Suppressed Truth in Government

COVID Shelter-In-Place Lockdowns Produced No Benefit

2022-02-02T16:38:00.001-08:00

A massive John Hopkins study released in January 2022 proves that Shelter In Place Orders issued by governments in Europe and in the United States had no impact on mortality from the virus (go to page 36 of study to get to bottom line quickly).

Do you remember being told you were forbidden to visit family and friends, including loved ones in hospitals and nursing homes? Do you remember being forbidden to report to work? Do you remember being unable to travel? Do you remember housing costs skyrocketing as persons fled the cities and sought suburban homes from which they could work? Do you remember the financial markets nearly collapsing as nearly all economic activity ceased? Do you remember governments incurring unprecedently levels of debt to keep households afloat with direct payments and with enhanced unemployment benefits? Do you remember children being kept out of school?

The Bureaucratic Impulse

2018-02-09T08:24:00.000-08:00

I work in the public schools and for part of my day I am in direct contact with teachers, government employees one and all.

Ninety eight percent of these educators are fine, well adjusted people, but a few are afflicted with a bureaucratic mindset that I find fascinating to analyze.

God fashioned the world in such a way, after our rebellion, to get our attention and bring us to a conviction of our utter depravity and our need for Him.

Plenty of people do not appreciate this work by God and seek to insulate themselves from it. These people are called bureaucrats.

The life of the bureaucrat is one where all the hard edges of life are blunted. No need to compete, just the need to lasso more funding, generally by whining louder.

To work among bureaucrats is, over the course of time, to come to believe that they might be succeeding in their quest to insulate themselves from reality. Job described such people:

They see their children established around them,
their offspring before their eyes.
Their homes are safe and free from fear;
the rod of God is not on them.
Their bulls never fail to breed;
their cows calve and do not miscarry.
They send forth their children as a flock;
their little ones dance about.
They sing to the music of timbrel and lyre;
they make merry to the sound of the pipe.
They spend their years in prosperity
and go down to the grave in peace.a
Yet they say to God, "Leave us alone!
We have no desire to know your ways.
Who is the Almighty, that we should serve him?
What would we gain by praying to him?"

But, to work among these bureaucrats, if one is patient, and watches closely and long enough, one begins to find that for them the attempt to keep out God and reality is akin to an earthenwork believing it can forever keep at bay the surging of a great sea or river.

Reflections on Herbert Hoover

2018-02-09T08:03:00.002-08:00

Many of you, who know at all, will know that Herbert Hoover was the 31st President of the United States (and yes, the Hoover Dam was named after him).

You may have some vague associations with him in your mind of bad things, like economic bad times.

Hoover became President in March 1929, and seven months later the stock market collapsed.

What you may not know is that Hoover was fairly progressive for his era, and took many bold steps to address the economic crisis he was handed, the crisis that came to be known as the Great Depression. (You may also not know that Hoover, prior to The Crash, was a rare voice in public office (he was Secretary of Commerce in the 1920's) counseling against stock speculation, and that he acted on his own advice, by liquidating much of his own stock holdings prior to the crash.)

Hoover was born into a Quaker family in a small town in Iowa, the son of a blacksmith; was orphaned at a young age and grew to be one of greatest engineers America ever produced (he was ranked equal with Edison), and amassed a great fortune.

The Great Depression hit when communism, fascism and national socialism (Nazis) were gaining a foothold in the world and Hoover had a tireless message for his country and the world - that mankind should not lose faith in what individual imitative could, and would, do to retrieve the situation. He counseled mankind to not yield to "isms", but to have faith in what God could, and would, do through individual human beings.

The Great Depression reached its nadir under Hoover and then began to recede. His opponent, Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the 1932 campaign for President counseled Americans to believe, as did his successor, Barack Obama, that Americas greatest days were behind her. This may ring untrue, but in fact Roosevelt never counseled Americans to have hope for a return to halcyon days - his chief objective was to distribute "more fairly" what wealth remained. Roosevelt laid all the blame for the depression at Hoover's feet, although for the next eight years of Roosevelt's presidency, up until WWII, the depression lingered.

In short, Hoover was a man who believed, informed by his faith, not that man was good, but that made in the image of God, the greatest hope for man was not in new political ideologies, but that the God in man would ultimately emerge and save the day. Roosevelt did not believe this way. To him, men were cattle to be herded.

Hoover was one of the greatest Presidents this county ever had and his name has been trashed, ever since his presidency, by those who place their faith in the state to redeem mankind.

The Authoritarian Impulse

2017-01-12T05:28:00.003-08:00

"To an authoritarian, logic is an enemy, truth a menace."
- Rod Serling

Who's the Anti-Semite?

2016-12-24T05:30:00.002-08:00

For the record, in the immediate aftermath of Donald Trump's 2016 election victory, the first narrative spun by the Left was that America had just elected an anti-Semite (and a racist).

On Friday, December 23, 2016 President Obama's non-action on a U.N. resolution declaring all West Bank and Eastern Jerusalem settlements by Israel "illegal" was just about as anti-Semite as one can get.

Trump's Election a Fraud?

2016-12-15T17:42:00.001-08:00

As of this writing, all the rage, at least in the media, is the suggestion that Donald Trump's election to the presidency is bogus because supposedly the Russians "hacked" the election.

For the record, a few things need to be said about this:

Other than morons, no serious person is suggesting that the Russians hacked the ballot process on election day. For example, Michigan, my home state, primarily uses paper ballots counted by machines that are not hooked to the internet.
The "hacking" that did occur, by someone, was of the Democrat National Committee (DNC) email server and of Hillary Clinton campaign chair John Podesta’s email account (Republicans may have been hacked but the information gleaned from those hacks was not made public). Moreover, when most people think of "hacking" the word being employed by the media, they they think of malevolent persons lurking behind a bank of high powered computers sneaking into victims personal lives by night. In reality, it seems likely that Podesta brought the intrusion upon himself by clicking on a phishing email link asking him to change his Google password.
Since we know that someone did hack the DNC, it seems to me all this hacking of sensitive material makes it even more plain, if that were needed, that Hillary Clinton's use of private servers to handle classified information while Secretary of State is all the more inexcusable, criminal, and disqualifying for her to hold the office of President.
Little attention is being paid, by the media, to strong preliminary evidence of election fraud in heavily Democrat Wayne County Michigan. So while the media goes chasing after phantoms, they ignore the real thing right under their noses.
What the hacking, whoever is responsible, did reveal is that the media was colluding with the DNC to elect Hillary, including supplying Clinton with debate questions, in advance. I applaud the hacker, whoever it was, for exposing this kind of truth. Also, the hacking showed that the DNC sabotaged Bernie Sanders campaign for president, favoring Hillary Clinton. So why wasn't Hillary discredited as illegitimate DNC nominee as a result?

Is Barack Obama a Communist?

2016-12-10T06:39:00.001-08:00

President Barack Obama was born in Hawaii and ran two successful presidential campaigns in which he sounded, especially the first campaign, like a God-fearing, flag waving American, but is that really who he is? Lets take a closer look through the lens of his interaction with Black Lives Matter.

According to Wikipedia, Black Lives Matter(BLM) is:

is an international activist movement, originating in the African-American community, that campaigns against violence and systemic racism toward black people

That sounds harmless enough, so lets look at:

President Obama's Interaction with Black Lives Matter

September 16, 2015 - BLM activists Brittney Packnett, DeRay McKesson, Johnetta Elzie, Phillip Agnew, and Jamye Wooten met at the White House with President Obama.
October 2015 - Obama publicly articulated his support for BLM's agenda by saying: “I think the reason that the organizers [of BLM] used the phrase ‘Black Lives Matter’ was not because they were suggesting nobody else’s lives matter. Rather, what they were suggesting was there is a specific problem that’s happening in the African-American community that’s not happening in other communities. And that is a legitimate issue that we’ve got to address.”
December 2015 - interview on National Public Radio, Obama described Black Lives Matter as a positive force on policing in America, notwithstanding the violence and incendiary rhetoric exhibited by many of its members. Noting that “sometimes progress is a little uncomfortable”
February 2016 - Obama welcomed BLM leaders DeRay McKesson and Brittany Packnett to White House for Black History Month event.
July 10, 2016 - Obama likened BLM to the abolition and suffrage movements of yesteryear, saying: "The abolition movement was contentious. The effort for women to get the right to vote was contentious and messy. There were times when activists might have engaged in rhetoric that was overheated and occasionally counterproductive. But the point was to raise issues so that we, as a society, could grapple with it. The same was true with the Civil Rights Movement, the union movement, the environmental movement, the antiwar movement during Vietnam. And I think what you're seeing now is part of that longstanding tradition."
July 13, 2016 - six days after a BLM supporter in Dallas had shot and killed five police officer and wounded seven others -- President Obama hosted BLM leaders DeRay Mckesson, Brittany Packnett, and Mica Grimmat at a four-and-a-half-hour meeting at the White House.

Now lets look at:

What Black Lives Matter actually says and does:

August 2015 - BLM co-founder Patrisse Cullors was one of more than 1,000 black activists, artists, scholars, politicians, students, “political prisoners,” and organizational representatives to sign a statement proclaiming, among other things: “[W]e aim to sharpen our practice of joint struggle against capitalism..."
November 12, 2015 - a group of approximately 150 BLM protesters shouting "black lives matter" and racial obscenities stormed Dartmouth University's library, shouting, “F*** you, you filthy white f***s!," "F*** you and your comfort!," and "F*** you, you racist s***!” A report in the Dartmouth Review said: "Throngs of protesters converged around fellow students who had not joined in their long march. They confronted students who bore 'symbols of oppression': 'gangster hats' and Beats-brand headphones. The flood of demonstrators self-consciously overstepped every boundary, opening the doors of study spaces with students reviewing for exams. Those who tried to close their doors were harassed further. One student abandoned the study room and ran out of the library. The protesters followed her out of the library, shouting obscenities the whole way. Students who refused to listen to or join their outbursts were shouted down. 'Stand the f*** up!' 'You filthy racist white piece of s***!' Men and women alike were pushed and shoved by the group. 'If we can’t have it, shut it down!' they cried. Another woman was pinned to a wall by protesters who unleashed their insults, shouting 'filthy white b****!' in her face."
June 21, 2016 - in the wake of massacre of 49 people in Orlando gay nightclub by a self-proclaimed Muslim jihadist, BLM posted on their website that, "Homegrown terror...is the product of white supremacy and capitalism...We need a world that realizes that the word 'terrorist' is not synonymous with Muslim, any more than 'criminal' is synonymous with Black. The enemy is now and has always been...capitalism."
July 7, 2016 - BLM activists held anti-police-brutality rallies in numerous cities across the United States, to protest the recent shootings of two African American men by white police officers in Minnesota and Louisiana. At a rally in Dallas, Texas, demonstrators shouted “Enough is enough!” while they held signs bearing slogans like: “If all lives matter, why are black ones taken so easily?” Then, suddenly, at just before 9 pm, a gunman opened fire on the law-enforcement officers who were on duty at that rally (in Dallas). Four policemen and one transit officer were killed, and six additional police were wounded. The perpetrator, Micah Xavier Johnson, subsequently told a hostage negotiator that he had acted alone, was angry about the recent police shootings of two black men, and was determined to kill white people -- "especially white officers." In the wake of the carnage in Dallas, a number of BLM activists taunted uniformed police officers who were standing guard in front of a gas station. Some Twitter users posted footage of a local news report that showed approximately 300 to 400 protesters dancing, shouting at police, and raising their middle fingers to them. Moreover, BLM sympathizers posted numerous online tweets to express their approval of the mass shooting.
July 2016 - a BLM delegation arrived in Israel and in a July 28th Facebook post the delegation's members wrote, "Our collective oppression mandates that we work together across geography, language and culture to decry and organize an end to capitalistic..regimes."
July 9, 2016 - activists participating in a BLM protest in Phoenix threw rocks at police officers and threatened to kill them.
July 2016 - a BLM activist speaking to a CNN reporter shouted: "The less white babies on this planet, the less of you [white adults] we got! I hope they kill all the white babies! Kill 'em all right now! Kill 'em! Kill your grandkids! Kill yourself! Coffin, bitch! Go lay in a coffin! Kill yourself!"
August 13, 2016 - BLM activists in Milwaukee engaged in violence after police in that city shot and killed an armed man with a lengthy criminal record who was carrying an illegal gun that had been used in a burglary. One video clip of the violence showed rioters chanting “black power!”, vowing to "beat up every white person," and trying to drag white drivers out of their cars and assault them.
September 2016 - BLM activists rioted in Charlotte, North Carolina after a black police officer there had shot and killed a gun-wielding black criminal named Keith Lamont Scott. Prior to that killing, Scott had been: convicted of assault with a deadly weapon in two different states, convicted of assault in three states, charged with “assault with intent to kill” in the 1990s, and spent 7 years in jail for “aggravated assault with a deadly weapon.” In multiple requests for domestic violence protective orders, one of which had been filed in 2015, Scott's wife claimed that the man had stabbed her, hit one of his children, and threatened to kill his entire family. The woman also reported that Scott carried a 9mm handgun but had no permit for it. At least 20 police officers were injured in the Charlotte riots, and National Guard troops were called in to help restore order. During the mayhem, protesters threw things at police, sometimes shot one another, looted and destroyed local businesses, set vehicles on fire, attacked white people who happened to be in the vicinity, decorated the landscape with BLM graffiti, and chanted slogans like “Black Lives Matter” and “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot.

In August of 2016 Movement for Black Lives, a group affiliated with Black Lives Matter issued a statement of grievances and demands including:

The retroactive decriminalization, immediate release and record expungement of all drug related offenses and prostitution, and reparations for the devastating impact of the “war on drugs” and criminalization of prostitution.
A divestment from industrial multinational use of fossil fuels and investment in...sustainable energy solutions.

Sources: Black Lives Matter and Movement for Black Lives websites, plus Discover the Networks website, especially this article accessed 12/10/16 Black Lives Matter

Forgotten Man or Duped Man?

2016-11-23T04:35:00.000-08:00

Donald Trump's ascendancy to the presidency is being heralded by many on the Right (Sean Hannity, Breitbart News Service, etc.) as a victory for "the forgotten man". Trump is said to have won because white men in Rustbelt states like Michigan and Pennsylvania, who believe they have been ignored by the Democratic Party - men who feel that their economic prospects are dimming, not improving - voted for Trump over and against free-trade, open-borders Hillary.

There is a flaw with this analysis. We need to examine how the blue collar white man got into this predicament to begin with.

In 2008 there was a financial crisis in American which was, in reality, the consequence of the collapse of the speculative residential real estate bubble. Many Americans, including white, blue collar Americans, participated in or benefited (in jobs, etc.) from this bubble, but white, blue collar men were more victims of, than culpable for, the bubble.

Along came a young Washington outsider who offered Americans "Hope and Change". As a leftist it was the most natural thing in the world for him to try and link, in the mind of Americans, the financial crisis with a broader criticism of the American way of life specifically, and democracy and capitalism generally.

He claimed that what was wrong with America specifically, and capitalism more generally, was its dependence on callow, unsustainable consumerism. What was needed, claimed Barack Obama, was to rebuild shattered America on new "sustainable" foundation. Out was to go the crumbling foundation of a carbon based-energy economy, and in was to a come strong, sustainable foundation of an economy based on sustainable, renewable energy - energy from the sun, wind, biomass, geothermal, and more. Candidate Obama promised the American people a sustain-ably growing economy, with high paying jobs; first, tearing out the old foundation, and then second, rebuilding our entire infrastructure upon renewable energy. Voted into office along with a sympathetic (Democrat) majorities in both chambers of Congress, Obama was immediately granted an unprecedented nearly $1 trillion "stimulus" to begin his monumental task (The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009).

As was chronicled at the time on our sister blog, Suppressed Truth About the Environment, Obama's plan never had any hope of succeeding. Moreover, we submit that Obama himself understood his plan had no chance of succeeding.

As regards the former - that the plan had no hope - it is manifest that the plan did not work, and the biggest loser in this failure was the very white, blue collar worker whose vote Obama was seeking, seeking with his slogan of Hope and Change. No jobs were forthcoming tearing down the old foundation or putting in the new one. Meanwhile what jobs there were, were increasingly threatened by open borders and free-trade deals.

As regard the latter - that Barack Obama knew his plan would not succeed - this accounts for white, blue collar Americans feeling "forgotten". Just as nobody seemed inclined to mention the dismal failure of Obamacare to provide affordable medical care for all Americans (The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act), so neither Obama, Hillary Clinton (candidate for President in 2016) or Democrat members of congress were inclined to mention the utter failure of The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 to kick off a new, sustained era of "green jobs". Now, while it is true nobody likes to dwell on their own failures, it is also true that prior to his election as President Obama was on record as saying his ultimate goal was the replacement of private health care system in America with a government run system ("Single Payer"), but that it would take ten years to get there; meaning Obamacare was never intended to succeed, it was intended to fail. Likewise, The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 was never intended to succeed, it was intended to so weaken America that Americans would eventually eagerly give up their freedoms and embrace communism. For this reason it was then, and remains now, my contention that the natural and proper candidate to oppose Donald Trump was socialist cum communist Bernie Sanders. The American people intuitively understood what there choices were for the future - communism or democracy - and wanted to be offered that choice. I think Obama, Hillary and the Democrat Party sabotaged Sanders campaign because they thought Bernie was too naively optimistic about the preparedness of the American people to openly vote socialist; more time was needed to prepare the ground and Hillary was to buy that time, prepare that ground; carry on the work of Obama.

Clinton Leads the Way in Clamping Down on Illegals

2016-09-11T10:00:00.001-07:00

Bill Clinton made the following comments about illegal aliens in his 1995 State of the Union Address:

All Americans, not only in the states most heavily affected, but in every place in this country are rightly disturbed by the large numbers of illegal aliens entering our country. The jobs they hold might otherwise be held by citizens or legal immigrants. The public service they use impose burdens on our taxpayers. That’s why our administration has moved aggressively to secure our borders more by hiring a record number of new border guards, by deporting twice as many criminal aliens as ever before, by cracking down on illegal hiring, by barring welfare benefits to illegal aliens. In the budget I will present to you, we will try to do more to speed the deportation of illegal aliens who are arrested for crimes. It is wrong and ultimately self-defeating for a nation of immigrants to permit the kind of abuse of our immigration laws we have seen in recent years, and we must do more to stop it.

You may watch him make those statements in the following video recording:

Bill Clinton on immigration policy in 1995 State of the Union

Champion of Women's Rights?

2016-03-01T06:48:00.004-08:00

In the spring of 1975, near Fayetteville, Arkansas, a 12-year-old girl was brutally raped. For five days she lay in a coma and was subsequently informed she would never bear children. Mental trauma and a devastated body ultimately contributed to the girl experimenting with drugs, which in turn led to prison. The girl became a woman, never married, never bore children. A suspect, 41-year-old Thomas Alfred Taylor, was arrested and a bloodied pair of his underwear was sent to a lab for testing. Testing confirmed his guilt but the bloody section of his underwear, cut out for the testing, was subsequently lost and therefore not available trial evidence. Nevertheless, Taylor still had to fear the testimony of his 12-year-old victim. What he needed was a clever lawyer. Luckily for Taylor a clever 27-year-old Yale graduate and lawyer had just moved Fayetteville. She volunteered to take his case, paid for by the taxpayers. The lawyer contacted a forensics expert 1,300 miles away, in New York, with a reputation for giving testimony favorable to whoever was seeking his help. The lawyer then submitted an affidavit to the court assaulting the character of the 12-year-old victim, claiming the “the complainant is emotionally unstable with a tendency to seek out older men and engage in fantasizing”. Confronted with a Yale-educated lawyer who was prepared to besmirch the reputation of his already traumatized 12-year-old complainant in open court, and with the physical evidence mislaid, the Fayetteville prosecuting attorney agreed to a plea bargain. Thomas Alfred Taylor served two months for his brutal rape/beating of a 12-year-old girl. The Yale lawyer later admitted she knew Taylor was guilty. Her name was Hillary Rodham Clinton, self-described champion of women’s rights, and current Democrat candidate for President of the United States.

36 Million Uninsured Under Obamacare

2016-01-09T11:25:00.000-08:00

According to the Congressional Budget Office’s March 2010 estimate (in the wake of the passage of The Affordable Care Act of 2009), 26 million Americans would remain uninsured in 2015. In March 2015 their estimate for 2015 was revised to 35 million uninsured in 2015, a correction of 9 million, or roughly the entire population of New Jersey.

For more info. see Unpopular Individual Mandate Fail to Make People Buy Obamacare

What Do the Federal Register, Poltical Correctness and the Mishnah Have In Common?

2015-12-23T09:00:00.000-08:00

In late December the Obama administration set a new record - it imposed upon the people the most federal regulations ever - Report: Obama sets red tape record, 545,875 pages, by Paul Bedard, Washington Times, 12/16/15.

It occurred to me that this is what certain type of persons try to do to other people - tyrannize them with petty rules (isn't this what the Lilliputians tried to do to Gulliver, bind him with a thousand tiny threads?).

Now Jesus encountered this problem. He found that the power elite among the Jews had manufactured thousands of superfluous rules by which to subjugate the people. Jesus said to the rulers "'You are experts at setting aside the commandment of God in order to keep your tradition'"[1]. Also speaking of the ruling elite Jesus said, "For they bind heavy burdens and grievous to be borne, and lay them on men's shoulders" [2]. The means by which the Jews did this was the Mishnah, 1500 manmade laws for every one of the 613 Old Testament Commandments handed down at Mt. Sinai.

In point of fact, by the time Jesus came along the ruling elite was so inured to these laws they were incredulous, even outraged, that Jesus flaunted them. So we find ourselves today - the political Left in general, and the Democrats in particular, like to pile regulation upon regulation and even augment them with social rules about what we can say, or even be permitted to think (a.k.a. political correctness), and they are dumbfounded, or outraged, when anyone speaks or acts out of conformity with their rules.

[1] Mark 7:9
[2] Matthew 23:4

Is Obergefell v. Hodges Settled Law?

2015-11-15T13:28:00.000-08:00

Everyone knows that the United States Supreme Court ruled (in Obergefell v. Hodges) same-sex couples have a "fundamental right" to marry.

Now that the highest court in the land has ruled, is this issue finally settled?

The reader might be interested to know that one of the most revered figures in American history argued that United States Supreme Court decisions are not the final word on constitutional issues under certain circumstances. Commenting on Dred Scott v. Sandford, the landmark decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in which the Court held that African Americans, whether enslaved or free, could not be American citizens, Abraham Lincoln said:

If this important decision had been made by the unanimous concurrence of the judges, and without any apparent partisan bias, and in accordance with legal public expectation, and with the steady practice of the departments throughout our history, and had been in no part, based on assumed historical facts which are not really true; or, if wanting in some of these, it had been before the court more than once, and had there been affirmed and re-affirmed through a course of years, it then might be, perhaps would be, factious, nay, even revolutionary, to not acquiesce in it as a precedent.

But when, as it is true we find it wanting in all these claims to the public confidence, it is not resistance, it is not factious, it is not even disrespectful, to treat it as not having yet quite established a settled doctrine for the country...

Now the casual reader may wonder if anybody challenged Lincoln on his views on the Supreme Court. You had better believe it. Political powerhouse Stephan Douglas challenged Lincoln head on in a series of seven public debates as part of their 1858 U.S. Senate contest, claiming Lincoln was defying the primacy of the U.S. Constitution. Lincoln rebutted that U.S. Supreme Court decisions decide individual cases before the court and do not bind Congress or the President in their political actions. If Court decisions did, Lincoln argued, this would undermine the foundational constitutional principal of separation of powers. Thus for Lincoln, he acknowledged the power of the Court to decide individual cases and bind the parties thereto, but he also asserted the prerogative of Congress or the executive to ignore Court decision, interpreting the constitution in their own ways. Lincoln even quoted Thomas Jefferson in support. This last is the backbone of Lincoln argument - it is the constitution that is the supreme law of the land, not any single branch of governments interpretation of it. Consequently, each branch of government, separate in its sphere of power, was empowered, and at liberty, to interpret the constitution by its own lights to be a check upon the other branches.

This understanding of separation of powers guided Lincoln's word and deeds for the remainder of this life. When he eventually became President, in his First Inaugural Address he opined:

I do not forget the position assumed by some that constitutional questions are to be decided by the Supreme Court, nor do I deny that such decisions must be binding in any case upon the parties to a suit, as to the object of that suit, while they are also entitled to very high respect and consideration in all parallel cases by all other Departments of the Government, and while it is obviously possible that such decision may be erroneous in any given case, still the evil effect following it, being limited to that particular case, with the chance that it may be overruled, and never become a precedent for other cases, can better be borne than could the evils of a different practice. At the same time the candid citizen must confess that if the policy of the Government upon the vital questions affecting the whole people is to be irrevocably fixed by the decisions of the Supreme Court, the instant they are made in ordinary litigation between parties in personal actions, the people will have ceased to be their own rulers, having to that extent practically resigned their Government into the hands of that eminent tribunal.

Later, Lincoln ignored Supreme Court decisions in his actions as president - he signed legislation, forwarded him by Congress, that outlawed slavery in the territories, directly in defiance of the Court in Dred Scott v. Sandford; he authorized his military commanders to suspend "the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus". Now in this last, the very purpose of the writ, the "Great Writ" of freedom harkened back hundreds of years to England as a tool to restrain the executive from arbitrarily chucking people into prisons and keeping them there without due process. Chief Justice Taney acknowledged that the constitution did allow for suspension of the writ but that such power was reserved for Congress. Lincoln ignored Taney.

Why Republicans Want Amnesty

2014-02-15T07:07:00.003-08:00

It's counter intuitive - why would conservatives in any nation-state want to ease the path to citizenship for people who will not vote for them?

According to various surveys here's what we can surmise about immigrants:

They aren't patriotic - 81 percent of native-born citizens think the schools should teach students to be proud of being American while only 50 percent of naturalized U.S. citizens do

They don't affirm our nation's constitution - while 67 percent of native-born Americans believe our Constitution is a higher legal authority than international law, only 37 percent of naturalized citizens agree.

They don't embrace capitalism - 47 percent of self-described “liberal Democrats” hold a negative view of capitalism, 55 percent of Hispanics do.

So why do Republicans want to pass amnesty in an environment where only 3% of Americans think immigration reform is a legislative priority?

Simple - with Obamacare driving up the costs of unskilled labor (the employer mandate will add another $1.79 per hour - about $350 per month - to the cost of keeping a single person on the payroll full-time; an extra $5.51 per hour - about $900 per month - to the cost of employing a full-time worker with dependents) immigrants admitted legally under the Republicans latest Path to Citizenship plan would not be eligible for Obamacare. This fact makes them doubly more attractive to businesses than before Obamacare.

Obamacare the Next Vietnam?

2014-02-13T06:56:00.000-08:00

The more I delve into the the details and potential implications of the 2,572 page Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act the more I'm convinced the law is unworkable...cannot even be made to work by committed ideologues.

This truth got me thinking about Vietnam - the rationale for involvement in Vietnam had its genesis under Eisenhower and Kennedy, but full commitment began under Lyndon Johnson, a true believer who really thought he could achieve the ends he desired in that conflict. No matter how much he tried, matters only got worse in Vietnam. It took a long time for Johnson to come to grips with this truth, and when he finally did, he decided to remove himself from governance.

One can argue over what the true objectives of the political left in American were in ramming through The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act in 2010, but there can be little doubt there are ideologues attached to accomplishing those objectives as of this writing, despite numerous delays in full implementation dictated by President Obama. Obama, like Johnson, likely truly believes that his fine-tuning of the Act will bring about the objectives he desires, but increasingly I am convinced that whatever Obama or, and any politician, does to successfully implement this act will meet with frustration and failure.

If history fully repeats itself, some aspiring right-winger will see the political opportunity for himself in extracting America from the grips of Obamacare, as Nixon saw in the mess in Vietnam. In doing so, this right-winger will expose himself to allowing the entire blame for the The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act to fall upon himself and conservatism; also as happened with Nixon.

The Devil and the Democrats

2013-08-19T05:53:00.002-07:00

Pergamon is no longer "Satan's throne", as described in the Bible, any more than the Democrat Party is likely to indefinitely remain Satan's means for control in the political realm in America, but for the time being....

I had long wondered why, in the tale of God delivering Israel from the clutches of the Egyptians, God placed so much emphasis on how, in the act of deliverance, He would be displaying the might of His right hand; I think I understand now - Satan is the power behind many earthly political systems, and Satan is arrogant and desires to rule over the earth and to be worshiped. In cracking down in Egypt the way He did, God was not only delivering His people, He was passing judgement on a political system whose arrogance had become unbridled. In God's assessment, the time for a slapping-back had come.

The title Anti-Christ in the original language, does not mean "against-Christ' as many think, it means "instead of-Christ". Satan is a usurper; he wants to assume Christ's role in creation, including the worship due Christ. Moreover, Satan is not humble; he does not emulate Christ, he despises Him and thinks he is more worthy - would do a better job. Being arrogant, Satan utilizes a direct approach in his dealings - he has disdain for God's humility, patience, and gentle/caring methods in earthly dealings. Satan is a brute and prefers the brute force method when it is available to him. Unchecked, this brutish behavior becomes unbridled arrogance, typified in brutes like Mussolini throughout history. The Pharaoh of Exodus had become such a brute. The arrogant, brute force methods of the Democrats today - ramming through mandatory health insurance, for example - has Satan's fingerprints all over it and is one reason I think President Barack Obama and his Democrat Party are cruising for a slap down.

All Men Are Created Equal?

2013-01-30T14:33:00.001-08:00

President Obama, in his inaugural address January 21, 2013, made the immortal declaration from the Declaration of Independence, "All men are created equal" his address centerpiece. Indeed, one news service declared that Obama's second term agenda "would be the continuing effort to use government to create a more just and equitable society." Certainly Obama's campaign rhetoric about everyone being assured, with him as President, a "fair shot", and being made to pay their "fair share" of taxes supports an agenda of achieving equality.

I find this curious because presumably Obama and most of his supporters believe the Theory of Evolution, and said theory is hostile to the notion of equality in organisms. Verily, the theory assumes variation, not equality, among individuals within a species; variations that provide the traction for natural selection to do its work.

So which is it - are we all equal as created by God, or all inevitably unequal in the midst of the never ending process of evolution? It cannot be both.

Tax Imperialism

2012-12-09T06:40:00.000-08:00

Liberals, and god-haters in general, are fond of employing a biblical edict "do not judge" to deflect attention and criticism from their outrageous behavior. However, the Scriptures also make the point - "at whatever point you judge the other, you are condemning yourself, because you who pass judgment do the same thing [1]." For this reason - since I believe Scripture - I have always had confidence that liberals who crow loudly about how other people are supposed to behave are guilty of the very behavior they criticize.

For example, liberals in America have labeled the United States an "imperial"a nation, built upon the seizure of other people's land and the subjugation, expulsion and/or the extermination of the native inhabitants. Competent scholars can and do disagree about the accuracy of this imperialism charge[2]. What matters for this analysis is not the accuracy of the charge, but whether or not Scripture's counsel hold water - are liberals guilty themselves of something they impute to others, in the instance of charges of imperialism against the American state?

It is a matter of record, no matter how the spin doctors may wish to suppress it in the future, that candidate Barack Obama made the public policy prescription of taxing-the-rich the centerpiece of his 2012 re-election campaign. In the wake of his re-election, it is a matter of historical fact that he has pressed vigorously for higher income tax rates for, singularly, the "rich".

Now it is hard, at least for me, to distinguish between the rationale for singling out the rich, who have committed no crime, for confiscation of their property, over and against one people group, as in a nation-state, deciding to confiscate the property of other people groups/nation-states.

Did not the Nazi's confiscate the property, and in fact the very lives, of the Jews? Are not historical archives filled with photographs of heaps of personal property stripped from Jews before they were gassed? Wasn't their real property seized by neighbors and the state when Jews were herded off, in the middle of the night, to concentration camps? Weren't the ancient Romans motivated, in part, by loot to satiate the demands for bread and circus's by the citizenry? Don't totalitarian governments, such as Stalin's, have a record of internal property confiscations (collectivization, nationalization) ultimately to prop up corrupt elites? Wasn't membership in the communist party critical to enjoying the benefits of such confiscations, just a citizenship was for those living under Roman rule?

I see no difference between Barack Obama's mission to confiscate the wealth of person's he deems rich, and the charges made by liberals against the heritage of America - that she has an imperial history. Imperialism and high taxation are simply differing means of punitive confiscation.

[1] Romans 2:1
[2] "The Skeptics Guide to American History; Lecture 13 - Myths about American Isolation and Empire", Mark A. Stoler, Ph.D.; The Great Courses

The Audacity of Arrogance

2012-04-29T06:53:00.003-07:00

I was watching HBO's production of John Adam's the other night, the scene where Adams is being transported to England aboard a United States warship via the Atlantic in mid-winter. The ships crew, as a matter of course, works in extremely difficult conditions, compelled to attend to the sails in all weather, including being continually soaked in freezing salt water spray. It struck me that with the passage of time this kind of labor would be virtually unknown in the western world thanks to advancements in technology, such as the steam engine and then eventually the diesel engine. The journey from such hard labor to relative ease and comfort for sailors was slow and gradual and a function of thousands of little refinements - this is what progress looks like.

Then I thought about how an obscure politician from out of nowhere managed to convince the American people, with a message of "hope and change", that he could supersede the experience of progress that characterizes all of human history - that he could decree progress by fiat; that he could simply declare a fossil fuel economy null and void and install in its place a renewable energy economy. That the slow process of human advancement through thousands or millions of refinements could be bypassed and that the human mind and human will could simply call into being, out of thin air, the progress it would like to see; all in the blink of an eye.

Who is this President and who are the people that are gullible enough to believe him?

Obama's Fantasy Quantum Leap

2012-04-09T17:37:00.003-07:00

I own a motorcycle, and for reasons of proper maintenance I was, the other day, doing some research on the drive chain, typical of motorcycles, that powers the rear wheel. Motorcycle drive chains are a type of chain drives called roller chain or bush roller chain and are employed in many kinds of domestic, industrial and agricultural machinery, including conveyors, wire and tube drawing machines, printing presses, cars, bicycles and, of course, motorcycles.

The more I read about roller chain the more fascinated I became about invention and development of such chain over the centuries. Leonardo da Vinci may have been the first to conceive of roller chain. He made sketches which make this clear.

Hans Renold, a Swiss engineer, is credited with inventing, in 1880, the bush roller chain widely used today that replaced more crude pin-and-link type chains. In fact the whole history of the development of roller chains is one of invention and refinement since Leonardo da Vinci's sketches.

Then I got thinking about Barack Obama's stated intention of reinventing the United States economy - transforming it from a hydrocarbon fueled economy to a so-called green energy economy. It took creative minds, on the order of Leonardo da Vinci's, a span of 500 years to bring us the modern roller chain - just a chain drive -, but Barack Obama fancies he can transform the U.S. economy in just four to eight years. The man is delusional or ego maniacal, or both.

Oliver Twist Redux

2011-12-22T09:39:00.000-08:00

"Please help! Bring back better food!" - Van Nuys High School student to Principal Judith Vanderbok

When Newt Gingrich was Speaker of the House he proposed a capitol showing of the Hollywood classic Boy's Town as a means to gin up support for his proposed boot camps for troubled teens. The Left retorted that if Newt did a Boy's Town showing, they would counterattack with a showing of Dicken's Oliver Twist. Newt promptly dropped the idea, but in this exchange the Left demonstrated that they believe Oliver Twist is a hero after their own ideology.

Now, Oliver Twist paid dearly for his temerity in asking a work house elder, 'Please sir, may I have some more?" of the runny, grey, porridge the work house boys were forced to swallow.

Oliver would have been far better off to adopt the methods of deprived teens in the Los Angeles Unified School District. Confronted with a Michelle Obama endorsed and promoted lunch diet officially adopted by the District this past fall term - a diet featuring such yummy selections as vegetarian curries and tamales, quinoa salads and pad Thai noodles. - the kids are rebelling (participation in the District's lunch program has plummeted to just 13%). At Roosevelt High School in Boyle Heights, Frida Duarte, 16 described the fare as "Like dog food". Many have struck up a thriving black market in lunch items for teens crave. If only Oliver had thought of that.

Meanwhile the Los Angeles Unified School District Cafeteria Fund has imploded to a $20 million deficit catalyzed by the aforementioned collapse in student participation, a 1000% increase in budget for fresh produce the kids won't eat, and the gift of a gold-plated health-benefit package for part-time cafeteria workers, many who stand idle as kids scramble for black market, back-alley lunches.

All told, Michelle Obama's crusade against obesity seems to be having about as much success as Obama's crusade to tranform America into a booming green economy. Wasn't it Leftist Lincoln Steffens in 1919 who said of the newly comprised Soviet Union, "I have seen the future and it works."

Sources for this post include:
1.) "L.A. schools' healthful lunch menu panned by students", Los Angeles Times, December 17. 2011; http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-food-lausd-20111218,0,2593733.story

2.) "Michelle Obama’s Unsavory School Lunch Flop" http://frontpagemag.com/2011/12/21/michelle-obamas-unsavory-school-lunch-flop/

3.) Wikipedia, Lincoln Steffens

Tea Party, New Party - What's the Difference?

2011-08-22T17:51:00.000-07:00

TEA Partier or New Partier...Can You Choose Correctly?

For the record, as of this writing (Barak Obama in the White House), there is an American-wide mainstream movement of grassroots protesters, encompassing millions of individuals and thousands of self-organizing groups called the TEA Party Movement (TEA is a backronym for Taxed Enough Already). The main focus of the TEA Party Movement is a rebuke of what movement members consider to be outrageous mandates, overspending and a radical agenda by an out of touch federal government with values similar to King George III (see Boston Tea Party in American history). The TEA Party is perceived to be reactionary by many liberal, left-of-center Americans and has been attacked accordingly and vigorously - on August 20, 2011 Representative Maxine Waters of California opined:

And as far as I’m concerned, the ‘tea party’ can go straight to Hell.” [1]

Now the Tea Party is not an official political party, it is, as described above, merely a grassroots movement, and yet it is the target of exceptional venom from the left. This is ironic since leftist idol President Barack Obama was himself at the very least supported by, and was possibly a "member" of, a party - not an official political party - whose aim it was to drag the Democratic Party to the left, just as the TEA Party seeks to drag the Republican Party to the right. That party, called the New Party, is amply described in this article by former left-wing radical David Horowitz - click on New Party.

[1] "Maxine Waters to tea party: Go to Hell"

Deifying Iliusion

2011-08-22T07:13:00.000-07:00

"From the dawn of civilization onwards crowds have always undergone the influence of illusions.

"It is to the creators of illusions that they have raised more temples, statues, and altars than to any other class of men."

Tower of Babel

Source: French social psychologist, sociologist Gustave Le Bon quoted ( p. 108) in The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind

The Deadliest Contagion is Majority Opinion

2011-08-13T12:47:00.000-07:00

The author of the sentiment expressed in the title of this blog is unknown, but the truth he asserted in not -Charles Dickens, in the wake of his one and only visit to America, observed that it appeared to him that in America the old tyranny of despotic monarchs had simply been supplanted by -

...a new tyranny of public opinion, fostered by a rancid press

Moreover, when the media have successfully concluded their work public opinion acquires the characteristics of a religious sentiment, as explained by French psychologist and sociologist Gustave Le Bon -

The sentiment has very simple characteristics, such as the worship of a being supposed superior, the fear of the power with which the being is credited, blind submission to his commands, inability to discuss its dogmas, the desire to spread them, and a tendency to consider as enemies all by whom they are not accepted.

A person is not religious solely when he worships a divinity, but when he puts all the resources of his mind, the complete submission of his will, and the whole-souled ardour of fanaticism at the service of a cause or an individual who becomes the goal and guide of his thoughts and actions.

Le Bon continues -

Today the majority of great men who have swayed men's minds no longer have altars, but they have statues, or their portraits are in the hands of their admirers...An understanding of the philosophy of history is only to be got by thorough appreciation of this fundamental point of the psychology of crowds. The crowd demands a god before everything else

Source: The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, Gustave Le Bon

Holding America Hostage?

2011-08-02T15:27:00.000-07:00

Singling Out Those Who Won't Raise Debt Ceiling

Tea Party conservatives of the 112th Congress were accused by all manner of leftists of "holding America hostage" by demanding spending cuts in exchange for their votes to raise the nations debt limit. Tea Partiers were also called "irresponsible" and possibly even "terrorists" (by Vice President of the United States Joe Biden). President Obama, during the run-up to raising of the debt limit on August 2, 2011 also had strong words for those who might block it, jeopardizing the nations ability to honor it's debt obligations. In consequence of all the above it ought to be easy for readers to guess which nationally prominent, currently elected officials (as of this posting), had this to say about raising the nations debt limit:

The fact that we are here today to debate raising America’s debt limit is a sign of leadership failure. It is a sign that the U.S. Government can’t pay its own bills. It is a sign that we now depend on ongoing financial assistance from foreign countries to finance our Government’s reckless fiscal policies...our federal debt has increased by...trillion(s)...That is money that we have borrowed from the Social Security trust fund, borrowed from China....,borrowed from American taxpayers...And the cost of our debt is one of the fastest growing expenses in the Federal budget. This rising debt is a hidden domestic enemy, robbing our cities and States of critical investments in infrastructure like bridges, ports, and levees; robbing our families and our children of critical investments in education and health care reform; robbing our seniors of the retirement and health security they have counted on.

The above quoted politician voted NO on raising the debt ceiling. Who was it? (Post your guess - first politician - in comment section.)

But as the rest of the world copes with the waves of U.S. debt, we are now all in the same leaky boat. There is just so much of our debt other nations want to hold. The more of it they accumulate, the closer we are to the day when they will not want any more. When that happens, slowly or rapidly, our interest rates will go up, the value of their U.S. bonds will drop, and we will all have big problems. We need both more awareness, and more understanding, of this fundamental threat to our economic well being and the global economy. … The President’s budget plans will bring that number to (many) trillion (by) the end of the next 5 years. This is a record of utter disregard for our Nation’s financial future. It is a record of indifference to the price our children and grandchildren will pay to redeem our debt when it comes due. History will not judge this record kindly. My vote against the debt limit increase cannot change the fact that we have incurred this debt already, and will no doubt incur more. It is a statement that I refuse to be associated with the policies that brought us to this point.

Who was this NO voter? (Second politician)

Given the explosion of debt in recent years, it is long past time for Washington to change the course and adopt a new fiscal policy. After all, the future of our economy and our Nation is at stake… If my (other political party) believe(s) that increasing our debt by almost (many) billion today, and more than (several) trillion dollars over the last 5 years, is the right thing to do, they should be upfront about it. They should explain why they believe more debt is good for our economy. How can the (opposing party) majority and this Congress explain to their constituents that trillions of dollars of new debt is good for our economy? How can they explain that they think it is fair to force our children, our grandchildren, and our great grandchildren to finance this debt through higher taxes? That is what will have to happen. Why is it right to increase this Nation’s dependence on foreign creditors? They should explain this. Maybe they can convince the public they are right. I doubt it, because most Americans know that increasing the debt is the last thing we should be doing. After all, I repeat, the baby boomers are about to retire. Under the circumstances, any credible economist would tell you we should be reducing debt , not increasing it. Again, on debt –Thomas Jefferson. These are his words: “And to preserve our independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt . We must make our election between economy and liberty–or profusion and servitude.” That was President Thomas Jefferson. …We are being asked to do what should not be asked of us, to increase the debt to almost (many) trillion. I hope everyone walking down to these desks today will understand what they are doing, what they are doing to our country.

Who was this NO voter? (third politician)

(Answers : 1st - Barak Obama; 2nd - Joe Biden; 3rd - Harry Reid. All quotes are from 2006 when George W. Bush was president.)