Culture, Health Care

TO LIFE, TO LIFE, L’CHAI’IM

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Now that life, itself, is measured only in financial terms, at least for many – mostly young First-Worlders, the shining wisdom of liberal thinkers is becoming clearer… and more frightening. Canada recently completed a study that showed “savings” of nearly $140 Million, Canadian, that might be realized with more accessible “end-of-life” care, as they call it.

Or suicide, for the crudely honest. And that $140 Million could finance, ummm, infrastructure improvements and transportation safety! For those who remain, of course. One hopes that all that protein won’t go to waste – maybe pet food. After all, we’ve been eating animals like forever and they’re only human, too.

This is a side-effect of socialized health care, like those ads for the latest wonder-drug where the disclaimers about side effects like moods of depression or suicide, elevated heart rates, rash, constipation, diarrhea, dry mouth, bad breath, loss of vision and tingling in hands and feet, are three-fourths of the ad. Certain cancers and even death have occurred. If you experience any of these symptoms, speak to… your… doctor. He or she is a caring, white-smocked employee of the Government Accounting Office.

Abortion as a “constitutional right” is the first step to the destruction of not just life, but of freedom. We have been sold on abortion providing “Freedom” of choice for women who are shocked, shocked to find themselves pregnant when a child is too much to cope with… for any number of reasons. Even Planned Parenthood, responding to the outcries of stranded, pregnant, shocked women, has found ways for all that protein to not be wasted, as a market exists for whole, pre-natal organs and tissues. Financial value and loads of freedom for those who remain. They’re a non-profit, you know, so not much help with the infrastructure thing.

Some Planned Parenthood executives have had their own infrastructures improved.

And yet, despite all the excess babies we produce, “scientists” are struggling to clone humans like frogs and sheep, as if there were not enough, already. Maybe we just don’t want to accept the risk of imperfection; let’s replicate a human that “we” like.

We’ve followed the liberals, the socialists, the communists, the progressives and the Democrats down the path to where dollars or other forms of power define the value of life, even as the role of churches, religion, spirituality itself, are cast aside like so much magical mumbo-jumbo, a drag on society and on tax-receipts. We should be taxing all that church-owned property because our collective costs to protect it are born unfairly by non-believers. Abortion, and infrastructure, and voting… that’s real.

Since we can’t keep up with fertility, and since more people born into the last, best hope for freedom is a big public problem, we have got to destroy hopefulness, as they have in Russia, for example, where too few people are being born. Perhaps some terrorism will help spur the youngest, most fertile citizens to fear bringing children into “such” a world… a world where Donald Trump can be elected. Let’s just hook up after lecture hall and if I get pregnant I can get an abortion before mid-terms.

The value of life is primarily spiritual, if there’s any purpose beyond finance and fun, at all. Isn’t that the big question? What is the purpose, the meaning of life? Didn’t you see the movie? Hilarious. No, but honestly, sometimes I get the feeling that there just must be more to it than eating and screwing, don’t you think?

Well, we could help people who are having problems – that always makes me feel good. You should take that job at the clinic and you could help girls with unwanted fetal masses. When I get my promotion at the condom factory we’ll have enough money to maybe donate to Greenpeace or PETA. How would that be?

I’d rather donate to my alma mater where the money could help poor kids get their Masters. Aren’t they a religious school? Oh, they used to be.

Roughly speaking, Americans can choose, now, between the Death Party and the Life Party. The Deathers are pretty firm in their beliefs, while the Lifers are kind-of soft in their defense of Life. The former can state their death wishes as matters of Freedom, and Choice, and purging the country of brown people… except they don’t mention the last part. Lifers are almost afraid to mention their beliefs or their spirituality, yet they somehow won an election the other day. Seemed like spiritual intervention, but with all this warm weather we’ve been having, who can worry about that?

The main thing is to get back on the death track or we’ll never balance the budget. Consumer confidence is high, though. Maybe Christmas sales will cap a really good year, financially.

I hate Christmas, don’t you? It’s so commercial.

Culture

More than a game

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What can be said that hasn’t been beaten into the ground already, about football? Well, some things can be said about the meaning of it. Your response may be that there must be something more important to expound upon, but there is a point, here, worth making.

Football is a metaphor for America. Not because of the “sport” aspect, but because of its declaration of excellence being rewarded and celebrated, vicarious inclusion of couch potatoes, and attraction of profits – even the creation of millionaires.

“Aww, c’mon,” you say, “it’s just a game.” No, no it isn’t.

Football is a great business, and Americans react well to this because we are, like every other human, innately capitalist. We recognize and appreciate smart business, smart marketing, and that wonderful effect of smart business: secondary benefits to multiple other businesses and tremendous flows of profit dollars into charities.
Even better, football succeeds, itself, because it grandly recognizes and rewards individual excellence and discipline.

No matter how loosey-goosey our morals appear to be, we each value excellence and we honor those among us who strive, daily and hourly toward perfection. We are awed and thrilled by organizations whose profit motivations imbue their individual members toward constant improvement… and success.

“Do Your Job.” Americans respect and reward responsibility. No matter the qualities of leaders – and successful organizations, particularly business organizations are led, obviously, more than simply managed – every individual following a leader is ultimately responsible to that leader, to his associates who depend upon him or her, and to him- or her-self, for the task each has trained and learned to accomplish at the moment of execution. Ya’ gotta’ love it.

There are a handful of truly great and greatly led moments in our history, when large fractions of the nation followed, even sacrificed, for the proper purpose a recognized leader had placed before us. The Revolutionary War – in a sense our first Civil War, as we “seceded” from England – is a perfect example. Clearly Washington was a superb leader who was able, in the face of extraordinary odds and opposition, to maintain the shining goal and keep his under-fed, under-supplied and under-appreciated troops striving toward an “impossible” goal: Independence.

The Americans weren’t fighting for treasure or even for comfort or out of fear, but for a set of ideas and ideals. To maintain leadership for such an effort is rare and justification for our reverence of General Washington.

Lincoln showed similar, not identical traits. But his sense of “mission” was no less complete than Washington’s. And there was a purity of purpose that never faltered and was apparent to enough people in the “Union” to re-elect Honest Abe in the midst of our bloodiest, most-hate-filled war ever.

In a sense, Washington led his troops to become the prow of the ship facing war’s stormy waters; Lincoln was, himself, the prow of that same ship. Both were leaders for the right reasons… and respected. Those being led were able to sacrifice for the purposes each leader embodied. Americans respect and honor that stuff!

Another, more refreshing example was the Apollo Moon-landing mission. Jack Kennedy was a leader. It’s not because of any significant executive experience – far from it. It was because of vision. For those of us born during WW-II, the 1960 election was the first we could vote in. We grew up under Eisenhower, but he didn’t “speak” to us. His presidency marked the end of an era and of his career… he was our parents’ president.

Kennedy represented the vitality of America and the start of new adventures, new ideas… the New Frontier. He was our start, too, and anything was possible. Somehow, in spite of his practical naiveté Kennedy perceived that the competition with the Soviets was a competition between cultures, between beliefs, between dreams, and that American needed a new dream every so often, and that the times and the possibilities were coming together. The U.S./U.S.S.R. conflict was a challenge to the ideas of America, and there simply was no room to come in second.

Kennedy’s May, 1961 Moon-landing proposal to Congress met every aspect of what a leader should include in laying out a mission: it was bold, it was a challenge, it was timed and measurable, and it had a specific goal – a goal that rose and set every day. It was perfect, and what the nation needed at a time when popular, slanted news was extolling the amazing progress the Soviet system had made in everything from rocketry to housing to medicine and to education.

The other element of the Apollo challenge was technological, and a certain boost to our economy… something every President needed. What happened?

Military leaders, scientists, engineers, colleges, think-tanks, machinists and a thousand businesses with their own leaders, adopted the mission and devised a thousand missions of their own. Most of the knowledge needed to pull off the moon landing and a safe return to Earth, was unknown. Many of the skills were floating around among the disparate parts of the nationwide, about-to-be-team, but they’d never been marshaled to a single goal until Kennedy presented a new dream. Still others had to be invented.

Again, what happened? A new unity of purpose. Indeed, there was an irresistible force of purpose that caused levels of sacrifice, stress, service and a striving for perfection rarely experienced by any industrial society… and success. The success was so profound that it swept up the vast majority of Americans into a new belief in what we stood for and could accomplish. It has not been repeated.

But metaphorically, its impact is out-pictured in teams’ quests to reach the Super Bowl. And the fans of those quests, fans of every team, respect the sacrifice and discipline, study, practice, learning and leadership that’s needed to get there. Brady would be nowhere without good leadership at the head of and within the Patriots organization, and within himself in fact.

Americans get that, and respond, even to buying shirts and hats as if to absorb a little of it.

The same qualities exist in the military, although the sacrifices are so compellingly greater. And Americans grasp what it means. We honor and respect the training, discipline, leadership and near-perfection elite teams strive for in every service… and even more, the physical, sometimes mortal sacrifices made in furtherance of the greatest mission on Earth: defending America. We share the pain when we back out of conflict without victory; we try to honor the many victories it has taken to get even to there.

We felt and respected some of the magic under Ronald Reagan, perhaps never recognizing the nature of his and our victory over the Soviet communist system.

But the momentum of dis-education and the constant anti-American pressure that has marked American culture since Nixon was forced out of office, was bearing fruit… and nuts.

From the utter debauchery of the Clintons, through the distorted semi-conservatism of Bush-43, through the Obama dislike of America, of Whites and of Christians, and his greater respect for everything we are not, Americans have yearned to respect again; to respect, perhaps, themselves. We have yearned to respect our institutions, and people, and systems and teachers and churches and everything that has, no matter how hidden or suppressed, the innate sparks of leadership, training, practice and sacrifice, that we know has created greatness in this land and in us.

No ONE can do that, and certainly he or she cannot BE that – not even Donald Trump. But he, at least, knows what IT is and its importance to the ideas of America. Like JFK, he has succeeded because he sensed Americans’ need for a new dream, every now and then.

Now is good. Go Pats!

Immigration

Immigration, Emigration, Love the nation

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Immigration is a decidedly misunderstood aspect of nationhood. Our Constitution nowhere mentions border protection. At the time of its creation and adoption, everyone was intimately aware of and concerned with frontiers, borders, defense and protecting the existence of our new nation.

Border integrity was so obviously the business of the new government that no one needed reminding. Besides, it was pretty difficult for an individual to get here and hard for him to cause widespread mayhem or murder. Women didn’t do such things in the old days.

And there was still a frontier and unlimited space, or so it seemed. From our side the frontier was where WE were the invaders, which served as a form of border defense in its own way. Manifest destiny.

But border control is inherent to the obligations of government, indeed, primary to them. Without it government becomes simply a facilitator in the demise of it’s ostensible permanence.

Americans have grown up in a dream world. Thanks to instant worldwide communications and the lingering lessons of the 1960’s, Gen-X’ers and Millennials perceive themselves as “citizens of the world,” and borders as inconveniences. To many, the advantages of the United States belong to the world and to everyone who wishes to share the “American Dream.” And he or she has an ill-defined “right” to those advantages, especially if he or she has had a tough life, is poor, and not white… and not a Christian.

As Americans have drifted away from less-than perfect churches, and enjoyed relative peace and fattening prosperity, their children have been taught that religion has no place in their education, and, besides, it imposes restrictions on the wonderful new forms of fun that the “American Dream” has produced. Who are we to withhold this great place to live from non-citizens? How cruel to enforce our own laws.

But, despite our lax mores, the majority of states elected a very different kind of leader in Donald Trump. There is trepidation to be sure, in the early going, but we’re getting what he promised. There is no way – NO way – to reverse the course of national dissipation that outrageous immigration, purposeful lack of border control, and fascination with socialism and communism have wrought, without breaking a lot of eggs… or snowflakes.

Trump, or someone quite like him, was inevitable following the descent into the regulatory, bureaucratic, non-representative state that has eroded the Constitution and the real freedoms enshrined therein. A second mendacious socialist was too much for the heart and soul of the United States. As Ross Perot once stated, 24 years earlier, it was “…time to pick up the broom and go clean out the barn.”

Well, it took us a generation, but we finally hired someone to do so, except he’s “draining the swamp,” which might be better.

Illegal and un-vetted immigration was Trump’s key theme for a year and a half. Daily there are dozens of incidents in which illegal entrants have broken laws as simple as drunk-driving and as complex as home invasion and rape. Sometimes as simple as vehicular homicide or as complex as drug distribution. Sometimes as simple as working under-the-table, or as complex as gang-banging, mayhem and rioting. Sometimes as simple as terrorism with rapid-fire weapons or as complex as terrorism with bombs… or passenger jets.

What is our obligation to illegal entrants, or to false asylum-seekers or to false refugees? Do they have Constitutional rights? How is that possible? When did the Constitution start applying to non-citizens?
What obligations do we have to our legal citizens? Well, everything the Constitution ostensibly guarantees, including the Bill of Rights, which did not create rights, but clearly enumerated them as rights the government we formed henceforth was obligated – is obligated – to PROTECT. Nowhere is the government given license to spread its responsibilities across the peoples of the entire globe – including trying to change their governments.

Our obligation ends at civil, humane treatment of non-citizens, including humane deportation if they are inside our borders illegally. Hell, we even treat them humanely if they commit serious crimes. Since even wealthy drug dealers are “indigent” when caught, we provide attorneys for one and all, EVEN TO FIGHT DEPORTATION when our total responsibility to the citizens of the United States is prompt, humane deportation of them!

The U. S. is not perfect and has been less so in the past, and MORE SO at other times in our past. On balance, we’ve done more good than bad and jump first and fastest to aid anyone who asks when disaster strikes. Our philosophies and the IDEAS that formed this nation are better than those underpinning most countries. That’s not bragging, it’s just so.

They are the reason our growth and wealth have led the world, and why, frankly, so many have come here and try to come here, now. Like no other nation, the United States invites people from every other nation to come here – legally – in order to become Americans. It’s a unique process. Americans, for our part, welcome both visitors and newly-minted citizens. One need not be of the exact same race and origin as those already here, he or she need only share the ideas of America: personal freedom and responsibility, religious freedom and tolerance; honest dealing, respect for law and earning one’s own way.

Those who wail about “illegals” as though they were not only entitled to steal across our borders but are deserving of Constitutional rights as amended and applied for citizens to this day, are deeply confused as to the nature of nationhood, specifically, the nationhood of the United States. These are the same who refuse to acknowledge any goodness in the hearts of patriots of this country, now or in the past, and who, if charged with the task of education, nearly refuse to teach its founding, its ideas or the documents and philosophies that underlay them. For shame.

And so, there is no justice in denying free entrance to all who choose to take our bounty and who, if properly different from U. S. citizens, can help remove the blot of America.

The alternative to erasing the time and impact of Americana is controlling immigration, indeed, limiting it, so that those who come do so to assimilate and share the ideas and ideals of our exceptional nation. All may become Americans, one nation under God.

“OMG, can you say that?”

Foreign Policy

The UN, or something better?

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We’ve been part of the United Nations for 72 years, nearly a third of our national history. At the end of World War II the U. S. stood astride the globe, stronger than any other nation or even groups of nations. We were so rich that we financed several countries’ rebuilding after dramatic devastation, both militarily and politically. The globalists, led by Averell Harriman, David Rockefeller, Henry Luce, Eleanor Roosevelt, Harry Truman, himself, and a host of left-leaning FDR advisers and academics, saw a unique opportunity to dilute American sovereignty and independence.

The UN’s purpose was to “end” war and provide “prosperity” and the ability for everyone to “live free.” Grand, grand ideas that never would have been the topic of worldwide planning had it not been for the external and internal success of the British and American empires. Like most benign, centralized efforts, the “UN” attracted – and still attracts – many globally-minded Unitarian types. These are they who believe the words of Pope John Lennon: “…no Hell below us; above us only sky…” because “Love is all you need, love is all you need, love is all you need…,” songs best appreciated with a toke.

Free sex, seed-free weed and the UN and to Hell …oops, to oblivion, then, with the United States, Christianity and the requirements of citizenship. “Nothing to kill or die for; the brotherhood of man…”

One of the first, and greatest acts of the U. N. was to create the nation of Israel in 1948. Hitler’s allies, the hard-rock Muslims who have been fighting the Hebrews for millennia, were not happy with this tiny piece of land’s becoming a home for the most oppressed of oppressed people, and they caused two things to happen: first, the “Palestinians” separated themselves from “Israel,” and then Arab League militias and mercenaries attacked cities in the Israeli portion of the Resolution 181-partitioned land. Jordan, Egypt, Lebanon, Syria and Iraq attacked the fledgling nation, including with air strikes and even forces from Saudi Arabia and Yemen. By 1949 the Israeli’s had defeated the uncoordinated forces arrayed against them. In the process they gained the West Bank and East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip. More wars followed and still Israel stands.

Israel made the desert bloom and planted, as well, a democratic republic amidst a dozen dictatorial, theocratic, tribal and royal countries, sworn to it’s destruction. In the Muslim view, once land is possessed by Muslims it becomes sacred, never to be stained by the presence of infidels. Their habit is to erect mosques on “conquered” land, often directly upon infidels’ religious sites. For such land and sites there can be no future negotiation – only discussions about how to remove all other infidels.

Since the Six-Day War in 1967, Israel has been a target of hatred in the UN, the high-minded body that had created it 22 years earlier. As the United States became more intimately connected with Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Iraq and Iran, attempting to eliminate Soviet influence and build however shaky alliances in tolerance of Israel, the hatred of fundamental Islamists, particularly since the installation of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini as the Supreme leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran, has been concentrated on the “Great Satan,” America at least as much as on the “Little Satan,” Israel. And so it continues.

Aside from the near-total corruption of the UN Secretariat and its multiple “missions,” the UN has become a forum of hatred and opposition for the United States, reinforcing the self-hatred, fifth-column actions of many Americans, themselves, and interfering with foreign policies of the U. S., England and most of the industrialized “First” World.

Things are changing. The European Union has shown its inability to resolve its finances as sovereign countries fail to adhere to dictates of the Über bureaucrats serving the European Parliament in Strasbourg. Europe is a “nation” of rules… rules that require the steady erosion of sovereignty from its member states. Britain voted to withdraw, not to form a competing “nation,” but to reform itself. The United States elected Donald Trump for much the same reason.

I believe we should take the next, logical step: form, with the U. K. and others, an international Association of Representative Republics. And have it stand for some things. Things like honest government, honest courts and honest contracting and trade; things like democratic elections, representative legislatures, parliaments and councils; things like free speech and the rest of the Bill of Rights.

Except for a handful of charitable works, the U. S. could divest itself of U.N. influence and interference. Membership in the A. R. R. would be open to every sovereign nation that governs itself according to principles that we believe in, including religious tolerance and non-theocratic governance.

As I perceive it, member-states of the Association of Representative Republics would maintain their treaty relationships, including trade agreements, but agree to somewhat better terms with other A. R. R. members. Military treaties should remain bilateral, but with a general agreement to continue working toward non-aggression toward every other member. But there is no reason to subject ourselves to constant attack and calumny while we erode our own sovereignty at the U. N. Better to expend our efforts and treasure among nations that have roughly equal goals of freedom, prosperity and security for every member nation, and in helping other nations to qualify under those principles.

Funding various terrorist nations and sub-groups who wish to destroy us and our allies, is not foreign policy – it is foreign folly.

Education

SCHOOL CHOICE

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School choice is a big deal for our new president, our soon-to-be Secretary of Education, millions of parents and students, and for teachers’ unions. Three out of these four favor it. The process of expanding school choice and the effects of it are the basis, potentially, of a learning revolution.
“You’re destroying public education,” say public-school educators.

Charter Schools are a hot topic and part of the revolution. Politicians take strong positions on both sides of the issue. Some like to defend “allowing” more charter schools in urban school districts; others, mindful of union support, insist on defending “our public schools,” as if charter schools weren’t “public.” They are public schools, but they aren’t unionized, for the most part, and they can set many of their own policies, work rules… and inspirations.

Public schools have been saddled with tasks that do not improve learning. This has happened in fulfillment of social-engineering intentions, “political correctness,” whatever that happens to be this year, and in reaction to fairly poor management, generally. There is little accountability under unionization, particularly when most middle-level school managers are in the same teachers’ unions.

America has tried to “fix” education… we can give some credit for that, but the fixes are bureaucratic and government-growing, and have yielded spotty improvements. And, they’re damned expensive. In general, learning problems concentrate in “poor” school districts, and these concentrate in urban areas. Simply busing children around to “mix” them with richer kids in richer districts has some individual success, but it reaches very few.

There’s no news about school districts EVER recommending that less money should be spent because they have learned that a lot of it has no value to education.

School budgets start with staffing classrooms and balloon to provide disproportionate numbers of administrative personnel. In the mid-1980’s the Brookings Institution completed a survey of public school districts nationwide. Across every demographic stratum, they found, test scores and other grade performance metrics were lower in inverse proportion to the number of administrative personnel.

Another way to look at that result is to say that in school districts where higher proportions of personnel funds were spent on teachers, students did better. Too many highly energized, highly motivated teachers are ground into robots by having to explain what they intend to do, describing what they are doing and reporting on what they did.

Too many, who never were highly motivated, are protected by unionized tenure, sometimes reporting to lounges to do what they wish because no principal wants them – still paid as if one did. Will more money correct that?

Although the premise of the public complex says that now that we have calcified all of this waste and misspending, more money will make things better from this point forward, little evidence exists to show that it does.

Charter schools, by and large, have few administrators and are non-unionized. Their teachers may be fired if they don’t teach with zeal and initiative and love. The schools, themselves, will go out of business when they screw up, fail to educate or mis-spend their budgets. Public schools never close due to failures like these – they get more money… and administrators.

Choice is what makes freedom work… Free Will: the essence of our Judeo-Christian ethics and heritage. “Thou mayest choose from evil.” We can choose to accept the responsibilities of freedom… of our choices. Or we can choose foolishness, crime, irresponsibility… socialism, in effect, not to be confused with humanity or even humanitarianism.

We can choose what is best for ourselves, and still be responsible. We can choose to marry and be a parent and a dedicated spouse, and thereby to raise our children and choose their educations in fulfillment of our philosophies and responsibilities.

We are not obligated, except by the public school monopolies, to turn our children over to different philosophies and relinquish our responsibilities. We can choose – or should be able to in a free society of sovereign citizens – to direct our children along the responsible path of our choosing. We can choose his or her place of education and the teachers who will help us create a new adult one day.

Somewhere, a town or school district will vote to charterize all of its schools and provide separate, superb facilities for individuals who cannot contribute to or grow within standard classroom environments. May God bless their endeavors. Otherwise and in spite of that, the resources the polity has decided to spend on each school-age child should be available for parents to spend as they see fit. Universal vouchers, universal responsibility. Let a teachers’ union prove that it delivers better education.

Responsibility

THE BELIEFS OF LEADERSHIP

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There are lessons to be learned from the reactions of his opponents to the campaign and election of Donald Trump. Those same opponents seem deaf to them… and blind. As history often provides, the lessons will be made clearer, oddly enough, as the lens of time becomes thicker, longer and, in fact, cooler. Are these lessons so earth-shattering? Well, yes, probably.

Some nation is going to lead all nations, like it or not. Since its founding, in a sense, the United States has been that nation. Why? Much derives from the sacrifices of George Washington, a quite spiritual man. Unlike all the kings of history, Washington finished his second term as president and went back to his farm. He could have been president for life; he could have dictated who the next president would be. Instead, he surrendered a power the extent of which he may not have realized. In many ways he was the key man, launching our ship of state with faith in the inherent goodness of the people of America… and little else.

That “goodness” was primarily Judeo-Christian, filtered through all of Europe and the British Isles. Whether steady attendees at churches or not, most “Americans” were Christian – an inconvenient truth. When Franklin answered that the Constitutional Convention had delivered a “…republic, if you can keep it(.)” he expressed his recognition of the need for a morally straight citizenry in order for a representative democracy to function and survive.

Only morally raised children would grow up to live in honesty. Only a moral people would demand and sustain a legal structure of honest jurisprudence, honest, enforceable contracts, written and verbal, and honest money, trusted by every seller and buyer. Only an honest people would allow, even encourage, the least among us to excel, grow and succeed. Our many flaws grew from wrong beliefs and our regret is justified. But, our basic honesty and the strength of our institutions enabled us to change flawed beliefs.

Which is not to say that changing all beliefs is a good thing – our forbears were right about most of it.

Those of us old farts who have worried about the upset changes of the 1960’s, are being proven right, too. That was a decade that saw socialism become a “solution” through the “Great Society,” and indulgence of every youthful abandon begin the erosion of moral institutions, education as a moral institution, and every sort of drug and sexual thrill gain “rights.”
These changes are bearing their fruits… and nuts.

Daily we are challenged over every institution’s role as modern politicians – liberal ones, anyway, and fearful non-liberals – bow to every new idea about how individuals are not responsible for building their own lives and economics. Unfortunately, in a whirlpool of new “rights,” the lives of those citizens who don’t agree with or don’t care about the new licentiousness, the power of government has been turned against the majority of those who give it power in the first place. What are the new beliefs?

A growing minority believe that every form of sexual expression is as valid as all the others. These same believe that resistance to the disappearance of procreative sacredness is the equivalent of Hitler’s incomprehensible pathologies. This same group decries all rules of personal behavior not invented by them, and they are quick to hate while castigating haters. What sort of leaders will they be? With no social norming at work, will nations, in their view, become irrelevant, too?

The ungoverned seem quick to demand that “government” destroy the lives and rights of the traditionalist majority, and there are sufficient psychologists and lawyers to twist their ideas into effective arguments against… whatever. Screams for diversity – whatever that is – turn into screams of rage when diversity of beliefs is placed before them. Technology cannot mask that divide, nor, apparently, can elections. Majority rule is hateful until the disenchanted are in a majority position, however briefly. Since it will be brief, court rulings are sought to make their beliefs permanent policy.

Drugs are becoming mainstream, which might have some positive value if they calmed the hateful. They don’t, evidently. Drugs are a subject for belief and not necessarily truth, or reality. Besides, there are tax revenues to be realized, the purest calcimine that ever touched a brush. Soon we’ll be crime-free. Let’s hope the lights come on and the water flows on that day.

Health Care

“Single-Payer?” Single delusion.

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Socialists never learn. Socialism, or Communism, failed in the past because the practitioners weren’t as smart as we are, today. Can you say ‘hubris?’ Can you recognize utter failure to learn from history OR from human nature?

Single-payer health care (they mean single-payer FINANCING) is some people’s answer to the problems governments have created in health-care. This is a pattern for statists: problems can never be solved by freedom or free enterprise (the system that has solved more ‘problems’ than any system ever devised) but only by the benign love of government bureaucrats.

If those bureaucrats have actually made things worse (typically), the solution is ALWAYS, always more money (from taxation) or more bureaucrats who are told to be nicer or to not be stupid, and to be “fair.” Laws are passed to these effects. Oh, what a glorious new morning!

Single-payer is sold to the gullible as THE means to “contain costs” of medical care. Only through coercion, my children, only through coercion. How benign can they get?

You need to read “Health Care, Fairness and Free Enterprise” and I’ll send you a copy if you send a stamped, self-addressed envelope to Prudence Leadbetter, PO Box (tba)

Health Care

WHERE’S THE CARE?

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The grand error that has been undermining health care for about 50 years is grandiosity. It is federal politicians’ belief in their greater-than-average wisdom and resulting ability to guide every individual’s life. Health care provides not 2 or 5 or 50 issues about which politicians can buy votes, but hundreds! Oh, the sweet possibilities.

Federalizing healthcare under Medicare was a stroke of genius: give needed stuff to a demographic that votes. At first, it was “free,” another key element for acceptance of big government. Medicare was originally paid for through Social Security… what a slick idea.

There will always be elderly citizens who managed to grow old without preparing for their old age. Today an observation that those people should have prepared is a radical, hateful statement; obviously it is the government’s job to take over responsibility for individuals once they reach a magic age. Everybody knows that.

Health care has not become “better” as a result of Medicare, but it has become more widespread. “Well,” say most, “that’s certainly ‘better,’ isn’t it?” Well, for some, certainly.

Medicare began the process of creating HMO’s and PPO’s and mediocritizing (if that’s a word) medicine. It’s a process that separates individuals from the doctor-patient relationship, one that will ultimately separate individuals AND DOCTORS from personal responsibility. Only government is left to fill that “responsibility vacuum.” The statists’ dream realized.

Maybe such matters of state and culture are too intellectual. All that matters is that people get health care when needed. Unfortunately, that has not been the greatest effect of federal intrusion in our personal lives. The greatest effect is cost, followed by government growth, followed by fraud, followed by new, tangential costs. All in all, it’s unaffordable and governmentally wondrous.
Amidst the federalization is incredible confusion and obfuscation. Very few patients know what to do or who to do it with for the best results. Almost none has much choice of who or where to go unless he or she pays high premiums to augment or supersede Medicare. For non-Medicare-age workers, everyone must now pay for Medicare in addition to the 13+% of payroll they pay for Social Security. And we are 20 Trillion in debt, placing everyone’s health care at risk, along with our ability to defend the nation.

Obamacare tried to involve the federal government in every health-care decision. Amazingly, costs went up faster, options declined to only 1 in many states, and the government got bigger faster than ever before. Do we discern a pattern, here? Yes! The greatest advantage and success is for government! Not patients, not costs, and not care.

So we really ought to divest ourselves of the “government solution.” There are many ways to provide care, to sell it and buy it, to negotiate the cost of it and to compete for a share of the business. Statists distrust nearly all of them, except those most infused with federal cost-saving finesse. Since we’ve allowed statists to make the rules we are left to hope ever more diligently that the doctor we saw truly cares what happens to us – if it was a doctor.

Statists seem to distrust insurance companies, also, yet love them beneath the sheets of propriety since they provide substantial bribery for re-election and other purposes. Let’s hope that the double-dealing done with the insurance companies and the reverse bribes Obama finagled with the people’s money, is brought to light so that we may never attempt such thievery again. In any case, the attention called “health care” is spent on the wrong target: “coverage.”

It ought to be spent on HEALTH.

We need better ways to inform patients on how and what to buy that will improve their health, repair their injuries and treat their diseases. That’s health care. It’s not sex-obfuscation operations or breast enhancement. Such are not the public’s concern. What is of widespread concern is the 40% of “health-care” costs that go to administration. Anything proposed as a “solution” that increases administrative overhead must be resisted with every fiber of our citizenship.

Race

RACE? AGAIN?

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Prudence says that America needs some fresh thinking about race.  Anthropologists can “describe” some 300 “races” using markers like blood-type concentrations, in a process that tries to use physiology to delineate human “types” or races.  It is largely a waste of time for most people since it cannot relate social activities, social actions, with physiological differences.

RACE is a construct for both safety and control within societies.. except, lately, a construct for hatred.  The most visual markers are employed – like skin, facial distinctions, hair, eye-color… virtually meaningless attributes in terms of how people ACT, but crucial when differing groups come together.  No training or understanding is required to distinguish physiognomy.  That is a matter of belief.

Prudence has thought long about the power and dangers of belief.  It can exist and guide the actions of millions of people without paying any heed to reality… to truth.  Just as faith is the engine for maintaining religious traditions, there are many other belief structures to which individuals can adhere that effectively replace reality with constructed, believed paths of action that guide whole lifetimes.  Belief can be so self-fulfilling that it becomes its own evidence of “truth.”  It’s commonplace.

Less common is honesty.  An honest person can be taught the error of his or her beliefs and it is this very effect that has held the United States together through slavery, Manifest Destiny, the Civil War, destruction of Native American culture, waves of immigration and the Great Depression.  Beliefs have changed, honing more closely to reality little by little… until the 1960’s.

It was under the aegis of “The Great Society” that we changed the role of government to one of, essentially, social engineering – unionized social services that Lyndon Johnson and other hubris-laden socialists believed could change the nature of both rich and poor people for the better.  Change has certainly happened.

Blacks, who were making sure, but uneven progress in the 1950’s, have regressed in the inner cities where federal and state policies have re-enslaved them for 3 generations.  Why such conditions continue, even as the drug trade flourishes in that population, seems a great mystery to progressives.  It must be the fault of Republicans.  Our incoming president has mentioned conditions in the inner cities, but no policy changes have been described.

It’s all a matter of belief.  Progressives have long held the belief that the most generous “safety-net” possible, especially now that welfare has been federalized, will cause people WE have taught to be irresponsible for themselves, to become responsible, self-sufficient citizens.  We have placed them in a system where the only way to “get a raise,” requires careful cheating – things like getting two EBT cards or SNAP allowances beyond one’s entitlement.  Or, to sell some drugs, perhaps.  There should be no surprise that blacks hate whites.  They believe that whites have kept them from opportunity, that we discriminate in a thousand ways, that we are racists and on and on.  Some of it is true.  But the policies that have done so are not those of most whites, who feel guilty about black’s condition, and who act a little nutty because of their guilt; they are the policies of progressives who believe socialism will make better humans than God has… despite all reality to the contrary.

One might infer that Prudence indicates that progressives may not be truly honest, else they could learn the error of their beliefs, lo these past 50 years.