MESSING WITH THE MACHINE

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government,” Thomas Jefferson.

“If the injustice is part of the necessary friction of the machine of government, let it go, let it go; perchance it will wear smooth — certainly the machine will wear out. If the injustice has a spring, or a pulley, or a rope, or a crank, exclusively for itself, then perhaps you may consider whether the remedy will not be worse than the evil; but if it is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine. What I have to do is to see, at any rate, that I do not lend myself to the wrong which I condemn.” From Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau.

I stand humbled by the language of these two men. There is a time honored tradition in this country that when the government inflicts on the people a law, rule or tax that is unjust and goes against the will of the people then it should be resisted and then rescinded. Government can only rule with the consent of the governed and we have seen that part of our heritage trampled and disregarded too many times. The government is setting itself up as our overseers and not as our servants and the time have come for the people to reassert the individual sovereignty that is ours. After all it is not the government that is in control here. This is a Republic and we the people employ the government to serve our wishes and they serve at our pleasure. They have forgotten this. I believe that the people’s sovereignty has been lost of late and those who imagine themselves in power are operating under the delusion that we serve them. This has to stop or be stopped.

We have 7 months to wait before we have the opportunity to express our displeasure and send them packing. I fear that they can do a lot of damage in that length of time. I further believe we must make some immediate effort to keep them busy lest they do permanent damage to our country. We all know they are inefficient, slow and bureaucratic so let’s prove it. Let us put them to the test and take their alleged minds off messing with the principles of our nation. Help me help the government prove their inefficiencies.

Call them every day. Ask your Senators and Representative for a flag that has flown over the Capitol. Ask what new laws they are considering and ask for paper copies, if you can have them faxed some place do that. Ask for speaking schedules, ask to speak to your Senator personally, and agree to hold. Ask to speak to your Congressman, agree to hold. Just call and ask the receptionist about the weather in Washington. Prepare by having what you want to ask clear in your mind.

Tie them up in any way you can. Be polite but firm. They work for you and they are well paid for the privilege. Ask them who they work for and if the answer given is anything other than you, be sure and correct them. If we can't stop them from screwing us, let's screw with them a little. Send the Treasury a penny in the mail. Say in a letter that it is for the national debt. Then call and demand a receipt. Write them checks for 31 cents. Get on the Internet and look up all the different Departments and Agencies and call them or write them and ask for any information they might be offering and any they aren’t. Apply for jobs with them and then call them back every hour to see if they have made their decision yet. If you feel particularly patient fill out Freedom of Information forms about UFO’s, bigfoot, who killed Jimmy Hoffa, etc…

Call the White House, ask for Sasha. See if she wants to come over and play with your daughter or granddaughter. Send her a toy. Civil disobedience can bring them to their knees. Don't forget to order your copy of the budget and a copy for all your kids. Send them those paint samples from the hardware store and suggest they paint the White House that color – I suggest red. You all have magazines around the house fill out those little cards with 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20500, on it so that companies will send them free samples of stuff. Copy them on all your commercial emails. Sign them up for a visit from the Army or Navy recruiters. Enter them in raffles. Send them gift subscriptions to magazines. Force them to notice that there are people out here and we expect a little action for our hard earned money.

Go to the Post Office and mail your letters one at a time. Stand in line and buy a stamp, mail the letter and then get back in line for the next one. Apply for grants. There are lots of grants. If you get one use the money to continue the pressure or convert it to individual checks for 31 cents and start paying down the national debt with it. Always get a receipt. Write letters, send emails, make phone calls, send faxes, knock on the doors of the local offices…if you can get a fax number give it to every sandwich and pizza shop in the United States. Get a name, share it on Facebook.

This may all sound silly to some, but it isn’t about the individual act, it is about the volume of little acts. These are just small things that I thought of in a couple of minutes. We are a creative people. Think of new things, legal things, annoying things. Share them with those who believe the government has overstepped its Constitutional mandate. Expect retaliation. Publicize it when it comes. Ignore the criticism from those who support the government. These are people who express a desire to be ruled and have a need for someone to run their lives, why would anyone listen to the helpless about anything?

EARTH HOUR 1888

I have been noticing a few references here and there for something called “Earth Hour” that is to occur this weekend at 8:30PM March 27th. The day stuck in my head because it is the anniversary of my father’s and my brother’s birth. It would have been my brother’s 56th birthday and it would have been my father’s 122nd. Now the significance of that is that makes my father’s year of birth 1888 and when he moved to Texas as a boy they came in a wagon and there were no electric lights. There were no cell phones, radios, computers, cars, appliances, motors, engines (other than steam), there were no electric toothbrushes, razors, alarm clocks, pagers, fax machines, video games or any of the technological gizmos that we take for granted in this world. The expectation of lifespan was about 45 years.

There were no antibiotics, no CAT scans, no MRI’s, no treatments for cancer. The medical profession was still operating in the dark for the most part not unlike how everyone was when the sun went down in rural Texas. It was not a great place. There was a bright spot. Thomas Edison was 41 years old and had already moved his operations from Menlo Park, New Jersey to Ft Myers, Florida. He had improved on the design and patented his incandescent light bulb. His basic improved designed was accepted when my dad was 1 year old. It was a time of creation and progress. But the part of the country where my father lived was dark when the sun went down.

So I was watching a television commercial that featured a bunch of children telling us stupid adults that Earth Hour was coming and we should turn out our lights for an hour on Saturday. Don’t think so. This is supposed to be a call to action to save the planet…from us. So they want me to stand around in the dark for an hour to show how environmentally friendly I am. I have a different plan. I am going to turn all my lights on and celebrate the technological advancement of mankind. I am going to sit my granddaughter down and teach her about Thomas Edison and Adam Smith.

Nothing being proposed by the environmental movement is good for people. I see nothing to celebrate by emulating our primitive past. Life before the technology was hard, brutal and dark. Our ability to light up our world is a good thing not something to be scorned and certainly those who would use kids in this way telling them that having the lights on is bad should be ashamed. If I believed that the Earth was in any danger I would view things a little differently. I don’t, but if I did, I would be more likely to promote the growth of technology and capitalist economics because those are the things that have made things better. Nothing on this planet has ever gotten better by regressing technology or centralizing economic planning. It is the stuff of famine, disease and unrest.

Needless to say we won’t be turning off our lights. I may even turn on some extra ones and start the car and turn on the headlights. This world has spent enough time in the dark and the future of mankind should be one of continuous improvement in our technological abilities. We need less centralized planning and more entrepreneurship to keep us moving forward. There is no going back because that is the direction of death and darkness. Those who would tell my granddaughter that the solution to anything is to turn out the lights and stand around in the dark are on notice that I am not tolerant of the new luddites who want to turn back the clock.

The same people who support these kinds of anti-people ideologies are the same people who are the enemies of liberty, freedom and individuality. They are the people of the state. They are the designers or tyranny and they need to be opposed. I will do my little part in my own little area by teaching my granddaughter to stand in the light and give thanks for Thomas Edison and Adam Smith. Those are the heroes of the age. They brought us light and the economic engine to lift us out of the dark ages. There is no one in any of these environmental groups who have the stature of these two men. Those who turn out their lights are merely standing in the shadow of these giants.

NEW TACTICS

We are going about our opposition to the Democrat’s healthcare bill shenanigans all wrong. The Conservatives, the Libertarians and the Republicans are out there trying to get as many people as they can to call their congressman and let them know of our opposition. A lot of the people who would make this call already have a congressman that is against it. Those who don’t are wasting their time and spinning their wheels. The Democrats have decided that they know better than the people and they are going to pass this bill regardless of the desires of their constituents. They believe that we are too stupid to know what is good for us and they believe that the news media will distract us with some other shiny bauble before the November elections.

They are probably right.

We have been re-electing these clowns for so long that they really have no reason to believe that we won’t continue to do so. Of all the people engaged in this thing there are probably 5 or 6 who aren’t even paying attention and about half of them will vote for whoever is already there, the party they have always voted for or the party their spouse wants them to vote for. I know people who vote entirely based on how the candidate looks and could care less what they stand for. These are people who don’t understand the process and if someone tells them that the government is going to give them something then they are all for it.

They are the majority.

There is another group that’s politically active and thinks that the purpose of government is to take money away from those who produce wealth and give it to them because they are somehow entitled to it. They add nothing to the country and are net consumers of government services and largess. The Democrat Party has been actively growing this group over the years by dumbing down education and demonizing those who produce wealth. These are people who would starve to death if someone wasn’t there to feed them.

This is the parasite class.

The fact that this country is based on the rule of law, limited government and individual liberties as identified in the Constitution is immaterial to most of these people. They see the Constitution as just some words that prevent them from getting more stuff. The Democrats who now infest the White House and the Congress see the Constitution as an impediment to their using the government power of taxation to purchase political power for their constituents and campaign donors.

You are in their way.

We have currently reached a milestone in the battle between those who love the country and those who use the country. The Democrats are willing to bypass even something as sacred as the vote to get their healthcare bill into law. This is the first step towards socialized medicine and ownership of the insurance, pharmaceutical and hospital industries. They aren’t listening to us. We can call them, stand outside their offices with signs, send petitions and knock on their doors but they will not heed our demands for fiscal responsibility and the rule of law. They think that once they get more people dependent on government then they will have an unassailable majority of bought voters.

They may be right.

The time has come for some new tactics. The 1st amendment to the Constitution gives the Press a special place in the American landscape and they have abrogated their responsibility as the watchdog over what the government is doing. Instead they have become a cheerleader for the statists/collectivists who want to fundamentally change what we are now into something that would be completely unrecognizable to Americans of just a generation ago. They want the welfare state to grow. They want you to have to rely on them for your well being day to day. They want you to shut up sit down and obey.

This is not America.

What is needed to turn this around is for the news media to reclaim their responsibilities to the Republic. So instead of calling your Congressman call the media. Call ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, your local newspaper, magazines and call their sponsors. Tell the press to do their jobs or you will turn them off. Tell their sponsors that if they don’t insist the media do their job you won’t buy their products. The one thing that socialism has to have to get its feet in the door is other people’s money. If we can deny them their cheerleaders and turn down the economy significantly enough maybe we can get the attention of those who aren’t political just long enough to vote this monstrosity out of office.

IT’S THE DEBT STUPID

The country is embroiled in constant debate about different topics like healthcare, education, the wars, jobs, the effectiveness of the stimulus, and the growth of government. When I close my eyes I can envision us all sitting around on couches in this vast living room shouting across the open spaces and shaking our fists at the idiots who can’t see the reason and logic of our arguments. That is because people are stupid and no matter how well one constructs one’s point of view those other people just don’t grasp it.

Something I noticed in this living room is this huge mound of “stuff” sitting right in the middle of the floor. No one is really talking about it, except for a few people out on the fringes we can’t really hear. I do see them though…jumping up and down pointing and shouting something. So every once in a while we all get up off our couches and go down to the polling places and cast our votes for the people who represent us. We all know them, they have all been in Washington or Austin or Lincoln or Sacramento for years. We go into the little booth and pull the lever, and then we go back to the living room and resume our heated conversation with the other side.

That mound in the middle keeps getting bigger and the people out there on the fringes get more animated. I wish I could make out what they are shouting about. So I get up off the couch and walk over to that growing mound and notice that the whole thing is made up of little scraps of paper with the letters IOU written on them. How strange is that? It finally dawns on me what those people back there are shouting…”You are arguing about the wrong stuff,” they are screaming.

Right then I had an epiphany. We are missing the point. We are in serious trouble as a nation and we are distracted by the politics of the moment. What is worse is that those people we just pulled the lever for to send back to the centers of power, they aren’t in the room and I don’t think they are paying any attention to the mound of IOUs. They have a singular goal in mind and that is to get re-elected and produce laws and services. We are drowning in laws and services but we don’t send anyone to public office who knows what the solution is.

What is left unsaid is that the unfunded liabilities of just two programs, Medicare and Social Security are 8 times greater than the gross domestic product of the United States. Let that soak in for a moment. The current debt is 80% of the GDP and the debt is projected to rise from 14 to 23 trillion dollars in the next ten years and the current government is funding our country by borrowing money against assets we don’t have and printing money that has no backing in the economy. Now pause and think about what could happen when interest rates rise on the borrowed money.

The solution is outside of the thinking of the government. People who go to the power centers to represent constituents do not think in terms of fewer laws and less services. Neither party has the political will to send people to power under the banner of fixing any of this. The solution is to drastically reduce the role of government in our lives. That means getting rid of entire cabinet position departments and turning out the lights. It means changing the definition of the word “entitlement.” It means turning off the spigot of money to anything that doesn’t directly protect the country as an entity. It means getting the government out of the way of the economy so that capitalism can flourish unimpeded by crushing regulation. It means that the people who are about to be the old people are going to have to do with less so that our children and grandchildren don’t witness the collapse of our way of life.

I can guarantee you that there is nobody on any ballot who is prepared to do what has to be done to save the republic. The time has come where everyone needs to decide whether to ride the country down to the inevitable crash if we continue down this path or to step up and do what is necessary to salvage the United States. If you are voting in the primaries to return your leaders to office you are part of the problem. If you intend to go to the polls in November and vote for the status quo you are who I am talking about when I talk about those who haven’t the courage to fix this nation. If you think we can spend and borrow and print our way out of this then you are as deluded as that fellow in the White House.

Insurance for Pre-Existing Conditions and the Constitution

There are a lot of people out there who think that insurance companies need to provide coverage for pre-existing conditions. The thinking, if you can call it that, goes that if a person has insurance through his employer, gets sick and then loses his job, he also loses his insurance. Any new policy won’t take on his costs for his existing illness. Both Republicans and Democrats seem to agree that somewhere in the Constitution there is a “pre-existing conditions cannot be denied by private health insurance companies clause.” I have a copy of the Constitution and lately I have been dragging it out and pouring over it looking for all these new powers that the government has decided they have. I am still looking for the automobile bailout clause, the banker bonus control clause and the compensation czar clause.

Let’s say I was looking to start up an insurance business. I go out and raise the capital I need, hire some employees, rent some office space, buy some computers--then the government tells me I have to offer policies to people with pre-existing conditions. How do I stay in business? For the people who show up with diabetes, what are they buying and what am I selling and who makes a profit? Now I am going to assume that here in the United States I will still be allowed to make a profit in the coming years. Profits allow me to improve my business, hire more people and send my kids to college. I know that many on the political left think profits should be secondary to helping the community but reality says that making a profit is what keeps me in business and keeps the motor of the country running.

So is my new insurance company a business or a charity? It pays taxes like a business but signing someone up simply so that I can pay their medical bills is more like a charity isn’t it? This is the magic question that I am really looking to have answered. If I have to take on the medical payments for pre-existing conditions why would anyone pay me for a policy prior to getting sick? What is my motivation for simply raising capital to pay people’s medical expenses? If I go broke because I can’t be selective about who I insure, what happens to my employees and who pays the medical bills when you do get sick?


A more fundamental question is do I have the right to start a health insurance business in the United States of America and expect success? Is there a free market for health insurance? If so, how does it work if the government demands that I simply take on the payment of some portion of the population’s bills? In order for this to work and to support the insurance industry as it exists, the government will be required to force everyone to purchase insurance at a cost that covers everyone’s pre-existing conditions. Who will decide which insurance company will get the premiums? How will the balance of charity cases be divided among the existing companies and will new ones be allowed? If someone can’t pay the premium will they be jailed? Where, exactly, is this new right located in the Constitution?

Are we going to ditch the idea that this is a nation of laws or are we going to pretend that the supreme law of the land takes a backseat to what a particular political point of view wants the nation to be? The remarkable thing about the United States is that no matter what political party is in power, each is limited by the same set of rules laid down in the founding document. One cannot hold an election to negate the rule of law. That axiom seems to be lost on the current administration. They seem to think that if they can pass a law, the constitutionality of that law is moot.

I am not beholden to the government of the United States. We are not ruled by our government. The government exists solely to serve the people and protect the Constitution. It is the duty of all Americans to remove any government that ignores the rule of law and violates the Constitution. If we destroy the insurance industry, then the people in power will seize that service as an entitlement. It will destroy the healthcare delivery system of this country and depress our economy further. If you want to improve the health care delivery system then get government out of it. There is no “right” to healthcare as there is no right to any service or product someone else must provide.

IT’S A CONSPIRACY I TELL YA

Sitting at a Burger King the other day after having the person behind the counter correct my order for the third time I was struck by the level of incompetence people have reached just in my lifetime. It is now possible to arrive home with the wrong number of burgers, condiments and change, all presented to you in two languages. “Café Grande por favor”…ends up a diet coke, two packets of sugar, incorrect change with hash browns. Since we live in a society where no matter what happens, blame must be assigned, I started looking into the root causes of this national bout with stupidity and I think I have discovered the main culprit…the majority of the people will absolutely believe anything! All you have to do is present what can be astounding nonsense with an air of mystery and basic plausibility.

There used to be a radio talk show host in Dallas, Texas, named David Gold. He had a theory that 10% of the people had working engaged brains. The others, the 90 percent-ers were basically the reason People Magazine is in business, Paris Hilton is a celebrity and people listen to Sean Penn on foreign policy. I am certain that Mr. Gold missed the spread by quite a large margin. From what I see, those in the know are a fraction of 1% and the other 99.98% just barely make it through their lives managing to find their way to work each day by some miraculous stroke of pure luck. Full parking lots at businesses always surprise me.

Excluding me and an extremely small circle of peers, we, as a people, will not only believe pretty much anything anyone throws our way, we will act on it. This has always been true from the first snake oil salesman in the market square to the new global snake oil salesman on the internet. We are currently going through a spike in idiocy. Recently, in the last 5 years or so, stupidity has become the rule and intelligence the rare exception. It all comes down to what a person is willing to believe.

I have examples.

Here is a list of things that many people actually believe in:

UFOs and Aliens
Ghosts
Alien Ghosts – See Chapter 2
Magic
Werewolves
Vampires
Curses
Good Luck Charms
Voodoo
Animal Rights
Psychics
Astrology
Moon landing conspiracies
Government conspiracies – 9/11, JFK, RFK, Etc…
Area 51 having alien technology
The intellectual prowess of actors
Global warming
Hope and Change
Winning the Lottery
Eternal rewards for killing people – Virgins, Etc
Liberalism
Socialism
Spiritualism
Power in inanimate objects, Magnets, Crystals
Barrack Obama’s qualifications to be President
Government Economic Stimulus
Corporate Taxes
Left wing intellectualism
Bigfoot, Yeti

If you fall into a group who believes in any one of these things, it is understandable that you would have trouble remembering to leave the pickles off that burger. Believing in silly crap like this leads to whole segments of the population becoming willing participants in absolutely ludicrous nonsense. For example, people believe that raising taxes on the prosperous will somehow make the poor prosperous someday. Or, that rewarding people for doing nothing will make them want to do something.

It isn’t that these goofy things are being presented to the people to distract them from what is really going on. It is that nothing is really going on. People believe there are aliens flying around in gravity defying vehicles and the government knows about it. There are people who believe that being born in March changes your personality based on the position of the planets in March, simply because they are gullible. The only physical effect that could remotely be affecting you from the planets is gravity and the girth of the delivery nurse has more of a gravitational effect on you than Mars. I know this because I used to do terrain corrections for gravity surveys for a geophysics company.

The government is not…repeat NOT, hiding bigfoot, aliens or secret conspiracies to bring down the Twin Towers. They aren’t competent enough for that. The thing that should worry you about the government is that it will get too big, trip and part of it might fall on you. The problem is not diabolical evil…but clumsy unstoppable inertia. Government is a monster but it is a dumb one….I mean look at who we elect to lead us. The trick to protect yourself from the monster is to stop feeding it. When you feed it, it gets excited and happy and wants to do stuff for you. Then it is time to head for the hills.

(This is a rewrite of part of a chapter from God's Motive.)

PARASITES

I have a short story to tell about an event that occurred on the social networking site Facebook. Facebook has a lot of pages set up by various individuals that cater to certain groups or interests in addition to those individual pages we can set up about ourselves. I have a Facebook page. I am also a member or a fan of other Facebook pages and until recently was a member of a page called “Writers.” I fancy myself something of a writer. I have written and published a couple of books, been published in a couple of newspapers, and have a blog. So when I noticed that there was a Facebook page titled “Writers” I stepped right up and requested to join. They let me.

Now a group of writers one would think would have a wide range of interests. I mean the title of the page was “writers” not religious writers, political writers, fiction writers, poetry writers, newspaper writers just “writers.” On this page was a tab that said “Discussions.” This was a place where people could create topics for discussion. Usually you can’t get any clearer than that, but perhaps these folks should have tried. I had posted in some of these discussions before and had enjoyed some back and forth discussion with other members of the page. One day, while visiting the page, I noticed that someone had put up a discussion that said “Favorite Quotes.” Well I have several favorite quotes after all I am a writer.
Back in 1992, I ran for the Texas State Senate as a Libertarian. One day, the Libertarian Presidential candidate came to Dallas for a visit and to be a guest on a radio talk show. I got to ride with him from the airport to where the interview was taking place. His name is Andre Marrou. He is a likeable sort and on the way he told us this joke about the origins of the word “politics.” He said it was from the Latin “poli” meaning “many” and tics which were blood sucking parasites. I remember saying something about my dog and parasites and the line that survived was; “If parasites are bad for my dog, what makes them good for my country.”

Nothing truer was ever said in my estimation and so that is what I typed into the “writers” Facebook discussion tab under favorite quote. I didn’t think another thought about it. Couple of days later I was back at the Writer’s page and went to see if someone had commented on my quote or put a quote in I might enjoy. My quote was gone…erased...deleted. It took me about two seconds to decide that I wasn’t happy about that at all. So I went back into the discussion group and posted my ire with the fact that the quote had been deleted and reposted it. I also sent a note to the keepers of the page letting them know my quote had been deleted and asking them why.

Next thing I knew I was deleted. I could no longer go to the Writers’ Facebook Page because I had been delisted a lot like my quote. Now there is another Facebook Page called Writers II which exists because some of the people from the first one, think that they are too heavy handed with their censoring of ideas they don’t like….well duh! On this new page there is a discussions tab and on this page was a discussion called, “tired of the heavy handed editing on the writers page?” Well I was so I went there and posted my ire with the first page and got a response from a fellow claiming to be the very one who deleted my quote from the first one, telling me how awful it was that I would say such a thing.

As a matter of fact I got responses from several people on this new page that were perfectly fine with me getting kicked off the first page, because they saw something terrible in my quote. One of them thought I must be talking about his unemployed father. Another though I must be talking about his Aunt who had to work two jobs. Another thought I must be talking about unwed mothers…and they were all mad at me for saying simply that “if parasites are bad for my dog, what makes them good for my country?”

I found this to be remarkable. None of these people knew the context of my quote or anything about me at all, but they all knew that I must be talking about someone they know. “Methinks perhaps thou doth protest too much.” WS. They wanted my blood. They weren’t going to stand idly by and allow me to disparage their particular victim. They were shouting that their relation or group were not parasites even though no one had accused them of being so. They weren’t reading what I was writing and they were using emotion instead of cognition to come to conclusions about facts not in evidence. It was sort of a mob mentality.

I don’t think I ever got them to go back to the origin of the controversy and that was the idea that if you ask me for my favorite quote, I am going to give you my favorite quote, and if you really want your favorite quote or one you agree with, that is what you should ask for. Am I the only one in this scenario who can follow directions? This was typical behavior for people who are insecure in their beliefs. If I don’t tell them what they want to hear…they demand that I do. And when I still don’t, they attack me personally.

I don’t think any of these people are in danger of becoming very good writers. They must first learn to read, comprehend and think critically.