Category Archives: Economics

Biden, Crime, Economics, Education, Elections, Foreign Policy, Health Care, Politics 2022, Religion, Representation

THIS IS THE YEAR

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What can he see?

This is the year.  2022 has been forced by the left to be the fulcrum of history.  The perception of the left in 2020, faced with the likelihood of Trump’s re-election, was that the field was finally fertile enough to sow Communism (under a variety of euphemisms) in the sharply divided and guilt-ridden, formerly United States.  Cities were collapsing in 2020, “Black Lives Matter” had coordinated with thousands of weirdos, “antifa” thugs and students and other youth who had been taught to hate our nation and history.  The time seemed right to pull the trigger on revolution… besides, the media and a strange congress had many municipal leaders so consumed with hatred for Donald Trump and the Americanism he represented, that they too, agreed with “BLM” and allowed rioting in the name of myriad hatreds to destroy their communities.

The demise of George Floyd provided the spark as if written into a script.  If Derek Chauvin had not been so incredibly stupid, some other event would have happened, some other black man would have conflicted with police and drawn fire while unarmed.  Then his family would have become millionaires and Nancy Pelosi and a bunch of other dopes would have kneeled in the rotunda in that man’s memory, while the same cities – and hopes – burned.

The left engineered the answer to a big wish of theirs: dumping Donald Trump.  We can begin to grasp what leftists really have for an end-game, when we dissect their hatreds, and their hatred for Trump – and trump supporters – is instructive.  Trump, they decry, is a “populist,” which is to say, he only goes with what is “popular.”  “Populist,” however, actually means being a member of the “Populist Party,” which gained traction in the late 19th century over issues like initiating an income tax, public ownership of utilities, support for unionization to counter the power of large corporations and banks, and support for fair returns for farmers.  As a “people’s” party, the Populists were seeking to balance  economic freedom for small business and workers, against the explosion of industrial growth and price-fixing power of industrial and financial trusts.  Many of these issues were assumed by Progressives and the “Trust-Busters” in the first decade of the 20th century.

The more meaningful approbation of Trump is that of “Nationalist.”  This is supposedly terrible, and likened to Nazism, ostensibly because Hitler was a nationalist.  “America First” became pejorative in the view of leftists.  So, what is the alternative goal?  Globalism: the dissolution of national identities and, therefore, national heritage and culture.  Destruction of American culture was the primary effect of 2020 lawlessness.  It seemed to have many allies, one of whom is now president.  What were/are they thinking?

Anti-nationalism has only one goal, globalist, one-world government.  Is there any reason to expect that one-world government will be based on the American, Constitutionally limited  model?  We can learn a lot from the last 50 years of United Nations “enlightenment.”  The vaunted U. N. was a creation of liberals and leftists who sold war-weary Americans on the image of diverse peoples all getting along to spread peace, democracy and the end of hunger around the world.  Communists never accepted those premises, nor did other kinds of tyrants… nor Nazi-enflamed fundamentalist Muslims.  To poorer nations it was a way to get money from the United States; to Communists a way to weaken the United States, to Muslims, a way to get the U. S. to pay for oil for poorer nations while weakening Christianity.

Within a very short time the U. N. became an excusatory congress for the U. S. policy of containing Communism, and we were thrust into the Korean Conflict for that stated purpose, but at its heart that war was an excuse to pit the U. S. against the Soviet Union and, ultimately, against communist China, while weakening the only super-power.  It was the first war we won by losing: a new experience for the greatest generation.

Right on its heels the globalist C.I.A. and State Department leftists concocted what became the Viet-Nam War, the scars of which have never healed.  Still ostensibly “containing” Communism, the U. S. consumed about a $Trillion dollars (back when a Billion dollars was a lot of money) and destroyed Americans’ faith in their military.  So many lies were told about the conduct and success of that stupid conflict, that the Army had to hire hundreds of paid dissemblers to keep up with the flow.  Again, we lost by winning, and were shamed.

Since Viet-Nam we have embarked on numerous military adventures, most of which are unknown to Americans and better grasped by other nations, including our enemies, of which there is a considerable list.  At the same time we have exhausted our credit line with policies of welfare, corporate, family and personal, international and more. Nine administrations and 18 Congresses have seen fit to overspend – not at declining but at INCREASING rates.  We now have commitments that cannot be met, and devaluing the currency is the final effect.  Americans are seeking a political solution to a philosophical deficit: we have accepted the blandishments of socialists and communists for 60 years and mismanaged our industrial base so badly that we can barely afford to defend ourselves, much less project power to constrain tyrants.  Freedom is shrinking, everywhere.

Americans have swayed from responsibility to licentiousness, forswearing God and religion, turning instead to the perpetual debt-creation of government.  We are not able to sacrifice for a better future as our parents and grandparents did, automatically.  We have a plethora of foolish rights… and fewer freedoms.  The freedoms remaining are under assault, now that we have elected a tyrant of our own.

So, 2022 poses a host of problems that took a long time to gestate, but which need to be corrected in very short order.  It will take sacrifice on everyone’s part.  America has never been invaded, discounting the War of 1812, and we have not felt the devastation and losses of war.  But a war is brewing, here amongst us, and a welfare check won’t stave it off.  What do Americans have to do, now?  Learn Mandarin?

More than once over the past eight years we have considered our ballooning debt.  For the past two years elements of our deep state, agencies of the National Institutes of Health, elected leftists, George Soros’ minions and Communist China, have conspired to hobble capitalism about as rapidly as has ever been done – our hobbling of ourselves not having proceeded as quickly as they’d liked.  Brutal lockdowns and debt-defying welfare payments to locked out workers and free-loaders, fearful school closings and now mandated injections of ersatz vaccines or firings – even in the military and emergency domestic personnel – have stripped our workforce and businesses of the people needed to produce our goods and productive surplus.  We are broke and rushing to become poorer…, well, except for a few multi-billionaire-global merchants and money manipulators.  We have given up the capitalist opportunity society for an oligarchy of wealth and severe stratification into the rakers, the makers, the takers and the fakers.

Even more effectively, we have turned the “vaxxed” into haters of the “unvaxxed,” while formerly trustworthy doctors and hospitals, in thrall to the pharmaceutical manufacturers, have started denying medical care to those who choose to not be injected with mRNA poisons, whose safety and efficacy have been unknown, only now being revealed as neither safe nor effective.  Our barely recognizable “government’s” only offering is dissolution of the constitution and further expansion of the debt by another couple of $Trillion.  God save us.

It appears that a massive shift in political alignment is in the offing for the mid-term elections, but so what?  We are teetering, contemplating a preposterous war1 and swearing at one another.  Society is rending itself as it awaits the next free-delivery of goodies and gadgets from Amazon Prime and GrubHub, no longer even bothering to cook for ourselves.  We’ve demonized smokers, and glorified tokers.  Will changing control of Congress mean a tinker’s dam?  What do we expect a powerful new Congress to do?

Will a Republican congress cut the federal budget?  Will it use its “power of the purse” to force enforcement of the Constitution and of laws?  Will it impeach scurrilous Joe Biden?  Will it pursue exposure of the deep state and various collusions and corruptions that seem to have happened?  Will it force a complete house-cleaning at the Department of Justice?  Will it impeach Merrick Garland on Constitutional grounds?  Will it stop raising the debt “ceiling?”  Will it undue a host of bad laws and regulations?  Will Republicans eliminate clearly racist distinctions in the application of laws?  Will it pass a budget?  Will it resist any legislation of more than say, 30 or 40 pages in length?  Will it prevent the back-door passage of unrelated “wants” that certain Reps or Senators want to attach to true “needs” legislation?  Do we think either House will reform itself for the benefit of citizens or in defense of Constitutional rights and freedoms?  Given the last 40 or 50 years of congressional history, all these hopes… indeed, ANY of these, seems like a long shot.

We saw, upon the surprise election of both leftist and somewhat questionable Democrat Senators from Georgia, that the Democrat party was poised to push through utterly radical policies.  Indeed, their virulent attempts to “reset” American Constitutionality would lead patriots to accept the plausibility of concerted efforts to steal the presidential – and other – elections in 2020, in order to get the “reset” underway.  It, the rabid intensity for replacing the American system, seems to not be politics, anymore; it is no longer based on how to best represent the needs of the American people, but rather a mission to undo the last bastion of freedom in favor of a Chinese-led global tyranny.

The question, then, aside from “will we descend into war over Ukraine,” is how radically, how rabidly will the Pelosi-Schumer Democrats breach the bounds of law, custom and ethics to achieve victory in the mid-terms?  They have shown, repeatedly, that free and fair elections cannot be depended upon to maintain their majority in either house.

Consequently, given the building expectation of a Republican sweep of the mid-term elections, the threat to a Democrat majority anywhere is also building.  Watching the criminality guiding the Biden administration along our southern border, and the willingness of Merrick Garland to abridge the Bill of Rights, the threat to the survival of the United States will likely be experienced in 2022.  There is no one to our West who will save democracy for US.  We must save and defend it ourselves… right now.

1 There is really only one solution to the Ukraine standoff.  With consequences for invasion on the table, the U. S. must reach out to Putin and President Zelensky, not at the same time or place, but close, to commence negotiations.  Ukraine deserves respect, but not American blood.  Biden or Blinken or one of their apologists must make clear to Zelensky that neither NATO, or an assemblage of European states is going to risk everything to defend Ukraine from the Russian juggernaut.  Russia holds the military cards and killing thousands of them and more thousands of Ukrainians is not going to shift that balance materially.

Russia also must be respected, and assuaged.  The U. S. must assure Putin in no uncertain terms that war will not ensue over Ukraine IF an acceptable condition of neutrality for Ukraine: neutrality with sovereignty, can be established that is acceptable to Ukraine and Russia.  That may involve special trading status between those two nations, and sufficient flexibility for Ukraine to trade elsewhere as well.  It will have to recognize the special status of Crimea as a military enclave for the Russian Navy with some rights of veto by Ukraine for other than agreed uses and operations there, perhaps with a 99-year “lease” of the peninsula.  It could include a pact within which neither nation would take sides with any 3rd party against the other.  It must also recognize the cultural distinctions of ethnic Russians resident in Ukraine, and possible changes in the acceptance of the Russian language within Ukraine.

There is a diplomatic path that the U. S. could broker and cause to be recognized by the European Union and NATO itself, including NATO’s firm rejection of membership by Ukraine and agreement by Ukraine to cease negotiations with or appeals to NATO.  The U. S. should agree to recognize the neutrality of Ukraine and to lead the effort to have the rest of the U. N. similarly recognize the new status.  Russia must agree to exercise no military provocation or threat to Ukraine and to recognize, unequivocally, its independence, neutrality and sovereignty.  It’s possible.  All alternatives to this framework are disastrous.

Crime, Culture, Economics, Education, Family, Taxation

BUSINESS, PROFITS, CHARITY & FREEDOM

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Taking care of business…

Fewer and fewer people understand capitalism, despite every, single, one of us being a capitalist.  This is an odd distortion of knowledge and understanding, and it has taken a lot of work.  There are two kinds of capital: earned and unearned.  Figuring out which is which will make clear where each of us is on the spectrum.

Consider a newborn baby.  He or she will cry and fuss until he or she receives food and/or comfort – often the very same things.  There is no sense of sacrificing for greater rewards an hour or two later, or of “saving up” cries in order to obtain a larger portion at a later time.  Babies exhibit raw capitalism: pure barter.  I won’t make your motherly instincts feel the discomfort of a crying baby if you will provide what it takes to comfort me and put enough food into me so that I will sleep… like a baby.  We all start out as capitalists.

We might also note that a baby doesn’t save any food or comfort for later, nor does he or she offer more quiet alleviation of motherly guilt in exchange for food than it takes.  Everything is on the expense accounts as “current” – no accrual.

It takes a while for infants and toddlers to figure out that kindness and caring can be “banked,” as it were, for increased pleasure and happiness any time later.  It’s a big concept.  If lovingly raised, however, children do learn to avoid punishment for “bad” or costly actions, and to express love and kindness toward parents and others when they are not hungry or uncomfortable… and even to share possessions.  At some point they learn to trade possessions for perceived “profits.”  Something Tommy has seems more desirable than what Jeffy has – and vice-versa – and both parties “profit” from an exchange of goods.  Also a big concept.

Like all human “isms,” even incipient capitalism requires regulation and “institutionalized” bounds.  Almost every child learns that simply taking something of Tommy’s is extremely profitable: nothing is given up in exchange.  Parents or other adults are, at that point, obligated to punish – or dis-incentivize – that practice.  Jeffy’s taking, or stealing the possession of Tommy’s, must be made costly enough that Jeffy learns as immediately as possible, that there is no advantage or profit in that act or acquisition.  And, it must be a cost that exceeds the simple return of the stolen property.  Whether it’s a period of disfavor from a parent, or deprivation of a desired activity, a slap on the hand or something else proportional to the “crime,” there must be a cost that the perpetrator, Jeffy, will do his best to avoid going forward.  Otherwise, stealing becomes a habit and will be perceived as profitable and worthwhile.  Several big concepts.

It’s easy to imagine the fairly short-term consequences of the lack of institutionalized sanctioning of “bad” actions.  In this case, the “institution” is the “law,” or, at least, the automatic and swift punishment (let’s hope, by parents) of theft in addition to retribution.  This is the fundament of civilization; capitalism is woven amongst all the threads of civilized society.

Now let’s assume that our properly guided and sanctioned child grows up, essentially according to the Ten Commandments.  People of faith attempt to obey all ten, there being nothing negative about any of them, which is to say: nothing that hurts social cooperation and quality of life, or the raising of new adults with civilizing self-control.  Strictures against creating and worshipping graven images instead of God; taking the name of God in vain (cursing involving God’s name or power); keeping the sabbath day holy is also a good idea, albeit one that we in America have cleverly set aside; honoring our fathers and mothers is both logical and essential to the health of society; not killing one another; not committing adultery; not stealing; not lying about our neighbors; and, not coveting the property of our neighbors.  These are essentially society-protecting strictures that we attempt to talk ourselves away from only at our peril.  The hate-based riots of 2020 are the clear and clarion proof of the fragility of civilization in the absence of “the Commandments,” whatever their source.

Our new adult decides to start a business.  Having been raised “with a conscience,” Jeffy plans to sell his skills as a carpenter, and he recognizes that he’ll need a partner with similar skills in order to keep his contracting promises and to help avoid mistakes.  He makes arrangements with a local lumberyard to establish an account with sufficient credit to do significant renovation or add-on projects.  The account is based on Jeffy’s reputation as an honest person and, in part, on his father’s equivalent reputation.  The lumberyard considers the potential of a growing business customer as a worthy risk of a certain level of credit, or debt.

By virtue of hiring Aaron, a friend he knows from High school, who also loves building things, Jeffy takes on a remarkable burden of employer obligations, including various benefits that must be paid, including health care and liability insurances, and, of course, meeting “payroll.”  As owner of the business, Jeffy also is responsible for legal contracting with customers, and for other tax consequences of success.  He and Aaron still believe in their abilities and respective roles. and business commences.

“Jeff’s Construction” finds itself busy and able to pay both the owner and his employee reasonable wages while gaining assets in the form of two trucks and several power tools, and while accumulating some money in a local bank.  In other words, “Jeff’s” is profitable.  Knowing that his little company was facing taxes on his profits at both the state and federal levels, Jeff decides to make a donation to his church’s Christmas Food Drive.  With profits on the books of about $12,000, Jeff donates $2,000 to the food drive.  He and Aaron get their picture in the paper handing over a big cardboard check to the chairman of the Drive committee.  The minister and several other key people are also in the picture.  Jeff makes a handful of new connections, as a result, a couple of whom later contract with “Jeff’s Construction” for renovations of their homes.

As the years go by, “Jeff’s Construction” becomes “J & A Builders, Inc.” incorporated and no longer a proprietorship.  They grow to 6 full-time employees.  Each summer J & A work with the regional technical high school to provide summer jobs to budding carpenters.  Aside from income taxes to state and federal government, J & A’s building and garages plus the property taxes on the two partners’ and their 6 employees’ homes total over $100,000 per year, while excise taxes on their vehicles kick in another $26,000.  Donations to the Food Drive, the Boys and Girls Club and to the local “Y” for Summer Camp sponsorships plus support of a local Little League team, amount to nearly $25,000.  J & A also matches 401-K contributions up to 5% of income for all 8 personnel.

Those who misunderstand the immense values of honest profit are always looking for “businesses” and “business owners” to right non-business wrongs in society, perhaps because they are “fortunate.”  But that is not a business obligation.  The business is obliged to operate legally and honestly, delivering what it promises and not cheating customers, and to do so at a profit so that all legal obligations to employees and suppliers are met.  By providing multiple streams of tax revenue, businesses provide for all that civil society is relied upon to provide for residents.  Charity is in addition, and a blessing, not an obligation.

Of course, everything is different for those small businesses that have a room in the back that’s full of cash… cash they’re just too greedy to share with their oppressed workers and every poor person in town.  But, there are damned few of those. 

There are  many ways to add new wealth to an economy and to a nation.  The first of these was personal manufacture, in a sense, where the best tools or weapons compared to other groups or tribes created an advantage in terms of safety, hunting and survival.  Next came agriculture, permanent villages and cities and the need to defend them, which latter need spurred invention, metallurgy, and more.  Along with agriculture, fishing also introduces wealth and spurred marine technology.  In the presence of defensive pressures came a third major source of new wealth: mining.  Everything, of course, required managed labor and the necessary efficiencies that make ever-larger projects, whether construction or war-fighting, possible.  Indeed, it all made the Roman Empire possible – a success of management and leadership that taught some lessons to all of today’s successful – and failed – governments.  Religion, particularly in terms of Judaism and Christianity and the economic and familial ethics they spread across Europe, led, eventually and often unpleasantly, to the enlightenment and the explosion of technology, which made intellectual invention a new source of wealth and source of medical advantage, which is another form of civic wealth.

Today, virtually pure intellect is like a global form of mining.  New products are “manufactured” from a raw material of electrons, bringing new wealth into existence.  Construction, of homes or factories or office towers or highways and bridges, adds new wealth, too: fixed assets, from which use is derived for years and decades, enabling other wealth and our gigantic “service economy.”  Still, no matter the type of business in which one engages, the obligations of businesses and business owners – including stockholders – are the same.

What are they?

  • Operate legally (but don’t hesitate to challenge regulations and laws that are irrational and which amount to unequal application of the law)
  • Earn a profit legally, without cheating customers
  • At best, manufacture a product (best way to create new wealth benefitting the most people)
  • Next best, grow a product and/or improve the growing process
  • Treat employees equally and provide appropriate training and safe conditions for work
  • Provide real services that add value to products and their use or availability
  • Deliver what is promised, never less than promised, and more if you can
  • Do not employ false advertising or sales tactics
  • Maintain honest accounting, pay applicable taxes
  • Do not dirty your property, the air or the waters

Individuals, business owners or not, are always free to be charitable and to take part in politics or social issues they believe in.  But these should be personal decisions and personal resources.  A business owner fails his or her basic obligations to a community , to customers and to employees, by diverting business resources that should be enhancing working conditions, or providing insurance against future threats to the business.  Otherwise, if this sense of purpose and obligation to the health of the business is being weakened for any number of reasons, the business should be sold to those who will work to meet the listed obligations, or folded, having fulfilled, or no longer fulfilling, its mission.

Crime, Economics, Elections, Governance, Religion, Representation

dry your (T)(F)(Y)ears

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No one really looks forward to what others think may happen in a 12-month period when the calendar changes to a new year.  Given the past couple of strange, guilt-ridden years, many just say or think something on the order of, “Please, just let it be more ‘normal’ or ‘stable’ or ‘American’ than it was in 2021.”  Of course, the question is, Who’s doing the “letting” we’re hoping for?

When we think about it, we are asking some undefined “force” that (also hopefully) permeates all of life and reality, waiting for our entreaties to effect a needed change or “alignment” that will turn our pleas into pleasure, even if it is simply making a handful of traffic-light changes go green when we are running late.

Sometimes we question our very “right” to ask for help from the Universe (if that is where the help emanates), as though our own worth were questionable at that moment.  Perhaps we were really snippy with someone we love and said some regretted words as we were running late, leaving us unworthy until we have a chance to “make up” for the hurt we inflicted.  As that moment of opportunity approaches, we automatically ask the same “force” to put our loved-one in a good mood and able to accept our apology or peace-offering.  Is this religion?  What if we’re not particularly “religious?”  What if Sunday School was our last brush with Biblical things.  Chances are, when “things” seem out of our control or when a tragedy has struck someone we may not even know, we automatically (it seems) turn to a form of power outside of ourselves to adjust or rectify conditions for the better.

So, is there a Who?  Let’s hope it’s not the government.

2021, and 2020, for that matter, are examples in stark contrast of how government power can destroy the lives of millions, perhaps billions, in multiple countries while other millions, perhaps, billions, are pleading with the “government” to make life better, safer, more prosperous and less guilt-ridden.  Doesn’t seem like too much to ask.  After all, government has the money and power to do what needs to be done.  This attitude may not be the most Prudent: it exposes a feared failure of “the Universe” and the absence of hope.

Can’t the intercessor who changes lights from red to green also defeat a mere virus and balance the budget?  We say “who” because humans can’t conceive of an omnipotent being or force without a personality and, to complete the package, a face.  Whether it’s Jehovah or Jor-el, let’s hope the force is with us in 2022, ‘cause we’re running late.

Covid-19 was a creation of at least two governments and was released across the planet by government, as well, while governments insisted the fault lay within animals.  So far no one has been punished for the largely avoidable deaths of millions of people.  Is that the fault of us or of the “Force” itself?  We know government entities caused the plague, we also know that simple treatments can stop it, yet we fret and worry and wait FOR THE SAME GOVERNMENTS to make everything better.  This seems odd.  It’s virtually a declaration of helplessness on the part of millions of people who, if they perceived their place in the “hierarchy of the Force,” could take dominion over their corrupt governors and set things in proper alignment.  Is there a hierarchy?  Are we groveling observers and pawns or do we have a role to play in the direction of life and hope?

At this point we’re all saying or thinking, “Oh, please let us not be groveling observers or pawns.”  There’s that “letting” business, again.

We can’t avoid politics when discussing government actions and failures.  Political parties – or “factions” – are amazingly inept mechanisms for effecting the “general welfare” of the whole nation.  They must, by definition, serve themselves, first.  That is, by some convoluted instruction set, or “truth table,” partisans convince themselves of the welfare of their party being synonymous with the welfare of the nation as a whole.  It almost never is, although it might appear so in bits and pieces.  In any event, more and more of what the party has achieved always appears to partisans to be better for the majority of people than a mere leaving of things as they are.

Troubles accumulate, however, because each party inevitably promulgates some evils that serve key (ie. Powerful) partisans’ very local, even as local as their wallets’ interest, and the opposing party accepts those evils in order to obtain some “goods” that, in the arcane legerdemain of partisan politics, somehow balances out against the evils.

When the levers of power change partisan hands, the pent-up desires for self-interest are unleashed and the immediate saviors of the nation transform into evil-doers, albeit, in their own minds, at much more rational levels than those foul denizens of the other (yuck!) party.  And so it goes.  The “goods” instituted by this or that group of partisans, are replaced, little by little – or, sometimes, in huge gobs – by evils of the other group.  This fact of partisan life can be seen in the unimaginable mountains of debt with which the flocks of both producers and non-producers (who hope that bills are being paid in the background, but which are not, in fact) have been saddled while sloshing back and forth between partisan saviors.

It is most Prudent, going forward, that those of us who still have hope enough to ask for salvation from the What or Who that never employs evil, recognize that partisan politics and personages will never fulfill What’s or Who’s hoped-for intercessionary role.

Still, as with every New Year transition (many people revelers or not, miss the sound of the transition, which is a faint, barely audible ‘Ummm’ in low E) we have a “new beginning,” whatever that means for each of us.  We have, by the good fortune of living into a “new” year, a new set of opportunities to “make up for” things we have done that may have hurt someone else or, often, ourselves.  After all, as part of life, we also deserve to not be hurt or pushed out of alignment.  If we are fortunate enough to still hope that What or Who is listening to us, as it were, when we hope for improvement, we might want to forgive ourselves for errors and omissions or direct injuries we have suffered at our own hands – or hearts.  Perhaps our best hope is to adjust our lives so that we don’t “run late” in 2022.

What about the power we have to undo evils and effect good in the world?  You may have fallen prey to the popular notion that only by doing evil, like burning, looting and destruction… and by hating properly, can humans bring about good, but in 2022 you need not believe that.  If you know the difference between good and evil then 2022 could be the year when you agree to not support evil in the name of “progress.”

What if every adult in your town visited the city council or Board of Select Men and Women and stated, simply, that you want every act of vandalism, shoplifting and public drinking or drug abuse to be punished according to the law, including full restitution and public service by offenders.  That’s it: no shouting, no anger, no hatred or petitions dropped off.  Everyone appears and states his or her desire for good change.  Is there any doubt that our “governors” or erstwhile “representatives” would effect those changes?

The same would work for bad and unfair laws that should be repealed or modified.

We saw this work before school committees in Virginia and elsewhere.  There are no representatives who have as much power as their constituents; there are no elected officials who have as much power as their constituents.  Gandhi showed us that there is no military/police force that has as much power as a people with a unified purpose.

Clearly we cannot allow our self-fulfilling governments to keep heading downward on the same paths they have taken us over the past two years.  We are smarter than that – and smarter than they.  The public good will be more perfectly realized when our government is again restricted by the Constitution, when it is as small as practical for the defense of our nation, and when it costs about a third of what it costs, now.

Over the past 6 decades it ought to have become clear that no government can ever provide sufficient “welfare,” as public charity is known.  Nor is it really charity, since it is not given freely by anyone.  It is taken from supposedly “free” people who never intended to grant sufficient power to the governments they formed to take their personal property under threat of loss or punishment (ie. Police power) so that it could be given to others who did not work for it or, to put it more starkly, who would be arrested if they took it from its owners, themselves.

Is governance so complex that it cannot be reformed?  Is it our nature – or curse – that mistakes, once made by elected “representatives” of we, the people, cannot be undone amidst bountiful proofs of failure or error?  What is it about Americans that we are hide-bound to repeat mistakes made by other Americans who were elected to some office or another?  Why?  Does the happenstance, no matter how dearly sought, of election perform some immutable purification that raises those so blessed above responsibility for their mistakes?  Or, does it transform their mistakes into the most beneficial policy decisions, the perpetual financing of which confirms their near-miraculous properties?

Why is it that we, the people, who caused – nay, granted – the election of mistake-makers are perpetually bound to PAY for those mistakes, and suffer from them?  Is there no means of correction?

One factor we have permitted and even encouraged is “career representation.”  With a 95% re-election rate for federal representatives and senators, and similar rates for state-level reps and senators, the decline in governmental and budgetary quality – honesty – has to be reviewed through the lens of longevity.  Connections and relationships among other denizens of capitol buildings become much stronger than the periodic and temporary connections to voters.  Combined with influence over the spending of billions and billions of dollars – and billions of dollars’ worth of regulations – the personal, rather than representative value of elective office eventually outweighs the higher ethical requirements of representation.  Soon, reps and senators at every level become elected bureaucrats.  Their voters tend to ignore their work until an issue makes the news.  When an opponent runs against a sitting (there is a lot of sitting) rep or senator, there is a desire to not “take away ‘Tom’s’ or ‘Jane’s’ job.”  Can we change these attitudes?

If a thousand people showed up for legislative hearings do you think representatives could be tricked into representing, again?  One of the key problems that inhibit citizen participation in their own government is the simple issue of parking.  Boston, in Massachusetts’ case, has for a variety of reasons, not least of which is some ephemeral effect on global climate, made it more and more difficult to park in the city and most particularly anywhere near the State House on Beacon Hill.  What if there were a 600-car parking lot reserved at certain times of the year for hearing attendees.  It could be where people could take the “T” or commuter rail into Boston at low cost.  With car-pooling there could easily be 1,000 citizens attending hearings. 

Do you not believe that 1,000 testimonies about a topic would get “representatives” attention? 

Is this 2022 a new year…, or less?

Biden, Culture, Economics, Education, Family, Health Care

IN PHARMA’S FIELDS THE RUMORS GROW

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IN PHARMA’S FIELDS THE RUMORS GROW

In days of yore (a term used here for the very first time in all of Prudence’ writings) DOCTORS were much revered and obeyed for their advice, in part for their licensed acceptance by their profession and peers, and just as much in part for their ethical standards to which they had sworn as had been their ethic for days and centuries of even greater yore.  They also possessed various elements of arcane knowledge to which the average supplicant of their curative powers was not privy.

Those days are gone thanks, most specifically, to the Great COVID Reset during which the politicization of medicine… of MEDICINE… has been completed.

Inadvertently, President Trump fed this beast upon the advice of both good and somewhat black-hearted advisors, many of whom are now billionaires.  Hapless Joe Biden has not only ridden the beast of politicization, but has whipped it into frenzy. “Politicization” can nearly be defined as the “monetization” of medicine, which has been going on for a long time, primarily, in the U. S., since the Johnson administration.

Many countries have provided “universal health care” while the United States has done so only stepwise, retaining as much innovation and private initiative as possible, resulting in the greatest industrialized health care system in the world even since Medicare, while the beast nibbled away, digesting philosophies and dollars with equal rapacity.  There are vestiges of independence and competition remaining, which enables our remarkable responsiveness to medical needs in comparison to most state-run “health-care” programs.  Unfortunately, competition and independent excellence are increasingly perceived as problems by the “nattering nabobs of negativism”1 whom we continue to re-elect.

The hitherto ethical boundaries that defined and protected our phenomenal medical care systems, have nearly disappeared.  Where “doctors” in general were once automatically trusted because of their ethical standing, more commonly, now, doctors are forced – and their patients just as much – to provide certain treatments at certain rates of contact for costs dictated by federal agencies.  The most egregious of these trends is crystallized by the Pfizer and Moderna and other injections purported to “protect” us from Covid-19 and variants thereof.

“Medicine” has attempted to protect itself through a principle known as “informed consent.”  The old “Hippocratic Oath” was too close to a religious oath, for one thing, and, as the ability of medical technology has improved to a point of sidestepping many life-threatening conditions (ie. Heart bypass and valve-replacement surgeries) ever-larger medical consortiums have seized upon “informed consent” to reduce their liability for bad outcomes.  Extraordinary promises require extraordinary defenses.

Consequently, patient-customers are presented with various forms of Informed Consent or “waiver” forms on even fairly simple procedures.  Contained within each is the promise by the patient to pay for any part of the cost that is not covered by either government or semi-private insurance.  Despite the fact that they have just agreed to the indemnification of the provider from bad results of whatever set of procedures are being ordered, what patients mainly recall about the forms ritual, is that he or she has agreed to pay.  The “waiver” part, though, helps contain the costs of “malpractice” insurance for the provider(s).  More on malpractice, later.  Let’s look, first, at how governments, and politicians and political appointees, are mandating medical procedures.

It’s fairly clear, now, two years after the fact, that sloppy, or, God forbid, intentional procedures in the Wuhan, China Virology Institute caused the recently engineered SARS-Cov-2, novel coronavirus to spread rapidly in the city and across the Hubei Province of which it is the capitol, and from there across the globe.  Sadly, the Dr. Anthony Fauci-led National Institute for Allergies and Infectious Diseases – NIAID – funded gain-of-function research through research company, Eco-Health Alliance, a “non-profit” headed by British scientist Peter Daszak.  Eco-Health remains non-profitable as it funds research in various places around the world, including Wuhan, from grants it obtains from entities like the National Institutes of Health, within which lie the NIAID and Dr. Fauci.  That sentence means what it says.

“Gain of Function” means that a natural bat coronavirus was modified, or engineered in the Wuhan laboratory to enable it to readily infect humans and “humanized” mice for research purposes, but it is a matter of intent.  If some Communist dictatorship intended to create a bio-weapon – just saying – it would cause the exact same engineering to go forward.  Any outside source of the funding needed for such engineering or research would, if it had half a wit, deny any connection to such a sharp, 2-edged sword.  This may account for argumentativeness on the part of the world-renowned Dr. Fauci during testimony in Senate hearings on the coronavirus.  He certainly has half a wit.

For those Americans who carefully limit themselves to certain news sources, the participation of the NIAID in development of Covid-19 is just a rumor, nothing more.

Another rumor that is very widely known… and repeated by numerous official sources, is that President Trump’s “warp speed” regulatory changes and funding produced three very effective “vaccines” against Covid-19 in record time.  Millions are convinced that the rumor is true.  But how could modified RNA technology have been applied to this novel coronavirus so rapidly?  Well, “Moderna,” a little-known Cambridge, Mass. Pharmaceutical company just happened to be working on such a rumored “vaccine” against the SARS-Cov-2 novel coronavirus IN THE WUHAN INSTITUTE OF VIROLOGY in late 2019 before the rest of the world had even heard of the disease.  What a fortunate coincidence.  Almost as if they had been preparing for the “lab leak” that put Covid-19 on the world stage, when the President called upon “science” and business to work together on an emergency search for a vaccine against the deadly worldwide pandemic, why they were more than halfway there!

Miracle of miracles, not just Moderna but Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson / Janssen were also able to develop “vaccines” in record time that were able to be “approved” by the FDA for emergency use, right AFTER the 2020 federal elections, since approval before November 3rd would have yielded bad optics.

Unfortunately, Trump was as much in the dark about the legal and illegal machinations of the NIH, CDC and NIAID as the rest of us.  He simply recognized the need for a vaccine to stem the disease and believed that what the pharmaceutical industry and Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx and the FDA were calling vaccines actually were vaccines.  Trump is a do-er, not a doctor, taking the best advice he could get.  He had no idea how thoroughly corrupted federal health agencies were by “big Pharma.”  Even the FDA whom we trust to protect Americans from bad foods and unproven drugs, is populated almost completely by former pharmaceutical-industry hacks.  So, we can put that rumor to rest.

The other rumor we can finally bury is the “vaccine” status of the modified RNA injections that are, even now, being mandated by businesses and governments, willy-nilly.  They’re not vaccines… they are stimulants.  They stimulate one’s cells to create non-infectious “spike” proteins that are similar to Covid-19 spike proteins.  There very quickly develops a flood of “foreign” spike proteins that the body does its best to get rid of.  If, while the flood of foreign proteins are sloshing around, one is also exposed to the Covid-19 spike proteins, well the body will get rid of them, too, during its stimulated get-rid-of-foreign-spike-proteins-phase.  It’s ingenious, really, and it can reduce the number of Covid-19 proteins (viruses) that are able to infect a person’s cells.  This provides some time for the body’s immune system to finally begin creating defenses against Covid.  For most who are exposed following an MRNA injection, the resulting Covid infection will be somewhat milder than it would have been if never injected.  However, the MRNA injections do not cause the body’s immune system to create T-cells and B-cells that will confer virtually life-long responsiveness to Covid proteins, and rapid immune defenses to them.  They do, however, practically guarantee the emergence of mutations – the dreaded “variants” – by mass-injection programs during a pandemic.

Since the body is good at filtering out foreign proteins, the MRNA injections wear off in a few months, leaving injectees vulnerable to future exposures to Covid-19, and with no built-up immunity or rapid immune defenses, possibly more vulnerable than if never injected.  There is some evidence that natural immunity function, itself, and natural immunity to Covid-19 following infection and recovery, may be impaired by MRNA injections.  Natural immunity to Covid is 5 to 25 times stronger than the temporary “immunity” conferred by MRNA injection, so it seems a shame to weaken it with future MRNA shots.  Apparently our politicians know better than scientists and doctors what is “good” for us.

As part of “warp speed” development of the MRNA injections, pharmaceutical companies were granted immunity from suits due to bad injection reactions up to and including death.  This is interesting.  The same people who shy away from you if you are not “vaccinated” and who rush to get their children “vaccinated” with MRNA injections, want gun manufacturers to be made fully liable for the use of their products, yet many, many more people die from pharmaceuticals and bad reactions to them, and from bad drug interactions, than from gunshots – many more.  The MRNA injections, themselves, account for upwards of 45,000 deaths and hundreds of thousands of bad reactions that have yielded debilitating effects, including paralysis.  “Give it to our children!” some people cry.

One of the greatest, life-changing effects of MRNA injections, is the creation of dozens of new billionaires from governments’ purchasing of these “free” shots.

Malpractice insurance is no problem for big Pharma, but it is for most treatment providers.  Throughout medical school and residency, future physicians are schooled in the employment of “best practice” when diagnosing or treating patients both medically and surgically.  Best practice is a doctor’s only defense against charges of “malpractice.”  Hence, defensive medicine is the best practice: every test that might illuminate and inform a doctor’s next step or recommendation or prescription, must be employed lest a key piece of “best practice” be overlooked, creating malpractice vulnerability.

Throughout medical education, “best practices” are taught, tested, drilled and tested again and again.  The advancement of medical knowledge is not as rapid as it may appear.  It takes time and extensive trial and error: studies, “teaching hospital” trials, even for surgical improvement, before a new procedure among dozens that comprise complex surgery or cancer treatments and every other interaction with doctors and laboratories, may be accepted as a “best” practice.  To a great degree, the defensibility of the procedure contributes to its “best” designation.  Also crucial, however, is the predictability of result in the majority of patients.

When new procedures are finally tried and used, the old “informed consent” firewall is duly presented and signed.  Progress is made, somewhat better methods and, presumably, results manifest, the patients recover, possibly faster.  Because of testing and trials with careful analyses of results written up for peer review and duplication of results in similar patients, “informed consent” is genuinely “informed.”  Insurance companies and their attorneys have been satisfied that coverage should, properly, be extended to cover the new procedure or device or development.  What ever the patient now consents to has been deemed “safe” enough and effective enough that the overall risk to the insurors can be quantified as low enough – and, thus, to the patient – that they’ll “cover it.”  The provider institution and every clinician who will be part of the new whatever, is also able to be insured, and PROTECTED so long as the insurable “best practice” is employed.  Are MRNA injections a “best practice?”  Who the Hell even knows?  Evidence is accumulating that they are NOT.

The cost of progress is not small.  Research and trials are financed, oftentimes by the pharmaceutical industries.  Many changes require new drugs or new formulations of drugs, and their new aspects and applications must also be tested, whether under real treatment conditions or in research programs at medical schools, among other venues.  Doctors are “educated” in large part by and thanks to pharmaceutical manufacturers.  All of their professors have been, too.  Best practice is as much best prescription as best action.  And doctors and institutions like pharmaceuticals that have been “approved” by the “independent” Food and Drug Administration (FDA); they form a large part of “best practices.”  If a malpractice suit is brought against any provider, his, her or its only defense, all things being normal, is that “best practices” were employed, documented, and witnessed by other professionals.  Every medical student knows this: it helps cement their trust of “Pharma.”  Their products are predictable in effect and “approved.”

Now and then, however, a drug is approved only for “emergency” use or for “last resort” use.  This is because there has not been sufficient testing on enough populations to gain full FDA approval.  Typically the emergency demand for such a drug is from a fairly small population, each of whom signs a quite different “Informed Consent” form that makes clear the experimental nature of the drug in question and its “emergency use only” designation.

Where does this leave all the brilliant people in the medical industry when the subject is the “emergency use only”-designated Covid-19 MRNA injections?  Are they impressed or confused by the description of the injections as “vaccines?”  Surely that can’t be so.

Are they blinded by the CDC’s daily recommendation to be “vaccinated” by these experimental chemicals, regardless of the mounting evidence of the rapid decline of such “protection” from Covid that they offer?  Impossible.  They’re all very smart, very careful professionals.  Are all the providers of the injections offering informed consent forms to every guinea pig…. ahhm, recipient of the experimental shots?  Well, no, how could they when the data from testing has not been released by the FDA?  Clearly when people roll up their sleeves they are consenting to the injection, but not because they are well-informed of the risks.  In fact, by calling the shots “vaccines,” they have been MIS-informed by every official health-care agency or department in municipal, state and federal governments, including the CDC, Dr. Anthony Fauci and the NIAID he heads, the FDA and thousands of Doctors nationwide and even worldwide.  Even the President and his predecessor and a host of other politicians are on the same misinformation train: they all refer to these weird biologics as “vaccines.”

People fundamentally trust vaccines.  Vaccines protect the recipient from diseases like polio, Rubella, chicken-pox, diptheria and tetanus.  Vaccines can protect against pneumonia, tuberculosis and shingles.  They confer “natural immunity.”  Someday, we hope, there will be an actual vaccine that protects against Covid-19; people will want to get that shot.  Unfortunately we don’t have one… not yet.  We have Modified RNA injections that don’t confer immunity and provide only temporary protection from the worst effects of infection.  They’re NOT vaccines.  OMG.  Is money a factor?

“Medicine” has crossed an ethical line, as if to catch up to the dozens of ethical and legal lines politicians and governments cross every day.  Across the country hospitals are literally firing highly trained and experienced doctors, nurses and others who are declining to receive the experimental MRNA injections.  This seems stupid, on the face of it.  Why would smart professionals fire other smart professionals over an experimental shot the safety and efficacy of which the former group cannot describe to the latter?

Do you know who else is being fired?  Police officers, firefighters, Army, Navy, Marine and Special Operations troops – all expensively trained and needed.  What kind of idiots would do that?

Speaking of crossed lines, did you know that life-saving surgeries are being denied to people who are not the recipient of these weird injections?  God save us. 1. With thanks to the late Spiro Agnew.

Biden, Economics, Elections, Foreign Policy, Governance, Immigration, Politics 2021, Race, Representation, Trump

TIME NOT ON OUR SIDE

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Time may not be on our side.  One cannot overview the world and our political circumstances… and the calendar, without realizing a little fear for where things might go from here.  Where is that?

Let’s look at some of the pressures building up.

First, the political time-line.  Mid-term elections are the historic relief valve for sometimes hasty or confused political decisions made during presidential elections two years earlier.  There certainly were those in 2020.  Because the national conscience is so, well… impacted by beliefs concerning the 2020 elections – stolen or not stolen – the release of tensions in the 2022 mid-terms is a little harder to predict than what a lot of pundits are trying to foresee.  Most are making judgements on “normal” political considerations and it doesn’t seem Prudent to do so.

The weird eminence that most have already discounted, but who is the key to millions of voters’ decisions, is Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House.  She has been a unique Speaker, at least.  For decades she has appeared to be simply a fierce partisan and has been appreciated, if not revered, by partisan Democrats who were happy to be “winning” barely-understood battles through her slick machinations.  By rights, she should be at the end of her career, and she probably is, but it’s a career that descended into a previously unrecognized socialism starting under Obama and deepening with hatred under Trump.  In those 12 years, Democrats became uneasy.  While enjoying victories Nancy engineered, no matter how messy, Dems also became concerned about the leftward lurch, yet had no other port in which to seek refuge.  Over the Trump years, leftist hatred for “America First” left many Democrats adrift.  What are they going to do in 2022?

If “centrist” or “American” Democrats abandon the Pelosi-led leftists (not that Pelosi was elected to lead the leftists: she has run, skipped twisted and kneeled as needed to stay ahead of them) will they suddenly vote Republican?  That doesn’t seem Prudent.  Will they fail to vote in standard numbers?  That question forces Prudence to wonder about what “the Black vote” might do.

Blacks have slowly been drifting away from their Democrat plantation, with an interesting increase in that trend in 2020.  Despite Covid, Blacks did well economically under Trump since 2017.  Despite, also, a perpetual anti-Trump media blitz accusing Trump of racism, Blacks could see that his policies helped all races.  Like all underdogs, Trump was seen somewhat sympathetically by Blacks who understood too well how prejudice hurts.  Have Blacks been treated better by increasing leftism?  Were they advanced by BLM-led riots and Antifa hatreds that damaged so many black businesses and jobs?  Have they been helped by Democrats’ union-led resistance to school choice?  Has weakening public safety served Black families or neighborhoods in any way?  Are they particularly likely to “reward” Pelosi’s weird coalitions with more power, more votes?  That doesn’t seem Prudent, either.  But, will they vote for anyone else?

So, on the backdrop of multiple failures of the “Biden” administration and severe economic news, what will be the “shape” of the change in fortunes for our two parties?  Over the next 11 months, how virulent will the Pelosi Left become?  Clearly their anger has been kindled by the loss of legislative momentum thanks to West Virginia Senator, Joe Manchin and Arizona Senator, Kyrsten Sinema.  Even 3 counties of Maryland would like to become part of West Virginia.

In 2020 we suffered through months of cultural destruction and destructive rioting and looting and economic despair in numerous cities.  Many strange, leftist mayors and governors have been exposed as feckless, ignorant and ideologically foolish.  Americans are practically fleeing their jurisdictions for states that seem to honor the Constitution more.  Yet the Pelosi House insisted on passing the enormous, so-called “Build Back Better” bill that would have transformed fundamental freedoms and democratic-republic structures created by the Constitution.  Against the backdrop of systemic failure at the southern border and the flood of illegals swept into the country by administration policies, the congress spent inordinate time on the “BBB” plan and the pointless “January 6th” commission.  Not a word is spoken in congress about what Americans are truly upset about, not least of which is the southern border.  With that legislation apparently doomed, what will the 117th Congress do to improve Democrats’ re-election chances in 2022?  Most options are likely to do damage to the republic at least domestically.

_________

Internationally, the Biden bindlestiffs have made a mockery of leadership and of honesty.  Without fundamental honesty, there are no diplomatic maneuvers that will work, almost regardless of what’s at stake.  In matters of war and alliance, conditions, tensions, and opportunities for gross, deadly errors, can spiral out of control quite abruptly.  Let’s look at the simplest area of tension: Iran.

The postulate is the following: Iran hates the United States as much or more than it hates Israel.  Iran is a theocracy determined to correct spiritual wrongs to the point of suicide.  To correct those wrongs, Iran will use nuclear weapons.  The inherent danger is that first the Obama regime and now the Biden regime DON’T BELIEVE THESE THINGS.  That is, they’d rather believe that Iran is as rational as other nations, desirous of better living standards for its people, better economic conditions internally, and willing to negotiate to achieve those ends.  All this talk about “death to America” and wiping Israel off the map is just talk, just posturing.  Because they don’t believe the United States can be guided by religious concepts of good and evil, neither can any other nation.  The United States can show them how love is better than hate and kindness and generosity will prove that the U. S. can be a reliable partner in seeking a better life for Iranians.

As the imbecilic John F. Kerry, onetime Secretary of State once said: “Would that it were, would that it were.”  For a man who has but the mildest relationship with truth, he places a lot of faith in the words of Iranian negotiators.  He apparently believes that Iran is enrichening Uranium purely for domestic power production… to improve the standard of living for Iranians.

Trump, to his America-first credit, had a sense of when he was being lied-to, and that extended to Iran.  He recognized that the “Iran Nuclear” agreement (never proposed as a nation-binding Treaty because it would never pass the Senate) was a pack of lies, which, naturally, Biden has been begging Iran to renew under his administration.  Iran has refused, so far.  With all the cash and lifting of sanctions that Obama and Biden have given them, the Iranians no longer need to negotiate further concessions under the agreement – they received what they needed for free.  Now it is merely a matter of time before Iran starts issuing nuclear-backed threats toward Israel, which the Biden regime will perceive as opportunities to go “back to the negotiating table.”  To their credit, Israel (and other nations in the Mideast) will take steps to prevent an Iranian strike.  The U. S. won’t, failing to realize that Iran will likely strike both the Little Satan and the Big Satan simultaneously. 

PRUDENT JUDGMENT: VERY DANGEROUS UNDER THE CURRENT ADMINISTRATION.

The next simplest, as in somewhat more complicated, problem area is the Western Pacific, including both Taiwan and North Korea, but also India, unfortunately.  Here is the postulate: China intends to take over Taiwan; China virtually controls what North Korea does at any point; China will not move against Taiwan if it believes the U. S. will fight for Taiwan’s independence; China is beginning to think that the U. S. will not make any serious moves to stop China (the Biden family’s compromised position vis a’ vis China is a factor, here); and, finally, North Korea will make some sort of military moves against South Korea at the same time, seriously complicating United States’ response to the Taiwan crisis.  There has been shooting along the frontier of China and India within the past 18 months.  It is not inconceivable that China would stir that pre-heated kettle at the same time or before, that it moves against Taiwan.  This feint would likely involve Pakistan, as well, another nuclear power that hates India.  Every nation in the arc from the Arabian Sea to Qinzhou will suddenly be seeking a side in the conflict.  The failure of the U. S. to decisively defend its allies will transform the entire region and its oceans… and world trade.

PRUDENT JUDGMENT: EXTREMELY DANGEROUS UNDER THE CURRENT ADMINISTRATION.

Finally, of the 3 hottest spots, Ukraine and Russia are preparing for some level of shooting.  The U. S., thanks to Obama and Joe Biden’s family, has meddled in Ukraine for years.  Ukraine is a big country that encompasses wide swaths of fertile land, great waterways, warm-water coastline on the Black Sea, huge coal deposits and iron ore, manganese ore, and other ores, which yield a large steel industry, heavy machinery manufacturing and, its greatest political weakness, a natural, relatively unimpeded pathway for oil and gas products to be transported to Western Europe.  The same can transport armies, too.

For more than a thousand years the Russian people have had strong cultural and religious ties to Kyiv, now the capitol of Ukraine, and to Crimea, Odessa and Sevastopol.  Strategically, the naval value of Crimea is perceived as so crucial to Russia, as with the USSR, that taking the Crimean peninsula “back” from a recently independent Ukraine was worth the international condemnation.  It’s a done deal and will never be negotiable.

In addition, the industrial heartland of Ukraine in Donetsk, Kharkiv, Dnetpropetrovsk and Zaporizhzhya, covers much of eastern Ukraine from the Dneiper River to the Russian border.  Russia depends on many of the manufacturers in the region for not just machinery, but military and aerospace equipment.  Not having complete control of them is a sore spot.  Further, Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson districts have significant Russian populations and Russian-speaking populations, which has formed an excuse for Russian regulars posing as irregulars or subversives, to create an enclave of sorts with a militarized line facing Ukrainian army regulars.

Sensing weakness and indecision from the Biden administration, and determined to not have Ukraine join NATO, Putin and the Russian Federation is looking for the opportune time to, in effect, take control of eastern Ukraine, if not all of Ukraine, by military force or forced federation.  When they move, what will Biden do?  Both Democrats and some Republicans have made tough-sounding statements about standing firm with Ukraine as if the status of Ukraine were a vital national interest.  Perhaps it is.  But setting up a line of U. S. troops to deter Russia seems unduly provocative.  If the situation were reversed and the Russians were placing troops to deter the U. S. from taking over cartel-dominated Mexico, let’s just say, we would certainly not find that a reason to stand down, would we?

What seems “small” to most Americans, in geopolitical terms, could place us in a hot confrontation with a huge nuclear power, 4,000 miles from our border, where both the land location and the naval one make us the underdog.

PRUDENT JUDGEMENT: VERY DANGEROUS UNDER THE CURRENT ADMINISTRATION, and more dangerous than it appears.

____________

The shift away from “America First” thanks to the 2020 “elections,” has caused friends and foes, alike, to re-evaluate their relationships with the U. S.  The brutal withdrawal from Afghanistan, apparently executed by military idiots and a bumbling president, has changed strategic calculations by many nations.  The English-speaking world no longer reveres the U. S. as the leader of their coalition, and certainly does not respect Biden as it did Trump.  A strong, pro-national leader is not only respected, but understood by other nations, including adversaries.  There is a profound logic to leadership that clearly is patriotic and who speaks clearly of his – or her – intentions.  No nation likes surprises, internationally, nor confusing messages.  Every leader can make clear judgments about clear leaders, even about those they view as opponents.  This is not our current situation.

It has been said many times that the most dangerous circumstance is when other nations are unsure about what America will fight for; it is yet even more dangerous when America, itself, is unsure.  God save us.

Economics, Education, Governance, Health Care, Politics 2021

THE VELOCITY OF CARBON

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Masking won’t help…

In terms of money, economists measure the health or activity of an economy using “velocity” of money in an economy.  There are a thousand measuring tools measuring the same parameter, whether it’s investment dollars generating new production or a change in policy like a tax cut or increase that either releases money to or sucks money from, an economy.  Supply-chain snags can certainly reduce the velocity of money; building road, rail or air infrastructure can speed it up.  If you’re seeking real understanding of this kind of velocity you’ll have to ask someone else: I know only how rapidly $20 bills move out of my pocket these days, converting themselves to a few coins in a blink of an eye.

Let’s talk about the climate… a place where velocity is never discussed as a “good.”  It’s always “bad,” and it’s everybody’s fault, which means “climate change” by today’s – or this morning’s – definition, is going to increase a lot of financial velocities while slowing or stopping others.  These effects will affect everybody and his or her $20’s like we’ve never seen.  In any case, the velocity of “change” in the Earth’s climate seems to always be too fast, potentially the end of humanity, often in a very small numbers of years, and the result of conservative politics.  That is, unless the “conservative” in question is neither European nor English-speaking.  The Earth knows.

Very quickly, climate change discussion centers on carbon: carbon dioxide, carbon-based fuels, “carbon-neutrality” by 2030, 2050 or next week.  Anyway, the other day, at a point when no other useful actions were possible, Prudence led to an interesting question about climate that we’ve never heard asked: “What is the velocity of carbon in the Earth’s climate-economy?”  And this will be followed in most people’s minds with, “What the Hell is wrong with this person?  There’s no such thing as carbon velocity.”  Ahhh, but there is, my friend… there is.

The Earth has about as much carbon on it as it has ever had.  A lot of it is buried deep underground, but a lot more is in the biosphere between, say, 20 feet below ground and, maybe, 200 feet above ground, although with 1,000-foot high rise buildings we’re certainly stretching those limits.  Then, there’s the ocean – definitely part of the biosphere, so… cripes!  We live in a gigantic biosphere!  And, it’s carbon-based, which is to say that molecules with carbon in them are the fundamental building-blocks of life, including seaweed and us.

Now, the CLIMATE we all live in has been “changing” for billions of years, which is a very good thing.  The simplest example of a climate-change “good” is the endings of ice-ages, of which there have been several.  Humans were impacted by only the last couple of them: they’re not very frequent, thank goodness, and the impacts of the last one are still with us, even being enjoyed by us, like the Great Lakes, Cape Cod and so forth.

For the average ersatz vaccine-loving supplicant to climate-change fears, the movement of carbon from safety underground to horrific, polluting, crime above ground is a cumulative, onrushing white-man-caused threat to life.  Why, the USGS (U. S. Geologic Survey) tells us that upwards of 36.5 TRILLION TONS of carbon spewed (probably, “spewed”) into the atmosphere worldwide in 2019!  That is a hu-u-u-u-ge number, but there are lots of huge numbers involved when measuring worldwide things.  A small amount was in the form of methane, other ethanes, ordinary “anes” and the majority of it from CO2 which is a lot heavier than average, breathable air.  Fortunately for all concerned, plants “breathe” CO2 in and oxygen, O2 out.

“Oh, my Gawd!  Everybody stop breathing!”  Also, stop mowing your lawn, heating your homes, cooking, refrigerating, making plastics, driving cars and trucks and, for God’s sake, stop flying back and forth around the world on those terrible jet planes… just stay home.

Quite a bit of CO2 derives from cute little woodland creatures that, since Walt Disney gave them names, we must love and protect, along with every other sort of elk, antelope, bison, bear, reindeer, POLAR bears, for heaven’s sake, whales, dolphins, dogs, cats, protected tigers, elephants and, of course those evil cattle who do little but eat and fart, don’t you know?

Still more comes from rotting vegetation in the normal cycle of plant life and the bacteria and bugs, termites and ants that live off of the trillions of tons of IT.  Government types, those who really like to apply rules for living to most everyone else – rules derived from superior intellects like theirs – hold, without fail, concepts of perfection for humanity and how humanity should live, among which are rules against eating animals that Disney may have named or which provide substantial amounts of nutrition for sub-perfect humans, nutrition those same humans may be “taught” to live better without.

Just the same, carbon in various chemical combinations moves into and out of the atmosphere at rates that could be measured, extrapolated, closely estimated, and measured again for more or less controllable impacts humans might want to have.  Except no one asks the velocity question.  There are no grant millions for calculating how fast carbon churns in what kinds of weather, over what kinds of land or waters. Or, in what levels of the atmosphere.  Grants are plentiful if researchers – or advocates – can add to climate panic; only a level of panic enables political control, after all, which is a large part of making grant monies available: find out something that makes specific political or taxation controls possible.  If you find out something else, give it a good leaving-alone.

No matter how carbon moves around, whether from volcanoes seen and unseen, or burning forests to yield cropland, or propelling planes at 35,000 feet, or burning trash at ground level, moving trucks and things, or, pushing ships with both vital and frivolous container loads, joy-riding passengers or militaries setting off to war, not all climatological consequences are of the same value.  Some are just plain pollution, spreading dirt where we live in ways that we could control if the value were better understood.  Others are “necessary evils,” tolerated, temporarily, for lack of cleaner alternatives.  Over the past 130 years, say, humans have quite consistently moved away from “dirty” ways to improve life and living standards, towards much cleaner ones.  Only a relative handful of people on Earth burn cattle dung to keep warm – too many, and a very controllable problem – but a handful.

Cars and trucks get phenomenally better mileage compared to 40 or 50 years ago, as do even those jet planes at 35,000 feet.  More and more electricity is generated without coal, and “scrubbers” can mitigate particulates and sulphur compounds, which are actually bad to have in the air, along with some CO2, making even coal much cleaner.  New buildings are built to be far more thermally efficient.  New lighting and electronics are far more efficient, too.  Watch for the impact of solid-state batteries in making almost everything electrical more efficient, including cars and trucks.

The point is, CO2 in the air is not, per se, a bad thing, but if you ask the average, fearful, climate-change crybaby what he or she is afraid of and the answer will be that we have to stop spewing CO2 or else the world is going to end… possibly even before illegal aliens and polar bears get the vote!

In a sense, we are constantly reminded that the CO2 from last year, and the year before that, and before that, and ever since the first automobile burned gasoline, is hanging over our heads ready to destroy the PLANET, including my daughter’s recycling science project!  All it will take to tip the balance is for a few more Trump voters to drive through drive-up windows for a cheeseburger and some Freedom Fries, when they could have had a hand-picked kale salad.  The time to act is now, now, now!

But it isn’t, is it?  The CO2 building up in the atmosphere, I mean.  It churns around, dissolving into bodies of water, like oceans, of which there are a lot, and if not dissolved right away, generally CO2 sinks down to near ground level because it’s quite a bit heavier than air.  This, alone, is a good thing, because that’s where most plants that we can eat, grow.  Whoever thought of this system was a very smart Dude.

Mankind, however, is both brilliant and ignorant, wise and foolish, scientific and superstitious, and clean and dirty.  We used to think that God had provided convenient sewers in the form of rivers, but we have become smarter about that foolishness – we could be and will be much smarter about that.  We used to think the atmosphere was a big river to dump effluents into, too, but we’re coming around quickly on that foolishness.  Politically, however, we are being propelled to ever greater foolishness over CO2, not because we can “save the planet” and keep ocean levels and weather right where WE want them by limiting it, but so that we can, politically, control how people live, prodding them ever closer to the perfection models government-types have clung-to since Miss Hannigan’s 4th grade terrarium with the turtle in it.

Just like fraudulent COVID-19 statistics, if the government and compliant media focus on single numbers, a lot of fear can be ginned up, quickly modifying sovereign individuals’ actions, beliefs and willing abandonment of freedoms… like the number of COVID “cases,” as they “spike” from time to time.  Most are simple positive results from testing, and what they have detected are remnants of spike proteins, mostly not actual infections.  If you run enough cycles of PCR tests you can detect a lot of “cases.”  Everyone can be made to change his life through the police-power of the state or municipality because of largely meaningless numbers like these.  Fixating on how much CO2 goes into the atmosphere is much the same.  That we should be happy it’s there, for the most part, is never part of the news.  Do you have any concept of where we’d be without global warming?

Respecting our home planet by not dirtying its air and water is a noble thing to do – not from baseless fears but from purpose.

There are satellites watching the whole earth, now, measuring CO2 for places where it comes from and goes to at different times of year.  These are fine data to have and will, little by little, improve recommendations for spewing less CO2 .  Which we probably should… spew less, that is.  But we never will, or never will fast enough, if we don’t adopt a worldwide perspective on being clean or dirty in how we live, prosper and move ourselves and things about, starting with how cleanly we can generate electricity.  This will have to include nuclear power at its best, for urban areas, and solar collection and energy storage at its best in rural areas.  Cleaning up the planet need not, and should not require forcing people into cities, for example, or forcing ever tighter regulation on freedom (quite the opposite) or directing whole economies from a dictatorial, tight-control top.

It does involve honest education and a recognition that fouling where we live is anathema to both God and to humanity.  Economic mobility is prime in terms of balancing needs and wants and increasing qualities of life.  That comes from freedom.  Any “plan” for defeating – pick any – COVID, inflation, climate change, crime, ignorance, poverty in every other country in the world, that also includes restricting personal freedom or sovereignty, is the absolutely wrong move to accept.  A political party that identifies with restricting freedom and which villainizes those who don’t, does not deserve any American’s vote.

Biden, Culture, Economics, Education, Elections, Family, Health Care

vaccina, vaccina

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Let’s go, Brandon!

The most misunderstood word in the world in 2021 is “vaccine.”  Thanks to the internationally criminal actions of Communist China, there has developed a world-wide effort to “vaccinate” virtually everyone who has not perished from COVID 19.  President Trump, a person who knows how business works and how changes in regulation can influence business success, also provided seed money to Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson to jump-start development of vaccines against Covid-19.  He and others called it “Warp Speed.”  Little did he realize the nature of the corrupted cesspool that “big pharma” and the federal government’s health agencies: CDC, NIAID, NIH and the multitude of agencies that provide forms of payment for health service, like Medicare, Medicaid, HRSA and HCFFA… and many others, had created.  Making sure that everything this band of worthies desires to sell to Americans and others is actually “safe” and “effective” for the purposes for which it is intended, is the ostensibly “independent” agency, the “FDA,” now mainly staffed by former “big Pharma” functionaries.

To everyone’s delight, Project Warp Speed worked; all 3 multi-billion-dollar, global companies, produced viable injections that everyone calls “vaccines,” and in “record” time – given that most actual vaccines require years of careful testing and review by our careful overseers of the public health, mainly the FDA. Hmmnnh…

While not vaccines, the three companies’ injections do produce temporary resistance to COVID infection such that the disease usually won’t progress to severe levels and fewer victims will require hospitalization, or, at least, not lengthy  hospitalization.  Definitely a plus, however imperfect.  Harder to explain is the two-year suppression of actual treatment of the disease with drugs known to reduce the ability of COVID to overwhelm the body’s defenses while it figures out how to fight the infection off, resulting in natural immunity.  Indeed, some perfectly safe drugs, anti-parasitics like Hydroxychloroquine in combination with zinc and other chemicals, and Ivermectin, that are widely used around the world and among our own Congress members, have been rendered nearly illegal to prescribe, and if prescribed, often not provided by pharmacists regardless of “doctor’s order.”

True vaccines impart a protein mapping to the immune system that is relatively permanent.  Chicken pox or Rubella or Polio, for examples, if encountered years after vaccination, will trigger a rapid response by one’s body.  Vaccination created a specific type of T-cell that “maps” to a specific pathogen should it enter the bloodstream.  These cells are reproduced normally such that there are always some present after vaccination.  If the pathogen enters the bloodstream these cells trigger production of B-cells created to attack the pathogen molecules or cells, as well as increasing the numbers of the specific T-cells.  Together with “custom” macrophages that can “digest” a disease invader, neutralizing it while alerting the body to recognize similar invaders, our immune systems keep us alive, literally from birth and even before.  Successful vaccination is a wonderful medical advance.

The various types of “RNA” manipulator-injections that Pfizer and other manufacturers like to call “vaccines,” (a comforting term) do not create any “cell-memory” that will recognize future infections.  They work by stimulating cells to create “spike proteins” that are similar to COVID-19 spike proteins: billions and billions of them.  The immune system, in turn, is stimulated to attack and remove these proteins.  If one is infected within, say 3 or 4 months after receiving the injection, the immune system will simultaneously remove COVID proteins and serious infection consequences MAY BE avoided.  The COVID protein, itself, however, does not trigger an immune system response to fight off a COVID infection nearly as rapidly as it fights off other pathogens.  This fact is part of the magic of bio-engineering an animal virus so that it can infect humans most efficiently.  This engineering took place in Wuhan Virology Laboratory, a project of the Chinese Military, partly funded by the NIAID (National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases), where Dr. Anthony Fauci is the head worthy, watching out for us.

Since the modified RNA injections don’t “map” any T-cells, and because the human body continuously tries to rid itself of foreign proteins in the bloodstream, the effects of the very expensive “vaccine” shots wears off to a point of uselessness after about 4 months or so.  “Booster” shots, also expensive (you may think they are free, but we are all paying for them through our largely socialized health care to the tune of $150 to $200 Billion so far) are therefore needed to regain some level of resistance to serious infection, which will again prove temporary.  What a money-maker!  Create enough fear, make it political rather than scientific, force everyone to accept the injection whether he or she needs it or not, and watch your stock-option wealth multiply.

“Well,” leftists say, “who could possibly not need this wonderful vaccine?”

Let’s group them.  Young people up to age 24 or 25, is a large group now being forced to accept the injections through extortion, an ugly, anti-liberty process.  Even if they have paid for college they aren’t allowed the “value” of the education they’ve contract for.  Colleges have changed the terms of the contract ex post facto: no injection – no entry to classes or even the campus.  Younger children, who have been bounced from pillar to post with “remote” learning and mask mandates, don’t need the shots since the disease called COVID is of virtually NO THREAT to them, as statistics bear out.  Neither are the older youth through college age much threatened by COVID.  In these age groups there is greater threat from bad reactions to the injections, of which there have been thousands, including deaths and disabilities.

Next group is everyone who has had and recovered from COVID, more than 50 million of us, for they have natural immunity, now shown, scientifically, to be 5 to 10 times more effective against COVID than any of the existing injections.  In fact, forcing these folks to accept the shots carries a greater likelihood of a bad reaction than if they had not developed immunity.  Making them do so is downright stupid.  There are lots of leftist-influenced people, hitherto fairly decent folks, who will swear at you if you refuse the injections regardless of the validity of your refusal.  They call the un”vaccinated” “anti-vaxxers,” which is really, really bad, except they aren’t refusing an actual vaccine, so what is the berater’s point?

Then there are a host of other people who have medical conditions that are logical reasons to not risk the injections no matter how happy someone else might be if they did.  Why should they lose their jobs and freedoms for not accepting an unproven injection of RNA-modifying chemicals?

So where is this whole, unscientific, politicized, faux-medicine tyranny taking us… us Americans who formed a more perfect union and constrained the government with the Bill of Rights?  Will we devolve into Australia?  Who knew that beneath their outward geniality Australians had been itching to go Fascist all this time?  That society is falling apart as rational Aussies grasp that their small-g governors are out-of-the-closet Nazis.  The same kinds of governors in the U. S. of A. are less well perceived as a dozen crises unfold at the same time, dividing citizens’ attention.  After all, who knew that Joe Biden, of all people, was a left-wing-shit-turned-tyrant?  Who knew that he had such a grasp on medical science that he would attempt to impose a nationwide injection mandate?  Aside from 72 million Trump voters and the people at the upper levels of the Democrat Party, Xi Jianping and other leftists, who actually knew?

There are treatments appearing just as the bloom is fading on the so-called vaccines.  Merck has one and now, Pfizer.  They are expensive enough to be approved against COVID.  The off-label treatments, despite their effectiveness, were very inexpensive and the wholly-owned worthies at the CDC, NIH and others in the alphabet soup of money-holes, could not allow any of those to challenge the panic-necessity of the injections.  Their side-bosses who controlled Pharma’s grants to these agencies were counting on the multi-billions flowing from the shots.  What’s a few hundred thousand bad reactions, some debilitating, and the 17,000 or so deaths from the injections really mean in the grand scheme of things… the grand life-saving miracles of erstwhile “vaccines,” after all?

Interestingly, back when the FDA and others were independent, rigorous and non-political, there was a pandemic called the Swine Flu, which name was changed to “H1- N1” to protect the pork industry.  H-1 and N-1 refer to certain proteins that define this strain of influenza as unique.  In 2009 a vaccine for H1–N1 was developed and tested specifically on infants.  Some serious reactions occurred during the study period, including about 50 deaths.  The manufacturer pulled the product from study distribution: 50 deaths, not 17,000.  H1-N1 is also a “coronavirus” by description.  To date there has not been a very successful vaccine against natural coronaviruses.  The gain-of-function engineering done in Wuhan, China, makes a highly effective vaccine somewhat more difficult to create, since “COVID-19” is so highly transmissible, even in the presence of any of the current stable of injections.

Novavax, another pharmaceutical powerhouse, is claiming that its “nanotechnology” has created a COVID vaccine that is immunogenic – like an actual vaccine is supposed to be – which none of the current shots are.  One wonders if this new approach will be delayed and resisted by those who appear beholden to Pfizer, J&J and Moderna.

One wonders if any development will ever get Biden’s boot off of the necks of Americans.  If “Lunch-bucket Joe” ever does anything that is good for the American citizens he is sworn to protect, it will be the first time, and an accident.

Culture, Economics, Governance, Health Care, Politics 2021

WILLS AND TRUSTS

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How America Works

It is difficult to find an area of American culture, education, economics, race relations, security and, one might say, expectations, that is hopeful or uplifting.  The Biden administration seems to be creating threats in all these areas and in areas that are increasingly personal… like health.  The unsettledness seeping through the American people, even through Biden supporters, is going to manifest in other than political arenas – primarily economics.  Underlying all of it is the loss of Constitutionalism and trust, which many in the political business have decided to take advantage of for their own power and benefit.

There are many dangers to the Republic.  There are dangers to families, schools, students in particular, to our supplies of basic necessities, and to our ability – or willingness – to believe advice from any level of government.  With the corrupt connivance of tech platforms, there are dangers to truth, itself.  Can a nation that is unable to withstand Dr. Suess and must bury his books to “protect” fragile psyches, be trusted to raise children, at all?

The greatest and newest threat to integrity is the reaction of the United States, at many levels of “authority,” to COVID-19, the Chinese-spread, engineered coronavirus.  As of today, the misinformation / disinformation and literal tyranny surrounding the mis-named “vaccines,” developed in extraordinarily short time-frames, has reached its highest pitch.  Hundreds of thousands of employees in every sort of business, industry and professional service, are going to lose their jobs if they fail to accept the Pfizer, Moderna or Johnson & Johnson anti-covid injections.  It appears that as the efficacy of these shots is revealed to be increasingly temporary and NON-protective from Covid-19, the harder the President and various agencies of government, including OSHA, are pushing, indeed, forcing workers to accept them, no matter their legitimate objections.

It turns out that one of the big lies about the injections, at least for Pfizer, is that no aborted fetal cells were used in the development of the shots.  In fact, there were such cells, sparking intense religious objections from many whose employers, private and government, are forcing the objectors to take the injections.  The penalty is their livelihood, religious objections be damned, so to speak.

To sugar-coat the threats involved in the “forcing,” there are constant claims of “safety” and “protection” conveyed by the injections.  More and more these claims are proving to be false.  Worse, the mountain of evidence of negative reactions to the shots, including over 16,000 deaths, is ignored and suppressed, even as approvals are rushed through the “FDA” to require the shots be mandated for schoolchildren as young as 5.

Across the country parents are raising strong objections at their elected school board meetings, to mandated mask-wearing and mandated injections.  Unfortunately, the reaction to this opposition (and to objections about Critical Race or Gender Theory) by the mendacious Biden administration and our odd Attorney General, Merrick Garland, is to assign the F.B.I., of all agencies, to investigate angry parents as if their concern about their own children were criminal.  It would seem Prudent to investigate treasonous actions by key people in the military rather than moms and dads.  To institute policies like these, a lot of lies have to be firmly held as either true or so crucial as to become policy regardless of fallacy.  These are un-American times.

Still, COVID has proven the perfect foil for proto-tyrants, and it takes a lot of lying to keep it going.  For example, the U.S. claims a total of 711,000 “Covid deaths.”  Unfortunately, due to financial pressures, virtually all primary reporters – mainly  hospitals, with government connivance – have overstated the numbers of deaths since Spring of 2020.  How much overstated?  At least 25% and possibly by as much as 50%.  Hospitals are paid more for treating Covid-19 patients.  Anyone who expires in hospital and who can be described as a Covid patient, will be claimed to have died “from” Covid-19.  Craven politicians, accommodating their only two motivations, imposed lock-downs, closed churches, stopped all sorts of family gatherings and prevented relatives from visiting patients in hospitals and nursing homes.

What are those motivations?  Re-election and avoiding blame.  “Making the tough decisions” helped the first, blaming “CDC” recommendations helped the second.  “Following the science” provided enough confusion to keep news on the side of the new tyrants.  That there was little science, in fact, supporting how the country dealt with Covid, and even less, now, supporting Biden’s un-Constitutional dictates on “vaccination,” simply makes clear, we hope, why federal structure and control must be replaced.

Covid-19, distributed for free by the Communist Chinese, is far along the process of destroying our democratic republic, our civil rights, health-care system and educational establishments, public and private.  First, inordinate fears of infection were used to bring suits in multiple states to change voting regulations.  Despite the clear instruction in the written words of the Constitution, Article 1, Section 4 (“The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing [sic] Senators.”) these lawsuits, brought by lawyers working for the Democratic National Committee and others, shifted voting to mailed ballots and extended voting periods, all to avoid “spreading” Covid-19.

A large fraction of Americans has been led to believe that BIG problems can be solved only by BIG GOVERNMENT.  Chief among these is so-called health care.  “We” think health care is a “problem,” (meaning that government is lurking in the shadows ready to take it over with “solutions” to the “problem”), when, in fact, it is a RESPONSIBILITY that each individual citizen is obliged to solve for him or herself and for his or her family.  Recognizing millions of potential customers’ responsibilities to stay well and seek licensed, knowledgeable services from health care providers when less than well or injured, health care providers would compete for those customers’ health care dollars by offering improved services, ever better response and invention and innovation to make “care” ever more successful.

Health-care customers could also “shop” for best providers and best prices, perhaps with licensed advisors… like buying stocks.  The “problem” lies in paying for health care, regulating quality of healthcare, assuring access to care in rural areas, and catastrophic medical costs.  None of these requires federal dominance of the entire system / industry.   It requires creative licensing and subsidies / incentives to assure access, and licensed professionals working for / advising individuals and families.  It requires transparency from and among providers, clear, advertised pricing, and the ability to negotiate with patient-oriented groups and their advisors.  It DOESN’T require politicians issuing threats and promises about personal responsibilities for their own advantage; nor does it require blanket policies for diverse individuals and circumstances.  Governments may serve as partners with individuals in playing its proper roles; government can be a partner when an individual or family is facing catastrophic expenses, by loaning money to that person or family.  That loan can be repaid over a lifetime by the person, his relatives, friends, mutual healthcare group, or religious, charitable or fraternal groups.  Decision-making will be left to those who care, who are also able to negotiate and understand the costs and the invoices for the services and products to be consumed.

Keep in mind, that despite all the claims of “fighting for working families,” our favorite congress-people have managed to pretend to do OUR BUSINESS and OUR BUDGETS over the past 60 years and put us nearly $30,000,000,000,000 IN DEBT!  With all the skim that disappears into the maw of bureaucracy to control where and to whom all those dollars flow, is the federal waste machine where the future of health care, OUR HEALTH-CARE, should be entrusted?

If you believe in government health-care as better than private, you will, unfortunately, believe that socialism is “better” than capitalism, the greatest current lie.  In fact, capitalism is a whole lot better than the economic mess we function under, now.  When communists point out the flaws of “capitalism” that will be improved by socialism, they are easily able to poke holes in the unequal distribution of wealth that our mendacious governors have allowed to replace practical, opportunity-based, Christian-ethic limited, free-enterprise capitalism that was integral to America’s founding.  Americans, generally, should have the wisdom to disassemble our globalised, government-monopoly, over-licensed and regulated business model that is inhibiting success for millions of citizens.  We must do better and stop accepting outright lies from government tax hyenas and regulators.

To whom can we turn when virtually every agency of government, from the President on up, is un-trustable?  The only “institution” in society that must deal with reality and truth every day and with every customer/client, and that is largely untainted by government shenanigans, is small and independent business.  No other group is committed to LESS regulation and MORE freedom than the millions of small businesses and the business owners and workers who go to work every day.  As an adjunct to them are the hundreds of chapters of service clubs comprised of mainly small businesses and their key employees.  These are they who focus on needs and marshal resources from non-government sources, and who deliver solutions to points of need from the heartfelt desire to serve.  These are the motivations that need to expand throughout society in order to restore America.

Small businesses are where the best Americans work and produce.  Statesmen and women who will fight for their own, their employees’ and their customers’  interests, not Amazon’s, or Apple’s or Communist China’s.

Small businesses, UNITE!  Or, cries to that effect.  Can the best of America regain power, or shall we succumb to professional politicians and national-scope organizations that prefer to play ball with impersonal, largely un-American federalized forces whose answer to problems is ALWAYS TO TAKE MORE FROM THE PRODUCTIVE CLASS?  Small businesses must form, in effect, our own “party,” based on defense and re-empowerment of our founding documents.  America, AWAKE!

Biden, Crime, Economics, Education, Governance, Health Care, Immigration, Obama, Politics 2021, Representation

THE TRUTH WILL SET US APART

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The statue of Goddess Athene on the top of the famous Pallas-Athene-Brunnen
in front of the Austrian Parliament in Vienna. Built by Theophil Hansen 1898-1902.

For a free people, freedom becomes increasingly harder to realize or defend when knowledge is limited by twisted education (which is to say, by the government) and by outright, calculated lying by that same government.  To maintain control at the most fundamental levels, a government bent on Fascism will weaken the economic standing of most Americans and, equally as powerfully, create dependency upon the government for health care.  Nearly $30 Trillion debt clarifies the former; elevating Anthony Mussolini, errr… Fauci, to prevaricating pandemic potentate, makes obvious the latter.

To whom does a citizen turn to counter a government that lies?  Does he or she try to work more often with local or state government because they are more likely to tell the truth – no certainty, just greater likelihood – because he or she may know someone whose best friend has met someone working at that level?  Like all contracts and covenants, only the honesty and integrity of their guarantors can give them force or value.

“Official” lies have become more creative since the Viet-Nam War.  Viet-Nam exposed the mendacity of our well-respected military, whose veterans we have always revered.  That period also revealed the ease with which our “free press” could be co-opted to push a leftist agenda.  In the case of Viet-Nam this meant reportage of destruction and failure, terror and war-criminality, while beleaguered marines, soldiers, sailors and airmen are winning every battle of the conflict, an untold story.  Trust in officialdom began to crumble.

Governments lying about, obfuscating or withholding truths from those governed is nothing new.  History is a series of stories about conspiracy and secrecy within and between governments, not populations.  The U. S. Constitution and the Declaration of Independence that gave it flight, formed a shift toward honesty between government and citizens, culminating in the Civil War, in which both sides were brutally, murderously honest about their purposes and positions.  It has been mostly downhill ever since, as the forces of tyranny, the more comfortable theory of governance for government-types, rubbed and abraded the notions of citizen sovereignty and bottom-up authority – liberty, itself.

The threshold events and actors are well-known: Teddy Roosevelt; Wilson; Hoover; FDR-Cordell Hull; Johnson-Humphrey-Rusk-McNamara; Nixon-Kissinger; Carter- Brzezinski; Bush the 2nd; Obama-Clinton-Kerry-Rice-Jarrett; Biden-Blinken-MIlley, and many of their hangers-on, of whom some were/are virtual if not avowed communists.  Numerous congressional leaders steadily pushed American government further and further left, now to an accelerating rate by Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer-Adam Schiff-Jerrold Nadler, A.O.C., Eric Swalwell, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar and other fellow-travelers, many of whom literally seem to hate the United States.  Here we are in 2021.

Gently speaking, the only federal agency whose pronouncements are accepted as true is Amtrak when they inform erstwhile passengers that thus-and-such train will be late by some number of minutes or hours.  We also believe the Federal Aviation Administration is truthful, we hope.  But anything coming out of any Cabinet department or the White House, or the House or Senate, or the “Pentagon,” is now taken with so many grains of salt.  Since the phenomenal lies told during the Summer of Hate in 2020, and through the federal elections, there is very little that is trustworthy coming from any spoken or printed communication of the federal government.

Not a whole lot from state governments, either.

To whom does a law-abiding citizen turn when he or she is governed, cajoled or tyrannized by his or her government?  A church?  In a few cases, yes.  But even normal conversations are rare among ordinary civilians, in 2021.  Until one can discern or deduce what news sources a correspondent pays attention to, conversation is superficial at best.

Most Americans achieve respect for a politician who promises certain actions or efforts when running for office, and then does those very things.  Even in disagreement, honesty by an office-holder is respected.  Trump, for his braggadocio, embellishments and “mean tweets,” still pursued – and accomplished many of – the things he promised to do.  His fundamental philosophy of “America First” never wavered, and his foreign policy held true to his philosophy.  Americans learned to love “America First.”  Under the Biden regime, whomever is the leader of it, We have learned to hate “America Last.”

Biden and his strange, far-left crew, have realized one distinct accomplishment.  By reducing Americans’ expectations from the President and from any of his cabinet officers and functionaries, they are now meeting Americans’ expectations on a daily basis.  When the Press Secretary speaks, everyone expects her to lie on behalf of the Biden cabal and she never disappoints!  When Secretary of State Anthony Blinken testifies before Congress or holds a press conference, everyone, even including Congress, where most members are well adjusted to prevarication, expects him to avoid answering reasonable questions, to provide only partial scraps of information when he does answer, or to repeat lies that the regime has already spewed.  No one is disappointed!

If the reader thinks that “all politicians lie” and Joe Biden is just being a “politician,” then he or she should pay attention to the southern border, which has spawned lies so grotesque as to place political lies in a wholly separate category of simple mendacity.  Biden administration words, phrases, sentences and non-answers about the border and illegal immigration, are so crooked and twisted as to fold back upon the truth!  How is this possible?

It seems as though the military, Homeland Security, the President and the president’s spokeswoman stay up late – well, not the President – just thinking up how to explain or avoid explaining to the American people that what they are seeing and experiencing at the southern border with Mexico is actually NOT what they are seeing and experiencing.  Every action taken by the Biden regime regarding border protection, immigration policy, public health, “Homeland Security,” drug interdiction, human trafficking, child abuse and sexual slavery, makes clear how gross were the lies Mr. Biden told when he swore to uphold the Constitution and promised to faithfully execute the laws of the United States.  With nearly hourly disingenuousness from media sycophants (formerly known as fellow-travelers) Biden cruises along, seemingly oblivious to the conditions at the border.  When a question is tossed to him about “the border,” he turns his back and walks away.

Biden’s Secretary of “Homeland Security,” Alejandro Majorkas is in an impossible position… at least in terms of public relations.  He does face questions and is required to claim that “the border is closed” while the Border Patrol tries to keep count of 200,000 or more illegal entrants PER MONTH.  On the other hand, he has dropped the ultimate truth bomb: “…things are being handled according to plan,” or words to that effect.  The sad truth is, an open border and flooding the country with unskilled criminals IS the plan – a plan the most crass, cynical and hateful aspect of which is no more than to first make the U. S. a one-party nation and second to tear down the United States as a stumbling block to global communism.  Millions of Americans voted for these poop-heads, who claim that we “need” immigrants to fill jobs that are not getting done by citizens.  It’s as though they might actually expect most of our invited illegals to actually work.

Joe Biden has never been at a loss for some prevarication or another.  The first time he ran for president he contrived an elaborate story of his father’s mining career in Scranton, Pennsylvania.  Lunch-bucket Joe, father was a miner.  Unfortunately the story was untrue and, worse, had been “lifted” from a speech given by a British politician, Neil Kinnock, about HIS father.  It was such a good story and Joe’s mental capacity being so limited, even in his 40’s, that “borrowing” it for his own campaign just seemed the best path.  Rather odd, that.  But Biden was uninjured by what should be seen as a gross lack of honesty.  Somehow the father-was-a-miner whopper became part of the élan of Joe Biden.  “That’s just Joe being Joe.”  Well.

Joe was being Joe when he voted for the Iraq war and the Afghanistan invasion, but speaks forcefully against both actions, now.  He worked as Vice President to help Saudi Arabia fight Yemeni fundamentalists, but speaks against it now.  He advised Obama not to attempt to “get” Bin Laden in Pakistan, but he’s proud of it, now  He was opposed to busing in the 70’s and 80’s, even working with Jesse Helms on legislation, yet was offended when Kamala Harris called him out on it during the 2020 campaign.  Now, as Obama was, he is in favor of eliminating single-family zoning everywhere in the country.  Millions of Americans voted for this poop-head.  Now his title is POTUS: Poop-head Of The United States.

So, the fundamental question remains: To whom can a citizen turn in a supposedly Constitutionally limited Republic?  Federal agencies and officers, top congressional leaders and most states have been lying to Americans while generating irrational fears about the Chinese-spread pandemic of 2020-21, while denying use of effective treatments for Covid-19 infection, and while destroying small businesses in the name of “stopping” Covid-19.  Federal agencies, including the White House, and several state officials and agencies are colluding with media companies to censor news and opinions about alternatives to the “party line” on the pandemic, the “vaccines” and treatments, not to mention questions about vote fraud in the presidential election of 2020 – quite arguably in contravention of the First Amendment – and citizens are wondering where to turn for “redress of (their) grievances?”

What is a greater threat, lying outright or preventing the dissemination of truth?  Perhaps the President will set that straight for us.

Culture, Economics, Education, Family, Governance, Health Care, Immigration, Politics 2021, Representation

ON LITTLE CAT FEET

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Tyranny by any other name…

Tyranny crept in on little cat feet.  You may have been too busy – or frightened – to have noticed what happened to our nation and to our attitudes over the past 60 years.  So, ummnnh, let’s see… 2021 minus 60 years, well, that would be, ahh… 1961!  All right!  I got it.  Don’t ask, it’s a white supremacist thing.  Nineteen-sixty-one: Kennedy was president; the United States had achieved its pinnacle of average standard of living for all races and classes of people.  Black families were making economic progress at a higher rate than whites.  We were starting to tickle the edge of space and gearing up scientifically, technologically and educationally to defeat the Soviet Union.  People everywhere respected, envied, the United States’ obviously superior political and economic system: Freedom… even Americans themselves!

There were rumblings, for sure.  It was fairly obvious that Kennedy’s election was the result of vote fraud in Chicago among other cities, but particularly the Mayor Daley machine that delivered Illinois to Kennedy.  Kennedy won by a “national” margin of about ONE VOTE per precinct.  Nixon, to his credit, decided to not challenge or call for recounts, even in Illinois, believing that doing so would be bad for the country, a foreign concept in 2021.

Kennedy squelched the “Bay of Pigs” invasion of Communist Cuba by denying U. S. air support for the C.I.A. –trained and encouraged army of anti-Castro Cubans.  It was a project hatched under Eisenhower, possibly without Eisenhower’s own awareness.  An unholy alliance of the Mafia and shadowy C.I.A. operatives, the invasion was inherited by Kennedy, who was already skeptical of the latitude of operations arrogated by that secretive agency.  To Kennedy’s credit, he took responsibility, publicly, for the failure of the “invasion.”  It is widely perceived that the same unholy alliance that wanted to re-establish pre-Castro Cuba ultimately had Kennedy assassinated in 1963.  The slide from America’s pinnacle had begun.

Lyndon Johnson, a racist, shepherded Kennedy’s Civil Rights Act through Congress, relying on substantial Republican support and widespread sympathy for Kennedy.  More significantly, he acquiesced to another C.I.A. scheme in French Indo-China where, following the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu in May of 1954, French colonialism in Southeast Asia ended.  The U. S. had helped France fight the Viet Minh communists to no avail.   Truman’s policy of “containment” of international Communism was threatened.  Viet Nam was divided into North and South and U. S. “advisors” attempted to build up South Vietnam’s resistance to takeover by the North, viewing South Korea as a shining model.  The C.I.A., as an armed tool of the State Department, basically set policy for America’s role, there, ultimately engineering the assassination of South Vietnam Premiere, Ngo Dinh Diem and his much disliked brother and sister-in-law.

Theories have swirled about Kennedy’s assassination being linked to his supposed desire to pull away from involvement in South Vietnam, but facts don’t support such a course.  Anti-Castro Cubans, Mafia leaders and the C.I.A. are the more likely perpetrators.  Once Kennedy was eliminated (There were about 16,000 American troops assisting ARVN efforts against the Viet Cong when Kennedy died.) Johnson fell for the ridiculous “Gulf of Tonkin” incident report and committed major ground forces to the Vietnam “Conflict.”

With daily broadcast of bad news from Vietnam and revelation of the “Pentagon Papers,” Americans began to lose faith in our government and our military, while the existence of a “Deep State” within our own government became apparent.  Politics, and the future of the United States had become clouded.

The Press and the Democrats took down Richard Nixon.  In the process they had even Republicans believing that the crimes Nixon had apparently done in covering up stupid political stuff were so threatening to our Constitutional Republic that he had to go.  Maybe, but there was a lot of theatre.  Numerous characters saw their careers secured by working to expose the President or working to sabotage him.  Some were right… about the career part.  But “the press” has never been the same.  No longer are journalism majors directed to learn how to report the truth; now they all intend to change the world from their digital pulpits from which they preach about others than the God of Truth.  Fake news is a mark of pride, today, if the result fulfills intention.

The loss of a free press and of free speech is a key stepping stone to tyranny.  An “agenda-press” will protect crimes by people whose philosophy comforts it, while it works to erode and corrode those with whom it disagrees… truth be damned.  Readers, watchers, listeners are misled through misinformation, and by the rat-a-tat-tat repetition of lies spread by philosophers the organs of information agree with.  Soon whole beliefs are addled and worse philosophers and philosophies, become “mainstream.”

Public employee unionism, especially applied to the education industries, public and private, has in recent decades, gained control of teacher qualification and certification, all with 90+% leftist attitudes.  Students seeking a path out of poverty, often a path away from failed families, are fully malleable by prevailing philosophies in schools of education.  They all seem to want to change the world, as well.  Trusting parents are trusting the wrong institutions to reinforce their philosophies of life, truth, honesty, religion and responsibility.

Since the 2000 elections the concept of government by litigation has grown beyond rational bounds.  When the Supreme Court ended the charade of selective recounts in Florida the politics of hate gelled into a real means of acquiring power: first, destroy the opponent(s) personally, then destroy his or her followers and supporters.  “The politics of personal destruction.”  It’s not an “American” thing.

For whatever reason, Republicans posted two weak candidates in a row against Barack Hussein Obama.  McCain had a shot in 2008 with Palin as V.P., but her conservatism was carefully constrained by McCain’s handlers.  Then the financial crisis hit.  What a fortuitous coincidence for the Obama campaign.  Eight or ten key money people demanded settlement simultaneously and dominoes began to tumble.  President Bush was out of his league, deferring completely to Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, a product of Wall Street and Goldman Sachs.  As the FED and emergency legislation started a flood of hollow dollars to bail out the very investment banks that precipitated the crisis, McCain appeared helpless while Obama remained simply concerned, saying little.  Goldman Sachs got a goodly share.  Others did less well, places like Lehman Brothers, and AIG, the re-insurance company.  General Motors took plenty, as did Chrysler, but Ford declined.

As a result of it all, McCain lost respect, Obama got elected to “transform” the United States, and the financial system became more tightly controlled by – or integrated into – the federal government.  The near-collapse was global, exposing the dangerous (to self-government) interconnectedness of banking, particularly of central banks.  The ease of controlling populations is multiplied by control of their personal money and finances.  Legislation that reacted to the 2006-2007-2008 banking crisis, like Dodd-Frank, define certain financial institutions as “too big to fail.”  American taxpayers, indeed, American short-term financial health altogether is now tied to propping up what are essentially international institutions.  The loss of financial sovereignty is a keystone to collapsing national sovereignty, the worst element of tyranny when that nation is the United States.

It should be growing clearer how seemingly unrelated events provide facilities for imposing Fascism or worse should a government be controlled by people who believe that top-down imposition is the best way to organize a nation or a people.  Constitutional limitations interfere with that form of thinking.  The American Constitution serves as an obstacle to global, transnational tyranny of every type, but its strength depends on leadership that agrees with its principles.  The Constitution, itself, provides very limited tools to counter the political power of anti-American leadership.  It is one of the contingencies of self government that the founders could not conceive of: that the electorate would be so twisted in its thinking that it would elect – and re-elect repeatedly – representatives who were decidedly UN-Constitutional, or anti-Constitutional – which is to be anti-American – in their thinking.

Obviously the effects of two or more generations of public education could sway enough voters to misunderstand their roles in self-government, and to misunderstand the roles of the institutions of government to be not defenders of individual rights and responsibilities and of private property, but rather dispensers of welfare in various forms so as to provide comfort to citizens.  In order to provide that much welfare the government entities must take the money from those who have earned it and to whom it belongs.  If people are constantly being taught, or encouraged to think that it’s not FAIR for some people to have more wealth, the political will to take more from “the rich” is easy to find and hard to oppose.  Undreamed of debt, weakening the nation’s ability to defend itself or to perform its Constitutional duties, becomes a threat to everyone.  As resources begin to fail, more government, and more tyrannical government will appear to be the only answer for literal survival of large fractions of the population.

Government types have encouraged media conglomerates to tilt, then embellish and finally create “news” that has political value and, now, actual control value of nearly the whole country.  This has been the greatest “end-run” around representative government and inalienable rights, ever.  A generation of Americans has been convinced that its country is so imperfect as to be indefensible.  In effect, patriotism for the United States has been made negative, something espoused only by ”white supremacists” and other sorts of obvious racists.  Even the U. S. flag is viewed negatively by some – those who are in agreement with Black Lives Matter, that the whole American culture, history and success must be torn asunder and replaced with communism, the direct route to tyranny.  For shame.

The Biden regime openly colludes with Google, Facebook, Twitter and others to censor ideas and speech it doesn’t want heard.  For the government to be involved with that corrupt and twisted role, assumed by those companies, is utterly unconstitutional, but the Congress is unable to convince itself that the political advantage those organs provide is not worth the damage to the Republic.  With representatives like those, who needs tyrants?  There are, potentially, institutions and limits that could be created to prevent this form of Fascism from becoming rooted, but we have yet to find the courage to create them.  At the present time there are about a dozen courageous members of both houses combined, and 523 sheep who are most involved with re-election and not with the defense of America or even with citizenship.  For shame.

The engineered diseases that result from COVID-19 have exposed the weak-mindedness of a large number of Americans , and the tendency toward Fascism of many of the rest, mostly government types and other authoritarians, even in private business.  A supposedly “free” people has been exposed as unable to make thoughtful judgments about where personal sovereignty ends and government control begins.  In the American Constitutional system the individual citizen is sovereign, relinquishing only enough freedom as to enable the “federal,” not “national” government to provide what individuals and local governments, even state governments, cannot.  The system is virtually backwards, or upside-down, today.  The supposedly federal government has arrogated powers to dictate everything from lightbulb design to grade-school curriculum, even the meaning of words and content of religious faith.  Forcing free citizens to wear masks or receive injections of barely understood concoctions falsely called “vaccines,” while lying publicly about the nature of and origin of the latest, new, viral disease, was a relatively small step.

That same government has succeeded in dividing Americans against one another over relative rates of conformity to false premises – even to restricting everyday freedoms for failing to conform to federal “Covid” dictates.  America, awake!… please.

Major corporations are in league with proto-tyrants in subverting Constitutional limitations and in subverting freedom, itself.  While an individual artist baker or web designer is punished by the courts for refusing to employ his or her artistry for morally or religiously objectionable activities, airlines, sports team, employers of 100 or more and many others, are empowered to refuse service or entry to those refusing the injection of phony and proven remarkably harmful, “vaccines.”  It’s how Hitler built the Wehrmacht.

“And you tell me, over and over and over again, my friends, that you don’t believe we’re on the eve of destruction…”