At a high level, how complex would it be to program everyone’s preferences into a computer and just let the government plan how much stuff of every type the manufacturers are allowed to produce? This has recently become a big deal, since the US government is now trying to dictate to drug companies how much of various drugs they should produce, seeing as how one of the leading results of Obamacare is severe drug shortages of drugs that aren’t widely prescribed.

Let’s dive into the problem.

On any particular shopping trip, an individual has a list of P things that he or she could conceivably want (don’t forget saving some money to pay the mortgage and electric bill in a week as two of the choices). There are P! (P factorial) different ways that the individual can arrange his preferences. A factorial is what you get when you multiply a number by every single number that is less than that number, all the way down to 1. For instance, 2! is equal to 2. Two items can be sorted in two ways. 3! is equal to 6, and 3 items can be sorted in 6 ways. 4! is equal to 24, and 4 items can be sorted in 24 ways. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. This gets large quickly. For example, if there were only 100 things that a person might want he would have 100 factorial possible preference orders . This order is likely to change day to day since people generally don’t spend a lot of time calculating exact preference orders for things they want. They generally wing it. But the government can’t plan for “winging it.” The government needs to plan ahead! So let’s assume we want to make our central planning realistic so we can anticipate exactly what the people want at any time.

How complicated can it be?

Let’s start with a preference list of 100 items. That seems about the maximum that you could remember at any one time. 100! has been computed as roughly 9.3 times 10 to the 157th power (). Written out it is the following:

93,326,215,443,944,152,681,699,238,856,266,700,490,715,968,264,381,621,468,
592,963,895,217,599,993,229,915,608,941,463,976,156,518,286,253,697,920,827,223,
758,251,185,210,916,864,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

That is considerably larger than a google (10 to the 100th power), which Google the company took as its name because of the mind-staggering vastness of a google. And that is the number of computations that would need to be performed to determine one person’s preferences for a set of 100 items.

As a point of comparison, physicists have estimated the entire observable universe contains 8.8×10^79 atoms.

vs.

One person’s 100 item preference map is 10^78 times larger than the number of atoms in the observable universe. That’s pretty big! It is nearly the square of the number of atoms in the observable universe.

As a thought experiment, pretend we have a computer as big as the observable universe and every atom is a logical switch that performs logical/mathematical transactions on data. To process all the data from a 100 item list every atom in the observable universe would need to perform 10^78 transactions. That’s a transaction count per atom of nearly the number of atoms in the universe!

Onward

How many books are on sale at Amazon? As I write this Amazon offers 24,702,516 books in stock. This does not include kitchen items, electronics, MP3 downloads, or anything else offered by Amazon. In order for the government central economic planners to be able to compute the preferences of an inquisitive Amazon shopper of wide-ranging tastes who only wants to buy books that are in-stock, they would need to solve an equation with about 24.7 million factorial moving parts.

But wait! It gets bigger because there’s a problem. People are not all the same. Every one of us is a unique snowflake of individuality. We all have different incomes, different likes and dislikes, different utility bills and energy needs, different appetites for different things, different families with their own unique likes and dislikes. And we all shop at different places, times, and speeds. So is only big enough for one of us with our 100 item preference list. For N of us we need to multiply everyone’s complexity by everyone else’s complexity. And you thought that the factorial was bad! This gets even bigger even faster than a factorial.

To solve the equations for two shoppers, or two hundred, or two hundred million, or 7 billion, necessary in order to provide the right number of diapers, flip flops, cigars, Jack Daniels whisky, and Kia minivans for the population, we must solve a gargantuan multidimensional cross-tabulation of preferences. Calculate the product of over the individuals (i) from 1 to N where P is the number of preferences any individual i has and N is the total population. (Reminder: the product is ALL those factorials TIMES each other)

We long ago passed the number of atoms in the observable universe in our count and the numbers keep getting bigger. So… do you think this will crash any possible computer in the universe? I do. After all, it requires vastly more calculations than there are atoms in the known universe, even if there are only 100 products that any one person might have the privilege of choosing. And no computer can have more switches or memory registers built into it than there are atoms in the observable universe. That’s an impossibility.

Then add in two more facts.

First, people change their preferences on a whim. They don’t have a static set of preferences for all the things in the world. Circumstances change. They learn. They grow. They forget. New things happen to them. They think of new things. And so their preferences change all the time. Calculations of preferences from one day are no good the next day.

Second, people invent new things. These new things are either absolutely new and have no comparable products on the market, or they are better/faster/cheaper replacements for existing products on the market. Calculated preferences on the day before the iPad was released would have needed to be recalculated after the iPad was released. This happens every time that something new is invented and comes to market. New inventions are either better/faster/cheaper or they fail. Nobody would buy a new product that was worse than the existing, known products with which it competed, after all.

What must a government hellbent on implementing central economic planning do?

First, it must remove all individuality from its people. It must turn every citizen’s preferences into a clone of every other citizen’s preferences.

Second, it must stop progress dead. New inventions upset everything. You will need to be happy with what you can get today forever. If the government decides to cut down America’s car choices to the Chevy Volt and the Impala, then that will be your choice for the next fifty years. Remember that Cubans still have the choice of driving around 1957 Chevy Bellaires or nothing, and it is 55 years since that model was made. That’s how central planning works. Kind of ironic given that central planners claim to be so progressive, since the first thing they do is ban progress.

Third, it must reduce the number of products available from the thousands that are available now to very few. This is the real reason why some governments try to give people “free” health care, “free” housing, government mandated jobs, “free” heating and cooling, “free” transportation and so on. They need to reduce the number of choices people have and the resources people have to get stuff. Certainly there must be fewer than a hundred products, as even a hundred products require a calculation that is impossible for any computer to solve ever. Reduce the choices to twenty or so, and then the computers can do the work.

That’s doable.

But with only 20 items available, including one car, one bicycle, one form of public transportation, one brand of shoes, one type of bread, and so on, what has the government done? What do we call a state of affairs where we only have a vanishingly small number of choices available to us, and we are not ever able to exercise individuality because our existence is constrained so tightly?

Unexpected shortages are inevitable

We call it poverty. We call it misery. We call it living in a cage.

That’s socialism for you. It doesn’t matter whether it’s the international socialism called communism, the national socialism called fascism, or the welfare state socialism called the European model. They all depend on controlling the people and reducing the choices they have. All socialism plunges the middle class into the poor class and creates equal poverty, equal misery for all.

That is what central planning must create in order to do its work. It forces us into uniformity. It creates poverty. It creates misery. And we, the people, would have to live with it the rest of our lives.

This article was originally posted at Unified Patriots

Who are the candidates and their supporters?

Mitt Romney: His supporters are the country club Republicans and the people who base their support on who they think will win. As other candidates drop out his momentum appears to increase, and this momentum draws more and more casual supporters who don’t really care whom they support as long as the guy they support ends up winning.

Newt Gingrich: His supporters are Tea Party firebrands, fiscal conservatives, and those who want to see a candidate who fights against the real enemy. That real enemy is Obama and the Democrats along with their lapdog media. Newt’s occasional outbursts against the deplorable Pravda media have been the most reliable applause line in his debates and appearances. However, when the debate is over he’s over at the moderator’s table gladhanding the same JournOListers he excoriated a half hour before, and telling them they are doing a great job. You know, it makes me think maybe, just maybe he doesn’t really believe there is anything wrong with the Pravda media. He doesn’t really believe the Pravda media is fully in the tank for the Democrats and will never give Republicans an even break, or even back off the mendacious unfairness a wee bit. Maybe he even believes the media are his best supporters, as the delusional John McCain did in 2008.

Rick Santorum: His supporters are social conservatives, primarily, some defense hawks who like what he says about the global counter-Jihad, and some fiscal conservatives who noted that he’s the only candidate not named Paul who was against TARP, the Stimulus, and all the other bailouts and Keynesian market manipulations engaged in by the late Bush administration and the socialist and union supervillains of the Obama administration.

Ron Paul: His supporters are libertarians, disaffected Democrats, conspiracy theorists, hysterics, and anti-war populists who have taken up his cry for monetary sanity and disengagement from the insanity of the world outside America’s borders. There are more than a few Jew haters among their ranks, some racist and racialist douchebags, and a lot of people who want to legally smoke pot and engage in other personal vices.

What will the supporters do if their first choice drops out?

Mitt Romney

RINOs will take the best fiscal candidate. In 2008 they voted for Obama but Obama has caused a lot of damage. Though he hasn’t endangered their bonds and their hedge fund investments, those RINOs who still work for a living will vote for anyone but Obama. I’d guess that if Romney dropped out, about a third of the RINOs would vote for Obama with the rest voting against Obama. WHO BENEFITS: Any.

Fair weather voters will take the candidate who looks like he will win. I guess they will split the same way that RINOs split, with 1/3 going to Obama and the rest going against him. WHO BENEFITS: Any.

Newt Gingrich

All his voters will vote against Obama. They will go to whoever wins the primary. WHO BENEFITS: Any.

Rick Santorum

The fiscal cons and hawks will vote against Obama no matter what. WHO BENEFITS: Any.

Santorum owns social conservatism in 2012. This is the guy who is so hated by the homosexual lobby that they named the homosexual’s wet spot after him. He is steadfast in his social conservatism, to the point that he loses some other conservative groups. Santorum’s social cons will not vote for any candidate who is on his third wife, who cheated on both previous wives, who was a notorious womanizer, and who is unpredictable morally and in his support for wacky leftist ideas like global warming, open borders, nationalized health care, and an ever-larger government. That means if Santorum drops out the social cons will not go to Gingrich. They will go to Romney or they will refuse to vote. Some might go to Ron Paul. I’d guess that about half would go to Romney or Paul and the other half would refuse to vote in the general election. This is a huge portion of the Republican tent and they don’t believe they are well served by anyone but Santorum. WHO BENEFITS: Obama, Romney.

Ron Paul

Libertarians will vote against Obama no matter what. They see him as a communist and a total disaster. There is no other group that is as fiercely anti-Obama as they are. However, many of them think Republicans (RINOs actually) are just as bad as Obama. Just look at the military and fiscal disasters that happened when Republicans controlled both houses of the legislature and the presidency under George W. Bush. They might vote for a third party if the wrong candidate wins the primary. Their candidate needs to have good ideas on the economy and be fiercely opposed to socialism in all its forms. The second best choice is Santorum. WHO BENEFITS: Santorum.

The “legalize pot and hookers” crowd will either not vote or go to Obama if Paul isn’t the candidate. Write them off now. WHO BENEFITS: Obama.

Hysterics, conspiracy theorists, disaffected Democrats, and other populists will behave like Romney’s fair weather voters. They will vote for whoever is poised to win in the general election. Since Obama is a disastrously bad president that will be predominantly an anti-Obama vote. WHO BENEFITS: Any.

Analysis

The way I see it, only one candidate of the ones left can unite fiscal, social, and national security conservatives. Rick Santorum is the solution to the dilemma of how to maximize Republican turnout. He will also maximize Democrat turnout, since homosexuals and the pro-abortion crowd hate him. But by the time Obama is done spending his multiple billions on the campaign, any Republican running will be the embodiment of Scrooge, the Grinch, George Wallace, Anita Bryant, and George W. Bush. What can I say, Democrats are awfully good at dividing and conquering their political rivals. But he’s a good man, a family man, a believing Catholic (unlike John F’ing Kerry or Jack Kennedy), and has reasonable ideas about the economy. If he finds his voice and starts behaving like a leader who can face down the Pravda media and Barack Obama now, and the UN in a year, then he might just be the right choice.

I think we conservatives may want to rethink our support of Gingrich, especially if we are doing it because of Romney and because Newt took the fight to the Pravda media, and instead encourage Rick Santorum to hit the media just as hard. God knows the Pravda media deserve every drop of inadvertent spittle that flies their way.

I only wish I were hearing the same voice of a leader coming out of Santorum’s mouth that I heard from Sarah Palin, Rick Perry and Herman Cain. That’s the one thing I am still missing.

Originally posted at Unified Patriots

Charts illuminate numbers like this in a way the numbers alone cannot.

Rasmussen has differentiated its political poll results between mainstream Americans and the Political Class for a while. The difference is that Americans trust the people more than they trust the self-appointed rulers of the people, while the Political Class trusts the rulers more than the people. So it’s no surprise that the Political Class disagrees with the above result.

The data leads one to the conclusion there is widespread dissatisfaction with Congress’s performance. Despite this widespread dissatisfaction, the Political Class, comprising the DC establishment, East and West coast elites, the media, legal and higher education professions, continues to support this profoundly non-representative Congress. The Tea Party is in the lead of efforts to replace Congress with representatives who take their duty to represent their constituents seriously. But there is an underlying pessimism in the country concerning this course of action. Most Americans believe the system is rigged to prevent the people from replacing bad members of Congress.

The greatest danger is that the American people may begin to believe that their votes don’t matter, never will matter, that the government is an occupying, enemy force, and that their only recourse is violence. Violent revolutions almost never increase the freedom of the people. Usually they result in dictatorial rule. The US did it once and it’s not likely to work again.

The Precinct Project holds as its goal the mobilization of Conservatives who want to restore accountability and Constitutional governance to the United States, and send home all those public servants who believe their job is to rule over us and ours is to obey and give them everything we own. We need to overcome despair, which will weaken us, and become energized by our knowledge that we are not alone. We, the conservatives, outnumber those who support every terrible thing the government has been doing for the last hundred years by a factor of 3 to 1. Our problem really is messaging, and winning the political battles. Most important of those is winning.

Conservatives, you need to join up with the Precinct Project and united with other Conservatives to take over the Republican Party from those members of the Political Class who still occupy the top spots. The GOP must be cleansed, and then it can become a force for good and the renewal of the American Constitutional promise of 1789.

This diary was originally posted at Unified Patriots.

Barack Obama's 2012 Anti-Bad-Obama Poster

• Still in Iraq. Iran and Iraq are edging closer and closer to being BFFs all the time. Christians are being massacred here at an increasing clip.
• Still in Afghanistan, and it’s deadlier than ever. The Taliban and al Qaeda appear to be recovering their strength, holding onto secure garrisons inside Pakistan and Iran. Pakistan is edging ever closer to collapse, and the road across the Khyber Pass is more treacherous to supply traffic every day.
• Libya is going well, for some meanings of “well.” Obama decided to bomb Qaddafi’s forces, then the rebel forces, then discovered there are al Qaeda among the rebels, then decided to supply the rebels with weapons, then decided not, then decided to hand over command to NATO, then decided to stop flying any missions at all, then clammed up. He still hasn’t asked for or obtained a resolution from Congress granting him war powers. I guess that bombing enemy fighters does not amount to war in the new-speak of the Obama era.
• Someone found Obama’s Selective Service form and checked on the SSN he used. Strangely enough the SSN appears to belong to someone from Connecticut who was born in 1890. Obama is not 121 years old and was not born in Connecticut! Either the document is wrong or there are major issues with Obama’s document trail. But it is really hard to know what’s going on since Obama has spent millions to block the release of any of his documents since well before the 2008 campaign.
• Energy prices are up as high as they have ever been, and are poised to go higher with serious unrest in almost every petroleum producing country in the Middle East. Gas will reach $5 per gallon this summer and will most likely be even higher by next year.
• Food prices have doubled for produce, meat, eggs, and dairy in the last couple of years. Overall food prices rose modestly because people are buying lower quality food.
• Home prices have continued to fall as the housing bubble, which was prevented from reaching its proper level, continues to lose air and hype, depressing economic activity and causing economic unpredictability.
• The dollar is down. Way down. Weaker every day. Almost as if it was being intentionally destroyed to make American workers competitive in a world marketplace by impoverishing them, while reducing the worth of America’s national debt in order to default by stealth on the US Government’s creditors. This isn’t paranoid, is it?
• Gold and other precious metals are way up! So are petroleum and pork bellies.
• The US Treasury has been buying some Fed auctions, which is also known as printing money. This has a lot to do with why consumer prices are now going up rapidly, as inflation is always primarily a monetary phenomenon with price increases that are a necessary result of inflation that already occurred.
• Obama’s personal popularity is down to 44%, and generic Republicans have a 6-7% lead on generic Democrats in polls.
• In the first week of his campaign it seems very likely that the Federal government will shut down. This happens while polls are either split on responsibility for the shutdown, or in favor of Republicans, who are seen as more reasonable than Democrats  on the matter of spending cuts.
• Obama and Democrats keep on saying that American taxpayers and companies need to take a haircut. Meaning they need to sacrifice money and freedoms for the good of the collective. But Government, for some reason Americans can’t figure out, never has to take a haircut. Most Americans wouldn’t stop at the hair either. They’d give the government a haircut clear down to the neck, or even the waist, on the theory that half a government is a good start at cutting it down.
• Obama had to reverse course on Guantanamo yesterday. He had run on shutting it down and trying enemy fighters in US civilian courts. But after several judges attempted to release terrorists onto the streets of American cities because they weren’t arrested with Miranda warnings and other procedures that have never been used on a battlefield, Congress tied Obama’s hands and passed legislation forbidding him or the Department of Justice (or anyone else, for that matter) from moving foreign, enemy terrorist suspects to mainland US facilities.
• Obama’s background, so unclear during the 2008 campaign, has settled out. The question in voters’ minds for 2012 is not, “what is a community organizer?” The question now is, “is Obama a communist, a fascist, or a muslim?”
• Unemployment has gotten worse and worse during Obama’s tenure in the White House. The official measurement has finally dropped below 9%, but that is because lots of people have run out of the unemployment benefits that had stretched out for two years. Now they are not employed and don’t count as unemployed. Perhaps that makes them invisible men and women.The media thinks they are invisible. They don’t show up on the news, except for Fox News. Invisible it is!
• There are lots of invisible men and women, including the members of the Tea Party. Their complaint in 2009 was over extreme Federal Government spending at levels that seemed designed to destroy the credit markets and bankrupt the country. But their outrage only grew louder with the rush to pass Obamacare, the 3,000 page bill that needed to pass so we could know what was in it. Now we know what was in it, and with over 1,000 of the White House’s friends having asked for and received waivers from needing to comply with the provisions of the bill it is clear that the bill was bad, and that if you are a big campaign contributor the law does not apply to you. This doesn’t seem to bother Obama and his friends, but the Tea Party and other invisible people do vote, and they are not pleased.
• Obama’s BATF smuggled semi-automatic weapons into Mexico, and one of those weapons was used to murder a US Border Patrol agent, who was armed with a beanbag gun while going up against paramilitary narco-terror gangs. The intent behind this smuggling ring seems to have been to be able to prove that American semi-automatic weapons were the main weapons used by Mexican narco-terror gangs. This is not true, as at least 60% of the weapons used by the Mexican narco-terror gangs are fully automatic weapons obtained from South and Central America (mostly Venezuela, but who’s counting?).
• Obama’s Department of Justice is suing Arizona to try and prevent the state from enforcing Federal immigration laws, while it drops a case it had already won against Black Panthers who intimidated white-skinned would-be voters at a polling place in Philadelphia.
• And everything that goes wrong with Obama is the fault of birthers, and racism. Remember, “all Republicans and Teabaggers are raaaaacist!”

In the meantime, Obama is expected to spend a BILLION DOLLARS!!!! 11!!! 11!!! !eleventy!!! 11!!!! on his reelection campaign. And he will have the media on his side, doing their duty as they see it to reelect the worst President in American history to the office he desecrates so brilliantly. It’s because of raaaaacism, and he looks really good in a tux. So he has that going for him. And he has already started his campaign, without anyone to run against yet. So he is hiring thousands and thousands of college kids at slave wages to knock on doors, talk to people, recruit fraudulent voters, and organize their neighborhoods to vote Obama back in.

It is going to be hard to beat Obama. But maybe Obama can do it.

Let’s just pray that when the voting is done in November 2012, a president whose last name does NOT start with 0 will be elected.

Crossposted from UnifiedPatriots.

But my point is not the viral appeal of Facebook. It is that he did the key work on that first project in one night—while he was drunk. He was motivated because he was mad at a girl. So he did something stupid and juvenile about it that got him in trouble. But afterwards he took his insight in a different direction, and coded and architected Facebook. He did it. He did it himself. He found helpers afterwards. But while he was creating something entirely new he worked on his own, he worked hard, and he worked as fast as a man can work.

What has changed? Why couldn’t Rome be built in a day but something like Facebook was close?

The speed at which life happens has always been limited by how far away someone could communicate. Since the distance of communication was pretty much limited to how far one could shout, that meant communication was limited by how far you could travel in a day. A man could walk ten to twenty miles a day through rough country, and fifty to a hundred miles a day on good roads. On horseback, with remounts as needed, he could double that. So when the several United States were surveyed and their borders established, the borders of each state were set about one day’s mounted travel from the capitol. That made it possible for people who lived along roads or navigable waterways to travel to the state capitol, do their business, and return taking no more than three days for the entire trip, barring bad weather and encounters with bushwhackers or indians. It also allowed government agents to travel to the distant parts of the state without being out of communication for weeks at a time. As a child, it always seemed peculiar to me when I would look at the US map and see all these tiny New England states and compare them to the huge states of the west. Now I know “why” and so do you. The speed of travel dictated the sizes and shapes of the states, and many other things as well. As technology has marched on, first railroads made the large states of the west possible, then the airplane made huge, distant states like Alaska and Hawaii possible.

Today we use computer networks to communicate almost instantly over huge distances. 70% of the speed of light is the approximate rate of propagation of electrical impulses in a copper wire. Same thing for light waves through an optical fiber. That allows us to reach out and communicate with someone 130,000 cable-miles away with a two second response time. It would let us send a message 7.5 billion cable-miles and get an answer back the next day.

Compare that to the speed of a man on horseback, in a car, or even in a plane.

The size of a governable state has been changed by technology. Now the technology has advanced to where the entire US including Alaska and Hawaii could be governed from Washington DC. The wisdom of doing this is another issue entirely. In fact, the entire world could be governed from one city as actual travel to a remote capitol in order to do one’s work is no longer necessary. Now with telecommuting and other distance conquering technologies our senses and ability to communicate can be sent all over the world at 70% of the speed of light, or 130,000 miles per second.

This is not only true of governance. Travel and communications technology used to limit the size of all organizations. Today any organization could, if not restricted by perverse national and international regulations, operate in a coordinated manner in every nation simultaneously, using temporary and permanent employees to accomplish its objectives. No matter what those objectives are, this is possible. As everyone knows the organizations that do bad things including breaking the law all the time don’t care much about obeying those irksome regulations either. Rogue and illegal organizations are coordinating world-wide right now. Al Qaeda is doing it. So are the Russian and Sicilian mafias, the Chinese tongs, Japanese yakuza, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, South and Central American narco-gangs, the sex-slave traders in the former countries of the USSR, and the agents of the narco-nuke-counterfeiting-criminal state of North Korea.

What of legitimate businesses? Before computers and computer networks, news bureaus and wire services needed to have agents located in remote locales with access to telegraph or shortwave transmitters. This let them get information around the world in a day. But it was necessary to have people everywhere in order to know anything about those other places. Now we don’t need agents everywhere. The locals tell us themselves. Now, when something happens on the other side of the world we might know it as quickly as their neighbors know it. We might even know it before they do if we are watching the right facebook page or the right twitter stream at the right time.

Things happen quickly now, and there is no time to waste. Now if you have an idea and delay, the next guy who thinks of the same idea and decides to implement it can make it happen, put it on the web, and compete in exactly the same marketplace you were going to sell to even if he lives on the other side of the country or the world. The bad guys are doing it too. Do we want to leave the field to them?

Now it is no longer good enough to seize the day. Now you need to seize the instant. As ColdWarrior told me.

I wanted to create a web site to serve as a resource for people who wanted learn how to “do something” real for changing the outcome of the elections. Did not have the time to relearn FrontPage or Microsoft’s replacement for it, Expression Web 2. I asked around. I think it might have been Ron Robinson who told me to check out WordPress.  I got on Google and looked up tutorial videos.  Found a great one.  Kept it simple.  Created some videos with my little Logitech web cam. Learned how to use YouTube.  That lead to the Kyl video and the ensuing firestorm over it becoming a reality.

When the Maricopa County and AZ committees wouldn’t create “how to become” a PC for their web sites, or even update their web sites, I created the content and gave it to them and then found volunteer web masters from the ranks of the PCs I had recruited just by sending out an e-mail to them. Got more than enough volunteers to do the work, professionally, for free.

This reminds me of a website I built not too long ago. It was a juvenile idea for a website but amusing for a while. The idea came on me one day. I created the website using blogger.com that night because I was bored with using wordpress.com for my other blog. It was functional within 6 hours after the original idea. The longest part of the process, which I finished the next day, was spent hand-drawing the art-work for the site and scanning it in. The hand-drawings were an important part of the look, as was the interface customization I put into it. That’s all there was to it. “Just do it.” The website didn’t last very long because it wasn’t friendly enough. It was too angry. It didn’t draw a big audience.

My takeaway was that customizing the interface was a lot easier than I had thought it would be and that designing a friendly website, one that built a community, was very important. Oh, and as Nike keeps saying, “Just do it.”

“Just do it” isn’t only something Nike says. ColdWarrior also mentioned the same kind of thing.

I like how everyone here helps each other figure out the techie stuff.  But, before I ask for help, I try to figure it out on my own.  It’s usually not too hard.  I don’t want someone to do for me what I might be able to figure out on my own.

I was on a weekly call with some folks from around the country who thought one of the things they needed to do was create a tutorial for the basics of Robert’s Rules of Order.  Of course, I told them, “don’t reinvent the wheel!”  There are many, many good RRofO video tutorials on the web.

If you can figure it out on your own you might as well do it. There is no “not my job” syndrome in the room when ColdWarrior or I are in it. There should be no place for “not my job” syndrome in your life either, not if you want to get big things done. Does that mean there are a lot of generals? Yes. And it also means there are a lot of bottle washers and janitors as well. “Just do that too.”

There is a much more recent website I have been involved with: UP/News Report. I have been going on and on for several years, endlessly on Redstate and my personal blog, on email lists and at home, ‘ad nauseam’ as it were, about the deplorable state of the news today and how an alternative to the left biased news needed to be created, based on a conservative ethical framework. The ethical framework was more important than the bias “problem.” I do not believe it is possible to be unbiased. Bias is inherent in the human condition and unavoidable. Read Plato’s The Cave to see why the fact that the world is not experienced directly, but projected on our human senses and cognitive patterns, requires us all to be biased in our own ways.

Everyone is biased, and the answer to the bias “problem” is not to pretend we don’t have it. The answer is to acknowledge it, then to follow rules that prevent us from getting out of hand with our biases. So on a recent night I was given the go-ahead to draft a news website. I knew what it needed. It needed to be a community and to have its own news style. It needed to provide positive and negative feedback to keep writer’s bias within bounds. The style needed to emphasize the facts, and define those facts so that writers could write about them and readers knew what was true and real. And it needed to allow for analysis, since analysis is valuable. But the style also had to be rigid about some things. No mixing of reporting and editorial. No confusion between what was real and what was speculative. And no “facts” that required mind-reading to prove. The site needed to look like a news site. It needed to be reasonably pretty. It needed to allow a wide range of comments, for comments don’t just reduce bias. Good comments and the ability to comment intelligently and have those comments intelligently discussed are what draw involved and smart readers back. That was the candy that would draw the good people back in.

In short what was needed was a community centered around the news. There are roles for three types of community members.

1. Readers who comment. They don’t need accounts but they do need to be allowed to comment.
2. Contributors who write up their own news stories following the style. They need accounts.
3. Editors who enforce the style and can help contributors improve their writing. They need privileged accounts.

All three roles are needed. I believe that people will self-select their roles, and other than enforcing the style and requesting coherence with our stated biases we will not do a lot of enforcement. If you fit in, you are welcome there.

But the reason I’m writing about UP/News Report is that the platform was written in a day. The WordPress theme we used was buggy and needed a couple of days of work smoothing out the irregularities. But in the end we were able to create a functional website with its own style starting Thursday, refining Friday through Sunday, and launching Monday morning, with one person doing 98% of the programming work and now sharing in the hard work that remains.

Now we need to Seek and Report the Truth. That is still the liquor in the journalist’s cabinet. Even with our conservative ethical framework, to Seek and Report the Truth is the holy cocktail. I believe that UP/News Report has a better recipe for that drink than the left biased media in most newspapers, on most tv stations, on public radio news, and in academia.

And it happened mostly because I sat down and did it.

You can do it too. This is not the age of Rome. This is the age of Facebook.

Rome wasn’t built in a day. But Facebook…

This article was crossposted from Unified Patriots.

Do not be sad or feel left out. You will also get a chance to see unions in revolt in your state. The SEIU’s purple people beaters are coming to a town near you! They aren’t just visiting Wisconsin, but will be marching all over America to intimidate their political opponents.

Among other fiscally sane ideas anathema to Democrats, Ohio governor John Kasich and the overwhelmingly Republican Ohio legislature are also pressing right to work legislation and cost cutting of gold plated public union contracts that threaten to bankrupt that state. Unions threaten to turn out twenty thousand union supporters Tuesday for another borderline violent protest like the ones in Wisconsin.

Sinister fist images worthy of a Kevin Jennings

Indiana also has its own problems with gold plated union contracts threatening the financial future of the state. Like Wisconsin and Ohio, prompted by disastrous state budgets and unemployment numbers, the voters elected overwhelming majorities of Republicans in the statehouse and gave the governorship to Mitch Daniels. Now Daniels, who seems according to the tea leaves to be running for the Presidency as a one-legged-stool (fiscal only) Republican, doesn’t want to push HB 1468 (The Right to Work Bill) or any other legislation that claws back gold plated benefits from public employee unions. He makes excuses that he didn’t run on Right to Work as a campaign issue in November. The unions are revolting in any case. Frankly, I’m not sure why Daniels is paying any attention to union demands. There is nothing for Republicans in coddling unions. Union elites will continue to drain away union pension funding and give it to Democrat campaign funds, hoping for government bailouts at some time in the future to make good the pensions they stole behind workers’ backs.

Kasich and Walker know what needs to be done. They are doing the smart fiscal thing.

I think Daniels, who claims to be a fiscal conservative, knows the right thing to do. But he seems to be convinced that he shouldn’t do it because… because… because… I have no idea why he thinks this. He happens to be wrong. He might not have run on forcing public unions to be responsive to the voters and their pocketbooks, but that’s why the people voted for him. They understood this conversation was happening nationally just like everyone else did. Everyone, that is, except for Daniels. If Daniels claims to be a fiscal-only conservative and demands that social and national security conservatives shut up and be quiet about their principles, he will never inspire anyone in the presidential contests coming up. And now he isn’t even doing the fiscal conservative part right! He will not be electable if he persists in this ill-advised political triangulation.

UPDATE: Teachers are the focus of Daniels’ other education reform plans for Indiana. Among his plans are expanding charter schools, offering vouchers, and restricting the ability of teacher contracts to expand relentlessly, forever. Teachers have already been playing hooky in Indiana in order to protest these moves. And one of the first moves Daniels made on coming into office in 2005 was to rescind the license of state workers to collective bargaining. He didn’t run on this change in 2004, but made it anyway. Given this, it’s not clear why he is resisting a right to work law this year.

Someone at Daniels’ ear needs to advise him that he needs to behave like a fiscal conservative, not like a Clintonian Democrat trying to claim the center. Otherwise he will doom his candidacy with Johnny McMaverick style centrism before he begins. And that leaves out his rejection of the other two legs of the three legged stool that supports conservatism as a governing ideology.

Further: The bailout mania of the idiotic US government in 2008 and 2009 does not bode well for political backbone when faced by the bankruptcy of the majority of labor unions in the country. It’s a sure thing that unions will squeal loudly when they have to pay out on pensions. Unions have been stealing pension money without worker approval to play political games for years. When this theft comes to light union leaders will cry to the heavens for help, claiming they didn’t know. Taxpayers, having already payed a monopoly premium for union work, have paid for these pensions once. Taxpayers must not be held liable for theft committed by union elites in the past, today, or tomorrow. Union members need to hold their leaders to account today, before these accounts come due leaving them completely without pensions: forced to subsist on Social Security.

That would put an exclamation point on the union-sponsored betrayal of America’s manufacturing workers for the last 50 years, would it not?

And we Republicans must stiffen the backbones of the officials we put in office. They did not get put into office in order to coddle union elites or bail-out thieves. That socialist practice of bailouts must end, no matter what business the thieves are supposedly in.

William F. Buckley’s Desk…

And Nat Hentoff’s Desk…

And Albert Einstein’s Desk…

And Barack Obama’s Desk…

Have a better caption than the one I put in the title? Let’s have a caption contest in the comments.

X-posted

I didn’t know they could fly that high!

So I did a little calculation to see how high birds would have to fly to run into the debt ceiling. My presumption is that the debt ceiling needs to be tall enough to fit a stack of dollar bills under it. A dollar bill is .0043 inches thick when stacked, according to the US Treasury. Here is a table showing how high birds would have to fly to run into a debt ceiling defined thusly.

Once the debt ceiling passed a billion it was 68 miles up, too high for birds to fly. This happened before the turn of the 20th century. The center of the moon is between 225,622 and 252,088 miles away from the center of the earth. So the debt ceiling passed the moon when the national debt got to 4 trillion. This happened some time in the 1990s, while Clinton was in office. Mars is 34 million miles from earth at its closest approach. This would require a debt ceiling at roughly $501 trillion. The US government will go bankrupt well before it approaches that level of debt, in fact it will require drastic and destructive measures if the debt approaches the $16T GDP any closer. So I wonder what the idiots in charge of federal spending are trying to reach. They can’t reach Mars. So what are they trying to reach?

Maybe bankruptcy is the whole goal, after all.

In January 2011, House Republicans should introduce a clean bill to make the Bush tax rates permanent. It should apply to all Americans, even small business owners whom Democrats want to punish with extra taxes. The public is on the Republican side in this. The tax issue is a winner for Republicans, and will be something that Republicans can talk about on every Sunday show and every press interview. Pass a pure, brief version in the House after reading the entire bill aloud and debating it on C-SPAN. There should be no extraneous legislation in it: No unemployment; no refundable tax credits; no money for ACORN or unions. Send it to the Senate and wait.

Until it passes and is signed into law this bill will be the best evidence in the world that Democrats do not want to let people keep their money. It would show that Democrats think the government is better qualified to spend the people’s money than the people are. This is the government we are talking about, the one that borrowed over $3 Trillion in the last two years to finance spending. Now that the government has spent all this money, the government’s pet political party wants to reach into the pocket of every American man, woman, and child and extract $35,000 each for their share of the national debt.

Progressive Democrats like Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama are not going to let permanent Bush tax rates pass if they can stop it. They hate the idea of Americans keeping their money. They want to redistribute Americans’ money to the communist rulers of other countries like China and Brazil and to their favored political and racialist groups. But about 50% of Democrats want the tax rates to be permanent for all Americans. This makes it one of the best wedge issues ever. It cuts the Democrats in half. It will never pass with the progressive, socialist Democrats in charge of the party right now. And until it passes, non-socialist, rank-and-file Democrats will keep splitting off from their party in search of a political party that brings some sanity to the discussion.

The socialists in charge of the Democratic Party today will destroy their party before they let it return to the control of people who think like Americans. So Republicans should give them the chance to do just that.

Most likely the bill will not get through Democrats’ fear, urgency, and doubt attacks right away. It will just sit there, waiting, making noise, underlining how Democrats didn’t take care of this when they had the chance. That just makes it better. The longer it sits there like a festering sore the more urgent it gets, and the more apparent it is that Democrats do not want people to keep their own money.They think that no matter what it is, whether to buy food or drive our cars, go to the doctor, buy medicine, clothes, housing, lunch for our kids, or even give money to charity, government bureaucrats do a better job at picking what to spend money on than regular Americans do. Why should Americans have to pursue happiness on their own when the government can just hand it to them? Sure, it’s a little like living in your parents’ house as an adult, under their rules, while putting all your money in the family pot. Your loving parents say it’s worth it because Mom’s such a great cook and you will never want to eat anything she didn’t cook, make any decisions your Dad doesn’t agree with, put away money for your retirement, get married or have kids, because Mom and Dad wouldn’t approve. That’s what it’s like when you don’t have resources of your own. You don’t have choices either. It’s always pizza on Friday night and chicken on Wednesday.

And that’s the bottom line. Democrats do not want Americans to keep their own money or to be free to make their own decisions. Republicans do. Republicans should pass this bill, then pop the popcorn and wait.

The Tea Party Patriots event begins with brunch and goes 11:30AM to 3:30PM. The Claremont event runs from 12:30PM to 3:30PM. Both events have a hard stop so currently serving Republicans can get over to Congress to oppose the Socialist Democrats as the Red Queen Pelosi commences her revenge plan to ram more spectacularly bad legislation [preposition] America’s [body part] starting at 4:00PM in the lame duck session.

First, after Republicans won a historic victory on November 2, 2010, it’s critical for those Congressmen and women who actually get to vote during the Lame Duck session to come out of the gate strategically smart enough and united enough to defeat the Socialist Democrats and their destructive agenda. Most freshmen are not in the Lame Duck congress, but have a few months to get their feet on the ground.

Second, I’m sure that newly elected Senators and Representatives who owe their victory to Tea Party voters and donors are thankful to the Tea Parties for their assistance. It would only be polite to show up at the Tea Party event and shake some hands.

Third, the Tea Party event is more likely to emphasize the principles and values that unite We the People with our Republican public servants than the Claremont event, which will be full of lobbyists looking for “friends” to help them get favorable tax treatment and earmarks. If our newly elected Representatives and Senators don’t already share our Tea Party principles and values, they aren’t going to learn them at one Tea Party event. So it won’t be the end of the world if they attend Claremont’s event. Actually, as EE notes, Claremont is one of the most conservative organizations that exists anywhere. Freshmen will make valuable alliances at either or both events.

Fourth, We the People will respect our public servants according to what they do in Congress, not according to whose shindigs they attend.

Fifth, We the People are watching what the 112th Congress does on the job. If they remember what the phone lines and fax machines were like during the Obamacare cramdown, that’s what it will be like from now on.

I will finish up with a note to the 112th Congress.

Technorati Tags: Government, Conservatism, Republican, Tea Party

Some men think the earth is round, others think it flat. It is a matter capable of question. But if it is flat, will the King’s command make it round? And if it is round, will the King’s command flatten it?

Of course the King cannot decree the shape of the earth, any more than the President can declare things to be evil that are good, or things to be good that are evil. Sure, the President or Congress can pass unjust laws but this is a violation of the Constitution, and as Napolitano pointed out: The states created the Federal Government and gave it its power, and they can take that power back. Napolitano approaches the end of the speech with another telling anecdote, this time about the incompetence of government.

• Medicare: broke.
• Medicaid: broke.
• Social Security: broke.
• Amtrak: broke.
• The Post Office: broke.

You’ll know this one. It didn’t happen too far from here. When the Mustang Ranch was taken over by the Federal Government for failure to pay its taxes, they drove it into the ground. So… the government can’t supply hookers and booze to truckers in the desert and they want to run health care

The government proves it has the reverse Midas touch. Everything it touches falls apart and turns to dust. Only a government with employees similar to those Obama put in charge of GM and Chrysler, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, could lose money with a bar and legal house of prostitution in the middle of a desert.

Watch it all, peeps.

Judge Andrew Napolitano at RightOnline 2010 from AFPhq on Vimeo.

We were surrounded by fireworks. Sparklers, screaming roman candles, bottle rockets, combination fireworks that released little army men that drifted down on little parachutes, loud fireworks that pulsed white light like a strobe, showers of sparks, big bangers, little bangers, whizzing flying things that sounded like a blender gone berserk and looked like the bat signal, bigger rockets, huge rockets, crackling crawfish, fountains of sparks, and various firecrackers and smoke bombs. And not a single person got his hand blown off or his eye burned out. I didn’t even hear a single “ouch” (unlike earlier in the day when one of those little tank firecrackers singed the tip of my finger). There were probably about 2000 or 3000 people on this beach setting off fireworks.

The official fireworks were bigger, admittedly. But they were about a third or half a mile out from the beach, and there were so many more munitions going off behind and to either side of us that the main show paled in comparison to the people’s show. The people, who bought fireworks on their own, without municipal support for their purchases, who set them off using their military training or common sense for safety measures, who set them off for their own selfish reasons instead of a government’s solemn dedication to whatever a government is dedicated to, the people had a better fireworks display than the government did.

This is why the fireworks display that I saw tonight was the best fireworks display I’ve ever seen. Not only were the fireworks better. The people, acting in freedom and using their own intelligence, demonstrated something we all know to be true but sometimes forget. Individuals, doing things for their own reasons, always do a better job than government, no matter how much money government expropriates.

Life is the right to live, intact with one’s limbs, eyes, and organs. Any physical damage that cripples or removes a limb, or eyes, or kills one violates this right. This definition was important because according to the common law people had the right to defend themselves with lethal force if they were under threat of losing life or limb.

Liberty is the right to move about freely. Any false imprisonment, clapping into slavery, or kidnapping violates this right. Once again, under the common law people had the right to defend themselves with lethal force if they are under threat of losing their liberty.

Property is the right to keep the fruits of one’s own labor, including items that are improved from their natural state, and to transfer the rights to this property to others as one wishes. If people become wealthy through their hard work, they can trade for the things they like, buy and sell items, and pass property on to charities or family as they wish. This is also known as the Right to the Pursuit of Happiness, because if happiness is brought nearer by a life without hardships, and hard work and the accumulation of property leads to a life without undue hardships, then they are one and the same. Certainly people cannot be happy if they are forced to constantly struggle in abject poverty for food, a bed, and a roof over their head.

Those with nothing to their name, newcomers and the bankrupt can always start building up wealth with their bare hands and their innate inventiveness. Anyone can. Nobody said it was easy to become wealthy, but with property rights it is possible. Without property rights it will never be possible for the poor to rise out of poverty. The best they can hope for without equal property rights is a few pennies thrown their way by their ‘betters’ in the elite classes to make their poverty slightly less miserable, and maybe free beer on holidays so they forget their misery as they also lose their drive to succeed. The question though is whether it is desirable for people to live in poverty and misery, even if it is alleviated by government charity. Shouldn’t they be allowed and encouraged to lift themselves out of poverty instead? Shouldn’t they have property rights allowing them to rise from poverty?

As even the most obstinate slaveholders learned in the War Between the States that ended the Peculiar Institution of Slavery, when rights conflict, for instance the right of a slaveholder to his property conflicting with the rights of a human to go where he wants and keep the fruits of his own labor, humans do not have rights to the life, liberty, or property of other humans.

This was never all that controversial. The controversial part was in defining who was human. Eventually all Americans came to the true conclusion that the differences between the different human races were cosmetic. Under the skin we all were, are, and forever will be members of the same human race.

If healthcare were a right, which it is not, what would that mean? First, if Able has a right to healthcare, Dr. Baker must supply his labor to Able (violates Property rights). Second, Dr. Baker cannot move about freely, because he is required to serve Able (violates Liberty rights). And Third, Dr. Baker’s property rights in his medical learning, his medical practice, and his office are seized for Able’s needs (more violations of Property rights). Dr. Baker serves Able, just as all doctors serve patients now, but Dr. Baker no longer has a choice of whether to serve Able. Now he is placed in involuntary service. Another phrase for involuntary service is involuntary servitude. And that is equal to bondage or slavery. Dr. Baker must be a slave if Able has a right to healthcare!

And that is why the right to healthcare is not a right. Because if it is a right then it places all the Dr. Bakers into slavery. No right can place another person into slavery. Such rights are illegitimate.

What is healthcare really? It is a responsibility that goes with being alive. If you are alive, you have the responsibility to stay healthy. There is no argument possible about it. You can exercise. Nobody else can exercise for you. You can eat right. Nobody else can eat for you. You can pay attention to wounds and diseases. Nobody else knows how you feel until you tell them. Nobody has any responsibility for your body other than you. You do.

And that is the underlying reason we are having this discussion. The Christianity-hating progressive movement could not reinvent society following reason alone without acknowledging God, has therefore abandoned reason entirely, and now denies that individuals have responsibility for their selves and their actions.

The Truth is obvious to those who look. Don’t be afraid to see what you see and say so.

…

This post was inspired by A Well-Reasoned Perspective on the “Right” to Health Care, by Amy Miller and Ryan Kazmierczak. Read here for more on rights and duties.

Technorati Tags: Health, Rights, Responsibilities, Obamacare, Government, Constitution

Canadian law puts reasonable limits on the freedom of expression. For example, promoting hatred against any identifiable group would not only be considered inappropriate, but could in fact lead to criminal charges. Outside of the criminal realm, Canadian defamation laws also limit freedom of expression and may differ somewhat from those to which you are accustomed. I therefore ask you, while you are a guest on our campus, to weigh your words with respect and civility in mind.

There is a strong tradition in Canada, including at this university, of restraint, respect and consideration in expressing even provocative and controversial opinions and urge you to respect that Canadian tradition while on our campus. Hopefully, you will understand and agree that what may, at first glance, seem like unnecessary restrictions to freedom of expression do, in fact, lead not only to a more civilized discussion, but to a more meaningful, reasoned and intelligent one as well.

Ann Coulter responded with musings about how she would file a Hate Speech complaint, including in a letter to the Ottawa Citizen:

The provost simply believes and is publicizing his belief that conservatives are more likely to commit hate crimes in their speeches. Not only does this promote hatred against conservatives, but it promotes violence against conservatives. [link]

And the sequel to this was extremely amusing, if you are amused by irony. Tonight, according to Drudge, a mob of 2,000 angry, hateful students and members of communist parties, carrying rocks and sticks with which to attack and commit violence upon Ms. Coulter, assembled outside the building in which she was to speak. Some got into the building and pulled a fire alarm, while others shouted hatefully outside the building in protest of Ms. Coulter’s “hate speech.” Blogs called for Coulter to be hurt. Members of Parliament were banned from going, while a Member denounced her on the floor of Parliament. The threats were bloodcurdling enough that the police were persuaded to shut down Coulter’s speech before she was able to give it.

Whose speech stirred up violence and hatred again? Was it Coulter’s or the provost’s?

Technorati Tags: Canada, Ann Coulter, Censorship, Culture War, Education, Political Oppression, Hate Speech

Can anybody tell me if I missed anything?

Supposedly this bill is totally awesome and we are idiotic chumps because it…

1. Reduces the deficit;
   It nearly breaks even by paying for 6 years of benefits with 10 years of increased taxes. And it only ends up 800 billion in the red after ten years. In the second ten years that means it will be 40% over budget. How exactly is that reducing the deficit? By the way, I plan to pay my full year’s taxes next year on only 6 months of my income. The IRS understands and agrees with Congress’s math, right?
2. Cracks down on Medicare waste, fraud, and abuse;
   Does this require a new law? Why in the world hasn’t the super genius Democrat Party-controlled congress already done this? Or was it because they like Medicare fraud?
3. Provides historic tax credit for small businesses and individuals to purchase health insurance;
   Small business already has a tax benefit for supplying healthcare. It might not be a temporary, targeted tax credit that doesn’t do a darn bit of good, but it is better because it is continuing rather than one-time-only.
4. Allows consumers to shop for health insurance across state lines via multi-state compacts;
   What else is involved in a ‘compact?’ Why not just repeal the states’ exemption from the interstate commerce clause when it comes to insurance? Force them to allow insurance to be sold in their markets without imposing onerous requirements. Let the consumer decide the coverage they want instead of some busybody insurance commissioner and the lobbyists who took the busybody insurance commissioner to lunch.
5. Inaugurates medical malpractice reforms, (an area where the GOP failed to take any action when in charge of Congress for 12 years).
   It imposes mediation. That is not malpractice reform. That just raises costs even faster than the ambulance chaser lawsuit lottery that already gives so much money to Democrat Party election slush funds.

   Also they claim it will do these things immediately…

6. Offer tax credits to small businesses to purchase coverage;
   Temporary, targeted, based on the assumption that a one-time $3000 tax credit will convince companies to hire permanent $50K per year (unionized) employees. In other words, this is a fairy tale.
7. Prohibit pre-existing condition exclusions for children in all new plans;
   So if my kid breaks his leg I can buy insurance ten minutes later and the hospital will fix him up and charge it to my brand spanking new policy? What could go wrong with that?!
8. Provide immediate access to insurance for uninsured Americans who are uninsured because of a pre-existing condition through a temporary high-risk pool;
   This requires a 2700 page law plus a 2300 page reconciliation package? Are you insane?
9. Prohibit dropping people from coverage when they get sick in all individual plans;
   Sounds like it will raise insurance rates a LOT.
10. Eliminate lifetime limits and restrictive annual limits on benefits in all plans;
    Sounds like it will raise insurance rates a LOT.
11. Require premium rebates to enrollees from insurers with high administrative expenditures and require public disclosure of the percent of premiums applied to overhead costs;
    More regulation of insurance companies… Don’t added regulations just increase costs? Utility rate boards have done such a great job of keeping utility rates low… That was sarcasm in case you couldn’t tell.
12. Ensure consumers have access to an effective internal and external appeals process to appeal new insurance plan decisions;
    How do we appeal insurance plan decisions made by the government single-payer plans we will all get thrown into because of the fine and tax structure in the bill? By the way, the worst health insurance for denying claims is MEDICARE! What’s it going to be like after Obamacare forces everyone in the whole country onto Medicare and Medicaid?
13. Require plans to cover an enrollee’s dependent children until age 26;
    Let’s increase their parents’ costs some more. It’s not like we ever want kids to grow up and move the hell out, is it?
14. Require new plans to cover preventive services and immunizations without cost-sharing;
    Great. More stuff for free, encouraging people to use medical services wastefully. I plan to be tested for pregnancy at the Doc’s office monthly. I recommend all men do the same.
15. Relief on the Donut Hole.
    What in the world is a Donut Hole? Did you just make that word up? Why do I get the idea it isn’t something I would want to dunk in a cup of coffee?
    

Anybody with better answers?

Bueller?

Technorati Tags: Obamacare, Common Sense, Healthcare Highjack

• Takeaway: DoD Intelligence is finally recognizing the usefulness of open source intelligence and accurate history as practiced by bloggers sitting in basements, and as compared with the relative uselessness of politicized intelligence coming from the official US intelligence community.

Shannon Love at Chicago Boyz, Why Alternative Power is and will Remain Useless

• Quote: There exists no alternative energy source, no combination of alternative energy sources, and no system of combinations of alternative energy sources that can fully replace a single, coal fired electric plant built with 1930s era technology.

Shannon Love at Chicago Boyz, Does the President actually understand the Concept of Insurance?

• Quote: Liability insurance pays for the damage that you might do to the property and lives of others. Comprehensive pays to repair the damage to your own car. The law requires that you protect the rights of others, it doesn’t require that pay for your own car in any particular way. Everybody knows this.
• Takeaway: Everybody except Obama.

Gateway Pundit, Upward Bound is Down… Radical Sexual Indoctrination of Kids is In

• Upward Bound, which has a 95% rate of rehabilitating at-risk youth and getting them to graduate from four-year colleges, is being cut. Funding to teach fisting in schools is being increased.
• Takeaway: Jennings and GLSEN want homosexual, bisexual and transgender themes taught in every subject at every grade, all the way down to the kindergarten level, maybe even preschool.

Gateway Pundit, 12th Imam Appears, gets arrested by Iranian Regime

• On Friday during the local Friday sermon, in the southern Iranian city of Bandar Abbass, a young man presented himself as the Mahdi and claimed to have been sent by God to bring enlightenment and blessings to people. Soon after this however he was arrested by agents of the revolutionary guards.

Belmont Club, Masters of the Unvierse

• Are interstellar aliens likely to be peacemongering progressives, or somewhat more ruthless?

Robert LeFevre at Mises.org, The Birth of a Man

• Takeaway: What is needed is a Declaration of Individual Independence

Liz Blaine at Newsreal, How to Beat Leftists and Astroturfers

• While lurking the web I ran across a set of videos that fall into the “must view” category for conservatives this year. Recorded during Conservative New Media’s workshop the videos focus on tactics used by leftists and astroturfers during the 2008 primaries and election, and methods to defeat them.

Technorati Tags: Roundup, Interesting Articles

You’d be surprised how easy it is to leave a soldier on deployment. You can do it with a letter. (He can’t argue with you. He doesn’t have a phone.) If you lay the groundwork early, saying to the soldier before he leaves, “This will be the end of us, we might as well admit it,” it’s that much easier. The letter won’t even come as a shock.

And if you have children with that soldier? You can handle all that with a letter, too. He’ll write it — because he cares about the kids, because he wants to work with you to do what’s best for them even though you’re leaving him — and you’ll give it to them. Here again, you will avoid a nasty confrontation. Who will they cry to? You? You’re just the teary-eyed bearer of the letter. Him? The one who’s sweating it out in the desert?

There will be no moving truck, no boxes, no house torn asunder. The soldier is peeing in a bucket as you pack. He doesn’t care who gets the couch.

Now she has married a blue-eyed marxist war protester and had a marxist baby with him, while her ex-husband married again and had a baby with the new wife.

Nessa already wrote a beautiful response to this article. If you click through and read Ms. Cook’s diary you will know the cheater’s story, the spoiled brat’s story, the oath breaker’s story. Nessa tells the story with statistics and history. Cassy Fiano at HotAir explores the process by which this spoiled brat of a woman went astray. This diary isn’t about those things. This essay is about what oath breakers like Courtney Cook do to their husbands, men who are risking their lives to protect their families and country. And this essay is about the alternative.

Those who broke their Oath

There are online forums where people relate stories about military spouses who cheat.

I wish to h— I had the answer to that question. I was a Navy man for 12 years, and let’s just say that the wife disappeared, so to speak and things went to hell for me, but I survived it. Some guys don’t. I was a Hospital Corpsman, and I saw suicides and a couple of homicides related to just that problem. It all comes down to loving yourself as well as your spouse, and loving and trusting in God. That’s just my opinion, but to answer your question, I don’t think there is a solid answer…loneliness, depression, a feeling of abandonment, any other of a few dozen reasons or excuses. I just hope you’re not cheating, and maybe the ones who are need to reevaluate their relationships with both husband/wife and with God. [link]

This writer offers bitter advice to other soldiers.

My advice – ditch your girl before you go to war, then you won’t be disappointed when she turns out to be a filthy slut. [link]

Another soldier, a leader of men, tells about his men.

When a comrade at arms is KIA it is disturbing but not utterly debilitating, the betrayal of a spouse left behind, even one who has “prepped the battlefield” as this filthy w—- suggests is. Utterly. Totally. Debilitating. Period. I’ve seen some of the finest young men I have known reduced to crying, spineless, simpering jellyfish, incapable of even standing a guard post, much less participating in a mission. And the w—-s who cause it just go on with their shallow little lives.

A mother tells an anecdote.

My son had to hire a private investigator to track down his first wife. And even that is not the worst I’ve seen.

A sister remembers.

My brother joined the Army in the early 80′s. It was truly his last best hope of having a life (he was alcoholic). His wife was screwing around on him. My mother found her in the lap of another guy in a bar. Not thinking, she told my brother who then deserted to come home and try to save his marriage. In the end there was no saving his marriage, or his life for that matter. He ended up dying from his alcoholism at the age of 34. I know my mother wished she had never said a word. He had just finished his second year and was happier than he had seemed to be his whole life. She blamed herself for the rest of her life.

The wives who keep the faith tell stories about the ones who were once of their number and betrayed their soldier husbands.

You know, I never would have thought that there would be so many utterly wretched women in existence until I got involved with Marine families in Tennessee. Some of the stories that they told about the women who snagged their sons were so appalling that they lingered on my heart for months. Years actually, as the one that was the absolute worst had to do with a Gold Star Marine mom whose son was her only child. She adored him so, and was so proud of his choice to be a Marine, even though she was terrified for him. He met and married a girl from somewhere out West before he deployed to Iraq, where he was KIA. His loving wife, all too happy to have been named his beneficiary for the life insurance benefit, not only refused to let his mother have so much as a scrap of his personal belongings, including the letters from his mother that he had so carefully saved while in Iraq, the b—- had his body cremated and refused to let his mother have a say about where the ashes would be scattered. His mom found out just before the ceremony and rushed to get there in time. You want to have a broken heart? Just imagine this poor woman, denied every comfort after the death of her only child, arriving in time to see the ashes of her son’s body being scattered by the wind at a lake. When everyone left and no one could stop her, she remained behind, desperately trying to scrape enough of her son’s ashes out from between the boards at the pier so that she’d have something of her only son to take home with her.

And those who kept it

Oath breaking is by no means universal. There are many good military wives and husbands, who do not betray their marriage or their oath. Let’s also read their stories.

An aunt remembers.

I have never been in war myself. But my nephew, who was like a brother, went to Kuwait. He had four little girls and a wife who loved him. He also had his mom, and the rest of the family, sitting at home day after day just praying the phone didn’t ring, a letter didn’t come, or a car didn’t show up at the door to tell us he was dead.

Kuwait was supposed to be a safe place to be sent at the time. But, there had been occasions where our troops were killed or endangered by attempted attacks against them. So, every newscast, we watched for his name. Day and night, we tried to go on and do the things we needed to do, but the fear of that call, letter, or visit was always there every where we went. Every day it loomed darker and larger like a huge cloud.

We didn’t complain, we just accepted it. That was our role. We waited for his first email or letter to tell us here where we could write him and send things. The fear, the loneliness, the isolation, only added to our fears. But we still carried on. That was our job.

He didn’t have to go. He was 32 and a many times decorated local police officer. His mom could have gotten him out of it as he was her only son, and her only child. But after 9/11 he felt it was his duty to enlist and be ready in case his country needed him. And, though we were afraid for him, we knew he did the right thing.

We never got that first letter. His mom and wife did get a couple emails. He died on March 5, 2004. He didn’t die in combat. He was killed in a car accident. The driver of his car pulled into the path of an oncoming vehicle. We died with him to a big degree that fateful day. We will never be the same. His youngest at 7 months will never remember him. The next to the youngest won’t either. But the seven year old and the five year old will remember him. They will also remember his promise that he would be OK and come back to them.

Those of us left behind may not be getting shot at or have to sleep with our guns. But, we also don’t have a “Band of brothers” to help us endure our fears for the safety of our loved ones deployed. We have the MSM to show us every negative aspect of what is happening in the war. They show every atrocity our troops and others endure. They show us every taped video with the screams and fearful pleas for help that we are helpless to give them.

All we can give them is our love, our prayers, our trust, our fidelity, letters, packages, etc., that may or may not get to our loved ones or make their lives easier while they fight this war.

We die a little each time a soldier is shot. We add to our shame each time it isn’t our loved one because we are so ashamed to admit to anyone that we are so glad that if someone had to die it wasn’t our loved one. We scream silently inside that it isn’t fair our loved one has to be a part of this hell. We pray for forgiveness for all our moments of despair and fear because we just know we ought to be stronger and that maybe if we aren’t strong enough God might not bring them home because we don’t deserve it.

We wish we could be there in the place of our loved one, then chastise ourselves because we don’t know if we have the guts or what it takes to do what our deployed loved one’s are doing.

I will always wish I could have been sent instead of my nephew. I would have gladly given my life for him, exchanged places with him. But, I couldn’t and can’t. I can only go to the cemetery at night and look on as the lantern by his grave caresses him in a way none of us can ever do again! He is now with God. But I am sure that we are in hell or at least as close to it as one can come here on earth.

His wife could no more have cheated on him than he could have cheated on his wife. You see, most of us left behind don’t have time to cheat because we are too busy praying for your safe return, raising our kids, taking care of the house and bills, getting together letters and packages for you, and trying let you know we support you and we’re OK, you don’t need to worry about us, we’re safe at home so we don’t have any problems at least not like what you are going through. We will never admit to you all that goes through our heads because we don’t want you to think we are weak. We don’t want you to worry or be distracted because it could make you careless and get you killed. [link]

If you think modern day military spouses have it rough with 12 month and 15 month deployments, just think about WWII when deployments lasted for the entire war.

I have a great-uncle who is still alive. He fought with the “Jumping Jews” (6th Infantry Division, their insignia was a Star of David) in WW II. Philippines. Absolutely brutal stuff. He married his wife just before going to volunteer in early 1942. Left for basic, then for training in Australia.

It was 18 months before his wife got the first letter form him after he went to Australia.

He almost died during the battle for Luzon. Its quite a tale, when the Japanese surrendered his doctor released him from the hospital and told him to find his unit. He hitched a ride to Manila and bumped into his First Sergeant. Top put him on a boat with a bunch of the other guys and sent him home.

He arrived before his letter announcing he was coming home. His outprocessing was a bit rushed, no one told him about the Silver Star w/V device, PH or several other lesser medals he had earned. They were in his records but somehow not on his DD 214. His kids contacted the VA and DOD and traced it all down. Several years ago Senator Durenburger, before his censure and expulsion from the Senate, came to the 4th of July picnic in Holland MN, (population 49) and presented my uncle Hank with his SS w/V. That was a powerful moment, most of the surviving members of his unit were there.

As a young buck Sergeant at the time, I was a favored nephew and got to hear all the stories they were willing to share, from him, his buddies and his wife of 50+ years. Hers were the most heart wrenching, for months on end she was certain he had been killed, then when he got home, she touched him while they were sleeping, he broke in during this story and said, he woke up but didn’t realize what he was doing till he was straddling her with his hands around her throat. It seems that if anything woke you during your odd moments of sleep in the PI, it was trying to kill you so you woke up fighting. They didn’t sleep together for another 10 months.

Uncle Hank has been retired from his farm for many years now. He and LaVonne spend their days at the Holland Senior Center or visiting the farm where their son runs things. I still get letters regularly, they are appreciated now as much as they were while I was in Iraq and Afghanistan.

We’re not the people we used to be. I think we can be again, but we’re not going to like getting there.

Another uncle story from WWII.

I had one uncle who drove a truck from Normandy to Berlin and fought in the Battle of the Bulge. Just a Wisconsin dairy farm boy.

Came back from the war and became a construction equipment salesman, owner of a small business and mayor of a small town for many years, M——. We had a family deer hunting tradition and he could shoot a flea off a deer’s ear at 100 yards with a Browning semi-auto 12 gauge shot gun (we couldn’t use rifles at that time in our county). When asked, “Stub, where’d you learn to shoot like that?”, he’d look incredulous and say, “Well, the Army, of course.”

The sad thing is his kids, my cousins, never pressed him for details about his exploits before he died. And I kick myself fo not having done so, too. And his wife, a wonderful Norwegian spitfire, was a Rosie the Riveter in California in the aircraft factories while her man was fighting the Nazis.

I got choked up at the reception in the Catholic church basement after his funeral and burial — I was in my early thirties and hadn’t shed a tear in almost two decades. I, too, fear we do not have enough kids like him coming into the fray, and I pray that I am wrong.

I share that prayer.

Kipling had words for soldiers on marrying, and how it is best done, in his poem The Young British Soldier. These may be the wisest words yet spoken to young soldiers going off to war.

Now, if you must marry, take care she is old –
A troop-sergeant’s widow’s the nicest I’m told,
For beauty won’t help if your rations is cold,
Nor love ain’t enough for a soldier.
‘Nough, ‘nough, ‘nough for a soldier . . .

If the wife should go wrong with a comrade, be loath
To shoot when you catch ‘em — you’ll swing, on my oath! –
Make ‘im take ‘er and keep ‘er: that’s Hell for them both,
An’ you’re shut o’ the curse of a soldier.
Curse, curse, curse of a soldier . . .

Last week I lost a good friend and colleague. Percy died on his 53rd birthday, too early, felled in sleep by his heart. He was a soldier who retired after 20 years in the Army, a NCO, and a fine network engineer. He was married when he was in the Army and had children with his first wife, but she left him sometime along the way. This was a man who had traveled all over the world, and when he retired from the Army he didn’t stop searching to find a wife to complete himself. When he found her, it would be for life. He did find a wife and married her. And it was for life. Sadly, the thread of his remaining life was all too short. Percy was a newlywed, married less than six months, when he died.

Percy’s daughter spoke at the memorial service. She was young, nervous, apologetic. She told the story of how, when she was a teenager not too long ago, her dad, my friend, told her she would not be allowed to date until she was 35. And then she told us, the audience, her greatest regret. She told us in her quavering voice, while feeling the import of what she was saying, that her dad would not be there to walk her down the aisle when the time came for her to marry. She sobbed as the preacher helped her sit down.

Percy would have wanted to walk his daughter down the aisle as much as she wanted it, for he was a man who loved being married, a man who knew what it meant to take an oath and keep it. And that is something that soldiers know something about: Keeping an oath.

Read Kipling to your daughters and sons. Tell them these stories and others like them. Teach them that marriage is a trust that binds two people and two families together as one, into an extended family that is bound with unbreakable ties of blood, and that when soldiers go off to war their spouse left at home is as important to their life and the success of their mission as anything. To be betrayed by a loved one is to be shattered. Teach them not to betray their loved ones. Teach them to take their marital oath literally, as if every word in it were sacred and holy, for that is precisely the truth of it. In short, teach them to be good.

We need more good people who can and will keep their Oaths.

Technorati Tags: Military, Family, Conservatism, Appreciation

tol·er·ance

1. The capacity for or the practice of recognizing and respecting the beliefs or practices of others.

That’s what tolerance used to mean, before Orwellian progressives performed their cunning linguistic tricks on it. Now the class-obsessed left has divided tolerance into two classes: partisan (good) and repressive (bad). The dirty secret is that both their meanings are identical and neither one is real tolerance.

It all started with Herbert Marcuse, the Marxist theoretician, who decried “repressive tolerance” that doesn’t take sides (or maybe it takes the side of tradition. This is confused in the essay.) and advocated its replacement with “partisan tolerance” that takes sides against the status quo, which means taking sides against anyone who isn’t a partisan “victim,” or even better an actual outlaw.

From the introduction to Marcuse’s 1965 essay (emphasis mine):

THIS essay examines the idea of tolerance in our advanced industrial society. The conclusion reached is that the realization of the objective of tolerance would call for intolerance toward prevailing policies, attitudes, opinions, and the extension of tolerance to policies, attitudes, and opinions which are outlawed or suppressed. In other words, today tolerance appears again as what it was in its origins, at the beginning of the modern period–a partisan goal, a subversive liberating notion and practice. Conversely, what is proclaimed and practiced as tolerance today, is in many of its most effective manifestations serving the cause of oppression.

The author is fully aware that, at present, no power, no authority, no government exists which would translate liberating tolerance into practice, but he believes that it is the task and duty of the intellectual to recall and preserve historical possibilities which seem to have become utopian possibilities–that it is his task to break the concreteness of oppression in order to open the mental space in which this society can be recognized as what it is and does.

Marcuse reaches his conclusions by purposefully misreading Locke and by assuming his own conclusions (e.g. he literally accepts as a postulate that the status quo ante is ‘evil’). But this is not the place to indulge in a long argument against Marcuse. Any reader with a lick of common sense who reads Marcuse’s essay will realize it is packed full of learned lies and rhetorical and subliminal trickery. The takeaway of his argument is the conclusion that all things that have been outlawed or suppressed by society, including murder, rape, and robbery, and all matter of perversion and anti-social behavior, are good things that should be accepted, while every single traditional value or person must be rejected militantly.

To him, tradition is the enemy.

Let us take a minute to think about tradition.

In modern society we appreciate science and the scientific or empirical method. Through experiments, the scientist makes changes in things and observes them to see what happens. He formulates hypotheses and theories in response to physical facts. When a new process is discovered, formalized, and replicated by other scientists then it becomes a generally accepted scientific theory, and is also accepted by all manner of engineers and inventors as a formula to do something useful.

Not only does science work that way, so does tradition. People start from a beginning point, and over years, decades, centuries, and millennia they experiment with different ways of doing things. When they find a way to achieve better results, better facts, the improved way spreads to others. The origin of some innovations may be obscured in folkways, but the more obscure their origins the more you can trust that they were empirically tested and retested over time by people, not invented by rulers and priests who have always written down their commandments. Eventually survival-enhancing best practices beat out the alternatives. Over macro-scale time, except where overridden by a tyrant’s fiat, a society’s tradition becomes the repository of all the best practices empirically formulated by the members of society.

The common law is a tradition.

Tradition is, quite literally, the true science of sociology. The freer the society, the better the science in society’s traditions. The less free, the worse.

Tolerance is a best practice of a free society. The whole point of tolerance is that it lets groups of free people live with each other even when they disagree, without one group needing to defeat the other and place them into subservience. But in Marcuse’s formulation the purpose of tolerance is to enforce the beliefs of the group in charge, and to punish conflicting beliefs of their subjects. Marcuse’s formulation assumes an unfree society, with one annointed aristocracy ruling over another, lesser class of serfs. And his answer is to reverse the formulation so that the serf class becomes militantly intolerant toward the aristocracy and revolts against it.

Partisan Tolerance explicitly inverts every single moral and social good in American and Western European culture and society.

The Peaceniks are Revolting

What happens when one group of people, in a free society without class barriers or defenses against revolution, unilaterally decides to revolt against the whole system? Well, either they fail or succeed. We lived through this process in the USA with the violent, millenarian upheavals of the 1960s and their peace-mongering pipe-dream of creating a heaven on earth where there is no more war and the lion lays down in peace with the lamb. Unfortunately, in the real world the lion lunched on the lamb, the tiger mauled his trainer, the environmentalist’s lawsuits shuttered the factories and put all the factory laborers out of work, millions of innocents were murdered by the “peaceful” communists in Cambodia and Vietnam, welfare for poor families created a plague of drugs and violence, and the violent revolutionaries of the 1960s failed to overthrow American society. So SDS and the Weathermen and their drug-addled cronies put away their guns and bombs, went to grad school like Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn did, and burrowed into the universities and colleges where they began to indoctrinate college students whose brains had been turned into receptive mush by the infantilizing, prison-like, government monopoly schools and their guild-like teacher’s unions. Others went into entertainment, law, social work, the environmental movement, and government. And finally there were those, like Bill and Hillary Clinton, who went into the Democratic Party for the 1968 Democratic convention and took the party over in time for McGovern’s doomed 1972 run.

Political Correctness

Political correctness arose from these people. Originally something of a cynical joke about the uniformity enforcing effects of political power, then sold to us as a kind of little white lie to paper over hurt feelings, it quickly became a way of enforcing partisan tolerance. In other words, political correctness is a lie that replaces the truth with a partisan political lie in order to gain a partisan political advantage. Why doesn’t the press call someone caught red-handed in a plane full of people while lighting himself on fire in a fumbled attempt to set off a bomb a terrorist, but calls him an alleged terrorist instead?–Political correctness. Why can’t you call an aggressive pan-handling bum who urinates on the sidewalk and cusses at every passer-by crazy? Why does every infringement of your freedom and the freedom of your children seem to be “for the children”? Why is abortion called a woman’s issue, or a reproductive rights issue, or free choice, rather than homicide, dismemberment and disposal of defenseless children in the womb? Why did Congress pass a hate crimes law in 2009 that protects dangerous perverts like pedophiles and bestialists from “hate speech” and provides  punishments for those who call them the wrong words, while with-holding this privileged status from members of the military who face identically hateful mistreatment? Why do progressives wear fashionable portraits of despicable tyrants and mass murderers such as Arafat, Che and Mao on their tee shirts while claiming these monsters somehow stood for freedom? Political correctness and Partisan Tolerance are the reasons.

The truth is that Partisan Tolerance and Political Correctness are nothing more than Lies in a web of lies promoted by revolutionary communists, socialists, fascists, Democrats, and other progressives. The source of these lies is as old as humanity: he is the Father of Lies, the Lord of the Flies, Beelzebub, the Serpent.

Is that all?

Partisan Tolerance does not stop at Political Correctness, or even Multiculturalism, though that is where we most often see it. It is truly perverse. In the progressives’ Newspeak dictionary, freedom means total government control of everyone, justice means treating privileged minorities better than non-preferred groups, property is not the means by which individuals suffice for themselves and escape bondage to others but the means of oppression, equal treatment before the law is replaced with legally-enforced equal misery for all, those who create great products and employ vast numbers of people are treated like criminals and perverts, and the most fundamental right of all, the right to life, can be invalidated by another’s right to privacy or convenience.

Here are a few more examples…

1. Some critical theorists (this means communist in the progressive secret code) justify censorship of the arts based on the Marcusean idea of partisan tolerance.
2. We have an explanation for why according to Democrats, any argument by a black person always beats an argument by a white person, as long as the black person is a Democrat. In other words, racism is a good thing for progressives to practice according to partisan tolerance. If the black person is not a Democrat, like Clarence Thomas or Condoleezza Rice, s/he is not authentically black, is even worse than a white person with the same views, and must be demonized and personally destroyed by all “good” progressives.
3. We have a response to a court decision in Belgium that declares that suppression or oppression of majority views is not legally objectionable. This is exactly the same structure as existed in apartheid South Africa: The minority oppressed the majority. In other words, apartheid is allowable as long as it is not against the wrong majority.
4. We have the example of San Francisco, where law abiding, productive citizens are oppressed by the official bureaucracy while the same bureaucracy refuses to enforce laws against criminals and those who can claim the privileges of “victim” status. Are you an illegal alien and a criminal? You will get treated with kid gloves, while a businessman who wants to turn a profit so he can grow his company and employ more people is  taxed to the brink of failure.
5. We have all the ways that Progressives lie, mislead and cheat to get out of losing arguments.

Is partisan tolerance simple hypocrisy? I would argue it is worse. It is not simply stupid hypocrisy. It is an organized LIE that turns the categories of truth and lie on their heads, makes words meaningless, and prevents understanding between people. It is an attack on language and understanding and against reason and the intelligence of everyone in society, whether they pay attention to this or not. It is the willful infliction of the chaos at the Tower of Babel on the whole world, in order to bring us to a perfect, pre-linguistic, communist paradise that never existed and is fundamentally inhumane. It is the Lie.

It is the Lie, and all too many Democrats believe in the Lie as hard as they can. They cannot see it is a lie, because they have trained themselves to not see anything for what it is, but only see what fits into their preconceived, partisan politically correct categories.

What’s this mean for us?

One of our jobs as responsible, clear seeing adults is to recognize political correctness and partisan tolerance wherever we see them, identify them by name as a LIE, reject them forcefully, and ridicule and demolish the arguments of any and everyone who advances these destructive memes. We have to make it personal. We have to hurt their feelings.

And maybe that’s the hardest part. Because we are nice. Because we don’t want to turn into mirror images of the hateful, horrible douchebags who are the attack dogs of the Democratic Party.

But even though this is not a fighting war, this is none-the-less a civil war for the culture and soul of America and to maintain the last best hope for real freedom in the rest of the world.

The Alternative

The alternative to struggle and victory is surrender and loss. The result for those in an America where we lose will be, as George Orwell so eloquently wrote:

If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.

That’s what is at stake. Life in a world where everyone is forced to believe lies or pretend to, where right and wrong are turned upside down, where none but the political aristocracy are free in any meaningful sense of the word, and where a single terrible tyrant holds the lives of all in his all-powerful, all-corrupt fist. Though we often say that socialism and tyranny don’t work, the dirty secret is that once freedom has been thrown on the trash heap they do work. They have worked for most of human history, when men and women were not free but were slaves of their kings and emperors. Most people are miserable in these societies, but such societies are stable and aside from occasional violent revolts, pogroms, wars, and oppressions, life goes on. That is how socialism, fascism, monarchism, and other forms of tyranny function, by forcing the vast mass of people into equal misery.

How many generations will it take to restore freedom if we go down that road? And will we die in the transitional struggles, waste away in jails, or will we die, old and full of regrets, as slaves who through our forbearance sold our fellows and descendants into slavery?

Militantly opposing the LIE of partisan tolerance, all the lies of progressive Newspeak, is not the only thing we must do. But it is something we all must do. Because truth will set us free, as long as we are able to know it when we see it.

also posted at Beaglescout

Technorati Tags: Common Sense, Culture War, Democrats, Socialism, Tyranny

If you are allowed to vote, then your vote should be counted. If your vote is not counted, then it’s just as if you were stopped from voting. If a person gets to vote twice, that is the same exact thing as taking away someone else’s vote. If a person votes a dozen times at a dozen precincts, a dozen people have their votes stolen from them. One of them could have been you! There is nothing funny or innocent about vote fraud. No matter how rare it is, each time it happens it takes away a person’s Constitutionally granted power to vote. And each time it happens, the frustration over vote fraud convinces another person that voting is useless. If too many Americans come to believe their votes don’t count because of fraud, then the possibility of revolution by other means becomes very real. Those are the stakes. Those are the reasons why preventing vote fraud is important.

There is a non-partisan Voter ID Petition going on in Mississippi. Currently Mississippi state law prohibits poll workers from asking for or checking a photo ID to make sure that every voter is who she says she is. Coupled with the inability of cities and towns to clear the voter rolls of people who die, this leaves a wide-open field for fraudulent voting. The only way fraudulent voters get caught is if they come back to the same precinct to vote under a second name and one of the poll workers or watchers remembers them and calls them on it. The current petition is to put a question on the 2010 general election ballot that lets the people of Mississippi decide if they want to require Voter ID to prevent vote fraud.

We are very close to our statewide goal of 130 thousand signatures. We will be out in force on the home stretch trying to cross that finish line before January 31, 2010.

Pick up a petition and take it to your job, your school, or your church. Get your friends and neighbors and your kids’ friends’ parents to sign. Pick-up and drop-off locations for petitions can be found below. So can some good advice on how to answer questions you might get about the petition.

Jackson County Pick-up/Drop-off Locations:

• Ocean Springs:  Miner’s Toy Store, Washington Avenue
• Gautier:  Coldwell-Banker Realty, Hwy 90
• Gautier:  Sleep King, Hwy 90
• Gautier:  David Thompson (at bank between McDonald’s & Wendys on Highway 90 – ask for David)
• Pascagoula:  Anderson’s Bakery, Market Street
• Pascagoula:  Sleep King, Denny Avenue
• Vancleave: Coles Service Center, Poticaw Bayou Road
• Wade/Hurley/Big Point area: Farm Bureau Insurance, 16913 Highway 63 (10 miles north of I-10, 1 mile north of the power plant, 4 miles south of Wade-Vancleave Rd.)

Harrison County Pick-up/Drop-off Locations:

• Sweet Pepper’s Deli on the west side of Hwy. 49 in Saucier.  Ask for David or Joyce.
• Comvest Properties on Beauvoir Rd. in Biloxi.  Across from Autozone.
• Vintage Station on Courthouse Rd. in Gulfport.  After 5pm.  Just north of the railroad.
• Bernie’s restaurant in Biloxi.
• Hallmark Mortgage on Cowan Rd. in Gulfport.  Just north of Hwy. 90.
• Palazzo CPA’s.  1/2 mile north of I-10 at exit 41/Woolmarket.
• Any Sleep King location.  Denny Ave. in Pascagoula.  Eisenhower Dr. in Biloxi.  Hwy. 49 in Gulfport next to Best Buy.  Dedeaux Rd. in Gulfport, 1 mile east of Hwy. 49.  Hwy. 90 in Gautier.  Pass Rd. in Gulfport, next to Center Point Energy.  Sangani Blvd. in D’Iberville next to Lowe’s.

Petition Guidelines:

• Official petition forms are 2-sided legal size. Sheet must have printing on back to be valid. Use official forms.
• Print name and address as listed on voter rolls (Clerk compares name and address to voter rolls to certify each signature).
• Yes, petition signers need to be registered to vote in Mississippi for their signatures to count.
• No P.O. Boxes.
• Black or blue ink is OK.
• Don’t worry about precinct or congressional district (not necessary)
• Keep different counties on separate sheets.
• Sign at the bottom of the sheet as the circulator.
• Deliver completed sheets to drop-off points AS THEY ARE COMPLETED (we want to avoid a bottleneck at the Clerks’s office). Our deadline for turning in sheets to the drop-off points is January 31^st.

Frequently Asked Questions

• Some people will object to signing a political petition, saying they don’t want news to get back to their boss, or to face political retaliation. Answer: We are going to have at least 130,000 signatures on this petition. Nobody is going to go through all these thousands of sheets of paper to check to see if your name is on it.
• Careful signers may point out there is an exception for people who have religious objections to having their photograph taken and object to this. Answer: I totally understand where you’re coming from, and if I had my druthers I’d prefer that too. However, the lawyers tell us that if we didn’t have this exception in the legal language, the first legal challenge based on a religious objection would overturn the law.

Also posted at

Technorati Tags: Voter ID, Mississippi, Vote Fraud, Activism

Shift bells ring, are you listening,
In the streets, blood is glistening.
Revolution in sight,
We’re toiling tonight.
Progressing to the workers’ motherland.

Gone away is our history,
Here to stay is equal misery.
We sing labor’s song,
As we go along,
Progressing to the workers’ motherland.

In the meadow we can build a snowman,
Then pretend that he is Chairman Mao.
He’ll say: Are you orphans?
We’ll say: No man,
But we can do the job,
Just show us how.

Later on, we’ll conspire,
As we dream by the fire
To face unafraid,
The plans that we’ve made,
Progressing to the workers’ motherland.

In the meadow we can build a gulag,
And pretend that it’s full of the rich.
We’ll starve teabaggers right there in the gulag,
Until the mass graves fill up the new ditch.

When it snows, ain’t it thrilling,
Tracking down bourgeois and killing?
We’ll murder and slay, the Soviet way,
Progressing to the workers’ motherland.

Everybody sing along with the progressive lyrics!

Updated: Replaced “Josef Stalin” in the second line of the third stanza with “Chairman Mao” for better poetic meter. Adjusted rhyme in fourth line to fit.

Xposted at

Technorati Tags: Satire, Lyrics, Music, Socialism, Progressivism, Christmas