Category Archives: Education

Culture, Economics, Education, Politics 2020, Race, Representation, Responsibility, Terrorism

Brown Injustice

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America is confused.  It seems a sudden event, this confusion, but it has been a long time coming.  Rational patriots hope only that the radical leftist and fascist forces have sprung their trap at the wrong time, thinking that Americans, particularly white Americans, have finally grown so soft that we’ll all just roll over and wash the feet of black people for the sheer joy and justice of fawning over a brown-skinned person.

Once we’ve reached that level of automatic love and justice, we can readily let brown-skinned criminals out of jail regardless of their offenses, because someone’s great, great grandfather was a slave, known or unknown.  Just being brown is close enough.  All of our successes and failures are contained in simple formulae: more whites are better off than the average black person, therefore whites, as a group, are ALL guilty of something that has negatively impacted brown-skinned people… as a group, you understand.

Now, black people are pretty smart.  Most have larger cranial volume than most whites; they are physically stronger in most cases, and, as a group derive from dozens of tribal heritages – racial types you might say – but now that they are in the United States they are all one race, one tribe, one aggrieved group, one voting bloc, one drug-dealing, white-hating, criminal-minded, low mentality group – easily led to welfare and other addictions… if you don’t look too closely.  If you do look at blacks and other brown people, really look at them, you’ll find that they are as diverse as white people, Asian people, Indian people, Arabic people and so on, and on and on.

Most black people work for a living.  Doesn’t seem like it, but most are competent and responsible and trustworthy.  But not all.  There are problems, not all of their own making… if you really look at how blacks are marginalized by governments and weak-minded whites, among others.  Among those others are black racial leaders.  No one has marginalized blacks more effectively than purported leaders who gain both influence and wealth by placing black individuals into a group, contravening the real American Dream.

Like any American citizen, any black is an individual, and equally treated (by law) under the law.  Any black or brown citizen should have the same opportunities to “get ahead” in society and status and wealth, based on that individual’s  own strengths, attitudes, education and will to succeed.  The “government” cannot give an individual higher status or a higher level of attainment, although it can give him or her money in various forms.  He or she knows deep down, that he or she has not earned  the money/support just received.  Black racial leaders, on the other hand, make a living by making blacks believe that they are owed that money or support.  Whites have treated blacks so badly in the past that they have taken away blacks’ opportunities in this racist society, and simple fairness requires reparations.  Thanks to us, your black leaders, here they are.

Except, they aren’t.  No, no.  Welfare is separate.  Money transfers up until now are barely just, though vital and seriously demeaning.  They don’t “count” toward reparations.  Real reparations involve big, large, grandiose, unheard-of and astronomical numbers of dollars.  We’re talking about multiple TRILLIONS  of dollars.  Welfare, free health care, Head Start and WIC, AFDC and a dozen other transfers, are mere window-dressings, drops in very, very deep buckets.  Once the “reparations discussion” gets serious, the real price tag and the breadth of beneficiaries will take shape.  Suffice to say that a starting point for said “discussions” could be every black person of unspecified fraction of black ancestry, is deserving of a share.  We’ll get to the size of the fraction when discussions get serious.

Barack Hussein Obama, for example, was born to a white mother and a dark-skinned Kenyan about 100 years after slavery ended with the capitulation of the Confederacy.  He claimed more than once that he was born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia, but everyone else who would benefit from denying that claim finally convinced him that he was wrong, after all, and was born in Hawaii.  Maybe.  Still his family had no connection to slavery, including the Arabic part of his father’s ancestry, and no connection to segregation and Jim Crow laws in the South after the Civil War.  He appears to have lived a highly privileged life, in fact, even becoming President – a quite corrupt one it turns out, not in terms of money but of process, intent and belief.

Would he be “entitled” to reparations?  Would his children, who are “blacker” than he is?  If so, paid by whom?  Taxpayers, obviously, particularly white ones.  But what about the millions of brown and black taxpayers?  What is their “debt” to black people?  Prudence indicates that there isn’t one, so a lot of people would have to be excluded from the special reparations levy  on white people.

There are millions of whites who emigrated to the United States since, say, 1870.  Do they somehow share this unprecedented burden?  Well, say BLM balloonists, “they” all were prejudiced against blacks, so they owe us, too.  And Chinese indentured laborers – most of them weren’t willing immigrants; what do they owe? Nothing, seems Prudent.

And all of the immigrants over the past 60 or 70 years… or since World War II, let’s say, carry no burden of making black Americans richer because of slavery in previous centuries.

Then, we’ll have to exempt people related to courageous abolitionists who fought slavery their whole lives.  There wouldn’t be a “Juneteenth” without them.  Add in descendents of soldiers who fought in the Civil War to end the Confederacy, particularly of those who died – hundreds of thousands of them – and there are relatively few people: descendants of slave owners, who might be connected tenuously to the institution of slavery.

There are descendants of people who fought for the Confederacy, who might be prime targets of this scheme, except many of them were fighting for their states, not for slavery, per se, and many, like Robert E. Lee, who was very opposed to slavery, itself, were complex patriots, many, many of whom died.  What more do they owe?  If we isolate blacks who can trace their genealogy to slaves, do we then separate out those who are doing very well in America?  Shouldn’t we look only at those who are still suffering from the effects of slavery?  Or, from the effects of severe prejudice?  How do we distinguish between racial prejudice and anti-social acts that would keep anyone from wanting to hire or help, or even be within the field of vision of the individual committing them?

Prudence knows who should be compensated:  Native Americans.  None of them emigrated since any time in American history.  Their history and treatment is far worse than that of any other group, and they are a group that is identifiable.

Do you know who is enslaving blacks today?  Mostly other blacks in the welfare-industrial complex.  And they do so with the best of intentions; they hired on to federal and state welfare programs to help less fortunate black and brown people.  Welfare is the second most corrosive acid ever concocted, exceeded only by other liberal-leftists, some of them, black, who make a living keeping hatreds raw.  Shame on them.  The continued failure of many blacks to advance economically and educationally, keeps those foul dragons powerful.  Many actually fight against better educational opportunities for the very people they claim to share the suffering of.  For shame.

There is a speech that a wise president ought to deliver – none has, so far: 

“Ladies and gentlemen, Americans of all heritages, welcome!  America does welcome you, it is our exceptional opportunity to do so.  There are times in the life of every nation when its citizens must be reminded of their purpose and mission among the family of nations.  None is quite like that of the United States of America.  Our first Civil War was our separation from the Kingdom of England, of which we all were subjects.  We paid mightily in blood and deprivation and with acts of heroism rarely seen even in war. 

The United States were sorely tested on moral and Constitutional grounds in our second, ‘THE’ Civil War as we call it.  By the numbers of participants on both sides, it was the bloodiest, most fatal war we’ve ever fought.  At a time when medical practice was ignorant of germs, antiseptic conditions or instruments – often bone saws – or of anesthesia, patriots on both sides risked everything for their beliefs.  Yes, Confederate soldiers were also patriots.  Many cared not a whit for slavery, but they risked, and gave all for their state and their new country, not so many years – just ‘four score and seven’ – after the United States was itself brand new.  The civil War of 1861 was a terrible purging of a nation’s soul.  Work barely begun in the Constitutional Convention in 1787, was finally completed in the destruction of ‘the South.’  From the thousands of funerals on both sides sprang the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to our founding Covenant.  When the Declaration of Independence declared it self-evident that all men are created equal, it did not clarify that non-whites were also men, and created equal too.  Finally, that was rectified by the Fourteenth Amendment, and strengthened in terms of voting by the Fifteenth: the first voting rights ‘act.’

It took nearly 100 years more to rid our many states of ‘Jim Crow’ laws and codified segregation.  But black people are amazingly strong and resolute, stoic and faithful.  They are incredibly talented and beautifully expressive.  For hundreds of years and in dozens of countries, whites and many other “non-black” people have tried to keep black people down, or separate.  For shame.  But they keep rising up!

Blacks constantly show their intelligence, creativity, skills and abilities in virtually every field of study, science, invention and strength.  And as they rise up and excel in their professions, they lift up all of us.  There are so many examples of excellence, duty, honor, fealty and faith among black men, why aren’t the loudest black politicians holding them up for young black men to follow?  Is there no political power there?  Is political power found only in marshalling hatred?

We have recently seen the harvest that hatred brings.  Along with statues of Jefferson and Washington being torn down by ignorant, hate-filled rioters, a statue of John Greenleaf Whittier was vandalized, despite his outspoken abolitionism and calls for total emancipation.  Yet even this was excused by one black apologist bemoaning the fact that black poets and writers of the same era did not receive enough attention.  Perhaps this ignorant, stupid act of vandalism will ‘fix’ what didn’t happen in the 1800’s, but that is unlikely.  What fools rioters and vandals and their apologists are.

Such acts of destruction and blind hatred must not be excused no matter how angry or hate-filled someone is.  They must not be rewarded by venal politicians hoping to buy kindness from hate-filled gangs.

What fools these blind, empty-headed politicians are.

There is so much good that black and brown people are responsible for; there is so much good to build upon.  Who among us truly believes that anything good will be built on utter, blind hatred?

My fellow Americans, it is time, indeed it is our duty to learn and grasp our own history, our own heritage, and the exceptional engine of freedom that our Constitution is.  The mantle of American citizenship includes the defense of freedom and the inalienable rights that flow from it.  If we don’t do so; if we let this fragile gift slip from our hearts, there is no one to our west who will save this, the last great hope of mankind.”

Culture, Education, Family, Governance, Politics 2020, Race, Responsibility, Terrorism

Kneel Down, KNEEL DOWN

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How to lead by falling line...

For those who have eyes to see and ears to hear, the waves crashing against the shores of America’s understanding ought to be exposing to the wise some of the great fallacies of our corrupt and feckless political power structure.  First, a crucial point: government  cannot “fix” racism, but it does make it worse.  Government… and politicians, can’t even describe what racism is and as a consequence, they attempt to fix something else, leaving no question as to why they have failed so miserably.

Racism is not the government’s business at any level; injustice is.  That is, how individuals ACT against the rights or property of another individual are the only matters that may be adjudicated, for only they may be placed in evidence at trial.  How someone feels  about another individual is inadmissible since it is not provable.  Often it is self-declared or, at least, a matter of others’ feelings.  Brought forth through testimony today, an individual’s feelings may be different tomorrow, if not within the hour.  This is the problem with so-called “hate crimes” and with the laws that purport to make the underlying, adjudicable crime worse in the presence of hate, than otherwise, such as in the presence of neutrality, one supposes.

Our Constitution protects every person under its lawful jurisdiction by the principle of “equal justice under the law.”  Any individual  who interferes with that principle deserves appropriate sanction under the law.  Any individuals of a group who interfere with it to the detriment or damage to any individual or individuals, each deserve equal sanction.  Aside from some sort of executive or threatening force applied to cause an individual to abrogate the rights, freedom, or property of another individual or individuals, the individual perpetrator is responsible for the consequences for his or her actions.  He or she is not absolved of that responsibility by virtue of others also being prosecutable for the same actions.

Our various governments manipulate racial groups and their designations in order to both control “groups” and to acquire their political favor.  In other words, local, state and federal governments constantly distinguish among groups in terms of legislation, special benefits that result, and differential legal sanctions, both good and bad.  That is, equal application of the laws is out the window if there is racially-based political advantage to be gained.  The ideal of a color-blind society is most undercut by the very governments formed in its shadow.  Prudence wouldn’t mind defunding that.

One of the worst consequences of the multi-city insurrection we have endured in late May and early June of 2020, is the obsequious surrenders of mayors, governors and federal politicians, to the well-coordinated mobs that have committed thousands of crimes across the country.  These include murder, assault, arson, theft, insurrection, destruction of public property, incitement to riot and public mayhem.  Yet public officials, sworn to uphold the law, public safety, state’s and our federal Constitutions, have decided to ignore most of it because “people are really angry.”  This philosophy deserves some analysis.

Two weeks ago soft-headed, stiff-necked governors, and mayors, were threatening to fine, if not arrest, law-abiding citizens who dared – dared – to open a barbershop or 20-seat restaurant in the face of the Covid-19 scourge of the century and the requisite lock-down and social-distancing dictates.  “We’re following this week’s CDC recommendations.”  None of the orders were strictly legal but lots of ‘woke’ people were and are afraid to not wear a mask outside.  Some mayors say they,ll fine you up to $300 for not wearing a mask!  Burning out someone’s business should be fined at least $350 by that measure.

Protesters who are upset (as is everyone else) about the excessive force in the arrest of Saint George Floyd, somehow conflate every white person’s white skin with the causes of Floyd’s death.  Guilt by skin color.  People with white skin may say they are glad the police officers involved have been arrested and charged, but it doesn’t count: their skin’s the wrong color.  People who own businesses or private property or both, are guilty of Floyd’s death, too, making the needed “justice” for George Floyd fall upon them, and burning and looting in the wake of George Floyd’s unjust death at the hands of 4 individuals in Minneapolis, can barely begin to balance the scales of racism since time immemorial.  Besides, looters apparently believe, the only way white people are going to respect black people is if they are deathly afraid of them… that part of the plan is working.

They can show respect only by kneeling and apologizing for being white.  Anyone who kneels for that is an idiot… they’re out there.

Lost in all of the riots – as clearly distinguished from “protests” – are the rights of individuals supposedly guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States which every elected official and police officer is sworn to uphold.  These same rights protected  George Floyd throughout his long criminal career and involvements with police, courts, judges, public defenders and prisons.  What are police, mayors and individual, terminally guilty white kids being ”forced” to kneel for?  Being white?  Being elected and somehow responsible for George Floyd’s death – when they clearly aren’t?

Are they being made to kneel before the “Black Lives Matter” organization/movement?  “BLM” is based itself on lies that they repeat over and over.  Every wrongful death is tragic, although not always a crime, per se.  In many cases they occur as a result of a series of grievous errors, not always only by the police personnel in question.    But police are the ones who must operate at a higher level of professionalism.  They can’t react from fear or confusion, else they must be accountable.

The “justice” that legitimate protesters seek has been remarkably swift in the Floyd case –rapid.  That’s justice.  First fired in one day and charged criminally about 2 days later.  A couple of days after that, the other 3 police officers present were also charged in Floyd’s death.  Very swift.  Two autopsies had been performed before the smoke cleared from the first riots.  A go-fund-me operation had raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for Floyd’s family before the funeral services had been scheduled.  That’s a lot of justice.  Derek Chauvin, the officer whose knee caused the death of George Floyd, was served with divorce papers as he sat in jail under suicide watch.  How much more “justice” can the protesters obtain?

None, that’s how much.  So why keep protesting?

The actual protesters are a minority of those marching in the streets.  Indeed, if one were able to interview every “protester,” the majority of them would be hard-pressed to explain what they are actually protesting.  Are they protesting the death of George Floyd?  Well, pretty good, so does every Prudent person.  What do they hope will be the result of their protest?  Better police?  Cool, me too.  The elimination of police?  We part ways on that one because doing the ultimate stupid act isn’t Prudent at all.  Is that really what protesters think they’re doing?  Doubtful.

Rioters, though, are a different group, literally paid to agitate.  They are where most of “Black Lives Matter” personnel are – coordinating riots.  If that means looting, arson and beatings, that’s okay, in their eyes, because justice for George Floyd is not their purpose.  If they cared about black people they’d be agitating to get rid of welfare or, possibly, they’d be protesting the 6,000+ deaths ANNUALLY, of blacks killed by other blacks.  But they seem mainly to be concerned, upset really, about police and police departments.  Regardless of color, black activists want to get rid of police.  This is not a solution to problems shared by all Americans; police, law and order are a problem only for those attempting to destroy belief in our Judeo-Christian mores and America, itself.

“BLM” believes very different philosophies than you or I do, or do the vast majority of Americans.  Their own statement of beliefs is in opposition to the norms of American, Judeo-Christian culture.  In effect, every “victim” class they can identify, including all variants of sexual identity and “trans” sexuality, most particularly non-white, are claimed as equal-status members of the Black global movement.  In this they are largely in opposition to the norms of a majority of American blacks who desire to live far more conservatively.  Like most Christian or Christian-influenced people, Americans are tolerant of the need for political expression and of the redress of grievances, Prudence included of course.  BLM is a wolf in sheep’s clothing, however.

BLM is purely racist.  There is no pejoration in that description.  Blacks, evidently can demand “black-only” this or that, whether a congressional caucus or a college graduation; whites, not so much.  One of the lies that undergirds Black Lives Matter is that only whites can be racist.  That is utter nonsense, of course.  And racism per se, is neither evil nor negative… it is normal.  Only under a regime of group identities and its hand-maiden, socialism, is “racism” a weapon.  Americans are sadly in error, literally in denial of our heritage, if we accept group guilt for “racism.”  Our nation and its founding is based on individual responsibility, not group responsibility.  Every individual could be “racist” in the sense that he or she is uncomfortable with members of another race.  It takes time and education to overcome that uncomfortability, even fear.  But only a handful of individuals will act uncivilly or in a hateful manner toward members of the other “race.”  That action is the only legitimate area of action for government.  Bad actions may be sanctioned under the law, bad thoughts may not be.

Another aspect of what BLM “believes,” is that the “Western” nuclear family model must be undone (that is, thousands of years of Judeo-Christian family structure must be undone).  BLM global wants “village” child-rearing, which is to say, some sort of government child-rearing.  We’ve been drifting toward this model to our social detriment, for 60 years.  As the federal government federalized welfare, removing all moral or any other judgment in the disbursal of “benefits,” black families disintegrated to such a degree that over 60% of black children are born to and raised by a single mother, which means that Headstart, Pre-K and numerous other social support programs often have more time with a child than its mother, let alone its father.

Black Lives matter is a fraud on America, since its concern is not helping black people, but rather the unseating of our nation and constitution.  To communists, which they are, freedom is an affront.  Any politician who accedes to BLM demands, kneels for their blessing or grovels in other ways, is presenting him or herself as the person to vote against in the next election… while elections that so many have died for, are still free.

Culture, Economics, Education, Family, Race, Responsibility

LOVE OF WISDOM

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It is our obligation to understand what things mean.

Life is a philosophy, as is death, one could surmise.  Another philosophical thread might be spun from the question of whether death and life are opposite one another.  The observer of, say, a live frog and a dead one can readily note the obvious differences, most specifically that the live one is capable of independent action while the one considered dead, obviously is not… but, are the two states opposite one another?  Given that death is the natural end of the limited period called life, it ought not be seen as the opposite of life.

Let’s jump up a level in our contemplations.  Philosophy implies belief and wouldn’t exist without it.  Truth being immutable and untethered to belief, the death of, say a frog, leaving a dead, stiff carcass, is subject to only one belief: the formerly live frog has ceased the stage we call “life” and now exists in a state we call “death.”  There isn’t any room for conflicting descriptions of the change of condition or, for the rational, conflicting meanings  of the change, as well.  Humans, however, are immersed in a sea of philosophies and, in the presence of a large smattering of scientific knowledge, our philosophies are concentrated upon – if not entirely concerned with – life and death… of humans.  We believe humans are unique for whatever reasons and philosophy enables our explaining those beliefs.

One might distill that fact into simpler terms: philosophies are based on how  to create life,  how  to live and on how  to die.  Too simple?  Let’s consider a few.  The most widely known are religious, the fire that has forged most of our beliefs:  marriage, rearing of offspring, educating them and launching them into marriage, conducting our personal lives, dealing with crime and anger and unfairness and injustice, meeting our obligations to others, and being honest and honorable and fulfilling our duties… and how to worship our creator and perhaps other gods.  Every religious belief structure includes dietary and sexual laws, ways to punish and ways to exact revenge, as it were… or avoid it.  Structures of belief.

There are philosophers who explain the meanings of our beliefs, of our lives, our emotions and our hatreds.  They try to explain why religions are complete or incomplete, why life has meaning or it doesn’t; they rationalize failure, success, happiness and depression, loneliness, gregariousness, hygiene and filth.  Philosophers have, and will again, endeavor to explain industry, work, laziness and entertainment… even complete nihilism and the need for suicide.  In a way, they are all explanations or understandings (opinions) about creating, living and ending life… of humans, mainly.

Humans build things.  There’s a philosophy about this need to construct more than is necessary for basic shelter and safety.  Humans invent ways to grow more than enough food – then we eat it all.  There are philosophers trying to explain why we eat more than we need, even if it hurts us.  The same is true about alcohol, drugs, tobacco, coffee and chocolate.  Why are these things so important to humans?  How is it that we can abuse one another and even children?  People try to think about and reason about, explain and understand these odd behaviors.  What do they mean?

Much of religious thought / philosophy is about the end of life and the existence or absence of a soul living in the spiritual self of every human.  The majority of humans alive today believe to some degree that there are rewards or punishments awaiting them after death.  It feels Prudent to consider those possibilities.  If we live a rotten life do we, should we, “get into” heaven the same as the most charitable and saintly people we know?  Do non-religious people have a last minute choice to win or possibly earn a ticket to heavenly realms?  How good a life must one live to be acceptable to get even a decent room in the many mansions of heaven?

Do we have to leave earth, or just life, to get to heaven?  What if you aren’t good enough to take up residence in heaven?  Do you remain stuck on earth somehow?  Or are you wiped from creation, every record and memory, any act of love or anger toward others that you created while alive – just ‘poof’?  Gone?  The people who run heaven wash their hands of you?  Maybe you are parked in a halfway village – or a one-third way or one-quarter way – until there is either a lull in new applications or one of the staff in heaven thinks you can be rehabilitated.  These are philosophical questions because each is laden with meaning.  For some.

It is possible to drift through, or fight through life without ever thinking of what your actions mean.  Philosophically this seems like a sad outcome for years of living, and implies a certain sociopathy: complete disregard for others, something that has to be learned; no one is born that way.  Some people, unfortunately, learn a rare but real philosophy of hatred or disregard for others, even in their families.  These are they who have a high likelihood of incarceration and other interactions with government agencies.  Those interactions, whether with social workers, foster care or special schools, fulfill the philosophies of others.

That is, a large fraction of society believe in government as a better source of decision-making than any family unit or parent.  We can see a constant push from these types to remove children from parental influence at ever earlier ages.  It reflects the philosophies of socialism which are also anti-religious.  At the same time, there are smaller societies where communal child-raising has worked beautifully for centuries, only thanks to a culture supported by shared philosophies toward rights, wrongs and the stages of life.  These beliefs are too rare in complex industrialized “societies” like ours.  Here and there small “communes,” often religion-based, attempt to maintain cleaner and simpler cultures and child-raising is shared somewhat.

This can practically, and honestly, be done in the United States in only small, restrictive communities, because ever growing fractions of our “multicultural” nation do their best to be as different from our actual heritage and mores as possible.  Parents relinquish control of their children for more than brief periods at great risk.  Their teachers, counselors and coaches are increasingly likely to believe very different things about what children should believe , learn, memorize or think of the world, than what their parents believe.  Those whose philosophy includes greater trust in government(s) than in individuals will tend to separate children intellectually – philosophically – from their parents.  These are the ones whose guiding philosophy is that we cannot enjoy a true society until we all accept the “common good” ideals of socialism, and reject all the old ideas and ideals, including that pesky freedom we try to enjoy and pass on to our kids.  Religions are an impediment for this type… unless the beliefs they espouse are destructive of the awful principles that formed the United States.

Try to find out the philosophies of your children’s teachers.  If they don’t believe what you believe, why let them screw up your kids?  Because the government says to?

There are a lot of money-related philosophies, too.  Some of these – most of them, actually, are destructive of the lives of ordinary people: the kind that go to work and try to provide for their families and save for retirement.  Most of the people who form the backbone of free-enterprise capitalism don’t have money philosophies.  Money is simply a tool for negotiating life… which could be a philosophy, but isn’t worth the time.  For the ultra-capitalists, worldwide bankers, central bankers, money isn’t money, it’s their lower-than-secular God.  They worship the stuff.

Money is not the “root of all evil,” it is the love of money that has that effect.  Those international, ultra-wealthy, celebrity and relatively hidden titans of finance, are among the most evil, amoral humans on the planet.  The small-business entrepreneur who winds up wealthy is the example to emulate; the financial wizard who earns through speculation and trading and who controls multiple fortunes internationally, is not.  While both may cause envy, you will have to forego your moral bases and patriotism to emulate the latter.  Prudence is skeptical of entrepreneurs who become extremely wealthy because they are smart, but then decide that they are also wise.  These same then try to sway governments or major institutions to follow the wealthy person’s philosophy on how life should be lived.  The wisdom of history and heritage, they often deal with as impediments to the “better” or more efficient ways of life, education and freedom from which the oligarch is far removed and insulated by wealth.

There are philosophies of money and wealth that derive from the love of money.  They are perceived as entitled control of others, and are divorced from the beautiful chaos of freedom.

Philosophies about human differences are key to civilization.  Rarely do philosophies derived from ignorance of “others” include automatic trust or love.  A philosophy of tolerance will erode natural distrust and lead to acceptance and then love and trust.  One’s philosophy must include belief in a path toward acceptance – the alternative is mental barriers that devolve into hatred.  Either philosophy must be taught to offspring.

Can we make laws that require belief in eventual acceptance?  No, not successfully.  But we can, by trusting citizens self-governed by largely shared philosophies, create a legal structure where acceptance is possible.  Our Constitution is the best example of this structure.  “e pluribus unum” is the clearest statement of the philosophy of acceptance: “from many, one (people or nation).”  Recent failings of American constitutionalism have resulted from the intrusion of alternative philosophies  into the fabric of liberty and responsibility, and from the denial of other philosophies, primarily religious.

We must remain vigilant.

Each of us will pass on, but not, Prudence’ philosophy says, like the stiff and lifeless frog.  We have an obligation – one we accepted – to leave this plane of existence having lived, loved and served for the benefit of others and thus for the benefit of ourselves.  A wise and Prudent soul once observed that “…you get to keep only what you give away.”  Only our acts, loves, angers, hatreds go on with us to be judged.  That’s a Prudent philosophy.  The United States of America provides unmatched opportunities to live in ways of which we might be proud.

Culture, Economics, Education, Governance, Health Care, Politics 2020

The Prices of Freedom

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We're surely safe, now....

Our recent – and continuing – experiment with executive, unconstitutional tyranny in the name of public health, ought to wake up a nation that has been doing a poor job of conveying America’s exceptionalism and founding ideas.  At least two generations have matriculated with limited and essentially non-philosophical education about our own country’s history.  The unique responsibility that is part of and the foundation of  United States citizenship is barely mentioned, if not derogated, in government-monopoly “public” schools.

Being shut-down, locked-down, and pushed-around by a variety of state governments brings to mind the importance of our Constitution and our individual sovereignty as U.S. citizens – sovereignty that does NOT extend to non-citizens.  We are exceptional precisely because our form of government, and the IDEAS that define it are an exception to commonplace tyrannies that defined governance prior to the American Revolution.  Our nation is not an outgrowth of ethnicity or tribal history, but of a rare, exceptional set of ideas and philosophies.  One of these is that citizens are sovereign  and the federal government is formed by their consent, limited  by the Constitution that We the people created, ratified and (should) hold sacred.  If we only understood it!

It is hard to explain to Obama types who perceive the Constitution as flawed since it doesn’t list all the free stuff the federal government is obligated to give to people.  Those are they who bristle at the description, “free stuff.”  People will be paying taxes out the wazzoo for all the federal gifties, they note.

Still, as any veteran can tell us, there is a price to pay for freedom; we just don’t contemplate what that statement actually means.  A young-to-middlin’ man whom Prudence has known for his entire life, has grown to be a good observer of political fallacy, and he pointed out a good one regarding coronavirus tyranny: our freedom… our sovereign independence is not a gift from any government.  It is God-given, or, if you can’t stomach those concepts, it is a birthright if born under the Constitution, and precious.  Yet we wiil happily share it(!) with anyone who wishes to become a U. S. citizen.  That’s a gift that isn’t even offered anywhere else in the world, except somewhat in Canada and a couple other former dominions.

Freedom belongs  to the individual; it is personal, private property.  Unless we hurt others by committing crimes, no one can CONSTITUTIONALLY take our freedoms away.  Free citizens installed the constitution to limit the powers that the federal government THAT WE CREATED, could exercise on OUR behalf.  WE delineated the limits to government, not the government – not the congress – not any president except in the rare instances when the survival of the nation was threatened, war was declared by our supposed representatives, or when internal uprising threatened the nation.  Nowhere in its clarity and brevity is there a power granted by the people to restrict our inalienable rights in the event of  really bad influenza.  These bedrock concepts may sound quaint, but THEY ARE THE FUNDAMENTS of the United States of America.

So, since freedom of movement, assembly, religion, the redress of grievances, of speech and from unreasonable search and seizure belong to US, along with freedom from excessive bail and cruel and unusual punishments, from being forced to quarter soldiers in our homes unless provided by law in times of war, from frivolous criminal charges except by a grand jury, from deprivation of life, liberty or property except by due process of law, and from having our property taken for public use without just compensation, they are OUR PROPERTY.  We also have the right to a speedy trial, and to confront witnesses against us and to have the assistance of counsel.  We may demand a trial by jury.  The enumeration of rights (protected by the Constitution) shall not be taken to mean that other rights not enumerated are not still retained by the people.  Do you grasp the enormity of those words and others in the Constitution?  WE are the top of the heap: NOT THE GOVERNMENT.

The Fifth Amendment enumerates our right to JUST COMPENSATION when our properties are TAKEN from us.  Where does this leave our small-g governors when they attempt to force us to stay home, to stop working, to stop going out without a face-mask, to stop assembling with whom we please, or to stop earning our lawful livings?  How can we be restricted from buying any lawful product from any lawful seller thereof?  Our RIGHTS are our PROPERTIES… inalienable except in the most dire circumstances.  Over the years courts and even the Supreme Court have established that there must exist some overarching PUBLIC PURPOSE for ANY restriction of citizens’ rights.

There are 1,000 definitions of “public purpose” for every 100 instances of the exercise of police power.  Since the government, AND THEREFORE THE POLICE, exists to serve and protect US, our property , our rights, our citizenship, in fact our sovereignty, public gatherings, riots, parades and demonstrations and other incidents that block commerce and free access to public works like streets and sidewalks which WE PAID FOR AND OWN, legally and only appropriately, may be restricted to serve a public purpose (that purpose being the defense of good order so that private rights and properties may be legally enjoyed), including commercial properties.  Public safety in terms of free and safe flow of traffic and commerce, is also a public purpose.

So where is the government when the “public purpose” umbrella has evaporated in the presence of new information, scientific and otherwise?  It is in the increasingly comfortable position of tyrant, decreeing and attempting to enforce restrictions on the sovereign rights of citizens for NO GOOD PUBLIC PURPOSE.  And here is where we are regarding restrictions on movement, assembly, commerce, travel and personal hygiene in the guise of imaginary “Law” that says no one may exit his or her domicile without wearing a face covering.  We need not get in to keeping 6 feet away from other people.  These restrictions on rights actually form an offer to take with just compensation, our personal properties: things we own without restriction.

So WE THE PEOPLE should issue letters of conditional acceptance to our governors and Mayors and selectmen and Aldermen and police officials if necessary, stating our CHARGE for the loss of freedoms and rights.  That is, “just compensation” is not a price set by government who desires to take these properties for NO compensation; no, it is a price that seems “just” to each of us based on our own free judgment of the importance and therefore value of specific ones of our rights.  It seems Prudent that wearing a silly mask that has neither medical nor public value, should cost $80.00 per day, no terms: payable upon receipt.  Restriction to one’s home is worth at least $336 per day, unless one has school-age children, which adds $121.77 per child.  Staying 6 feet away from others is worth $2.25 per foot, per hour times the number of people so distanced.  The federal magicians have already tried to pay us for our inherent right to work.  Freedom of Religion is worth a lot more than these tiny sums.

It’s a whole lot less costly than days in court with juries, which cases the state and municipalities will lose.

Culture, Economics, Education, Governance, Health Care, Politics 2020, Representation, Responsibility

ALL AHEAD: LEFT!

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Even government has to employ the Constitution...

There’s a new economics in town.  It’s based on virus avoidance.  A majority of Americans have bought some, if not all the virus-avoidance products suddenly for sale.  Some of those are advertised as something the wise, concerned, empathetic and news-trusting person definitely should  have: things like toilet paper and sanitizing wipes, for example, or things like people-avoidance, face masks and fear.  When sales dropped a little, politicians got up on their pedestals and decreed that most of these products were now mandatory, while others, for some arcane, authoritarian reasons, were forbidden.

The latest viral threat has exposed a host of new sales experts, male and female.  Unlike the multitude of regulations these same, new sales reps have instituted to protect buyers of everything from prescriptions to orange juice and canned soup, there are provided no guidelines whereby the hoped-for… no, required  buyers of the new virus-avoidance products these abrupt sellers are peddling, can fairly judge which are good and wholesome and which are not.  Yet, purchase and swallow we do, lest we miss out on the greatest shared sacrifice of all time – the first to bring our nation to its knees.

There is no choice between bitter or sweet, it’s virtually all bitter, and since we are the tough, always successful American people, we join in the sacrifice to show just how patriotic we truly are.  There are even new badges of courage, so to speak, like face masks and oddly walking so as to avoid others, not to overlook cowering at home as one of our greatest strengths.  The only side-effect of the lately prescribed purchase we all must buy, is a new, nearly universal distrust of everyone else should we be threatened by their presence.  Since the FDA- and CDC-approved products are so new, no one knows if the side-effects are long-lasting or even permanent.  Small additional price to pay.

Those who are skeptical of our national reaction to our newly purchased fears, are perceived as barely deserving of the right to buy food, even less the right to buy toilet paper.  This is a great unifying moment.  Obviously it does make sense to wear a face mask of some sort when entering a market or hardware store, although, in a perverse way, it also seems Prudent not to do so, as wearing one indicates acquiescence to the miasma of dictates, pronouncements and unconstitutional separation from “inalienable rights” that hundreds of thousands died for prior.

Nascent socialists love a good crisis like this viral one.  Now, what they have dreamed of since entering their first poli-sci lecture or law class, and subsequent entry into “government” itself, there is presented a chance to change the world, re-order disorganized society, and to clear the path through the jungle of liberty that those sufficiently wise can follow to a brighter future.  Those who cannot share the vision of an orderly nation will need just a little coaxing to walk arm-in-arm with the wise followers… ahhmm, except walking arm-in-arm will be disallowed to prevent a “second wave” of coronavirus.  And, no hand-shaking or sharing others’ spaces, now deemed to be a 3, 4 or 5-foot circle according to the Ministry Of Social Distancing.

Exposure of the best and worst of federal regulation is one of the blatant results of dealing with COVID-19.  Evidently there was some concern among intelligence operatives back in November of 2019, that the rapidly spreading, perhaps new contagion, bore watching in the off-chance that it would spread outside of China.  Initially their concern was focused on problems for U. S. assets in South Asia.  Still, it wasn’t actionable: there was little hard information and it was wholly a Chinese problem.  It was good that our arcane intelligence caught wind of the problem, but anything further depended on the honesty of the Chinese Communists.  Well.

At some time after the problem surfaced, perhaps the beginning of December, the Chinese not only hid their unique problem, but allowed millions of people to leave Wuhan before they realized they had to lock the city and region down if there was any hope of containing the spread of this new disease.  With disinformation as its prime public function, the Chinese Communist Party argued against travel restrictions and coerced the UN’s W.H.O. to repeat their lies for 3 or 4 weeks.  First “it doesn’t spread from human to human,” as Chinese trade and technical personnel spread across the world carrying the new “smallpox” to the indigenous tribes of America, Italy, England, Spain, Germany and Iran, among many others.  No infected blankets – human-to-human works better than expected!

No one seems to want to consider that COVID-19 has damaged the world’s economies, including ours, on purpose.  “Oh, no!  No country would ever do that.  The Chinese are wonderful people.  This was an embarrassing mistake that China feels terrible about.”  Indeed, China feels SO badly that it has striven continuously to blame the United States for the disease.  The trusted professionals at the W.H.O that China controls, have done their best to reinforce Chinese proficiency at handling the virus, in the face of unending disinformation about the extent of COVID-19 in China, the brutality employed to contain it and about the tens of thousands of deaths that have happened.  While the world suffers the constant spread of this new virus, China has miraculously experienced the end of the spread to the point of virtually no new cases and business is up and running and kids are back in school.  Okaaayyy.  Ignore the western news people who have been kicked out of the country, China is the model to follow.  Can you say, “disinformation?”

Relative only to the United States, it has cost only about $10 Trillion in denied business and market wealth to fight the virus… so far.  That’s assumed to be a lot of “money,” but it’s not.  It is a Hell of a lot of obligation far into the future.  There was no money to borrow from the Federal Reserve; the FED didn’t have $2.2 Trillion.  What it does have is the right to create lendable “money” out of thin air, and charge Americans interest for it.  It’s a nice business to be in.  Having received the imaginary air-money from the consortium of private banks we like to call the Federal Reserve, the Federal government, all legislatively legal-like, deposited bits of it into millions of business and personal bank accounts to help us all “fight” the novel coronavirus that China sent us.  China’s model for supposedly containing and defeating the COVID-19 coronavirus, is the model most “Western” countries – ostensible democracies and republics – adopted, rather than the Swedish model of good sense and personal responsibility, without national business shutdowns, that is working about as well as the Chinese model of repression is working for the rest of us.

Measuring the astronomical and ongoing costs our fascist lockdowns of businesses and individuals are imposing, one could speculate that we could have posted two nurses and a personal assistant at the side of every vulnerable elderly person and otherwise medically weak person at a cost of about one-twentieth of that $10 Trillion.  A private chef could have prepared gourmet meals for each thrice daily and fluffed their pillows on demand. The rest of us could have gone about our business, using care and best practices to minimize infection.  One could observe that those who have imposed the shutdowns and stay-at-home orders – all in contravention of our Constitution – are enjoying it a little too much.

As in all matters of great moment and of life-and-death, literally, we are witness to tawdry congressional machinations.  Without hesitation certain key congressional figures have attempted to insert completely unrelated issues into “emergency” economic legislation rushed through to save the economy.  What constitutes “emergency” legislation for those on the left, includes having voters vote up to 45 days “early” and to vote by mail to “maintain social distancing.”  These are election-stealing tactics.  The left: socialists, liberals and our beloved Democrats, never relax in their battle to unseat conservatism and the strengths of tradition.  Every defeat of their radical (anti-traditional) plans is never accepted, but is a key to how to bring a different tactic to bear in the next battle to unseat a specific tradition.  The famous instruction to leftists is “Never let a good crisis go to waste,” and “no” means simply, “later.”

Every aspect of traditional life – and belief – is naturally political to leftists in an environment of hateful anti-traditionalism.  COVID-19 is a political  matter on which sides must be taken and defined.  In some way the attack of this new scourge is not a common enemy all Americans should unite against.  No, it is an opportune moment to instill ever greater socialist plans and practices, virtually while people aren’t watching.  If a few dozens or hundreds of people die in the execution of socialist plans, that is a reasonable cost to install “equality” and to tear down the capitalist, unfair economics of the Constitution and of Christians.  China made the same calculation when the (perhaps) accidental release of COVID-19 presented an opportunity, as well.

As epidemiologists have grabbed the economy by the throat, the ostensible requirement of “social distancing” has extended to include everything from weddings to funerals, school classes and restaurants, most jobs and even walks in parks and on beaches, and, quite logically in the eyes of leftists and fascists, our new governors have prohibited Church services!  In a nation glued together by religious freedom and codified disestablishment, and built by believers in God, this is extraordinary.  This exposes the disdain that leftists hold for religious faith: religion is nothing more than social gathering and virtue-signaling such as the left understands all too well.  Amazingly, at the same time that Chinese Christians are risking imprisonment, if not their lives, to hold surreptitious prayer meetings, Americans, and more oddly, their pastors and priests, have acquiesced to the dictates of secular functionaries to avoid church services.  What if prayer works?

Secular leftists are laughing in their latte’s as they think they have proven the fallacy of religion.  Erstwhile Christians are congratulating themselves on being good rules-followers, not grasping the peril their meekness has placed them in.  Regardless of Constitutional guarantees, churches have shown that they will readily forego their faith and their rights when so directed by non-believers.  Never let a good crisis go to waste.

Nearly every religious tradition around the world includes some form of prayer in unison.  There is great effect from unified belief – it’s the strongest force on earth.  Are all churches agreeing that there is no one to hear their silly prayers?  Are Sunday services mere collection-plate convenience?  Good grief!  Prudence has seen prayer work in the physical world.  No pastor should fail to resist the attempt to squash this essential right – and duty.

Finally, it is hopeful that so many private efforts have sprung into being to supply medical equipment and help to other individuals.  Companies have changed course in matters of days to provide masks and ventilators and hand-sanitizer.  Remarkable organic chemists and biologists are testing, creating, and improving drug therapies and even potential vaccines to defeat COVID-19.  Americans, most especially those of us who have dealt with the risks of private life and economics, are generous, charitable people.  Even while unable to work and with their incomes limited or missing, Americans are being asked to donate and they do. 

The brunt of the multiple variations of shutdowns and lock-outs has been borne by private interests: individual workers and contractors, small and large businesses, and charities and non-profits to differing extents.  The pain has in no way impacted public employees economically.  Yes, first responders are working longer shifts – on overtime.  Teachers have had to learn (where union-willing) how to teach on-line.  Big public thinkers and planners have had to think and plan more than ever, but none has lost pay, benefits or pension.  Daily there are stories of private incidents of charity and outreach, some quite widespread as people contribute thanks to social media.  What Prudence has failed to observe are news reports of large-scale public-employee  charitable efforts, whether by bureaucrats or teachers or others, and maybe the reports have just been missed, somehow.  Are “we” all in this together or is it just “you,” the private, not yet socialized sector, who are all in this together?  God forbid.

Economics, Education, Governance, Politics 2020, Representation, Responsibility

THE BIG ENVELOPE

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North Carolina Senator Richard Burr coincidentally sold most of his stock portfolio after a closed hearing on COVID-19.

The big envelope arrived the other day, from the National Republican Congressional Committee, which is not a committee that tries to solve problems for the Prudent and concerned citizenry, but a campaign committee that tries to solve problems for politicians.  And, while it certainly has that right, Prudence dictates that recipients are just as permitted to scoff at it and withhold requested funding… or send in the funding to the degree that the needs of politicians may, momentarily, coincide with one’s own.

The questions were off-putting.  Did the carefully chosen recipient think that the Democrats would work with President Trump to improve things for the American people?  The options were Yes, No, and Not Sure.  At the very end of the over-sized questionnaire the committee provided a space for “Comments.”  Except, they didn’t really want very many of those.  Prudence tried to compose two sentences that could impart the folly of the questions and the implied policies they hinted at, to no avail.  It could fill a whole blog post.

Unfortunately, in this recipient’s view, even President Trump, ostensible leader of the organization that spawned the aforementioned Committee, is barely trying – or able – to shift the course of Socialism that has infected our Constitutional system of individual liberty.  None of the questions even hinted at the underlying, fundamental corrosion of our potential and promise, so it didn’t seem Prudent to answer any of them.  Most Americans are inured to the essential Socialism we live with, even as it washes out our national foundations, nor do we recognize the socialist nature of hundreds of federal and state programs.  The Left has dragged the debate firmly onto its spongy, swampy, turf, yet we still appear befuddled in the few debates there actually are.  Where is all this socialism?

The federal and state budgets are replete with it.  “How can that be?” you ask.  “We don’t like socialism in this country!”  That’s what WE think.

Since 1946 the federal government has provided subsidized free and reduced-cost lunches to school-age children… millions of them.  Most recent statistics indicate that some 30 Million children receive breakfast AND lunch in public schools.  Here and there late-afternoon meals are also served.  Where are the parents?  Obviously so tied up with important tasks that they are unable to feed their own children. 

Obviously, no one can bear the thought of hungry children trying to learn on empty stomachs; we must feed them.  At the risk of sounding cruel, one is prompted to ask what the SNAP program is accomplishing if it fails to make sure that children receive nutrition from its benefits?  Are there no sanctions on parents who fail the test of the most basic parental responsibilities?  Feeding your own child?  Apparently not, and not needed.  The federal government has provided much of that function so that parents need not be bothered.  Everyone is happy.  Socialism:  identity linked to a certain group spurs unique attentions from a central governing body, frequently economic attentions – positive or negative.

What about the most basic socialist program: Social Security?  Begun as a simple, partial support for those too old to work, Social Security has become an ostensible retirement program as well as a source of “off-budget” revenues for our erstwhile budget-masters in the Congress.  Indeed, there they were: some dollars they couldn’t obtain cheaply enough on the open bond markets, and they didn’t actually steal  them.  They placed bona fide I. O. U.’s in the form of United States bonds in the imaginary “lock box” of which existence taxpayers were repeatedly assured.  In a way, the moneys collected on behalf of future retirees WERE stolen, another of the inevitable actions of socialists for whom ANY source of revenue may be justified for the good of all.

Social Security, long in surplus, was too sweet a piggy-bank when the “need” to provide for the mentally “disabled,” especially children, and for a host of others deemed disabled under the ADA, including alcoholics and other addicts.  Now, in answer to another prayer to who knows who, for more revenue for the common weal, we have THC emporiums springing up from coast to coast, often enriching former socialist office-holders, and which can allay the disabling anxiety of the developmentally coddled.  There will be less crime, now, and happier sheeple, ahhmmn… voters.  Gambling wasn’t expanding its contributions to the common good quite rapidly enough.  Prostitution is always waiting in the sheets, as it were, with added revenues needed for “education” and “infrastructure.”

Another clue to our socialist underpinnings is the $23 Trillion-dollar debt hanging over us, all.  The centuries-old result of socialism is running out of other people’s money.  Socialism is based on collectivist action, governing by group identity rather than having power derived from individual rights and actions… and responsibilities, the source of business-generated productive surplus and innovation.  Socialism is a system of diffusing responsibility, and once in that mindset it is a small step to borrow today’s comforts, ahh… crucial needs, from future taxpayers.  Politicians are especially comforted by the prospect of buying votes with the greatest “other people’s money” ever conceived: “borrowing” from 3 generations in the future.  Talk about diffusing responsibility.

Into this dishonest mess has dropped Covid-19, facilitating the wet dreams of socialists everywhere: “universal” health… ahh, well, not care, exactly, but universal RULES that are backed not by law but by police – best of all.  And these aren’t rules for hygiene; these rules are destroying the economy, individual businesses of every size, jobs, household economies, availability of goods, including food, paper goods and all the cleaning and disinfecting products that are needed to render every body antiseptically pristine.  All it costs are hundreds of billions of lost business and tax revenue, plus a few inalienable rights, like the entire Bill of Rights.  In one swell foop our governments have rendered virtually EVERYONE dependent on government, and otherwise rational and independent men and women are willing to argue angrily for following every new restriction on rights and commerce, out of fear.

Meanwhile, the largest bailout/stimulus/stock-buyback program in the world is being polished up by the 535 people on Capitol Hill who can benefit the most from it.  Don’t you sometimes wonder how Representatives and Senators become multi-millionaires while sacrificing for us in “public service?”  Insider trading is a good way.  Let’s hope that what they finally shove down Pennsylvania Avenue is actually the right prescription for our suddenly sick economy.  Could happen.

The third person in line of succession to the presidency, Nancy Pelosi, doing her level best to help Americans in this time of shared stress and fear, tried to slip a loophole into the emergency “stimulus” legislation that would have enabled federal funds to pay for abortions, which is currently illegal.  She has her priorities; most of the rest of the people in the United States have theirs.  One could look back to 1973 when a shadowy “law” was discovered in the fog and abortion became “constitutionally” protected, and wonder if the termination of 61,000,000 Americans was simply not enough to have prevented COVID-19.  Maybe speeding up and expanding the death of our future will have a net positive effect.

Fortunately, every college graduate over the past 40 years has NOT been a communications, marketing or art major, and the latest iteration of “coronavirus” will be solved and resolved by very smart and accomplished people.  The problems of the hog-tied economy will not be so readily set aright.  It was shaky prior to the flood of unprecedented federal and state dictates, becoming, both because of and in spite of the booming financial markets, more and more unbalanced.  The ultra-rich were becoming ultra RICHER; a smaller middle-class of small and medium businesses were doing better; the vast majority of small businesses were struggling against the globalization of contracts and ownerships that remove thousands of previously independent enterprises from the competitive, free-enterprise marketplace.  A large fraction of the population were simply watching the growth of the rest of the economy, while experiencing little of the new wealth.  This model is common as socialism matures in the societies that have suffered under it.  A small group becomes very much more comfortable – and powerful – than everyone else, the middle class is reduced to homogeneity, the helpless low-producers are eventually eliminated or relegated.

Right now we are required, under stronger and stronger sanctions, to place our trust in a pyramid of government strata, populated by smiling politicians who have made careers out of deceiving Americans.  Let’s hope this crisis has shocked them into utter veracity, now.  That could happen, too; we’ll ignore the deceptive insider trading.  It’s nothing new.

Economics, Education, Governance, Representation, Taxation, Terrorism

TO CATCH A THIEF

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If only it were only our money being stolen…

Coronavirus, Covid-19, strain S or strain L – or both – is the unannounced candidate in the 2020 presidential race.  Democrats have already been calculating how to use the epidemic to make Trump look bad; they haven’t been calculating, much, as to how to protect citizens and residents from the disease, or to restore the pharmaceutical industry to the United States.  Hatred will do that: blind the carrier to its contagion, making him, or her, feverish and seeking a point of blame.  Trump will do.

Theft is very similar.  Where the blind virus can steal a person’s health, mobility, outlook and good nature, so can hatred, equally blind, make off with decorum, civility, kindness, compassion and good sense.  Both patients are… sick.

But theft, as any victim of a thief can testify, destroys belief as it reduces one’s economy.  A break-in to one’s home, for example, leaves residents distrustful, vulnerable and suspicious.  New information coming to those people is filtered through a different set of beliefs than prior to the act of thievery.  Eventually, assuming no repetition of the crime, distrust fades, safe feelings return and life goes on.  Love for others replaces fear.  But what if the nature of the theft is not precisely known… and what if the feeling of one’s safety and privacy having been breeched, one’s familial or even personal integrity being threatened by unrecognized thieves, almost continuously… what does a person believe then?

A person would certainly be angry at the violation, the assault on privacy, safety and personhood.  And that feeling would lead a person to be mad at, well… someone – whoever is stealing from him or her.  What is being stolen?  Who is it that should be punished for the constant thievery?

We live, today, right now, in a world of constant thievery, and among those things being stolen are the traditions of America’s founding.  One could posit that history, itself, is being stolen from us as “we” dis-educate our youth and restrict and belittle the beliefs that made the American experiment work and the American Dream real.  It’s unsettling.  What other thefts are being perpetrated?

Pick a state, any state.  How many of its agencies are staffed beyond need and paid beyond reason?  How many departments or programs are suspected of malfeasance, misfeasance and corruption, often political?  Surely some.  Honesty is being stolen every hour of every day.  How many have died from opioids?  How many from in-hospital errors?  How many children in state care were neglected so badly that their health or lives were threatened, perhaps lost?  How are such questions answered to the public on whose behalf all such actions are taken?  Almost never in full truth, often in blatant deception and cover-up.

We are forced by police power to sacrifice our private properties – the gains from our labors – to PAY for governments that lie to us as normal operating process.  It is unsettling.  A little anger is justified.  If one is not angry, he or she isn’t paying attention.

What about our past 3 years nationally, when one political party conspired with federal agencies and officers to attempt to unseat a president?  So many lies were told to us by so many official and “news” organs that the count is without total.  The political divisions exposed over the past 20 years have been sharpened so fiercely that the next 20 years are in grave doubt.  Taxpayers pay for everyone who works in the federal government and they have been lying to us, all, and never more grotesquely than in the years 2016 through 2019 and through the impeachment of president Trump.  They, including many in congress, have lied and stolen from our present and future the innate trust we ought to be able to enjoy with regards to our representatives, so called.

That our heritage has been stolen, tossed away when we weren’t looking, can be realized by noting the groundswell of support for an old communist/socialist as he claims to be the “leader” America needs.  Young people, college students, even many adults seem enthralled by attacks on capitalism and free enterprise, the unfairness of success, the inequality of unequal results for unequal efforts.  It’s all a matter of “fortune” and “unfortune.”  The fortunate ones, regardless of their path to wealth and regardless of the millions of jobs they create and the trillions of tax dollars their enterprises and employees pay to support common goods, should not have any more than they need to live on… the rest to be divided amongst the “unfortunate.”

Truth and reason have been stolen, as have history and fact.  And, it is unsettling.  Even those espousing socialist nonsense feel stolen-from, although they refuse to recognize what their losses truly are.  It makes them hazily angry at the fortunate thieves, for they have no mirrors.

Inheritance far greater than one’s grandmother’s silver has been, is being stolen right from our dining-room buffet, and we have not only left the back door open, we’ve marked the shortest path to the buffet with bright orange duct tape.  How can we tell all these thefts have gone on?  Check the books, the ledgers of our balance sheets.  We’re out of balance.  “What happened?” we ask one another.  “How did we get $23 Trillion in debt?”  “When did it become illegal to separate boys’ and girls’ bathrooms?”

“When did people start to hate others so much that teams of thugs would be allowed to beat them up while police watched?”  “Is this what Socialism has done?  Made us hate each other?”  “They” are stealing our nation.  It’s unsettling.

Culture, Education, Family, Health Care, Politics 2020, Sex

THE PRINCESS AND THE P

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Lyon Hospital, Department of urology. Sex reassignment surgery, transgender Female to Male, hystero-ovariectomy under laparoscopy. Operation which precedes the phalloplasty, hysterectomy, ovariectomy, vaginectomy, (Photo By BSIP/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

“Male and female created He them.”  For hundreds, thousands, millions of years, this truth was not a burden on humanity.  Many would rather ignore the whole statement because they don’t – or don’t want to – accept the “He” portion.  Somehow, and religious teachers must bear some blame, “we” have, over just a couple of decades, tried to undo the essential facts of biology: male and female.  Being called a female or male, amazingly, collides with thousands of people’s beliefs.  Why has this phenomenon crept out of counselors’ offices and parents’ concern?  Who are they who work so tirelessly to force the sexual variant of Jonestown on the rest of society?

Because lives are definitely lost amongst this new belief structure.

Transgender-ism  is a belief structure.  It is not supported by biological fact in any but the rarest of anomalies.  It is a belief, usually quite temporary, that one’s body is the “wrong” one.  This is a strange thing to believe… strange only if other humans were interested in discovering the source of the belief, itself.  But, strange becomes “normal” and deserving of societal respect if – and only if – the individual’s feelings  have been elevated to the level of truth: truth in the absence of evidence, a new faith.

Non-evidenced “truths” are now receiving legal  status as craven legislators bend over as far as possible to pander to the new faith.  Sadly, there are craven doctors, too.

And craven educators.

Public schools are not merely tolerating and preventing overt discrimination or bullying against children pretending to be their opposite gender, but they are encouraging  transgenderism among those children who are, for the moment, envious  of the opposite sex.  Parents, and professionals, ought to be helping children to be comfortable with their bodies, not to be revolting against them.  At the same time, adults should all be trying to find the source of childrens’ “gender dysphoria.”

The resolution of this heretofor rare condition, is something adults should pursue, even if it means a full social transition.  Few people will need to know that an individual was not born as he or she appears.  Whether full surgical mutilation is called for, is quite another question.

In the past decade the number of dysphoric youth has grown 1,500% to 5,000% and even more in some countries, with the ratio of girls to boys flipping dramatically.  Why?  Transgenderism “advocates” would say that only now are trans youth enjoying the freedom to express their “true” identities, thus accounting for the explosive growth.  Critics of the trend might see a frightening desire, like a virus from the bowels of China, that infects female and male alike, however disproportionately, with the desire to escape the responsibilities of their sex. 

There are unnumbered ways to achieve sexual release, alone, in pairs or even groups, and none require total denial of self, or bodily mutilation, so there is something else at work, beyond the sexual.  Perhaps it is more Prudent to consider a virus that infects not those who reflect its torment but their parents, schools, and social institutions, like unbalanced feminism, which, with other failures of freedom, convince late-term, newborn, toddlers and pre-schoolers (which age socialists and fascists would have include all of the earlier mentioned) to distrust, if not hate, the prospects of womanhood and manhood.  Despite our access to Instagram and Twitter, Panera, Chick Fil-A, Starbucks and weed, our twisted norms create a society in which children don’t want to be, well… who they are.

The result is not true gender dysphoria for most of its claimants, but a hatred for life, itself.  Prior to actual suicide (the end-game for many who attempt to change their sex) these, now, tens of thousands try to kill their personal realities.

For those who are dysphoric, one’s heart must fill with sympathy, and great care should be shown them, and tolerance and kindness.  For most of the new residents of Jonestown, however, new beliefs, alone, can save them however that counseling can be accomplished.  Doctors and clinics that press them with chemical and surgical confirmation of unreality, are but licensed charlatans.  Their parents, worse.

Shame on religious institutions.  From old, old texts, replete with truths eternal, they have made difficult lessons and philosophies not more clear, but softer and “more inclusive,” practically rejecting realities in order to fill pews.  The elegance and majesty of womanhood should be the easiest clay to work into gracefulness and motherhood, but they’ve largely failed to enhance those values.  The responsibilities and required wisdom that men are obligated to accept and to achieve, are trivialized and even derogated, as boys are drugged into submission and global communications portray men not as leaders but as fools.

The institutions of our culture and nationhood, almost as though coordinated by some evil puppeteer, are all reinforcing the concepts of unreality and hyper-sexualization.  Websites produce and provide pornography 24/7 for free, perhaps the most insidious attack on men, marriage and mental health.  Congress after congress ignore this corrosion without even discussing ways to restrict and limit global pornographics.  Why?  Money?  Is this addiction different from opioids, gambling or tobacco?  Or does it simply expose the flaws within males that all “woke” geniuses knew were there all along?

In a thousand ways we have made life, itself, unattractive.  Why would thousands of young people, even youngsters, refuse to the point of embarrassment and mutilation, to be who each actually is?  Is it because so many are born with the “wrong” body?  All of a sudden?  Doubtful.   Birth is not the issue, Prudence believes, but influences, even before birth.  We are teaching boys that being male is a sort of disease; and teaching girls that life is a system of oppressions, including motherhood.

The destruction of social roles and values is reaping its foul rewards with great efficiency.  The end-game is social dissolution, loss of nation-hood, economic stratification and, worse, institutionalized unreality.  What shall we teach our children when lies have gained legal status?

Culture, Economics, Education, Politics 2020, Representation, Responsibility, Taxation

BACK TO THE FUTURE

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It seems Prudent to pray.  Humans have an urge to worship, whether unto a deity of the personal perception of each supplicant, or to a set of deities connected to important natural phenomena like trees, rains, sunlight, moonlight, stars, winds, lightning, high and low temperatures… and more. 

If not truly worshipped, natural aspects of locales are generally respected with some attribution of supernatural importance, power or influence.  Caves, mountains, bodies of water, great forests and vital rivers are considered more than just natural by populations on whose lives they have life-giving or life-threatening influence.  Whether the Holy Spirit or the Great Spirit of native tribes, life’s continuous foibles, phenomena, fertility, feelings, fears and finality cause humans in every kind of society to come to terms with what can’t be controlled through forms of spirituality or religious faith.

What does it mean to all of those who claim to have no attachment to any church, religion or spiritual belief structure?  There are many and the number grows as government schools and liberal-leftist guided private schools divest themselves of morality and other quasi-biblical philosophies.  Only “science” can satisfy agnostics and atheists, those so declared tell anyone who’ll listen.  Religions are “mumbo-jumbo.”  So certain of their cold, scientific facts are many atheists, that they feel compelled to prevent any expression of religion or faith or spirituality.  The Prudent observer might think that they protest too much.  Their innate need to worship something is simply satisfied in a different way.

An argument can be made that Socialism is the secular faith, as it were.  Those who believe in this “ism,” must take its tenets on faith, since there is no empirical evidence that Socialism has worked anywhere.  Yet they work tirelessly to impose socialism so that individuality and human nature are replaced with the collectivist ethos, and innate capitalism is replaced with Utopian premises of “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.”  A lot of faith is required to believe such ideas in the face of utter failure in every example.

Inevitably, Socialism devolves into tyranny.  In place of “guided honesty” of free individuals, Socialism is required to impose rules for correct behavior, and they inevitably become very granular.  The logical concerns we have about the American administrative state are genuine fears about a Socialist bureaucracy that is charged with imposing a statist conformity on large populations.  Although a modern socialist state might refrain from police-state status, today’s technology empowers social engineers to gather voluminous data that help identify non-conforming citizens, whose lack of adherence to rules threatens, or are perceived to threaten, the health and safety of the group/collective for whom the state exists and is dedicated.

Power, ultimately, and before very long, concentrates in the hands of the higher echelons of bureaucracies.

Also logically, politics within socialist systems can’t be allowed to offer significant opposition to the functioning bureaucracy.  There is a certain necessity to promoting, educating about, proving and re-proving a high level of infallibility of the state.  The benign nature of the system that all benefit from and must support, has no room for serious opposition to its own quality.  Calling socialist leadership into question is simply anathema to the established rules of conformity.  Freedom and socialism are essentially antithetical.  There is no need for freedom when “everybody” already benefits from the state.

The reactions to freedom and independent sovereignty can be seen in the United States today.  Wherever the premises of socialism/atheism are challenged by Christians, in particular, the socialist response is most often anger: the public face of hatred.  If any question of this set of observations remains, just consider the nature of angry reaction to Trump and to any of his supporters.  Hatred.

For every form of governance and social cohesion, there is a beginning and some sort of end-game.  Given the ubiquitous factor of human nature, which is fundamentally, personally, independent and capitalistic, in the sense of retaining the products of one’s labor – the whole “private property” thing – the founding of the United States did the best job yet in history, to craft a Constitution and the original institutions that, in the hands of both faithful and honest officials, judges and democratically elected representatives, might survive the tyrannical tendencies it was designed to oppose.

From the beginning, the desires of some for power over others, for self aggrandizement and for monopoly economic advantage, have been trying to erode the bases of liberty.  As the philosophies of tyranny also matured, the description of socialism as the utopian supplantation of capitalism, and thereby of individual freedom, caught the interest of those who already hated the chaos of freedom as much as they distrusted the unity of thought that resulted from religious faith.  Any system of human organization that did not need the guidance of the state, was/is to be discredited and destroyed.  And so it has gone since at least the (second) Civil War.  Never let a crisis go to waste.

The blind faith in socialism is not so dissimilar to religious faith: life-changing belief in something that can’t be seen, and acceptance of various scriptures.  On the other hand, but in the same way, erstwhile conservatives show blind faith in unregulated capitalism, as if human nature were fulfilled by monopoly, government-protected wealth concentration, and as if the super-rich billionaire class were going to become benign rich uncles to us, all.  There is foolishness aplenty to go around… the world.

Rather than thinking with our human-nature selfishness, a little statesmanship is the better prescription.  We need, first, to recognize that these, again, are the times that try men’s souls.  At the founding of the independence struggle, those who signed the Declaration of Independence were placing their support for what was a civil war, not truly a revolution, out in the public eye, making themselves primary targets for the British military fighting to hold the American part of the British Kingdom tightly to England.  It took phenomenal courage, as they pledged their “… lives, fortunes and sacred honor.”

Where is sacred honor, today, as we face the United States’ greatest enemy: the failure of belief in the American Dream?  Where are the statesmen and women who will risk everything to restore America’s path?  There is no question that stepping back from the brink of tyranny – from the brink of unfathomable debt – will be quite unpleasant, uncomfortable, unpredictable and will require a continuity of leadership we have not seen since Lincoln and Washington.  It will not be possible for Americans to work 30 and 35-hour weeks, take multiple vacations each year, and waste as much income on frivolous, games, goodies or fattening foods.  Everyone will have to sacrifice.

Especially governments.

The federal budget must be rendered $1 Trillion smaller.  Sounds easy when the number is so even and simply stated.  A trillion… a thousand billion dollars.  In none of our lifetimes have we seen a congress cut – as in spend less money this year than was spent last fiscal year – ANY federal office or program, without spending much more elsewhere.

Local governments would have to assume the absolutely essential social services, and forego multiple other demands… demands like raises, fancy equipment, landscaping that isn’t done voluntarily, new school buildings and numerous non-essential municipal jobs.  States will find cutting even more difficult, since all those unionized state employees are the same people whose families donate to and work for campaigns.  Plus, there’s all that graft on enormous public works.  No more $750,000 state university presidents in those days, either.

None of these politically unlikely changes will happen, of course, until a far greater hurdle is crossed: making everyone, both parties, and everyone else, public and private, believe that eliminating debt-based government is more important than all of everyone’s private concerns.  More than during any war-time mobilization, Americans will have to agree to the importance of national sacrifice… to the importance of living within our means, Constitutionally, and with added sacrifice to pay off all of our loans.

There is no other path to financial freedom and strength.  Every dollar of debt is a loss of independence; every dollar in taxes is a loss of freedom.  Can we strike the correct balance going forward?  – the balance between independence, freedom and responsibility?  – the balance envisioned in our founding that relied upon morality and personal responsibility?

Or shall we succumb to the blandishments of socialist, identity politics, and hollow promises of greater freedom through national controls?  Shall we continue down a path that promises the slow loss of all we hold dear in America… slow, until one day we lose everything that’s left, abruptly, cataclysmically, destructively, unrecoverably?  We hope we know when that will be, but we don’t.  We hope we can pull back from the brink before all is lost, based on some arcane calculations that, literally, no one knows how to make.

Will the path to sanity commence before the next election?  Not bloody likely.  What about after the next election?  Well, not until all the other spending promises are fulfilled, and by then it will be mid-term elections and there’s no way in Hell those congressional giants are going to bear the brunt of mismanagement long before THEY were first elected.

Culture, Economics, Education, Governance, Health Care, Obama, Politics 2020, Responsibility

Corona, corona

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Corona beer comes from yeast, not a virus.
there is no connection whatsoever…

There are people who believe that the latest health threat to emanate from China is caused or somehow made contagious by Corona Beer, a well-known health threat from Mexico.  It is on this canvas that the gloppy acrylics of impeachment, economics, presidential politics, petro-dollar monetary policy, Antifa, Hezbollah, North Korea, opioid deaths and suicides, and the real threat of coronavirus must create a picture that is both truthful and meaningful to majorities in dozens of countries including our own.  Whew!  There are 15 national leaders whose views and beliefs about these and other issues, will define the next ten years and beyond: Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, Angela Merkel, Vladimir Putin, Benjamin Netanyahu, Ali Khamenei, Kim Jung Un, Xi Jinping, Ram Nath Kovind, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, Volodymyr Zelensky (who at least has a sense of humor), Arif Alvi (who doesn’t), and both last and least, Nicolás Maduro, who is an idiot.

Mixed up in all of their opinions is the existence of American constitutionalism, our ostensible structure of rights and freedoms, and our unbalanced, imperial economy.  Our primary concern must be the survival of the United States and freedom itself.  What presidential politics does every four years is stir us enough to reflect on our beliefs about our nation and our country, not the same things.

Democrat hotheads, committed to control of… well, everything, have impeached Trump to no good end, although his acquittal was never in real doubt.  No good end, certainly, but the disinformation value of, first Mueller, and then impeachment itself, must appear to elected Democrat leaders as a worthy end nevertheless.  Those who now shy away from bottled Corona most assuredly cling to bottled hatreds, known and unknown, but felt viscerally.  So there is the worthiness of relentless hatred of the aforementioned Mr. Trump.

There should be little disagreement with the proposition that hatred is the worst basis for political competition, yet hatred is everywhere employed in the United States, of all places.  Hatred doesn’t develop automatically.  Fear does: it’s pure ethnocentrism, even “racism,” per se.  But racism and fear of difference are not hatred.  Hatred is a visceral desire to kill or destroy the “other.”  To fear or to mistrust a stranger – or a strange “culture” – is instinctive and need not be taught.  To HATE  that person or group requires coaching, teaching, explanation and mythology.  It’s a long-term, methodical process to convert fear to hatred.  Who does crap like that?

Here and there are parents who were, themselves, taught to hate certain others and to varying degrees manage to convince their children to also hate them.  But it’s not as easy to do in the modern era, as public schools, ostensibly, fight the urge to bully or to gang-up on the unusual or most defenseless kids.  To some degree, children receiving messages of hatred at home are going to hear enough lessons countering that prejudice, that fewer and fewer reach early adulthood with firm hatreds.

Yet, now we have a split electorate, fueled by the sweet lies of socialists (people complain about Trump’s looseness with the truth but never a peep about the absolute and historical bullshit spread in the name of socialism).  A virtual communist is at or near the front of the pack in the ostensible “Democrat” party’s campaign for nomination to the presidency, and giddy polls regularly trumpet the acceptance of “socialism” by millenials.  There are reasons to fear Bernie Sanders’ cry for “transformation” of the United States, just as there were for the stated intentions of Barack Obama to “fundamentally transform” the United States.

Consider just the “ACA,” Affordable Care Act, which was not “affordable,” whatever that was hoped to mean, and it wasn’t about “care,” particularly: it was about coverage, the perpetual stumbling bloc to health care.  The nature of every “coverage” entity, whether “insurance” companies and HMO’s or governmental agencies that both regulate and directly pay actual care providers, is to reduce costs.  The main difficulties inherent in the ACA-expanded coverage industry were made worse and more expensive, nearly removing people from decision-making while nearly removing physicians and others from caring about their customers.

These sorts of change ought to be anathema to citizens of a nation with the heritage of the United States.  Our mythos is founded in individualism, self-made success, pioneering advancement into unexplored territories, and homesteads created even where the only building material was prairie turf.  Somehow the steady erosion of socialist promises of “free” safety and comfort have weakened the resolve of Americans to take control of their lives and circumstances, and to do so responsibly.

(See:
http://www.prudenceleadbetter.com/2017/01/16/health-care-fairness-and-free-enterprise/

Obama also made substantial changes to our foreign relations and to our ability to control events to our benefit, rather to enhance the influence and strength of Muslim regimes.  Fundamental transformation.  Here in 2020 these same intentions are voiced repeatedly by Bernie Sanders and others whose vision is not to improve or “perfect” our union, but to replace our form of government by altering Constitutional institutions and original rights.  The “new” goals are not comprised of strengthening liberty, but to “set” everyone’s standard of living so that no one is “above” his fellow residents: ultimate “fairness,” a new form of political organization that removes the interference in individual beliefs by churches, and in which every sort of human pleasure-seeking will be permitted… by benign elites, and, perhaps, taught in public schools.

The struggle of socialism is never-ending.  While “we” in the American, Judeo-Christian traditions of individual liberty and responsibility tend to assume our battle for freedom is won… and done, globalist socialism never rests on its continuum of undermining and destroying liberty and faithfulness.  It is a continuum that extends back to the “Garden of Eden.” 

“What?” you say, “nothing Prudent about that silly claim.”

Well, a few terms we don’t think about enough: Thesis – The Word of God, or the first premise; Antithesis – Direct opposition to the Word of God; Synthesis – Human-generated, pretended, compromise position with the Word of God.  The synthesis becomes the new Premise, no longer the Word of God, something less.  Is this not exactly what the “Serpent” offered to Eve, assuring her that God’s threat to not eat of the tree in the midst (center) of the Garden, or touch it “…,lest thou die.” would not come true.  “thou shalt not surely die.” the serpent told her.  God issued the thesis to Not eat of the tree; Serpent offered the antithesis  that the punishment would not be death (at least not right away) and the rewards of knowledge were worth the chance.  Is this process any more or less than the Hegelian dialectic?  Thesis – Antithesis – Synthesis.  Abortion is no longer murder; socialism will create a better America than God did.