Tag Archives: communism

Culture, Economics, Education, Governance, Politics 2020, Race, Terrorism

BLACK AND WHITE AND RED ALL OVER

Leave a comment

Prudence won’t be watching any Red Sox games in 2020, not because it’s a truncated parody of sport and exemplary of governmental malfeasance and economic ignorance, and not even because the whole team organization besmirched itself by “winning” the World Series by cheating in 2018.  Besides, who the Hell is even playing this year?

No American should watch because of that stomach-turning, obscene “BLACK LIVES MATTER” banner draped above the “Green Monster.”  Please don’t misunderstand: it is perfectly Prudent to appreciate that black lives certainly matter, just as much, in fact as white, tan, beige, medium brown and swarthy skin-toned people’s lives matter – we are equal in the eyes of God.  If that is too scary, consider that we are equal under the law in this country and that anyone who takes away that equality has committed a crime and the law says he or she will be sanctioned appropriately.  To our shame this doesn’t always work equally.

Instead of a banner supporting the “BLACK LIVES MATTER” movement and political efforts, the Red Sox might as well have a banner that says, “TEAR DOWN THE UNITED STATES.”  Not many people would put up with that crap, yet that is exactly what Black Lives Matter stands for and is fighting for.  They are Communists.  They hate the United States and everything about it; they hate White people and everything white people have ever done back into history immemorial.  Well that should attract a big audience, John Henry, you idiot.

Black Lives Matter also hates Christianity.  Quite a lot of Red Sox fans and customers actually ARE Christians, so that’s another brightly illuminated marketing ploy, John.  If you put a flashing l.e.d.-lit sign rivaling the “Citgo” sign above the sky-boxes that says, “SATAN CELEBRATED HERE,” you can surely get a lot of Christians to pay outrageous prices to watch your millionaires play ball with the other guy’s millionaires.  What a country.

Maybe the Red Sox organization agrees with the purposes of Black Lives Matter.  For wealthy people these owners don’t seem to be as bright as their prominence would lead one to think.  Most business owners would carefully evaluate any signage, ad messaging, inadvertent imaging – everything.  Just look at how quickly social media slugs will turn on a business and attempt to damage it for any racial slight or perceived hetero-normal bias.  No intelligent business would spend $3,000 or more for a banner that supports the destruction of the nation that made them rich, would it?  Surely not.  They would make sure of what that banner’s message is.  That would be Prudent, at least.

Lots of private homes display the same signage: “BLACK LIVES MATTER.”  They’re very proud of that sign because it shows the less-sensitive population: racists, every one, for sure, that the resident of that house is more loving, sensitive, non-racist and deserving of honor than everyone else who is not awakened to the tragedy of racism in America.  Wow!  That’s a lot to convey in just 3 words.

Actually, these “woke” self-praising superiors are conveying an entirely different message.  They either have no idea what in Hell they are aligning themselves with, at best, or they do know and agree with “BLM” crap, at worst.  For shame either way.

If every ostensible Black Lives Matter “supporter” gave enough of a damn to know what he or she is supporting, then minds might change, one hopes.  The BLM “Manifesto” is as dishonest as the original Communist Manifesto and contains a host of non-truths and deceptions.  Communism, like socialism in lesser forms, cannot be honest about its intentions because it plans to replace human nature and all spiritual values, leaving BLM’s promises doomed to fail without total top-down control by a small group.  It has never been otherwise in every attempt at socialism or Communism.

Still, the BLM Manifesto is nothing if not comprehensive.  It reads like the step by step annihilation of the Constitution that it is and, therefore, of freedom and our entire heritage and founding.  Indeed, the Manifesto’s first section, item D., specifically calls for creation of a 3-year assembly for the express purpose of replacing the U. S. Constitution.  What is worse, if you think about it, is item E., where they demand creation of a committee of “experts” who will control and administer the entire U. S. economy.  More than one of our neighbors proclaims “Black Lives Matter” along with a bunch of other “woke” platitudes.  They seem like nice people and it seems Prudent to assume they haven’t the faintest idea of what they are promoting.  Odd, as they seem intelligent, too.

There are lots of ways to align oneself with the concept of the sanctity of life no matter the color or creed.  Despite our racialist governments and welfare programs, our society, operated ideally, pays no attention to color – everyone is equal under the law.

BLM intends a government very similar to the soviet, Leninist model, with a few exceptions, one of which is power sharing with anyone who wanders across the ostensible borders.  The danger of open borders is that people can escape as easily as others might enter, and that will weaken the power of the central committee of the wokest, so those who swallow that part of the manifesto should be prepared for temporary border closures until the “revolution” is completed and every vestige of white supremacy and racism has been removed from the United States.  Prudence’ readers are well aware that racism cannot be expunged by government and “white supremacy” is simply hatred of white civilization, a condition of shifting definition.

BLM is about creating a black-peoples’ dominated international Communist structure.  To effect it they have recognized and leveraged the failures of American education and the tendency of a people too comfortable, to feel guilty about their comfort in the presence of poverty.  They’ve watched as political America transferred many $trillions through federalized welfare to support restive, non-working blacks in inner-city ghettos.  The failure of these decades-long efforts created a willing army of resentment–filled “protesters” ready to explode upon ignition of the right fuse.

Why are Whites bending the knee before Black Lives Matter?  What are we collectively guilty of?  What have any of us done to deserve the collective hatred of, well… anyone?  Did Andrew Jackson own slaves?  Why, yes he did.  Is there anyone alive today who is actually affected by that fact?  Perhaps if one is determined to hate and to spread hate, he or she is “affected,” but that is a choice made to cause reaction today, which cannot change anything Jackson did, believed or smelled like.  But, that hatred can create division today.  The real question is why are whites falling for it?  Have we “decided” that we have no rights?  No culture of value?  No progress or civilizing improvements, inventions or developments to be proud of?  Progress achieved with the phenomenal contributions of blacks and every other race?  Nothing to take credit for?

What’s the matter with us? Four assholes in Minneapolis murder a black suspect and western civilization is called into question?  Can no one tell the truth anymore?  Can no one call out Antifa or BLM terrorists when they operate inside the United States?  If those terrorists steal the artifice of white-on-black oppression does that turn crime into protest, murder into justice, destruction into positive change?  Does it magically make hatred a basis for something good?

Does anyone besides rabid, committed communists see the destruction of our unique Constitutional system as the path to a “better” future for mankind?

Wake up, America! … all of you!

Culture, Education, Immigration, Race

What Direction is “Right”

Leave a comment

The wasteland of American politics, amongst a hundred other logical and moral perturbations, is roughly divided into a party of life and a party of death, neither perfectly, of course. But… but roughly, yes. One party is aligned more with “pro-life” and one is aligned more with abortion, or “pro-choice.” Anyone can state which is which since it’s fairly well known where the two “parties” stand.

But it’s a circle and not neatly linear. The leftists, or progressives, infatuated with victim-identity-groups, exercise their dudgeon in support of “civil rights,” regardless of the effects on the group they describe as victimized by the denial of this or that civil “right.” In the case of abortion that group – and it’s a good, big one – is every woman. Rightists, or conservatives, are opposed to abortion because they think it’s evil and bad for individuals. They see the “right to life” as somehow the opposite of the freedom to choose abortion when pregnancy occurs, seeing the unborn child… and the mother… and the father, as affected individuals protected by the constitution. Leftists see the decisions about pregnancy, both the inception and the termination, as strictly the purview of the mother – so far always a woman. And so we divide.

It is impossible to avoid hypocrisy when it comes to other positions involving life and death. For example, progressives are both pro-choice and anti-death penalty, while conservatives are anti-abortion and pro-death penalty, very generally speaking. The latter would say that the unborn have a “right” to life but that murderers and other capital offenders have relinquished that right by their actions.

Progressive argue that pregnant women have the unique right to choose abortion, a right that must be protected, while those condemned to death at the hands of the “state” deserve a right to be rehabilitated from the conditions – many of those social – that caused them to kill or brutally rape and that the state should not become a murderer, itself. Both sides defend these “rights” and views with passion. Well, okay.

War – or defense – muddles the life or death arguments of both camps. Stalin, for example, caused the horribly painful deaths of millions of peasants (and intellectuals) in order to impose purer Communism, and he is regarded as a leftist exemplar and hero, today. After all, a thousand deaths are a tragedy; a million or more is a statistic. Hitler killed many fewer millions but the left declares him “right-wing,” although it is the right, today, that defends Israel. Hitler, a different-striped socialist than Stalin, the left has decided to hate; Planned Parenthood, the largest abortion mill in the world – and most profitable – they love. It can be confusing.

Progressives also fight for the “right” of illegal entrant women to have their babies (in the United States) so the confusion of leftists and of rightists trying to comprehend them, is understandable.

Giant business conglomerates that make armaments are identified with the right, although those companies, themselves, have literally no concern for parties or even nations. Their partnerships with governments removes them from the capitalist economy, in a sense, since they have saddled taxpayers with the burden of their success, not competitive customers. Both parties like these people because they are willing to support anyone financially, who will maintain them in power. It’s no longer recognized as corruption – just business, although it has little to do with the free-enterprise engine of capitalism that pays for everything.

To function over time armaments manufacturers need conflicts and threats of conflicts. Both parties come around the circle of life and death to where they bump into war and the manufacturers of the implements of war. The unpleasant side-effect of war, unfortunately, is death – death of soldiers, men and women, who despite volunteering for the military still didn’t want to die, and death of innocent civilians, no matter how careful politicians would direct the soldiers to be. Lots of death, injury and ruin, and both parties enable war in their own ways; both run in the opposite life or death direction from their opponents and inevitably bump in to the war business that puts the lie to most other philosophies each espouses.

Rightists tend to identify with “a strong military” and they use patriotism to the fullest for their advantage. Leftists, in very recent years, have come to despise patriotism, our anthem and the flag, itself, which rightists still can’t figure out. Conservatives see militarism as protection of the nation’s “life.” Progressives seem to have grown tired of the U. S. and patriotic references to it are of no value to them and may be readily opposed if only to aggravate the right. One might infer that the “death” of the nation wouldn’t upset the left nearly as much as it would the right.

Still, very generally speaking, the “right” tends to be pro-life while the “left” is pro-death. Like other destructive (of constitutional republicanism) movements based on “rights,” the right to destroy one’s fetus is defended as superior to the historic right to life. Indeed, the distinction between the two conflicting rights is a point of battle, not just opinion. As vital and fundamental as this conflict has been for 40 years (and for hundreds of years before Roe v. Wade) Society is now being sundered by the conflicts between “rights” unheard-of 40 years… or even 20 years ago.

Of ironic interest is the intensifying effort to grant Constitutional “rights” or “protections” to illegal entrants. While a pleasant-sounding attitude, there is no logical basis for giving such hard-earned rights to non-citizens. The Constitution was formed by American citizens in an era of freedom purchased by the blood of the first Americans. Citizens in the first thirteen states approved it. It is a benefit of citizenship whether by birth or by adoption, not of illegal residence or illegal presence. Yet there are large minorities in both parties – larger in the anti-Trump party – who are evidently quite happy to damage the nation, no matter how permanently, by breaking down immigration and border-defense laws. Many of these are equally enamored of Socialism… even of Stalin, himself, not because they understand what they are doing, but because they are willing to do anything to damage the United States. Make no mistake.

Many of the “no borders” zealots preach the “right of immigration” to improve one’s living conditions. It is a broad and ill-defined right that extends to everyone who is, first and foremost, not white. Like the right to abortion, when actually contemplated, the image of an immigrant or of an aborted immigrant to life, is covered in brown skin. Whites have been defined as oppressors in any and every instance, and are therefore entitled to almost no rights and chief among those so proscribed is ownership of private property. Thank you, education systems.

A more dangerous trend, Prudence teaches us, is “rights” codified based on personal, self-declared feelings. Our culture has been turned, if not twisted, by the 30-year fight for “gay” rights. Initially it was a logical, and reasonable push back against cruelty and discriminatory rejection of professed “gays” and “lesbians.”

Appropriating the word, “gay,” apparently applied primarily to male homosexuals but is sometimes used to describe lesbians as well.

But the “gay rights movement” quickly morphed from tolerance and non-discrimination towards unusual people, into demands for total acceptance and legalization of every permutation of sexual deviance – all of it self-declared. In other words, a person can declare him- or her-self to be “gay,” and come under constitutional protections now accepted as protecting every form of “expression.” That same person, however, can also choose to live as a heterosexual, self-declaring a non-gay status, and have, in effect, fewer rights or protections than previously.

This seems like a preposterous basis for application of the 14th Amendment. We have moved into a realm where people’s feelings are made the basis for anti-discrimination protections. More diaphanous is legislative logic for “trans-genderism.” With no physical evidence, men and women… and boys and girls… are permitted, if not encouraged, to live out their fantasies of being the opposite “gender.” The argument is based on “gender” being a linguistic designation of maleness and femaleness, and therefore nothing “permanent.” The lack of permanence is based on the fluidity of feelings and not of gender, itself, necessarily. Some exercise their convictions to the point of bodily mutilation and chemical distortion of their natural hormonal beings. The legitimization of these emotional incongruities has found its way into governmental responsibility for the emotional satisfaction and even physical or chemical balance of military personnel and even of prisoners who self-declare their identification with the opposite sex from that of their birth. Again, individuals are able to gain rights and protections based upon only their declarations and not on verifiable evidence. It is a dangerous path; parents keep your children safe – society no longer will.

Finally, and simply for the length of the essay, come the new “rights” to be offended. This amorphous body of social “rule-making,” stems from the concept of “hate crime” and its bastard child, “hate speech.” For a legal and judicial system that can’t define pornography, defining “hate” as an enforceable term seems a bit of a stretch. By some sort of arcane, subjective reckoning, a murder performed by a killer who keeps his feelings to himself is LESS of a crime than if he advertised his extreme dislike of the group he thinks the victim deserved to be part of. A dope who kills a fat person and who also hates fat people is in worse trouble than a murderer who loves them. You figure it out.

Academics and others who are ostensibly intelligent, actually nurture the concept of unbridled “offense” and attempt to set rules against “hate speech” (anything traditional, conservative or Constitutional… or critical of liberalism… or of Hillary Clinton), or insensitive pronouns like “his,” hers,” “he’ and “she.” By accepting the mythical “fluidity” of gender, colleges and other self-righteous arbiters of “education” buy in to the concepts of self-selected pronouns the meaning of which is decided by their inventors, with no connection to our common language(s). It’s another dangerous path, one that leads to hatred and confrontations initiated by the supposedly offended. Social and cultural adhesion are the victims… as is freedom, itself, in a country of rules rather than laws. Those are the tools of socialist fascism.

The loss of freedom our rabid quest for “rights” engenders (speaking of “gender”), is a form of death for every free person.

Culture, Education, Immigration, Representation, Responsibility, Trump

The Progress of Hate

Leave a comment

Since Mr. Trump’s campaign for the presidency commenced, the Left and those easily led by leftist propaganda have virtually exhausted the supply of calumnies that can be thrown against another person. For his part, Trump can take satisfaction at having advanced from “buffoon,” and, one of the worst, “businessman,” to “Nazi” and, topping every other, “Hitler.” And he seems to have advanced so far with no effort. Remarkable.

As interesting, and not just interesting: phenomenal, is the ability of the Left to accuse their most hated opponent of being history’s most reviled LEFTIST! Of course, as the left constantly proves, the meaning of words – and philosophies – is one of the left’s adopted tasks. The danger is that words intended to cut the deepest might become meaningless.

When Hitler attacked the Soviet Union in 1942, Communist sympathizers infesting the West, including the U. S., immediately placed Hitler on the “far Right.” That lie was so successful it has become common “knowledge” and not just repeated casually, but taught as truth by people who ought to know better. Hitler was a socialist and a fascist. “Nazi” is an abbreviation of “National Socialist.” The enmity between Hitler and Stalin was between Cain and Abel. The Soviets suddenly became “allies” of the West by virtue of sharing an enemy – they never became a brother of American constitutional republicanism.

Ultra-leftists, George Soros and others, created the “spontaneous” agitators, “Antifa.” Antifa is an abbreviation of “Anti-Facist” which blithely mirrors the lie of Nazism being a right-wing philosophy. Fascism, as under Mussolini, Hitler’s happy Axis ally, is the primary tactic OF THE LEFT, not of the right. Antifa is a creature of the Left and it’s stated justification is to oppose fascism, a tactic of, well… the Left. Mainstream news outlets repeat their supposed purpose without analysis, in large part because most of today’s news companies are leftists, too, and the lie serves them.

No nation has ever “adopted” Fascism, although Italians were acquiescent following the corrupt failures of World War One and the economic fragmentation that followed. The soup of socialism in Italy was a widely varied mix from Catholic socialists to Communists. None could resolve the economic malaise and inflation. Fascism held out the promise of straightening everything out – putting people to work, making the trains run on time, enforcing dependable utilities of all kinds, where disparate unions had made key functions erratic and thrown people out of work. Mussolini, socialist to his core, perceived himself as the strong-man who could set things aright, and his rallying point was patriotism.

Patriotism for Italy and all things Italian, provided the unifying banner. For 30 years Italians could agree on very little but that they were Italians. The Fascists became “the Right” by virtue of usurping power that Communists and other ultra-socialists had jockeyed to obtain for themselves. Being to “the right” of international communists could hardly qualify Fascism as “Right wing” as the term is used today. Fascism was the penultimate collective, shy of Communism’s collective misery and politically elite control of production. Fascism organized business and industry to do its bidding, employing the profit motive for the State’s purposes. By putting people back to work Fascism appeared benign and was at first. Before long, however, Fascism could not help but take away freedoms as the trade-off for efficient government and, initially, efficient industry. The beliefs of fascist governors that they are in some way the best people to hold the positions they hold, is inevitable, and Fascism provides no mechanism for the governed to “clean house” of the corruption that power engenders.

Today’s “anti-fascists,” in their complete misappropriation of history, place American constitutionalists in the same camp as fascists and accuse them both of being on the “right wing” when, in fact, there is no connection. The exceptionalism of the United States is a form of “Rightness” that is at the opposite end of the political spectrum from the leftist, socialist soup of which Fascism was the outgrowth. Fascism and Constitutional Republicanism are so different as to be diametric. Yet we allow, and leftist media happily reinforce, the concept of “right-wing” and fascism/Nazism to be grouped as synonymous. Thank you, American public schools and most private schools, too. Even the Pope is now infected.

The founding Fathers, or, better, founding Philosophers, of the United States, determined to not simply create a kinder tyranny, but to create a new spectrum of Freedom. To become “an American” meant to agree with the ideas of America and, by adoption, accept the “American Dream,” defined only as the Constitutional Republic where people of all kinds can live together in Freedom and personal responsibility. We have drifted very far from the IDEAS, but not so far, quite, that we cannot row back to the safety of the Constitution.

Unfortunately, the exercise of citizenship in the United States is unlike that in every other nation: it depends upon shared morality and self-discipline. As those qualities erode and scatter in the winds of sexual abandon, the U. S. follows the same path toward leftwing fascism that far less promising nations have done before us. What might that look like?

It is, most sadly, conceivable in this summer’s reactions to normal legal functions at our southern border, that widespread rioting could erupt prior to the mid-term elections. People consumed by irrational hate for Trump’s second Supreme Court nominee and alleged “incarceration” of children in Texas have shown the ability to move thousands of ignorant people – young people – into civil disobedience. Is there a line they will not cross? Could a police incident where a young black man were killed, God forbid, in an urban setting, with cell-phone video spurring Ferguson-type rioting and destruction, spill over into multiple cities? As Federal troops arrive to support local police could shooting break out?

If erstwhile conservatives are in elective power when it becomes necessary to declare martial law, God forbid, again, they’d be accused of “police-state” tactics and “Hitlerism.” The police-state charge would have some merit. But it is a very risky step to take no matter how serious the civil unrest appears. So many legal conditions are suspended under martial law – even under a state of emergency – that “justice” is essentially discarded. Even if martial law ended in a month, say, the legal clean-up would take years.

Executive department bureaucracies would be locked out for at least some period. There is no way that “government” can appear to go on as before and, unfortunately, very little economic investment can proceed without satisfying a federal law or regulation or several of each. Large-scale trade activity would be severely disrupted for days or weeks, and with it, the World economy. No one outside of the U. S. knows how to deal with a non-functional U. S. government, any more than we in the 50 states do.

There are sizable numbers of people on the Left and the Right who would welcome a federal clamp-down in certain circumstances. On the Left one could imagine acceptance of a clamp-down to “stop fascism” and to free “political” prisoners, essentially rendering the U. S. a one-party state: socialist. On the Right, one can imagine acceptance of absolute federal stoppage of the drug trade, purging of bureaucracies of socialist-minded individuals, restrictions on abortion and absolutism on immigration. Neither adheres to the Constitution.

Martial law is too extreme to employ. We will need some rational way to walk our way back from the precipice of daily hatred of everything not “progressive” / socialist /Democrat. To Trump and those millions who wanted him in the Oval Office, the thought of relinquishing the limited exposure of foul and secretive government that Trump has begun, is anathema. Another way.

Unlike most pundits and proclaimed wise observers, Prudence dictates caution in offering solutions to our current divide between retaining the United States under the constitution, and letting it dissolve for the cause(s) of socialism. Do those fighting for dissolution even recognize which side they are on?

Have we allowed, through the actions of our “representatives,” the descent into a dilemma that democratic representation cannot solve? Aye, that’s the question.

Uncategorized

Thought Leaders and other followers

4 Comments

The evolution of politics in the U. S. is only a symptom of the collective consciousness of our people, as reactions to the much-anticipated “Nunes Memo” makes stark.  So-called “thought leaders,” who, in earlier times, might have been recognized as “leaders” by any definition worthy of follow-ship, are now best identified by a mix of shrillness and hypocrisy, the latter readily ignored by erstwhile and very temporary “followers.”

Any Gen-X’er or Millennial who stumbles across this scree is advised to watch “Saving Private Ryan” or “Apollo 13,” where he or she might get a glimpse of real adversity, dignity and bravery.  Shouting at people with whom you suddenly disagree doesn’t begin even to cast a shadow in the sunlight of true grit.  Who are the “thought leaders” of these most recent generations?  Barack Obama, may be one, although none of his great thoughts come to mind; just as much so is Colin Kaepernick, just as hard to comprehend.  And looming over Hollywood there is always Barbra Streisand.  For both Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama Saul Alinsky was a thought leader, as he was for a generation of radicals.  Thought leaders, all.

Universities – in the “West,” at least – no longer place much emphasis on historical thought leaders, nor much on history, itself, sadly.  It is as though their role in preserving and increasing knowledge of western civilization is no longer worth the price of admission, which is trending toward the upper half of a hundred thousand bucks a year.  For those kinds of dollars one’s sons and daughters deserve safe spaces where never is heard a discouraging word.  Real debate requires grief counseling – parents have paid enough to get some.

George Soros might be a thought leader.  He certainly has enough followers, including those he pays minimum wage to riot on call.  But, there’s the nagging question, what does he THINK?  And, the gloomy corollary, what could his followers be thinking?

Soros thinks, in part, that a system of governance in which individuals are sovereign – like that outlined by the U. S. Constitution – must not be tolerated on this planet, he being a rabid socialist.  We also know that when Nazis were actively collecting and killing Jews like himself, that renouncing his faith, family, heritage and neighbors was not too high a price to pay to preserve his own life and comfort when all one need do was cooperate with Hitler’s Fascists, perhaps helping them steal Jews’ property.  No regrets, he says, and one might suppose his followers think the same way, as do partners, colleagues, compatriots and comrades who either have or hope to benefit from Soros’ wealth, whether an influential Democrat or a $15-an-hour “antifa” thug.  We need not probe too deeply into the erstwhile meaning of “antifa,” but Soros has bought, at least, a place in the thought-leader coven.

Many other political and government types see themselves as thought leaders.  They do their damnedest to lead the news whenever possible, but there they must compete with supposed journalists  who are vying for their own places in the thought-leader cabal.  Dismayingly, thanks to Twitter, Facebook, You-Tube and the like, many of both groups do lead thousands of people’s thoughts, even if only for a few hours… or minutes.  It’s heady stuff, nevertheless.

Mr. Trump has long thought he could lead some thoughts and a good slogan and article of clothing can do that, as evidenced by Madonna, for one example, and “KISS” for another.  Still, he does lead a lot of thinking in that everyone seems to think about him, whether skeptical, neutral, favorable or downright hateful.  People are in various tizzies since Trump decided to run, never mind since being elected, including great thinkers like Nancy Pelosi and Joy Behar of NBC.  Prudence isn’t sure whether great connivance is the same as great thinking.  Maybe.

One can recall when Billy Graham and a handful of other faith leaders were also thought leaders, in that large numbers of people attuned their beliefs to theirs.  In the “old” days, one might say, Cardinals in the Catholic Church were in that same role, in the sense that the Pope was a thought leader for the faithful.  Prudence indicates that their role has diminished significantly, largely from self-inflicted, festering wounds.  Western civilization overall has an abiding stake in the success and purity  of the Roman Catholic Church.  No matter one’s own path of faith, that purity is worthy of prayer.  Indeed, the purity  of EVERY Christian path is worthy of prayer, but each of those will have to find the strength to ignore popular culture and the attractions of money.  Few have.  Still, it is only in folly that we attempt, societally, to disavow the thought leadership of our Judeo-Christian heritage and history, since it underlies our laws, our origins, our forms of economics and capitalism and our sacrificial sense of justice.  There is no single thought pattern  stronger or more pervasive than what is described in the Bible, much as we wish there were no rights or wrongs or, for their matter, conscience.

Regardless of our half-baked feelings and weird higher education “leaders,” every society with endurance requires an abiding, overarching thought or belief in its mission… or purpose… or, failing those, right to survive.  “Balkanization” became a verb for good reason.  It names and describes how and why a nation held together by force will fracture along racial, tribal, religious and cultural lines, whereupon old hatreds, temporarily shrouded, again by force, will spill out into murderous, brutal conflict.

That is a fate to which the United States is not immune… not on the path we are following now.

Why?  What do we think about that?  Do we even hold congruent opinions, or beliefs about our direction?  Our future?  Karl Marx was and lately, is, a thought-leader, who later in life had to forego many of his twisted economic thoughts, since he had not factored in freedom, economic and otherwise.  We might consider that devotees of Marxism, like Trotsky, Lenin, Stalin, Mao Tse-Dung, Pol Pot, Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, and, also of late, Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, were also thought-leaders, but their thoughts have destroyed not only dozens of economies but tens of millions of their citizens.  That isn’t easy to conceive of or even feel badly about – if you’d ever heard of the events – but one can imagine a gymnasium, let’s say with 100 people in it: it’s only 10 rows with 10 people in each row.  One might even know all 100 of them.

But to appreciate these historic thought-leaders we’d have to imagine, say, 250 such gymnasiums just in Massachusetts and with a little help from one’s phone, realize that that is only 25,000 souls.  Hmmmnnn… Various kinds of Communist and National Socialist thinking have eliminated over 100,000,000 people – friends, neighbors, mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, sons and daughters and more.  That’s at least 4,000 Massachusetts-es worth of gyms.  Is that enough murders to care about?  They make Hitler, alone, a very junior partner.  Does Marxism lead your thoughts?  How in Hell has communism gained favor among American youth?  For whom is this change a measure of success?

Somebody… some thought-leader, so called.  It makes one a little happy to be at this end of his life and a little sorry for today’s youngsters who will mature in an America where the thoughts of knuckleheads will be “leading.”

Economics, Education, Race

Government by Unreality

Leave a comment

We are truly vexed in this, our great, open, rich, cruel, loving and generous country with our $20 Trillion debt, by social and civic problems of our own making. Whole industries are comprised of complaining and hating perceived groups of people unfairly imposing problems and then unfairly benefiting from them. Not much money seems to flow toward the loving business, but various dolled-up hatreds are profitable.

Some hatreds are aimed at Republicans, for no specific reason other than party affiliation; some are aimed at Democrats for the same reason. Both of those groups seem to have the same goals of expanding welfare, growing government and raising the debt ceiling. Neither is trying to seriously fight the LGBTQW revolution, although one side obtains money by claiming the other side hates LGBTQW “victims.” But aside from a lot of posturing, little honest change is proposed by either party, whether in power or out, although there’s plenty of the opposite.

When erstwhile Republicans and various independents and conservative-leaning parents elected a hard-to-fathom or mollify President Trump who thought he had the balls to actually change SOMETHING, leftists and others wedded to the status-quo ante began raising gobs of cash from fellow travelers and bird-brains who actually do hate HIM. Most of the money comes from people who hate haters. Those same hate bigots – people who pre-judge their neighbors as somehow flawed, just as much. In fact, they are able to spot bigots from quite a distance, especially if they are wearing one of those stupid red hats… or deign to vote for Republicans.

There has been some change, but nothing so dramatic as to let Constitutionalists relax.

In our hubris, we, Americans, a large minority of us at any rate, are convinced that normal laws of economics and well-established human nature no longer apply to us. Through our elected representatives we have become convinced that we can borrow a richer life, today, from our great grandchildren to whom and for which we’ll never answer.

We also believe that our enjoyment of freedom and wealth is somewhat automatic and somehow deserved. We are so happy with it and it’s easy accessibility, and being suspicious of our governors and bosses, we’re determined to share it with anyone those governors and bosses don’t like – just to get even. Why should we be so selfish as to keep America to ourselves? This misunderstanding leads us to fight against any standards or limits, like anachronistic borders, that those cruel governors want to maintain.

Freedom is some sort of gift, leftists say, provided to us by government, the source of all that’s good. If you aren’t as free as you’d like, more government will fix it. They don’t want to be limited by those Christian haters, especially the ones actually in churches… you know the ones, in their black suits and robes who read the “Bahh-bull,” for Heaven’s sake. The basis of Western civilization has no connection to today’s disconnected leftists. “Thanks, God,” they say, “thy system was far from perfect so we’ll take it from here. Call me, we’ll do a funeral.”

It’s the perfect statement of non-responsibility, which is the leftist, group-identity outlook. Whatever group we can burden you with is the reason things have gone the way they have for you – even if we don’t really know how things have gone for you. If you’re black (the best group ever invented, thank you, Lord, for giving them different skin; it helps a lot) then all sorts of causes for your victimized life can be proclaimed. Don’t y’all worry about finding justice in this White-privileged world, we are here to help the helpless. Take this check and be sure to put yourselves in POWER on election day.

To live a political existence on the basis of resentment of White people, is to, eventually, be subsumed by hatred. Evidence of this effect is everywhere poor, or “disadvantaged” blacks and other minorities are concentrated: ghettos. Surrounded by others who feel cheated out of their fair shares, and further surrounded by more richly “advantaged” Whites, ghetto residents become hateful, regardless of EBT cards, free health care and food subsidies. Welfare becomes merely a down-payment on justice.

It should be obvious, had education done its job, that government cannot create or impose justice on a social system; but, it can adjudicate injustice. In other words, if laws are made clearly and succinctly, the failure of some one or of several some-ones to treat another person or group of several persons fairly under the law, then government can ascertain appropriate charges for failing to act legally toward another or toward others, and prosecute illegal actors for their failing and impose penalty or restitution to those so treated.

What government should never do is create crimes out of feelings, or stretch clear laws into fuzziness about things people feel are unfair. This includes creating laws to cover self-declared conditions for which there is no empirical, quantifiable proof. Unfortunately, this includes special laws concerning homosexuality, sexual indecision or confusion, and mis-named trans-genderism. It should also not provide special legal strictures based on race. Rather, law is intended for, and only fair if applied to, sanctioning individuals or legal constructs like corporations when those persons/entities act outside of clear laws that are applicable to everyone of the members of society. We as a people or nation, create immense structures of unfairness and unreality when we attempt to legislate based on feelings and political unhappiness.

This old observer suggests that mankind’s worst circumstances result from acceptance of – even codification of – unreal, baseless claims and beliefs. For some this is religion, and many examples of severe warfare between religious groups or sects, can be cited. For shame. But there are other incredible murderers, like Hitler, for whom occult religious stories justified warfare on a global scale. Coupled with hatred of a group for unreal reasons, it formed an upheaval from which we still suffer, almost 80 years later. Unreality made “real.”

Communism is much the same. Not so much riven by group hate, Communists hate individuality and freedom. It is more economic than philosophical, and even more deadly than hatred. Power, of course is the currency of socialism of all stripes. For Communists there are only two groups: the official Party and, economically, everyone else. Resistance to being part of the nationwide serfdom into which Communism inevitably devolves, yields starvation or the gulag. Venezuela is an obvious current example of Communism’s “promise.”

Communism is based on unreality although its effects are brutally real. It believes in a different human nature than what is in fact reality. We are on this same path in the United States, evidenced not the least by our world-threatening debt.

Yet on we stumble, electing and re-electing people who don’t like America or the ideas that created it because the people who crafted it were white or owned slaves in a slave-owning society, or picked their nose in public. They are blind to the fact that these were the men who built a ladder to get us out of slavery and a thousand other unfairnesses. And so we are locked into hatred and failure and inability to govern while anguishing over millionaires taking the knee at football games, another example of trying to “govern” based on unreality.

Unreality as the basis for action is the same as dishonesty, well-stated by Mark Twain: “It’s not what you don’t know that’s the problem; it’s what you do know that just ain’t so.”

Governance

CABINETS AND BUREAUS

Leave a comment

President Barack Obama holds a Cabinet meeting in the Cabinet Room of the White House, Jan. 31, 2012. (Official White House Photo by Lawrence Jackson)
It’s not easy… changing the course of the ship of state, that is. Building a Great Pyramid, that’s easy. Transitioning from communism to capitalism – not so much. Worse, every move a newly elected president must make is nit-picked, criticized, undermined, called fascist and/or racist by the dominant media.

The real threat of the incoming Trump administration is that the new president may keep even some of his campaign promises. How dare he?

Those of us who were willing to overlook Trump’s several lacks of finesse and glibness, thought we could discern his visceral messages that mattered, “MTM’s.” One MTM is stopping illegal immigration. Viscerally, Americans recognize that inviting millions of very different people into our midst – people with different cultures, beliefs and languages who neither wish to adopt our culture and language nor are forced to for personal or economic survival, MAKES NO SENSE. What folly such a policy would be. What a treason it would represent.

We are transitioning from an administration whose intention it was to change, literally, the color of America. Mr. Obama is governed by a number of hatreds, among which are hatred of colonialism, hatred of white “supremacy” and hatred of capitalism. One might also discern a hatred of the Constitution in there, somewhere. What an odd person for Americans to elect.

Mr. Trump has been sounding like he may not be as concerned about the illegal entrants already here as are we who voted for his promised change. Let’s monitor what happens to the border control he also promised, very carefully. No matter how “big” we think we are in the U. S., having escaped full-scale attacks or invasion – so far – our culture is under assault, largely from confused domestic enemies who find it satisfying to hate America’s imperfections while celebrating the imperfections of others. It’s perverse. For too long we have relinquished power, including power over education, to those who hate the premises of America. Importing people of vastly different ethics – particularly Muslims – whose belief structures are antithetical to our constitution, is pretty stupid policy.

Another big MTM is about re-energizing the American manufacturing and jobs engine. Can a president actually do this? Maybe. Like most of Washington – a construct of creative bullshit – (sorry, sort-of) “managing” the economy is mostly wishes and hope. Tax cuts can surely help as lower taxes will, for a while, encourage the PRIVATE economy to make good domestic decisions and investments. Production, productivity and employment should improve. But Trump’s choices for Treasury and Chairman of The Council of Economic Advisors (White House) are from Goldman Sachs, a mendacious Wall Street behemoth, and this exposes a serious flaw in Trump’s economic courage.

Between the Federal Reserve (neither federal nor a reserve) and the Wall Street financial manipulators like Goldman Sachs, the United States has been led into astronomical debt. Trump, and all of us, need to recognize that just as every dollar of taxes is a loss of citizens’ freedom, every dollar of federal debt is a loss of national sovereignty… and loss of flexibility to manage our own domestic, foreign and military affairs. What’s a president – or a people – to do when they are stuck in a box of perpetual servility to banks?

One of the changes, perhaps the most significant of changes, that Americans tried to bring about in November, 2016, is the upside-down relationship between our supposedly sovereign nation and these blood-sucking banks. For shame. Trump has already proven to be deaf to our outcry and he’s not even in office yet. Usually newly elected presidents don’t start giving us the finger until around April first. So, many people’s concerns about Trump’s impact on – or proximity to – conservatism have some validity. We’ll see.

Finally, naming Rex Tillerson to head the State Department. Feelings are mixed, obviously, but there are positives. On the face of it there is an element of putting oligarchs in public charge of “the world.” Trump’s a business mogul and must believe that only business moguls are smart enough to manage big systems like the U. S. government. For everyone who has gained the impression that businessmen are inherently dishonest – as popular media consistently portray – giving one political power is the worst possible outcome. “They’re all crooks!”

Even worse, Tillerson is in the OIL business, helping to scourge the earth while stealing money from everyone. Woe is us. Some perspective is required.

Exxon-Mobil is certainly huge, deals in global commodities and must negotiate with virtually every country in order to maintain stable supplies and stable markets. Well, it’s time Americans admit – or recognize – that most of what foreign policy comprises is maintaining and defending global commerce, free access to the seas and stable markets and prices. It is rarely a pretty business, but undeniably vital.

And, it’s not simply oil. Oil is the current (for a hundred years) leading commodity against which almost every other commodity (corn, wheat, soybeans, beef, pork, gold, uranium and… on and on) is valued. The U. S. dollar is how oil is valued and oil is how the dollar is propped up in the face of unbelievable debt. There may be more sense behind having this particular mogul in charge at State than first appears. Exxon-Mobil is pretty-well run, after all.

Politics 2016

The New, Pure Democrats

Leave a comment

DWS-cc-426x565DEMOCRATS
Gross defiance of truth, justice and the American way is contained in the communization of the Democrat Party. You “good” democrats out there, stop shaking your fingers at me. Your party has gone so far left you can’t effect a “pass” without driving up on the sidewalk. Your party is weird. Don’t believe me? Listen to anything Harry Reid says. Talk about a mental breakdown, he’s having one as I write. It would be bad enough if he were just a sick, twisted dope – lots of senators are – but he’s also a God-damned liar and a cheat. Shame on the Nevada Democrat party for supporting him and getting him re-elected in 2012. What a turd.

He stands for what constitutes Democrat politics these days, my good Democrat friend, and you have every right to be ashamed. If that dope ever does anything that is good for the U. S., it will be the first time, and an accident.

Reid is only slightly more dishonest than Nancy Pelosi. However, she is weird and, worse, has a claim on the “sisterhood.” You lady Democrats have nothing to be proud of with this dilly. She’ll do you all a favor by retiring or losing her next election. Praise the Lord.

It is sad to see the ignorance of such a large number of Americans, who can be shoveled a ton of crap about “entitlements” like food stamps, free phones and nationalized health care. It’s just watered-down communism and a large coalition is happy with it. If there has been a 50-year plan to dissociate Americans from our own history, heritage and economic wisdom, I suppose the socialist public education establishment can pat itself on the back for a great success.

Thank God for private schools, and even better, church schools. These are, of course, the most attacked and vilified of all alternatives to government monopoly schools. The only form of education that may be hated even more is home schooling. Those kids are more likely to grow up conservative and un-indoctrinated. Oh, the horror.

This mess will never be corrected from inside the education establishment. Even the best of teachers are slowly converted to defense of “their” profession without seeing that their profession is completely co-opted by forces of collectivism. It rode in on unionism and fairly crappy management of public school systems, but it’s a form of communism that is just as willing to sacrifice generations of children as Stalin was willing to starve out resistance to collectivizing farms in Crimea in the 1920’s and ‘30’s. For shame.

I think it’s safe to say that turning schools toward real education isn’t going to happen from top-down direction by politicians, either – a place where lots of conservatives place their hopes. It would be like punching marshmallow fluff: good ideas completely absorbed with no permanent effect. Worse, the puncher’s hands will be so grubby afterwards that the rest of his or her agenda will be compromised.
The only fix is competition, and not only from charter schools. There are millions of allies out there who are hoping and wishing for the same change conservatives and other grown-ups are dreaming of. Our first obligation is to teach our children well. Government schools are doing a poorer and poorer job of this key function and parents want control back.

Public (government monopoly) schools don’t even want parents to know what they are trying to teach! Nor do they want to teach American history, our Constitution or the Federalist Papers. Probably afraid that too many people grasping the concepts of freedom, limited government and sovereign citizenship, would screw up the socialist tyranny we are enjoying.

But Democrat obfuscation and dumbing-down extends to their own party, not just the public. Right now the “party” is trying to apologize to millions of Bernie Sanders supporters – and to Bernie, himself – for having cheated him and them of any possibility of winning the primary campaigns for the Democrat nomination. The depth of party cynicism has reached a new low.

Somehow, in the age of hacks and data breeches the DNC thought it could keep secret a total favoritism for Hillary Clinton, even as it emailed the plans and tricks back and forth thousands and thousands of times. Among them were ways to denigrate Sanders including, believe it or not, foul questions about his religious/Jewish status to be fed to media interviewers (which sycophants would have asked them, make no mistake.)

Meanwhile, Sanders is attracting millions of people to his (admittedly weird) proposals, and struggling to campaign on low budgets and minimal assistance from “his” party, to which, despite the “Socialist” label he proudly wears in the Senate, he has been completely loyal for decades.

The DNC, suddenly no longer led by double-dealing Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, has been exposed for its duplicity and is attempting to carry on in its Convention as if nothings has changed: Wasserman-Schultz is out and Vice-Chair, Donna Brazile is in. We are to believe that she had nothing whatsoever to do with the evil eMails, no, no, no.

The newly purified DNC can now cheerfully and confidently promote its most pure candidate, ever, who knew nothing at all about any damned eMails that brought ol’ Debbie down. Hillary loves Bernie, we all know, and with his support she will usher in a new political age of honest, transparent government, free of taint.
Prudence Leadbetter

Economics

When Work Is a Spectator Sport

10 Comments

06062011_McD_Robot_2_cropped_articleThe lack of knowledge, especially skilled knowledge, is forcing production managers, from McDonald’s to General Motors, to automate. This isn’t new. Until quite recently there was value added to both products and services by the presence of a competent human. Such beings are becoming rarer. Whether one wishes to blame education – and not just public – or welfare and dissolution of the “family,” America is turning out relatively fewer highly competent, decision-capable graduates than in the first 175 years of our constitutional history. Such a societal change has severe consequences. We can see it reflected in our latest choice of president and other elected leaders. It is an outgrowth of essential socialism: the dissipation of responsibility, specifically, personal responsibility.

So far we have limited our concentrations of incompetent adults to inner cities, and built a sloppy welfare industry to keep them from causing too much trouble. No one running for president in 2016 is talking about how the next 50 years of public policy will significantly change that pattern. The current president, Obama, has been struggling against laws at every level to… well, make it worse. Our nation’s future will be that much more painful.

One approach has been to inject “federal” dollars into college tuitions through ridiculous loan obligations that some pandering politician will forgive someday. The problems, of course, come from wrong attitudes, and those come from wrong governing. We have taught our least responsible residents to hate their masters (who hand out the sustenance). Education is to blame for a lot of this, too, which is to say, government, again.

Now this is translating into demands for higher wages for very low-skilled, entry-level jobs. Those jobs are relatively low-paying because they are tied to selling relatively inexpensive products and services in a marketplace that demands those low costs. As the cost of, say, frying prepared french-fries and filling paper containers with them, increases by 40% or 50% with artificially high wages, the owners of the french-fries, Frialators, electric bills, buildings, uniforms, liability insurances, payroll benefit obligations, training costs, supervisory costs, advertising expenses, franchise fee obligations, parking lots, snow-removal charges and sundry materials, rags, grease trap cleanouts and so much more, will have to find a way to CUT that arbitrary cost increase. Believe it or not, the preparation and dispensing of french-fries was automated – or robotized, if you will – over 44 years ago.

But the integration of all the steps for the early machines to do that relatively simple, repetitive task, was not smooth and didn’t justify the added capital cost for the complex machinery. In part, this was because the designers were trying to mimic humans in the performance of those steps, and modern computerization wasn’t available. New designs, already in test, are not based on human workspace; they are smaller and designed from freezer to fryer to deliver bags of hot, salted fries when needed. The advantages – aside from almost no payroll costs, health insurance or withheld taxes – include better portion control, increased employee safety, reduced waste, fresher net product at point of sale, and reduced noise in the workplace.

And… lower cost-per-portion, enabling the restaurant owner to keep his or her prices lower than those available in traditional eateries. That is the business model, after all.

At one point in the late 1980’s, nearly 10% of all employed workers had once worked at a McDonald’s. There they had learned to keep schedules, serve real customers, show up on time, dress presentably, follow directions and respect managers. Those opportunities are now perceived as oppression. The claimed needs of low-skilled potato fryers threaten to drive costs for such employees sharply upwards with no possible way to increase production of fried potatoes more than a percent or two. Higher-paid workers will not increase demand for fried potatoes; higher resulting prices for fried potatoes will significantly reduce demand for them. This will reduce demand for potato-frying employees and all of their training and re-training and other costs, and hasten the installation of robotic frying systems. Those will be “trained” by the manufacturer through software and never complain about their low-paid jobs.

There will be employees in another place – or country – who will manufacture the robotized fryers. However many of those there are, will make possible the frying production of ten to twenty times as many on-site employees. The low, nearly UN-skilled people, who thought they could make $600 a week resentfully frying potatoes, will remain on welfare. It is not, and has never been the duty of a McDonald’s operator to correct the failings of families, schools and individuals. It is his or her job to earn a profit in the business. “Displaced” potato fryers will have to find a job that can’t be automated.

The example, above, will play out in literally hundreds of occupations in the next 20 to 30 years. This process may be more rapid, but not differ materially from the industrial changes that Luddites fought in the 18th and 19th centuries. Resisting it still draws the opprobrium of “Luddite.” However, in a mostly settled world, carrying 7+ Billion people who depend upon remote sources of critical materials and finished products, there are not the options to “check out” of the labor market and simply provide for oneself. The accelerating robotic upheaval in the means of production will displace a very large fraction of the least-skilled “workers” that we seem to be creating at an equal rate. This cannot go on for long.

Increasingly, a shrinking number of “producers” will own the production upon which we all depend.

Monopolization, always preferred by owners of production, will multiply by default. What will be the political response – indeed, international, GEO-political response?

Will governments appropriate profits to finance growing dependency? Will producers keep being productive if there are no rewards? History teaches ‘no.’ Will governments attempt to nationalize all production? History teaches us that such a reaction is almost instinctual among government-types. The past also shows that general living standards will decline under communism.

How can “we” maintain technological progress and living improvements, high efficiencies that make living costs decline, overall? Will governments force producers to break up their processes to maximize net jobs? Will work weeks decline to 32 hours? Twenty-four?

What will happen to quality if three people must be trained and maintained to accomplish what we consider one “job,” today?

If “products” like clothing, tools, appliances and even houses become much cheaper because of robot production, and fewer and fewer people have high-paying jobs, such that there are fewer people who can afford even those cheaper things, how will “we” make sure that everyone receives the essentials of life?

This looming, virtually unavoidable consequence of robotics, contains the seeds of the greatest political stresses and conflicts a republic might face. Unlike the generational traditions of public assistance for our official underclass, the need to “share” productive surplus with large populations of historically productive families will require better application of political / police force than we have experienced – and rewarded – to date.

Political power has been granted to people of varying honesty, indeed, for a lifetime, who can trick a majority of voters into paying and borrowing enough to pacify the underclass while guiding federal advantage to favored industries and institutions. It has been shamelessly dishonest and the reason we face many, many trillions of dollars in debt. That is, much of our economic “success” and relative luxury has been a hoax – a lie – and about to be stressed beyond reason. One path, likely to be recommended by controlling types, is for “government” to appropriate larger fractions of productive surplus. They always have the answers. The redistribution of those resources – assuming they continue to be produced – will generate fierce, possibly insurgent conflict. The stability of social function and public utilities, could devolve into police power: a police state, in other words. Culture and heritage be damned.

Yours in liberty, Prudence.