All posts by Bob Wescott

CANDIDATES AWAKE!

legislateEvery couple of years purportedly rational humans scurry about seeking votes. To acquire same, they promise new levels of honesty, integrity and transparency and half of them (or more, where unopposed) get elected to do the peoples’ business. Almost immediately our erstwhile reformers and crusaders begin to justify legislation that extends for hundreds of pages, covering hundreds of matters – some quite disparate. For Clinton voters, that means they are not all related to the subject matter of the legislation’s title. It is possible, although improbable, that every new restriction in the legislation is pure, wholesome, beneficial to all and free of the taint of quids, pros and quos. Therefore, Prudence Leadbetter (pronounced: Lead Better) and I recommend the following to all solons and candidates:

YOUR FRIEND, BILL JUDGEMENT

For all you Representatives, and you others who hope to gain power in 2016, you will find it much easier to fulfill America’s heritage if you follow a few simple rules of judging legislation so as to minimize the potential damage to our economy and society, and so as to enhance the Freedom that makes us strong. Our new friend, Bill Judgement, will show you how:

Bill Judgement #1: Is this proposal more than 1,000 WORDS long? Chances are there’s something wrong with it or hidden in it that does not fulfill the Spirit of the Constitution or the true purposes of American freedom. The 27 Amendments to the Constitution, are each a lot shorter than that!

Bill Judgement #2: Does the effect of the proposal TAKE FREEDOM AWAY from sovereign citizens? In other words, are you about to force some people to give up their inherent rights in order to buy favor from some other people? Then don’t do it – no matter how good the title sounds!

Bill Judgement #3: Does the legislation as proposed, include stuff that doesn’t have anything to do with the purpose of the original bill? For example: Does a bill to “reform” health care include a federal takeover of student (consumer) lending? Then don’t vote for it: it’s partly fraudulent!

Bill Judgement #4: Does the bill, or any part of it, effectively PUNISH citizens or legitimate businesses for doing something legal that some people don’t like? Then don’t do that!

Bill Judgement #5: Does the bill include some hidden gifties for special friends of legislature-people? Then suck in your gut and say NO to it. Until we have a real, cash surplus, you heroes should be able to keep your hands out of the cookie jar – and then, only after taxes have been cut.

Bill Judgement #6: Are there special sections of the proposal that provide some kind of pay-off to other Members in order to secure their votes? Sounds like a crappy way to do the people’s businesses. Steer clear of it. If the merits of the bill are that questionable, it doesn’t deserve any honest person’s support!

Bill Judgement #7: Will the net result of proposed legislation create more tax-PAYERS? That is, will it enable or cause the PRIVATE-SECTOR to grow and flourish? Then support it fully. If it does the opposite, or, worse, expands government and the number of net tax-TAKERS, just say NO, NO, NO!

Bill Judgement #8: Does this bill take away PRIVATE PROPERTY from tax payers? Or maybe so restrict their use of their own property as to destroy its value? Then don’t vote for that until YOU can articulate why the basis of American Freedom must be taken away from those folks!

Bill Judgement #9: Does the new law include increases in taxes? Until some of the exorbitant waste and favoritism inside government is CUT by the amount you propose to raise, VOTE NO, NO, NO! To maintain the organized theft inside the government while taxing citizens more is to deny your oath of office, for shame.

RACING TO THE FUTURE

baltimoreSpeaking of different knowledges, one can recognize how close to savagery America is, at least in urban cores, which is a consequence of severely distorted knowledge and utterly alien beliefs among, mostly, American-born blacks – beliefs being the result of gaining knowledge or the certain stand-ins for it. Disaffected blacks have been taught to believe that America is a system of oppression, based on hatred for non-whites and fueled by corporate theft. Like all beliefs, these are based on kernels of truth, or knowledge.
Poverty and hopelessness can sure feel like, well, oppression, for example. Bolstered by socialism and industrialized sympathy, young blacks perceive being locked into a permanent lower caste and lash out at any opportunity to do so.

I would, too.

In some ways blacks have a clearer perception of the inequities built-into our corrupt, grotesque combine of banks, debt, stock markets and politics, than do most “middle-class” and wealthier others, color notwithstanding.

Sadly, the governing class – originally just lefty Democrats but, now, both lefty parties – have found their political power to be intertwined with either bribing inner-city denizens to keep them not too restive, or not un-bribing them, out of fear. What have we wrought? It doesn’t make us – or the next generation – or the nation, stronger.

There is NO evidence that weakening self-reliance by addicting people to welfare, does anything to make them better parents, workers or citizens. Nor does it make them – the recipients – grateful for the tax-paid gifts. Quite the opposite. Welfare breeds resentment, fatherless children, generational failure, wanton sexuality and, evidently, a criminal mindset. That is not to denigrate a race or a current generation. It does recognize that criminality is much higher in long-term welfare populations. Why is this so?

The answer, I think, is that people have a sense of right and wrong, despite the specifics of what is right and what is wrong within their groups. Generational welfare recipients learn to scam the porous, foolish transfer systems that guilt-ridden liberals have erected. There is no way to increase income on welfare without inventing (or procreating) new needs or finding ways to take additional shares to which one is not “entitled,” which is so ridiculously simple with “EBT” cash-cards that large numbers of people learn to cheat and to break rules, if not laws, without consequence.

Since others still have better lives and opportunities, the sense of entitlement among welfare-ites becomes a large part of where right and wrong diverge. It’s not the same distinction as for groups – fortunately still a majority (shrinking) – who never have been trained to cheat the system to get ahead.

“Responsible” citizens cannot grasp the ethics of the “non-responsible.” The “non-responsible” welfare-ites see the alternative outlook as a “white” one, and oppressive, the two descriptions inter-changeable. Blacks who attempt to leave the irresponsible culture for the responsible one, are put down for acting “white,” which is the same as acting like the oppressors. The gulf is virtually unbridgeable.

The two groups believe different “truths.” They are possessed of different “knowledge.”

The responsible bill-paying, tax-paying largely honest group sincerely believes that the answer is to change the beliefs of ALL the non-responsibles and, further, if granted full power in Washington, they will apply the tough-love necessary to redress these wrong beliefs and everyone will recognize the error of liberalism / progressivism… and learn to love conservatives.

Maybe.

It is truly a puzzlement as to which path to the future will dissolve the sharp hatreds that bedevil blacks and whites, today. But, there must be one, mustn’t there? We cannot plan to continue for another two American generations with cauldrons of hatred and economic dissolution festering in urban cores. We can’t seem to resolve that reality with more welfare programs or dollars; we have no political will to significantly restrict our current sloppy welfare disbursement mess; there is no amount of added public education dollars, free college tuition or forced relocations that are going to change very many people’s beliefs about “white capitalist oppression.”

Only one system has ever worked: the path of attainment. Sounds spiritual and it does address the human spirit; it also sounds religious, and its tenets underlie Judaism, Hinduism, Christianity, Confuscianism, Zoroastrianism and other belief systems. Ahhh…, okay, but can the government possibly create rules and enforcement that will force people onto this path?

No. Humans, outside of bondage – or Alzheimer’s – are on some path of attainment automatically. People, by virtue of living and thinking are always bettering themselves, as each perceives “better.” The majesty of our Constitutional “system” is that it is designed to protect and defend a social, religious and economic structure under which people can perfect themselves! Freedom is required for such a concept to work, as is personal responsibility. That means every person must have some sense of shame: a set of rights and wrongs driving his or her conscience. Every adult must be self-governing.

Benjamin Franklin recognized the fragility of a Republic. His famous quote was uttered as he left Independence Hall and was asked what sort of government had the delegates created? “A republic, if you can keep it,” he reportedly replied.

Republicanism DEPENDS on the quality of its citizens! America can only survive if its citizenry understands the meaning of a Constitutionally limited democratic republic. And personal responsibility.

For 100 years the idea of constitutional limitation has been under purposeful assault. From Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, through Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt, weird Lyndon Johnson and poor Richard Nixon, overwhelmed Gerald Ford and dewy Jimmy Carter, slimy Bill Clinton and messianic George W. Bush, devolving into communist Barack Obama, political leadership has been aggregating power farther and farther away from those same citizens and their erstwhile representatives.

An unfortunate consequence of ever-stronger executive agencies and their growing armies of controlling types, is intrusion into virtually every aspect of life and comfort. The so-called “welfare state” has evolved into virtual sustenance for millions of less-competent, less-responsible citizens who, for complex reasons of undying, slavery-generated resentments, have been raised to believe that the oppressor government owes them reparations – reparations that will never be paid in full.

How will the equation between races be solved? Can either “group” be totally subdued? Would that even be a solution? What could that solution look like and who would enforce it?

“The government(s),” obviously. Who is most likely to become dominant in the “government” of that day? Will it be the people who control the military? Or, will it be the most lawless people – those willing to kill to reach dominance? Can the guilt-ridden, mostly white and legalistic population ever be brought to the point of fighting back?

Since the 1960’s, majority America has been redefining crime and going into debt to support “oppressed” welfare recipients. The reward has been rampaging anger. When would the majority forego lawsuits and crafty arguments that have been relinquishing equal application of the laws for decades… and turn to force?

What will “peace” consist of after that? Total segregation? Banishment of the “losers?” Apartheidt?

Clearly the living conditions for both the wealthier “oppressors” and for the welfare-economy “oppressed,” will deteriorate – possibly abruptly – as will the ability of “the government” to repair and rebuild after riotous confrontations. Smaller and smaller subsets of government-control will become islands of control: tiny police states, in effect. Constitutional bases for self governance will evaporate, not to regenerate for a long, long time, if ever.

Liberal America has been afraid to enforce truly equal application of the laws for a long time. Whatever burden personal responsibility might impose on minorities has been regretted and argued-against and, bit by bit, relaxed. The larger premise has been that “white” laws and customs may not be “imposed” upon minorities. It is unfair. In the process, “we” have managed to destroy morality and historic standards, in the hope that those things are not important to maintaining a unified nation.

Even as we pay “Ferguson” deposits on the coming bills for liberal mendacity, we pretend that there is some individual who can increase welfare dramatically enough to make our permanent underclass happy. We should not buy these lies any longer. Why is it permanent, anyway?

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.
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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

FAIRNESS and TRUTH

clouds_above_10_by_skybaseTruth applies to things both transient and permanent… like clouds, for example. Obviously they are a true thing, but the truth of how they appear was not known for most of history. It was still true.
SUN, SON
The Sun truly exists. Exactly how it came to be is only well-theorized. (Did you know that ‘theory’ means “words about what God is thinking?”) It is impossible to truly know until we can re-create its formation, and until that day we accept the words of scientists and their wonderful mathematics – a great source of truths all its own.
POLITICAL SCIENCE
Politicians love “science,” but not math so much. They like ‘agreement’ more. As science reveals truths or, better, evidence of truths, the opportunities for more laws and taxes multiply. But when a majority of people agree that something is true politicians can immediately step in front of that large group and claim to have always known the truth of that something in their electable hearts.
Absolute truths make these types very wary, unless, joy of joys, their absoluteness creates unfairness. Agreeable people will always vote to end unfairness wherever it lurks, or to create fairness. Fairness, as opposed to truth, is a poor basis for law. Some will look at a truth that affects everyone equally – as does a law based upon it – as completely “fair.” Equality is a good thing, no?
PRICE OF TRUTH
Money interferes with truth, for some people. If one has less money than some other person, then absolute truth/law can feel unfair, and those feelings build up and up, especially if one is reminded of them daily – or hourly. This is painfully true if the one with more money appears to be having more fun in life despite the absolute truth and the laws it spurs. Then politicians are called upon to level a playing field and eliminate unfairness. This is accomplished by penalizing those with more money and “fairer” taxation is the tool.
Fairness, in a political sense, is inseparable from truth and, like so many issues today, is best described as attempts to deny, or manipulate truth – also known as ‘reality.’
LIARS AND FAIRNESS
Harry Truman described three kinds of liars: “liars, damn liars, and statisticians.” Statistics are, ostensibly, evidences of truths. When certain statistics are used but not all, or if statistics that aren’t really related are placed together, patterns of “unfairness” can be discerned, especially by those who are looking for them. This affects tax theories and governance.
When Barack Hussein Obama was running for president, he stated that he would raise corporate taxes on the basis of simple “fairness.” The consequences to corporations, or to the economy, as well as considerations about whether the federal government “needed” those new revenues, were not part of his thinking. His statement was pure politics, based on perceptions of unfairness that were derived from the belief that corporations had too many tax advantages – or “loopholes” – while poor people (who largely paid no tax) didn’t have those “advantages.”
CAREER FAIRNESS
Obama’s entire career has been based on defining unfairness and getting people organized to put an end to it. It has not been because he cares about any particular social construct’s impact on people’s lives. It has been based, as many liberals’ views are, on the perception of unfairness that may be tapped into and used to incite radical change. Very little “fairness” is ever achieved. And if it is, it comes at a severe cost, often to those whose unfair situations were the spur to identifying the unfairness. Fairness, unlike truth, is malleable, and a destructive basis for laws.
SOCIAL JUSTICE
“Social Justice” has been the motivating buzz-word in the 21st century, and Obama has capitalized on its amorphous unfairness – if socialists can capitalize. Essentially, social justice takes over where “reparations” for the sin of slavery, falter. The concept of reparations disintegrates as the details are examined. Hundreds of thousands of Union soldiers, and millions of dollars (back when a million dollars was a lot of money) were expended to defeat the Confederacy – many thousands of black soldiers included. Millions of people sacrificed to fight to total victory. Who owes who what?
Most claims center on corporations that existed before the Civil War, especially those that existed in the 18th century. The condemnation is that they profited from slavery and that it’s time to “own up” to that tainted past. Apparently, the only way to set things right is to give money to brown-skinned people who were never slaves, themselves.

TRUTH IN EDUCATION

Members of the University of Maine class of 2010 keep a beachball aloft during the commencement ceremony at the Alfond Arena in Orono Saturday.  The university held two  ceremonies because of the large number of students graduating this year.  About 1700 students received their diplomas this year. BANGOR DAILY NEWS PHOTO BY GABOR DEGRE
Members of the University of Maine class of 2010 keep a beachball aloft during the commencement ceremony at the Alfond Arena in Orono Saturday. The university held two ceremonies because of the large number of students graduating this year. About 1700 students received their diplomas this year. BANGOR DAILY NEWS PHOTO BY GABOR DEGRE
LEARNING TRUTHS
Truth in education would seem to be a perfect sequitur. That is, educators will naturally be imparting truths to their students… without question. Go to school – society’s best expression of its worth, strength and future – and truth will be your reward. Naturally. But, increasingly it seems, not necessarily.
HISTORY AND TRUTH
What has happened in the past, for example, to the best of our ability to discover and document, provides a body of truth that should be the basis of a History course. In order for our children to know our nation’s origins, our standards of action and cultural “traditions,” we are obligated to convey to them what the facts are and were. We are obligated to tell our children the truth… I think.
Adults – and teachers – sometimes forget that what they show and what they tell their kids is grasped as TRUTH. It can take years for those who have the good fortune or good parenting to unlearn opinions, biases or hatreds, and replace them with “truer” truths. Unless they also have the good fortune to go to most colleges.
COLLEGE LEDUCATION
There they’ll listen to deeper biases, radical anti-Americanism, lists of words that can’t be used any longer, while learning about “trigger” words or concepts that can damage their fellow students… although they won’t be allowed to say “fellow” students. That’s a micro-aggression.
The “Education Industry” used to open minds to new ideas, challenge them with opposing views, teach them to embrace exploration for ever greater and purer TRUTHS. That is a habit that serves American citizens and other humans, for their entire lives.
TRUE HATE
How did higher educators become sources of so much hatred? Inordinate amounts of effort are expended teaching students whom they ought to hate, largely by accusing their targets of being haters! No debate seems to affect this process. Then they demand campus cultures that protect their charges from hearing hateful opposing views. Often this includes agitating to prevent certain people – some quite accomplished – from speaking on their “safe” campus.
WAR ON TRUTH
The college war on TRUTH includes cleansing courses of books written by white people that have been judged by today’s irrelevant attitudes to have been hateful, regardless of truths they may have understood or discovered. There are, apparently, no reasons to learn about truths discovered or described by people we no longer approve of. The entire basis of the United States, going back 500 years, is now rejected as distasteful and properly hated by our delicate “students.” One wonders if they are students if their areas of exploration keep shrinking.
The Constitution and its intellectual premises are well documented, forming a certain body of truth worthy of study (“worthy” is an opinion). At least, one would hope that raising new citizens would include truths about their own country.

TRUTH – On the Road

hiway2hell[Part A] TRUTH IN PAVING
Truths with hard, empirical evidence are best, since all concerned see, or know, the same information, the same fact(s). Laws may be enforced based on empirical evidence. Consider directions, or geometric dimensions. They are often expressed as related to right or left hands. Roads are an example: they have length and width, width described as the left side and right side of the road. As soon as more than one person desired to travel on a road, some sort of custom, and later, law, was needed to prevent collisions.
TWO SIDES TO EVERY TRUTH
Since it was – and is – absolutely true that the road had a left and right half – or sides – then a law that directed travelers or drivers to “keep to the right,” as they were facing, prevented collisions to every traveler’s benefit. Truth is a good basis for laws.
Nowhere are people who have lost their right hands excused from obeying the “right-hand” law. The loss of a hand doesn’t change the truth.
DIRECTIONAL OPPRESSION
Now, let’s imagine some travelers, or drivers, feeling oppressed by the right-hand restriction. These are they who feel compelled to drive in a different lane than the right-hand one. This leads them to drive on the left side, which poses serious risks to themselves and others. Mature, elected leaders, never at loss for a pander, rather than tell those differently-compelled drivers that they must drive on the right, instead tell cities, towns and states to hurry up and create a third lane down the middle so that the differently-compelled can drive in a lane that’s not the right-hand lane.
THREE DIRECTIONS… FOUR
No sooner is the third lane completed, striped and the road landscaped, but a problem crops up with other differently-compelled drivers going the other way, who also want to drive in the center lane. No problem to political types: everyone will simply cough up the taxes to build a fourth lane to accommodate both directions of differently-compelled drivers. Problem solved… maybe.
PAY NO ATTENTION TO THE TRUTH BEHIND THE CURTAIN
Unfortunately, many differently-compelled drivers can’t set aside the urge to drive on the left side, and actually feel discriminated against to be forced to use the middle lane(s). Politicians feel their pain right away. A new law is created that requires all right-hand-adhering drivers to make way whenever some differently-compelled driver feels compelled to use the left lane. Old-law-abiding drivers are given the option to drive in the middle lanes or, if they think it’s safer, to pull off the road and wait until a differently-compelled driver goes by. It interferes with all the non-differently-compelled drivers’ travel, but, none of the differently-compelled drivers feel oppressed any longer. That is legally important above all other concerns – even truth.
A TRUTH TO FIT EVERYONE
Eventually, though, non-differently-compelled drivers find that when traffic builds up, it saves a lot of time to take the center lanes or even the left lane. Police pull them over because they look like Non- Differently-Compelled drivers, and not like differently-compelled ones. Amazingly, every driver pulled over for driving on the wrong side of the street turns out to feel compelled to drive in other than the right lanes!
Oppression is either more widespread than originally known, or it’s contagious. Traffic cops would now be in a tough spot since the oppressed, non-oppressed and temporarily-oppressed all look alike. Perhaps the oppressed could wear different hats… or something.

Truth, Belief, Spirituality, Life, Death, Freedom

atomTHE BIG SIX.
It feels as though all the “old” ways are under assault at once. The arguments against what is and how it came to be, are endless. Overpopulation is an argument that’s so old it’s become new again. The reasons to limit – even reduce – population change with the winds of politics, but they’re certainly heating up again, now. Mankind has no clear basis for determining when population is “over,” or just larger, but there are plenty of worries… and theories – same things, sometimes.
TRUE SEX
Another, relatively new argument is about sexuality. The closer we can get to pure animalism the better, according to some. Animals, themselves, exercise better ethics about sex than do humans who want to act like animals. Even Federal and state governments are de-regulating sex, mostly by coercing straight people, who are the vast majority. Why it is a government problem is hard to compute.
Reconfiguring sex brings up issues like Freedom, Social Cohesion, Law, Justice and the Regulatory State. The social – and sexual – roles of males and females are shifting, and have been for a century, to the point they no longer have legal definition. Their denial is where legality matters. The original feminist rebellion, allegorized in the Garden of Eden story, is playing out to unintended results, all around us.
HOT TRUTH
Climate Change – measurable in less than half a lifetime – is a wonderfully heavy political tool for leftist, controlling types. Too many people on the planet is the source of it, of course, as we are the source for everything unpleasant, even, now, earthquakes and volcanoes. The chief agitators about climate change are the same who want to sunder sexuality, disrupt business, cut law free from its moorings and render education into government pigeon-holing.
COLD TRUTH
Religious institutions are being de-legitimized, despite Constitutional protection of religious freedom, but religion, itself – as in spirituality – is being lost at the same time, as if it were never more than decoration. The spirituality of life is dismissed as inconvenience, as millions of abortions are committed around the world, so strongly advocated by those who deny fatherhood and motherhood as oppressive.
Science, to socialist controllers, is the new religion. It’s technology, really, that provides cover for the erasing of tradition… and of spirit. Science somehow justifies top-down regulation; freedom, religious and otherwise, is its impediment.
FORMULA SIX
All areas of human testing, failure and success derive from the following elements of the formulae for Humanity:
1) Truth; 2) Belief; 3) Spirituality; 4) Life; 5) Death; and, 6) Freedom.
I have tried to identify another “root” or “end” to improve this sextet, but these encompass everything, I think. All other topics of debate, argument, war and peace, including those heated and cold, are “means” to these “ends.” My contention is that it is possible to devise governance that prevents the means from thwarting the ends for all… and for every individual, family, extended group or nation. So, in turn:
TRUTH is absolute, illimitable, pure. It bumps into beliefs – or the other way around – constantly, but it can’t be changed with a new truth (opinion) to take its place, and lies may stick to it only temporarily. Truth is the reason for experiment, discovery, curiosity and science, but it can’t be limited by any of those – it simply is.
TREWTH
Many of mankind’s troubles stem from attempts to define or re-define truth, as though different opinions represented differing sets of truths. Obviously that is impossible; there are only differing sets of beliefs or, corrosively, attitudes.
Truth may be described through evidence, but evidence, itself, requires constant, scientific (defined as examination and testing free of the pollution of beliefs) distillation. There are as many truths as there are atomic particles, all potentially discoverable, but true regardless. Humans are concerned with a tiny fraction of them.
PERSONAL TRUTH
Our greatest literature is about the revelation of truth, or about truths that conflict based on unequal beliefs about them. Often, unable to reveal absolute truth, literature will draw moral lessons from its obvious existence, even if imperfectly known, and present those as a form of proof of absolutes. Such are easily disregarded by skeptics, who insist that they are entitled to irrefutable proof of absolute truth if they are to respond to it in any way. Otherwise, their comfortable beliefs will suffice for this lifetime.
JUDGMENT
Legal battles are one forge for isolating absolute truth, hopefully stripped of all misunderstanding. Oddly, mere opposing “views” of what is true are the essence of “proof” that will convict or acquit a suspect. Recognizing that absolute proof of absolute truth is imperfectly achievable by humans, we invest judges and juries with the power to “rate” the quality of opposing views of truth, in order to convict or acquit. Neither outcome establishes “truth,” although one may come close. Whose opinion of what is true, is most plausible?
Even confessions must be proven, as individuals are known to admit to acts not performed for various reasons.
TRUTH IN POLITICS
Controlling types, politicians and others, find that controlling access to truth – thereby defining truth for the controlled – yields immense power. Science is their umbrella, and education, glorious, indoctrinating, “public” education, is their most effective tool.
The monopolistic ability to control the beliefs of most of the population, and therefore how that population grants power democratically, enables teachers – controlled through licensure and unionization – to define “truth” for their students. “Science,” then is more free to pursue the “truths” it wishes to discover and to ignore those it wishes to obscure – or, as happens, doesn’t believe in.
Truth controlled by politics is a dangerous, dangerous weapon.
TRUE LIES
The existence of truth spawns lies… some unintended. Lying, when on purpose, is purely human. There is no inherent requirement for lying that must be met to live well. Lying is easy in its simplest applications; many are harmless, even beneficial for the “ly-ee.”
“Do I look stupid?” The asker probably thinks he or she DOES look stupid in some situation, but usually receives an answer like, “Of course not!” Which might be a lie. “Do these clothes make me look fat?”
Of course not.
[Additional Truthiness to follow]

The Guardian Program

1-minuteman-grangerIt is time that we institute a national program I call “Guardian.” The Guardian program will be populated by men and women who are trained to take emergency defensive steps in all sorts of venues, and who are willing to carry and employ firearms as part of those steps. Each would be carefully investigated by the U. S. Marshall service, and trained, at partly their own expense, at certified gun safety ranges and, later, at police academies in each state. The idea is that these thousands of individuals would have a form of interdiction powers, such that one might stop an incipient crime or shooting by presenting his or her weapon and a trained stance, in situations where an idiot wielding a firearm would have expected no resistance whatsoever.
Copious history supports the likelihood that a fool with a gun will usually abandon his plans and submit or attempt to flee when faced with a defender with a gun. At the worst, like the examples of Adam Lanza at Newtown, or James Holmes at Aurora, Colorado, or even the two dopes at Columbine High School, a single armed and trained individual would have stopped the carnage before or immediately upon its beginning in all three of those circumstances.
Guardians would also be equipped with “911” buttons, so to speak, that would be required equipment anytime they are carrying a firearm. One push of the button would open a 911 channel unique to that purpose, such that the wearer could explain what was happening as it unfolded. Police could respond at their fastest, knowing it was a potential shooting incident, probably active.
Guardians would be insured under a federal policy, and held harmless from prosecution unless true negligence were established. It will be at some risk that a gun owner might submit to the rigors of Guardianship, but, aside from announcing the existence of the program and the numbers of Guardians in the country, neither their identity nor their locations – even generally – would be published.
Obviously they would be witnesses, but perhaps better-quality witnesses – part of their training. Masking their identities at trial is not an insurmountable problem.
Many of the objections raised to the free exercise of 2nd Amendment rights eventually come around to “that’s not the kind of country we are,” or, “we aren’t that kind of people.” Such statements are correct, in the worst way. America is increasingly occupied by who must be seen as “non-Americans.”
That is, there are, ANNUALLY, many thousands of illegal and legal entrants added to our population, who have no desire or intent to “become” Americans. In other words, they are not interested in our culture, morals or heritage of individual responsibility. Many of these entrants and immigrants, come to the U. S. for no more than personal gain. They may work, but this means “under the table” for a large number. They may be granted refugee status and this provides various forms of welfare support without waiting, and it is as likely as not that what is claimed to earn “refugee” status is a lie. They may have a distant relative already here, making it easy to “win” welfare status.
They may simply be criminals, drug merchants or otherwise, ready to take full advantage of liberalism’s open arms. Despite their receipt of welfare and education, these criminal types remain members of criminal gangs who ply death amongst us.
The rise of indigenous gangs is another source of extreme criminality that soft hearts and softer heads attempt to explain, rationalize and justify as a fault not of the criminals involved, but of society -American society – itself.
None of these sources of sociopathy can be traced to the mere availability of guns, nor to the legal ownership of guns, regardless of number. What these sources have done, similarly to the influx of Italian gangs in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s, is to introduce a new element of danger and criminality to American society, with two significant differences.
One is the scale and reach of modern criminality – largely connected to drugs – which reaches down to virtually every street, unlike “organized crime” that may have profited from many streets, but which limited its murderous effects to rivals in its own universe. The other is that, today, murder is a way of doing business, even crappy, penny-ante neighborhood-dominance business. Kids are being shot before they can overdose.
The conditions for widespread death-dealing are a direct result of federal policiy failures. Yet many are afraid to recognize – or are blind to – that fact. As suburban kids, from “good” towns and families run a race to eternity with heroin, fentanyl and pain-killers, not always beating the cops with the Narcan, at least not the first time, more and more parents, police, teachers and counselors are asking why things have sunk to this.
Having porous borders for not just the past 8 years, but for the past 30, has promoted the hard drug trade like nothing else. Instead of delivering drugs to retailers, loose immigration has enabled larger-scale wholesalers to establish themselves in every metropolitan area and in many mid-size cities. Drugs, now, are delivered in tons rather than pounds. Shipments of cash in return are measured the same way.
A federal administration that prevents arrest and deportation of illegals only compounds failures of policy marking the last 30 or more years. Compounding that, the policy of releasing convicted criminals, mostly drug dealers – re-defined as “non-violent” offenders – has made a mockery of federal law in general, and a mockery of the oath by every member of our armed forces, to “…support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic…”
Finally, we have entered a period of social confusion that seems more concerned with the misfortune of criminals than with that of their victims. A new faith in “rehabilitation” has infected our judicial network and we are less safe. Some can be rehabilitated, and God bless them. The other 80% of violent offenders – and I include drug dealers – will not be. Yet we feel compelled to parole them, somehow, to test arcane psychological theories. No one involved is held accountable when a parolee murders an innocent, and we are less safe.
Combined with the influx of new criminals from outside our borders, we have created our own, unfolding tragedy. Gun ownership is a perfectly logical reaction; self-defense an inherent right, the Guardian program a wise extension of those rights. I strongly encourage its adoption.