solution to deadly, destructive drugs back upon individuals and localities, while grasping onto personal problems that earn votes and the continuation in power to make them national ones.  Someone is not being honest with the citizenry.

Over the span of 9 years or more, America sacrificed about 55,000 of its young men and women fighting Communists in Viet-Nam.  We have agonized over the waste of those young people for the 50-plus years since we pulled out.  Lots of lies and untruths were told to the American people during that botched conflict, yet we persevered until there was nothing left to fight for, and we left.

Drugs kill between 60,000 and 100,000 young people EVERY DAMNED YEAR nowadays – mostly due to fentanyl that comes through Mexico, our “friends” to the south.  The victims don’t need the Defense Department to ship them overseas to be killed; overdosing can be accomplished close to home… sometimes in the home. 

Fentanyl is fairly easy to make from its constituent chemicals, benzylfentanyl and 4-anilinopiperidine and our other “friends,” Communist China sells large quantities of those chemicals to Mexican cartels.  Toluene, an easy chemical to obtain, they don’t need to import.  “Fentanyl” is 100 times as potent as morphine in its ability to react with pleasure receptors in the brain, so a user must be very, very careful as to dosage.  Its other effect is suppression of breathing, and a user certainly wouldn’t want to end up like George Floyd, late of Minneapolis.  A deadly dose, even for a man as big as the late Mr. Floyd, is about the volume of one shake of salt on some food – very, very careful.  Unfortunately, most users of drugs, particularly drugs of questionable origin, are somewhat stupid.  Tens of thousands smarten up every year, right before they stop breathing.

A president, especially one elected due to his immense popularity with some 80 Million of his fellow citizens, would go out of his way, at least a little bit, to guarantee that they or their offspring would be safe from the ravages of illicit drugs like fentanyl.  It’s the least he could do for the millions of people who loved him so much, once.  It turns out that that President is more enamored of the one-point-something Billion friends he has in China, dwarfing the paltry crowd who “voted” him in.  So, he has done less than nothing to stop the flow of illegal drugs or illegal aliens across our once-guarded border.  Indeed, his actions have facilitated both of those illegal border-crossings, and here we are.  Parents and lovers who are mourning the loss of loved-ones to fentanyl and other “southern” drugs, are advised to never forget who their President cares about least.

Drugs could be stopped, but not one plea-bargained case at a time.                                               (See: https://www.prudenceleadbetter.com/2016/05/15/drugs-and-governance/)

It would be refreshing to hear a campaign speech that included the protection of the American people as a key promise.  It would elicit many Prudent votes, particularly if the death penalty were revived for drug distributors.

MEDICINE & FREEDOM

Recently, as in 3 years ago, a “new” coronavirus swept across the planet.  A lot of people died as a result, but not always from that virus, COVID-19.  We’ve talked about this, but the virus is not the biggest damage-causer.  The presence of COVID yielded a massive loss of rights and freedoms – un-Constitutionally – and changed the relationships among individuals, health-care providers and institutions, and changed the relationship between the federal government and individuals.  We who are plagued with short memories, owe it to ourselves and to our descendants, to keep alive the abuses Americans have been subjected to and why the new relationships must be reversed in law.  Lately we have heard the CDC and the NIAID branch of it, try to walk back the directives they issued during the “pandemic” that cost many their jobs, licenses and even lives.  Governors, school systems, public agencies, even branches of the military created executive authorities and powers to direct the actions of individuals because they were “following CDC guidance” or “following the science” as imaginatively defined by people like Dr. Anthony Fauci who claimed to “represent” science.  People like to think that “doctors,” including Phd’s, are “scientists,” but many are followers of others.  For medical doctors, with the brutal intrusion of federal governance into health care, many are employees, now, and they can be fired by the institutions that they turned to for stability and protection, if they don’t kow and tow.

Police and fire departments forced trained members to accept the experimental injections or lose their jobs; military branches forced members to accept the shots or lose their position, despite the investment in training and skills.  Teachers were forced to accept the experimental chemical injections on the same basis.  People were forced to get the injections or forego normal exercise of their rights of movement,  assembly or commerce.  Almost none of what was imposed on us, free, sovereign, Americans, was Constitutional.  Those who were questioned on these actions used various claims of ignorance by citing the “CDC” advisories as their authority to restrict freedoms.  Ostensibly, thanks to active fear-mongering by government entities, that same CDC and NIAID (Fauci) and ignorant media (to the point of marshalling hatred against those who disagreed with the fear… mixing it all up with “racism,” lack of “equity” and even “white supremacy” as reasons that people questioned “the science”) COVID was such a threat that states of emergency were justified and people could be arrested or economically destroyed for opening their businesses.

To be Prudent, most of “science” touted during the dark medical age of 2020 through 2022, was bogus.  Real science was often put forth and literally suppressed by government and media working together to protect a single narrative, and those actions killed tens, if not hundreds of thousands of Americans who would have survived COVID relatively easily had less harmful treatments been allowed early in their infections.  In some cases, those alternative treatments worked in very late stages of infection, but it took a contentious legal battle to obtain them.  Hundreds of thousands.

Science is not a place or even a consensus, it is a process.  Stopping investigation, data analysis and experimentation by claiming “settled science” or similar baloney, is as anti-science as can be.  That’s what the “great” Anthony Fauci represented throughout.  The entire National Institutes of Health – NIH – should be disassembled and reconstituted in a way that will improve health and longevity, not the bottom lines of pharmaceutical companies.

The only legitimate role of government in our democratic Republic is to be a partner in the health, safety, advancement and prosperity of its citizens.  Consider what it is, in fact today, and recognize why Prudence indicates that these should be revolutionary times.

DOLLARS

The world is awash in dollars including the trillions we create through productive enterprise in our own economy, those we create through productive enterprise in other countries, the “air-dollars” the FED creates for us at re-election times, and the dollars created by foreign banks and enterprises.  Lots and lots of dollars.  The “air-dollars” have been tolerated by Saudi Arabia and other OPEC nations (OPEC being largely a creation of Henry Kissinger and the American oil industry) and nearly every other nation in the world since Nixon closed the “Gold Window” of the Treasury in 1973.  Simultaneously we guaranteed to protect Saudi Arabia and its oil markets and they agreed to market oil only in dollar denominations.  People who wanted oil, and many other traded products, were happy to accept dollars in payment and just as often would sell their goods in terms of dollar values rather than their own currencies.  The need to maintain “exchange rates” with all other currencies and the dollar, gave rise to incredibly lucrative currency speculations that have been not only a financial lever but a political one, as George Soros and others can testify.  So many dollars.  Every one is a bill – a bill against American productivity, and each must eventually be paid with something valued by the holder.

Many in power today seem to view the ocean of dollars as something that will be tolerated forever, and, further, that our incomprehensible debt – over 32 Trillion, now – can be “mentalized” as opposed to monetized.  That is, we will eventually be able to talk our debtors out of worrying about it or even wanting it paid back.  Without grasping what their attitude means, many people just roll their eyes when asked about how we will ever deal with our national debt?  Since it can’t be dealt with now, the best thing is to not let it worry us too awfully much, and let someone worry about it in the future.  Apparently, since we have made ours the largest single element of worldwide debt, all other nations should realize that if our debts are called the world will be worse off without an independent United States… so there: deal with it.  That’s some convenient mentalizing, but it’s not likely to work.

Until 10 or 15 years ago, the majority of nations accepted the dominance of the dollar as a trade-off for stability and extensive military aid from the U.S. to the more than 150 nations in which Americans were posted to protect or stabilize smaller countries facing politically crappy enemies.  Militarily, the U.S. had established a global empire that benefitted itself in both trade and influence, yet also cost it more than its own productivity could afford, hence the enormous debt being tolerated.  But tolerance isn’t love.  There was and is nothing about our past relationships that will inhibit smaller countries from accepting “help” from Communist China, our sworn enemy.  Part of China’s all-dimensional war against the U.S. is the unseating of the dollar as the global currency of trade.  If we lose the “petro-dollar” advantage other nations will quickly decide to not accept payments of international trade obligations in dollars.  One hopes that some one of the geniuses who brought us to this point of astronomical debt, is working on how the U.S. of A. is going to survive as an independent entity without the petro-dollar economy to sustain it.  Voters should ask politicians this question.

Fellow Prudentialists will appreciate the growing, unique responsibilities of U.S. citizenship, ignored or un-taught only at our peril.  Let’s move further.

Economics, Elections, Governance, Obama, Politics 2023, Representation

BEING A LONG SHORTLY – 3

Leave a comment

Progress toward exposing problems we face has been impPrudently slow… and there are so many.  They are interrelated, but it is far too complex to discuss them all at once.  Let’s move forward.

UNIONIZATION

There are valid reasons for otherwise independent, sovereign individuals to put their futures and ability be productive into he hands of others who may or may not share their best interests.  Usually those reasons are related to bad management decisions, but unionism has devolved into monopoly labor, and it’s just as flawed as monopoly capitalism.  The private sector has largely rejected unionism; monopoly labor primarily exists in the “public” sector – government financed and managed work.  The reason for this phenomenon, the dirtiest possible, is the value of rewarding an army of political, re-election workers, be they in construction, policing, firefighting, plumbing, paving or bus-driving.

Most are good people.  It’s never a question of individual people, it’s the power held by a relative few of them who purport to “represent” their membership in obtaining more “fairness” in pay and work rules.  The process of keeping power for union leaders lies in politicians having voted for legal status for unions; it lies in “public” contracting and public employment being required to be unionized.  The unions, as a result these legal requirements, also are obligated to “negotiate” with the same politicians who granted them power and for whom they work at election times.  It is a game in which the politicians always lose when representing “the public” – taxpayers – in determining how much to pay the members of the unions.  On the other hand, the politicians, left mostly, but also many on the right, who “fight” for “working families” usually win on the re-election side of the board.  “Working families” are always union families, and the “fight” is always to pay them more.

It didn’t take long for what union members were paid became the “prevailing wage” and the rate that anyone doing business with town, state or federal governments had to pay in order to bid on “public” contracts.  Unlike business and labor and expenditures in the (dreaded) private sector where all the productive surplus that pays for every public expenditure is earned, virtually no one who negotiates for the “public” represents the interests of the public… not really.  Elected officials who win election and re-election by promising to “fight for working families and the ‘middle class’” only fight to keep things as they are, reliably in favor of government, always at higher pay.

If a single change could be made that was “fair” for every American, it would be for every state to be a right-to-work state with no favoritism in public contracting for unionized companies.  For contractors who could show superior results from their unionized workforce, they would rightly win their share of “public” projects.  Non-union contractors who could show the same, would win theirs.  Until that day, the slope will remain downward, always at higher pay.

 A sad example of the downside of legally sanctioned unionization is the death and destruction that followed the death of George Floyd in 2020.  “Oh, come now Prudence… you’re off the rails with that one,” you might be thinking.  But, you’re looking at the wrong end of the whole sequence.  The man who was convicted for the manslaughter of Floyd before his body was cold, Officer Derek Chauvin of the Minneapolis Police Department, was a dues-paying member of the Police Officers Federation of Minneapolis.  That union had no role in his trial relative to George Floyd, but it had protected Chauvin multiple times relative to complaints about his use of force while an active officer, of which there were many – more than 15.  Chances are that Chauvin ought to have been separated from the police department long before he restrained George Floyd.  He had demonstrated a tendency to use force to restrain detainees past the point when force was needed.  The Federation had argued for him in every case, saving his job.  That’s what unions do and a large part of why members pay union dues.

EDUCATION

One of the worst examples of public employee unionization is teachers’ unions – not teachers… teachers’ unions.  Their stranglehold on public policy and purse strings was made clear during the 3 years’ of COVID-19 fear-mongering.  The damage to children and to actual education itself, is nearly immeasurable, the money wasted to appease teacher unions during COVID, is outrageous.  Even the supposed scientists at the CDC were taking orders from the Federation of Teachers as to whether schools could open again or kids stop wearing masks – science be damned.  Teachers pretended to “teach” remotely while students pretended to “learn” from their computer screens.  But, no one learned from the “science” everyone claimed to be following, including the CDC and the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases: guardians of “the science,” every one.  And that’s another post.

Observers of things educational estimate that kids were set back one to two years of development and learning under the COVID regime.  Despite the uselessness of face masks and the increasing understanding of the damage they do to development of the youngest school-children, including socialization and speech and comprehension skills, some school systems, largely pushed by unions, still wanted to mask children at the beginning of the 2022-23 school year!  Because of fear of catching COVID?  Ridiculous.  These are the people we trust to impart knowledge to our children – knowledge that is supposed to prepare them to think on their own, resolve problems and conflicts and to prepare for adulthood.  Yet many school teachers and school committees seem Hell-bent on denying the children with whom they are entrusted for five days a week, a fair chance at growing up intact.  What are we doing?  What are they doing?  What in every matter of education should educators consider their mission and success to be?  Confuse kids about their sexual outlook or fantasy?  Convince kids that their skin color is more important than their abilities to apply themselves?

People who don’t lie to themselves and others about human nature – like socialists and Communists do – will say “No” to those last two questions.

BANKS & ECONOMICS

People whom we pay excessively to “manage” our finances, the money supply and economic growth, appear to not have as deep an understanding as we assume when justifying their exalted pay and position.  They are evidently even more ignorant of the majesty of freedom and individual sovereignty; money and freedom are inextricable, after all.  The foolhardy actions of the “Biden” administration, following on the heels of the largely mendacious “COVID Pandemic,” and the deadly inflation that results, illustrate all too clearly the lack of intelligence being applied to economics… and to governance, itself.

Amidst the jungle of banking, finance and investment regulations that have grown up since the Great Depression, a basic truth has been lost within government, itself – including Congress – and among the people of the United States.  Now, with communistic theories being applied thither and yon, we are approaching the cliff’s edge of economic collapse while a crowd of chowderheads is enthralled with its legislative “victories” in the first two years of the Biden regime, basic truth be damned.  And, what truth is this?  Inflation is the result of government actions.  It is not a virus that attacks without warning, or the result of too much exuberance by free people and enterprise.  It refers only to the money (actually, “currency”), supply, something for which the unholy alliance between government and the Federal Reserve are entirely responsible.  Rising prices are not inflation, although inflation results in prices rising.  Inflation (and this is why it is often employed as a matter of policy) reduces the value of currency, both in tangible form and in electronic accounts.  In the short term, it enables government to pay its debts more cheaply, but it also steals from every private person and family, savings and retirement account.  Inflation is a thief unleashed upon the population by government.

Lately, the secretive, highly regulated, yet poorly regulated banking industry, has been shaken to its boots by the severe inflation ignited by the pandemic and the wild, unneeded deficit spending of the Biden administration.  The Federal Reserve Board assumes as part of its role, that it must regulate the money supply, ostensibly to limit inflation.  Contra-indicated is its other assumed role: controlling (limiting) unemployment.  Controlling inflation comes first, always, since the health of the financial/banking system relies on stable rates of inflation and of interest.  In the world of mortgages and large-asset financing and leasing, interest rates – the cost of money over time – needs to be stable or growing very slowly.  Abrupt acceleration in the rate of inflation disturbs both long and short-term financing and, ironically, the availability of cash for daily economic function.  Banks have failed in the past two weeks and other banks are scrambling to save weakened banks.  Treasury Secretary, Janet Yellen has repeatedly assured the public and Congress that “the banks” are safe and that depositors will be able to obtain their money when needed.  America’s Gramma Yellen looks so friendly.  She expects to bring our total debt to 50,000,000,000,000 dollars.  That is a difficult number to grasp – maybe FIFTY FRIGGIN’ TRILLION is easier to conceive of.  Her calming words consist of the possibility that the total cost of INTEREST(!) will be a certain relatively small percentage of GROSS FRIGGIN’ DOMESTIC PRODUCT!

Yellen is a committed Keynesian economist, which is to say that she believes in deficit spending as a matter of policy and appropriate government action/response to financial OR social anomalies.  This belief blends in with the socialist view that any problem brought to government’s attention, must be resolved by government action.  “Deficit” spending also fits the modus operandi of the Federal Reserve, itself, since it is enabled by law to lend money to the government that it – the Fed – does not have!  What could go wrong?

Deficit spending, itself, is premised on the vast majority of the population being ignorant of the possible effects of it.  That is, so long as “people” (voters) don’t understand what government is doing to them (“for them” in theory), and it is primarily economic “doing,” the government can do what is good for government and keep voters occupied with a host of social issues, angers, unfairness-es, and fundamentally local grievances.  With enough words in favor of this or that response to these non-federal (non-Constitutional) issues, Congressmen and women and Senators, many of whom don’t understand economics much, either, can keep getting re-elected.  The permanent government and the “experts,” like Yellen, who slide into and out of powerful federal positions, can maintain the direction they want government to go, regardless of the wishes of the citizenry whose power they actually exercise.  Janet Yellen has been influential or powerful in the economic direction of the federal government for three decades – first as one of the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors in the mid ‘90’s, then as Chair of the Council of Economic Advisors for Bill Clinton for two years.  Barack Obama named her Chair of the Federal Reserve – technically a private consortium of banks, not Federal, in fact.  Joe Biden chose her for Treasury Secretary, likely as he chose many of the key people from the Obama Administration: at Obama’s direction.

Despite supposedly favoring low unemployment over inflation control, Yellen has argued for continued “stimulus” during the pandemic, and for higher taxes and lower “retirement” spending to deal with the national debt.  Republicans are routinely lied-about at any suggestion of reducing Social Security or Medicare expenditures like what Janet Yellen suggested.  Doesn’t matter, so long as she is happy to enable and promote Keynesian deficits in the face of “crises,” socialists will be happy to take her advice.

We are in trouble.  Stay tuned for more ways to Prudently analyze or resolve the problems we face.

Biden, Climate, Crime, Culture, Economics, Education, Foreign Policy, Immigration, Transportation

BEING A LONG SHORTLY – 2

Leave a comment

America is mired in at least 39 or 390 serious problems, but we’ve dealt with only 4 of those we’ve Prudently identified.  Time is short.  We must continue.

NUCLEAR POWER

Those who have submitted, mentally and emotionally, to the “green” cult, are uniformly opposed to so-called fossil fuels on the premise that carbon-dioxide is going to ruin Earth’s climate and cause the demise of civilization and of life, itself.  That CO2 is the prime “green” component of the solar-driven oxygen cycle upon which all life depends, seems not to affect their thinking.  Those same are virulently opposed to nuclear energy, the cleanest, least damaging source of electrical energy currently available.  Something doesn’t make sense.

Green leftists always reference “Chernobyl” as the end of the argument against nuclear; if that fails, “Three-Mile Island” is expected to shut-up any pro-nuclear stragglers.  Both of those supposed examples of what’s wrong with nuclear power plants, are non-sequiturs.  Chernobyl, in particular, is an example, but it’s an example of how NOT to build a nuclear pile and of how NOT to run and maintain it.  Rather than condemn the natural process of nuclear fission, opponents should correct their opposition to the technological stupidity the Soviet Union rewarded.  Chernobyl would have been a big nothing had it been designed and built like, well, Three-Mile Island, actually.

Chernobyl was, technically, not in a containment structure as nearly all nuclear plants outside of the USSR were.  That is to say, the weaknesses of the design and overall misunderstanding of the processes at various states of operation of their graphite pile reactors, make the Chernobyl-design power plants risky for mistakes and accidents under the best of circumstances.  A long list of nuclear accidents at those plants was finally made public after the investigation into “Chernobyl” was completed.  Some engineering traditions should not be permitted to operate or build nuclear plants.

Still, nuclear power plants have so many inherent advantages that it is foolishness to avoid making use of the continuously-improving technology that goes into their design and construction.  The largest deterrent to nuclear power is fear, often fed by reference to bad technology, like that employed in Chernobyl-design plants and methods.  New series III and IV plants are smaller, modular and 5 to 10 times safer than Three-Mile Island era plants, including passive safety systems.  They’re also much less expensive to build and license.  And, they are clean in both product and operating lifetimes up to 60 years and in eventual decommissioning costs and impacts.  There is no “all-electric” future without massive, weatherproof generating capacity like what nuclear can provide.

TRANSPORTATION

Ours is a highly specialized and competitive global economy.  Both commodities and finished products must move from points of origin to points of consumption; this is not going to change no matter how many “community gardens” are created, and it won’t change despite all efforts to go “carbon neutral,” either.  Some tasks must be performed.  Daily there are millions of them.  Reducing the efficiency of completing those millions of tasks places huge burdens on society, the economy and on freedom.  Forcing wholesale changes on how transport is performed… without a more efficient way to do it, is risky at best and foolish by definition.

We are in the midst of a green revolution, and we have been for over 100 years.  From time to time wisdom has been applied through government regulation that has sped up the process of becoming more efficient and therefore cleaner in our consumption of energy to get materials and people moved from place to place.  Increased mileage standards is one example, and automobiles are far cleaner and more efficient than ever, today.  On the other hand, there are far more cars on the road than ever – in virtually every country – causing ever more gasoline, diesel and lubricating oil to be consumed while propelling substantially more “transport” per gallon or quart, and overall.  For green evangelists there has been no progress at all – things are oh, so terribly worse because people insist on private, self-directed transport, and reject, for the most part, “public” transportation: too many cars, too many people driving cars.

Bad government, bending to the political pressure of “green” acolytes, responds by forcing people to pay for and to switch to public conveyance, and then fails to render it clean, comfortable or safe.  Worse, public transit doesn’t go to every place where people need to go, and it never will.  Government then considers how to force people to go to where public transit does go, imagining “model” communities that may never exist.  There are clean, electric alternatives, but so much money and political force has been committed to “public transit” that alternatives are now less likely to be considered than if government went back to being wise, again.  [See: https://www.prudenceleadbetter.com/2017/07/20/a-home-on-the-beach/; or https://www.prudenceleadbetter.com/2016/07/10/automotive-economics-and-freedom/.]

Battery magic seems to many, especially to “green” proselytes, to be cleaner than those awful carbon-based fuels; we should all shuck our internal combustion engines and switch to battery-powered vehicles.  Bad government is listening to them and is virtually forcing car manufacturers to make more magic cars and fewer reliable ones.  The ads are impressive.  Batteries, themselves, are dirty products to make, both physically and politically.  A person changing from gasoline or diesel to battery power has to drive upwards of 60,000 miles before the ecological cleanliness of an “electric” car starts to improve upon that of an internal combustion model.  The only advantage of lithium-ion battery-powered cars is that the filth of mining and tailings, processing and effluents, unsafe mining (including child labor) and ecological disruption and pollution… well, it all happens in other places, out of sight of “green” Americans and others.  Right in our neighborhoods things are pollution free!  Forcing indigenous people off of their ancestral lands in South America is meaningless to us: they’re not OUR indigenous people about whom we care very deeply… very, very deeply.  Improvements to Communist China’s manufacturing base and our long-term dependence on it for parts and replacement batteries, should keep China from ever damaging relations with the United States… so that’s good, too.

No matter how much cleaner internal combustion engines become, it is – and will never be – clean enough; only perfection is barely adequate in the business of planet-saving.  So, in partnership with an entirely anti-American regime, the “green” (actually Red) movement has twisted our economy to the point of throwing away phenomenal manufacturing and servicing skills and technology, as well as discarding remarkably and increasingly efficient electric generation in favor of windmills and Chinese solar panels.  Soon, there will be millions of used cars rusting away as planet-saviors force the end of internal-combustion cars and trucks and the adoption of battery-powered replacements, while limiting the number of “licenses” to sell gasoline… or refine it… or transport it, making continued use of gas or diesel power a little more awkward and unreliable than even severely limited-range electrics are and will continue to be.

Ultimately, (see “only perfection” in the preceding paragraph) owning and driving personal vehicles will become so troublesome that only grossly expensive “public” transportation will be able to provide a modicum of mobility.  Personal freedom and sovereignty that Americans have invented the technological means to enjoy, will be lost forever.  After that there will be millions of battery vehicles that no one wants or can sell, and will find difficult to recycle.  Everything will be approaching perfection.

IMMIGRATION

For many nearly forgotten reasons the United States of America has for over 230 years been the most attractive nation and place for people from every nation to emigrate to.  Americans, themselves, no longer understand (or are taught) why this could possibly be.  Today education appears to include – is compelled to include – every tawdry mistake anyone in our history ever made.  Worse, to complete a communistic circle, the effect of those mistakes is to absorb and render null and void, every great idea and action of those same people.  The net effect of this twisted lens of American history is to grow up blaming your country for every problem in the world, rendering the existence and founding of it indefensible.  As a result, fewer and fewer people do defend it… at least from inside the country… even as more and more people flee their home countries and sneak into, well, HERE.

Actual sovereign nations, however, have laws to govern and, basically, restrict entry to their jurisdictions.  Nations are defined by their borders.  The United States is defined by both borders and ideas of freedom and individuality – not by groups or identities, but by individuals, individual responsibility and equality under the law for – every – individual.  For the past 65 years or so, we have turned our backs on our unique and majestic ideas, and dispersed the gold of citizenship as millions of people who don’t want to become Americans flooded to the insides of our borders.  

Barack Obama was the first president who actively modified immigration practices if not policies, to try to change the demographics of the United States.  Democrats had been dreaming of pushing white America into the minority category since Teddy Kennedy, an avowed socialist (and idiot).  They couldn’t get it rolling any faster during the Clinton administration, but things started moving under Obama.  He was probably the first president who seriously does not like the United States or its Constitution.  Trump, obviously, was an unexpected speed bump in the race to change races.  Biden, on the other hand, knows only two speeds in that race: “flat-out” and “stupid.”  Some FIVE MILLION illegal aliens from over 100 countries have walked in to the U.S. since the 2020 votes were “certified.”  About a million of those never even checked in with the Border Patrol, preferring to sneak in with various subterfuges planned, including serious drug-dealing and, for some hundreds or thousands, terrorist crimes.

Biden is hard to pigeon-hole.  A patriotic observer is hard-pressed to declare him merely sloppy or foolish, when the very next day he might be presented with greater evidence of Biden’s treason toward his own nation.  Breaking, or failing purposefully to enforce U. S. laws, which enables the entry of enemies to our nation, is exactly what President Biden has been doing since taking office… and it’s treasonous.  That treason has come in many flavors, primarily these two: entry of those seeking to execute criminal activities including terrorist acts, and entry of those transporting deadly narcotics with intent to distribute.  That fentanyl kills 10’s of thousands of Americans – mostly young men, but certainly not exclusively – one would think might wake up Americans to the crime of making its importation easier!

The importation of people is also a crime.  Mexican cartels, who control drugs across Mexico and across the U. S., have found a new billion-dollar industry in the trafficking of people into the U. S., especially, by a factor of 10, since the Biden administration took office.  For all of the cooperative police work – DEA work – between Mexico and the past 5 administrations, the flow of drugs, now including abundant fentanyl, has not slowed.  Where there once were 5 or 6 cartels there may be 15 operating in every Mexican state and every U. S. state, as well.  They’ve become more violent in Mexico, causing record levels of homicides, destroyed families and widespread official corruption.  At the same time, with the cooperation of Chinese chemical suppliers, they are partners in at least 100,000 deaths in the U. S. from fentanyl overdoses.

President Biden commits treason against his own country in other ways, often by providing “aid and comfort” to our enemies.  It’s subtle, but definite… well, subtle except for scuttling Afghanistan.  According to sworn congressional testimony, Biden demanded immediate withdrawal despite the advice of military advisors, including the abandonment of Baghram Airbase and more than $7 BILLION in weapons, ammunition, aircraft, including some high-tech personal and tactical hardware.  The Taliban, of course, has never been an ally of ours or friendly toward America or Americans in any way.  They’re enemies, Joe, you dope.  And we armed them to the teeth, abandoned real allies to danger and death at the hands of the Taliban.  We could have retained Baghram and much of our equipment, and we logically should have regardless of costs.  So, militarily, why did we do things the way we did?  What on Earth was the headlong, damned stupid rush?

It seems Prudent to realize that we abandoned all of our work because China wanted us to.  China didn’t want us to maintain a base so close to their border.  China is happy to see us shoot ourselves in the foot – it saves them the trouble.  They have invested many millions into the Biden family; our retreat was a return on investment by a factor of a thousand percent.  When we look at all the players and pressures involved in 20 years of U.S. actions in Afghanistan, only the U.S. acted like an idiot, against its own interests.  Treason, thy name is Biden.

When China is invited to “help” the United States eliminate drug abuse, and elections are “temporarily” suspended to get a handle on “crime,” it will be too late to rid ourselves of the gaggle of assholes from the Obama and Biden regimes.

So many words and only 3 more issues discussed.  Prudence says stop here, wait for the next.

Climate, Crime, Culture, Economics, Elections, Governance, Politics 2023

BEING A LONG SHORTLY – 1

Leave a comment

How do we screw up?  Let us count the ways.  To take a clear look we need, first, to LIST all the ways the United States is, well, doing the wrong thing.  It’s a little difficult to determine which errors are in reaction to the actions of others, and which are proactive attempts to change America’s direction, both domestically and internationally.  It will take more than one post to cover all those we can list.  Where to start?

America is not functioning the way it did when we were the strongest, most free and most prosperous nation, a beacon of freedom and opportunity.  The single, most potent disrupter and destroyer of “the American way” is and has been, socialism and then Marxism.  It would be useful if we could simply mount a campaign to “say no to Marxism,” and scrub it from the public mentality.  Unfortunately, and criminally, its perverse pervasion amidst so many of our institutions and attitudes, politicians and civic leaders, schools, administrations and educators, and other millions of social services, workers and “charities,” makes its removal a painful, macro- and micro-scopic abrasion of every layer of society.

So, there is a list of problems in need of Americanist repair, but virtually every one of them (poor Prudence has 39, a starting number) is confused by Marxism – Communism – which is antithetical to our Constitutional Republic.  “Leaders” seem to be oblivious to its infection.

FOREIGN AID

Foreign Aid is a problem, for example, to which most Americans pay little or no attention.  It’s not a “big” number in “budgets” of hundreds and thousands of $Billions, but it is a honey-pot for some of the most questionable, if not reprehensible, governments in the world; and, it represents our political support for philosophies and actions that are the OPPOSITE of what “America” stands for.

So, “foreign aid,” this backwater line-item of expenditure, makes a patriot wonder about the meanings behind the actions of others.  And, it should cause every American to reflect on how it is that so many elected and deep-state bureaucrat “leaders” manage to gain and retain power when they are so opposed to what America stands for.  Clearly, over many years, lies are fed to American citizens and, more disturbingly, to our elected “representatives,” sufficiently to coax continued financing of those opposed to us and our way of life.  This tiny corner of our “government” shows us the nature of most of our debilitating problems.  (America, awake!)

If one were to pray to God to expose the lies being told – and the liars who tell them – then he or she would also need to pray for exposure of the truth and the tellers of truth… so that we would know who to follow.  We’d have to exercise good, thoughtful judgment.  One thing, then, that we must not overlook, is that behind or amidst every problem that we might examine: problems that threaten our Republic and the unity required under “e pluribus unum,” are lies – lies of initiation and/or lies of maintenance.  The original lie of any conspiracy or fraud, must forever be reinforced with more lies, great and minor.  If we can identify the lie, we may be able to identify the liar.  It is a key responsibility of citizenship.

Lately, and we’re looking back to World War II as the beginning of “lately,” there has developed an apparent increased density of lies emanating from “government.”  This phenomenon has been possible only thanks to a compliant – if not subservient, press.  Our Constitution protects and, in effect, promotes a “free press,” but the meaning of the term and the protection, is seriously diluted, “lately.”

In keeping with the Communist Manifesto, news has, for many outlets, become mere propaganda, justified by political and racist hatreds. Very lately we’ve learned of direct involvement by federal law-enforcement agencies with various information outlets so as to alter Americans’ understanding of the truth.  More than once, this illegal interaction has affected elections at the federal level.  Virtual Communists within our own government of, by and for the people, seem to be converting a manifesto into actions.

Communism, socialism and other far-left movements have to lie.  The truth of their ideas and beliefs is so ugly and inhuman that only a smattering of disturbed people would join or follow them if the truth of them were made clear.  As might be said of “Satan,” the use of some truth about conditions that are not perfect, and lots of sympathy for people in imperfect situations, will confuse enough people to effect a shift of power toward the left.  Later is soon enough for the confused to learn the truth of socialism-Communism.  Those who are challenged with the murderous and economic destruction of socialism-Communism will fall back on the claim that leftist governance has failed only because those who have tried it were not as smart as those, like Hillary Clinton, who hope to try it today.

So, as we look at problem areas for America, keep at the forefront of your analysis that the far left has to dissemble, distract and deflect in order to make its claim to power.  It is better to have truth as our number-one ally. 

UKRAINE

Ukraine is a problem, whether you think their defense is appropriate for them to pursue, or not.  For the record, it is Prudent for everyone to defend his or her family, home, property and country.  It is natural and logical to ask others to help in that defense.  But the Ukraine situation is not as simple as that – how they became a target of their Russian neighbor; how the United States became their main armorer; how the United States got involved with overthrowing the Ukrainian government in 2014 – the waters in Ukraine have been seriously muddied by the United States.  Russia… Putin, refers to the current Ukrainian regime as “Nazis.”  Sadly, he is remarkably close to truth in so describing.

The late, great Senator, John McCain became the public face of U.S. support for street-riot opposition to the government of Viktor Yanukovych, who had been duly elected, and who favored closer economic ties to Russia over connection to the European Union.  The U. S. favored the opposite.  The main opposition to Yanukovych came from what is called “the far right” inasmuch as national socialist oligarchs govern all that differently than Russian socialist oligarchs.  But the national socialist party, Svoboda, had descended from neo-Nazis.  During the Maidan protests (Maidan is the central plaza in Kyiv) an even more Nazi-like party, Right Group, gelled and became more violent than Svoboda, including firearms.  Hearkening back to the Nazi occupation during WW-2, many Ukrainians still perceive Nazi collaborators as heroic in helping rid the country of Soviet Communists who, under Stalin, had starved millions of Ukrainians during collectivization.  Both Senators John McCain and Chris Murphy stood shoulder to shoulder with the fascist leader of Svoboda as they promised support for the protesters.

So far, no government of Ukraine has operated without corruption and oligarchic power-brokering, keeping the rich, rich.  Russia’s primary bargaining chip to pull Ukraine eastward, was gas pricing, with Ukraine highly dependent on low gas prices from Russia.  They were deeply upset when Yanukovych rejected their final offer in favor of the EU.  Vice-President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, managed to gain a position on the Board of the Ukrainian gas company, Bourisma, immediately following the ouster of Yanukovych.  Petro Poroshenko, one of the richest men in Ukraine, became Prime Minister and merged a Neo-Nazi militia, the Azov Regiment, into the National Guard.  At the time of “The Maidan Revolution” both Geoffrey Pyatt, U.S. Ambassador, and Victoria Nuland, his Assistant, were actively manipulating people and events to place the government of Ukraine on the pro-Western trajectory it claims now.  No wonder Putin is so angry.  There ARE Nazi’s in Ukraine, whom the Russians consider the descendants of Operation Barbarrossa, that killed 20 million Russians in WW-2.

We are told every day that defending Ukraine “for as long as it takes” is the same as defending democracy, which doesn’t actually exist in Ukraine – Zelensky has eliminated opposition parties.  Who are the liars in this mess that grows more dangerous with every Biden breath?  The larger question is: why would any of us vote for people who lie about Ukraine or who are too ignorant to say something true about that benighted real estate?  Helping displaced people is a totally separate question.

NORDSTREAM

The Nordstream 1 and 2 pipelines should be as neutral as pipelines usually are, but these have been elevated to powder kegs by someone’s utterly stupid sabotage of them.  Given that Russia has been seeking bids to repair the pipes, the initial charge by the U.S. that Russia may have destroyed its own pipelines… makes less sense than when first postulated.  The apparent culprit is the United States, itself, and parts of that story are spilling out, most particularly in the deep reporting of Seymour Hersh.  The U. S. has pushed hard on a key economic sore point for both Russia and Europe.  Watching the gang of less-than-honest advisors and ambassadors “handle” America’s relationships with Russia, Ukraine, China, Iran and North Korea, gives a Prudent person pause and worry.  It’s almost as though war weren’t coming quickly enough, and these boobs were testing ways to hasten it along.  Don’t hold your breath waiting for the truth about the Nordstream operation from the federal government.

ENERGY

Pulling the plug on American energy production is one of the stupidest moves a federal government has ever made.  It seems inevitable that a leftist administration would be the one to attempt it.  It was known to be likely if Joe Biden became president in 2020: he campaigned on a “green” platform.  So, he has made it difficult and costly to develop oil and gas fields and bring them on line.  Doing so, along with the somewhat silly added regulations and restrictions on the uses of natural gas and refined products, has had an immeasurably small impact on the earth’s climate, if any, and probably won’t ever have more than that.  This is not to say that his destructive policies have not had AN impact.  Keeping the wealth of natural resources out of the American economy – and other economies – has lubricated the acceleration of inflation that hurts everyone while weakening the nation of the United States just as threats to the nation are the greatest they have been since the Cold War with the Soviet Union.

Controlling America’s energy production and keeping its costs low strengthen’s America strategically and domestically.  Forcing more of our citizens into subsistence economics weakens the nation, and removes millions of people from the “improvement track,” where adults gain in skills and earning power – and living standards – and their expanding hope for the future encourages them to have children who can advance in skills, learning and hopefulness.  Creating economic hardship is the exact opposite of what political leaders should ever do or ignore; indeed, failing to partner in the economic advancement and safety of your citizenry, is one of the clearest marks of failure by leaders.

The ”green” agenda is founded on a number of fallacies, including our ability to modify the climate of the planet.  Politically, the green movement has as much of its impetus a newfound political, regulatory ability to PUNISH economically successful people.  The rapidity with which President Biden reversed energy policies, ostensibly to undo anything connected to Donald Trump or any of his supporters, marks his, and his leftist, “green” voters’, intense desire not to govern as partners in success, but to damage the economies of non-leftists.  It exemplifies failure.  Energy is strength and security, and it defines the scope and efficiency of an economy in a world of specialization.  To weaken energy is to weaken the economy and every citizen’s position in it.  To reduce hope in an economy is to strike at the purpose of nationhood.  For Joe Biden, it fails beyond “us versus them” in a political sense, reaching the nadir of “me versus all who question me.”

_______________________ Our problems exceed a single posting.

Economics, Environment, Governance, Health Care, Politics 2023

DEFENDING PALESTINIANS

4 Comments

Supporting Palestinians

One need not look very hard or long to discover immense government mendacity and incompetence.  Yet, when found, both qualities of questionable federal actions serve to confirm excellence and veracity for those whose intentions are fulfilled thereby.  In other words, almost everything federal departments do is subject to the ideologies of long-term employee-perpetrators, and very little to do with the intentions of Presidents or Cabinet Secretaries.  Elected officers are relatively temporary, especially Presidents and their appointees – ostensibly the most powerful people in government.  All of this potential failure is exposed sharply in a little town named East Palestine, Ohio.

Norfolk-Southern operates a two-track main through the town of East Palestine.  Across those rails travel a thousand products every week, mostly in bulk – products like cement, flour, gypsum, wheat, oil, and a host of manufactured volatiles like vinyl chloride, methyl ethyl ketone, butyl acrylate, benzene residue and dozens of other toxic fluids and materials.  People whose lives place them along the tracks of Norfolk-Southern, are usually ignorant of, if not oblivious to, all of these potential hazards flying by at 50 and 60 miles an hour on trains that weigh so much that their cumulative momentum require up to a mile of normal braking to come to a halt.  On February 3rd, 2023, a train of 150 cars and tankers of various types was routed to pass through East Palestine around 9 o’clock in the morning, but it never made it through… most of it.

A bearing on a bulk dry-materials car was overheating.  That car and bearing may have traveled 300 miles or more since the train was “made up,” and the imminent failure of that bearing and axle was visible in Salem, at least 20 miles ahead of East Palestine, as sparks and eventually flames spewed from the doomed journal.  It lasted another 20 minutes until it failed catastrophically in East Palestine.  By raw luck no one was killed as 38 of the cars crumpled together and started burning, including 10 cars with truly hazardous chemicals.  Further luck allowed for only fire and not an explosion, which might have thrown metal a mile or more from the site.

One of the risk factors for the residents of East Palestine appears to have been that many of them voted for Donald Trump and, worse, that most are white-skinned.  Otherwise it is difficult to assess why the federal government was so slow to respond to the plight of the little town of 5,000 souls who were so rudely alerted to the unsafe nature of America’s rail transportation, and its ruinous costs for innocent victims of its accidents.

Of course, the huge costs of “breaking” a train somewhere along the main line, in order to remove one defective car, is very, very high. We must recognize the difficulties of running a railroad. Still, had they stopped the train to remove the car with the burning axle, they’d have had to bring another engine up to the rear section and pull it back away from the damaged car. the front section could be pulled away from the other end of that car. But then what? Bring in a crane to pick it off the rails? Probably just pushing the car off the tracks with a piece of construction equipment would have been the cheapest temporary solution. The rest of the train could be coupled together and complete it’s risky journey. Definitely it would have been a more elegant solution than the one they tried. Even the relatively insensitive thermal detectors that all railroads use to alert them to overheated bearings, must have detected a journal with sparks and flames spraying from it

Pulling that mess through East Palestine must have been an economic decision.

Despite Ohio and Federal EPA assurances, no one in East Palestine trusts either the water or the air.  Local anecdotes about headaches, sick pets and farm animals, rashes, burns and inability to tolerate the air in their homes and businesses, are discounted automatically.  “Everything is safe to breath and drink,” they are told, but after the conversion of vinyl chloride into phosgene gas and hydrochloric acid thanks to “burning off” the remaining vinyl chloride that hadn’t burned on its own, no one is taking the word of anyone in authority.  That and the mixed messages of safety and advice to drink bottled water, has everyone who can smell the chemicals on edge.  The Secretary of Transportation, one Peter Buttigieg, reassured the aggrieved residents with the information that there are as many as 1,000 train derailments every year in the United States and, despite the excessive attention being paid to East Palestine currently, they shouldn’t feel especially victimized, apparently.  Oddly, his wisdom provided no comfort, whatsoever.  Who hired that dope, anyway?

Eventually the EPA began serious cleanup, and the black cloud with which “they” had blessed this beautiful little spot of earth, dissipated, which is not to say that the poisonous gasses released “went away.”  They are now part of our environment… and everyone’s else, but “the solution to pollution is dilution.”  Closer to ground zero, however, the black ash fallout is a worry for those on whose property it fell.  No one really knows what the long-term health effects may be for those most impacted.  On February 3rd, their homes plummeted in value as did their land.  Norfolk-Southern is not likely to make them whole, probably no one can.  A thousand derailments per year… hmmmnnh, maybe there is something important for the Secretary of Transportation to do.

Biden, Economics, Governance, Politics 2023, Representation

INFLATULATION

Leave a comment

Currently we seem to be as concerned about inflation and the “consumer price index” as we are about any other nationwide issue.  “Inflation,” of course, refers only to the inflation of the money supply, something that is only partly affected by the actions of people in the day-to-day economy… what we call, “Main Street.”  This reference is usually juxtaposed to “Wall Street,” where the wizards of finance operate at, supposedly, an entirely different level of economics than the rest of us.  Though Wall Street money machinations are more arcane, they are not so very different from the decisions we all make regarding the presence or lack of “money” and the affordability of things we’d like to buy.

“Wall Street” is a combine of INTERNATIONAL money manipulators, and they are tied to many governments, especially that of the United States, where finance involves multi-Billions and even Trillions of dollars; financing shopping centers, small businesses and residences is not their particular concern.  They, like Federal socialists, are delighted to mess with 10’s and 100’s of thousands of mortgages, including selling “options” and “futures” contracts based on their supposed flow of billions and hundreds of billions of future mortgage payments – delighted, that is, until their phony financial instruments caused the destruction of several of their own pack, like Lehman Brothers.  At that point, thanks to their financial entanglements with “our” federal government and governors, they felt free to compel the taxpayers of America to bail them out.  Otherwise, they’re just like us.

In either case, “money” is defined as instruments of real worth or value: a dollar once was exchangeable for a dollar’s worth of silver or, in theory, of gold.  People – and banks and governments – around the world, recognize precious metals and true weights and purity thereof, as items of intrinsic value.  Right now, the “dollar” bill we are familiar with is no longer even tied to the United States directly; it is a “Federal Reserve Note” that the U. S. Federal Government declares must be accepted as “legal tender” for all debts public and private.  But, all you can get at a Federal Reserve Bank (neither federal nor a reserve) in exchange for a one-dollar Federal Reserve Note is another Federal Reserve Note.  So, our “currency” today is only “tender,” not actual money.  Others accept it in exchange for real goods and services and as long as this is true we can function economically.

Our good and trusted Representatives, however, legislating in “The People’s House” on our behalf, have decided over many decades to spend more “money” than we can actually afford to pay in taxes.  Our Federal “budgets,” such as they have been since 1960 or so, have been out of “balance,” now accumulating some $32 Trillion of DEBT, which has placed an obligation on the backs of all of us, thank them very much.  This occurred at an accelerated rate over the past two years of the Biden administration and the last year of the Trump administration, thanks, ostensibly, to a COVID-19 pandemic, and this has both distorted our employment, wages and sense of responsibility, and caused tremendous INFLATION of the money supply.  Well, actually, it’s not money that it has inflated, but our “legal tender” or “currency.”  Keep in mind that it is not “money” that gets inflated – that supply only grows by the quantities of goods and fixed assets that increase thanks to PRODUCTION of those goods, goods that have intrinsic value.  That “intrinsic value” is the closest thing to “money” that we have.

Unfortunately, as fascistic leftists shut down our economy and started paying newly locked-out workers to stay home as their jobs evaporated, PRODUCTION, oddly enough, declined!  Suddenly we had trillions of new bits of legal tender floating around with fewer goods – or SERVICES – available to buy!  This logically caused prices to rise.  That’s not “inflation,” regardless of how often we call it that, it is PRICE INCREASE derived largely from supply and demand.  In our foolishness we lowered supply while we multiplied demand.  Indeed, our decades-long transfer of production to China, where it was also restricted by COVID (including screw-ups in the supply chain, keeping what products were made out of our marketplaces) made our own inflation-generated price increases even worse.  Anyone who calls rising prices, “inflation,” is simply ignorant.  The Federal Government and the current administration are the most frequent mis-staters of what “inflation” is, but it helps to confuse – or lie to – the American people, one of which is always a Federal goal.

Consequently, President Biden and his tight tether to the truth, loves to claim that “inflation” has “come down” for the past 6 consecutive months.  How wonderful that sounds, as though his spendthrift administration were responsible for improving the economy for average folks.  But what is reality?  Do Biden’s truths have any congruence with reality?

Prices are still high and getting higher.  What does Biden’s claim of slowing “inflation” have to do with that?  Well, when we recognize what his “inflation” really is: price increases, Biden is patting himself on the back for slower price increases.  Swell.  What he hopes to obscure is the painful fact that all the price increase that has already taken place IS STILL THERE, and those prices are STILL GOING UP, just a little slower.  That is not a victory.  Factually it is a sloppy admission that the pain he has inflicted on Americans with his dumb-ass policies is as bad as ever and getting worse.  Congratulations, you old dope.

Add to the damage being done the fact that the rate of price increases (so-called inflation) is no longer honestly stated to begin with, thanks to Federal political calculations, since they no longer include ENERGY or FOOD!  What a hoax.  That lets the Department of Commerce claim that “inflation” is only 6 or 7 or 8 percent, when it’s actually 12 or 13 percent!  People might really vote against someone who presided over an economy with 13 percent inflation (whatever that is).  As Ralph Waldo Emerson famously said, “The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.”

So, Prudent readers, inflation isn’t the same as price increases, but it is a significant cause of them.  It isn’t something people cause; it is a tool of government that performs as a relatively slow devaluation of the currency.  Unfortunately, that is the same legal tender that we, all, depend upon for affording our means of living.  Don’t vote for politicians or erstwhile “leaders” who willingly devalue the money you have earned and the wealth you have accumulated over years.  Who the Hell do they think they are, to steal from every citizen?  Indeed.  Check out: https://www.prudenceleadbetter.com/2022/08/21/the-inflation-chronicles/