The Shake Down

Obama’s solution to all our problems is to tax more and spend more. Rand Paul’s solution is to actually balance the budget and impose a seventeen percent  income tax as though that were the answer to all our fiscal woes. Paul said in his response to Obama’s State of the Union address, “With my five-year budget, millions of jobs would be created by cutting the corporate income tax in half, by creating a flat personal income tax of 17% , and by cutting the regulations that are strangling American businesses.”

They are both wrong. Maybe Paul is correct about cutting corporate income tax and he could be partially right about cutting regulations, but he is all wrong about a seventeen percent flat tax. He has some nerve to state that the federal government is somehow entitled to seventeen percent of a person’s income. Why? So they can continue to throw it away on the moochers and parasites living on the dole? So we can continue to invade foreign countries and then spend years and years in occupation with billions and billions of dollars going to fraud, and waste for no purpose? Bailing out their favorite financial failures like banks and automobile corporations?

Cutting corporate taxes makes sense in that it is business that drives the economy not the federal government. Business is the true creator of wealth and for a business to survive they must be fiscally responsible, unlike the government.  Regulating those businesses is debatable. If businessmen had an enforceable code of ethics and consistently acted in an ethical manner then there would be no need for government regulation. There is a difference between government regulation designed to protect consumers and regulation whose sole purpose is to impede the creative process of capitalism. The purpose of government is to fill in the gaps the people cannot do themselves—like national defense, maintaining our national infrastructure, police, the court system, and protecting us from predatory business practices. Some regulation is a necessary and proper role of government.

The root issue in Paul’s statement is not corporate taxes or regulation, it is the delusional assertion that you and I somehow owe the federal government seventeen percent of our income. You work your tail off and Paul says that seventeen dollars out of every hundred belongs to him and his corrupt cronies. As though seventeen percent is all they ask. In reality they take it from us by force—that is called extortion by the way. The funny thing is when talking about taxes this is all we ever hear, federal income tax, never even a close approximation of the reality we all live with. I live in Utah where there is also state income tax. Add to that state sales tax, state and federal tax on the fuel we use to drive to work, taxes (at all levels) on the utilities I use in my home, and property taxes.  In Utah we are even taxed on the food we eat and now they want to tax the water we drink! If you drink and/or smoke, you first pay exorbitant federal and state taxes on the product and then pay an additional state sales tax on the purchase. I even have to pay sales tax on a movie rental! This is to be sure, only a partial list of all the taxes American’s are forced to pay, a small sample of only the most noticeable tribute extorted from us on a daily basis.

I have two questions for you Mr. Paul. The first is, what is the total percentage being extorted from the average citizen on items they have to have simply to live? Could anyone even figure it out? The second question is what is being done with all this money? I have my monetary income and expenditures on a spread sheet. If I were so inclined I could show you down to the penny where my money has been spent and will be spent. It is my money, I feel obligated to be responsible for it. If I were the steward of someone else’s money, I would be, if it were possible, doubly responsible. Stewardship involves, not simply dollars and cents, but an investment of trust in someone’s ability to responsibly handle the matter under their care.

Millions for Defense, Not One Cent for Tribute, was the response of America when first France and then pirates attempted to extort money from us. The phrase is indicative of the attitude of self-reliance and independence shared by our forefathers, an attitude no longer popular in the America we have today. Now that cry has been turned into, Billions for Pork and Welfare, Not One Cent for the Responsible. Seventeen percent? Well that could be less than we pay now, but it is still too much. Show me exactly where that money is needed and how you will account for it. Better yet do as responsible citizens do Mr. Obama and Mr. Paul—live within your means.

Why the Silence?

Though I currently don’t have any guns, I have owned firearms in the past. I like firearms, but I needed other things like groceries and a car so buying a gun was not a priority for me. I am finally in a place where I am ready to buy something so I went the other day to look at firearms at a local sporting goods store. My motivation? My son and I enjoy shooting—pistol, shotgun, we don’t really care, just something to shoot targets or clay pigeons.

I had read in the news, really only mentioned in passing, that people have been exercising their paranoid streaks and there has been a run on guns and ammo. I was not prepared for the reality of what I saw. The store I went to has a place on the wall, probably 10 feet high by twenty feet long where they display handguns—several rows deep. The entire wall was nearly empty! Row after empty row marked .357, .38, .40, .44, .45 where handguns used to be displayed, now all gone, it was the same with ammunition. When I got home, I checked a sporting goods website, http://www.sportsmansguide.com to see if they had ammunition—the same thing, all sold out. Look at their website and see the incredibly vast range of their ammunition offering—why is most of it sold out? Out of curiosity I even checked several other local stores, only to find that they too were sold out of most types of ammunition. Why?

Maybe a better question to ask is “why the silence?” This run on guns and ammo seems to me to have huge political ramifications yet hardly a word is spoken about it. It indicates a populace at odds with their government. A distrustful populace, so distrustful in fact they are stockpiling arms and ammunition—as if preparing for war. If I still owned a pistol, I might have a much as 50 rounds of ammunition in the house, unless I was planning on going target shooting. I saw people buying hundreds of rounds and becoming angry because they were not allowed to buy more!

Even more disturbing is the government’s rush to stockpile ammunition—illegal ammunition. Alex Jones’ website Infowars.com has reported the purchase of billions of round of ammunition by the Department of Homeland Security, the American equivalent of Hitler’s Geheime Staatspolizei (Gestapo).  http://www.infowars.com/dhs-purchases-200-million-more-rounds-of-ammunition/ This not just any ammunition, what they are buying are hollow point pistol rounds, a type of ammunition prohibited by both the UN and the American military.

So we have two camps, both armed to the teeth and both stockpiling ammunition, but preparing for what? It is a de facto arms race between the government and the people. Yet this is only one of many things I see going on in America today, each event a clue to a potentially disastrous situation about to unfold. It doesn’t take a conspiracy theorist or a puzzle master to notice that there are some very disturbing trends happening right now. Perhaps the trend I find most disturbing is the lack of attention paid to such issues. Perhaps the first question we need to ask is, “Why is the silence so loud from the mainstream media?”  What news is it they are “protecting” us from?

Pieces of the Puzzle

I had to take a break for a few days. I needed to think, not in an exercise of pointless mental gymnastics, but to determine a course heading. My mind has been going one direction for the last few months and I needed to know if that is the direction I really wanted to go. I hate to have a one track mind. I have a wide variety of interests. Lately however, I cannot seem to stop thinking about all the events—the macro events, that seem to point to one inescapable conclusion. It is as Neil Young’s old group Buffalo Springfield sang, “There’s something happening here. What it is ain’t exactly clear.”

Because all the evidence is circumstantial, I don’t want to proclaim a conspiracy. Instead what I see is like a very large jigsaw puzzle, only without the picture on the box to aid in its assembly. The pieces that are in place seem to indicate a certain kind of picture, but without the master picture to refer to, more of the puzzle needs to be put together. So that is the direction I am heading in this and subsequent postings. I want to attempt to assemble this puzzle with such pieces as I have to see what picture forms. There will be no particular order. Just as when you sit down to do a puzzle you don’t start with piece A and then move to piece B, you pick up the pieces when you think you see a place where they will fit. The first piece I see today is what I will call American ingenuity.

American ingenuity or innovation, what has happened to it? If you look closely, you will see that our legendary American inventiveness ended roughly in 1945, at the end of the Second World War, since that time there has been “nothing new under the sun”. I could be wrong, there may be one thing, but think about this. Everything we now have, all this wondrous technology, is only adaptations of technology developed in the 1920’s, 1930’s and 1940’s and even before. The scientific thought and research leading to television and wireless communication began in the late nineteenth century. Computers? Charles Babbage, began in in the early nineteenth century to think of a way to make a machine to calculate or compute numbers.  Automobiles, rockets, airplanes, nuclear energy—what invention—totally new invention has come about since World War II? Everything I see is only a refinement of what has already been invented.

What is going on here? How could a man with no real formal education, a man like Thomas Edison invent the things he did, or Henry Ford for that matter? Yet these men and men like them brought about America’s Industrial Revolution and changed the very nature of this country and the world. Steve Jobs or Bill Gates? Refiners, is all they were/are. True their refinement of the computer led to a new type of revolution, but only a revolution of convenience. Now thanks to them, instead of having to get drunk and go out in public to make a complete fool of myself, all I have to do now is make a Facebook posting or tweet something embarrassing.

To go from a telephone wired to my wall to this obnoxious gadget (my cellphone) I feel compelled to tote around with me everywhere I go is not an improvement. (How did we survive before being accessible 24/7?) I do like the convenience of the word processing programs on computers. I like the convenience of having access to the internet, but I would not die if they disappeared tomorrow—neither would you. I would use a typewriter and go to the library.

This is a huge issue with far reaching implications. One could write a book, or even several books exploring the innovation drain, but I think the origins are self-evident. The seeds of this tragedy lie in America’s educational system. I think without too much research one could prove the direct correlation between the rise of, the type of, and the quantity of mandatory education with the decline of American inventiveness and innovation.  I remember as a child reading the biographies of all those great men, the men who invented, Franklin, Fulton, Edison, Ford, and Whitney to name a small fraction. What happened?

The Nature of Evil

“Pleased to meet you, hope you guess my name, oh yeah but what's puzzling you, is the nature of my game.” So sang Mick Jagger in his brilliant composition, “Sympathy for the Devil”, released in 1968. In this song, sung as if it were the devil singing of his deeds, Jagger lays squarely in Lucifer’s lap all the horrendous events of history. But he also gives us another clue as to the nature of evil in the line, “I shouted out, who killed the Kennedys? When after all it was you and me.” You and me? Yes, you and me, the responsibility falls on us.

The devil is a convenient explanation for the evil in this world. But as we look at other explanations through the eons of human history, we also see that God (or the gods) and woman have also had the blame thrown squarely in their laps as well. Whether it is Pandora unable to resist her god given curiosity and obey the instructions not to open the sealed container (also given to her by the gods); or if it is Eve who was unable to resist the snake’s urging (Yea, hath God said?) to cross the line God had drawn, the result is the same, we blame others for our decisions i.e. choices. We read in Genesis 3:12 Adam’s response to his participation in Eve’s transgression,” And the man said, The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat.” In other words, Adam is saying, “Look God, I had no choice it was the woman—the woman You made who made me do it. So you both are to blame.”

I have seen real evil, I know it exists, but I am not sure I want to lay it solely at the feet of Beelzebub. There seems to me, to be more to the issue than simplistically ascribing all evil to the devil (or whatever source you think it originates from). It seems to me that when we do we miss an essential element—the key element, as to what constitutes the nature of evil.

If we believe in good and we believe in evil, then we must believe in a choice between the two if we are to be fully human. We cannot do wrong and then say in response, “The devil made me do it.” no, somewhere along the line you made a choice, the choice to either do the right thing or the choice to do the wrong thing. Even if you made your choice in ignorance, even if the evil you did was believed at the time to be good, it was still your choice and owning that decision is covered by a little understood word called responsibility.

Each choice we make leads to other choices. Even when we do evil, we still have another choice to make. Do we continue or do we desist? Do we deny or do we own up to it? Do we make excuses or do we take full responsibility for our choice? Each choice building upon the last, laying a foundation, as it were, of either good character or bad character, it is always our choice to make. When we make continual choices for evil, we reveal the nature of evil to be not from the devil, but from inside each and every one of us. The devil never makes us do anything. He only offers us a choice. “When after all it was you and me” who killed the Kennedys.

This may sound unbelievable, but did you know Mao Tse-tung, Josef Stalin, Pol Pot and Adolf Hitler (or even George W. Bush) were not created in Hell and then released upon the earth to commit their infamous deeds of depredation against mankind? Each one of them built their lives upon the choices they made. What to believe, who to listen to, where to get your information are all choices. These men made not one wrong choice, but a lifetime of wrong choices, but it was they who chose, just as their followers choose to act as their agents in the crimes they committed (as I did under Bush).

The nature of evil is such that the good are always going to be tempted to choose wrongly, but those who build their lives on wrong choices soon become a slave to wrong choice. It is you and I who allow evil to flourish, not the devil—you and I. The question becomes not a matter of some intractable destiny, but of the everyday decisions we make. Do you want to see evil eradicated? It can be done, but it’s your choice and my choice, and begins with one decision at a time.

P.S. If you need a graphic illustration watch the movie Flight with Denzel Washington and see how the power of one simple choice can destroy an accumulation of evil. 

Down the River

I am not what has been popularly termed a “conspiracy theorist”. I refuse to wear a label with such pejorative connotations. I am, simply put, a reasonably intelligent human being exercising my God given capacity to think. I use those basic math skills I was taught as a child. The world I live in may be in denial of certain basic facts, but in the world between my ears, two plus two still equals four. When those around me scream “No it doesn't  it equals whatever we want! It equals whatever is expedient!” it causes a condition in me called “cognitive dissonance”. Cognitive dissonance is the discomfort that a person with a functioning brain feels when they simultaneously attempt to hold two conflicting thoughts. Either two plus two equal four or it does not, you cannot be rational and believe otherwise.

So when I look at the events around me, events that don’t add up, it causes me to wonder. I wonder about those who throw out answers before they have even done the necessary calculations. I wonder about the patterns I see and I wonder what the real answer is—an answer evidently so dangerous that people feel it necessary to switch off their minds when confronted with it, an answer evidently so dangerous it takes an active propaganda campaign to conceal it.

There are those who feel the events of September 11, 2001 were a conspiracy, not by Islamic terrorists, but a conspiracy by the Bush administration. I think they are partially correct. There are those who are proposing that the rash of mass shootings we have suffered are also part of a government conspiracy, they may be partially right also. For a conspiracy to be a conspiracy it takes two or more people conspiring to achieve a certain end. These people must have a goal, a purpose in mind that they desire to achieve. So when I look at events that do not add up. When I see the government and the media proposing simple answers that you instinctively know are wrong, the first question one must ask is, “To what end?” Why or for what purpose? Who stands to gain and what is it exactly that they will gain from such events?

A major part of our problem stems from our refusal to face reality. No one wants to talk about that very obvious pachyderm in the living room. Most people have no problem with admitting our government is inefficient and largely incompetent. More than a few will concede that our government is corrupt, but no one really wants to contemplate that, no matter how inept it is, our government’s purpose is really to serve the ends of someone other than the American people.

The nonsensical events we see are only symptomatic of something larger. And unlike those in the medical profession we have to look deeper and not merely treat the symptom, we must find the cause of our dis-ease.

I have no answers but I do have a proposal. Let us create a new profession. Let us create a field of thinking people who investigate these events and then publish their findings. We could give them a fancy title like, I don’t know, maybe “investigative reporters and call their field investigative journalism. We would have to demand they stick to the highest standards of inquiry, that they dig deep, as deep as need be until the answers are found. We would have to demand that they look beyond the symptoms of the moment and look at the longer historical perspective.

I remember in 1983, people suddenly were buying George Orwell’s classic book 1984.  It was as if they expected to wake up on January 1^st in a police state. Ayn Rand accurately saw the world we now live when she wrote Atlas Shrugged which by the way was published in 1957!She depicted a world where people believed (the old lie. . .) in big government and small to nonexistent thinking, where public “need” achieved its primacy over ability and achievement.

In a country like America that could never happen instantly, it has to be achieved incrementally and only by some group conspiring to achieve it. It is now 2013 and we are living in a nascent police state, but how did we get here? I can tell you this. It never would have happened if we had created that new profession of investigative journalism 30 years ago. Back in the days when our government still had to maintain the appearance of abiding by the constitution. The prophets warned us this day would come, but our journalists failed to keep track and keep us informed, instead they too bought into the old lie and sold us down the river.

I have no answers, only speculations. But remember, the first step to solving a problem, begins with speculation, that is to say, with asking questions. If we don’t begin now we will soon lose the opportunity, because someone is busy erasing the question mark from our grammar books. Without that essential mark of punctuation what will we be left with. . .

The Guardians of Liberty

“You’re gonna want to sit down for this one. . .      There are always conspiracy theorists lurking online who come up with some horrifically outrageous claims.  Normally we would not dignify these claims with our air time.”

Those are the words of CNN’s Anderson Cooper found on an 11 January video from Anderson Cooper 360^◦  a program that seems to be representative of today’s journalistic endeavors. He was responding to Dr. James’s Tracy’s blog regarding the Sandy Hook school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut.  Click on the link below and observe where those lines quoted above fit in and how they are used.

http://ac360.blogs.cnn.com/2013/01/11/kth-exposing-newtown-conspiracy-theory/?iref=allsearch

Notice how Cooper sets up his audience to turn on their emotions while simultaneously turning off their brains. Watch carefully then click on this next link to read what Dr. Tracy actually posted on his blog.

http://memoryholeblog.com/2012/12/24/the-sandy-hook-massacre-unanswered-questions-and-missing-information/

Notice how Dr. Tracy encourages his audience to turn off their emotions while simultaneously turning on their brains. Notice too, how Dr. Tracy’s remarks appear when taken in context. When done so they tell a completely different story don’t they? What Dr. Tracy is asking his audience to do is to examine the inconsistencies and ask their own questions. Why is he being vilified by Cooper for doing so? Isn’t he in effect, doing Cooper’s job for him?

We have been conditioned to think of conspiracy theorists as a bunch of wild-eyed paranoid lunatics such as the character portrayed by Mel Gibson in his 1997 thriller, Conspiracy Theory. (Except in that movie Gibson’s character was actually vindicated, there really was a conspiracy.) Yet might there be a different way to look at this issue? Can one see another interpretation to this negative view the media gives to conspiracy theorists?

Consider this. A scientist is someone who observes a phenomenon, hazards a guess as to the cause of that phenomenon (i.e. forms a hypothesis), and then tests that guess to come up with a theory. A conspiracy theorist is also someone observes a phenomenon, hazards a guess as to the cause of that phenomenon (i.e. forms a hypothesis), and then investigates that guess to come up with a theory. They are both engaged in a little known endeavor called thinking. They both want answers to questions in order to make sense of those questions. Yet one is deified while the other is condemned. Why?

The media are supposed to be the real defenders of liberty. They have been granted an incalculable freedom by our constitution to observe events, ask questions, form conclusions, and then publish their findings. Instead we find them working in collusion with the government they are to supposed to be keeping honest. The mainstream media are in and of themselves evidence of a conspiracy the magnitude of which is still unknown. The evidence coming from the content of what they selectively choose to report and the method of that reporting. Their job as it is now practiced, is to condition the public to think emotionally. As in the case above, when someone dares to think critically they receive immediate condemnation and derision.

The media, if they were to adhere to their constitutional responsibility, should be the ones asking the questions they ridicule. The number of mass shootings in this country over the past two decades is a question begging for an answer. The sheer number of those shootings that have taken place in the last year and seem to only be increasing daily, is a question screaming for some type of resolution. There are too many commonalities; the frequency alone is too great for the simple answer of gun control. There is more to the picture, yet we are forbidden to ask what or why or how. Heaven forbid we look at other possible answers such as, psychotropic medication or ramifications of a disarmed populace.

I have seem sufficient evidence to know that there was a whole lot more to the events of September 11, 2001 that what has been popularized by the government and the media. I have seen evidence pointing to domestic, not foreign involvement in that attack. And there are too many credible people (like engineers and architects) being ignored by those whose raison d'être is to listen and understand why these people of credulity have their doubts as to the official explanation.

The very state our society is in today did not happen by accident, something is going on, but only those portrayed as delusional paranoiacs are asking the questions. Where are the guardians of liberty? Who has silenced them and replaced them with “talking heads”, those vacuous personalities who pass for journalists today? Why are thinking men like James Tracy allowed to be slandered? “Keeping them honest”? That is the last thing Cooper is attempting to do. Keeping them too embarrassed to speak is the real answer.

Every journey begins. . .

“War, what is it good for?” sang Edwin Starr in 1970, the answer of course, “absolutely nothing.”

The First World War was tragic in more ways than can be enumerated, from its ridiculous beginning to its tragic vengeful ending. Of course the casualties numbers, over 8.5 million killed, are terrible, but they are a statistic to us. The numbers are too large to even comprehend, it is as if in the short space of four years the entire population of New York City was killed and the entire population of New Jersey and the remaining population of New York State were wounded. Yet this, the war to end all war, was only the harbinger of the bloodiest century in human history.

            Perhaps the greatest tragedy of all the tragedy’s this war brought, was the loss of so many young men of such high caliber. The author of my title poem Dulce Et Decorum Est, Englishman Wilfred Owen, was one of those men of brilliance whose life was cut short—just seven days before the end of the war. There were others like him, but who survived the war physically, such as his compatriot Siegfried Sassoon, or Germany’s, Erich Marie Remarque, men who were able to put the horror of that war into print. And not only did they write about it, they did so with an unparalleled eloquence. Yet what compounds this catastrophe exponentially is that the only thing missing from their writings of this war is the smell and the noise. Everything thing else is there, everything we need to realize that war is much too horrible to tolerate and so we need to find alternative methods for settling our disputes.

Beginning with the Great War we have war on film, now we can see, exactly what these men and men like them wrote about. But having eyes does not mean we actually see. We still don’t get the answer to Edwin Starr’s question. As a child and teenager I glorified war, the generation who raised me, those who fought the second “Great War” did not speak of its horrors. As a young man I spent my life preparing for war, but it was not until I was a middle aged 43-year-old man that I experienced war. Now I understand, but is it necessary to experience war to understand its madness?

As these pages progress, it will be a journey with unknown ports of call and no certain destination, a wandering, meandering, walk through the realms of politics, government, social issues and personal reflections. It will not be a journey for the fainthearted or the weak minded. It will be a trek where honest critical thought is the motive power and an open mind the guide. As these pages progress, I think what I am saying here will become apparent, the relevance made known. Somewhere along the way you will understand what “the old lie” really means.