Consider the health care legislation itself. Its major features are that it will cost almost $900 billion over a ten year period, five of which that will be spent collecting the money needed to fund the other five. It will demand that every American to buy a specific type of government mandated health coverage regardless of whether anyone can afford it or suffer a 2.5 percent of that American’s income being taken by the government by force. It will take money from people who earn more than $250,000, again by government force, and give it to people who have done nothing to earn it because the oligarchs in power and their sycophants think it should be that way.

Welcome to the rule of the mob, circa 2010.

Our republic cannot survive this kind of strain without the kind of consequences most Americans find unimaginable. The principles that founded the United States–the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, the Federalist Papers, just to name a few–cannot survive rule by fiat, sanctioned theft by government force, nor the secession of liberty to an ever-shrinking group of political demagogues whose goal is their own power. Libertarian republican democracy can only survive when it is protected from these very kinds of threats.

Welcome to new feudalism, circa 2010.

The only hope in what is happening is that history tells us it is not unique to us. It happened to Athens. It happened to Rome. It happened to Britain. It happened to France. Nations begin with hope, then enslave themselves to dictatorship, then collapse into chaos before being reborn again as something else. Ours will to, though for those living through that time, the experience will be anything but pleasant.

Welcome to the birth of the next revolution, circa 2010.

The only question that remains is what you will do to survive it.

DLH

The glaring example of this idea in action is the “health care reform” legislation pending in Congress. While I think that most people agree that aspects of our current health care system need repaired, the current legislation serves more to make millions of Americans dependent on the federal government and the federal government dependent on the continued prosperity of a shrinking portion of the American population.

The heart of the health care legislation is that the United States will provide health care for millions of people who cannot afford that care by taxing other Americans who make more than a certain amount of money every year. The people receiving the care contribute nothing to provide for their own care, and the system depends on the people making the money to continue to make it. The result is that the people who depend on the government care really depend on the ability and will of the people making the money to continue to do so. No one seems to ask the question as to what happens if the system breaks down.

This kind of dependency is not just limited to government social welfare programs, nor is it always easily identifiable. One insidious dependency that infects nearly every American household is the way we feed ourselves. Most Americans depend on the industrial food chain to make sure there is a continuous supply of food available at their local corporate box store without ever realizing that how fragile that system has become or that they have no idea how to provide food for themselves if that system fails.

In fact, corporate industrial systems represent perhaps the most prevalent form of dependency in the world today. Most things that most people have came from systems structured around the notion that products and services can be produced for the lowest cost possible providing the highest profit possible forever. Such systems depend on an ever-increasing shell game of hiding the true costs of the system by shuffling the consequences somewhere else or simply ignoring them.

Yet, when those consequences reach critical mass, they bring the system to its knees, as the world recently observed with the collapse of the world financial, housing, and auto manufacturing sectors with the same year. Millions of people were directly—and indirectly—dependent on those sectors for their own livelihood and economic wellbeing, and when they collapsed, the livelihood and wellbeing of those people collapsed right along with them.

Of course, even the most independent people are dependent on others in some way, and it would be disingenuous of me to suggest otherwise, but the dependence I speak of here is the kind that leaves people unable to fend for themselves if the dependency fails. The original idea of independence was one of self-sufficiency in the face of adversity where it was impossible to bring the whole system down because it had too many individual constituent parts.

The idea of ending my own dependence is what led me to the path I currently travel. As much as it is possible, I work for myself, I am engaged in the process of raising my own food, and I am actively engaged in developing networks of similarly minded people with whom I can exchange for the things I cannot do myself. My belief is that, when the dependency systems that I am replacing with independent ones fail, I will be able to weather that storm and to provide for myself and those I care about.

So, here’s the question for you: what do you depend on? If it were to go away, even if it was because of nothing you did, how would you replace what you lost? Could you survive without the things you depend on, or would you be in danger?

We live in an era where the danger of dependence is real and growing, and the only way to avoid the consequences of this danger is to make conscious choices to be independent. By choosing independence, we choose to liberate ourselves and to be better off in the world, whatever might come next.

DLH

One of the persistent questions people ask me about this weblog goes something like “yeah, so you told me the problem, but what’s the solution?” While I cannot name the solution for every single person, I can state emphatically what the solution is for me, so using that question as I guide, I have decided where Worldview is going next.

None of us can change the world, even those of us who might believe we have the power or the will to do so, but every one of us can change ourselves and those around us by what we choose to do and how we choose to do it. Over the past few years, I think I have been a model of making choices that represent changes to a better way of doing things, and I think its time to share the experience these choices have provided with everyone else. My experience may not be the same as everyone’s, but I think  it is important to show that change can happen, succeed, and make a difference to ones own life and to the lives of others.

This new focus is not to say that the screed is going away. Instead, it is going to take on a new focus targeted on the things I am doing and how world, national, and local events affect the outcomes I am trying to achieve. My hope is that all of this will help inspire others to make changes for the better for themselves and all of us.

Here’s to hope and to a new breath of life for an old idea.

DLH

DLH

Sure, there are practical limits to what we can do, especially when our actions affect others or when they require great amounts of effort, but almost everything we do in life is what we choose to do, bot the good and the bad. So, if you’re not doing what you want to be doing, ask yourself, “why?” It’s very likely only you know the answer.

DLH

The obvious Christian answer is that we repent from our sins of commission and omission, confessing to our God and our fellow people that we continuously fall short of our responsibilities to them. This answer is applicable whether or not we believe in Christ as our savior because of the conviction of our own consciences. The only way to avoid such conviction is if we delude ourselves into believing we are not doing such things at all.

And if such an answer is applicable regardless of what we believe about Christ, then the next question we have to ask is what about Christ? If we know we sin, then we cannot do right by ourselves. If we admit we cannot do right by ourselves, then we understand we need a savior. Christ is that savior, the one who paid the price we could not pay for the things we cannot stop doing wrong.

Christ came to earth with a simple message: love God with all of your heart, mind, and strength and love your fellow people as yourself. Yet, he understood we could not do this ourselves, so he offered something else instead: he would do those things for us and all we have to do is have faith in who he is and why he did it. Even better, he promises to give us that faith because he knows we are not even strong enough to believe on our own.

Lent, then, is a time for us to consider this state of affairs. We have a simple law, so simple that it is heartbreaking to consider how many times we failed at it just today. We are lost and we need rescuing, but we know that a rescuer has already come and offered us redemption from what we have done wrong.

So, if we are sinners in need of a savior and that savior has already come and promised us redemption, then all that remains is to look upon that savior as he presents himself in his word and cry out to him with the words he has already given us to say with the faith he has already given us to save us: “Christ, have mercy on me a sinner.”

Now, knowing that we are already saved, and having concentrated ourselves on the nature of our salvation, we can turn ourselves to living the life of loving God and our fellow people as Christ wants us to live. Repentance becomes liberation, and it is that liberation that Lent prepares us for.

DLH

Historically, things like fasting represented a special activity on the part of faithful people to help them attune themselves spiritually by denying their flesh. This denial was not some sort of special atonement or test to see whether or not it could be done, but a way of sharpening the body and mind so that they could concentrate on the spirit and what lies beyond.

This idea is not some sort of mysticism or new age thinking, but an acknowledgement that our lives consist of far more than what we know and experience through the function of our senses and minds. Our physical world is just one part of an order of existence that stretches from God’s words of creation spoken into the void to this very moment as I write this post. Yet, we lose our connection with this order because we wall ourselves in with our obsessive focus on what we sense and what we know.

Giving up something at Lent, then, should be an effort on our part to sharpen our spiritual awareness in anticipation of the celebration of one of the most spriritual moments in mankind’s history, as Jesus Christ, perfect and innocent, died on our behalf, bearing the punishment for all of the sins of all people in all times, descended into hell to proclaim victory over sin and death, and rose again as the first-born of all those who will receive the Kingdom of Heaven by faith through God’s grace.

By choosing to focus ourselves in this way, we can join our minds and our souls with all Christians in all times and all of the order of existence in praise to our Savior and our God for his gifts of salvation and and faith. In doing so, we move a little closer to the Kingdom: Heaven our goal.

DLH

If you want to use the government to force someone else to pay for or do something you are unwilling to pay for or do yourself, then you are probably wrong.

DLH

Seriously, Democrats seem to be jumping like rats off a sinking ship, with Evan Bayh being the latest incumbent to give up an otherwise safe seat. How can a party have such a solid majority, yet be unable to pass meaningful legislation pulled right from their party platform or to keep reliable incumbents in the Congress?

Unfortunately, these incumbents are leaving vacuums in their place. Both Republicans and Democrats will put up more of the same to contend for those seats, and no one seems to be ready to put up alternatives to the same lame (D) and (R) politics, so instead of voting for something new and better, we’ll be voting for the same lesser evils in November. That is, unless you refuse to and demand something better. There’ still time for that kind of action in this long, cold winter of the Democrat party.

DLH

In a January 29 report, they find that starting in 1990, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) began systematically eliminating climate measuring stations in cooler locations around the world. Yes, that’s right. They began eliminating stations that tended to record cooler temperatures and drove up the average measured temperature. The eliminated stations had been in higher latitudes and altitudes, inland areas away from the sea, as well as more rural locations. The drop in the number of weather stations was dramatic, declining from more than 6,000 stations to fewer than 1,500.

Read the whole source article, then I would like someone who still believes in the legitimacy of climate change science to explain to me how this is not what it looks like.

Unless someone can, then I believe the evidence is clear: climate change science, at least how it has been presented to date, is a lie that millions of people have fallen for while ceding their liberty to increased government mandates to fight something that does not exist.

DLH