Tag Archives: economics

Crime, Culture, Economics, Education, Elections, Governance, Immigration, Politics 2023, Religion

THE NEW COLONIALISTS

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The world cannot continue as it is.  We Americans, like most people around the world who work for their livings, every day, quickly – automatically – adjust to, and begin to ignore, whatever significant news we’ve been pummeled with.  For us, the electricity and clean water stay “on” and we can take a shower whenever it pleases us.  Things can’t be very bad, can they?  Night comes and our homes or neighborhoods seem safe… and the electricity is still on, after all.  We wake up the next morning, the kids go to “school” and hubby goes off to work and no bombs have fallen.  Life is still good and the worries that crept in about inflation, drug abuse, China, Taiwan, Fentanyl and Ukraine… drift away.  Anyone that wants to discuss any one of those “issues” more than an hour or two later, must be a conspiracist or a radical, and quite boring.

Yet, off in the fuzzy distance, major forces are changing how the world “works.”

Once upon a time, independent countries could deal with one another on a wide spectrum from complete ignorance to invasive war.  What happened in Africa or Southeast Asia didn’t matter much to the enlightened few who lived mere cannon-shots apart.  As America took form, way, way across the daunting sea, things changed in ways unforeseen, and unplanned… or not – depends on your spiritual view.  Still, moving Judeo-Christian morals and urge to sacrifice, and the newly-developing economics and technologies to the “new” world, changed virtually every other nation’s future, for both good and bad.  The “old” world could not continue as it was.

Exploration and economics: old-worlders believed in ownership of the natural world, things like stockades, forts, fences, stone walls and armed defense of them all.  Homes and farms became permanent – at least compared to nomadic ways of life – and concentrated cities, stone fixtures defining streets, brick buildings and wheels, horses, oxen and the “tack” to harness their strength.  There shortly became a new “in” group and all others were in the “out” group and deemed “savages,” for their lack of Christian godliness… and technology.  The world could not continue as it was.

The colonial period lasted for 500 years, both good and bad… largely bad.  There are vestiges still, even as a new colonialism is preparing to take the place of nationalism and of freedom.  Communications have brought us together, but also into conflict.  It is not simply the conflict of nations, but conflict of individuals.  Powerful propaganda, as one form of colonialism, seeks and succeeds to take over our most valuable possessions: belief and morals.  Indeed, we can be led to reject even our personal selves in favor of a gender fantasy of becoming someone else.  Like the failed process of turning indigenous peoples into Europeans, attempting to change genders will create lifetimes of failure as people attempt to believe two diametrically opposed ideas simultaneously.  As belief structures, moral structures, religious structures weaken and fade, we find our governors changing laws to ENFORCE this false dichotomy onto everyone else with the vile tools of hatred for those who disagree.

Mind-addling drugs have been a tool for individual colonization for many decades, but rare until the Viet-Nam war.  Now, with fentanyl and other created chemicals, there is not only colonization of brains, but high volumes of death.  Whether live addiction is better is hard to discern.

But there is a world of colonization proceeding, also.  It’s called globalization.  If the United States allows it to happen, the concepts of individual liberty, sovereignty and free-enterprise – and of responsibility – will be as dead as doornails.  At the very time that citizens of the United States of America are most needed to defend our Constitutional way of government and of life, the purposeful lack of education about our unique role in the world, is bearing its most bitter fruits.

Our “Democrat” co-Americans, the cats’ paws of global leftism, are engineering a gross, illegal colonization of the United States, itself.  Attempting to justify an open border on “humanitarian” grounds has allowed, so far, over 6 MILLION illegal entrants to claim asylum status with virtually no limitation or follow-up by federal Border Patrol or Immigration authorities – the very “authorities” charged by law to prevent exactly what they are now forced to ignore.  Everyone in the chain of command from the President on up to the Border Patrol agent required to “process” invading hordes, is party to crimes and treason.  This is the new colonialism in the 21st century: displacement of rightful citizens as a public, global policy.

There is a legitimate, Constitutional question as to whether the federal government can impose costs upon any, let alone all, of the states and their ability to tax their citizens, including diverting STATE resources that were acquired for completely other reasons?  What legal thread allows the federal government or any President, by extra-legal executive order, to degrade the ability of a state to support and serve its own citizens?  What extra-legal authority allows the federal government to divert federal funds placed in the hands of states to administer and fulfill LAWFUL obligations, based on a Presidential executive order?

An even greater question is whether anyone except a United States Citizen is entitled to Constitutional rights and privileges?

Make no mistake, the “Free World” is being colonized by leftists with distinctly anti-American philosophies – Communists, for all intents and purposes.  We rarely hear of the “Free World” these days – it’s almost gone.  Not even the United States of America is number one in freedom any longer.  We, who used to defend freedom and exemplify it, can no longer define it except in terms of license.

In the “old days,” colonizers would appear with different tools, weapons, clothing, languages and religions.  Today?  Today they come with the very same differences… they just don’t have to travel as far, perhaps across the street or the down the halls of a school.  Do we rid ourselves of them?  Or, surrender?  So far, it’s surrender – the world cannot go on as it is.

The globalist colonizers approve of the amoral colonization of America.  Only America – the U. S. of A. – stands in the way of global Communism, yet we barely remember that to be our role in history.  The world cannot go on this way… not for long, anyway.  Of course, it will go on somehow.  But HOW is the business of all Americans – favoring Patriots, Prudence hopes.

There have always been economics, even when families were managing their own food, construction and defenses.  Aside from more elaborate ways to steal, the purposes of economic metrics are still the same, although the scale has exploded.  The United States, alone, squanders enough money to put the world economy at imminent risk.  Here we stand, on a sliver of eroding support for the Dollar, borrowing and spending faster than accounting can measure.  We should be ashamed.  We claim to represent a form of freedom and classless economics with which anyone can succeed with competence, work and integrity.  We elect our representatives democratically and send our best and bravest overseas to defend or create our model virtues while, back home, we don’t want or defend that system for ourselves!

Why would anyone take our advice?

The world cannot go on the way it is.

Culture, Politics 2021, Race

RACISM FOR LUNCH

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There’s no such thing as a free lunch: sounds Prudent – someone, somewhere, is paying for it.  There’s no free racism, either, since someone is or soon will be, paying for it.  Nation-wise, it’s damned expensive.

The ‘racism!’ accusation is pretty expensive, too, yet it’s tossed around like racism grows on trees.  Wait, wait, wait… that advice comes from the old “… it’s not like money grows on trees, you know.”  Usually it’s thrown up to someone who needs a lesson in economics.  And, it’s good advice, too.  Money has to be related to a value exchange; all it can be is a way to measure value, denoted in the fungible currency of the day.

Prudence advises us that racism doesn’t grow on trees, either, but it’s tossed around as if it does.  Nothing backs it in terms of value except in the rarest of instances.  Sadly, ‘Racism!” has become the currency of the day.  It’s a little like the relative who opens every gift with the question, “How much did this cost?  Do you have the receipt?”  She (don’t ask, it’s always a she) also gives gifts with the price tag still attached or packed inside.  The only way that person can judge or appreciate value is in terms of currency.

More and more, people – more and more people – cannot judge any other person without determining what level of racism, or anti-racism, adheres to that person.  The value of the epithet is now so low that one might think that racism grows on trees.  The trouble with racism, though, is that it’s a form of hatred: the more you give the more you get.

People who consider themselves “liberal” have suddenly become fully invested in racism currency, not because there is a tangible “R.O.I.,” but because the return is a thick coating of purity… of innocence.  Those same declared “anti-racists” are, evidently, easily educated as to the widespread nature of racism among people who are not as anti-racist as themselves.  In a mild form of “snitching” on racists around them, the anti-racists have begun to advertise their declared “anti-racism.”  One can see the “Black Lives Matter” placards and the “Hate Has No Home Here” signs that imply that the homes without those advertised attitudes must be housing latent or actual racists.

The declared / advertised anti-racist, anti-homophobic, anti-transphobic, anti-Islamophobic attitudes are, in fact, an attempt at the fabled “free lunch.”  Primarily posted by white liberals, they contain an unspoken hope that when riots reach their street, their house will be safe… or their business, or their cars.  Little do they realize that the racism they claim to be opposed to with all their hearts, is already being directed straight at them: their skin is the wrong color.

“But, but… I’ve got a ‘BLM’ placard in my window!  We’re of the same heart and mind as you.  We hate whites, too!”  What?  Don’t they know there’s no such thing as a free lunch?  Next thing you know, white liberals are voting for any politician with brown skin, donating money to “BLM” and other black/brown-centered charities, and holding signs protesting “systemic” racism that they knew was lurking out there, even on their own streets: look at all the houses that don’t proclaim anti-racism.  Racism became a mirror.

Politically, and that is ALL that is truly on the table, here, “racism” means power.  That is the currency that eventually exacts a very high price for the proverbial “free lunch.”  There is no such thing as a non-racist society anywhere in the world.  Actual racists, who have manipulated soft Americans into believing racism is rampant here, are holding out a gaseous premise that racism can be “fixed” or “eliminated” by a universal hatred of whites.  In their view – we’re talking “Black Lives Matter,” here – any rules or standards that whites attempt to live by, are so racist that black and brown people don’t have to abide by them.

Maybe that last paragraph got by you without a lot of reflection or thought.  “BLM,” a communist-inspired, anti-white, anti-Christian, anti-Jewish and anti-family terrorist organization, is saying that any part of current social-cultural structure that is comfortable for white people, is so racist and foul, that it cannot be reformed and must be torn down – burned down if convenient – and replaced with the global communist dream, dominated by black and brown people.  Prudence isn’t making this up – they’ve said virtually these words.  There’s no free lunch, or anti-racism, in any currency.

All the placards and rainbow flags a house or yard has room for will not insulate any avowed “anti-racist” from that change.  Moreover, since they are white, the spoils of “BLM’s” victory, should we stupidly permit it to come to that, will not be shared equally with anyone who is the wrong color. 

Racism is normal.  It’s not equitable, per se; “equity” is unrelated to racism.  The only value a Constitutional republic can offer is equality: equality of opportunity.  No one, as in not any person or official of any sort – no teacher, no coach, no drill instructor… not even any parent or pair of parents, can cause even two people to produce or earn or perform EQUALLY.  No one.  Equity implies that the results of equal opportunity are unequal because of racism, and not just crappy racism embodied in hatred of someone of one race by someone of another – bad enough – but, no, the results are unequal because of systemic racism, a blight that not only cannot be defined, but cannot be reformed. 

Some truly innovative fantasies – lies, we call them – must be sold to a lot of people in order to even begin to approach the nirvana of a world without racism.  Fantastic because such a world is impossible, has never existed and at the cost of millions of lives, has only been set aside temporarily except… except where people are free to worship as they wish and to perfect themselves as their individual happiness leads them.  Only one place on earth has ever formed a government intended to create and maintain such a place of freedom and of equality… of opportunity.

The problem is, we haven’t fulfilled our own founding, at least, not completely.  We were well on our way in the fities and sixties, but the rotten hand of leftism-socialism, often a problem for freedom in our middle century, but a threat to it only since LBJ, has almost completely shredded the fabric of freedom and responsibility, attainment and merit and even of morality.  Certainly it has shredded Judeo-Christianity.  Now it has weakened our ability to resist so carefully that the United States can barely afford to defend itself should it come to that.  For shame, Nancy, Chuck, Barack and the rest of you, demons.

Has anything they espouse resolved racism?  Not in the slightest, for they are employing hated-filled racism to fight unthinking racism.  Not that racism can be eliminated.  Martin Luther King, Jr. once said in a speech to the Massachusetts Great and General Court, that “…no law can make a man love me, but it can keep him from killing me.”  He summed it up nicely.  Government can enforce only civility, and it may adjudicate only injustice – it cannot “create” justice or enforce “fairness.”  Nor are those its duties.  However, an assault on one’s person, interference with his or her civil rights (including rights enumerated in the Constitution), theft or destruction of his or her property, various frauds, libels and so forth, provide a more than adequate basis for enforcing and protecting civil order.  No American citizen, for any reason, should be made to bow down or kneel before anyone else, or be forced by threats of violence or loss, to swear to any idea he or she does not believe.  How can people elected to lead in the United States, twist their beliefs to the extent that they can approve of or encourage the blatant subjugation of one race by another?

With hate now a political tool, principles and beliefs can be discarded, apparently.  Ask our 46th “president.”  Every principle he has espoused throughout his “campaign” and since winning the certifications by enough states to claim the presidency, is new.  Over the nearly 4 decades he became wealthy in the House and Senate, Joe Biden stated, repeatedly, completely opposite principles to those he now governs by.  It seems Prudent to wonder what sort of a man can completely change his beliefs after age, 60, say, or even after 50 years of age?  An unusual one, to say the least, if not a scurrilous bastard.

Joe Biden embodies the high cost of anti-racism as government policy.  Since it is impossible to achieve an anti-racist society, increasing levels of government are needed to pursue it and impose it.  That is to say, fascist socialism, which has nowhere to go but to communism.  Scratch an anti-racist agitator and the next layer reveals a fascist.

There is no free lunch.

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

ALL AHEAD: LEFT!

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Even government has to employ the Constitution...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Governance, Immigration, Responsibility, Trump

(Word)holes, Redux

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Many people worthy of trust and respect are seriously upset about the president’s crudeness.  He reportedly asked why “we” should allow people from various so-called “shithole” countries to immigrate to the United States?  For all of its crudeness, offensiveness and vulgarity, it is a very good question – one we should not be afraid to ask.

Well, the circumstance of the comment and the comment itself are both fairly straightforward, even simple.  But the inherent permutations and nuances are profound, sad, and instructive. This requires some parsing and mapping of the “splatter” that has emanated from the splat of a single word into the miasma of politics, hate, government, and the “American Dream… not to mention social media and hate.  Didn’t I already mention “hate?”  We shouldn’t overlook hate as a driver in modern… umm, modern ahhh, well… modern everything: media, news, broadcasting, ‘friend’ships, dialogue, religion, holidays, commerce, advertising, movies, philosophy and casual rumination.  Facebook, too.  Sad.

So, first observation is that every person who has talked about, proclaimed about or even thought about the description of many countries as “shitholes,” could in a few minutes, list a dozen or two dozen countries that fit the description!  Let’s change the term to “backward countries” and each could list three dozen.  What does it mean to make the identification?

It means, generally, that those countries have truly crappy politics.  Our politics are pretty crappy, too, granted, but, as Churchill observed, democracy is the worst form of government ever tried… except for all the others.  Corollary to that gem is this: The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.

Even those who could construct a list of “backward” countries probably cannot describe what is “wrong” with their politics – the system of leaders, laws and lies that govern their populations.  Typically, under the blanket of crappy politics, the economics of these countries are also pretty crappy… sorry, “backward.”  The result is extreme stratification, poor education, low skill levels, limited industrialization and little imagination.  Simultaneously, the BELIEFS of their citizens are likely to be very different from those of the majority of ours.

Changing beliefs is the primal tool for the weakening and subjugation of peoples.

One might reply that “America is the melting pot” and go on to predict that “we” will “make” those unfortunate immigrants “better” and therefore more like ourselves.  Seems like hubris.  This attitude sounds magnanimous and sympathetic but it was never true.  If there is an American myth, that’s it.  We have functioned fairly well as a “salad bowl,” but never as a melting pot.  Americans of every origin and kind learned to live and thrive together, yet they were never forced to change who they were, beyond learning and following our constitution and laws.  But there were very distinct differences about when America “worked” and how things are, now, when so many consider our country and institutions to be “broken.”  The key is a grand misunderstanding of what is “The American Dream.”

The real and enduring “American Dream” can be stated only thus: That all kinds of people can come together in FREEDOM, respective of one another, respective of law and reason, free to follow God as each sees fit, and responsible to themselves and others for the consequences of their actions.  This sentence summarizes the U. S. Constitution’s connection to individuals.  Not connection to groups, cliques, whether religious, emotional or political, but to individuals, much the way that Jesus described individual responsibility to the laws of God.  “America” represents the boundless opportunity offered to every individual to perfect him or her self: the pursuit of happiness.  And no less, or more.

This is not how many view the “American Dream” or “America,” itself, today.  Socialist thought perceives control of individuals as the high point of governance, the exact opposite of the teachings of Christ or of the values and purpose behind the founding of the United States.  To accomplish complete control – and different kinds of socialists have tried many ways to do so – it is essential to place people into groups, or “identities” for whom certain laws will apply, whether to control that group or apply to another group or to all others(!) in order to control THEM.  There is no clearer example than brown-skinned people as an over-group, and African-Americans, as the driving sub-group, and descendants of slaves, the most exalted of the “drivers.”  Barring descent from slaves, having marched in Selma or having stood near Martin Luther King, Jr., suffices.

As with the growth of federal welfare programs, the epithet of “racist” has become almost standard within the belief structure of many black or brown-skinned residents of the U. S.  The charge of “racist” works to control the “other group” of essentially all “Whites,” including modifying their language and actions.  This has yielded political power to the modern kind of socialists: American liberals.  This, in part, explains the immediate descent to charges of racism emanating from one participant of the immigration meeting during which the president spoke so crudely.  But, it doesn’t make it true.

Welfare, itself, is a gigantic difference, since the 1960’s, from when earlier waves of immigrants reached our shores.  Those from Ireland, for example, came to take care of themselves and their families, as did Italians, Poles, Portugese, Norwegians, Swedes, Finns and Germans, Russians, Albanians, Greeks, Turks, Syrians, Lebanese and Egyptians and many others.  Did they come perfectly?  No.  We didn’t send ships or planes to bring them here more quickly, either.  They were strong and self-selected to endure the sacrifice of leaving everything behind to start anew.  This is no longer so.

Immigrants in recent decades have been encouraged and assisted for purposes of “diversity,” the opposite of e pluribus unum.  Immigrants , today, receive fundamental – and generously comforting – public support, benefits, even cash, yet are not required to meet ANY tests applied to earlier generations.  They need not learn English, they need not become citizens (refugees, asylees) they need not assimilate.  Indeed, they need not even follow laws, often being released for offenses that citizens pay dearly for committing.  One might observe that their beliefs are not those of the “American Dream,” but of taking advantage of our official guilts and sympathies… or of selling drugs, or worse.

We are stretching our capacities to accommodate immigrants, including illegal entrants, even to the point of breaking our own laws, local and federal, to make them comfortable.  Yes, we are an “immigrant” nation, by past definition – most assuredly not by the current one.  I am glad someone with authority and sensibility is asking, “Why should we welcome immigrants from the (backward) countries of the world?”  What we have been doing of late is certainly not in the national interest, which is the primary business of a president, one hopes, although it may fulfill the interests of political partisans and of those who wish America to not exist as we know it.  Ask that question again, Mr. President, louder.

A second observation instructs that the president cannot, ever, trust in the confidence or even honesty of anyone from Congress or the “press” and damned few from the executive branch.  Trump failed to take note of the many lessons of the past year and more, when he posed the question everyone in the room, except Mr. Durbin possibly, a mendacious Democrat of proven, documented unreliability, was thinking and should be thinking: Why should we welcome immigrants who are unlikely to contribute to our economy or standards of living, and whose beliefs are antithetical to the fundaments of the U. S. Constitution or of the “American Dream.”

The ridiculous process of “hating” the president (and others) for so many things of which most of us are also guilty, and so readily accusing him of racism, transphobia, Islamophobia or a dozen other awful constructs, is corrosive and intensely destructive of our “unum” for which millions have bled and died, sacrificed and struggled.  If we are seeking perfection in or from our elected leaders we are fools.  They need, like John Kennedy, only to be pure enough to set a course that is pro-American.  The conversations never disclosed, that the Kennedys had then, or that brother Ted ever had, or by ANY other president, would curl our earlobes.  The profanity and privately voiced prejudices of EVERY president, have been, until recently, kept out of the news because their disclosure would have been so destructively irresponsible.  What we didn’t know didn’t hurt us; had we known all of it we’d have been damaged and history made far different.

News outlets of every kind hope to make history by ripping away confidentiality, no matter the damage.  Their hatreds justify the damage… for shame.  Do we think – do I think – that Trump will become perfect in order to avoid that damage?  Hardly.  When I pray about him it is to cause some intercession that will abridge the worst of his impulsive communication.  It is not that he will disappear, leaving leadership to others.  I have no love for him, but no hatred.  I grasp his attitudes, and even share some, not, I hope, the worst of them.  But then, I try to live on purpose and not in comparison, as does he, I suspect.

The Lord works in mysterious ways.  For all of his flaws I believe Trump is on stage exactly when needed by this country.  I want him to succeed where his direction and intention is right and best – or at least better – than where we were heading prior, God willing.

 

 

Culture

Strangers in a Strange Land

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The United States is in a strange place, and rather suddenly it seems. Prudence instructs that our disenchantments are the result of a fourth “civil war” and no less. Our first was the “American Revolution” in which we effectively seceded from England. Indeed, the fact that we so eloquently justified our right to do so left those states that seceded from the Union in the second Civil War, convinced of their right to do the same when they judged that their government had become tyrannical, too.

Our third civil war followed World War One and the foolish financing that led to the second president Roosevelt. His “New Deal” changed the nature of U. S. citizens’ relationship to government and he expanded that socialist framework to a global vision for every nation and people in a platform he called the “Four Freedoms.” Along with the freedoms of speech and worship he proclaimed freedoms from “want” and from “fear.” It was heady stuff for an administration whose policies had failed to cure a decade of depression, by January of 1941. Roosevelt was justifying a new world order and a global “United Nations” that would somehow enforce the American-inspired four freedoms. The United States was “neutral” in the face of the “gathering storm” in Europe and F. D. R. wanted us to straighten things out for everyone by changing that stance.

And there’s nothing like a good war to strengthen one’s industries – if one is lucky enough to not risk being bombed to rubble. The U. S. that emerged from World War Two was a vastly different place, sporting a new consciousness about its essential, police-like and perpetually meddlesome role on the planet. What Hitler, Tojo and Mussolini desired by starting WW II, the United States achieved by winning it: global dominance. And it’s expensive.

Like Vietnam, our next war may be lost at home. Despite our winning every significant battle and thousands of small ones, Americans were told we were suffering embarrassing defeats and doing little else but burning children with napalm. The narrative of the war was not one of incredible victories by the toughest of soldiers, but was controlled by America-lasters who wanted us out of it, and they got their wish. Which is not to gloss over the fact that, Vietnam was the dirtiest war we’ve ever fought and possible the most corrupt. The flow of heroin, primarily, increased phenomenally, facilitated by our own military operations and the CIA. It meshed perfectly with our fourth civil war, watched, voted for and barely resisted through the sixties, the consequences of which are now eroding our innate strength as a nation and as a culture.

It took 100 years for our first civil war to manifest in people’s hearts; 84 years to manifest a second, the Civil War; about 70 years for the socialist civil war to start; and only 25 years for the fourth: sex, drugs and rock’n’roll. It has been fifty years since then. Fifty years of gaseous economics, destruction of religion, derelict government and near severance from our own history – thank you, educators. Is there a fifth civil war coming? Where there will be another upsetting of social order? Will we become stronger? More licentious? Purer of heart and strong in character? Will we clean up marriage and families? Strongly encourage two-parent families having seen the failure of core social groups with single or government-parent families?

Or will we slide farther and farther away from what America means, into a drug-addled globalism where “America” was but a chapter of diversion from global tyranny? Or, maybe we’ll clean up pornography… ehh, probably not. We’ll tax it.

Economics, Governance, Representation, Responsibility

A Few Words on Capitalism – Part 1

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Every one of us is a “capitalist.” This, in the sense that we all strive to obtain as much safety, comfort, material goods and security for old age, as we possibly can for the least amount of effort necessary. It doesn’t matter for whom we vote. Many of us simply want to be free TO acquire what we need; others wish to be free OF the need to acquire. In both philosophies we are attempting to gain with minimum effort.
But that’s not the whole story, is it?

Every person is motivated to act differently. We all have our own “profits” that cause us to expend MORE than minimal effort necessary to take care of ourselves and our family. Some are motivated to gain as much as possible in terms of material goods and “wealth.” Some want to be charitable and will work more than necessary so as to give to others. Some are motivated by artistic expression, drama, music or writing. Some by the gaining of power over others, one way or the other. Many profits.

The invention of money both simplified and complicated capitalism. For some, in twisted ways, the accumulation of money, itself, became their “profit.” Such people are able to “buy” the necessities for which others strive, but they are also consumed by numbers and the quantities of money they represent. They have different fears and joys than “regular” people. Unfortunately, they come to realize that they can also “buy” power – influencing government-types to protect their accumulated wealth.

Government types come from those for whom “profit” means power over others, over “public policy” and over taxation and, unfortunately, over “public” budgeting. Tapping into the “profits” of others, familial, financial and charitable, provides the most ways to acquire at minimal effort for those so motivated. They concentrate in governments. Almost inevitably and partly because much of their effort is arcane, they come to believe in their own mental superiority over “regular” people whose concerns are familial, local and unobtrusive.

Meanwhile, capitalism, which in the U. S., OUGHT TO MEAN the right to own private property, and by extension, the right to own the fruits of one’s labors, carries on, inherent in every person. It is human nature.
Some aspects of human nature can, if unchecked by society and hence by government, cause damage and destruction to that society. Many control-worthy human aspects are checked by “agreement.” That is, members of society “agree” that murder, rape, theft, fraud and other forms of false witness, greed, sloth and envy, are to be controlled through various codified sanctions. Lately the list has grown to include littering of various degrees, like pollution, and, in an extraordinary reversal, discrimination against sexual oddities, a change that has led to “intolerance” becoming a worse social transgression than some actual crimes. Western societies must now “tolerate,” if not celebrate, anti-capitalist “lifestyles” that include essentially welfare careers. These things actually threaten the social order and every other right protected by the Constitution, our fundamental social agreement.

A tremendous strength in American capitalism has been the high integrity of our contracts, both with one another and with our governments. This phenomenon makes modern trade possible as well as the millions of debt contracts that describe modern economics. But today, we ignorantly embrace a new form of socialism based on twisted concepts of “social justice,” which intends, fundamentally, to cause guilt-ridden government types to alter the underlying concepts of private property, and to discard natural human capitalism. This need not be an inevitable slide toward the only economic future possible.

It is a slide the basis of which is ignorance, willful and otherwise. It is a slide that attempts, as all socialist plans inevitably do, to replace human nature with a government-directed one. While there may exist the technical possibility of directing every person’s life and economic decisions, governance based thereon cannot prevail. It devolves into tyranny or revolution, perhaps to a new tyranny or, once in a great, great while, into a new form of governance based on self-discipline and personal sovereignty, one in which the governed grant their governors limited powers, and where the tyranny of the majority is carefully sanctioned and where tyranny of the minority is unheard of.

Inherent in a government based on individual freedom and personal responsibility are the concepts of private property and ownership of the fruits of one’s labor: essential free-enterprise.

Capitalism gets fully mucked up when it is politicized, which is to say when limited governments attempt to create economic “fairness.” It seems that no “free” economic and democratic system can refrain from favoring certain industries in return for maintaining power for those who are already “in” government. Much of the favoring is done to “make things fair” or to “level the playing field,” but almost without exception, the net effects are to limit competition for those industries and to limit competition for those in power. These are tendencies that a wise and educated citizenry would create institutions in society and government to carefully limit, if not make impossible. In our growing ignorance we are failing at this essential part of citizenship.

A great strength of capitalism is that it doesn’t reward failure… it replaces it with something that can succeed, success measured in profitability and ability to destroy debt. In this is a lesson for all with eyes to see and ears to hear. Among our people, however, those who get the message are now considered hateful while those who refuse to see or hear are empowered, or re-elected. Ours is fast becoming a system hobbled by the removal of the pillars of individual freedom and personal responsibility. We are rewarding failure.

Immediately this statement will be attacked with charges of cruelty, but this stems from ignorance, which is to say, it’s a charge leveled by those who, for whatever personal profit, IGNORE the distinction between those who are capable and willfully refusing to take responsibility for themselves, and those who are incapable and needful of charity and public support.

The greatest value of capitalist profitability is the creation of surplus – productive surplus – of which a portion may be used to care for those who cannot care for themselves. The greatest flaw in capitalism’s opponents is their creation of and acceptance of a thousand reasons why individuals may be grouped among those who cannot care for themselves. They unfortunately become codified and form a malevolent inhibitor of success. And here we are.

Economics

HOW MANY DIVISIONS…?

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The seeds of division in our beautiful nation were planted in the Revolutionary War. You are wondering how could that be so when we all know they sprouted in just the past 8 years? How simple would be the solution if that were so.

The intention toward one-world government was already formed in the late 18th century and it was the birth of American constitutional republicanism that reversed the momentum toward ever-greater authoritarianism. But it was a momentum, yielding Hegel’s Dialecticism, Karl Marx, Otto von Bismark, Lenin, Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler and Mao Tse Tung. Along the way authoritarianism cost nearly 200 Million lives, each belonging to a human being person.

America, founded on religious freedom in more ways than one, including the inherent freedom of will that makes right action truly right, was not immune to the desire for ever greater centralization. So-called Progressivism, particularly since the Civil War, following which social problems and care for disabled veterans, for the first time in large numbers, became Federalized.

It is often said that “power corrupts.” But it should also be noted that “power justifies…” itself. Government attracts governing types who quickly find that even soft police powers lend a sort of antiseptic clarity to their decisions. Government decisions gain an aura of purity, especially in comparison to the chaos of freedom – that messy, disorganized, self-serving and selfish jambalaya of individual sovereignty with which our Constitution saddles the nation.

As giants of industry developed their monopolies and industrial efficiencies, there developed a view of government as becoming the ultimate efficient industry, led by a college-educated priesthood of good intentions and of higher thoughts than common people. “Wilson-ism.” A classless society, indeed.

Damn the laws of economics. Socialists of all stripes seem to think that by their super-clarifying adjustment of society and the physical (non-spiritual world), they can cause humans to be more perfect, more docile, more willing to accept average uniformity, and therefore happy to allow the ruling classes to enjoy their extra rewards for having done all the needful thinking for the whole group. Whew! It never works.

Oh, it might continue for quite a while – longer with a police state that is able to weed out cancerous individualists – but it eventually goes broke. Humans will be humans. Rulers might think they can get everyone to share and to accept their share, but they can’t destroy the human spirit: the inherently human desire to perfect oneself, to grow closer to God, or to improve one’s earthly condition. Damn humans. This would be a great place to live if it weren’t for most of the humans. The rich have obviously proven their greater value.