Tag Archives: welfare

Climate, Crime, Culture, Economics, Family, Religion

PARTY OF DEATH

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The United States is, essentially, a “Christian” nation. We were founded by Christians and our fundamental laws and jurisprudence are inspired by the laws and advisories of how to live and love that are contained in the Old and New Testaments. For hundreds of years the lessons of Christ have slowly converted relative pagans into empathetic Christians. It never worked universally; there have always been agnostics and atheists, but until quite lately, they were the outliers. Virtually automatically, the divine lessons and instructions have been modified, structured and even diluted by men (mostly), since they were first revealed. As quickly as Jesus, the Christ, declared His “church,” Peter and his spiritual descendants have seized Christ’s teachings as the means to political power and economic, let alone intellectual, control of “the masses.”

It was unavoidable. We have “free will” and the daily, hourly, momentary opportunity to choose from evil, which seems to lurk around every corner… when not lurking right beside us. Still, prelates of churches based on multiple emphases of certain teachings and of the traditions of Catholicism or Orthodox Christianity, have continued to prod us toward incrementally closer adherence to Christ’s teachings. It worked for centuries, resulting in the evolution of what we call modern ethics and economics… and freedom. Ultimately, the pinnacle of American success was reached, approximately in 1962.

The forces attempting to unseat Christianity have never wavered. The energy they have employed was noted as “early” as the story of the Garden of Eden. As quickly as God had prepared Man and Woman to take dominion over His “garden,” the serpent offered a great temptation. At the moment of choice, God’s creation chose to accept the risk to enjoy the “benefits.” Today we call those temptations “socialism.” Its “benefits” are the promise of avoiding both responsibility and hard work, while having access to everything in creation. Ancillary benefits include debauchery and license to enjoy sexual perversions and the thrills of hatred. No longer would the “serfs” have to earn their own way or face the responsibility for their decisions. Paradise on Earth.

The simplest, clearest distinction between the “forces of God” and the forces of anti-religious socialism can be stated as Life versus Death. God promises not only life on Earth, but eternal life. Socialism promises irresponsible cavort on Earth and then, lights out. Rather than growing both spiritually and physically by accepting the tests and responsibilities, even hardships and opportunities of life, many are tempted to seek comforts, enjoyments and conveniences of life without hardship, unfairness, or injustice, as promised by the sirens of socialism and, even more promissory, Communists. Throughout the growth of the socialist opposition to Christian-based government and economics, Democrat or Social-Democrat political parties have drifted (if not skipped) closer to outright Socialism while pretending to adhere to the traditions of “Western” civilization and civilian governance. But, like all opposition to Christian influence, their efforts are constant – sometimes incremental, sometimes leaping and bounding as they undercut those same traditions in pursuit of power.

Since that same 1962, leftist forces have assumed control of the “Democratic” party. First, they killed Kennedy… not the ordinary Democrats like Johnson and others, but the rabid defenders of the C.I.A. and other elements of the growing, deep, administrative state – the true leftists. One by one, people who overtly dislike everything about religious freedom – Judaism and Christianity, specifically – managed to obtain election to the House and Senate. First through opposition to fighting Communism in Viet-Nam and marshaling students to widespread demonstrations against the government, and then, cherry on top, unseating President Richard Nixon. A new landscape emerged in American politics and power; trust in government was gone. Rebellions of the ‘60’s shifted morality to the dark side as federalized welfare began to erode family strengths and the raising of children to be new, moral, responsible adults. As the old order, the fundament of governance, liberty and improved standards of living, imperfect but wildly successful, was dumped, the new order of Roe v. Wade was imposed on the flimsy premise that the “penumbra of the Constitution” protects a brand of “privacy” that permits personal convenience to be worth more than human life.

Since the explosion of drug addiction as new streams of tar heroin entered the U. S. market from Southeast Asia (thank-you, C.I.A. and the Golden Triangle), the “War on Drugs” has managed to capture tons of drugs and dollars, but the total flow of both has increased for decades. Drugs provide a foul but profitable – and corrupting – business in cities large and small, and a slow-motion suicide process for thousands of addicts. We’ve never had the upper hand on drugs. As we have helped to feed the growth of Mexican Cartels (and their Chinese providers) there has grown a deep division in American politics: Democrats have favored illegal entrants and “sanctuary” status for cities and states, where police cannot cooperate with federal deportation enforcement. Republicans have been opposed to both, and yet thwarted in every attempt to sanction so-called, law-nullifying, “sanctuary” declarations.

Today, drugs, mainly fentanyl, kill 100,000 mostly younger Americans EVERY DAMN YEAR! If we were facing groups of people who were SHOOTING and killing 100,000 Americans every year, this American hopes that we would marshal our forces and destroy them, saving the lives of our sons and daughters. Yet, for some reason, we have neither the wit nor will to stop drugs. Apparently there is a “right” to suicide by addiction. Did I mention profitable corruption? Who opposes rampant addiction? Well, it seems to be a right-wing thing which is condemned by the left (Democrats) since so many people wind up incarcerated for drug dealing. Boo-hoo. There must be a racist component since there is a preponderance of black and brown people breaking laws involving drugs. So, less than nothing is done. Indeed, in Democrat cities there are varieties of programs that FACILITATE drug use on the basis of… hold on to your brains… SAFETY!

A hundred-thousand lives are not enough. The same forces apologizing for drug users are rabidly in favor of abortion up to the moment of birth AND EVEN BEYOND THAT MOMENT. Indeed, they base their election efforts on appealing to women who agree with having the RIGHT to destroy gestating beings. First they must remain convinced that the growth in their bellies is not a human being.

Finally, the same leftists in the U. S. tend strongly toward both globalism (communism) and wars of maintenance (leftists in both parties) where, in effect, our greatest export are young men and women who risk death or disability for circumstances that have no plan for victory. And, still, there are too many Americans.

Democrats have an affinity for globalist fantasy, like “Climate Change,” as the reason to change U. S. policy to the detriment of our economy and, now, our food supply. They’ve gone so far as to advise numbskulls to consider the climate before having children… not before having sex. After all, if something goes “wrong,” we can always kill the product. Instead of promoting a clean, non-polluting economy, they prefer the more fascist approach of restriction, mandation and coercion through economic leverage, like encouraging banks and others to not do business with anyone who threatens the climate, as they see it, or, God forbid, exercises Constitutional rights. This includes changing the technologies of washing machines, stoves, toilets and schoolbuses, and not for the better. After all, a lot of those manufacturers are white people, and of Euro-centric backgrounds who don’t deserve any consideration for climate and a hundred other reasons, especially if Christian to boot.

Covid-19 showed that the W.H.O., China and the U. N. can fool all the people some of the time, but they were able to kill off only a few million humans with the original bug and then the mRNA shots. They’ll have to do something more, ummm… effective, yes, effective, to get the world population down to their “ideal” of a billion or fewer. That many people could eat beef all they want without damaging the Earth. Still, it will take a lot of dying to achieve the “safety” of our planet in a single lifetime.

When it starts, don’t believe a word they say.

Biden, Culture, Governance, Religion, Responsibility

THE NEW JERUSALEM

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Volunteer “service” clubs are a crucial part of American exceptionalism.  Whoops, these days it is imPrudent to describe the United States of America as exceptional in any way, yet it IS Prudent to so describe it and us, that way.  Contrary to the outright lies and un-historic opinion contained in the “1619 Project,” the founding of our nation WAS exceptional compared to ALL other forms of greater-than-tribal governance ever tried in all of history.  We were, upon our founding, an exception.  Service clubs are not exceptional in and of themselves, but the American style of such voluntary assemblies is unique if, for no other reason, because of patriotism.

The United States was founded as an extension of the will of the God of Abraham, and of Christianity: the “New Jerusalem.”  Carefully delineated in Ezekiel, the simple understanding of the new temple, the Holy of Holies and the city around it, was “Where the Lord God is.”  Subject to Masonic interpretation, the much-sullied Jerusalem, stained by the conquest by Islamic armies, needed replacement on Earth and the “new world” of America looked to be the “clean” location for the New Jerusalem, ostensibly defined in the District of Columbia. 

Distinction from Europe, and from England following the Treaty of Paris, led the “Founding Fathers” to create an exceptional set of premises to define the first populist, Constitutionally limited government.  It was and is exceptional.  Only fools and communists cannot admit the truth of that statement.  That it was flawed cannot be argued, nor can the fact that the new structure of distributed powers contained the tools to correct those flaws.

Obviously those flaws, most intensely, that of slavery, neither faded away nor were resolved quickly enough.  Yet, to keep its moral word, The United States took sides on the question of slavery at the most serious possible level: life or death… of the nation and of hundreds of thousands of soldiers and citizens.  No nation, anywhere or at any time, has paid such a high price to adjust relations between races, ie. to end racial injustice.  No nation.  Lately, however, as leftists are wont to do, we have been rubbing salt in old, old wounds, racial and pseudo-racial, attempting to exhume the guilt of past generations so as to gain dominance over current ones.  What a rotten process it is.

Those seeking political – or military – advantage, love conflict.  Those are they for whom the suffering, even deaths of those enmeshed in conflict are of no moral or humane concern.  For those, there is always some nebulous, overarching and much greater morality that magically forgives all injustices on the path to victory or revolution.  The presence of conflict implies an eventual resolution of that conflict, wherein all the opportunities for drastic change resides.  What sort of drastic change might be needed?

For those who have been busy tearing down our heritage, our Constitution, historical statues and election laws, the drastic change leads only to destruction of this democratic republic and its replacement with a fundamentally communist-socialist regime in concert with International Communism, but dominated by black and brown people.

For those of us who are not sold on that end result, what changes should we make and insist upon from OUR government?  Should we insist on only truth being taught in our schools?  All of them?  This would eliminate race and racialism as “curricula.”  There is enough negative, and positive, in TRUTH, to show the wrongness of slavery and racial discrimination, while showing the exceptional nature of the American model.  Perhaps we could insist on the strengths of smaller government as part of “civics” education.  Could we learn to be individually moral and responsible citizens rather than haters of one another?  That would be a nation-strengthening change.

Could we create a plan to ease people OFF of welfare?  The worst aspect of socialism is dependency and lack of growth as an individual.  What sort of rotten philosophy would guide anyone toward that end?  After 60 years of federalized welfare we have accomplished nothing as successfully as the destruction of the nuclear family, particularly of black and brown peoples.  Who could be proud of that?  Who could possibly proclaim that “accomplishment” as a reason to be granted more elected power?  Who would “fall” for it?

What the past 60 years have done is prepare a failing nation for Communism, and 2020 is the year the Communists among us believed their time to pounce had come, and pounce they did.  COVID-19 was their major ally whose only worldwide beneficiary was Communist China and a handful of multi-billionaire oligarchs for whom borders are mere address indicia.  The longer we fail to recognize the source of COVID’s international spread, the sooner we will fall to China for lack of preparatory defense.  Shame on us and on “our” media for whom facts are mere props or weapons in the battle to hide the truth.

During the COVID attack, Americans of all sorts were taught to follow the somewhat whimsical dictates of public “servants,” for whom Constitutional rights took a back seat, every time, to the fears mongered by elected and non-elected experts who, it turns out, were involved in the CREATION of the monster known as COVID-19, and, worse, creation in collaboration with Communist China’s military-dominated virology laboratory in Wuhan.  Little by little we are learning about the fraudulent nature of how the COVID epidemic was being handled in the United States, largely by the deep state and the collusion between “big Pharma” and the CDC and NIH bureaucracies.  Supporting their mis-directions were the cruel and mainly ignorant reactions of governors and mayors as they locked down economic and other activities on the premise of “slowing” the spread of the virus.  It is far from clear that any of the lockdown actions were particularly effective except to ruin the best economy in the world.

Oddly, the same period of economic lockdown and breakdown was chosen for coordinated rioting and violent, even murderous protests of ostensible “systemic” racism.  “BLM” and “Antifa” and most Democrats running large cities purveyed a grand lie of the historic upset over the death of George Floyd as adequate justification for destroying businesses and other properties, looting and violent attacks on municipal and federal buildings – particularly police/law-enforcement related.  Immediately, national leaders had to explain away (lie about) the threat of COVID among irresponsible rioters while locking down churches, schools and a host of other business types and activities like weddings, funerals and graduations.

Amazingly, the state and federal politicians who forced unconstitutional changes in voting procedures across the country, and who lied about the nature and consequences of multiple protests and riots, are the same who charge anyone, particularly Trump, who might question the results of the oddest election in our history, an election replete with an incredible set of vote-pattern anomalies made astronomically less likely to be innocent by virtue of their simultaneous manifestation at a single historic point… all favoring the least-competent candidate to ever win a major-party nomination, with telling lies.  We are still told that only that party can be telling the truth about the weird 2020 electoral processes.

Maybe a change we might demand would be honesty.  Perhaps we could strengthen our body politic and our “united” peoples (“e pluribus unum”) by telling the truth about the nature of communist/Marxist front groups who led the riots of 2020.  Maybe we could demand honesty from Congress about our budgets.  If budget honesty is too much to ask, maybe we can get just the truth about January 6th and the involvement of undercover federal law-enforcement personnel on that day and the days leading up to the breach of the capitol.

Maybe we could change how we identify ourselves, not by discarding precise pronouns in favor of those that somehow validate self-declared, non-empirical feelings, but by celebrating the exceptional quality of citizenship in the United States of America.  Maybe we could change the relative application of Constitutional rights to only U. S. citizens, relegating non-citizens to somewhat lesser advantage when residing in the U. S.  Another change might be to relegate non-citizens who enter our nation illegally, to the most temporary residency status, including comfortable transportation back to their countries of origin, assuming they have completed their prison terms, if so disposed.

The “New Jerusalem” is a concept, not a place; a means of fulfilling a philosophy, not a myth.  Jerusalem is “where the Lord God is,” which is to say, “Where the surrender to God’s will is.”  To Masons, Jerusalem is expressible in a sacred geometry: sequences of geometric ratios and relationships that outpicture divine mathematics.  Washington, D. C. is laid out in partial fulfillment of those divine patterns.  The Constitution and other founding “scriptures” are laid out to enable religious men and women to fulfill their own divine geometries, as they fulfill the divine plan of America.  It is not all an accident of architecture, but an intensely purposeful architecture.  God is the Divine Architect in both physical form of the Universe, and in the spiritual design of His Laws for mankind: each fits and complements the other.  The Universe for testing man’s mettle and faith; the Law for testing man’s faith and mettle.

The imperfect but perfectible architecture of the United States was entrusted to future generations.  Our democratic republic was deemed suitable only to a moral and religious people, being inadequate to any other.  To the best of its ability, the global, socialist movement to unseat God has inexorably pursued the removal of God, Christianity and (our) divine architecture of freedom and free will that is essential for the evolution of souls and the defeat of evil.  That architecture was entrusted across the ages to the fledgling United States.  Since the end of the Civil War Americans have done their best to shuck off this holy responsibility as we have shucked off holiness, itself.  The left perceived and employed our weaknesses and struck in 2020.  The hopeless Mr. Biden, ostensible president of the people to whom America, the “New Jerusalem” was entrusted, is our reward and his plans – or someone’s plans – are well underway to completing the undermining of the two architectures.  Just read H.R. 5.

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“20-20” Not So clear

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Oh say, can you see?
Oh say, can you see?

As Minneapolis (and three dozen other cities) burns and is given over to lawless thugs because, evidently, it is politically correct to do so and politically incorrect to arrest looters and arsonists and vandals, the United States has to face some uncomfortable truths, and resolve to believe them, since they are, well… true.

Here is one: sixty years of federalized welfare has destroyed the lives, hopes and attitudes of many blacks.  It has also destroyed the black family unit which had been gaining ground at an accelerated rate for two decades prior to the Great society, and at an uneven, but relentlessly upward direction for seven or eight decades prior to that.

Here’s another:  government cannot “fix” racism, nor can it “make” people love one another, or desire to integrate with one another.  What government, through the adjudication of INjustice can do, is set standards and make clear the police, judicial and penal consequences for the mistreatment of any individual, whether civilly or criminally.

We have enough laws.  We have the most beautiful Constitution and amendments that create a legal  structure of equality of opportunity for every individual, and of equality under the law for every individual.  But the rights guaranteed on paper do not belong to the government nor do they come from government; they belong to United States citizens who have formed  governments to ensure, protect and enforce those rights.  And, when those rights are abrogated by institutions or by individuals, those same governments, who are formed by and paid by we the people, and who are obligated to defend, protect and serve US, must take correct, legal, swift action against the offender(s).

Unfortunately our political structures have failed, largely in order to serve themselves, to treat individuals as deserving of every right and freedom as sovereign individuals, but rather as members of groups – groups who can be defined by either victimhood or unfair advantage.  Identity politics is the underlying acid that has eaten away at the foundations of success for Americans.  It is the same acid that leaves us, nationally, nearly destitute, as we constantly borrow from future generations to make ourselves more comfortable or politically powerful (and wealthy) today.  For shame.

The long-term political structure in Minneapolis and in Minnesota, generated and managed the police and judicial environments that left large numbers of people so distrustful of authority that a spark like a bad police action ignited the pent-up hatreds that politicians have pretended for years have nothing to do with them.  Their reaction is to blame President Trump.  He’ll react, somehow, and almost no one will be happy with what he does or doesn’t do.  Under the Constitution, under our federal system of 50 sovereign states, and under hundreds of years of common law and morals, it is not the president’s job or duty to resolve the grievances suffered by an individual in Minneapolis, Minnesota, except  that he must direct the Department of Justice to ascertain whether federal laws or Constitutionally protected rights have been abrogated. 

He cannot override the government of Minnesota or of Minneapolis.  Yet as the office of president has become as much one of celebrity as of competence or leadership, people, and the press, expect every problem to be federalized.  Competing political forces are attempting to gain advantage by spewing their own hates and dislikes in efforts to gain power from a bad even that, under group identity politics, is portrayed as a national problem.  It is an individual problem, allowed to fester by incompetent local police management and union politics, which played out against an individual, whose family, without question, deserves justice and probably substantial compensation for wrongful death at the hands of the city of Minneapolis.

If the political “leaders” of that city had any vision, they’d be having every other police officer in that department hand-deliver notes of regret and sorrow to Mr. Floyd’s family, with promises to prevent any such event.

The problem is that the utterly corrupt political cabals that generated the equally utter hopelessness that engenders the bottomless hatred for “white” society and control systems – like police – is not the group we should expect to propose a solution for utter corruption.  Just saying.  These are human conditions, created by humans.  Humans can, if armed with the right attitudes and beliefs – philosophies, if you will – prescribe right policies and applications of law and freedom that will unleash the creative, constructive power of inner-city citizens regardless of color.  If you are unable to believe this is possible, then you cannot help form the new structure… can you?

To help the irresolute, Prudence can provide a “coral fact,” as they say in Hawaii, to wit: increasing welfare payments to anyone is nowhere part of the solution.  So, let’s think fresh thoughts.  Actually, they need not be all that fresh, since the mechanisms of success and personal independence are rather well known.  “Oh, c’mon, Prudence!  These are complex problems.  Blacks have been repressed and discriminated against for hundreds of years in this country.  The solutions will take time.”  Words to that effect will be tossed across important looking meeting rooms for months after these riots are almost forgotten by the “press.”

Some very serious person who “sees the big picture” is certain to say, “We can’t just cut people off from their EBT, can we.”  It should be a question but the speaker isn’t seeking any other answer… at all.  She (most likely a she who feels great sympathy for the downtrodden) is part of the welfare industry, not so very well paid, but paid above average, plus state benefits and pension.  And she cares a whole heck of a lot.  She always votes Democrat because they do the most to help the poor.  Ultimately the meeting breaks up after resolving to petition the state for massive reconstruction funds and new housing upgrades, and to have the entire congressional delegation file and back legislation to provide tax breaks to industries to invest in the riot-torn neighborhoods across the country.  They all feel very good about their answers to the problems.  Why, it could be 8, 9 years before there is any unrest in those cities.

People are made weaker from handouts, sympathy and low expectations.  Strength, self-esteem and purposeful living come from attainment.  Having someone tell you that even though you are a personal failure, full of hatreds and resentment for having accomplished nothing of value to others, that you are important and “entitled” to the same “equality” that others have, only weakens the listener.  He or she knows that his or her status and independence have not improved one iota since the last time a social worker told them they were just as worthy as any white person.  After a couple of generations of welfare subsistence, the “white” system is an enemy, not an example; the armed defenders of an obviously racist country and society are merely armed enemies whose actions are invalid at every police, judicial and penal level.  There is no possibility of compromise.

“Piss me off enough and I’m gonna’ burn your house down.”

It simply is not Prudent to attempt to fix the problems, now a mere membrane away, with the policies of the last 60 years that created them.  What have we got to lose?

One can observe the feckless reactions of mayors and governors to the transformation of “loving” protests into coordinated  riots across the country.  Are these failures based on political motivations?  They certainly are not based on executive decision-making.  What fools these liberals be.  Have we decided, politically, that there is more than one America?  That model has placed some of these nincompoops into power.  Do they fear losing their political influence so much that they will allow the destruction of their jurisdictions so as not to “offend” destructive mobs?  If there were ever an un-American group/organization it is Antifa, and these are the people who must not be offended?  For shame.

The neighborhoods where welfare is the largest source of income, and any family now in its second or later generation of welfare as its source of income, must be transformed.  This won’t happen by building nicer public housing, nice as it may be.  Even for those who have come to terms with never being independent of welfare handouts, they must be directed, guided, rewarded for and, ultimately, forced onto a path of attainment.  What does that mean?

First, responsibility.  This requires moral judgment on the part of the welfare industry, something for which current policies and employees thereof are incapable.  We have created a process of handing out monies by people who are just as resentful of “white” attainment models as are the increasingly hopeless clients of the system.  More welfare yields more resentment, so it’s not a solution model.  Public assistance must reward attainment, not mere acquiescence.  That is, recipients need to be taught to believe in their own ability to be responsible for themselves and, despite everything they’ve been taught or heard for 60 or 150 years, that their efforts will succeed. 

This won’t be done through “training programs,” “computer literacy” classes or voter recruitment drives.  Some form of “responsibility boot-camp” is required, operated by people who believe in free-enterprise capitalism and in “e pluribus unum.”  What have we got to lose?  Political influence?

Our existence as a nation depends on the ideas  that make us a nation.  We are not a nation because of shared ethnicity, but because of shared ideas and ideals, the main one of which is “Out of many, One” – e pluribus unum.  This is the American dream: that all kinds of people, recognizing that people are NOT all the same, but are all entitled to equality of opportunity – to make the most and best of themselves – and to equality under the law, can live as one people!  There is little else that a government “of the people, by the people and for the people,” can honestly do… or should do.  The breakdown of order in multiple cities here in late May of 2020, is the result of attempting to dishonestly  do for people not because of their equality under the law, but because of their inequality  under the law.

The socialist outlook is to disperse responsibility for failure and to force sharing of success.  And, they teach this fallacy, having assumed control, politically and actually, of the government education monopoly.  Without changing the belief of all of our citizens that there is a “sub-class” of people who are incapable of being responsible unto themselves and their families, the end result will fail to strengthen society.  We cannot “pay off” people who hate the concepts of America and thereby get them to suddenly love this nation.

Every single program going forward must be designed in accord with the principles of personal responsibility and of the opportunity to attain to ever greater success and status.

Attainment is not about getting rich, although money can, with the right attitudes, be part of the measure of it.  Getting richer  in many more ways than money is the truer measure.  So far, and it’s been only about 100,000 years, so it’s not yet proven, humans have found only one way to advance: by attaining to every level of advancement, which is to say, by striving for each.  So far, and it’s been only about 100,000 years, no one has been able to give attainment to anyone, only the opportunity to reach for it.

It would seem that no government has ever been able to grant anyone the rewards obtained by striving and earning a certain level of attainment, only money – which has never made anyone a better human.  It follows that no quantity of sympathetic or even empathetic words has ever changed the outcome of pretending that a person is not responsible for his or her decisions, actions or feelings; likewise, those words cannot change a handout into attainment.  Yet every human being has the spark of attainment from birth… until taught otherwise.

Clearly it is parents who must instill the essential morals and beliefs… and decency into their children.  Clearly millions of parents have failed miserably at their duty; our governments have failed by supporting “families” that take no responsibility for themselves, and less for their children.  Financing generational resentment is not a plan.  As local and state governments finally recognize the need to stop rioters, the question of what to do with violent, destructive, anti-American thugs who are not interested in the path of attainment, must be answered.  Do we think we’re going to coddle them enough or pay them enough to change their hatred to love?  Do we intend to just send them home to apartments that we renovate to make their living conditions more fair?

Where should they go?  What kind of jobs can they do – or would they do – to support themselves?  Drug dealing?  Gun dealing?  Extortion?  House painter?  Roofer?  Carpenter?  Do we expect to incarcerate them all until they turn nice or die?  In part, their state of hatred and resentment is “our” fault and we can’t continue treating them as we have under the “Great Society.”  Do we try to be “nicer” to them?  Those willing to riot and destroy businesses and willing to kill police, are not part of American society.  They are not like you and me and our children.  Should we reward their hatred for decent society because we feel sorry for them?  Where should we let them live?  Where should they be so that the rest of us are protected from them?

Should they get to eat if they don’t work to support themselves legally?  That’s a deeper question than it sounds.

Economics, Education, Politics 2018

Socialist is as Socialist Does

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The “flash” of Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’ success over Joe Crowley in the 14th District in Bronx and Queens, New York, seems to have ignited latent socialist dreams in dozens of Democrat Party “leaders.” All of a sudden there is a “new” idea on the political landscape: more than half the people are downtrodden victims of capitalism and the “lucky” ones who work are the oppressors and should be forced, by law, to support those less fortunate. Hallelujah! We are saved.

Aside from the fact that there is absolutely nothing new about these views, there is also nothing new about their perpetual, predictable failures. Their primary justification is envy and, more frequently today, hatred. Those are sad and fetid foundations for a plan intended to “lift” people out of poverty and hopelessness. Ocasio-Cortez has done a service to America, however, by revealing the vacuum of historical understanding of human nature and of the American people in particular. Perhaps it is a reasonable reaction to the mess we have made of enlightened economics in the United States; it is not a reasonable reaction to the lessons of history.

If only Republicans and other mildly conservative people were awake to the rot eating away at the true American promise and premise, instead of being so deeply beholden to the salamanders of money.

Loosely described, the American economy (and political dysfunction) is a result of creeping socialism that has been gnawing at our strengths since the Civil War – more noticeably since the 1900’s.

Socialism and other forms of mis-identified Social Justice, can win votes, sometimes for very ignorant or, dare we say, stupid candidates for office. They get elected by promising to A) Punish the oppressors, and, B) Hand out free stuff. Sometimes they are neither ignorant or stupid, but evil; sometimes they’re all three. Unenlightened conservatives, at the other end of the pendulum’s arc, promise to punish the freeloaders and to enrich the productive, hard-working class. Deportation and prevention of illegal entrants is a perverse gift to their politicking, just as outrageous concentrations of wealth and power in the hands of some of history’s most accomplished thieves is to Socialists.

Ocasio-Cortez is a graduate of Boston University where she learned something about economics. Her statements about economics and “public” financing, however, would lead one to recognize that what one believes is far more motivating in both words and deeds than any expensive education. Maybe she believes what she says about Socialist distribution of wealth… if only there were a Socialist distribution of productivity that partnered with it.

One can forgive her misunderstandings of the current federal budget, tax rates and overall distribution of taxation, [see “http://www.prudenceleadbetter.com/2017/11/04/a-few-words-on-capitalism-part-1/”] but it is a bit harder to overlook her total misrepresentation of her “Bronx” background and the supposed house-cleaning by her mother. She displays no better ethics than many disreputable politicians before, beside and in front of her. Conservatives, or Republicans, at least, seize on her ignorance and inconsistency, “progressive” socialists overlook it – belief trumps evidence.

It is harder to overlook the deliberate ignorance of both soft Republicans and hard Democrats who hold office, now. Well, perhaps ignorance is too generous; maybe most are stupid, or evil. Prudence indicates that holding office in the U.S., these days, is altogether too lucrative, too irresponsible and too secure against challengers. “Conservatism, Socialism… what’s the difference if I can snag the sweetest pension in the free world?”

It makes a lot of difference to the function and future of the United States. One needs, as does Ocasio-Cortez, to appreciate the origins and history of the U. S. The Europeans, Spanish, French, English, Dutch, Germans, Scandinavians and others, who came to the “New World” were very strong people. They were courageous enough to risk everything simply for opportunity. If they survived the first winter, there existed a chance they could make a successful life, one they’d have to carve out of wilderness. If they didn’t hunt game successfully or failed to prepare a field for planting, they could starve. Each had, or very quickly learned multiple skills since there were no hardware stores or clothing stores… or even cloth stores.

Virtually all were religious, Christian, mostly, or Jewish. Establishing churches was one of their first community projects; thanking God a daily ritual. Many died young from disease, injury, bad food, and from Indian defenses of their own lands and livelihoods. For women, childbirth was a major risk. Still, they came and slowly triumphed, knit by religion into common weal and defense, even when fighting other Europeans. The borders and nations we know in North and South America are the result, including hard-fought wars of independence from the European homelands. No matter how easy it is to smugly judge their actions it is admiration that we owe them, not condemnation.

They arrived with what they could carry. There was no welfare. Some were charitable, some more than others. There were no chits for free food and no subsidization for housing or health-care. Still, they came: strong, risk-taking, resolute, religious. Some of the strongest people in the world, and the government they formed, a constitutional republic, is based on the finest secular distillation of Biblical lessons ever devised: As ye sow, so shall (must) ye reap. It’s based on personal responsibility, if you don’t grasp the meaning in the King James version: personal responsibility for actions and inactions, successes and failures, honesty and dishonesty. Each is personally responsible for his or her actions throughout life. For many, there is a personal responsibility to God for everything good or bad. In lieu of that faith, personal responsibility is still the best approach to life, growth, personal improvement and the strength of society. Washing the concept out with the soft soap of Socialism is a choice made at great peril, threatening the strengths of society, families and individuals.

Today we are throwing out every vestige of the Bible we can identify. Ten thousand years of strengthening morals have been flushed away in a hundred years. America is losing its way at the very point that the original lie, Socialism, is rising up in the hearts and minds of poorly educated young people, led by the crassest of politicians.

One can recognize the original lie, easily. Under socialism individuals are absolved of individual responsibility, first by their identification with a group or class of people. Indeed, when it comes to politics, each identified group – and group member – is expected to vote the socialist ticket. If one can also be placed in a group that has been victimized by “the establishment,” which is defined variously as fits the socialist need, then that group is supposed to vote even more reliably socialist.
If a person runs afoul of the law, Socialism likes to diffuse the causes of that criminal activity, often by ascribing a history of victimhood and abuse, poverty, discrimination, lookism, sexism or, the trump card, homophobia. Therefore a long-term incarceration is unfair and we should extend the hand of additional welfare to help in the unjustly-charged individual’s rehabilitation. Just an example; no one can seriously imagine such an argument carrying any weight in a courtroom.

Socialism does not respect nationalism. For many of our young people, today, defining and defending of our borders is viewed as some sort of international crime, an affront to everyone who wants to live here instead of his or her own homeland. How twisted. How wasteful… that these people could have consumed $200,000 to $300,000 worth of public education and been granted DIPLOMAS ostensibly indicating successful completion of 12 or 13 years of learning. Yet they are so ignorant they don’t even know what they don’t know. They seem to “hang” with others who celebrate the same ignorance and who applaud statements and beliefs of abject stupidity… at least in terms of history and human experience.

It is incumbent upon Christians and Jews, and upon Constitutionalists, generally, to explain again and again why the morals and economics that help people perfect themselves, and that built the ideas and ideals of America, are better for this nation and the world, than ANY Socialist plan.

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.

 

 

Economics, Education, Race

Government by Unreality

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Education, Race

Damned Conservatives

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Alas poor education, we once were free.  For those of us… you, who are angry with “conservatives” and who agree that conservatives are (choose all that apply): 1) racist;   2) homophobic; 3) Islamophobic; 4) “Trans”-phobic; 5) anti-women; 6) anti-science;    7) climate change deniers; and 8) fascists.  Excuse me, I forgot, 9) Christian fanatics.

Conservatives who support or, worse, don’t mind Donald Trump, are also stupid.  Did we pretty-much cover it?  Let’s not forget the Russians – don’t mean to slight anyone.

The United States was premised on the concept of individual sovereignty and liberty.  This isn’t taught anymore, but it’s true.  If you perceive or believe that we are “free” only when our entire group is free, then you are, to a degree, believing that the very basis for the exceptional founding of our nation, is no longer valid.  That’s quite sad.

The U. S. was not founded to be a unionized social-service mega-agency.  That we have become so is far from a testament to our benign compassion for the poor; not at all.  Rather, it is a massive subversion of liberty by the left.

“What?”  You exclaim, “Should we just let these poor, oppressed people starve?  If that’s what conservatism is, leave me out!”

No, conservatives would have taught those starving people to feed and otherwise take care of themselves.  Those same would then move forward in life without the artificial welfare of any government.  That seems, to the racist, homophobic, anti-women Neanderthals that liberals hate so deeply, like the ultimate compassionate action, and is, in fact, the very basis of free-enterprise capitalism.  There is wide misunderstanding about these principles.

The most easily grasped distinction between liberalism (in modern definition), or leftism, and conservatism (in modern definition), is responsibility – personal responsibility.  That is, modern liberals perceive everyone only as a member of a “demographic.”  Everyone only has identity due to matching characteristics of a named (must be known by a name) group.

Easiest to understand in this odd universe is a group known variously as “people of color,” “African-Americans,” “blacks,” or the current liberally-correct description.  People with brown skin are of a hundred origins and genealogies.  By definition they do not comprise a “group” or a tribe or even a nationality.  Why on earth would rational people look at people with brown skin as if they were somehow all connected or similar?  The answer reveals the heart of modern leftism.

The only rational purpose for grouping individuals who share a trait or appearance… even a little, is because those who consider them so might gain political power.  This rationalization has also infected members of the artificially constructed group, who join with liberals in maintaining the belief in the existence of a group that exists only politically and not in fact.  Great anger, hatred and historical distortion stems from this artificial group perception.  By automatic reflection, or reaction, every action of unkindness or perceived “hatred,” practiced by anyone not “in” the artificial group, becomes a failing of everyone in the “outgroup,” so long as its members share some identifiable characteristic – like a different skin color.  Suddenly, politically, hatred of the outgroup has flowered, and “white privilege” is the result.

Such hatred requires nurturing and nutrition.  Once embarked on the road to political power, people who know how to profit from hatred can’t seem ever to reverse course.  The joys of political office are too enticing; the lack of true responsibility too comforting, the outlandish emoluments too rewarding.  Today, hatreds are the MOST COMMON political motivations; statesmanship is nearly invisible.

For some “hatred” is simple cynicism.  These are they for whom “public service” is mere aggrandizement, and to Hell with society so long as they get as much out of our pockets as they can.  For the next level of public cynics, power is their profit, and they are satisfied to gain power for themselves, and to Hell with the rest of us.  The consequences of their powers are of little concern to them – indeed they generally absolve themselves of requirements to adhere to laws they codify.  Mixed into the second group are some of those who learn how to employ baser, defined hatreds in order to gain and retain their cynical powers.  Now it’s not simple lies and thievery, it is society-threatening.

And here we are.  Conservatives will point out that the left, constantly riding the “racist” bull, are using black hatred for white supremacists to enhance leftist political power, when it is the left that actually hates blacks by cynically trapping and consigning them to an artificial welfare life.  Blacks, themselves, hate what has happened to them, as they should, but careful education has taught them that it is conservatives who have done this to them.  And on the cycle of hatred goes, while fattened liberals live in mansions, sometimes not even in the districts they “represent.”

There are conservative haters, some of whom actually “hate” black or brown people.  Those are a very tiny minority.  Careful education and media manipulation teaches blacks that these few represent all conservatives.  This is easily refuted, but that is never taught. If one simply sets aside personal concerns temporarily and contemplates the question: “What element of society is primarily responsible for social and governmental failure?”

The likely answer will be “conservatives” or, at the very least, “Republicans,” the two far from synonymous.  At that point, the thoughtful and caring citizen has to wonder if that is a) possible; and b) how he or she came to think so.

Real conservatives, here defined as constitutionalists and others who believe in free enterprise and personal responsibility, are not haters… of anyone.  Mostly they, we, are disappointed that people of color aren’t doing better, on average, particularly with so much evidence of people variously brown in skin color, becoming champions of every field and discipline.  Clearly, or so it seems to us, there is no genetic reason for social failure.  It is based on beliefs, including carefully nurtured hatreds.

The actions that stem from hatred have no claim on forgiveness – from anyone.  The same is true for white-skinned people only more so, since they have no minority status to overcome along the way to happiness.  We have a left-induced tendency to forgive the hatreds of blacks, while trumpeting and often imputing those of whites.  Both destroy society and are to be condemned.  They are not to be exploited, God forbid.  But they are, to our shame… Black and White.

Culture, Education

GRADUATED CHANGE

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Prudence attended graduation at a well-known college in Boston’s Fenway section recently.  This particular school graduates no chemists, engineers, lawyers or business majors; no biologists, entomologists or astronomers; no materials scientists or agronomists or hydrologists, and no oceanographers.

Their purview is social work, and a healthy dose of “education.”  That is, education B.S. degree-recipients who, I think, they hope will teach the next generation along the lines of ultra-liberals who have been taking over education aggressively for the past 75 years. Fortunately, they sometimes fail and a graduate escapes with her (mostly hers and wannabes, there) internal philosophy intact, her understanding of reality clear, and her intense desire to educate young kids, rather than indoctrinate them, ready to run.  One such is Prudence’s only reason for attending.

Prudence’s eyes were opened, however, to the existence of this and other nests of socialist vipers, who churn out radical “change agents,” as were frequently referenced in the interminable speeches and last-second directives that made not a single reference to God, although the very last instructress managed to say, “… let the Divine …” which was amorphous enough to get through.  That tiny reference was among the last dozen words of last-second directions to the posse of Bachelors and Masters ready to change America.

The otherwise clear, May, day began with breakfast – free food, so to speak, catered in to the College’s Brookline facility.  Being observant was revelationary.  The professors are constantly professing, we noticed.  Tattoos, for example, profess attachment to the odd fascinations running rampant through society where women, sometimes grossly obese versions, have acres of “body art.”  It’s a statement of inclusion… or a test.  After all, if our campus is one of welcoming and inclusion and non-discrimination for students, then it must be for their instructors, too.  See how it works?

There seemed to be a single statement being uttered by a large fraction of both staff and graduates: There is no weirdness on OUR campus – all are welcome.  Prudence has no argument with the “welcom(ing)” part.  In other words, if you are as different and as unusual as you can make yourself, come, attend our college – we’re just as unusual as you!

Every speech underscored the same concepts of challenging the status quo; the difficulty is, today, that the status quo, having grown fairly weird itself, requires ever more strangeness from those who wish to challenge it.  This might explain, in part, the number of strange appearances of students, but it is unnerving to apply the same measure to staff and professors… at least it was to Prudence.

Sexuality is key to both protest and education, it seems.  Prudence needn’t describe sexual appearances and apparent expressions as most are indescribable and likely wide of the target.  But, unusual male-female iterations are more commonplace on college campuses than elsewhere in the world.  Perhaps it’s simply because these are the age groups where “youthful” experimentation is most likely.  Shouldn’t some adults guide these wandering – and wondering – children toward the most appropriate paths of action and belief?

Aren’t we intending to create new adults of our culture and social fabric?  Or is it our purpose to indulge every strange, interruptive feeling and treat it as if it were as valid as reality?  Reality is so restrictive: two genders… huh.  Are we kidding?  I mean, honestly!

Are there any lines a culture shouldn’t cross?  It’s not a trick question.  We used to decry drug use and numerous other forms of debasement.  Why?  Because it makes for a stronger, more nurturing society.

We used to require people to make their own way, no welfare and all the rest.  It inadvertently made for stronger people and children.  Problem free?  Of course not.  Too many fell through the “cracks,” as it were.  Some level of social support was required for simple fairness TO CHILDREN, and civil kindness to the helpless.

We used to require universal education that reinforced moral lessons, some Biblical, without damaging ANYONE, reinforcing shame for bad actions and strengthening the consciences of individuals… and their basic honesty.  These were good, strengthening-of-society kinds of structures.  Phenomenally, we have succumbed not to foreign powers but to our own cleverness, talking ourselves out of our heritage, our very culture, and of shame, itself.

We are so smart.

Murder, for example, now has shades of evil, some not so bad as to require equivalent sanction.  Indeed, abortion-at-will, deemed “murder” by half of the nation, has amorphous codified status and taxation support!  Suicide by drug overdose is a form of murder by drug-pusher, but we, the wealthiest, most sophisticated culture on earth, with more police forces per hectare than any other, has failed steadily for 60 years to clamp down firmly on drug commerce.

Now we are in a race to legalize ever purer and stronger pot despite its risks (there aren’t any, according to pot users) and to arm first responders with Narcan.  We’re smarter than we even realized.

The largest “industry” in the United States is welfare of a thousand titles.  Statists have found that the philosophies of the most rock-ribbed, self-made American stalwarts can be purchased with enough dependency, as recent “conservative” outcries against threats to Medicare makes clear.

The higher education “industry” is nothing if not opportunistic.  With TRILLIONS of dollars flowing from the Federal and state levels, colleges have justified turning out an army of social workers to soak them up.  Here and there people in need are truly helped, but the lion’s share of those dollars goes to the army of concerned, compassionate care-workers and, especially, to the army of administrators who make sure they are not wasting any money.

Somewhere, and here and there, are schools, churches and other institutions that respect and promote the concepts of self-reliance, absolute personal responsibility, honor and sublime integrity.  They must struggle against an onslaught of socialist control of budgets and information.  Is the ultimate success of the ultimate anti-God philosophy certain to overwhelm what made the U. S. great?

That future depends upon the ignorance of a majority of Americans.  How smart did you say we are?

 

Culture, Economics, Governance

When Robots are Rights

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We must, as thinking, contemplative beings at least somewhat concerned about the future, consider the implications of robotics and so-called artificial intelligence: machines that learn. It’s all a matter of large-enough databases and rapid-enough retrieval. So what? you might ask.

Civilization came to be built as it is through an economic reality that forces individual humans to strive for improvement – both personal and financial. That is, at one level or another, life has been tough for most of us, causing each to become stronger in order to be able to adjust one’s surroundings to greater comfort or safety… or both.

In the past century or so we have managed to elevate enough of ourselves to support elaborate industries designed only to entertain us due to growing levels of “leisure” time. That is, modern life for a large fraction of humankind (but not all, certainly) permits complete creation of safe and comfortable living conditions (standards) with about 40 hours of “labor” of very specialized kinds per week, or about 25% of available time.

In fact not even 25% is needed, as many forms of labor provide for weeks of non-work time each year in addition to “holidays,” storm-days, “personal” days, sick days and, increasingly, family and maternity “leave” periods. Politicians and other panderers – advocates and socialists of various stripes – are constant in their demands for more time off for ostensibly “civilized” and crucial purposes. Employers are, after all, mere thieves of workers time and comfort and must not be allowed to earn a profit from their labor, if such dis-allowance is at all possible.

In any case and by whatever fraction of productive employees’ time, businesses must find ways to produce the millions of products and services that they and others need or want in order to create and maintain the kind of safe, comfortable living conditions each desires. And those products must be profitable enough to justify all the investment, risk, work and education that goes in to producing them, delivering them and warranting their quality and usefulness, AND to permit sufficient taxation of both profits and of labor itself, to pay for all of the “public” works and subsidies that politicians think we need – including those that we truly do.

Together we, many of us, understand the multiple contracts and assumptions and personal costs that are enabling lives we like; and we understand, largely, the changes we must each choose to make to have “better” lives and proportions of leisure time. Robots are changing the “contracts” we have made between individuals, companies, governments and ourselves – and we are largely unprepared for the future that they are creating.

Right now the contracts of the economy depend upon parties who have striven to be part of the economy and who have striven to be “good” and “useful” people – most of us, anyway. What each has attained-to is the basis on which each of us judges the other as a qualified member of our society and culture, evaluates him or her as to qualities of charity, kindness and “fairness,” or lacks thereof, and on what his or her productive value is determined.

It is very important to us whether the person we are considering is one who “pulls his or her weight” or, barring genuine disability, “coasts on the work of others.” Is he or she “pulling the wagon” or just “riding?” Like it or not, every one of us needs to grasp these values for the current system to “work.” We understand and agree to abide by the hundreds and thousands of “contracts” that cause society, products, services, profit and pay to function with a net gain of living standards over time for the largest number of our fellow society members.

Are you with me so far?

Here and there, and in growing numbers, people who are employers, which is to say, producers in our economy (“job-creation” being simply a result of profitable productivity), are squeezed by governments – including their legal systems – through taxation and liabilities of increasing types. Customers demand redress and compensation from producers’ profits if anything goes wrong with a product, its delivery or its use, almost regardless of “fault.” Governments need more and more revenue to perform vital deeds and to buy votes from constituents.

To compensate for growing assaults on profits producers must steadily become more productive without raising costs… and this means reducing labor costs – employee costs. Given myriad labor laws protecting workers, insuring them, insuring their families and paying them at certain rates, producers are turning toward automating as many procedures as possible: ie. robots.

Robots don’t have to look like manufactured humanoids. They can be as unassuming as ATM machines and self-check-out lanes at Home Depot and a thousand other retailers. “Robots” can dispense prescriptions, take orders at fast-food restaurants and, soon, custom-tailor suits with nary a sales-clerk or store-manager needed. What do YOU do? What function are you compensated for? Maybe you build houses.

Robots make it possible to factory-manufacture modular homes that come with wiring, piping and alarm and computer circuits already in place. They’re delivered by truck and bolted together on site. Altogether there can be barely 20% as much labor needed to produce a single-family home. For modular multi-family buildings, there is even less per housing unit. What will all the tradesmen be doing?

Or, the counter workers, potato-fryers, and on, and on, and on… what will they be doing? Retailing is disappearing before our eyes, along with its jobs and buildings, janitors and re-decorators, security guards and on, and on, and on. There are very, very few jobs that are not threatened, except, temporarily, robot-maker.

Will this happen overnight? Not yet, but overnight began about 30 years ago and is accelerating as rapidly today, tomorrow and next week, as computing power and miniaturization permit. So what are the political and human consequences of the robotic devouring of what we now call “jobs?”

First, people who now control productive enterprises, from small to large, will be controlling larger and larger fractions of production generally, whether of precision-engineered parts or of sandwiches, and with fewer and fewer employees. This will concentrate productive surplus – which is to say: profits – and wealth as well, in those same hands or corporations. How, under the U. S. Constitution, will this wealth be “shared” among the soon-to-be jobless citizens? (“Soon” being in 20 years?)

Shall we raise taxes much, much higher? Should laws be passed that require producers to share remaining jobs among 4, 5 or 6 individuals (however inefficient that will be)? What happens to the essential right of private property? Will all hiring and profits become the purview of the least-efficient institutions on the planet: federal bureaucracies?

And how will individuals prove their worth? Not only to their friends, wives and children… but to themselves? If lots of humans don’t need to be very smart to survive, will more than the owners of production and the builders and programmers of robots, bother to become so? What happens to politics, then?

The stratification we have acquiesced to so far – stratification in which those elected deem themselves superior and entitled to office, ideas they have “sold” to relatively ignorant constituents – will become stricter and more calcified, virtually unassailable by the welfare-supported masses of citizens. Those will be they who never vote against wealth-sharing and at ever greater sharing rates. How will democracy or a republic or religiosity survive?

Just as large fractions of us, now, can’t find our ways without “GPS,” or feed ourselves without welfare, what will we become when there is no need to strive… and dependence upon robots approaches totality? What will civilization be? Constant leisure? A complete absence of sacrifice? SHALL WE ALL BECOME ENTERTAINERS? Shouldn’t we be thinking about these things?

Do you think of them? Fear them?

Race

Black Lives DO Matter

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blmblogPrudence and I were at our Book Club the other night – it was at one of the member’s homes in a room full of smart people. We felt a little out of place. Good food, though.

Our book this time was titled “From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation” and it’s not an easy read. The professor who advocated for us to read this particular book was unable to make the meeting, so 8 white guys had a discussion. The topic is definitely worth the work.

Author, Keeanga Yamahtta Taylor has done America a service, although its presentation is flawed by numerous non-factual declarations that are merely – and purposely – bumper-sticker- inflammatory. But one can get past them and still learn from the mountain of evidence she has laid before us.

Ladies and gentlemen of the polity, we do have a problem.

However, the book is a little one-sided. Problems faced by, let’s say, unsuccessful blacks, are not being solved in the “system” that America embodies, in Taylor’s (and #BlackLivesMatter’s) view, and that argument is valid. To them, the fact of some excessive force against black suspects and some unjustified killings of blacks by police, are reasons to indict ALL police and, by conflation, ALL of white Americans and, to seal the accusations, ALL of capitalism. To all of that our question is: What is the end-game?

Taylor and #BLM call repeatedly for the end of capitalism. This is somewhat understandable when considered from the standpoint of large numbers of blacks for whom “capitalism” doesn’t seem to work, and worse, is defended by a police-state of brutal, murderous police forces. Well. Given that George Soros and other America-haters provide funding to #BlackLivesMatter chapters, socialism is made credible for dismayed blacks. But, the “soul” of #BLM is dichotomous.

On one hand, and that most publicized, #BLM is fighting to change policing AND to obtain reparations for slavery, Jim Crow and for “institutional” racism of which all whites are (must be) guilty. On the other hand, they seem to be advocating for the dissolution of white America and replacing it with a socialist democracy that will share its wealth with downtrodden blacks. This aspect is not as publicized, as the acquiescence of guilt-ridden whites is essential to #BLM’s political success. Amorphous guilt is working; fear of total loss will not.

Prudence and I are not ready to destroy what does work and which can be made to work much, much better. Unfortunately, and largely thanks to corrupt politics, American capitalism is twisted and encumbered by unbelievable debt, tax games and cronyism, and outright government-sponsored monopolies. The past 8 years of the first “black” president, Mr. Obama, has brought the flaws of politicized capitalism into stark relief. (He is not blessed with a large fraction of “black” genes; his black African roots comprise about 1/8th of his African ancestry, while Arab ancestry fulfills the balance of that “half” of him. His mother was white, of course, denying him the percentage of “blackness” needed to claim African-American as his “race.” Indeed, his Arab ancestors may have been selling blacks into slavery.) While Wall Street revels in a Federal-Reserve-fomented bonanza, black America has slipped even further behind in terms of employment, income, apparent opportunity, and familial net worths. Concentrated neighborhoods of poor blacks, mostly a burden of large cities, but not exclusively so, became, again, tinderboxes of hopeless dissatisfaction and outright hatred of “white privilege,” which most evidently exists given the (near) total absence of “black privilege.”

Colleges and even grade schools have tried to inculcate the guilt-laden concept of “white privilege” in white students. Only if whites can be made to regret their apparent membership in a national bloc of proto-slave-owners, can the plight of blacks continue to be purveyed as the result of nationwide group suppression. Like all politics based on anti-capitalism… that is, on the left, these views deny the sovereignty, power and responsibility of individuals.

Most white individuals have nothing to do with making or keeping blacks poor, although if they (we) were more sensitive to the distant or unseen conditions in black ghettos, perhaps we would demand better government and governance. Several problems pervade American politics and its resulting economics.

First, politics has become organized theft. A majority of us have agreed to take part in and benefit from the thievery. Despite 19th century warnings, we figured out not only how to vote ourselves money from the public treasury, but how to vote ourselves “money” from the future. Our hunger for this “free” wealth has resulted in $20 Trillion of debt and a worldwide distrust of American economics. Americans themselves are happy to suspend disbelief so long as “benefits” or “entitlements” keep appearing in their bank accounts and on their “EBT” welfare cards.

As debt has grown, periodic increases in the “debt ceiling” have been voted by Congress primarily to buy votes from beneficiary groups, including poor blacks on various forms of welfare. Welfare, despite shifts in programs, called “cuts” has grown fairly steadily since the federalization of it in the 1960’s. Welfare doesn’t make blacks happy or grateful. For white politicians (maybe for all colors of politicians) welfare is the only tool they can wield to keep blacks contained and not too restive in their ghettos. It’s a system we have tolerated/imposed for 50 years, and it deserves some questioning, like, “Who benefits from the welfare-hopelessness cycle?”

The socially blind might say that blacks do. After all, look at all the money “we’ve” transferred to them from the public treasury. More cynical types might say that over time, only the politicians benefit. Keeping blacks somewhat nurtured and somewhat angry means that politicians can commiserate enough at election time to direct their votes toward themselves. Democrats do this in no small part by pointing out to blacks that it is those evil Republicans who have failed to take care of them; indeed, it is Republicans who prevent caring Democrats from enacting the programs that will transfer enough money and other support to finally make for “level playing fields.” What bastards they must be.

Next is drugs and crime. The U. S. is not really serious about cleaning society of drugs and, if one were cynical about this, too, he or she might observe that “drugs” and brown skin tend to concentrate in the same parts of cities. Despite our 50-year “war” on drugs, they are more available today than ever. So, the same question pertains: Who benefits from drug crime? And a corollary: Does the ongoing drug economy fulfill a social or political purpose?

Our response has been to “manage” the drug economy and build more prisons. One might be reminded of national treatment of “Injuns” and “redskins.” Their susceptibility to alcohol didn’t bother us, it fulfilled a prejudice. In a sad, sick way, the fact that blacks (and browns) are affected the most by drugs and related crimes, seems to fit a prejudice, too. Unaffected people see the self-destruction of blacks and their communities as a “natural” outgrowth of weaknesses in black character. Worse, so long as it keeps blacks busy and of limited danger to suburbanites, no ultimate solution to drugs is in the works.

Unfortunately or, perhaps, fortunately, drugs are killing suburban white kids in noticeable numbers, now. Perhaps a real war on drugs will be finally joined. If so, it still won’t be because we are deeply concerned about black lives. All lives matter.

So, despite their odd politics, #BlackLivesMatter has a valid point, but not a true target for its efforts. Rogue police officers and “prejudices” within police departments are certainly a problem, and a wildly public one, lately. Bad practices on the part of police do result in wrongful deaths – some practices/reactions far worse than others. Prejudice among police personnel at every level should be corrected, removed, discussed, stamped-out, brainwashed away and punished – all of those things, maybe more. But, prejudice doesn’t really matter so long as police actions are preserving of life and safety every time it is possible to be so. Actions may be modified by training.

Better training of police officers, however, will do virtually nothing to improve the lives of most blacks. Blacks in the welfare/hopelessness cycle must be taught to believe something different about their lives and possibilities. Neither the Federal government nor any other amoral entity can perform that function. Correcting the spirit of hopeless people is almost impossible. Not killing them accidentally is possible.

So, #BlackLivesMatter has selected a politically advantageous target in the relative handful of cases so destructively publicized as to foment riots and new levels of hatred by blacks and of fear by whites. They have not – and will not – take on the big target of destructive welfare policies, destructive drugs, destructive fatherlessness, destructive life choices and all the rest of it. Right now, they can’t; neither, politically, can, or will, anyone else.

At some point, if #BlackLivesMatter, and others who claim deep concern about the future of black lives, can come to a more honest understanding of politics and economics, perhaps a totally different approach to black society’s dysfunctions will manifest. It must be free of political profit, for one thing, and based on a moral, marriage-based code. All the social license and all the foolish names we concoct for it, cannot replace stable families with two parents. Prudence says that some adults have to step forward… adults who can lead the children the rest of the way to a drug-free, non-communist promised land.