The New, Pure Democrats

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

AUTOMOTIVE ECONOMICS and FREEDOM

traffic2Increasingly there are stories and speculations about autonomous, or “self-driving” cars. Upon hearing these stories, many just look at their friends and roll their eyes, as if to say “Yeah, right. Never happen!”
POWER
People are too tightly connected to controlling automotive power, gunning it to pass or enter highways; there is too much alignment with sexual prowess for males, at least, to give up the pilot’s role. Maybe.
Self-driving vehicles hold a lot of promise. Consider overall expense. An ‘SD” vehicle won’t at least initially, be your all-around vehicle. Rather, it would be utilitarian, mostly used for commuting and short-haul shopping missions. Unlike mass-transit, a self-driving car retains independence and privacy for 1 to say, 4 passengers, but doesn’t have to be parked once “work” is reached. It can be electric, of course. Once depositing its commuters it can self-drive to a charging station – like a Roomba vacuum cleaner.
SAFETY
At 3:30, or 4:00, or whatever time the commuters have told it via cell-phone, the vehicle will guide itself to the convenient pick-up spot(s), receive its passengers and head home… or to a sports bar. Commuters could work, play games, watch TV, fool around (just sayin’) or, if not stupid enough, take a hit of ‘medical’ marijuana, all while presenting no threat to other drivers/commuters.
After all, the weakest link in a car or truck is the driver. Self-driving vehicles will offer some positives.
INDEPENDENCE
Not the least of these will be mobility for seniors (or the blind!). No one likes to be the one to tell mom or dad that it’s time to relinquish the keys and stop driving. That’s tantamount to saying stop enjoying independence. A self-driving car extends the “freedom” years for both parents and children. This alone will make autonomous vehicles popular, and keep other drivers safer, too. You watch.
****
AND MORE THAN THAT…
Autonomous cars can solve a lot of problems. Imagine every self-driving car having fairly simple radio-frequency communication with all the others within, say 100 yards, and with beacons at intersections. This inter-communication will enable cars to automatically give way to one another at merges and intersections, such that there will be very few reasons for forward progress to totally stop… as it does, constantly, during both “rush” hours and all other hours, when red and green lights “control” drivers to avoid collisions.
INSTANT PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION
Now imagine that for most uses, travelers will simply call for a car via cell-phone. Even for local shopping trips, the drudgery of parking can be avoided. As you check out with your groceries, a car is automatically called for you, meeting you almost at the door of the supermarket. You ride home with your stuff and the car moves off to do another job. Your flashy, powerful, expensive, highly-taxed and rapidly-depreciating (although impressive to others) SUV, remains in its garage-nest, shiny and undamaged. That’s good, right?
Except for the need to stow all the crap we leave in our cars – sometimes for years – not being completely responsible for a “car” can be increasingly attractive.
STAYING RICH
Rather than a $500,000 home – mortgage payment, insurance, upkeep and all – one’s car is the largest expense one carries. Over, say, twenty-five years, a homeowner might spend $30,000 a year for his home and on his home… $750,000, a lot of money. In the same time, he might buy and finance five $30,000 cars… $165,000. Insurance adds another $50,000, maintenance and taxes, gas and sundries, probably another $75,000 – altogether $290,000 (very conservative number).
At the end of the twenty-five years the home will be sold for a million dollars (if not three times that much), while the last car will still be on the road, sucking up expense dollars. Most homeowners will profit on the home, but the car dollars are all gone.
HOW MUCH PER MILE?
Suppose the homeowner travels 20,000 miles a year commuting, shopping and few trips. His average cost per mile is 58 cents, except, well, over the years, he’s also spent $120 a month for parking while at work – another $36,000! Now we’re over 65 cents a mile, despite some of the dollars being for “non-miles.”
What if you could call up a car whenever you needed it, for $500 a month, same amount of miles? To compare, that would be only 30 cents a mile… HALF! The other $150,000 you can keep in your pocket!
Insuring your private vehicle is a function of the extraordinary risk one takes both for himself and his prized possession. You might have a new, ultra-safe, back-up camera’d SUV that has cost you $4,000 before you left the dealer’s lot (taxes, registration, insurance, etc., etc.) and will soon generate monthly payments of $600. The first morning you pull onto the interstate parking lot, where its comforts and sound system are so valuable, and where its appearance can be thoroughly envied, a $500 piece of… crap can drift over the line as its driver reads the paper, texts or reaches for another doughnut, and pretty well ruin the driver’s side of your polished beauty. You can imagine your own feelings without my help.
In an instant you will appreciate the economy and efficiency of autonomous vehicles for commuting purposes, if for nothing else.
WHY YOU’RE GLAD YOU LEARNED LOGARITHMS
We can imagine, as autonomous vehicles gain numbers and acceptance, that only one lane, the “breakdown” lane will be designated for them at first. They will travel at no more than 40 miles per hour, automatically giving way to private cars that signal for exits. The blinker itself or a radio beacon it turns on will tell the “AV” that will create space for the exit turn, of the need to do so, and through virtually instant communication with the AVs behind it, a slight reduction in speed is smoothly achieved logarithmically back down the line, as is smooth acceleration back to normal.
Along with other automatic adaptations to traffic conditions, the ride-sharing (or not) commuters in the AVs will arrive at the destination for each in about half the time as all those individually impressive, singularly occupied, driver/commuters will. Better still, they won’t have to find parking – or pay for it.
SHARED CONTROL
Now let’s imagine that most of the vehicles on the Interstate are autonomous and happily communicating with the dozens of other AVs that are nearby. Let’s extend that to all cars being required to have a couple of basic transponders so that “special-license” drivers can’t screw up the works. Now manually-operated and autonomous vehicles can share the road, even to the point that the AVs can “scatter,” so to speak, whenever a “ManOp” does the wrong thing. If it’s something really foolish, or dangerous, all the vehicles around the offender will “know” who the offender was – at least what the ‘numbers’ of his vehicle were.
RISK
AVs will cost a lot less. With fairly simple RFID chips in every vehicle, there won’t have to be on-board radars, back-up cameras, etc. (that may not be paid-attention to). Those suckers are expensive. Plus the cost of insurance will be very low and cost in dollars and suffering will be almost eliminated. That is the best part. Medical care (some quite dramatic) resulting from automobile accidents, is just as expensive as for other reasons.
This is disruptive technology. The phase it is going through, now, is going to be brief. All the automatic safety and silly systems (like automatic parallel parking), that owners love to show off, will become superfluous in large part, when there is no need to park, among other things.
NEW-CITY
Imagine the people-positive effects of not having millions of cars parking in our cities and towns.
Drunk-driving, drugged-driving, texting, reading, applying makeup and eating breakfast on the commute, will all become safe to do! How cool is that? Streets and interstates can be smaller, believe it or not, instead of constantly become larger, more costly, ugly and dangerous. We won’t need as many police, either, since the number of accidents will decline markedly, and insurance will cost a lot less.
When you start to consider all the crap we put up with to maintain private, manually-driven cars – and trucks – the day when true transportation arrives, can’t be too soon. I didn’t even mention the first teen-age solo…

A PROBLEM LARGER THAN RADICAL ISLAM!!

Omar-MateenThe following was originally published in the Westford CAT as a letter to the editor by Dennis J. Galvin of that town.
home phone : 978-692-3157 cell phone: 978-846-2635 cell email: galsix90@aol.com

June 27, 2016

Letter To The Editor

A PROBLEM LARGER THAN RADICAL ISLAM !!

Our nation recently experienced one of the worst terror attacks in its history. Yet, rather than coming together, with a firm resolve to respond, Americans find themselves bitterly divided over political agendas. There are three rails in American politics today. The conservative rail favors small government, strict adherence to the constitution and a free enterprise economic system. The liberal rail favors larger government, wide latitude in the interpretation of the constitution, and qualified support for the free enterprise system, provided there is a safety net. The third rail are the progressives. They are neo Marxists, who believe that American society is inherently flawed and must be torn down and rebuilt. Centralized re-education, social re-structuring, pervasive government indoctrination and rule by fiat are their answer. They see the constitution as biased toward certain classes and believe that wealth redistribution is the only way to achieve social justice.
Progressive ideology has played a significant part in bringing about our division. The mass shooting in Orlando Florida gives clear evidence of this. It was perpetrated by a self-avowed radical Islamist, supported by an ideology focused on destroying western civilization. Progressives distinguished themselves by their response to this incident. They fabricated a narrative to distort the intent of this ruthless killer, using his crime to attack American citizens, who do not agree with their agenda. Gun owners, Christians, straight men, were all accused of contributing to the conditions that led to this carnage. The leading national progressive, our president, became unglued over criticism of his leadership, attacking Republican candidate Donald Trump with a ferocity that should have been reserved for the terrorist ideology responsible for the killings.
This display is unnerving and it supports an assertion made by David Horowitz, a former member of the new left, now a progressive critic, who said that to understand progressives, one must remember that “the issue is never the issue, the issue is the revolution.” Horowitz warns that the only focus of progressives is their agenda. The implication: no matter what happens, with regard to the radical Islamic threat, progressives would sacrifice our security to advance their goals. The anemic response of our President to ISIS, his unwillingness to fully commit the nation to their destruction, and the renewed calls to curb the second amendment support this assertion. It would also explain his vehement public attacks on Republicans, rather than homicidal radical Islamists.
Horowitz’s implications are clear, progressives are so blinded by the correctness of their ideology, that they no longer feel an affinity for their nation or their fellow countrymen, if they disagree. All that counts is the cause, anyone who gets in the way must be destroyed. Offering a sobering insight into this mindset, Horowitz once said “ if you believed that you could bring about heaven on earth, what crime would you not commit and what lie would you not tell.” Such audacity threatens our freedom and our security. The aftermath of Orlando reveals that as a nation, we are facing bigger problems than just ISIS.

END